N A T I O N A L I S M
R E V I E W
RICHARD BROOKHISER
Mr. Brookhiser is a senior editor at NR.
N A T I O N A L I S M
R E V I E W
RICHARD BROOKHISER
Mr. Brookhiser is a senior editor at NR.
THE average intelligent American who wants to learn something about history does not get much help from the political class. The Left projects identity politics backward, in a pageant of saintly martyrs. We of the Right offer little more: here, some remnants of the Army of Northern Virginia; there, the West Coast Straussians, riding between the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address like passengers on the shuttle between Grand Central Station
Hamilton's Republic: Readings in the American Democratic Nationalist Tradition,
edited by Michael Lind (Free Press, 345 pp., $25)
and Times Square. Hamilton's Republic, edited by Michael Lind -- an anthology of short excerpts from the writing of various Federalists, Whigs, and turn-of-the-last-century Republicans, with an idiosyncratic twentieth-century coda -- has the virtue of offering something fresh. If Mr. Lind had his way, Mount Rushmore would get some new faces, and pundits and speechwriters would find a new source for bumperstickers.
Mr. Lind is not primarily concerned with expanding our frame of reference. He argues that his selections present a vision of America as a country with a foreign policy based on self-interest, an industrialized and often state-encouraged economy, and an ethnic melting pot, all held together by a strong national government, and finding its most recent fulfillment in the Presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. Hamilton's Republic is a hostile gloss on Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s The Age of Jackson: Schlesinger tried to trace the New Deal to Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Michael Lind wants to trace the Great Society to Henry Clay.
Lind begins with Alexander Hamilton, thereby performing a useful service. Hamilton's papers have been available in a modern scholarly edition for years (a project that was finished so quickly, its editor, Harold Syrett, joked, thanks to Aaron Burr). But the only item in Hamilton's output that is readily available is his contribution to the Federalist Papers. Lind dips into the Federalist, the ``Report on Manufactures,'' and the ``Pacificus'' letters, a sober warning against American Francophilia at the height of the French Revolution.
The most interesting of the thematically organized sections that follow is the one on foreign policy and defense, and its star is Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, commenting on American idealism during the early days of World War I:
Nothing will be accomplished by people who are sheltered under neutrality . . . summoning the combatants to throw down their arms and make peace because war is filled with horrors and women are the mothers of men. The nations and the men now fighting . . . for their lives and freedom and national existence know all this better than anyone else, and would heed such babble, if they heard it, no more than the twittering of the birds. The section on nationalism and culture is more variable, placing some eloquent blacks -- abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet, author Jean Toomer -- alongside white blowhards like playwright Israel Zangwill and (on this subject, anyway) Theodore Roosevelt. Here is TR, working over Henry James: ``the undersized man of letters, who flees this country because he, with his delicate, effeminate sensitiveness . . . cannot play a man's part among men.''
The section on economics seeks instruction in American practice. American trade policy throughout the nineteenth century was at least moderately protectionist, and Lind's authors try to justify this status quo theoretically. Some confusion of tongues results: Hamilton wanted tariffs to protect new industries, Henry C. Carey (a nineteenth-century publisher and economist) wanted them as bargaining chips to break down the tariffs of other countries, Lodge wanted them to keep out the goods of low-wage countries like China (Lodge's blast could be Xeroxed and passed out on Capitol Hill today).
Does all of this run as smoothly as Lind thinks into modern liberalism -- even a liberalism purged, as Lind would like it to be, of pacifism and multiculturalism? Clearly something changed between the ``general welfare'' clause of the Constitution and the welfare state. Roughly speaking, Lind's earlier heroes wanted to help employers; FDR wanted to help the unemployed; LBJ wanted to help the unemployable. Alexander Hamilton, who supported taxing the poor to make them work, and who liked factories because they exploited the labor of women and children (sentiments not quoted here) would be puzzled by the progeny Lind has fathered on him.
Lind is also unnecessarily harsh on Hamilton's great rival, Thomas Jefferson. Lind chides the third President for holding fanciful notions of minimal government, unrealistic attitudes on foreign policy, and crackpot views on race. These criticisms are just. But Jefferson and his supporters were also pioneers of the rhetoric of resentment and class hostility, assailing their enemies (Lind's heroes) as tools of bankers and secret monarchists. The same arguments, suitably updated, have served Democrats in the twentieth century (who are also Lind's heroes). It seems ungracious of Lind to disdain the man who furnished FDR with so many useful tropes.
But these are quibbles. Hamilton's Republic is worth reading because it expands our views, and because nationalism is a hot property, whose claimants are worth keeping track of. In a widely read essay in the Wall Street Journal on ``National Greatness Conservatism,'' William Kristol and David Brooks of The Weekly Standard put some of Lind's characters to rather different uses. Pat Buchanan has been worrying this question for years. So has NATIONAL REVIEW. What is a nation-state good for? What degree of statism does it imply? Who gets to belong? What can we learn about these questions from our past? Stay tuned.
