Books, Arts & Manners March 9, 1998

J O H N S O N'S
A M E R I C A

MICHAEL LIND

Mr. Lind is most recently the author of The Alamo and editor of Hamilton's Republic.

ALTHOUGH he might be horrified by the comparison, Paul Johnson reminds me of another British writer, H. G. Wells. Like Johnson, Wells was an amazingly prolific generalist who took it upon himself to bring order to chaos in vast realms of human experience and to pronounce his judgments with the Olympian certainty and infernal wit that only journalists and pundits are licensed to deploy. Also like Wells, who was too smart to be a consistent leftist, Johnson,

A History of the American People,
by Paul Johnson (HarperCollins, 1,088 pp., $35) BUY IT
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a convert from the Left to the Right, strikes me as constitutionally incapable of acting as a spokesman for any orthodoxy.
For any other writer, a history of the American people would be a daunting, lifelong project. For Johnson -- the author of, among other works, synoptic histories of the Jews, Christianity, and modernity -- the subject is comparatively modest. The very fact that Johnson has undertaken to write a history of the American people is a clue to his perspective. For a national history presupposes a nation.
A significant current debate involves precisely this question: Is there an American nation? The ``national question'' is addressed by three schools of thought. American nationalists believe that all Americans, except for unacculturated immigrants and enclave minorities like the Amish and the Navajo, belong to a common, extra-political cultural nation, defined by language, culture, and customs. American nationalists do not confuse our inherited caste categories (of which the most important are the arbitrary divisions of ``white'' and ``black'') with ``cultures,'' which individuals may or may not share with other Americans of similar ancestry.
That confusion is at the heart of a second viewpoint, multiculturalism, which treats ``race'' and ``culture'' as synonymous. Multiculturalists think of racialized cultures or culturalized races (usually five of them -- white, African American, Hispanic-American, Asian-American, and Native American) as the components of a multinational America.
A third school of thought is represented by democratic universalists, who have a purely political definition of American identity. According to this view, the U.S. is a post-national or non-national idea-state -- a purely political entity whose members have nothing in common except for a commitment to the liberal-democratic ideals of the Founding Fathers.
This debate over American identity has obvious implications for the historian. A multiculturalist cannot write a history of the American people -- at most, he can write parallel histories of the five or six American peoples (in the plural). A democratic-universalist history of the United States would be a history of constitutions, parties, and political philosophies. Only someone who subscribes to the nationalist school can tell the story of the American nation as a nation.
The choice of a theory more or less dictates the point at which the historian will begin. A universalist historian should start a history of America in 1776 -- when the liberal-democratic American state was founded. Since the American nation is older than the Federal Government, a nationalist history of this country should begin in 1607, when the Virginia colony, the first permanent Anglo-American settlement, was founded, or earlier.
Johnson proves that he belongs to the nationalist school of American history when he begins his narrative with the Middle Ages. ``The mixture of religious zeal, personal ambition -- not to say cupidity -- and lust for adventure which inspired generations of Crusaders was the prototype for the enterprise of the Americas.'' This is a typical Johnsonian observation -- at once strikingly original, and strikingly obvious, now that he has pointed it out.
Rebuffed in the East by Islam, the Portuguese, Spanish, and French move into the Western Hemisphere. Appropriately the English, who were late-comers to the European conquest, colonization, and exploitation of the Americas, do not show up until we are well into the first chapter. The key figure in the English colonization of America is Sir Walter Raleigh -- for whom Virginia is the second frontier, after Ireland: ``In the American enterprise, Ireland played the same part for the English as the war against the Moors had done for the Spanish -- it was a training-ground both in suppressing and uprooting an alien race and culture, and in settling conquered lands and building towns.''
It has always struck me as weird that we celebrate the founding of our Federal Government rather than the ``plantation'' of our nation. Before there could be a Washington, there had to be a Raleigh. The genuine ``Founding Fathers'' were not the Patriots of 1776 and the Framers of the Constitution of 1787. They created the government, not the nation. The true founders were the impresarios of the colonial era, who ``planted'' the first British settler populations -- Raleigh and Captain John Smith and their Virginians, Penn and his Quakers in the Delaware Valley, John Winthrop and his Puritans in New England. Johnson does full justice to this neglected subject; he describes Winthrop, for example, as ``the outstanding figure of the Puritan voyages, the first great American.''
MOST of the readers of this magazine presumably know how the story of America turned out, and I will not presume to summarize in a few paragraphs what Johnson takes nine hundred pages to describe. A colossal undertaking like this requires a rare combination of scholarly Sitzfleisch and literary skill.
Inasmuch as history is a branch of social science, a first-rate historian must be able to marshal divisions and battalions of data; at the same time, as history is also a literary art, he must be able to direct the maneuvers of his legions by means of banners and flags, in the form of judicious quotes or memorable anecdotes. I am not qualified to check all of Johnson's scholarship (who is?) but his treatment of a subject which I know quite well, Alexander Hamilton's financial reforms, unites sound scholarship with insightful analogies, personality profiles, and vivid detail in just the right proportion:

His disloyal and acerbic Vice President, Adams, might call him Old Muttonhead, but Washington knew very well what he was doing. And the first thing he had to do was to get the national finances in order. That meant appointing Hamilton the first Secretary of the Treasury, and giving him a free hand to get on with the job. The financial mess into which the new nation had got itself as a result of the Revolutionary War and the subsequent failure to create a strong federal executive can be briefly summarized. . . . The market price of government paper (that is, proof of debt) had fallen from 150 to 30 cents on the dollar, depending on the relative worthlessness of the paper. The consequence of inflation and improvidence was precisely the kind of disaster which was to hit all the Latin American republics when they came into being in the next generation, and from which some of them have never recovered to this day. Somehow, the United States, which sprang from the stock of England, whose credit rating was the model for all the world, had to pull itself out of the pit of bankruptcy.

Note how Johnson turns what might have been a dreary passage about eighteenth-century fiscal policy into a suspenseful narrative, enlivened by a reference to the present (when ``debt crisis'' has usually been modified by the phrase ``Latin American'' -- although the Asian currency crisis may change this).
Here is Johnson on Henry Clay, whom he describes as ``probably the most innovative politician in American history, to be ranked with Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison as a political creator'':

Clay was six feet . . . and could fight with the best of them. He was slender, graceful, but ugly: ``Henry's face was a compromise put together by a committee'' and was distinguished by an enormously wide mouth, like a slash. He used this mouth often, to eat and drink prodigiously, to shape his superbly soft, melodic, caressing voice, and to do an extraordinary amount of kissing. As he put it, ``Kissing is like the Presidency, it is not to be sought and not to be declined.'' His opponents said his prodigiously wide mouth allowed him an unfair advantage: ``the ample dimensions of his kissing apparatus enabled him completely to rest one side of it while the other was on active duty.'' If women had had the vote Clay would have experienced no difficulty in becoming President every time he chose to run.

This is vivid and memorable writing, as well as an object lesson in the artful use of quotation. A mealy-mouthed American academic or popular historian would have cut the last line, for fear of offending politically correct feminists, just as he would have dropped the line about Latin American debt, for fear of being accused of racism.
On the Civil War, Johnson writes that it ``constitutes the central event in American history.'' Here Johnson follows the consensus opinion. However, while the Civil War was the most violent event in American history, was it really the most important? If you take the distinction between the American nation and the Federal Government seriously, then the wars that determined where English-speaking Americans lived in North America were more consequential, in the final analysis, than the wars about what the capital (or capitals) would be. The French and Indian War ensured that the language spoken in most of Canada and what is now the eastern United States would be English, not French. The Texas Revolution and the Mexican War extended the territory of the Anglophone Americans into Texas, California, and the Southwest. Was the war to keep Alabama really more significant, in the long run of history, than the war to gain California and Texas -- today the two most populous states in the Union? If the U.S. had crumbled in the 1860s into two or more confederacies, world history would have been quite different, but the ethnonational division of North America between English-speakers, Spanish-speakers, and French-speakers would have been pretty much the same, though the South and West might have expanded into the Caribbean and Mexico. (To his credit, Johnson devotes a lengthy section to ``Polk and the Mexican War.'')
In his discussion of the Civil War itself, Johnson is admirably even-handed. ``Only two states wanted a civil war -- South Carolina and Massachusetts.'' (They still do.) Johnson points out that Jefferson Davis was progressive in many ways, and that Lincoln hoped that freed blacks could be shipped out of the country. When it comes to Reconstruction, though, he goes badly wrong. Johnson repeats the old Southern Redeemer view of Reconstruction as the tyrannical rule of ``blacks, guided by Northern Army officers, a few Northerners, and some renegade whites.'' This makes it seem as if only blacks (who needed to be ``guided'' to oppose the ex-Confederate Democrats!) supported the Reconstruction state governments. In reality, significant parts of the Southern white population -- particularly Highland Southerners and German immigrants in Texas -- despised the Confederacy and welcomed the federal armies and the Republican regimes.
Fortunately, the remainder of the book shows Johnson at his combative, iconoclastic best. With an uncanny sense of timing, he provides titillating details about the sex lives of liberal Presidents and their wives. ``It was widely believed by Eleanor's many enemies . . . that she became a lesbian. If so, she was bisexual.'' ``Jack, in turn, used his political glamour to secure political trophies from the movies, including Gene Tierney and Marilyn Monroe, the latter first shared with, then passed on to, Bobby.'' LBJ ``was an inveterate bottom-pincher, especially in swimming pools.'' Repeatedly Paul Johnson portrays liberal Presidents as adulterous cads who betray their long-suffering wives. He may be onto something.
Much more interesting is his attack on what he regards as inflated reputations -- including the biggest of them all. He criticizes FDR and also Eisenhower for failing to wage the war in Europe so as to deny as much territory as possible to the Soviets. ``Eisenhower refused to countenance the proposal of his chief British subordinate, General Bernard Montgomery, to throw all the Allied resources into a single, direct thrust at Berlin.'' Before we congratulate the British on their foresight, however, we should remember that it was the casualty-conscious British government that wanted to delay the invasion of the Continent; an earlier invasion might have ended the war sooner, with Soviet armies further in the east. There is a bit of the confident armchair general in Johnson.
His historical revisionism reaches a crescendo in his attempt to rehabilitate the image of Richard Nixon. His boldness is impressive but his timing in this case is unfortunate, given the recent release of hitherto-secret Nixon tapes which portray a self-pitying bully and corruptionist. Nevertheless, Johnson may be ahead of his time in insisting that Nixon's crookedness be seen in the context of the behavior of other Presidents, especially the sleazy Kennedys.
The subject of Nixon raises a serious problem with Johnson's entire project of revising the reputations of American leaders in the twentieth century. Nixon, after all, was denounced by the Right as a Rockefeller Republican -- and he has been claimed as something of a progressive by liberal historians like Stephen Ambrose. Should conservatives defend Nixon's memory, or calumniate it?
Johnson has equated the Republican Party with conservatism and the Democratic Party with liberalism, and then gone back through the history of the twentieth century, painting mustaches on the portraits of Democrats and providing the Republicans with haloes. But the conservative Republican/liberal Democrat dichotomy really does not work before the 1960s, when the two parties exchanged constituencies. Before the Sixties, the Democrats were the party of socially conservative white Southerners and Northern Catholics (particularly Irish Catholics). Today those groups tend to vote Republican. The GOP used to be the party of Greater New England Protestants and blacks -- the very groups that are now the core constituencies of the Democrats. In 1964, more Republicans than Democrats in Congress voted for the Civil Rights Act. The young Hillary Rodham was a rock-ribbed Republican.
Johnson has failed to realize that the real continuity is found in constituencies, not parties. A comparison of Truman's and Nixon's electoral bases shows that they were almost exactly the same. The continuity is not just regional and ethnic; it is found in policy, too. Yankee Progressives -- Democratic and Republican -- were disproportionately opposed to U.S. intervention in World Wars I and II and to the Cold War. Southern conservatives ardently supported U.S. intervention in all three conflicts. As for the much-reviled New Deal, Reagan and his successors have been careful not to slash entitlement programs that benefit their white Southern and white ethnic constituents -- only those identified with blacks (like Aid to Families with Dependent Children) or favored by elite Yankee mainline Protestants and Jews (like the National Endowment for the Arts). If Johnson wanted to denounce the precursors of today's Democrats, he should have assaulted the memories of Yankee Progressives like TR and Hoover.
When it comes to subjects other than partisan alignments, Johnson understands the importance of regionalism in American politics. ``The shift of America's center of gravity, both demographic and economic, from the Northeast to the Southwest was one of the most important changes of modern times,'' he observes. ``The economic-demographic shift brought changes in political power and philosophy. Since the mid 1960s, all America's elected Presidents have come from the South and West: Johnson and Bush from Texas, Nixon and Reagan from California, Carter from Georgia, and Clinton from Arkansas. The only Northerner, Ford, was never elected.''
In debates over American art and culture, Johnson takes the sides of Westerners, Midwesterners, and Southerners against Northeasterners. He quotes Van Wyck Brooks in 1919 telling Waldo Frank to ``never forget that it is we New Yorkers and New Englanders who have the monopoly of whatever oxygen there is in the American continent.'' Johnson disagrees. To expatriates such as Henry James and T. S. Eliot he prefers artists and intellectuals who stayed at home to shape a new American culture. He writes admiring descriptions of jazz: ``It was genuine melting-pot because the left-hand bass performed a steady 2/4 Western march time while the right-hand treble did the Afro-syncopation.'' As if there were any doubts about Johnson's populist aesthetic, he follows the architect Robert Venturi in praising Las Vegas hotels as the quintessence of American culture: ``Characteristically American, they followed in the tradition of the gargantuan, paddle-wheeled Mississippi gambling steamers, with their Babylonian luxuries and rococo decor, which outraged and fascinated Americans between the Age of Jackson and the Civil War.''
JOHNSON brings the story of America to a rather abrupt end with a pep talk: ``It is appropriate to end this history of the American people on a note of success, because the story of America is essentially one of difficulties being overcome by intelligence and skill, by faith and strength of purpose, by courage and persistence.'' Well, maybe or maybe not, but Johnson's reader can only be impressed by his ability to overcome the narrative historian's difficulties with intelligence, skill, faith, strength of purpose, courage, and -- not least -- persistence. Johnson's major competitor in this genre of popular history is himself, and despite some lapses and longueurs inevitable in such a book -- he lives up to his reputation as a scholar and a writer.
Of the two roles, the latter is the more important. In the final analysis, the historian is like a dramatist or novelist retelling a familiar story in a fresh way. Macaulay portrays William of Orange as the savior of Britain and civilization; Hilaire Belloc portrays him as a morbid figure who set Britain and the West on the path to ruin. Only one of these historians can be right, but both can be great. A History of the American People proves that history can still be literature.