Travels with Tocqueville

I saw Richard Reeves latest title, Infamy, and thought it an odd subject for a historian who made himself famous by his profiles of Presidents. I decided to peruse his other titles and landed on American Journey, in which he traces the path of Tocqueville around the country from 1831-32 looking for the essence of our Democracy. Reviews were mixed, but for a pence from amazon.co.uk who can resist.

As Robert Nisbet notes in his review that Tocqueville is also an odd choice for Reeves, as Alexis was "a profoundly conservative young aristocrat interested in the United States as a sociobiologist is interested in a community of birds or animals." Reeves is every bit the American liberal but he has tackled conservative figures like Nixon and Reagan in his biographies, so it seems that his reading of Tocqueville had an influence on him.

I had read Democracy in America after being goaded by Goliard in the old NY Times book forum, as he saw this as a seminal book in American politics. Tocqueville assessed the fallout from the Andrew Jackson landslide electoral victory and came to the conclusion that the young country was run by a "tyranny of the majority." He offers some profound insights into the nature of the US Constitution and how it differs from the state constitutions in terms of the individual vs. the community, but throughout we sense the young aristocrat's distaste for Jackson, who he sees as nothing more than a populist figure who managed to hoodwink the country with the false illusion of democracy. I could see how a book like this would appeal to conservatives like Goliard, but wondered why it was continually cited by liberals as well. It will be interesting to read Reeves' take on Tocqueville.

For others, especially a young Walt Whitman, Jackson represented a seismic shift in American politics. His election in 1828 brought to an end the last remnants of the Federalist era in John Quincy Adams, who had scored a narrow electoral victory over Jackson in 1824. Jackson refused to renew the charter on the National Bank, and wanted to decentralize the national government, which the Federalists had worked so hard to achieve. Jackson cited Jefferson as his inspiration, but Jefferson had upheld much of the Federalist structure, as had Madison and Monroe and J.Q. Adams.

By contrast, Tocqueville saw the Founding Fathers as iconic figures and couldn't understand why Americans would turn their backs on them. Americans hadn't. They just saw them in a completely different light than did Tocqueville, Jefferson especially.

From today's stand point, Jackson would be seen as a Teabagger, but in the 1940s he was seen as the founding inspiration of the Democratic Party, and revered by historians like Arthur Schlesinger, who praised him in The Age of Jackson. It's odd considering that Jackson was the very antithesis of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who Schlesinger also praised, but the young historian made a very convincing case for Jacksonian Democracy just the same.

I don't know how much of these dichotomies Reeves pursued in his 1982 travels with Tocqueville, but there is no doubting the influence Tocqueville has had on historians and politicians over the last two centuries. Goliard was right about that.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl. The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics' Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts. The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories. The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...

Dispatches from Vilnius

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