Unafraid of Greatness

...I love them and salute them, and this is their story...

...His thousand-page account of the birth of our age in Modern Times may be the most provocative and thoughtful history we have in this century...

...In addition to grasping the core religious framework of this country, Johnson understands the second tradition that lies at the heart of our history: the tradition of individual democracy, grass-roots populism, anti-authoritarianism, and anti-government sentiment...

...and the degree to which entrepre-neurship and the creation of wealth made America a better and different country in ways that had nothing to do with government or social or political theory...

...Johnson correctly identifies the origins of the American Revolution in the religious impact of the Great Awakening, but he notes as well that while the American colonists paid remarkably few taxes, they resented every single penny...

...I could not agree more fully with Johnson's focus on George Washington as the central figure of the revolutionary movement: He is the genuine Founding Father, the foundation on which this nation is built...

...For a clear and powerful and persuasive statement of these truths, we owe Paul Johnson a great debt of gratitude...

...He begins his preface, "This work is a labor of love," and he goes on to close it with the words: "I do not acknowledge the existence of hyphenated Americans, or Native Americans or any other qualified kind...

...The critique of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, the Watergate coup d'etat by the Left, and the Clinton administration in A History of the American People is so harsh, so intense—using so many revisionist insights and revisionist events—that it will stun and startle readers...

...Johnson is convincing well into the twentieth century, all the way through the 1920s...

...Readers will be forced to agree that Woodrow Wilson was a very important leader who both defined America's moral role in the world and created much of the modern, strong presidency...

...And he not only answers the question, "Yes," but he provides a remarkable framework of historical study to support his case...

...Let me confess at the outset that I am a Paul Johnson fan...

...It forcefully presents a coherent model of a wealth-creating productive class that also took citizenship seriously, along with an account of philanthropists like Carnegie, who gave away virtually all his money before he died...

...Johnson understands the role of religion in America: the importance of religious thought, the Declaration of Independence's assertion that "We are endowed by our Creator," the sense that America is directly endowed by God and responsible to God...

...the rise of popular culture...

...I would question, however, the degree to which Johnson dislikes and criticizes Jefferson, a president who intellectually played a much larger role in defining America than Johnson gives him credit for...

...we are one people...

...I would challenge every reader to hold its core assertions: America is a civilization...

...In his latest large tome, A History of the American People, Johnson is, as usual, clear, forthright, and daring...

...He has, however, a remarkable section—entitled "Huddled Masses and Crosses of Gold: Industrial America, 18701912"—that is profoundly revisionist in its understanding of the importance of invention, of entrepreneur-ship, and of Andrew Carnegie as possibly the most important American between Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt...

...He raises the key question about America and its nature: "Is this in fact a learned civilization and are there characteristics and traits unique to the American people that make them, because of their cultural experience in becoming Americans, different from other people...

...He regards it as a corrupt, power-oriented movement totally lacking in principle, willing to indulge the most venal and decadent behaviors while wearing a mask of complete hypocrisy...

...Johnson treats Lincoln and the Civil War in an effective, if relatively conventional manner...

...To some degree, the reader must concur when the author applies his critique of Hoover's interventionism to Roosevelt's...

...The pages Johnson devotes to Carnegie—the man's personal culture, philosophy, and witness to the importance of those who have been successful helping those who haven't—are worth the entire book...

...Hoover's interventionism extended and deepened the Depression, and what should have been a two- or three-year panic followed by a recovery (in the classic mold of 1892-93 and 1907) became the Great Depression, in part because of state intervention both here and abroad...

...Now sixty-nine years old, he remains a prolific columnist for the London Spectator and other British publications...

...This role was taken up within the framework of the United Nations and other international institutions—essential-ly American creations based on American power—structured to extend to the planet the American values of the rule of law, the right to private property, free speech, freedom of religion, and free elections...

...As the book turns in subsequent chapters to examining the nineteenth century, readers will be surprised by Johnson's emphasis on the importance of free land...

...As a former socialist who came to adopt far more conservative values, he has not only been a great adviser to Margaret Thatcher, but he has brought a unique talent for understanding left-wing thought to his explanation of conservative values and conservative attitudes...

...This tension between the individual and the state is deeply embedded in classical American civilization, and those who reject it demonstrate just how distant they are from the American tradition...

...A History of the American People understates the dangers and difficulties Roosevelt faced, the complexities of leading America, and the importance of Roosevelt's contribution both to reestablishing middle-class democracy and to leading the nation into its international role as the most powerful country in the world...

...The modern anti-tax movement can trace its roots directly back to a knowledge present even in the colonial period: the knowledge that every penny and every power government gets comes at the expense of personal freedom and personal opportunity...

...They are all Americans to me: black, white, red, brown, yellow, thrown together by fate in that swirling maelstrom of history which has produced the most remarkable people the world has ever seen...

...It permeates his book in a way that no modern liberal under-stands—which is why modern liberals are blocked from ever completely understanding America...

...Washington's personal character was, in fact, more important than his intelligence...

...The real breakdown was not in the 1920s, but in Hoover's intervention-ism and his efforts to apply Ludendorff's command-economy model to a free society in peacetime...

...He takes his epigraph straight from Shakespeare: "Be not afraid of great-ness"—certainly one of the most politically incorrect comments on America by a contemporary intellectual...

...and entre-preneurship, invention, and work create far greater wealth than any bureaucracy in history...

...And let me confess as well that, like Paul Johnson, I believe America is a great country filled with good A former professor of history, Newt Gingrich is speaker of the House of Representatives...

...his capacity to discipline and master himself and spend his life in service to the American nation was the rock upon which the country grew...

...Virtually unending in his condemnation of the Left, Johnson's analysis might have led to a wonderful firestorm of debate had he published it by itself...

...But, all in all, the author handles the founding of America with great skill...

...there is a religious base to our freedom...

...Johnson is contemptuous of the modern Left in America...

...In this sense, Johnson undervalues Roosevelt's power as a visionary— even while he accurately states Roosevelt's destructive tactical behavior as a manipulator and as a man untrustworthy on many occasions with his allies at home and his allies abroad...

...But I fear it may prove a distraction from a remarkable and, on the whole, extraordinarily accurate restatement of two-hundred years of American civilization as a unique, religiously based, freedom-oriented, low-tax, high-entrepreneur-ship system...

...the impact of technology...

...But I disagree with Johnson about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, probably more than about any other topic in his book...

...people, that we are a unique, learned civilization, and that there is something different about being American: People are born Chinese or European or African, but we learn to become Americans...

...It should be read by every college student and by every advanced high-school stu-dent—to say nothing of their teachers...

...One almost wishes that Johnson had published as a separate book his pages that cover the era from 1960 to the present, for they may very well cloud the first 80 percent of his magnificent history...

...Nonetheless, the book remains one of the most important works on America in our generation...

...If only for this reaffirmation of American uniqueness and the existence of a genuinely American civilization, Paul Johnson's book would be worth reading, but it shows, in addition, a remarkably insightful understanding of the core elements that have powered this civilization...

...Coolidge proves to have been a fairly effective president who had a very precise philosophy of an effective but minimal state presiding over an enormously successful society that was growing rapidly, increasing its wealth, bringing the poor into the middle class, and inventing a new generation of technologies (including the mass-produced car, the radio, the refrigerator, and the beginnings of television...

...They will come to share Johnson's belief that the 1920s were a much more successful decade than modern liberal academics have suggested and that it is a profound error to suppose the Great Depression to have been inevitable...

...Because the state blocked the market from recovering and the state blocked capital from investing, the state created conditions that made it artificially harder for the recovery to take place...

...And he remains as well an indefatigable writer of big, compelling books covering wide swaths of history—his mammoth History of the Jews, for instance, or his Intellectuals, in which he surveys the development of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers...