Books, Arts & Manners: The Nightmare of Oscar Handlin

The Distortion of America By Oscar Handlin

Atlantic/Little, Brown, 154 pp., $10.95 Professor Oscar Handlin of Harvard is a highly respected scholar, a gifted interpreter of American social history. In politics he is an old-fashioned liberal, vintage Adlai Stevenson—although (as he has often reiterated) not too liberal. For he is also a patriot and still convinced that the cure for what ails the modern world lies in some version of the American proposition: our social system, our politics, our economy. In The Distortion of America he has gathered a number of his occasional writings that express his reservations concerning the current version of the liberal agenda. Most especially, in the area of foreign policy he is “polemical and passionate” in his animadversions on the failure of the Left to take a stand for freedom and against that species of myopia which notices only the shortcomings of the United States while ignoring the spread of officially benevolent totalitarianism.

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M. E. Bradford

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Harvard University

The Distortion of America By Oscar Handlin

Atlantic/Little, Brown, 154 pp., $10.95 Professor Oscar Handlin of Harvard is a highly respected scholar, a gifted interpreter of American social history. In politics he is an old-fashioned liberal, vintage Adlai Stevenson—although (as he has often reiterated) not too liberal. For he is also a patriot and still convinced that the cure for what ails the modern world lies in some version of the American proposition: our social system, our politics, our economy. In The Distortion of America he has gathered a number of his occasional writings that express his reservations concerning the current version of the liberal agenda. Most especially, in the area of foreign policy he is “polemical and passionate” in his animadversions on the failure of the Left to take a stand for freedom and against that species of myopia which notices only the shortcomings of the United States while ignoring the spread of officially benevolent totalitarianism.