University Bookshelf

THE place of scholarship in a democratic society is one of the important problems of democracy. The increasing sales and expanding lists of the university presses show that the public no longer thinks the mere presence of footnotes is enough to condemn a book as uninteresting. The public is thus discovering, through the help of the presses, that scholarship, if it is competent and relevant, can remain in character and be exciting. That a work is scholarly may mean that its subject is special, but must mean that its treatment is thorough. We cannot forget this distinction without relegating scholarship to an altogether ineffectual corner in our democracy. The university presses are not letting us forget it, and recently their most particularly effective means, it seems to me, of broadening their area of impact upon public opinion has been the publishing of many more books on current affairs and contemporary history.

In his Liberty Against Government (Louisiana State University Press, $3.00), Professor Edward S. Corwin has produced a really firstrate piece of illuminating scholarship. This little book might serve as a model to admonish some of our popularizers that a large subject does not demand inflated treatment. Professor Corwin is interpreting, he tells us, the “due process” clause in the Constitution — the clause stating that no person may be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law: but behind the legal history that he records move the great social processes that are still shaking the modern world.

With careful legal neutrality, Professor Corwin defines liberty as “the absence of restraints imposed upon our own freedom of choice and action.”The Founders of the Constitution, with less neutrality and more reverence for John Locke, thought that the restraints to he avoided were those that came from government, and that liberty must inevitably be infringed if the rights of private property were not absolute. As industrialism developed in the United States, this legal tradition became a weapon against workingmen to prevent them from concerted action on their own behalf to “restrain” the “liberty” of their employers. The legal apparatus thus came into conflict with the forces in society that were making for equality.

In the Fourteenth Amendment government took the momentous step of intervening to protect the equality of its citizens, thus recognizing that other forces besides government may encroach upon individual liberty. Finally, in certain decisions of the Court under the New Deal, the law acknowledged that we are now living in an industrial democracy and not in the society of hereditary proprietors and private capitalism for which John Locke had written.

Where law had previously been conceived as a weapon to protect liberty (and property) against government, under the New Deal the aid of government was invoked to ensure the security of the “common man.” In the American colonial mind the ideas of liberty and equality were naturally joined; the modern mind associates the idea of equality —or security— more closely with the extension of benign and protective governmental power than with individual liberty from governmental restraint.

Such is the legal state of affairs as the United States moves deeper into “the Century of the Common Man.” The ideas of liberty and equality have not yet found their final and stable balance; the history of this century may decide, Professor Corwin concludes, whether equality will become as abused a concept as liberty once was, and whether mankind, led by its desire for security, will choose to relinquish its liberty.

The title of Eric Fischer’sPassing of the European Age (Harvard University Press, $3.50) provides a neat label for the crisis in world affairs. Mr. Fischer docs not deal only, or even primarily, with the catastrophically desperate situation of European civilization after the Second World War. The passing of Europe has been a much more continuous process, beginning centuries ago with the flow of peoples, wealth, and culture from the European center to its peripheries in America, Australia, Africa, Eastern Russia, Siberia, and the Orient.

Not being catastrophic in vision‚ Mr. Fischer does not indulge in pseudo-Spenglerian gloom. He views the passing of European civilization with a kind of stoic calm, almost cheerfulness: the death of civilizations, after all, is a fact, like the death of human beings, with which we must come to terms. The passage of civilization to new centers has often permitted new forms of human progress; and if mankind survives, it may come to possess, in place of the old European center, a new and more comprehensive culture embracing a much greater surface of the globe.

Even apart from its solid documentation, this book would be valuable just for its tone of historical stoicism and sobriety.

Democracy has a great deal to learn from the political miracle of Switzerland, and I know of no book from which the reader can learn it more pleasantly and easily than from The Swiss without Halos by J. Christopher Herold (Columbia University Press, $3.75). Not that Mr. Herold has given us here an abstract book about political theory or Swiss culture; though himself not Swiss, he knows the Swiss too well to treat them in abstraction.

The Swiss, the most visited of peoples, are probably the least known by foreigners. Visitors who intend to travel there for the snow and mountains will find out.from this book that there are other things to enjoy in that country, and that the people of die Alps are almost as interesting as their landscape.

The Swiss and their history teem with paradoxes, but paradoxes that possess a central core of instruction. Traditional neutrals, the Swiss gave their name as a synonym for the mercenary soldier; the model of political liberty for other Europeans during the eighteenth century, Switzerland possessed its liberties by being less “progressive” and more “primitive” than the other nations; known, or unknown, as a people of hardheaded hotelkeepers and watchmakers, the Swiss have a strong streak of mysticism, and a rich, complex, and rather introverted culture that includes figures like Calvin, Zwingli, Rousseau, Voltaire (at a certain period), Pestalozzi, Ramuz, and a good many others.

Geography may hold together this motley amalgam, but geography does not wholly explain why, in contrast to the history of the rest of Europe, people who spoke French, German, Italian, and Romansh overrode their linguistic barriers to form a federation of liberty. Mr. Herold’s answer — simply that it was profitable for the Swiss to do this — goes a long way to explain the other characteristics of this people and their history.

It explains (though, again, there is geography) the famous Swiss neutrality, which has been the country’s most profitable financial asset in this century. That self-interest can be the motive for both liberty and peace ought to be more, not less, reason for recommending the Swiss example to other nations, whose idealism is sometimes only exceeded by their belligerence.

Practicality and tenacity have enabled the Swiss to wring from one of the most barren soils one of the highest standards of living among modern nations. And though this economy, delicately balanced and finely geared as a Swiss watch, is now threatened by new disturbances in the world market, Mr. Herold suggests that the Swiss can be counted on to meet these problems with the same tenacious resourcefulness shown in their past.

Observant, witty, learned, Mr. Herold is that rare combination of the right traveler in the right place, but even his urbanity cannot prevent him—so apocalyptic are the times — from ending with a note to startle the imagination. In the event of an atomic war, he tells us, Switzerland will probably once again maintain its tough-minded neutrality until at war’s end, with the peoples of Europe decimated and their cities shattered, the Swiss come out of their mountain fastness to take over the rest of the Continent.

Switzerland and imperialism taking over Europe! Fantastic! And yet the history and character of the Swiss would seem to justify them, as much as any other nation, for this dubious mission.

It has not yet been decided whether North and South America are sister or cousin continents; but whatever the degree of kinship, the relation is often strained, as happens in the best of families, by the one’s taking the Other too much for granted. North Americans have not been unaware of the existence of Simon Bolivar, the great South American “Liberator,”but it would not be true to say they have thought seriously about the lessons of his life, or estimated him at his proper worth as a world figure.

This deficiency in our appreciation ought to be remedied by a new biography, Simon Bolivar by Gerhard Masur (University of New Mexico Press, $6.50), which presents Bolivar’s fife with a thoroughness (Professor Masur is a refugee German scholar) that will very likely make it stand as authoritative, for North Americans at least, for some time to come.

In judging Bolivar provincial, we North Americans only submit our own provinciality for judgment. By any standards of measurement, Bolivar was a man comparable in stature with our great colonial revolutionaries, deserving, like them, a place on the stage of world history. And unlike their Anglo-Saxon sobriety and solidity, Bolivar’s temperament had all the color, verve, and agility of the Latin.

An intellectual and a man of action, lover, soldier and poet, Bolivar resembled either Lord Byron in fife or a Stendhal character in fiction. The excitement of his fife glows even through Professor Masur’s competent and plodding prose, which, however, is adequate to its purpose, since any attempt to dramatize or “fictionalize” Bolivar’s life would be adding unnecessary spice to a very gamy meat.

True, Bolivar brought his revolution to countries less advanced than the North American colonies. But, by a paradox not at all uncommon in history, this backward condition of the South American countries enabled Bolivar to see further, in one direction at least, than the North American revolutionaries: where their vision was restricted by local selfsufficiency, he prophesied that the nations of South America could not live except in union, and his was the first voice raised for the idea of PanAmerica.

And if, viewing the present political condition in some South American countries, we are tempted to raise a questioning eyebrow at the value of the work which consumed Bolivar’s life, we are answered by his prophetic words: “The destiny of America is deep and sublime, but before it is realized America will experience every stage of the medieval nations.” The modern form of medievalism, Fascism, through which some of these countries may now be passing, ought not to obscure for us the fact that the South American continent is still in the process of the revolution initiated by Bolivar.

By comparison with somebody like Bolivar the life of Civil War General George H. Thomas would seem to be so colorless as to provide only variations on the theme that they also serve who only stand and wait; and it is significant that the climax of this life came at the Battle of Chickamauga, where General Thomas covered himself with glory by holding the line. In Rock of Chickamauga (University of Oklahoma Press, $3.75), Freeman Cleaves seems lo have done the best that could be expected to make interesting the life of this estimable general, whose whole career might be summed up in the single word “solidity,” and whose legend, if there could possibly be any, would become simply the statue of the man on the horse now in a Washington park. Students of the military aspect of the Civil War (I am not one myself) will probably find interesting Mr. Cleaves’s account of Thomas’s differences with Sherman over questions of strategy.

Where a life is as legendary as that of Abraham Lincoln, the detection of any hoax, the separation of any legend from fact, no matter how trivial, can be important for the historians. In The Mystery of “A Public Man” (University of Minnesota Press, $3,7.5), Frank Maloy Anderson sets out to discover the mysterious author of an item well known to Lincoln scholars, “The Diary of a Public Man,”which was published in 1879 by the North American Review and purported to bean actual diary kept during the Secession Winter of 1860-1861 in Washington.

Professor Anderson attacks the problem with the rigor of a systematic detective, amasses from internal and external evidence a list of eighteen clues, and then proceeds to canvass suspects with the thoroughness of a police sergeant making a roundup. A first-rate piece of literary detection is accomplished, the crime is solved— though I must not spoil the reader’s fun by giving away the secret. But it is not indiscreet to cite the book’s incidental, rather paradoxical, conclusion: though the “Diary” is a fake, it remains a genuine document for historians, revealing convincingly the atmosphere and drama of its period. Fiction, it would seem, may be as “true” as Truth.