SOURCE: Drinnon, Richard. “The Maypole of Merry Mount: Thomas Morton & the Puritan Patriarchs.” The Massachusetts Review XXI, No. 2 (Summer 1980): 382-410.

In the following essay, Drinnon finds New English Canaan to be an authentic and singular effort of the European imagination to accept Native Americans and the American surroundings on their own terms, and regards Morton as part of a countertradition that continues to be manifested in American social life.

The devil would never cease to disturb our peace, and to raise up instruments, one after another.

John Winthrop, Journal, December 1638

In May 1968 Robert Lowell's play Endecott and the Red Cross opened at the American Place Theatre in New York. One of a trilogy called The Old Glory, it appeared at just the right time. That was the spring of the Columbia University sit-ins and, across the Atlantic, of the insurrectionary Paris May-days. That Easter, a half-block from Lowell's...