Whose American Conscience?

What this country needs, a friend of mine tells me who is in the process of filling the need, is a good conservative history of itself; and I propose, in my capacity as a professional cultist of the open mind, to read his book as soon as he can make it available. Meanwhile, however, I wish to record my skepticism about the enterprise, and say that I for one will settle for a neutral history of the United States—that is, one that would content itself with telling what happened. I should wish it written by a man of a certain competence, but above all a man who does not know or even think he knows the difference between right and wrong, and therefore can’t sit in judgment upon the men and events he is writing about, and can’t help inculcate upon still another generation of Americans our traditional unhealthy preoccupation with identifying the good guys and the bad guys with moralism, with spotting those events in our nation’s past we should be proud of and those we should be ashamed of. (One advantage of such a history would be that the historian would be able to take cognizance of, perhaps even explain, that preoccupation, which has become the characteristic vice of American political discussion in general; and, by explaining it, enable us at long last to understand ourselves a little.)

Mr. Roger Burlingame’s The American Conscience (Knopf, $6.75) is on neither of the counts I have mentioned that history of the United States I’ll settle for: its author is not a man of a certain competence, not by a long sight; and he not only knows the difference between right and wrong, but knows—to judge from his performance in this book—little or nothing else. Least of all does he know how to pose a problem, identify the kind of research and analysis it calls for, and get on with the job, so that one real challenge with which he confronts the reader is that of finding out what it is he thinks he is doing, or, if you like, which of the many books that might plausibly be written under the title The American Conscience he thinks he is writing.

WK

About the Author

Willmoore Kendall

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What this country needs, a friend of mine tells me who is in the process of filling the need, is a good conservative history of itself; and I propose, in my capacity as a professional cultist of the open mind, to read his book as soon as he can make it available. Meanwhile, however, I wish to record my skepticism about the enterprise, and say that I for one will settle for a neutral history of the United States—that is, one that would content itself with telling what happened. I should wish it written by a man of a certain competence, but above all a man who does not know or even think he knows the difference between right and wrong, and therefore can’t sit in judgment upon the men and events he is writing about, and can’t help inculcate upon still another generation of Americans our traditional unhealthy preoccupation with identifying the good guys and the bad guys with moralism, with spotting those events in our nation’s past we should be proud of and those we should be ashamed of. (One advantage of such a history would be that the historian would be able to take cognizance of, perhaps even explain, that preoccupation, which has become the characteristic vice of American political discussion in general; and, by explaining it, enable us at long last to understand ourselves a little.)

Mr. Roger Burlingame’s The American Conscience (Knopf, $6.75) is on neither of the counts I have mentioned that history of the United States I’ll settle for: its author is not a man of a certain competence, not by a long sight; and he not only knows the difference between right and wrong, but knows—to judge from his performance in this book—little or nothing else. Least of all does he know how to pose a problem, identify the kind of research and analysis it calls for, and get on with the job, so that one real challenge with which he confronts the reader is that of finding out what it is he thinks he is doing, or, if you like, which of the many books that might plausibly be written under the title The American Conscience he thinks he is writing.