A Dream of Greatness: The American People, 1945-1963
Hamby, Alonzo L.
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "A DREAM OF GREATNESS: THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, 1945-1963" Geoffrey Perrett / Coward, McCann &Geoghegan / $24.95 Alonzo L. Hamby T h i s is a hefty tome with a hefty price and a hefty ambition. It...
...One must, I suppose, put it down to the aggressive defensiveness that often manifests itself in the rhetoric of authors who move into a scholarly field in which they lack training...
...By rejecting such notions as "natural rights" and by refusing to equate economic reward with just deserts, van den Haag is able to concentrate on the practical benefits of the market system...
...It is a temptation that Mr...
...This may not be good history in the strict scholarly sense, but it is what the lit trade calls a good read...
...Most of his chapters, running the gamut from ordinary political history to rock-and-roll, are well-structured...
...Besides, in what other general work on recent U.S...
...But enough is enough...
...Written by academics for other academics, it has yet to reach a wide popular audience...
...He has an especially good touch with some of the lighter aspects of popular culture, and from time to time he evokes a sense of real experience...
...Numerous minor errors and a few ludicrous ones cumulatively tax one's patience...
...Perrett's aims, as he further states them, are "to explore new approaches in social history" and to integrate it in a meaningful fashion with political history...
...If the reader takes Mr...
...but when the author devotes a chapter to a single topic with some natural coherence, he frequently is fluent and informative, if not profound...
...M r . Perrett's interpretive performance is at best uneven...
...Fortunately, van den Haag's thoroughgoing empiricism precludes his relying on those murky moral assumptions on which many pro-market analyses founder...
...It is this puzzling abhorrence of capitalism-an abhorrence not explicable in terms of a mere difference of opinion about which economic system is superior-that is investigated in the essays brought together in Capitalism: Sources of Hostility...
...So what you have to do is to alter the reality to contrast an affluent oppressive society with a poor free society: Then you can have a discussion...
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...If what follows through the next 700 pages is evaluated against the author's declared purpose, the thesis is not demonstrated--assuming that so mushy a proposition is capable of demonstration--and the book is a failure...
...In his introductory essay, Ernest van den Haag offers a brilliant analysis of the psychological resistance to the market system t h a t is generated by its very success...
...Whether it is worth the price of dinner at a first-class restaurant is ultimately for the consumer to decide according to his tastes...
...Perrett charges, tend to be conceived negatively--history without politics, or diplomacy, or intellect...
...It Alonzo L. Hamby is professor of Distory at O/Jio University anal tDe author of The Imperial Years: The United States Since 1939...
...However one characterizes this book, it is not the new social history...
...Part II begins with snow falling on Los Angeles in January 1949, then goes on to mention or discuss (in order of appearance): the French Gratitude Train, Pyramid Clubs, the Waldorf-Astoria "peace" convention, the death of Margaret Mitchell, a demented mass murderer (13 people in 12 minutes), the coal strike of 1949-1950, the great Brinks robbery, three mercy-killings, the Ingrid Bergman-Roberto Rosselini affair, a devastating explosion in South Amb0y, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 33 New Jersey, the introduction of the Volkswagen to America, the trial of Preston Tucker, the attempt to assassinate Harry S. Truman, "The Tennessee Waltz" and "Rudolf the RedNosed Reindeer," a habitual threatener of suicide, the West Frankfort mine explosion, Captain Kurt Carlsen's heroic efforts to save The Flying Enterprise, chlorophyll, panty raids, a southern California earthquake, Mickey Jelke, king.size cigarettes, tight skirts, slim ties, poodle and ponytail hairstyles, flying saucers, science fiction, and Immanuel Velikovsky--all in the space of five and a half pages, There are other things for curmudgeonly scholars to grouch about...
...Perhaps the most tempting of these pitfalls is the tendency to dwell upon the superficial and the bizarre, the classic example being the Flappers-and-Flagpole-Sitters rendition of the 1920s...
...But there is no avoiding the suspicion that there are deeper Steven Goldberg teaches at City College, City University of New York...
...history could one discover that the first modern digital computer was known by the acronym ENIAC and that, five years later, it was rendered obsolete by a much-improved model called MANIAC...
...Please attach the address'label from the most recent issue of your American Spectator in the space below...
...On other occasions, he comes up with such off-thewall pronouncements as the coupling of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Lenny Bruce among "the great servants of truth...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR Circulation Department P.O...
...Primarily descriptive, it often exhibited a shapelessness that reflected the absence of a strong organizing principle or a well-defined purpose...
...One questions his critical faculties when he cites the Earl Mazo-Stephen Hess biography of Nixon as his source for an assertion that the Democrats stole 100,000 Texas votes in 1960...
...Suffice to say that the author does not deliver on his promises and in fact largely ignores some of the most important issues of contemporary American social history: the relationship between class and politics, the rise of what the neoconservatives call "the new class," the impact of television upon American culture and politics, the increasing dominance of the bureaucratic ethos in almost every aspect of our national life...
...It is a tradition that might be brushed off as "backward-looking journalism," but it is a perfectly respectable mode of popular history when practiced with some awareness of its limitations and pitfalls...
...The most wondrous aspect of the book, however, is the scene-setting section used to introduce each of its five major parts...
...Perhaps something of this sort plays a role in the various battles over the relative merits of capitalism and socialism...
...Perrett's declamations less seriously, he may find himself enjoying a frequently entertaining, albeit often muddled, survey of the trivial and the important during the early years of our own time...
...William Benton, for example, one of the more decent public men of his time,, is both unfairly savaged and rechristened "William Benson...
...did, as Mr...
...One doubts his thoroughness when he discusses the Hiss case with no reference to the work of Allen Weinstein...
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...he uses _9 Roy Cohn's biography of McCarthy as documentation for the unlikely tale that John Kennedy first met Joe McCarthy in the South Pacific during Changing Your Address...
...At times, as with the Rosenberg trial, or the Black Muslims, he does a good job of stating both sides of a controversy and opting for neither...
...A few move to and fro with no discernible sense of direction...
...After all, what kind of discussion could you have if the issue were whether one should prefer a society that is free and affluent or a society that is totalitarian and poor...
...Print your new address and mail this form to The American Spectator...
...One might go on and on--this is a big volume, after all...
...Perrett's achievement in lending his work to parody obscures the fact that taken at a less serious level, it is not a bad book at all...
...Geoffrey Perrett, a young writer who has produced both fiction and a useful book about the American experience in World War II, strikes one as altogether too balanced and intelligent to engage in such silly posturing...
...This is precisely the right tack, given the purposes of the book, for it is the success of the market system in 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980...
...forces pressuring so many intellectuals to attack so readily and so unremittingly an economic system the worst about which even the socialist can say is that it is the best yet, but not so good as the variety of socialism the socialist espouses...
...In the academic study of American history over the past generation, there has emerged a new social history, generally focusing upon specific groups or institutions, invariably more precise in its objectives, prone to employ quantitative tools, self-consciously analytical in its approach...
...Closer to the old, it is squarely in a tradition pioneered by Frederick Lewis Allen and more recently practiced with some success by such authors as John Brooks and Richard Lingeman...
...CAPITALISM: SOURCES OF HOSTILITY Edited by Ernest van den Haag / Epoch Books / $10.95 AN AMERICAN RENAISSANCE: A STRATEGY FOR THE 1980's Jack Kemp / Harper&Row / $8.95 Steven Goldberg I t ' s not necessarily ideological need or malicious purpose that leads an intellectual to misrepresent reality~ sometimes the misrepresentation may be merely to make discussion possible...
...A DREAM OF GREATNESS: THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, 1945-1963 Geoffrey Perrett / Coward, McCann &Geoghegan / $24.95 Alonzo L. Hamby T h i s is a hefty tome with a hefty price and a hefty ambition...
...It is not well thought-out, and portions of it are sloppily researched...
...A revised edition of his The Inevitability of Patriarchy has recently been published in England by Maurice Temple Smith, Ltd...
...IMPORTANT: Allow six weeks for address change...
...Perrett's denunciation of the old social history is not without merit...
...It is designed, the author tells us, "to show that real history can be written about the recent past and can be written on a large scale," as compared to the "backward-looking journalism" that he believes characterizes the social history that has been written on post-1945 America...
...He declares his thesis as follows: "From V-J Day 1945 until November 22, 1963, t h e people of the United States were engaged in a conscious attempt to become the greatest nation in history...
...An intellectual without something to argue about becomes desperate, and such desperation may explain the possibility of controversy over, for example, the relative merits of the United States and the Soviet Union...
...And we are confronted with the astounding assertion that John F. Kennedy, because he was a man of limited political connections, chose his secretaries of state and defense solely upon the advice of a Republican, "Robert Lovell" (he means "Lovett...
...Perrett cannot wholly forego...
...And that self-conscious, self-willed effort so inflamed the nation's temper that it led inevitably to turbulence...
Vol. 13 • February 1980 • No. 2
