From This Moment On
Hart, Jeffrey
FROM THIS MOMENT ON: AMERICA IN 1940 Jeffrey Hart/Crown/$19.95 Terry Teachout nce upon a time, history and biography aspired frankly to the condition of literature. Even economists could be...
...According to Hart, that was the year in which American optimism attained a kind of perfection...
...H. G. Wells's The Outline of History, which sold a fearsome number of copies, did a fearsome amount of damage in the process...
...One popular biography animated by an idiosyncratic point of view and shaped with an unerring sense of drama is worth a dozen earnestly plodding monographs on the Schleswig-Holstein question reconsidered from a lesbian perspective...
...The literature of the day is a succession of "major poetic statements, grand philosophical syntheses, final statements...
...Fortunately, every copy of Modern Times cancels out an Outline of History, and From This Moment On: America in 1940 will doubtless have the same countervailing effect on any number of hateful revisionist screeds...
...Hart was ten in 1940...
...A book about America in 1940 that devotes four chapters to sports and one paragraph to popular music is a book written by a man with earmuffs on...
...Randall Jarrell once described a book of poetry as giving the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter...
...But it is Jeffrey Hart's 1940 that we are invited to survey here, not anyone else's, and his admirably personal approach to historical narrative has a sweep and vigor that makes objections like these, however noticeable at the time, seem trivial on reflection...
...From This Moment On is about these "champions" and the America they dominated: Roosevelt and Willkie, Bogart and Bergman, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Louis and DiMaggio...
...To be sure, Hart's awareness of the coming cataclysm, of the loosening of the will that would dominate postwar America, lends savor and bite to every page of From This Moment On...
...His When the Going Was Good...
...But Jeffrey Hart grasps this aspect of Roosevelt in the same way he grasps the optimism that is so salient a feature of the American character...
...In doing so, he became a half-consciously perceived metaphor for an America shattered and "paralyzed" by the Great Depression...
...Such ungainly books are clearly written on word processors for other word processors to read...
...A popular book, then, and a perfectly wonderful one...
...Some of them, anyway...
...It is unusual for a conservative to recognize, let alone frankly acknowledge, the symbolic power of Franklin Roosevelt...
...Despite the Great Depression, which was ending in 1940, these champions and others radiated a sense of possibility that did not afterwards appear in so pure and so concentrated a form...
...War was plainly on the horizon, of course, and its looming presence shaped the texture of American life in 1940...
...And From This Moment On, like When the Going Was Good!, is marked at times by a positively Chestertonian disdain for precision...
...May it sell a million copies...
...Wendell Willkie is "the first major Republican since Theodore Roosevelt with sex appeal...
...The technique with which Hart evokes their America, familiar from When the Going Was Good...
...The New York World's Fair is "a luminous statement of American optimism...
...was by far the most engaging portrait of the fifties to see print, and now we have a second installment in what one hopes will eventually become a five-foot shelf of American chronicles, a crisp and sprightly volume called, with Terry Teachout is a member of the editorial board of the New York Daily News...
...Given the choice between Paul Johnson on the will to power or William Manchester on the young Winston Churchill and one of the crudely written slabs of meticulously hounded footnotes that currently pass for history among the academics, I'll go for the former ten times out of ten...
...Hart even gets the lyrics of "As Time Goes By" wrong...
...One may quibble here and there V with Hart's sense of priorities...
...Roosevelt told everyone that America would rise again and walk, too...
...and based on the kaleidoscopic style which John Dos Passos used in U.S.A., is a virtuosic blending of pointed capsule biographies, longer set pieces dealing with important historical events like the Willkie-Roosevelt race, and nostalgic camera-eye reminiscences of the author's own childhood...
...The strength of From This Moment On, however, lies not so much in Hart's remarkable powers of evocation as in the unfailing accuracy with which he locates the temper of the times in person and place...
...Still, Hart recognizes that the American temperament is not at base a pessimistic (or conservative) one, that it simultaneously encompasses individualism and idealism, and it is his special gift to illuminate the resulting cultural tensions with grace and clarity...
...But our century has seen the gradual driving of a wedge between "academic" and "popular" history, and the writing of the latter has become a widely disdained pursuit nowadays, a moneymaking enterprise scornfully left to the William Manchesters and Paul John-sons of this world...
...Even the fussiest of academics must acknowledge that such efforts, by the force of their popularity, sometimes end up shaping history as much as recounting it...
...His epigraph comes from that quintessentially American pessimist, Robert Frost...
...Willkie's opponent, however large his failings, is still the champion of champions: [T]he overwhelming fact about him is that he was horribly crippled, and yet, through sheer courage and will, he rose above his devastated lower body...
...Even economists could be relied on to write stylishly...
...And wonderful, too, that another conservative has emulated Paul Johnson and turned his hand to the writing of interpretive history for the common reader...
...Myself, I care less and less to read any other kind of book...
...So it is a pleasure to announce that Jeffrey Hart, who normally spends his crowded hours shuttling between the offices of National Review and the classrooms of Dartmouth, has somehow found the time to write another book...
...It looked as if a night of dark intent/Was coming, and not only a night, an age./Someone had better be prepared for rage...
...But the shadows of war also heightened the influence of individuals largely formed during the previous two decades who could be called champions, who succeeded, perhaps because of an undivided will, a will that remained intact, in being larger than life and in dominating their chosen activity...
...a nod to Cole Porter, From This Moment On: America in 1940...
...We "have nothing to fear but fear itself...
...Whatever that strange and famous sentence means, it surely implies a celebration of pure will...
...Why 1940...
Vol. 20 • June 1987 • No. 6
