Nostalgia for Heroes

As a contemporary novelist John Dos Passos has found it increasingly difficult to come upon a theme that is capable of feeding his imagination. His recent Most Likely to Succeed, the story of a fellow-traveling careerist who hit several new lows for abject bootlicking, nearly perished under the weight of auctorial contempt for the material at hand. As a student of the eighteenth century, however, John Dos Passos finds himself nourished, happy and creative. The novelist has been successfully re-born in the historian, and great works are in the making as Mr. Dos Passos plunges into libraries with all the gusto he once exhibited in traveling about the world.

Mr. Dos Passos’ latest venture in his new field is a long, rich survey of the twenty-year period in American history which began with the British surrender at Yorktown and ended with the election of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency in 1801. Called The Men Who Made the Nation (Doubleday, $5.95), this panorama of the Federalist epoch is enrolled in a lively series of intermingling biographies of Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Lafayette, Tom Paine, Robert Morris, Gouverneur Morris, Benjamin Franklin and others too numerous to list. The fast clicking word pictures are not limited to America, for Dos Passos has a keen awareness of the interrelatedness of all the late eighteenth century struggles to lay the ghost of the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings. With the astounding success of the American Constitutional Convention of 1787 constantly in mind, he is able to convey the full enormity of the travesty on liberty that came out of the sharply divergent course of the French Revolution. The French disaster, in turn, enhances the under-lying theme of the book, which is Madisonian in its insistence on the idea that sovereignty must be “sufficiently neutral between different parts of the Society to controul one part from invading the right of another, and at the same time sufficiently controuled itself, from setting up an interest adverse to that of the entire Society.” (The words and the spelling within the quotation are Madison’s own.)

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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As a contemporary novelist John Dos Passos has found it increasingly difficult to come upon a theme that is capable of feeding his imagination. His recent Most Likely to Succeed, the story of a fellow-traveling careerist who hit several new lows for abject bootlicking, nearly perished under the weight of auctorial contempt for the material at hand. As a student of the eighteenth century, however, John Dos Passos finds himself nourished, happy and creative. The novelist has been successfully re-born in the historian, and great works are in the making as Mr. Dos Passos plunges into libraries with all the gusto he once exhibited in traveling about the world.

Mr. Dos Passos’ latest venture in his new field is a long, rich survey of the twenty-year period in American history which began with the British surrender at Yorktown and ended with the election of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency in 1801. Called The Men Who Made the Nation (Doubleday, $5.95), this panorama of the Federalist epoch is enrolled in a lively series of intermingling biographies of Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Lafayette, Tom Paine, Robert Morris, Gouverneur Morris, Benjamin Franklin and others too numerous to list. The fast clicking word pictures are not limited to America, for Dos Passos has a keen awareness of the interrelatedness of all the late eighteenth century struggles to lay the ghost of the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings. With the astounding success of the American Constitutional Convention of 1787 constantly in mind, he is able to convey the full enormity of the travesty on liberty that came out of the sharply divergent course of the French Revolution. The French disaster, in turn, enhances the under-lying theme of the book, which is Madisonian in its insistence on the idea that sovereignty must be “sufficiently neutral between different parts of the Society to controul one part from invading the right of another, and at the same time sufficiently controuled itself, from setting up an interest adverse to that of the entire Society.” (The words and the spelling within the quotation are Madison’s own.)