Books: American Ideas

THE AMERICAN SPIRIT — Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard—Macmillan ($5). .

This book is a summary of American thought and American civilization from John Adams to Franklin Roosevelt. As the fourth volume in Charles and Mary Beard’s monumental Rise of American Civilization, it tries to define—after 2,629 pages of history in the first three books—the civilization they have described.

At 39, Charles Beard wrote an Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, father to a generation of muckraking biographies of the Founding Fathers, and one of the main bases of the economic and political beliefs of the liberals of the 1920s, out of which grew the pragmatic liberalism of the New Deal. Now, at 68, a white-haired, rugged-featured Yankee living on a farm near New Milford, Conn., he is the dean of American liberal thinkers.

Behind him are the crises of his career, his resignation from Columbia during World War I, for Columbia’s treatment of pacifist professors; the bitterness of his recent pre-war isolationism. His productive life, marked by a deep skepticism about American civilization, has been a tribute to the quality of that civilization.

The American Spirit consists of 674 quotation-packed pages from U.S. thinkers great & small about the character and the direction of American civilization.

Early Confidence. Civilization is a word that has only recently come into common use. As a concept it dates only from Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, who in 1791 united the idea of progress with the thought of history embracing the multitudes of men (and not merely their leaders). Early Americans, with their revivals of two ancient words, “republic” and “democracy,” had anticipated the philosophy of Condorcet. They accepted the idea of civilization with an enthusiasm that still rings through their works and shames all but a few of later commentators.

By the time the Constitution had been ratified, Americans were racing to Europe to assert the superiority of their institutions. The Beards do not stress the audacity of this intellectual aggression. They do not need to. The words speak for themselves. The old distinctions of American thinkers into Federalists and Democrats, agrarians, mercantilists, industrialists, capitalists lose importance in the face of united insistence abroad on the superiority, the inevitable future growth of America. Not only Jefferson, John Adams and Tom Paine were united in this. Benjamin Rush, Surgeon General during part of the Revolution, calmly declared after it that two-thirds of Pennsylvania’s farmers had reached “the perfection of civilization.” Even the occasional doubting moods of the Founding Fathers were spirited, compared with the dry despair of later scholars like Henry Adams, or the nebulous affirmations of moderns like Henry Wallace.

When the U.S. had an area slightly larger than that of Mexico today, a population equal to that of Denmark, the world’s smallest army, the least impressive fleet that sailed the seven seas and the longest defenseless coastline in the civilized world, John Adams, who was considered conservative, rushed to Europe to assert the superiority of American institutions he had helped create. When Hitler wanted to impress the Germans he told them their victories would last 1,000 years. Adams was less cautious. He told Europe the institu-[tions America had already built before 1800 “will not wholly wear out for thousands of years.” In England, as Minister, he said that American study of Europe had convinced America that she could no more go back to her institutions than she could take up the worship of Thor. “The experiment is made,” he said with calm finality, “and has completely succeeded.”

Late Uncertainty. The quotations from these early-American rugged optimists make the broad plains of later American thought look barren. The Beards in the part of the book devoted to the 19th Century choose quotations to illustrate the various facets of American civilization, including the works of many an intellectual maverick, from Frederick Turner’s theory of the frontier to Admiral Mahan’s theories of the influence of sea power. Mahan’s faith in a British and American crusade committing the U.S. to a “world-spanning imperialist mission in the name of Christ and civilization” is posed against Mark Twain’s dour disbelief in extending the blessings of civilization to “Our Brother Who Sits in Darkness.”

Increasingly incoherent, alternately despairing and hopeful beyond the dreams of the early philosophers, American thought churned around the notions of Marxists, of Spengler, of Andre Siegfried. Moodiness, vague idealism, bewilderment characterize the thought of the time.

Without comment the Beards, stubbornly opposed to imperialism, to internationalism, to war for unclear ideals, reprint President Roosevelt’s brooding question of April 14, 1942: “I want a name for the war. I haven’t had any very good suggestions. Most of them are too long. My own thought is that perhaps there is one word that we could use for this war, the word ‘survival’ . . . survival of a hemisphere. . . . And when it comes to cleaning up the mess at the end of this war, after the Axis is defeated, we will have again a Hemispheric Council around here to see what we are going to do all over the world. …”

Questions. This book, while it testifies to the optimism inherent in American civilization, gives little evidence of it in detail. The Beards might have theorized less about civilization and devoted more attention to asking themselves what has changed in U.S. thought from the calm confidence of John Adams to the flounderings of contemporary citizens.

The best answer in this book is not the Beards’, but the contribution of Philosopher Max Otto of the University of Wisconsin: “The vast economic, material body of the world lacks a mind to match it, and is not animated by a commensurate moral spirit. This backwardness is the tragic inadequacy of our time. It is the problem which, more than any other, calls upon philosophy for new vision and creativeness.”