HORACE GREELEY : NINETEENTH CENTURY CRU- SADER. By Glyndon G.
Van Deusen. (University of Pennsylvania, $5.)
HORACE GREELEY, founder of the New York Tribune, editor, political commentator, eccen- tric, is a splendid example of the nineteenth- century liberal reformer (American type) whose dreams of Utopia, mingled with dreams of personal renown and commercial success, advanced so many causes, convinced so many people and accomplished so much that the nineteenth century appears to us, in retrospect, to be an age of immense assurance, conviction, principle, expansion and advance. A man thoroughly embroiled in the commercial and political enterprises of the time (success, pros- perity and the God-fearing virtues went hand in hand), Greeley strove for his vision of a nineteenth-century all-American Utopia. A man distrustful of the mob and suspicious of human motives, Greeley sought to advance God's America, a proud unity, based on uni- versal suffrage, a noble race of men realising freely their infinite possibilities, working hon- estly and industriously, behaving temperately, getting (democratically) rich. Ambitious, self- advancing, success-seeking; a man of principles rather than of standards, Greeley spent himself energetically on reform—Fourierism, anti- masonry, slave-emancipation, universal suf- frage, better wages for the (honest) worker, greater prosperity for the honest employer, material, educational, moral advance, national greatness.
This book is less concerned with Greeley's work as reformer—for which, together with his famous `Go West, Young Man, he is prob- ably most remembered—than with an account of Greeley's support, in the pages of the Tribune, of political parties and figures. His partisanships, his relations with Abraham Lin- coln and the part he played in the Civil War are all documented by Professor Van Deusen with great scholarship and thoroughness. The way in which Greeley's faith in infinite Ameri- can progress has roused the Professor to salut- ing position should tell much about the influ- ence of Greeley's vision on modern America.\
MALCOLM BRADBURY
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