Professor Walter A. McDougall’s new book, Gems of American History, is subtitled The Lecturer’s Art, an apt phrase for a collection of lectures delivered to audiences ranging from the Museum of the American Revolution to the Agnes Irwin School. For those yet unfamiliar, Professor McDougall is a professor of history and the Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, where he served as editor of Orbis: A Journal of World Affairs. In 1986 his political history of the Space Age was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history.
Formally educated at New Trier High School, Amherst College, and the University of Chicago, McDougall continued his education in both the U.S. Army—as a soldier in Vietnam—and the classroom. In fact, he mentions that, although he is “frightened by all technology” and “delayed learning PowerPoint,” he eventually “fell in love with its possibilities” and now illustrates all his lectures with “vivid pictures.” Alas, the present volume contains no illustrations. In his preface, McDougall notes that, as the lectures in this book “are not strictly international relations,” they can be read without visual accompaniment, simply as essays. That’s true, but surely “vivid pictures” would have spiced up the text and given readers a better sense of the lived experience.
This book’s 12 chapters, arranged chronologically, focus on pivotal events, figures, and themes in American history. Chapter 1, on America’s “Machiavellian moment,” gets this volume off to a fine start. McDougall notes, reasonably, that the word exceptionalism “is more trouble than it’s worth: it either means nothing or altogether too much.” He uses “Machiavellian moment” in the way J.G.A. Pocock did, to signify “a historical conjuncture when the founders of a republic confront the question of how to build durable institutions like those of Venice.” He sees that George Washington, although a realist in war and peace, nonetheless “displayed a character the very opposite from that of a serpentine Machiavellian prince” and that all the Founders were not so much theorists as practical builders of new institutions. Indeed, he invokes Russell Kirk to remind us that the Founders’ moral order depended on the wisdom of the Bible and ancient Israel, as well as on the great texts of Greece and Rome. Therefore the Atlantic republican tradition drew upon both Classical Republicanism and Hebrew Republicanism: “a Machiavellian body quickened by a Biblical spirit” and “a civil government inspired by a civil religion.” This chapter and its successors demonstrate the approach of this entire book: important episodes illuminated by good questions, deep knowledge, and sound judgment.
Chapters 2 and 3 deal with Benjamin Franklin and the American Revolution. They include striking sentences that quickly delineate the journeys of key figures: “No one miscalculated more thoroughly or more often than Franklin, in part because no one tried harder to heal the rift in the empire.” McDougall makes it clear how hard some Americans and Englishmen worked to avert war.
In the House of Commons, for example, the Rockingham Whigs were ably represented by Edmund Burke, “their most eloquent orator,” who delivered a three-hour “Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies” to a packed chamber. He warned that the conflict could not be settled by force; the American character was such that the colonists could not be held down for long. If they were suppressed by arms, they would only rise again. “These people are Englishmen, sir, born with a free spirit.” In them, “religion is neither worn out nor impaired.” The northerners’ Protestantism makes them resistant to any submission. Although members of a variety of Christian denominations, they nonetheless “commune in the same spirit of liberty.” And the southerners’ attitude toward freedom “is still more high and haughty.” Moreover, Americans assiduously study the law, which makes them “acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defence, and full of resources.”
Franklin’s long quest for imperial unity, however, ended in frustration. The failure of King George III to step forward and appease the colonists embittered Franklin. He became a “reluctant republican” because the British themselves had blocked his vision of unity. Lord North’s belated offer to send a peace commission and seek a truce came to nothing. But what if, McDougall asks, war had been averted? Then: no radical French Revolution, no War of 1812, quite likely no American civil war, and possibly no First World War (the British Empire, with an industrialized North America, would have been too strong for Germany to challenge), and therefore no communism, fascism, World War II, or Cold War.
Counterfactuals have their problems, but McDougall employs his sparingly and thoughtfully as teaching devices: They spark interest and help make history much more than the dry recitation of facts and dates. Alternative trains of events point up the significance of historical decisions and turnings; they create opportunities for students to penetrate the analysis of momentous happenings.
At the same time, McDougall, a careful historian, warns his readers of the danger of prolepsis: the temptation to interpret historical events “in terms of an implicitly inevitable future,” thus reading history backward from conditions not yet existent. He points out that “very few of the Founding Fathers had any notion that they were about to establish a new nation.” And he poses a difficult, thought-provoking question: “Can it be that American independence was not an inevitability, but an improvisation?” Cautious of prolepsis, he would urge his students to see that the war was not inevitable but instead a matter of contingency, a result of decisions and actions large and small, taken and not taken.
Chapter 4 is on the remarkable Philadelphia philanthropist Stephen Girard, whose life and career McDougall depicts in full and colorful detail, while chapter 5 discusses the strategic results of the War of 1812. The author concludes that this “allegedly unnecessary conflict” had consequences well worth considering: the Era of Good Feelings, economic expansion and population explosion, the rise of Andrew Jackson, and international agreements producing a boundary between Canada and the United States that made that border “the longest—and longest lasting—unfortified frontier in world history.”
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A delightful lecture on the Fourth of July, chapter 6 throws new light on such emblems of American civil religion as the Star-Spangled Banner, Old Glory, and the Declaration of Independence. McDougall concludes by observing that while communism derived from “faith in an idea which the Soviets pretended was still alive by embalming dead human beings, Americanism was born of faith in human beings who prove that faith by ‘embalming’ their sacred ideas.” He finally notes how “implausible” the American founding was, how often its survival was imperiled, and how the Founders—whether they were Protestants, Catholics, Jews, deists, or Freemasons—“believed the Author of History meant this to happen.”
Chapter 7, titled “The Madness of Saint Woodrow,” asks: What if the United States had stayed out of the First World War? McDougall takes into account Wilson’s Presbyterianism, remarking that total depravity was not one of its ingredients. He notes that of four options available to Wilson and the nation in the spring of 1917, the president chose crusade, a holy war to end all war. The results were a vast increase in executive power, an explosion of the national debt, conversion of a laissez-faire society into a command economy, and establishment of the military-industrial complex as a permanent fixture of American life. The war caused 53,000 combat deaths in five months, anti-German hysteria, an inflamed nativism, and “the worst violations of civil liberties in American history.” McDougall argues that “Wilson … got nothing right,” including his demand for regime change—the abdication of the Kaiser—in Germany. And yet the Princeton scholar Arthur Link “devoted his whole career to the sanctification and beatification of Thomas Woodrow Wilson.”
Chapter 8 offers a change of scenery and perspective: Americans’ romance with flight, from the Wright brothers, through the wartime perversion of airpower, to NASA and 9/11 and the Age of Terror.
Chapter 9 discusses the Vietnamization of America. What McDougall means is that the American involvement in Vietnam led to the professionalization of the armed forces and the elimination of the draft, “a congressional counterattack on the military prerogatives of the president,” the first U.S. army to be fully integrated by race, and the lingering problem of POWs and MIAs. In sum, the war not only “’wasted’ Vietnam”; it also “wasted so much of what it used to mean to be American.”
Chapter 10 concerns grand strategy, and chapters 11 and 12 offer a survey of the constitutional history of U.S. foreign policy. Grand strategy is a nation’s long-term, high-level, national and international plan to use military, diplomatic, economic, and other means to achieve its strategic goals and serve the national interest, which typically includes defense of territory, protection of its citizens, and deterrence to maintain a just peace. McDougall, it should be noted, is a member of the realist school, which he says advocates “prudence and restraint in foreign policy.” It contrasts with liberal internationalism, neoconservatism, and other, more aggressive and idealistic approaches to foreign affairs and national security. The author asks difficult questions, such as what relevance the postwar grand strategy (Truman and containment) has to policy in the 21st century given that the deadliest threats to world peace today did not exist 80 years ago.
Especially effective is McDougall’s rehabilitation of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a Ph.D. historian who could speak six languages. Unfairly termed an “isolationist,” Lodge was “far more cosmopolitan than Wilson,” and he “tried to build a coalition to ratify the treaty [of Versailles] in defiance of the dozen or so Irreconcilables led by Senator William Borah (R., Idaho).” Although schoolchildren were taught that Wilson’s defeated League of Nations effort “hurled the nation back into isolationism,” the truth was otherwise. The Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations stood for progressive Republican internationalism. The Republicans employed “deft diplomacy, deployed private capital, and made informal ententes with foreign governments and businesses to resolve international conflicts.”
In sum, this collection of lectures, most of which were later published as articles, will be of interest to all students of American history. The resources in this book will be of greatest value to instructors of secondary and undergraduate U.S. history students. These teachers are always looking for ways to take the received accounts of important themes and periods and enrich, dramatize, complicate, and question them from fresh perspectives. These chapters frequently work against standard interpretations and the conventional wisdom, but invariably in a lucid and reasonable fashion. In fact, Gems of American History could also function quite handily as a supplemental text. It makes for both stimulating and enjoyable reading.
