America's Goodly Veneer Was a Lie
If the country awakes from its nightmare, the knowledge Americans will have gleaned from these years is harrowing.
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1835 short story “Young Goodman Brown,” an upright citizen of 17th-century Salem journeys into a New England forest on a dark night and finds himself among fellow Puritans—“faces that would be seen next day at the council board of the province, and others which, Sabbath after Sabbath, looked devoutly heavenward, and benignantly over the crowded pews, from the holiest pulpits in the land”—who are summoning Satan himself to bless their revels.
When the Prince of Darkness appears, he tells Brown that he will at last learn the truth about his neighbors:
how hoary-bearded elders of the church have whispered wanton words to the young maids of their households;
