Moral Son of a Moral Father

In writing The Hero: Charles A. Lindbergh and the American Dream (Doubleday, $4.95), Kenneth S. Davis started from a sound premise: if he could understand the “pure symbolic curve” of his subject “across the turbulence of our times,” he would indeed be in a position to give us needed counsel on all the dilemmas that bedevil us today. Unfortunately, Mr. Davis lacks the temperament, the philosophical detachment and the ability to understand the ironies of history that are so necessary to the gigantic task which he set for himself.

Though he is an industrious fact-grubber who knows the nineteen twenties in intricate detail, Mr. Davis has no perspective on the decade as it figures in the stream of American life. Everyone who lived through the period looks back on it with intense nostalgia. Yet every time an author writes about it, ritualistic apologies seem to be in order. Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager, in their Pocket History of the United States, speak of the decade as “dull, bourgeois and ruthless”— but it is quite apparent in their subsequent pages that they don’t mean a word of it! They are fascinated by the energies unleashed by the decade, and they are in love with its most characteristic philosopher, who happened to be John Dewey.

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

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

Featured Tags

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Adolf Hitler

Germany

In writing The Hero: Charles A. Lindbergh and the American Dream (Doubleday, $4.95), Kenneth S. Davis started from a sound premise: if he could understand the “pure symbolic curve” of his subject “across the turbulence of our times,” he would indeed be in a position to give us needed counsel on all the dilemmas that bedevil us today. Unfortunately, Mr. Davis lacks the temperament, the philosophical detachment and the ability to understand the ironies of history that are so necessary to the gigantic task which he set for himself.

Though he is an industrious fact-grubber who knows the nineteen twenties in intricate detail, Mr. Davis has no perspective on the decade as it figures in the stream of American life. Everyone who lived through the period looks back on it with intense nostalgia. Yet every time an author writes about it, ritualistic apologies seem to be in order. Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager, in their Pocket History of the United States, speak of the decade as “dull, bourgeois and ruthless”— but it is quite apparent in their subsequent pages that they don’t mean a word of it! They are fascinated by the energies unleashed by the decade, and they are in love with its most characteristic philosopher, who happened to be John Dewey.