MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The focus of this presentation is on the ways in which a Transcendentalist death-of-death ideology evolved and was assimilated in twentieth century American culture and has continued to evolve from the time of the Second World War to this day. In the course of a life that spanned the twentieth century, the Rev. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale famously propagated a populist message of “positive thinking” by dint of an innovative use of emerging mass media—newspapers at their peak of influence, radio and film at a nascent stage, and television during its rise to a place as a dominant medium. He was an eloquent but plain-speaking speaker who preached to a packed congregation from the majestic pulpit of a New York, Fifth Avenue church sanctuary before, during, and after the war.
Peale’s core message—“Believe in yourself”—has applicability to changing American ontological perceptions of the meaning of life and the nature of the afterlife. This presentation will present ways in which the apparent finality of death was reconciled with a veritable positive thinking theology promulgated by Peale, with ideals founded in the Transcendentalist Movement. Peale, I will contend, managed to conflate life and the afterlife into a continuum of self-defining, self-referencing, quasi-fulfillment. I will present selected period excerpts from Peale’s sermons and books that exemplify this theology. I will also present newspaper reports of the war’s impact on individual families, and parallel illustrations in American cinema of depictions of life, death, and the afterlife during the Second World War. In doing so, I will contend that, Peale, like the culture at large, held to an American ideal of the pursuit of fulfillment that belies a yearning for transcendence—an unfulfillable “pursuit of consummation,” as one critic puts it, that is a dominant ritual action in the American story.”