Mixed Findings About the U.S.
WEISBERGER, BERNARD
Mixed Findings About the U.S. The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World By Mark Hertsgaard Farrar Straus Giroux. 246 pp. $23.00. To Begin the World Anew: The...
...brings network television news anchors winging to the scene for a brief visit...
...More important, though, Hertsgaard learned that the democratic openness of life here is still envied by tradition-bound members, particularly women, of the closed societies outside Europe...
...What is more, if his subjects are typical, millions around the globe believe in the ideals embodied in documents such as the Declaration of Independence, and have probably read them in English, now taught as a second language almost universally...
...he concludes that our "Constitutional establishment" has, "for many in our own time and within our own culture...
...Both authors wonder...
...Their vision is therefore sometimes colored by a nose-pressedagainst-the-glass perspective that makes us all look insouciantly rich...
...The Americans pose earnestly and solemnly, intent on proving title to what their admirable efforts have earned...
...Their fine clothes and gorgeous drawing rooms belong to them by right...
...For example, freedom of the press needed to be curtailed by libel laws for fear that, unrestrained and in the wrong hands, it could bring down a popular Administration-Jefferson's, of course-and deliver government to a commercial aristocracy where liberty could not exist...
...He interviewed a broad spectrum of people in 15 countries-ranging from a South African bus driver, to a restaurant owner in China, a musician in Seville, and a former Czech cabinet official-about thenviews of the United States...
...225 years later they survive as an inspiring prescription...
...The first reflects the author's conviction that the founders were able to exercise unusual creativity in political thought because they were "provincials...
...author, "America Afire: Jefferson, Adams and the Election of 1800" The attacks of September 11,2001 have provoked a fallout of lengthy essays on how we see ourselves, how others see us, and what effect those perceptions can and should have on our current national purpose...
...Its point, rather, is that there is a well-disposed populace beyond our borders still loving America the Beautiful but harboring reservations about America the Superpower-and we need to hear its voice...
...They were informal, humorous, open to challenges, energetic, generous, and optimistic...
...In defense of this apparent hypocrisy, the author argues that the third President often found two cherished values in conflict and had to choose one at the partial expense of the second...
...Bailyn is no apologist...
...Both of these books, in different ways, are contributions to that discourse...
...To Adams' annoyance, Franklin indulges in a highly personalized diplomacy that takes advantage of how the French elite see him and, by extension, young America...
...But there was another dimension to Franklin...
...the darker ones were deplored but forgiven...
...I remain awed by the founding ideals of the United States...
...In portraiture, these English nabobs lounge easily in the comfort of self-assurance...
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...They crafted the system of divided and counterbalancing authorities, and of majority rule limited by personal rights, that make up our system...
...Similarly, it is noted that foreign languages are conspicuous absentees from U.S...
...curricula, cutting off an avenue to engagement with other cultures...
...All of this strengthened a justifiable notion that Americans are on the whole indifferent to the suffering of others...
...He was also seen as the hero who snatched lightning from the sky and demonstrated in practice the enriching force of liberty on society and the soul...
...To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the Founding Fathers By Bernard Bailyn Knopf...
...Could it do otherwise and stay Number One...
...But America, I fear, has strayed from its founding ideals...
...Many who spoke to Hertsgaard said that despite the occasional blowhard, the Americans they met projected a likable character...
...self-absorbed, selfcentered, and in significant ways distant from the ordinary facts of life...
...Do we, today, follow the stated ground rules that earned such respect...
...Try reading Charles Dickens' American Notes or rus Martin Chuzzlewit for pleasurable examples of a large genre of unflattering representation...
...Or do we honorthem less often than we evade them...
...That is not to suggest The Eagle's Shadow is a soapbox diatribe portraying Americans as deserving targets of extremist hatred, or at best as hypocrites for lecturing neighbors on their sins while ignoring those committed at home...
...Even the mansion of a great Virginia planter like William Byrd is far less imposing than the many-splendored palaces, surrounded by manicured lawns and formal gardens, that belong to the highest rank of British nobility...
...French artists of the day, as Bailyn shows us, portrayed Franklin in paintings and busts as the American fur-capped, bespectacled commoner or the shrewd-eyed and pragmatic businessman he was...
...Serious foreign coverage in the U. S. is thought to be practically nonexistent, except when a crisis directly affecting the U.S...
...What is good for us is assumed to be good for everyone...
...And rightly so, for while our official mythology of the qualified person's easy journey from log cabin to White House or rags to riches may not be true, the opportunity to change communities, careers, lifestyles, and localities almost at will is nevertheless dazzling from distant shores...
...become scholastic...
...The media gets low marks too...
...Chapters on Thomas Jefferson and on The Federalist Papers cover more familiar ground...
...Their hope is for agreements that will express the principles of universal freedom on the seas and safety for private property...
...He therefore became central in allegorical artworks-surrounded by classical gods and heroes, or cradled in the arms of Liberty, or trampling Tyranny underfoot...
...Bailyn literally illustrates his definition of provincialism through a series of contrasting paintings of British aristocrats and American men of wealth in their home settings...
...Out on the margins of Atlantic civilization, they were not fenced in by the English or Continental experience and the conventional wisdom underlying "unchangeable" old ways...
...That is the key question specifically at the heart of the journalist's assessment and implicit in the historian's backward glance, and it cannot be avoided...
...Two of the sketches are striking in their use of visual imagery as a form of historical evidence...
...power...
...Hertsgaard declares: "I love America...
...Reviewed by Bernard Weisberger Former columnist, "American Heritage...
...Foreigners-and not merely café intellectuals, by any means-resent the predominance of U.S...
...The exercise of power is a necessity for any government, and power makes sizable demands on the purest of intentions...
...The second sketch, entitled "Realism and Idealism in American Diplomacy," presents Benjamin Franklin in Paris, trying along with John Adams to secure treaties of commerce and alliance from the French monarchy...
...Our government is also perceived as presuming an exclusive right to define democracy and summon the world to its defense...
...As a result, horrifying as the World Trade Center body count was, we are simply looked upon as newcomers in a tragedy club we rarely deigned to notice when massive civilian casualties were experienced elsewhere...
...Image was the key...
...To begin the world anew is a worthy goal, but resistance to the project is a force that inevitably creates barriers to perfection...
...They like blue jeans and McDonald's, cars, TV, movies, and pop music-all the gewgaws of the consumer age...
...The best features were celebrated and frequently imitated as democracy spread throughout the Atlantic world...
...The "real" and "ideal" depicted in marble, crayon and pigment emerge as figurative expressions of the two competing elements driving American policy...
...So, alas, were the undemocratic compromises, especially the recognition of slavery and the permission to count a slave as three-fifths of an enfranchised person...
...208 pp...
...They decry not only the contradictions between our professed morals and real practices, but our tendencies toward preachiness and selfabsorption...
...Although they drew on European philosophical thought, the practical arrangements were indeed their own creations...
...The slim volume consist of four "sketches" (his word) thematically linked by a probe into the minds of the "extraordinary" leaders who gave rise to the American Revolution...
...The writers of the Constitution, as three of them explained in The Federalist Papers, knew as much...
...What he found is not surprising: Overseas, citizens of nearly every kind, even in countries theoretically hostile to us, maintain a lively admiration for many facets of American culture, including some that upscale natives deem questionable...
...Yet there is an opposite side to the coin...
...Bailyn explores the wellknown contradictions between Jefferson the eloquent apostle of freedom and Jefferson the slaveholder, elitist, nationalist, expansionist, and party manager...
...In The Eagle's Shadow journalist Mark Hertsgaard reports on a round-the-world tour that actually began in May 2001...
...But both are compelled to recognize that in fact the finished products will involve promises of territorial gains and special privileges for a victorious King Louis, in accordance with the sordid time-honored customs of imperial conflict...
...Overseas visitors have long been irritated by our swaggering gait...
...Bailyn's interpretation will not end the perennial debate on who "the real Jefferson" was, but the point is a broader one-that freedom is not so much an absolute as an idea that shifts with circumstances...
...Judging by what they hear, we debate our financial and trade policies with little attention to their impact on the rest of the world, where there is no escaping the repercussions of a cheaper dollar or an import restriction...
...In their virtual invention of a new political order, they encountered perplexities, contradictions and the "ambiguities" of the subtitle, all stemming mainly from the eternal tension between what idealism imagines and reality demands...
...IN To Begin the World Anew historian Bernard Bailyn turns his well-informed attention to the origin of our professed American values...
Vol. 85 • November 2002 • No. 6
