TRANQUILIZED HISTORY
Neumann, William L.
Tranquilized History The New Age of Franklin Roosevelt, 1932-45, by Dexter Perkins. University of Chicago Press. 194 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by William L. Neumann TTISTORY, it has been argued, is...
...Its subject matter is complex human behavior in a world of infinite wheels within wheels...
...Young minds are provided with glib summaries and stereotyped analyses which often support a lifetime of adult prejudices...
...On this subject Perkins has nothing to offer except to allege that Communists were active in America First...
...Charles Beard, Stuart Chase, Oswald Garrison Villard, and John Dos Pas-sos are all indicted for disillusioning Americans about Europe in the thirties...
...About wartime diplomacy the student will learn that the policy of unconditional surrender was "sound doctrine" while Yalta is dealt with gently as "an extraordinary exercise" of Presidential power...
...Among the first of these is this study of the Roosevelt era by a former president of the American Historical Association whose area of specialization has been American foreign relations...
...Of the war itself, Perkins concludes that "time has shown that the democratic process . . . was in no way undermined...
...Considerable space is devoted to re-fighting the old foreign policy controversies of 1938-1941 and to censuring with the weight of "history" those who opposed the Roosevelt foreign policy...
...College textbooks offer ample illustrations of this danger...
...Some students may receive the impression that the war is chiefly significant for its by-products of penicillin and the GI Bill of Rights...
...The editor of the series, Daniel Boorstin, tells us in the preface that this is a "fair-minded and good-tempered interpretation" from which we can all learn how partisan issues are "transformed in the eye of the historian...
...The University of Chicago is sponsoring a new series of volumes dealing with "American Civilization," directed primarily at the college student but also suitable for the general reader...
...But no mention is made of those writers who provided Americans with a new set of illusions, particularly about the Soviet Union during the war years...
...But the college student who learns of the past through this text will find no hint of these developments, no cause for anxiety about "American Civilization...
...Such assurances are supported by devoting only three lines to the wartime treatment of Japanese-Americans and by ignoring completely the Smith Act of 1940 and the wartime persecutions...
...What will the student see through "the eye of the historian" of these controversy-packed years...
...Instead he will receive a historical tranquilizer, a reassuring statement from an eminent historian to reinforce the tendencies of this generation of college students to smugness, to political conventionality, and to the conviction that all goes well as American material prosperity sweeps aside men's problems...
...Amaury de Riencourt now calls our attention to what appears to be the growth of an American Caesarism, Arthur Ekirch to the decline of liberalism, C. Wright Mills to the rise of a new and powerful elite outside of democratic control, while David Riesman and other sociologists point to such things as the disappearance of inner-directed personalities in American life and to the frightening development of the "engineering of consent...
...But far too often he will learn little or nothing about questions of lasting significance...
...Occasionally he will come across a heavily weighted summary of the pros and cons of key issues...
...Surely there are matters of great significance for the next generation which must be studied in this period...
...Reviewed by William L. Neumann TTISTORY, it has been argued, is much too dangerous a subject to be taught in colleges and universities...
...He will find, of course, the conventional listing of facts such as the major legislative measures of the period of recovery and reform as well as some of the foreign policy decisions...
...To bring this material within the comprehension of immature minds requires a degree of comprehension which is inevitably misleading...
...The college student who began to read newspapers in the McCarthy years and who comes more often than not from a Republican home will want to know something about Communism and the New Deal...
...Three chapters are devoted to the domestic aspects of the New Deal, one to the foreign policy of the thirties, and three chapters to the coming of the war and the war years...
Vol. 21 • August 1957 • No. 8
