Why We Think The Way We Think About the Puritans

I remember the way teachers at high school and college treated the Puritans in history and literature classes when I was growing up. It was not a pretty sight. The Puritans were presented as very drab and solemn folks who had no sense of joy whatsoever and wanted to make sure no one else did either. They were dogmatic in their beliefs and intolerant of anyone else around them having even a slightly different opinion. In a day when multi-culturalism and cultural relativism was the rule, the Puritans didn't strike my teachers as worthy of anything but spite.
As I read more and more history and literature, I began to see where that thinking came from. It didn't come from reading the Puritans, I can tell you that. It came from, or at least began with, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne (1804-4864) was a descendant of John Hathorne, one of judges in the famous Salem Witch Trials of the late 1690's. Hawthorne (who likely added the "w" to his name to separate himself from his ancestry) despised the actions of his grandfather and linked those actions to the austere Calvinism that pervaded much of New England at the time.
Hawthorne began writing in the 1820's and continued to write until the early 1860's. Many of his novels vehemently attack the Puritanism of New England history or simply picture the Puritans as ineffective and hypocritical. One of Hawthorne's most famous works, The Scarlet Letter, does this masterly. The main characters are hypocritical, ineffective, intolerant, and unloving. This was the version of Puritanism that colored the way generations of Americans view the Puritan movement.
Leland Ryken has done the world a great service by writing Worldly Saints: The Puritans As They Really Were. While not a work of classical literature or history, I like to teach this work in the course on 1500 - 1800 to show what Puritans were really like. It helps students see what good ideas they had, while not sugar-coating the bad things they stood for. It also helps frame many discussions that come up in American history; things like education, social action, and attitudes toward work and labor.