TYPICAL AMERICANS
Netboy, Anthony
Typical Americans Mainstream, by Hamilton Basso. Reynal & Hitchcock. $2.50. Reviewed by Anthony Netboy MAINSTREAM is an attempt to depict the quintessential American in terms of his intellectual...
...He gives off a light rather than a warmth...
...Huey Long and Franklin D. Roosevelt complete the galaxy...
...To Mr...
...Though it fails to integrate the novelis-tic, historical, and biographical techniques, it is honestly conceived and written with a scholarly purpose and a lofty intelligence...
...To admire Jefferson," says Mr...
...Mainstream is a book which one could honestly call provocative if that word hadn't been worn to death by reviewers...
...The protagonist is an imaginary character, John Applegate, corner druggist in a small town...
...There is Captain John Smith, who symbolizes the practicality and indomitableness which kept the early English colonies, like Jamestown, from foundering amid a hostile environment, and Cotton Mather, the devil-ridden New England Puritan who left an impress on American culture from which we are still suffering...
...It is difficult to compress a Great Man into an epigram, but this one comes close to success...
...He gave to America its belief in the dignity of the common man and the credo that the state is the servant, not the master, of the people...
...Long is the American as Machiavelli, for whom no political trick was too scurvy to gain his end, the end being always the aggrandizement and glorification of Long...
...John C. Calhoun is the American as Aristocrat and Abraham Lincoln is the Patron Saint, while Andrew Carnegie is the Horatio Alger hero...
...Basso, "is not necessarily to love him...
...Rooseevlt the author denies greatness of intellect...
...The hero himself remains rather featureless and abstract...
...P. T. Barnum is the Great Educator, by which is meant Advertiser, who taught modern publicists most of their tricks, and Henry Adams is the Great American Philosopher of the Twentieth Century...
...Perhaps the best portrait in Mainstream is that of Theodore Roosevelt, who brought the athletic way of life into the White House and afterward pranced around the country preaching the philosophy of the obvious...
...Reviewed by Anthony Netboy MAINSTREAM is an attempt to depict the quintessential American in terms of his intellectual heritage, to isolate the leading political, social, and economic ideas which the typical American of our time has inherited...
...It is about the Great Men, using the term in Car-lyle's sense, who shaped the thinking of the hero that this book is written...
...He regards him rather as "not only the leader of one of the greatest movements (the New Deal) in American history, but, in addition, a great political educator...
...Thomas Jefferson is represented as the Great Democrat...
Vol. 8 • January 1944 • No. 2
