City on a Hill

In the 1920s a college dropout from Chicago was unloading oil drums from an American vessel on the Congo River when a vision of America came to him and gave him a lifelong mission. He then went back to college to study American history. Perry Miller eventually produced a shelf of scholarly books that have shaped the national soul because they provide a convincing explanation of its origins and character. Implausible as it may sound, Ronald Reagan's invocation of the ‘city on a hill’ would never have happened without Miller's work.

Looking back three decades later, Miller contrasted his youthful self to Edward Gibbon, who was inspired to write The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as he gazed at the concatenated ruins of two great Empires, that of Rome and of medieval Christendom. Miller was moved to study the inception of empire, not its collapse.

‘Thrust upon me’ Miller writes, was ‘the mission of expounding what I took to be the innermost propulsion of the United States, while supervising, in that barbaric tropic, the unloading of drums of case oil flowing out of the inexhaustible wilderness of America.’

In the 1920s the oil business was not a marker of America's increasing dependence on other nations. For Miller the fuel drums spoke of America's autonomous power to project its own special character worldwide; he understood that control of oil counted for more than low prices for fuel to run cars and heat homes.