America the Beautiful

NEXT TIME YOU’RE DRIVING ACROSS the United States, glance up after the first 2,000 miles and you’ll see, side-by-side, Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore. Then pick up William J. Bennett’s America; you’ll be struck by how nearly he echoes sculptor Gutzon Borglum’s judgment that they were the four greatest Americans in history, deserving of the biggest possible form of recognition.

Most historians want to say something new about the past. Bennett, in this first volume of his popular history of the United States, wants to repeat a lot of old things about it. Too much recent historical writing, he says, has been corrosive, unpatriotic, badly written, and cold. He wants it to be warm, readable, and nostalgic, and he wants it to “kindle romance, to encourage Americans to fall in love with this country, again or for the first time.” Let citizens relearn their heroic heritage; let them take pride in George Washington’s flinty determination and feel grateful for Lincoln’s sacrifice; and let them understand that America is the last best hope of Earth.

All over the world, for centuries, history has served patriotism. The scientific history movement of the last century-and-a-half, however, created a rigorous method and imposed austere standards of accuracy, no matter what the cost in national self-gratification. Bennett borrows from the scientific historical tradition, synthesizing the work of such professional historians as James Flexner on Washington, David McCullough on John Adams, Stephen Ambrose on Lewis and Clark, James McPherson on the Civil War, and Edmund Morris on Theodore Roosevelt, but uses their work to instill in readers “pleasure and pride in what we have done and become.” Today’s jaded Americans, he says, should learn that history really does prove their nation to be uniquely privileged, an inspiration to the rest of the world.

Part history, part moral tract, America is an awkward hybrid. Still, on at least one point, Bennett is surely right: American history textbooks today are bad and boring. You would never know from most of them that Americans were ever generous, hospitable, cheerful, idealistic, inventive, or hard working. Instead they teach you, to the point of exhaustion, that American history is mostly about racist, misogynist, xenophobic, greedy philistines. In the standard school and college textbooks these days, victimization looms large, and only the victims, the powerless, have any nobility or decency. It’s bracing to see Bennett redressing the balance.

Has he let the pendulum swing back a little too far? Yes. As he tells it, everything just kept getting better as the decades rolled. Sure, there were problems like slavery, but the thing to emphasize, he argues, is that everyone else had slavery, too, whereas America was among the Western nations that eventually abolished it: “One might conclude that far from being slavery’s worst practitioners, westerners led the world to end the practice.” Similarly, he says, America may have had its moments of violent nativist intolerance, and long periods of race-based immigrant exclusion, but don’t forget the big picture. Overall, America’s welcome to immigrants has been magnificent: “No other nation on earth has accorded to so many the blessings of liberty and opportunity.”

Very occasionally, however, even the upbeat Bennett stares at a problem and admits that he sees all cloud and no silver lining. Then he gets indignant. He describes the Trail of Tears, the forced Indian removal of the 1830s, as “an indelible stain on America’s reputation.” Enraged a hundred years after the fact at a Southern senator’s racist reaction when Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House, Bennett declares: “[T]o the everlasting shame of the U.S. Senate, Tillman was not expelled at that instant.”

Moments like these aside, Bennett will make you feel terrific about America, and he is a good storyteller. The big set pieces and the big themes of politics and war reclaim the place they used to enjoy in old narrative histories. As a man experienced in practical politics, he understands the pressures confronting national leaders, and the fact that they often make fateful decisions while possessing inadequate information. He understands, too, that some things matter more than others in a nation’s history; if America had been unable to fight and win, it could neither have come into existence nor remained in existence.

HIS LIST OF HEROES AND VILLAINS is fairly predictable, but occasionally he skewers figures other historians have revered. He treats the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison as a deluded fanatic, and the three-time Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan as a nitwit (“He had no qualifications to be secretary of state. He had no qualifications to be president either but that is another matter.”). What happened to them? They were left behind by more prudent, constructive, and intelligent leaders: Frederick Douglass (for whom Bennett has a particular admiration) among antebellum abolitionists, and Woodrow Wilson among early 20th-century Democratic politicians.

Bennett ably evokes the mood and atmosphere of crises. A ragged Continental Army battles grimly against the Redcoats, makes a daring crossing of the Delaware to attack Hessian mercenaries in Trenton, and later shivers through a desperate winter at Valley Forge. George Washington reduces a crowd of mutinous officers to tears and obedience when he has to put on glasses to read them a letter from the Continental Congress: “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.” James Madison argues tenaciously, first in Philadelphia, then in Richmond, on behalf of the Constitution. The Battle of Gettysburg rages across 14 vivid pages, shown here from the general’s-eye view and from that of common soldiers on both sides. Bennett then depicts Lincoln delivering his immortal speech–and includes the entire text–at the graveyard dedication.

He never misses the chance to tell a good anecdote, and he has an eye for the strange, the gruesome, and the surprising. For example, did you know that, just as Virginia was becoming a profitable tobacco plantation, King James I became the world’s first anti-smoking crusader? Or that the French Jesuit missionary Isaac Jogues had to get a papal dispensation to celebrate the mass because the Mohawk Indians he tried to convert had tortured him and eaten most of his fingers? Or that Monticello was rescued from destruction in 1834 by Uriah Levy, the first Jewish commodore in the U.S. Navy, who was also the man responsible for abolishing flogging for sailors? Or that Teddy Bears are named after big-game hunter Theodore Roosevelt, after an incident in which he indignantly refused to shoot a wounded and cornered bear?

First Ladies add anecdotal color of their own. One was “Lemonade Lucy” Hayes, a temperance advocate who would not serve alcohol at the White House in the late 1870s. A disgruntled British diplomat wrote home that, at her receptions, “the water flowed like champagne.”

Just as he can’t resist quirks and oddities, neither can Bennett resist old nicknames; he is a heavy user. As you read about the politics of the 1840s and 1850s you’ll thrill to the magnificent oratory of “the Godlike Daniel,” to caustic rejoinders by “the Great Compromiser,” and to the grim challenges of “the Cast-Iron Man.” You’ll marvel as “Old Rough and Ready” conquers Mexico, and “The Pathfinder” builds a new republic in California, watched from the District of Columbia by “Young Hickory.” You’ll wonder: Is a crate of “Beecher’s Bibles,” paid for by indignant “Barn Burners,” enough to stop the “Border Ruffians” in Kansas? Will the “Fire Eaters” keep the “Doughfaces'” sympathies, and will “King Cotton” always require “the Peculiar Institution”?

Nineteenth-century Americans had a high tolerance not only for nicknames but also for doggerel. It used to be standard fare in history books, and Bennett revives it here to illustrate popular moods. He shows us the Yankee poet James Russell Lowell denouncing the Mexican War of 1846 as a slaveholders’ ruse:

Abraham Lincoln suspends habeas corpus in Maryland at the start of the Civil War, and we get to hear the citizens’ musical rejoinder:

Snatches of Emerson, Thoreau, and the whole of Melville’s “The Martyr”(on the death of Lincoln) enrich the book, as do vigorous polemics, insults, jokes, and barbs. When Harvard offered Andrew Jackson (“Old Hickory”) an honorary degree, alumnus John Quincy Adams (“Old Man Eloquent”) wrote: “I could not be present to see my darling Harvard disgrace herself by conferring a Doctor’s degree upon a barbarian and savage who could scarcely spell his own name.”

The grand narrative, the anecdotes, verses, and nicknames are the best part of the book. Not so good is the sometimes hectoring tone and the frequent use of italics to emphasize a point the author seems to fear you might otherwise miss. Here is a typical passage:

The effect of the italics, surely unintentional, is to make you think that Bennett doubts readers’ capacity to concentrate, or that he has decided to aim chiefly at teenagers. Teen readers probably favor this kind of portentous paragraphing, too:

In fact, I know they do because I receive dozens of freshman papers every year written in this “breathless headline” idiom.

America may be the ideal American history primer for the Instant Messaging generation. Bennett moves fast, covers a lot of ground in a short space, and writes terse, matter-of-fact sentences. Impatient or ADD readers will be delighted at how quickly they can get an outline picture of the nation’s history, along with a few bright illustrations. They must be more careful than he when it comes to editing their own work, however. Three times in two pages he says “principal” when he means “principle” (pp. 110-111). He writes “looses” in one footnote where he means “loses” (p. 67). Later, a star in the text promises a footnote but there is no note (p. 386).

SOME PARAGRAPHS are as confusing as the ones I find in my weakest undergraduates’ papers, which try to deal with several issues at once. Here’s an example–surely one of the most jumbled paragraphs ever to be set in type:

Did a former secretary of education really write that paragraph, then reread it, and decide that it was just right? Bennett is sometimes historically inaccurate, too, as when he describes the onset of the English Civil War of the 1640s with the highly misleading claim: “Oliver Cromwell, a local landed leader, raised an army against the king.” That’s like saying: “Ulysses S. Grant, an ex-West Pointer, raised an army against the Confederacy.”

If Bennett has cut a few corners in bringing us the good old stories, he has deferred to a long tradition of preserving the good old omissions. I’m an immigrant from Britain who may be unduly sensitive on this point, but I’ve always been astonished at American historians’ reluctance to say anything about the huge number of people who opposed independence and fought against the Revolution. From the soberest academics to the gaudiest popularizers, there is a conspiracy of silence about the “Tories” or else (from those who do give them a sentence or two) an assumption that they acted from the worst possible motives. No one would tell the history of the Civil War without considering what the Confederates believed and why they fought, but nearly all historians neglect a large part of the other side when it comes to the Revolution.

Most historians are all but invisible to the general public. Not this one. As you read America it’s hard not to think about William Bennett the man and his turbulent, high-profile career. He was chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, secretary of education, then “drug czar” in the Reagan-Bush administrations; constantly in the news. In the 1990s, he cried woe over what he saw as the nation’s moral and cultural decline, edited a bestselling Book of Virtues, and attacked President Clinton, during the Lewinsky scandal, in The Death of Outrage. Since the turn of the millennium he has remained a visible public figure. He recently survived revelations about a lavish gambling habit and allegations of racism for his remarks about the relationship between abortions and falling crime rates.

America is not politically heavy-handed, except for its claim that history should work in the service of patriotism. Bennett’s conservatism is evident in his praise for the free enterprise system and free trade, but he also puts in a good word for benevolent government. He deplores the vulgar rich, criticizes high tariffs and their lobbyists, and applauds Theodore Roosevelt’s early 20th-century “trust-busting” of over-mighty corporations. Trade unions, the Roman Catholic Church, and common decency all enjoy his support, while on racial matters he’s nearly as politically correct as Howard Zinn, author of the otherwise utterly different People’s History of the United States. Zinn is a compassionate lefty. We will have to wait for volume two to confirm, as appears to be the case, that Bennett is staking out for himself the corresponding historical ground of compassionate conservatism.

Patrick Allitt, professor of history at Emory, is the author, most recently, of I’m the Teacher, You’re the Student: A Semester in the University Classroom.