The Epic of America
THE AMERICAN DREAM
by [Atlantic Monthly Press & Little, Brown, $3.00]
A DISTINGUISHED historian once said to me that his only serious criticism of Mr. Adams’s books lay in the fact that they were so entertaining that the reader found it hard to believe they could be historically sound. The Epic of America can only intensify the charge that Mr. Adams makes history interesting, so much so that there is danger lest he attain the ambition of Macaulay and find a copy on every young lady’s dressing-room table. It is important, therefore, to insist at once that this is a book of the first historical significance, whether for the lay reader or for the professional historian, planned with a rare sense of proportion, instinct alike with a critical and a sympathetic spirit, cognizant of but not slavishly dependent upon the opinions of historical specialists, a masterly synthesis. Doubtless the authorities in each special period of American history will find much to object to, for the range of the subject does not facilitate complete accuracy of detail and the author’s generalizations invite polemics; but even the most critical cannot disregard the book.
Mr. Adams has set himself the problem of compressing into a compass of four hundred pages the entire American background of the contemporary United States. He writes as an American explaining why we have come to be what we are, different from the rest of the world, vulgarizing our talents and opportunities, contributing to the world a great idealistic dream. Although he begins with the American rather than the European background of the colonies, his method of presentation is not unconventional: the establishment of an English civilization on the Atlantic seaboard, the secession from the Empire, the pushing westward of the frontier, the industrialization of the North, the Civil War, the end of the frontier and the beginnings of imperialism, and finally participation in the World War. The suggestive the dramatic quality of his succession of pictures is found in the emphasis upon factors that exercised permanent effects instead of the conventional incidents of a political and diplomatic nature generally regarded as American history. Eli Whitney through the cotton gin, De Witt Clinton through the Erie Canal, ‘had more influence on the development of the country than 99 per cent of the statesmen in Washington.’ He pictures ‘Ol’ Man River’ as dominating the nineteenth century, and, regardless of paper constitutions, compelling eventual unity upon the continent. But the greatest factor of enduring control from the Revolution to 1890 was the frontier, ‘always retreating before us and sending its influence back among us in refluent waves until almost yesterday. . . . We began our scramble for the untold wealth which lay at the foot of the rainbow. As we have gone ever westward, stability gave place to the constant flux in which we have lived since.’
In his explanation of current American traits such as the spirit of lawlessness and the worship of size, the author is ingenious. He has also maintained a balance of judgment that is remarkable. It is apparent in his interpretation of the causes of the Revolution, where the American conservatives, anxiously disturbed by the rising tide of radicalism in the colonies, were nevertheless forced unwillingly into alignment with the radicals to oppose English legislative control. It is equally apparent in his treatment of the Civil War, a struggle for liberty on the part of the South, a liberty which could not be preserved in the face of the unifying influence of the Great Valley and the new West.
Mr. Adams’s Epic achieves unity through the enduring ’American dream,’which he believes to be our distinctive and unique gift to mankind—‘that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.’ The paradoxical confusion resulting from the conflict between Hamiltonianism and Jeffersonianism, from the attempt to reconcile ‘our Jeffersonian philosophy of democracy with conditions steadily swinging further and further from Jefferson’s postulates, has blurred the vision. But the author, troubled though he is by our present state, believes that the dream has been realized more fully in actual life here than anywhere else, and insists that ‘we know not yet to what faith may attain.'
CHARLES SEYMOUR