The Shaping of America: A People's History of the Young Republic
Wood, GordonS.
THE SHAPING OF AMERICA: A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE YOUNG REPUBLIC Page Smith / McGraw-Hill / t20.00 Gordon S. Wood H i s t o r i a n s do not write history the way they used to. During the...
...One wonders with Raymond Aron why "the Western obsession with Marxism" persists when history has failed utterly to vindicate any of Marx's major prophesies...
...He goes on for pages, for example, talking about the Republicans' repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1789 when he means the J u d i c i a r y Act of 1801, a s t a t u t e he appears totally unaware of...
...Economic e n e r g i e s burst out in every direction...
...I must confess, then, that I have never really understood Hook's socialism, unless I may be said to understand by agreeing with Max Eastman's remark that Hook "is defending his logical right to 'believe in' democratic socialism rather than declaring his allegiance to any practical effort to produce it...
...According to Hook, "the free e n t e r p r i s e system of Adam Smith no more exists today in the U.S.A...
...I think so brilliant and rigorous a political thinker as Hook is led to such a question-begging dilemma, in part, because he feels a need to remain loyal in some way to his early socialist beliefs, which today, as he concedes, are difficult to maintain in the face of Soviet Gulagism...
...But too often he has difficulty getting a handle on the immensity of the transformation and explaining it...
...He pauses repeatedly to tell his readers when something is "ironic" or "tragi c , " and he has a p r e f e r e n c e for extravagant metaphors, perhaps the most startling being his comparison of the American town to the little girl with a curl in the middle of her forehead: When it was good, it was very good, but when it was bad, it was horrid...
...than the socialism of Karl Marx in the U.S.S.R...
...It is not simply academic narrowmindedness, as Smith charges, that had inhibited the writing of sweeping narrative like his...
...For what does exist in the USSR is the socialism of Karl Marx...
...Indeed, Smith is so eager to cater to the sensibilities Gordon S. Wood is professor o f history at Brown University...
...One can argue, for instance, that the very belief in democracy subsumes a moral ideal...
...But it is not that...
...In his essay, "The Social Democratic P r o s p e c t , " Hook says the difference between Republicans, Democrats, and conservatives and social democrats is that for social democrats "democracy is not merely a political concept but a moral one...
...Whenever the response of people seems out of proportion to what Smith thinks is the ostensible cause, "we m u s t , " he says, "assume a hidden pathology...
...By the 1820s, on the eve of Tocqueville's visit, we had already become the anxious, optimistic, risktaking, materialistic, individualistic, highly mobile people that we remained through the greater part of our subsequent history...
...Marx's Communist Manifesto foreshadowed the rise of the totalitarian, politically monopolistic Communist Party...
...Not only were most of our political institutions established, but the society and culture were rapidly transformed...
...This apologia is far from uncommon...
...Despite intensive analysis, Smith in the end cannot understand the class antagonism of the p e r i o d - - ' 'more bitter in the first decades of the Republic than it ever was a g a i n " - - or the thoughts and actions of the F e d e r a l i s t s and the Republicans...
...Need they be social democrats in order to claim that for them democracy is a moral, not merely a political, principle, when the very raison d'etre of trade unionism is equality of opportunity...
...Nisbet perhaps intended, I think we may find one...
...Of course, a historian may do what Smith seems to have done h e r e - - ignore most of the historical literature on the period and rely simply on his own reading of the sources...
...What does a moral approach to democracy mean...
...The population exploded and settled half a continent in a single g e n e r a t i o n . Almost overnight a corrosive populism spread throughout American politics...
...The title " P e o p l e ' s H i s t o r y " is apt to suggest a new social history of the forgotten underlings of America's past...
...This volume, covering the period from 1785 to 1826, thus becomes volume three in what will be a P e o p l e ' s History of the United States...
...tending the area of equal opportunity beyond the political sphere to all other areas of social life...
...First of all, there are the difficuhies of writing history today on the scale Smith intends...
...It has short chapters, it has no footnotes, and it is written with verve (the military portions are especially engrossing...
...Such a heroic approach to historical r e s e a r c h of a large period is risky because it is easy to make mistakes, and Smith makes a number of them, including some big ones...
...Now this strikes me as rather exclusionary...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, P.O...
...it is very familiar political history...
...But such e r r o r s could be overlooked if S m i t h ' s volume did n~t suffer from a more basic problem...
...The social democrat, he says, derives the "justif i c a t i o n " for programs of social reform from " a regulative moral ideal": equal opportunity for all...
...The book's problems go deeper than that...
...I am referring, of course, to Sidney Hook, who has been a towering moral figure in American intellectual life for half a century...
...He has an effective later chapter entitlect "Whatever Happened to the Founding Fathers...
...Ultimately he has not been able to enter fully and empathically into this very different past world and to make it comprehensible to us in the present...
...His point is well taken, but by defining "philosopher" less exclusively than Mr...
...Still, it is not the occasional inelegance of Smith's writing that makes this commendable e f f o r t to write popular history disappointing...
...It is a "People's History" because it is presumably to be read by "the people...
...Defenders of the Marxist tradition always seem to be arguing that what exists in the USSR, or in Cuba, Vietnam, and Eastern Europe, has nothing to do with Marx at all...
...Without Marx, would there have been a Lenin...
...Recently Robert Nisbet despairingly asked what he thought was a rhetorical question: "Who at this moment would have the s l i g h t e s t interest in what a living philosopher has to say on any subject, cosmological, moral, political or social...
...In these most bewildering situations Smith simply throws up his hands and calls upon some psychological jargon for an explanation...
...His kind of intellectual courage was and still is a rarity in the academy: He has never taken a sabbatical from the continuing struggle against Communism...
...This is not good history...
...And how about trade unionists...
...For Hook to suggest that what exists in the Soviet Union is not Marxism would seem like an attempt to make the Leninist derivative of Marxism illegitimate...
...Marx advocated the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the elimination of democracy, and he posited the inevitability of an irreconcilable class struggle which would end in "the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions," as the final words of the Manifesto claim...
...Nevertheless, Hook has been my leader in many crusades: He is a skilled tactician, an uncompromising f i g h t e r against totalitarianism, and a superb political polemicist...
...Smith's bibliographical note is a remarkable display of scholarly stinginess: He mentions only three or four secondary studies and implies that the rest were of no use to him...
...Although the book contains several intermezzo chapters on religion, education, the arts, family life, and medicine, it concentrates on the headline events of the period: the creation of the Constitution, the inauguration of the new nation~ii government, the rise and fall of g r e a t political p a r t i e s , Indian warfare, western conspiracies, and the second war against Great Britain...
...In The Twilight of Capitalism Michael Harrington argues somewhat along the same line by saying that Marxism has been taken over by Communist dictatorships so that what exists in Communist countries is not the socialism of Karl Marx...
...In order to deal with the sweep of the period, Smith puts tog c t h e r two great blocks of ideas: what he calls the "Classical-Christian Consciousness" and the "SecularDemocratic Consciousness," which are more or less identical with the ideologies of the Federalists and the Jcffersonian Republicans...
...He enjoys this position because, from the 1930s on, he has been one of the intellectual communit y ' s most courageous fighters in behalf of freedom...
...it is not even good psychology...
...in which he describes the disillusionment of the Revolutionary leaders with what they had wrought...
...Address I | [] Payment enclosed City State Zip | [] Bill me later X91 L . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . J THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980 39 Admittedly, the half century following Independence is not an easy era to i n t e r p r e t . It was a period of e x t r a o r d i n a r y , unprecedented change...
...Needless to say, 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980...
...Hook himself praises organized labor for its "principled defense of freedom" and for its unfaltering opposition to all forms of totalitarianism...
...Smith is aware of the momentous changes of the period...
...Yet is not Leninism the logical outgrowth of Marxism...
...All Smith's crude psychologizing represents in fact a failure of historical imagination...
...But nowadays historians tend to write specialized and abstruse monographs for each other, leaving t h e popular interest in storytelling about the past to be satisfied by historical novels like those of John J a k e s or by television sagas like "Roots...
...Certainly for the millions of people who have chosen to immigrate here over the years the democratic ideal as represented by the United States is not without a moral component...
...After completing his twovolume history of the Revolution he decided to embark on a multi volumed, large-scale history of t'he United States similar to those written earlier...
...w William F. Buckley, Jr...
...Surely Hook will not argue that the workers in the United States are social democrats-or is it all a matter of definition...
...He recognizes that "there is a totalitarian potential in any economy which is completely centralized and nationalized" but capitalism remains for him an unacceptable alternative...
...And that is what historians, even popular historians, ought to be doing...
...ALSO: Paul McCracken, Brock Yates, A!bert Shanker, Ray Price, James Wechsler, John Roche, Lewis Lapham, Norman Podhoretz, Jack Kemp, John Chamberlain, Edith Efron, Henry Salvatori, David Meiselman, Martin Peretz, Jeff MacNelly, John Lukacs, William Rusher, Antonio Martino, Malcolm Muggeridge, Doris Grumbach, Colin Welch, Robert Bleiberg, James Jackson Kilpatrick, Jude Wanniski, Gen...
...Hook's allegiance to socialism may derive from his penchant for dividing Marxist " t h e o r y " from Marxist "practice...
...Page Smith, a professional historian with a number of good books to his credit, laments this decline of narrative history for the general reader and is bold enough to do something about it...
...How the rising "Secular-Democratic Consciousn e s s " gave birth to the revival of Protestant Christianity after 1800 is, however, not explained...
...But while one can readily agree with the first half of that sentence, one must wonder at the second...
...it is r a t h e r the incredible profusion of monographs and articles on all aspects of America's past that makes it virtually impossible for a single historian to command with authority anything more than a small part of this historical literature...
...But for Hook to jettison socialism as his idle martresse would necessitate his taking up another set of economic principles --something he seems unwilling to do...
...of a maximum number of readers that he leaves little to the imagination...
...P a r a - noia," "schizophrenia," "madness" are all thrown about with abandon...
...Thereafter in moments of confusion Smith wheels one Consciousness or the other into his larrative, like a deus ex machina, in order to resolve various historical difficulties...
...During the nineteenth century and for a good part of the twentieth century readers could get t h e i r history in grand, multivolumed n a r r a t i v e s - - t e n volumes from George Bancroft, nine from Henry Adams, eight from James Ford Rhodes, nine from John Bach McMaster, and six from Edward Channing...
...An equality of concern for all human beings, "exArnold Beichman, a political scientist, is the author o f Nine Lies About America...
...Surely it does not lie in the realm of rationality...
...Wedemeyer, James L. Buckley, Ben Wattenberg, Neal Kozodoy, Alan Reynolds, Walter Goodman, Harry Jaffa, William Safire, Charles Peters, Jeffrey Hart, Irving Kristol, David P~ "kard, Henry Fairlie, Jean-Francois Revel, Richard M. Nixon, Robert Nisbet, Leonard Garment, Norman Mailer, Frank Shakespeare, Malcolm S. Forbes, Jr., Melvin Lasky, Ronald Reagan, Anne Armstrong, James R. Schlesinger, Richard Whalen, Dana Andrews, Midge Decter, William E. Simon, Ernest van den Haag, James Q. Wilson, Lewis Lehrman, Woody Allen, Nathan Glazer, Fred Silverman, Thomas Murphy, William Proxmire, Suzanne Garment, Maj...
...Daniel Bell has written recently that " t h e death of socialism is the unrealized fact of this century...
...Without wishing to qualify in any way my admiration of Hook, I do want to take up some of the ideas presented in this book in something less than approving tones--in particular, Hook's adherence, however fragile it may appear to be, to socialism or social democracy...
...Sometimes even these Big Ideas are not enough...
...He has told us what happened in the half century following Independence, but in the end he has not been able to explain to us fully why it happened as it did...
...Its dedication "to the ideals of a free society," he says, "has been unsullied...
...And an entirely new perception of what it was to be an American emerged...
...George S. Patton III, Elliott Abrams, Patrick Buchanan, Patrick Cosgrave, John Lofton, Larry Flynt, M. Stanton Evans, Huntington Cairns, Eric Hoffer, Herb Stein, William Baroody, Tom Wolfe, William Randolph Hearst, Jr., Michael Kinsley, Tom Winter, Gerald R. Ford, Henry Regnery, Roger Rosenblatt, Richard Lugar, Anthony Harrigan, Robert L. Bartley, S.I...
...The fantasies of both parties," he writes, "seem so bizarre that one gropes in vain for an entirely satisfactory explanation...
...Indeed, it is not too much to say that what we and the world used to think was our "national character" was created during these years...
...Alexander Haig, Randolph Richardson, George Will, Sidney Hook, Richard Perle, James Hitchcock, Philip Crane, Shmuel Moyal, Hugh Kenner, Fred Ikl~, Tom Stoppard, Charlton Heston, ;Jim Fallows, Alan Abelson, Milton Friedman, Daniel Patrick Moynlhan, Senator Jake Garn, George W. Ball, J. Peter Grace, and many others...
...Box 1969, Bloomington, Indiana 47402 I I I Please enter a PLEASE PRINT I [] new [] renewal subscription to Name I The American Spectator for one I year (12 issues) for only $12...
...Hayakawa, Luigi Barzini, Nelson Polsby, Joseph Coors, Peregrine Worsthorne, Tom Charles Huston, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Clare Boothe Luce, Clay La Force, Roger Milliken, Edward Banfield, Victor Lasky, Ra~/mond Aron, Roy Cohn, Joseph Hazan, Eugene V. Rostow, Michael Novak, Thomas Sowell, Gen...
Vol. 13 • August 1980 • No. 8
