The Air-Line to Seattle
Lynn, Kenneth S.
THE AIR-LINE TO SEATTLE Kenneth S. Lynn / University of Chicago Press/ $17.50 Terry Eastland Do not be misled by the subtitle of this collection of articles originally published in Commentary and...
...Lynn's essays point out the errors and biases of "the professoriat," the glade people who ignore the air-line to Seattle (and who may need reminding that San-tayana's air-line was not a 747 but, as it could only have been in 1900, a steam-engine train...
...The poem describes "an old, secluded glade" where its aging Puritan and Quaker inhabitants "grow fervid in the shade," the surrounding trees "bending" to their speeches and providing "an echo's charm...
...Needed in particular is a good, general history of the United States that is not written from the perspective of the New Deal and the Great Society...
...Needed also are books that provide a more accurate treatment of the American past and are more empathetic with the aspirations and ideals of the American people...
...they were the glade's inhabitants...
...But like his friend, Joseph Epstein, to whom this collection is dedicated, Lynn is also a writer, a very good writer...
...That book challenged the conventional view that the Declaration of Independence reflected the American mind in 1776, a mind influenced by Locke, among others, and emphasizing the importance of liberty and the primacy of the individual...
...Politically and socially liberal if not radical, the sensibility of these writers is on display when they interpret the American past-a past they often get wrong...
...The trees and vines "weave about" the place, shutting "the mucker-village out...
...Just as, for Santayana, the American intelligentsia seventy years ago was cut off from "the unspeakable variety of possible life," the American intelligentsia today, in Lynn's view, is similarly cut off, more interested in its own theories and the imagined evils of America than the realities symbolized by "the air-line to Seattle...
...Similarly, historians of the early twentieth century are bent on portraying the rebels of Greenwich Village as fugitives from repressive small towns and authoritarian parents...
...They typically place more importance on man's intellect than on his other faculties, have noticeably egalitarian tastes, and are attracted to Utopian schemes...
...They have yet to appreciate that, as Lynn demonstrates, the majority of the rebels came from large cities and were the children of socially and politically liberal parents...
...These writers are hostile to traditional values of religion and family, and to those of business and commerce...
...These "studies in literary and historical writing about America" are not dry exercises in learning...
...The Air-Line to Seattle will serve a most valuable end if it encourages the writing of a more sensible and sensitive literature about America.literature about America...
...entertaining and forceful...
...Agitated in large part by the "wicked sin" of the Vietnam war, "the professoriat," writes Lynn, has "proceeded to initiate a whole new scholarship about American civilization, in which it [has] incorporated a host of dubious theories, old and new...
...But it is also a sobering reminder of the vast amount of work still to be done in the war of ideas that is determining the fate of America...
...Perhaps the most remarkable essay in The Air-line to Seattle is "Falsifying Jefferson," Lynn's review of Garry Wills's Inventing America...
...Lynn demolishes Wills's argument, concluding that Wills's "obvious aim is to supply the history of the Republic with as pink a dawn as possible...
...As Lynn explains, Santayana composed this poem in 1900 as a satirical attack on his fellow professors at Harvard...
...Reflecting on such subjects as the influence of Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday, reviewing such recent books as Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism, Lynn persuasively shows that many writers about America are indeed wrapped up in their own ideas and relatively uninterested in "the air-line to Seattle...
...Nonetheless, concludes the poem...
...THE AIR-LINE TO SEATTLE Kenneth S. Lynn / University of Chicago Press/ $17.50 Terry Eastland Do not be misled by the subtitle of this collection of articles originally published in Commentary and The American Spectator, among other magazines...
...Furthermore, critics and teachers of Huckleberry Finn have been preoccupied in recent decades with the idea that Huck was fleeing a sick society when he said, at book's end, that he had to "light out for the Territory...
...Thus, as Lynn points out, the biographers of Ralph Waldo Emerson are absorbed with the idea of his being the nonmaterialistic "American Scholar," the image Emerson himself sought to encourage...
...The idea of America as a sick nation has had many adherents but, as Lynn shows, Mark Twain was not one of them...
...Kenneth S. Lynn is an academic, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, and his substantial knowledge of American literature and history is apparent in each of the articles in this volume...
...The Air-Line to Seattle is as entertaining as it is informative...
...the smoke of trade and battle Cannot quite be banished hence, And the air-line to Seattle Whizzes just behind the fence...
...The phrase comes from a poem by George Santayana, which Lynn discusses in an essay that leads off the book...
...Winning the acclaim of journalists and academics alike, Wills argued that the Declaration instead reflected the communitarian ideas of the common-sense philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment...
...His ear for the language is obvious, his use of it Terry Eastland is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator...
...And as Lynn goes on to show, Santayana gradually came to view American intellectuals in general as full-fledged members of the glade, "locked into the beliefs and practices of the past," cut off from the "mucker-village" and "the airline to Seattle...
...The question is why the book drew so much praise...
...Lynn aptly comments: "In an age of ideology, the inventions of ideologues have come to seem plausible, even though they are fantastic...
...Lynn's basic message lies in the phrase, which is the book's title, "the air-line to Seattle...
...And it is what Lynn has to say in this collection of essays and book reviews concerning the American past that makes them worth reading again, if not for the first time...
...As for Santayana at the turn of the century, so for Lynn today: many who study and write about the American past are what one might call (if I may craft a phrase) "glade people...
...What they fail to see is the private Emerson, a man whose actions in his marriage and private life mark him as a scoundrel and a hypocrite...
...Inventing America does not help us to understand Thomas Jefferson, but its totally unearned acclaim tells us a good deal about modern-day intellectuals and their terrible need for radical myths...
Vol. 16 • November 1983 • No. 11
