Colonial America

...Their very existence depended on trade with the countries rimming the Atlantic Ocean and the exchange of ideas as well as goods went on constantly...

...Perhaps the simple explanation is that Franklin had something else to do...

...This "new interpretation," if I understand it correctly, amounts to the assertion of the fundamental importance of the "practical" and "experimental" as opposed to ideas and theories in early America, especially if the latter were European...

...If such is the case, I must render a "Scotch verdict" for the interpretation is supported more by assertions and "editorializing" than by a mass of evidence...

...It should be pointed out that the very life of these splendid isolationists depended upon the international tobacco market...

...Nor can I escape the impression that it is perhaps a "tract for our own times...

...In the following chapters we will illustrate how dreams made in Europe—the dreams of the zionist, the perfectionist, the philanthropist, and the transplanter—were dissipated or transformed by the American reality...

...However, we are told almost nothing of the content of their theology, the nature of the community they sought to build, or the results of their efforts...

...They were "distinguished" for "reasons of their own," for refusing to develop a theory of toleration...

...European ideas like those of the Enlightenment had no impact upon them...

...For example, the section on English and American law and lawyers should be expanded into a volume and the comparison of warfare in Europe and America throws real light on the problems of the war for independence...

...The issues of toleration and religious freedom were at the center of crucial debates in both England and America but we are not told what the Puritan "reasons" were, and Roger Williams, who did debate with them, is brushed aside with two statements unrelated to one of the central issues of American history...

...In insisting upon the ultimate importance of American experience and in denying at least the value of European ideas, it seems to me that the author comes dangerously close to glorifying ignorance, or at least to over-rating experience as opposed to ideas in human history...

...Nor did colonial religion exist in an intellectual vacuum...

...One may readily agree that America was different from Europe, that many imported ideas did not fit, that Americans had to be practical and experimental to survive, and that they had to develop institutions fitted to American conditions...

...Victims of Philanthropy" is the title given to the section on Georgia...

...they were preoccupied with the purity of their souls and were rigid in their beliefs...

...The "practical" Puritans, of whose history we are told little, come off very well when compared to the Quakers...

...But the Quakers had fatal defects...

...American political ideas and institutions were English and were expounded over and over again, particularly during the American Revolution, but this area of colonial life is omitted...

...Like the Puritans, Virginians were "practical" men and such ideas as they had were indigenous...

...In "Death of a Welfare Project" we are told how Georgians suffered from, among other things, the "universal ills of bureaucracy," and in "The Perils of Altruism" there are comments on what is wrong with philanthropists, martyrs, missionaries, and "apostles of the Good...

...yet this great movement is mentioned only in the middle of a sentence on the founding of colleges...

...The implication is that it was their fault for "the Puritans had not sought out the Quakers to punish them . . ." Unlike the Puritans, the Quakers refused to compromise...

...The book carries out this theme and attempts to divorce America from European influence upon it, and at times, it seems, from the importance of any ideas at all, whether American or European...

...No author is or should be responsible for the dust-jacket and this one reads as if written by a side show barker...

...Thus the Puritans were "practical" men interested in "community building," and while of orthodox theology, uninterested in theological speculation...

...One was an urge to martyrdom (which was not true in the Eighteenth Century, although this is ignored) and some of them were hanged in Massachusetts...

...I do not mean that the book has no value, for it has...

...This unfitted them to govern men, and their "failure" in Pennsylvania is enlarged upon...

...He begins by saying that "America was a sobering experience...

...Reviewed by Merrill Jensen fTiHis book begins with a discussion of four colonies—Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Virginia—and goes on to consider the "American frame of mind," education, law, medicine, language, books, printers, newspapers, and the character of military life in colonial America...

...The founders of Georgia, like those of Pennsylvania, were men with ideas to which they clung, and hence were unfitted to manage a colony...

...Virginia was utterly different, for there was "no attempt to rule by an idea but an earthy effort to transplant institutions...

...The concepts of Armin-ianism, Deism, not to mention Newtonian science, coming from Europe helped to set off the Great Awakening which rent the social fabric of the colonies from end to end in the Eighteenth Century...

...that after he learned about those theories he made no further contributions...

...The colonies were a disproving ground for Utopias...

...But the Americans did not live in a world whose impassable eastern boundary was the Atlantic coastline of North America...

...It is stimulating and argumentative from start to finish and replete with valuable information, for the author is well and widely read...

...The author makes no such claim...

...The latter "possessed a set of attitudes which fit later textbook definitions of American democracy": they believed in equality, simplicity, the goodness of mankind, and religious freedom...

...We are told, for instance, that progress in astronomy and physics was slight because Americans lacked the technical knowledge of Europe, but at the same time that probably Franklin's achievements in electricity were possible only because he was ignorant of European theories about it...

...Their achievements in that most prosperous of colonies are almost entirely ignored...

...But the book is not a "history" of early America...

...It asserts that the book is the first major reinterpretation of American history since Turner, Par-rington, and Beard...

...The word "practical" is reiterated endlessly...