The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn How Inevitable Is Caesarism? I have just finished—with great interest and enthusiasm—Amaury de Riencourt's book, The Coming Caesars (Coward-McCann, $6). The man...
...But the editors of this influential weekly have done a peculiar thing...
...It may be that, like the sailor who was told to go to hell, we need not go...
...On October 25, U.S...
...It may be that, as the centuries go by, the upshot of our political life does not remain the same...
...I am tempted to add a note of caution...
...He ties in the New Deal with the Great Depression and its suffering...
...Our French historian views all these things as part of the great stream of history...
...The similarities between Rome and Anglo-Saxondom have, of course, often been alluded to...
...So, for the most part, M. de Riencourt's space is filled with brilliant comparisons between ancient Rome and modern America...
...Too much has been omitted...
...The Republican leaders, he writes, "did not believe in strong executive power, and Hoover himself failed to give firm leadership to his own Republican party...
...In his mind, Roosevelt's reaching out for power with which to defend the unemployed is connected with the failures of the men who preceded him...
...News version gives us just Jackson and the second Roosevelt...
...He blames no one for what is taking place...
...The U.S...
...James Knox Polk is barely mentioned...
...His general idea is that the development of the Anglo-Saxon nations, England and the United States, runs along much like that of the Romans...
...In the main, he regards the American republic rather than the British Commonwealth as the great representative of these combined political entities...
...Being a social scientist, M. de Rien-court connects what comes after with what went before...
...Neivs and World Report reprints a good big slice of this book, amounting to eleven double-columned magazine pages...
...Through their failure to grasp the situation as it really was, these men ushered into the White House the first of the outstanding pre-Caesarians...
...And here in America, especially under strong, popular Presidents, the Presidency has tended to grow in power at the expense of the legislative bodies...
...In fact, they are likely to get the impression that this wicked business was started by a grotesque frontiersman named Andrew Jackson and carried to its disgraceful end by a hypnotist named Franklin Delano Roosevelt...
...The man has a deep understanding of history and a special talent for finding the right words for complicated situations...
...further, that the greater the social equality, the dimmer the prospects of liberty...
...The effect of Washington's character and policies on the Presidency is inadequately treated...
...But this French scholar develops a special point which promises to have its special uses...
...This is, of course, a fine thing to do...
...He describes with obvious gusto how Teddy Roosevelt extended his powers in order to get the real estate required for the Panama Canal...
...Our author's theory is based on the likeness between the Romans and the Americans...
...In the original volume, four chief persons are dealt with: Jackson, Lincoln and the two Roosevelts...
...The man makes his points and makes them brilliantly...
...And Grover Cleveland hardly has justice done him...
...The times are different, education and communications are far different, and so are the economic situation and many of the techniques of living...
...News can rest happy with the conviction that no good Republican has had anything to do with nudging us along toward Caesarism...
...The editors virtually omit the treatment of the Civil War and Reconstruction period...
...But now I come to my point...
...My main criticism of this lively treatise is that it is too short...
...But the trusting readers of U.S...
...And through it all he sees here in the United States this cyclical drift toward Caesarism...
...Without adding a word of comment, they have culled and arranged the paragraphs which they reprint in such a way as to give their readers the notion that M. de Riencourt's book is, in the main, an attack on Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...Of the eleven pages, about half deal with the second Roosevelt...
...But these comments are unimportant...
...This is how he states his basic idea: "It is the contention of this book that expanding democracy leads unintentionally to imperialism and that imperialism inevitably ends in destroying the republican institutions of earlier days...
...He sees each actor playing his part as well as he can and producing mixed good and evil...
...This similarity is very real, but it is not the whole reality...
...Thus, in Rome, as equality increased, the tribunes of the people gradually turned into dictatorial emperors...
...Our more or less steady progress toward government from Washington under the leadership of one man appears to him to be a natural process not unlike biological evolution...
...Though our author is by no means over-hortative, this thesis contains a warning to Americans...
...The author suffered obvious pangs in setting down some of Lincoln's usurpations of power, but he went ahead with it...
Vol. 41 • January 1958 • No. 3
