The Past as a Yardstick

...But I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind...

...combining humanitarianism with the empirical method...

...196 pp...

...Social and economic history are ignored in favor of political and intellectual history...

...Jefferson, Nationalism and the Enlightenment By Henry Steele Commager Braziller...

...Our third President's sense of proportion, with politics almost a distraction and two terms as Chief Executive not worthy of inclusion on his tombstone, can hardly serve in a period when government is inescapable and localism (to Jefferson "my country" meant "the Old Dominion") means vulnerability to modern leviathans...

...What Mr...

...It deserved well of its country...

...and his assertions of ancient sagacity risk lapsing into a sanctimoniousness that might tempt some readers to turn in relief to the devil's party...

...7.50...

...If few students of the American past have a stronger claim for membership in this party than Henry Steele Commager, his two collections of recent essays nevertheless show how intertwined historical scholarship and dissident liberalism can become...

...Commager, himself a wise writer, tends to idealize Adams' generation...

...For example, the war in Vietnam is called "the product of willful folly, hysteria and paranoia, lacking in logic, purpose or objective, and waged with insensate fury against victims with whom we had no quarrel and who are incapable of doing us any physical or even philosophical harm, waged for its own sake, or for the sake of 'honor' which we have already forfeited or for 'victory' forever elusive...

...After the electoral landslides in this century of Harding, Johnson, and Nixon, the Jeffersonian faith that the people will generally choose a "natural aristocracy" of "virtue and talents" demands- to put it gently-corroboration...

...To allow the President to take us into war is to invite disaster," Commager writes, but "to tie his hands in emergencies is also to invite disaster...

...While Commager is correct when he states that history "has exemplified only the first, not the second, of these dangers,' a more rigorous discussion would have given consideration to both perils...

...In The Fall, Camus' narrator tells us that "fundamental truths are simply those we discover after all the others...

...The Declaration of Independence, which "let facts be submitted to a candid world," has become a shield for secret intelligence work...

...A consensus to extend "the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity" is assumed-despite, as Commager himself admits, the persistence of slavery...

...Ultimately, therefore, the essays are ceremonial rather than critical, elegiac rather than skeptical, tableaux more often than analyses of change over time, a brief for the party of humanity rather than a sober sifting of evidence...

...Elsewhere, Commager pleads for a more modest America shorn of militarism and ideological frenzy, and for a less ambitious definition of Presidential power...

...How that reconciliation is to be accomplished is, unfortunately, never elaborated, for The Defeat of America shies away from rebutting the conservative case for order, a case the Nixon Administration- with its flair for intimidation and ineptitude-made flimsier than it is...

...In detailing the efforts of the Founding Fathers to inhibit Presidential adventurism, he tells the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "The central principle of our Constitutional system, as both Madison and James Wilson saw, is not energy but authority moderated by prudence, restrained by law, illuminated by reason, and animated by respect for freedom: in short, the reconciliation of freedom and order...

...He might at least have acknowledged the repellent attributes of Indochinese Communists, the victors in "a war we must lose if we are to survive morally...

...I belonged to it, and labored with it...

...It is the less instructive of the two books, not only because its contents-Indochina and Watergate-are so familiar, but also because Commager seems interested in exhortation instead of argument...

...We may continue to believe, albeit without Jefferson's complacency, in the benign "spread of the light of science," but the myth of American innocence and of immunity from the complicity and cunning of history can no longer be sustained...

...By implication, he refutes the idea of progress most of the Founding Fathers believed in, hoping instead to restore, in his words, "the intellectual and moral world which the Enlightenment created, and which we have lost or betrayed...

...But the historian is likely to be, as Peter Gay described the philosophies, of the party of humanity: believing in the 18th century's liberal virtues of self-government and secularism, as well as reason and respect for law...

...Reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield Assistant Professor of American Studies, Brandeis The true poet must be, as Blake wrote of Milton, "of the devil's party...

...Nor is the agrarianism so central to his ideal of much comfort or relevance in an industrial age...

...Thus the author fails to account for the declension of the American polity, or to indicate that in the 20th century the Jeffersonian assumption that "man was a rational animal" requires some amendment...

...This is op-ed page material, very good op-ed page material to be sure, yet nothing more than a set of manifestos fueled by high-octane phrases like the "shame of the republic" and a gruff though mellifluous prose style...

...Still, at his best, Commager has a knack for the pertinent civics lesson...

...Nixon complains of being unable to do under a strict interpretation of the Constitution," he remarks, "is precisely what those who wrote the Constitution intended he should be unable to do...

...John Adams' generation sought "to realize the theories of the wisest writers...

...A better corrective is to recall the letter Jefferson wrote in 1816, where he warned against ascribing "to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human...

...That is the most important item on the agenda of the Bicentennial years.' But however inspiring the case and inspired the writing-indeed, the essays sparkle with translucent learning-this volume has some conspicuous limitations...

...In Jefferson, Nationalism and the Enlightenment, it is clear that Commager's animus against the leadership and the policies of the past decade is grounded in the discrepancy he sees between the philosophy of the 18th century and the practice of the present...

...The Defeat of America is directed at the related problems of an imperial Presidency and an interventionist foreign policy...

...and manifesting a moderate temper that does not exclude Voltaire's injunction to crush infamy...

...The office of the Presidency, once occupied by a man who swore "upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man," has recently been abandoned by one who swore upon a podium not far from Disney World that he was not a crook...

...I knew that age well...

...Similarly, he neglects to couple his attack on the nation's anti-Communism with a strategy for combatting a tyranny liberals must on principle oppose...

...For Commager the fundamental truths came first, at the birth of the republic, and he seeks to affirm and penetrate what is no longer self-evident...