Progress Toward Sanity

...to the perils and responsibilities of global politics...

...One of the book's many virtues is an account of the horrible details of group prejudice, which enables even those of us who were contemporary with these events to set them in proper perspective...

...This is the main theme of the book, the one to which all the others are subordinated...

...This last, however, becomes a part of the study only when it is the occasion for a bitter political debate in which civil rights are involved...

...and the effort to deny the Socialists their seats in the New York Legislature as well as to unseat Meyer Berger as Congressman from Wisconsin...

...This is true despite the author's obvious intention to give the Negro struggle that place, for it simply is not reviewed in sufficient detail and depth to demonstrate its climactic nature...

...Despite these weaknesses, The Quest for the Dream, considered as the history of civil rights that it is intended to be, is so impressive and so instructive that one can only hail it as a significant contribution to the realization of the American dream itself...

...The Quest for the Dream is most impressive in dealing with the strivings of an ethnically and culturally pluralistic nation to achieve justice for its minorities...

...Yet this is the main theme of our national life, and in Roche's book it suffers from being subordinated to the struggle for civil rights...

...the Bisbee deportations during World War I; the campaign against the "Wobblies" and the Red hysteria under Wilson's Attorney General, Mitchell Palmer...

...His subtitle, "The Development of Civil Rights and Human Relations in Modern America," expresses the theme of the book...

...The second theme of Roche's book deals with the transformation of an agrarian civilization into an industrial one, and how this involved the effort to suppress radical minorities...

...Many renowned historians have dealt with it, among them Richard Hofstadter in The Age of Reform and Eric Goldman in Rendezvous with Destiny...

...The history Roche recounts reveals, to me at least, not that Americans are more decent than other peoples, but merely that, fortunately, we are enmeshed in a racial and cultural pluralism in which "decency," or tolerance, is the price of survival as a unified nation...

...Indeed the whole sad sequence of racial prejudice in the United States might refute Roche's idea of an "inherent decency" in the American people, a quality which only triumphed after many encounters with evil forces...

...has recorded the New Deal climax to the story in his definitive, though as yet unfinished, Age of Roosevelt...

...and Arthur Schlesinger Jr...

...Reviewed by REINHOLD NIEBUHR John P. Roche has given us a very comprehensive survey of the tortuous struggle throughout American history to realize the ideals of freedom and justice inherent in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution—or, to use his words, "The American Dream...

...This latter case of racial injustice was especially significant because during World War II, which in contrast to World War I Roche defines as the "Good War," the country's mood was sober by comparison with the prevailing mood during the War which introduced the U.S...

...The first of these themes is the achievement of justice for minority groups in a pluralistic society...

...It is, incidentally, a weakness of this important study that the current Negro struggle is not given adequate place as the climax to a whole history of trying to make real an original ideal...

...It may seem captious to criticize the author for his adequate treatment of the transformation of America from an agrarian civilization into an industrial one...

...The subject is too rich and complex to be treated as a subordinate theme, though I confess that I should be equally critical if it had been completely omitted from a study of civil rights...

...The obvious merit of this comprehensive panorama of modern American history is that it gives a coherent account of the trials and torments through which the nation passed until we achieved our present state of relative sanity, if indeed one can speak of sanity while we are still experiencing the brutal and stubborn last stand of white racists against the country's Negro minority...

...Here we become aware once again that the famed American "melting-pot" did not simply reduce all ethnic and religious minorities to a common amalgam without vicious explosions of prejudice against Jews, Orientals, Negroes and other minorities...

...Roche discusses, for instance, the brutal judicial murder of Leo Frank, reminiscent of the Dreyfus case, and the mistreatment of the California Nisei...

...But it includes, along with the outrageous treatment of the New York and Wisconsin Socialists at the beginning of this century, the consistent conservatism of our Supreme Court throughout the 19th century in its invariable injunction against labor's right to strike...

...Covering the whole history of the United States, Roche seeks to encompass three related but also independently significant themes of our history...

...The third theme is the gradual development of the nation into a world power, marked by the bitter "interventionist" debate of the isolationists and the interventionists between two world wars...