A History of the American People

...This has irritated those of his reviewers who, when not timid by nature, are timid on principle, and like Berlin's fox would prefer a thousand qualified conclusions to a single firm declaration...

...Not for nothing did Johnson begin his career as a journalist...

...Stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn...

...Parson Weems, mythologist of Washington, said he met him in the street in tears, saying 'I've been swearing again, and I'm sorry.' It was his new young wife, more elegant than he was, who did not like the swearing...

...Yet it is one for which John-son's method of writing history, developed in A History of Christianity and The Birth of the Modern, is ideally suited...

...the muckrakers roused public opinion against trusts, monopolies and even, laments Johnson, the very (American) notion of Bigness itself...

...Constitution...

...He has since written a history of the British people, a history of Christianity, a history of the Jews, a history of the modern world, and a history of the birth of modernity, relaxing in between by writing quicker studies on such topics as God, intellectuals, and John Major's Tory government...

...for the railroads were already transforming America into the world's first industrial superstate—and not by policies of laissez-faire ("it is calculated that total direct aid of government to railroads in the years 1861-90 was over $350 million...

...Revolutionary America, 1750-1815...

...admires the pugnacious Andrew Jackson but thinks his financial policy a crass failure and his treatment of the Indians cruel and genocidal, and so on, and so on...

...And any pantheon of American heroes must make room for Ralegh and Winthrop alongside Washington and Lincoln—something Ronald Reagan recognized through his frequent invocation of Winthrop's ambition to build a "shining city on a hill...

...Here was an age in which swashbuckling self-interestclearly dominated, and religious idealism took a back-seat—to the great material benefit of the American people who saw technological innovation and improved business efficiency dramatically lower the price of their everyday comforts and necessities...

...that slavery (though embedded in American life) was doomed to be destroyed by a kind of constitutional manifest destiny...

...Still, it is a fair criticism that they are better classified as current events than as history since they lack one important quality that history possesses: we do not know how they turn out in the end...

...Johnson has been attacked by some reviewers for answering this question with a naïve, uncritical, conservative (or, Heaven help us, even "Thatcherite") boosterism of America...

...Some of his unconventional judgments, moreover, compel if not agreement, then at least serious consideration...

...It meant that land was cheap, labor expensive, and government distant, and that for all these reasons a man might earn a family farm by hard work in a few years, enjoying a practical independence that made Locke's philosophy seem simple common sense...

...But the logic underlying them is plausible and helps us make sense of a vast mass of otherwise confusing historical data...

...believes John C. Calhoun was brilliantly on the wrong side and helped to ruin it with his brilliance...

...and that the opening-up of America was the result neither of government, nor of laissez-faire, but of both in different combinations at different times...

...Not that it ignores such warts on America's face as slavery or the destruction of the Indians...

...They also suggest a cyclical interpretation of American history in which periods marked by idealism (Revolutionary America, Civil War America) tend to be followed by periods of self-interest (Democratic America saw the seizure of California under President Polk, Industrial America produced the Gilded Age—of which more below...

...When it comes to America's greatest historical dilemmas, he argues that the treatment of the Indians was often abominably cruel but almost certainly an inevitable result of Manifest Destiny (itself inevitable...

...Though not an alcoholic, he liked a tumbler of gin to drink...

...quite the contrary, Johnson devotes a great deal of space and historical sympathy to both...

...John68 April 1998 The American Spectator son himself occasionally spouts cloudy rhetoric of this "creedal nation" variety...

...But his whole approach challenges the present consensus of academic historians that history (pace Gibbon) is a register of the crimes and follies of dead white males and of the misfortunes of women, gays, and people of color...

...America's bigness, as Johnson repeatedly underscores, was itself a political and philosophical fact of the first importance...

...As Michael Lind has argued in National Review, this has significance for America's current national debate over its national identity...

...But America's idealistic impulses are plainly the main explanation of our present peace and prosperity, and Johnson pays full tribute to recent presidents, notably Nixon and Reagan, for winning the Cold War, often with little help from lukewarm allies...

...It is within each categorical epoch, however, that Johnson's method really shows its breadth and flexibility...

...The freedom they prized was an English political idea that had flowered to its full potential in the geographical and economic space of the New World...

...That would be impressive if the histories were brisk snapshots of their topics...

...Ask most liberal historians about Reagan and all you will get is an articulated spluttering...

...Civil War America, 1850- 1870...

...Even those of his judgments that are undeniably controversial—his high view of Nixon, his low one of FDR — are the stuff of contemporary politics almost as much as of history...

...Democratic America, 1815-1850...

...He depicts the history of America as the advance of a great civilization—like the rise of Islam or the spread of the British Empire—which showers benefits and curses on the peoples in its path and allows its own citizens to participate in great achievements but also in great crimes...

...But how does he manage the reading...

...America now dominates the world economy and international institutions...

...it then segues into America's early town planning which, taking advantage of that size, laid down rules for wide streets and pavements in new spacious cities like Omaha and Topeka...

...The dynamic leaders were to be found in the economy— industrialists like Andrew Carnegie, inventors like Thomas Edison, financiers like J.P...

...His latest book is not his bravest—that, surely, must have been his History of the Jews, which risked the scorn of ten thousand Talmudic scholars...

...This fruitful tension between puritan idealism and swashbuckling self-interest— which Johnson identifies respectively with Governor John Winthrop and Sir Walter Ralegh ("a proto-American")— existed from the very birth of the American nation, which he dates not from 1776 but from the Roanoke landing in 1584, or at least from shortly thereafter when the Virginia and Massachusetts colonies had established themselves and begun to develop their own distinctive cultural and political institutions...

...He thinks highly of the Founding Fathers and Lincoln...

...He persuades me that the Gilded Age was perhaps more important than the opening up of the West because it secured the Western lands by linking them to the new industrial heartland by a vast network of railroads...

...Reading it is rather like getting through forty years worth of American daily newspapers, both the yellow and the gray, in an afternoon...

...Johnson is able to make a much better case for his politico-historical preferences, not least because he is better read in recent economic history than are most political historians...

...This perverted idealism—sometimes in alliance with commercial self-interest—has removed legal barriers to crime, encouraged divorce, illegitimacy and sexual vices of every kind, winked at corruption by Democratic presidents, weakened the morale of mainstream churches, justified judicial usurpation of legitimate congressional authority, fostered multiculturalism and the "disuniting of America," and damaged the social fabric in a dozen other ways...

...Both are essential to America's success...

...With which History's curtain falls —for the moment...

...Self-interest has played its part in these rescues, of course...

...Besides which, Johnson effectively dismisses his own fears for the Republic by ending on a high note of enthusiasm that America "is still the first, best hope for the human race" and that "Americans will attack again and again the ills in their society until they are overcome or at least substantially redressed...

...He therefore sides with American nationalists both against multiculturalists (who would replace his national story with multiple histories of the American peoples)and against those philosophes who see American identity as an allegiance to the liberal political ideas outlined in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the U.S...

...idealism usually wins out, but not without epic struggles from which it benefits...

...Europe in particular would be governed either by genocidal Nazis, or by genocidal Communists, or perhaps by both in bipartisan cooperation...

...and Problem-Solving, Problem-Creating America, 196o1997...

...presents the story of the American people as overall one of achievement and inspiration...

...This is a daunting task by any standards...

...A successful print and television journalist—at different times editor of the intellectual leftist weekly, the New Statesman, columnist for the fogeyish London Spectator, and hard-hitting, straight-from-the-shoulder columnist for the populist Tory Daily Mail—Johnson took up history in his middle years, at about the time most of us are taking up pension brochures...

...Seventeen seventy-six won the American people full political independence as a nation...

...regards Henry Clay as the ablest American never to become president and likes him for his wit, generosity and ugliness overcome ("Kissing is like the presidency, it is not to be sought and not to be declined...

...That way of life subsequently assimilated millions of southem European Catholics and Eastern European Jews to its essentially Anglo-Saxon Protestant outlook (and was, of course, enriched by them in its turn...

...If Johnson can end on an optimistic note, it is because he believes that the American people are better than their corrupted elites, and that in good time they will restore the right blend of idealism and self-interest to the nation's affairs...

...That reflects his knowledge of America's recuperative powers, but also his own temperament...

...He sees the Big Picture, but from both sides...

...By starting his historical narrative in 18 Johnson implicitly accepts that an American people existed prior to the United States...

...Yet, as he points out dryly, the period was one of mediocrity in politics...

...What his critics really dislike is that the answer he gives is both positive and sophisticated...

...But it was a coming-ofage rather than a birth...

...It has, for a start, become anti-religious in effect, seeking to drive religion from schools and indeed the public square in general...

...Presidents between Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt were mainly nonentities...

...Morgan, and towards the end of the period, muck-raking journalists like Lincoln Steffens...

...this leads naturally into the rise in America's population fueled by mass immigration ("between 1886 and 1915...the United States gave a home to 25 million people...

...and the Progressives emerged to deliver honesty, efficiency, and regulation...

...who, of course, needed feeding by America's farmlands, still expanding in this period, benefiting from new technology like barbed wire ("shipped into Texas by the trainload, it enabled the west of the state to be developed rapidly"), and home to a vast new industry of cattle-ranching and the "golden age of the cowboy [which] lasted barely a quarter of a century...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW The Big Picture A History of the American People Paul Johnson HarperCollins / ro88 pages $35 REVIEWED BY John O'Sullivan T his is a history of one of the eight wonders of the modern world by the ninth...

...But there are no good grounds for this irritation...

...Johnson's last three chapters leave no doubt that this exercise has been overwhelmingly successful...

...He always took twelve lumps of sugar in his tea...

...In short, idealism struck back...

...Melting Pot America, 1912-1929...

...understandably, the prospect of this loot attracted some dubious characters like crooked speculator Jim ("nothing has been lost save honor") Fisk but also some genuine pioneering entrepreneurs like Commodore Vanderbilt, who is the beneficiary of one of Johnson's pen portraits ("He was not elegant...

...I can just about see how he manages the writing...

...Indeed, with the arrival of Teddy Roosevelt and the Spanish-American war, idealistic America emerged from behind its moats to put the whole world to rights...

...Before getting to the American people, let us quickly review Paul Johnson...

...Superpower America, 1929-1960...

...Take, for instance, Industrial America 1870-1912...

...That method is to break the overall epoch he is covering into large chronological blocks which coincide with (and are shaped by) some great historical development—a war, a technical innovation like printing—and within each of these periods to show how different aspects of life were altered by it...

...This is a book that achieves much of its originality not by discovering new truths, but by reviving and brilliantly reworking forgotten ones...

...Is that Norman Podhoretz we hear sighing...

...In Paul Johnson America has a biographer extraordinarily like itself— monstrously energetic, greatly imaginative, large-minded and generous-hearted, occasionally grotesquely unfair, but almost always pointing in the right direction...

...As the period came to an end, however, the pendulum swung back...

...This is comprehensive history—great men and ordinary people, statistical trends and bloody battles, stolen elections and new domestic appliances, kind hearts and coroThe American Spectator April 1998 69 nets —but it has a thoroughly unstatistical zip and zest...

...in fact, each one is a comprehensive account, generally between 800 and 1,000 pages in length, not merely summarizing the vast mass of historical research, but also shaping it into a coherent narrative in lively and readable prose...

...But the whole drift of his narrative tells a different story: namely, that the Americans who seized their independence in 1776 were English colonists and their descendants who had been remolded by the experience of opening up a vast—and, for practical purposes, limitless — continent...

...That being so, the question a historian must ask—and answer— is that posed by Little Peterkin in Southey's After Blenheim: "But what good came of it at last...

...But it is a courageous enterprise nonetheless because it JOHN O'SULLIVAN is editor-at-large of National Review...

...and that in turns makes an obvious connection to such topics as corrupt speculation by Grant's administration in the gold market, a (largely favorable) assessment of the "robber barons," and an appreciation of their patronage of the arts, in particular of painting and architecture, made all the more impressive by the love and knowledge Johnson (who himself is a painter) shows of the artists they encouraged —all this in less than thirty pages, with another sixty pages to go to the end of the chapter...

...This begins with a disquisition on America's size and how it was seen by American and European artists after the Civil War (Walt Whitman: "Stand up, tall masts of Manhattan...

...but when one triumphs entirely, it usually leads to trouble...

...Without the United States as the policeman of last resort, most of the world would be in much worse straits than it is in reality...

...In the course of such lively narratives, Johnson delivers a constant stream of historical judgments with superb intellectual self-confidence...

...They saw the transformation of America from a still-small agricultural republic into the industrial and economic superpower of modern times...

...He is surely right to regard President Polk as underrated, given his success in consolidating the taking of Texas from Mexico and contriving by war and cunning the conquest of Cali-fornia...

...He sees America itself—and most of the great Americans he depicts in a series of sharp, witty, pen-portraits in the style of Macaulay—as an endless and productive counterpoint between idealism and self-interest...

...The American Spectator • April 1998 71...

...Johnson may be a millionaire in opinions —he is perhaps the most opinionated man in London—but he has earned them honestly by mastering the data...

...As Norman Podhoretz said of Johnson a few years ago: "It's not the writing...

...There is plainly some arbitrariness in these divisions—surely superpower America begins with Pearl Harbor rather than with the Wall Street crash...

...Thus A History ofthe American People is broken into eight successive chapters: Colonial America, 1580-1750...

...Still, the nearer he approaches the present day, the more Johnson sees American idealism as having become perverted and harmful in domestic matters...

...These accusations strike me as gloomy but 70 April 1998 • The American Spectator reasonable...

...B ut it is Industrial America and the years 1870 to 1912 that are the fulcrum of Johnson's history...

...Industrial America, 1870-1912...

...But Americans became a distinctive people quite early in the colonial period (as, incidentally, did Australians 200 years later...

...I n writing the history of a people, however, Johnson is tackling a far larger subject than merely the record of a political system...

...Besides which, many of those judgments are conventional...

...The principles in the Declaration of Independence were the distillation of the free way of life that Americans had already created for themselves in the previous 200 years...

...He is promising to cover the full range of the national experience — economic, cultural, social, technical, scientific, philosophical, and religious as well as the merely political —from 1584 to the present...

...And today's art markets endorse his belief that the art of the Gilded Age, denounced shortly afterwards as vulgar and immoral ostentation (Teddy Roosevelt contemptuously ordered a Tiffany glass screen in the White House to be broken up), is both technically and artistically brilliant...