The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian's eagerly awaited second volume of a landmark new history of the U.S. presents the story of America from a compelling and delightfully fresh new perspective.
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The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian's eagerly awaited second volume of a landmark new history of the U.S. presents the story of America from a compelling and delightfully fresh new perspective.
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Professor Walter McDougall of the University of Pennsylvania develops his understanding of American history as a "tale of human nature set free" throughout his lengthy study "Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829 -- 1876" (2008). This book is the second of three volumes devoted to a history of the United States. The first volume "Freedom just around the Corner" covers the period 1585 -- 1828 while the third volume has not yet appeared. McDougall is a scholar in love with the United States but deeply conscious of its paradoxes. Further setting the tone for his history, he writes in his Preface "I believe the United States (so far) is the greatest success story in history. I believe Americans (on balance) are experts at self-deception. And I believe the 'creative corruption born of their pretense goes far to explain their success. The upshot is that American history is chock-full of cruelty and love, hypocrisy and faith, cowardice and courage, plus no small measure of tongue in cheek humor." McDougall says he has written his history with two broad rules in mind: avoid cant (he uses a more earthy term) and "write as if you are already dead." On the whole, he follows through. McDougall writes from a philosophical/religious perspective which I will discuss below.
The book begins and nearly ends with fire. It opens with a description of an 1835 fire in New York City which destroyed lower Manhattan. And one of the last sections of the book tells of the great Chicago fire of 1871 which gutted much of the city. In both cases, McDougall finds that the cities rose from their ashes through the energy and untrammeled efforts of individuals and community. The fires became blessings as old structures were burned away and entrepreneurs rebuilt the cities to be more powerful, energetic, and corrupt than they were before the catastrophies. The drive for power and wealth combined with civic improvement as McDougall repeats his theme that many Americans of differing perspectives tried to "do good by doing well."
The history proper begins with the presidency of Andrew Jackson, continues through the Civil War and Reconstruction, and concludes with the compromise of 1876 which resulted in the election of Rutherford B. Hayes to the presidency and ended Reconstruction. This is a great deal of widely different materials to handle in a single volume. McDougall's narrative is frequently disjointed. Especially in the first part of the history, the period before the Civil War, McDougall tends to slight the political history of the period. The reader doesn't get a convincing view of the long history of events leading to secession and conflict. What McDougall offers instead is a picture of what he describes as hustling -- a theme which he finds characterizes American life. It is a story of individuals rich and poor devoted to their own individual welfare who use their freedom in the widest possible ways in the attempt to realize their individual dreams. It is a story of con-men, entrepreneurs, writers, capitalists, farmers, circus performers, soldiers, builders. McDougall tells the story of a nation on the make. He also finds it a story lacking an overriding sense of national purpose and meaning, which he finds the great shortcoming to date of American life.
Many historians see the Civil War as the pivotal event in American history but McDougall does not. He sees a continuity in events before and after the Civil War in that the basic nature of American life, individualism and hustling remained essentially in place as what McDougall terms America's civic religion of individualism. So, he argues (mistakenly)that at the outset of his administration, Abraham Lincoln tried to follow the temporizing, compromising posture of Buchanan until events proved the hollowness of this approach. The country lacked a stable frame of reference and authority, McDougall argues, and was instead a land of competing forces in which individual goals were projected on the nation as a whole. Among American writers, McDougall severely criticizes Emerson and Thoreau, not, indeed, for being money driven, but for fostering an ethic of radical individualism that McDougall finds essentially mirrored the individualism already in place. The corruption and failure of Reconstruction was also due for McDougall to lack of national resolve. The age following Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, was corrupt and venial, but it also made America the most materially successful nation the world had ever seen.
Some of the stronger elements of this book lie in the details: in the portraits of individuals well-known and little known, and in its scenes of the pace and notoriety of urban life in New York City, Chicago and elsewhere. McDougall admires Herman Melville. I appreciated his use of quotations from Melville's still under-valued collection of Civil War poems, "Battle-Pieces" to frame his treatments of Civil War combats. McDougall punctuates his narrative with short insert histories of each state admitted to the Union during the time frame of his study beginning with Arkansas in 1836 and ending with Colorado in 1876. These inserts are written in a reflective, almost poetical style and capture something of the individuals who formed and populated each of the states. The book is generally written in a colloquial, down-to-earth, informal style. The endnotes are important to read.
The hero of McDougall's study does not appear until the concluding section of the book in the person of Orestes Brownson (1803-1876). Brownson was a seeker in the best tradition of American individualism beginning as a transcendentalist and ultimately converting to Roman Catholicism. With this conversion, Brownson, for McDougall, became a profound critic of American individualism. For McDougall, Brownson showed that the spirit of individualism was chaos and selfishness writ large. From Emerson to the most aggressive financier or huckster, Americans confused their own desires for power and wealth with the nature of America. McDougall advocates for what today is called communitarianism, but his approach is even broader. He argues that individualism fails and needs a source of authority outside the scope of human reason or the human person. This authority is generally thought to be religious and is described by the term Revelation. Neither Brownson nor McDougall expected or desired Americans to adopt Catholicism or any other single religion. But as the book progresses, McDougall's claim that American individualism needs to be reshaped to acknowledge a source of authority outside the self and that this authority is ordinarily and best found in religion becomes increasingly prominent. This position is put forward at length in the discussion of Brownson and in McDougall's concluding quotation from a religious skeptic, Frederick Douglass.
"I hold that the pulpit is capable of being a powerful agent in the dissemination of truth, and I hold that truth is the power of God for the salvation of the world, and I do not limit truth to mere spiritual matters, but to man in all his relations in the family, in the church, in the government, and in the world." (p. 610)
More a philosophical than a political or social history, McDougall's book has its limitations. But it offers a provocative, thoughtful view of the American experience.
Robin Friedman
brotimg
Oct 28, 2010
revealing
this book reveals the truth about the nature of american culture and society as being based and maintained on a foundation of lies and deceptions. the founding fathers were hypocrites who proclaimed a belief in freedom and democracy, when, in reality such ideas were limited to wealthy white men. all of the hate and conflict engendered by racial insanity began with them and has spread throughout the world. mc dougall is a courageous man to challenge the conventional wisdom of this nation.
