Behind Our Era of Good Feeling
HICKS, JOHN D.
WRITERS and WRITING Behind Our Era of Good Feeling The Liberal Tradition in America. By Louis Hartz. Harcourt, Brace. 329 pp. $4.75. Meet Mr. Eisenhower. By Merriman Smith. Harper. 308 pp....
...One is written to be long read and pondered deeply: the other is obviously, almost blatantly, ephemeral...
...Americans, the author fears, can hardly hope to understand the behavior of peoples who have had to struggle for their freedom, or perchance are still struggling to achieve it...
...It makes a human being of Eisenhower, and on the whole a pretty nice human being...
...Even during the New Deal, the old liberal faith would not down, and America today, in attempting to lead the world, still adheres steadfastly to an "irrational Lockianism...
...adherents of both principals have embarked on the same boat...
...He likes people who have succeeded, particularly in business, where he seems to think the best American brains are to be found...
...But we can't help wondering a little if it was just the absence of a medieval feudal aristocracy to fight against that made them that way...
...In Hartz's opinion, this lack of opposition to liberalism from our earliest beginnings on down, this universal acceptance of Lockian views, is fundamental to an understanding of American political development...
...Probably Smith would wonder about that, too...
...In the European sense, therefore, the United States never had a revolution at all...
...rather, he is only a five-star general on parole...
...Everywhere in the Old World the character of liberalism was set by its fight to overthrow feudalism, but in America there was never at any time a feudal structure to be overthrown...
...Liberalism in America, he maintains, differs markedly from liberalism in Europe...
...He has a highly competitive sense, and likes to win, whether in a military or a political campaign, or at bridge, golf, or a contest with some wily planted trout...
...Our chief quarrel with Hartz's thesis is that it is too simple and proves too much...
...the other makes whoopee all the way through, plays golf, goes fishing, and gossips incessantly...
...The American Revolution, so-called, did indeed sever the ties that bound the colonies to the mother country, but it involved no tearing down of an ancien regime, no building up of "a new society on the ruins of an old one...
...Theodore Roosevelt once refused to shoot a planted bear, and so gave us our beloved "teddy bear," but, alas, we shall have no "ikey trout...
...If Turner's frontier hypothesis and Beard's economic determinism are insufficient to explain the whole course of American development, as they probably are, why should we put our faith in the even simpler theory of a frustrated liberalism...
...Differences between Eisenhower Republicans and Stevenson Democrats are not very significant...
...One is intensely and self-consciously serious from the first to the last page...
...But, even here, the doctrines of Locke and Jefferson somehow always stuck through...
...A general is still a general even when he chooses to be called a mister...
...Eisenhower trusts his lieutenants, and is proud of his Cabinet...
...One is an interpretation of American political thought...
...American Whigs had a hard time of it trying to wrap themselves in the trappings of aristocracy...
...The United States became, so to speak, a one-class boat in which, to be sure, some passengers fared better than others, but in which, by and large, all had full freedom of the ship...
...the other is a reporter's account of the current American President in action...
...Applying his thesis to the whole course of American history, Hartz notes that the absence to the Right of an old regime based on birth and favor was balanced by the absence to the Left of anything even approximating a democratic mob...
...Professor Hartz has a thesis to present and an argument to make...
...they want no modern contamination of "Americanism" and the "American Way...
...Smith professes to believe that the President will refuse his party's urgent call, but on the basis of the evidence that this book presents this reviewer would venture to predict the exact opposite...
...Smith's book on Eisenhower plumbs few depths, but it provides in its more serious moments some present-day evidence in support of Hartz's theory...
...3.50...
...The author gives two chapters to the efforts of those Southerners who saw that freedom and slavery could never be reconciled, and who sought therefore, quite unavailingly, to revive the class structure of feudalism...
...One speaks casually of Locke, Hobbes, Condorcet, Bentham, Ques-nay, Hegel, Bonald and Maistre, assuming all the while that the reader will identify the individual with the ideas for which he is best known...
...But he has a marketable commodity rare among Republicans, political sex appeal, and the party will need him in 1956...
...Thus America was born free...
...He has a general's temper, but can keep it under control, sometimes, perhaps, when he ought to let it loose...
...He examines "the world of Horatio Alger," from the Civil War to the Great Depression, in which "'success' and 'failure' became the only valid ways of thought," but with only Lockian winners and Lockian losers...
...He is a perfectly wonderful grandfather, he really has religion, and he would far rather retire to his Gettysburg home than to run again...
...It does not make a consummate politician of him...
...The chief difference is that the anti-Eisenhower Republicans much prefer the past to the present, provided only that it is the American past, pure and undefiled...
...Reviewed by John D. Hicks Morrison Professor of History University of California Beyond the fact that they both deal with American politics, it would be hard to find two books more unlike than these...
...Eisenhower doesn't like Washington, and he feels toward politicians about the way high-ranking officers usually feel toward politicians...
...Ultra-conservative Republicans who do not like Ike are afflicted, Hartz might say, with a kind of hardening of their liberal arteries, but even they are no less in the liberal tradition than their Ike-liking colleagues...
...American democrats were never willing to forego the chance to rise in the world that marked them as merely less well-to-do Whigs...
...Smith's book is best when it is merely descriptive and not, even unintentionally, profound...
...the other mentions only names in the news, names for the most part, of individuals whose philosophical depth is microscopic or non-existent...
Vol. 38 • June 1955 • No. 25
