AMERICA, THE GEM OF HISTORIANS:

...Where in Europe the Enlightenment directed men to improvement in the arts, learning and science, in America it meant wealth, material welfare, education and personal freedom and happiness...

...He found the American democratic faith the unifying element of those ideas...

...After all, discussions of the meaning of America don't come rattling down the pike every day...

...In any national debate, he concluded, the arguments used by both sides will identify essential beliefs...

...Commager seeks to reaffirm the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment, that 18th century intellectual outburst that trumpeted the laws of nature, the sovereignty of reason and the freedom of the mind...

...In seeking to discover basic American values, Gabriel looked for them in times of crises, for he believed that at such times leaders will appeal to fundamental convictions...

...He believes the enduring quality of American society is its "segmentation...

...Although not a scholar in the strict sense of someone deeply ROBERT V. REMINI engaged in original research, he is a literate, provocative, liberal voice who is passionately committed to democracy, believes in the pragmatic method of experimentation in working out solutions to political problems, and advocates the toleration of ideas, even those which might be thought of as "loathsome and fraught with death...

...Whether one accepts the idea of a segmented society or the existence of three distinctive societies, there is a great deal here to think about and argue over...

...For them the dream of the 1940s, as Wiebe says, somehow turned into a nightmare thirty years later.ghtmare thirty years later...

...They no longer believe it took special qualities to build upon a superabundant land protected by two oceans...

...In Gabriel's view the technological and scientific advances by the nation meant "we . . . have put our faith in reason...

...In relating his comments and observations to the present, Commager asks some penetrating questions which he feels appropriate to the coming bicentenary...

...Because these essays were all written more than ten years ago they tend to be brightly optimistic...

...Well, this is not an easy book to read or comprehend, much less describe in a brief review...

...Writing in 1948, for example, he saw a similarity between America in the mid-20th century and the Enlightenment...

...In defining the meaning of America, Commager and Gabriel would undoubtedly describe it in terms of equal opportunity, equal rights, the advance of democracy in government and general economic prosperity...

...That makes him, to use his own words, hostile to all forms of "audacities of Government," "pretensions of Authority," and the superstitions of ignorance...

...He claims that five fundamental conditions of American life combined to form a base beneath these societies...

...Now segmentation does not mean fragmentation...

...As we study the birth of the Republic, how, he asks, did we get from Independence Hall to Watergate, from Yorktown to Vietnam, from George Washington to Richard Nixon...

...The institutionalization in the United States, he says, was fundamentally political and constitutional as seen in the invention of the constitutional convention, the party system and a federal government with checks and balances, a bill of rights, judicial review and separated powers among the three branches...

...They range from such topics as constitutional democracy, the Enlightenment tradition, and nationalism and the atom to the spiritual origins of American culture and changes in American thought produced by the Cold War...

...But whatever happened to that new world...

...The present volume is a case in point...

...Yet the sources of cohesion were forever elusive...

...BOOKS AMERICA, THE GEM OF HISTORIANS Jefferson, Nationalism, and the Enlightenment HENRY STEELE COMMAGER George Braziller, $7.50 American Values: Continuity and Change RALPH H. GABRIEL Greenwood Press, $13.50 The Segmented Society: An Historical Preface to the Meaning of America ROBERT H. WIEBE Oxford University Press, $7.95 Henry Steele Commager is frequently referred to as the dean of American historians...

...But Robert Wiebe, a younger and one of the most provocative (without being leftist) historians on the scene today, sees it differently...

...Thus, what has held Americans together has been "their ability to live apart...

...And rightfully so-at least in some respects...

...America at mid-century might well come to be called the "New Enlightenment," he grandly predicted...

...Americans pursued it so doggedly because so much depended upon an answer...

...In the 18th and 19th centuries they were communities constructed around intense religious beliefs, a marketing or administrative center or a parcel of land...

...And freedom, as Commager understands it, meant "freedom from religious and social superstitions, freedom from the tyranny of the Church, the state and the academy, freedom to follow the teachings of science and of reason wherever they led...

...Of the eleven essays, perhaps the most useful is the last, entitled "Traditional Values in American Life" because of its length (over 60 pages) which gives the author room to expand his thoughts and because he attempts to summarize political, legal, religious, educational, social, scientific and economic values as well as values in international relations...

...But the central fact of American society-the meaning of America-is the persistence of segmentation...

...These units include kinship, occupational, ethnic and locality affiliations, or combinations of these affiliations...

...Wiebe concentrates this analysis on the 200 years since the American Revolution and identifies three distinctive social systems...

...Our wars of "liberation" proclaimed our faith in the "rights of humanity...

...In answering these questions-if indeed we can-then maybe there is a chance we might begin to restore the moral and intellectual world the Enlightenment created...

...Rather it is the arrangement of small social units- what he calls primary circles of identity, values, associations and goals- that can "dominate the terms of their most important relationships with the outside world...

...Thirty-five years ago Ralph Henry Gabriel published a book entitled The Course of American Democratic Thought that had a profound influence on the historical profession because of its pioneering attempt to trace the history of the influential ideas held by representative Americans since the beginning of the nineteenth century...

...Make sense...

...He argues that the Old World imagined the Enlightenment but that the New World realized it...

...Europe invented and formulated it, America absorbed and institutionalized it...

...Which is not to deny the stature of Benjamin Franklin, whom even John Adams begrudgingly admitted had a reputation at the time more "universal" than that of Newton or Leibnitz or Voltaire...

...The Segmented Society "making a new world...

...We are," he said, Each generation has had to rediscover America, for its meaning has been a problem that could be neither ignored nor resolved...

...Commager sees Thomas Jefferson as the embodiment of the American Enlightenment and so the third President figures prominently in these essays...

...Emotions that in another country might be apportioned among an established church, a social class, and a standing challenge to national boundaries, for example, concentrated with a peculiar, lone intensity on the presence of a whole America, on the imperative of creating and sustaining elementary confidence in a cohesive national society...

...Now in this collection of essays, all previously published in various forms, Gabriel continues his search into American values and their origins...

...The intervening years, according to Wiebe, mark the crucial transition from one social system to the next...

...Unfortunately, many Americans have recently become rather cynical about that meaning, one of the most depressing consequences of Watergate...

...It is a collection of seven superbly crafted essays, all previously published and all but two written in the past few years...

...Common to all these communities was a membership able to see their social unit as a self-contained system and recognize their relationships within it, as well as a set of indigenous institutions capable of managing its members' everyday activities...

...Perhaps more than any other modern American historian he periodically and regularly selects from the vast ocean of history what he thinks relevant to the present and in print and on TV interprets them in ways that will, in his mind, instruct and enlighten the American thinking public...

...In a rather haphazard and disjointed introduction by the editor, Robert H. Walker, it is nonetheless made clear that Gabriel's methodology was perhaps his greatest stroke of originality...

...The first runs through the 1790s, the second between the 1830s and 1890s and the third since the 1920s...

...They include the vast expanse of land, cultural diversity, military security, lack of extensive institutional frameworks and economic abundance...