Faith in the Founding Fathers
Bronwen Maddox
THE AMERiCAN FUTURE by Simon Schama The Bodley Head, £20, pp. 392, ISBN 9781847920003 ✆ £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 This is the most exhilarating book that has been written about America for at least eight years, although it depends on the premise that the influence of George W. Bush is over and that Barack Obama will be the next president.
Simon Schama is fortunate that this outcome looks more likely by the day. He has not been helped, on the other hand, by the suddenness of the financial drama which has overtaken the world’s most powerful economy, and which calls into question some of the American future he describes. All the same, this intricate and ambitious account of American inspiration and of the heartbeat of the national character is as good an answer to those doubts as anyone might give.
Schama sets his ebulliently combative tone in the prologue, which begins: ‘I can tell you exactly, give or take a minute or two, when American democracy came back from the dead because I was there’ — at the Des Moines caucuses on 3 January earlier this year, watching the first signs of Barack Obama’s eventual victory over Hillary Clinton. It is an instantly engaging account, as he makes fun of his own reflex as the ‘helpful professor’, trying to warn the Hillary campaigners of the potential misinterpretation of their sign ‘If the people are disinterested, move on!’). Having inserted himself in the narrative, as the wry but energetic commentator from a faroff country, part academic and part vivid reporter, he then launches into his analysis of the essence of the American spirit, weaving the immediate present with its earliest history.
He divides his account into four sections; it was inspired of him to begin with ‘American War’, given the doubts and divisions which are the legacy of Iraq and which, in similar form, troubled the new country from the start. As he argues, ‘The United States had been born to refute the cynicism that a fresh start was not utopian, and that it was entirely possible to live as a republic of free men and yet be a moral force in the world.’ The Cherokee, the British, the roots of the Civil War, and Vietnam all flicker by as Schama relates how America tried to pursue both ideals. He quotes, as is now common in the context of Iraq, the congressional protests at President William McKinley’s decision to annex the Philippines at the start of the 20th century, but to unusually devastating effect. ‘You have no right at the cannon’s mouth to impose on an unwilling people your Declaration of Independence, your Constitution and your notions of what is good’, argued George Frisbie Hoar, Massachusetts senator.
The section, dazzling for its sweep, is particularly remarkable, however, for pausing on the details of Thomas Jefferson’s foundation of the West Point military academy, and on the values — some would say contradictions — which Jefferson intended it to teach. ‘Of all the Founding Fathers [Jefferson] was the most heavily invested in an 18th-century philosophical idealism that looked on war as the sport of tyrants’, Schama writes, describing how Jefferson set out to found a national institution that would be ‘more of a school, less of a war college’. The cadets ‘would be nationbuilders, the engineers of democracy. In the Jeffersonian mind that has always been what the American military has been for!’ Schama then makes the short step to Iraq and the rejection there — until the past year — of that Jeffersonian principle.
The other sections, ‘American Fervour’, ‘What is an American?’ and ‘American Plenty’, cover more traditional territory in trying to put words to the American soul. Schama warms to Obama as a fellow intellectual but also delights in finding that American fervour in his speeches (a generous reaction, given that the Democratic candidate’s own supporters chide him for being too cool). Schama dances elegantly if quickly through the familiar question of why Americans are more religious than the British, arguing that it is the British who stopped believing rather than Americans who started. His ‘preferred explanation’, he says, is the ‘bitter education of 20thcentury history’. But while the British experience was undeniably bleaker, he might have said more about why Americans suffered none of that challenge to their faith from two world wars and the Great Depression, or whether he thinks the successes of the ‘American century’ have reinforced American religion.
Inevitably, a section on ‘Plenty’, threaded with tales from the Reagan years, sits more uncomfortably against the backdrop of the part-nationalisation of financial institutions, a direct challenge to an article of American faith. He notes that, ‘no one has yet won an election in the United States by lecturing America about limits, even if common sense suggests such homilies may be overdue’. All the same, that is in the end an irrelevance for this account. Schama has delivered a glittering tale of America’s past which amounts to his personal vote of conviction in its future. As at an Iowa caucus, you either gather in his corner, with passion, to vote his way, or slink quietly away. q
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