Perhaps one of the most valuable extra dividends of history is the dawning knowledge that things are never quite as bad as they seem to be. Perhaps there is a toughness of fiber in people that enables them to stand ever so much more than rational judgment would suggest as the maximum. It may even be that our perennial American optimism is sometimes justified in spite of all logic.
For any examination of the byways of American history is bound to lead one, every so often, to the contemplation of ugly facts which seem to prove that the whole Amercan experiment is in a state of collapse so complete that nothing whatever can be done about it. The infinite promise of this brave new world is forever being belied by contemporary reality. There have been times when any thoughtful observer would be bound to conclude that things have got into a mess that can never be made right.
But the thoughtful observer can be wrong; usually is wrong, as a matter of fact. The imperfections in American society can exact a frightful human cost, on occasion, but we do seem to work our way out of them. It would be interesting to know just how and why we manage to do it.
All of this is brought to mind by a reading of Mr. E. J. Kahn’s new book, The Merry Partners.
Mr. Kahn is not trying to conduct an examination into the seamier side of American history. He is simply out to tell an entertaining story about a song-and-dance pair which came on the American stage in the post-Civil War era, made a sensational success, briefly impressed a set of songs, gags and comedy sequences on the American consciousness, and then faded off into limbo in the normal way, and he tells his story expertly, lightly, with gusto, and very amusingly. Yet his book is a little more than just a gay account of the lives and triumphs of two theatrical stars. It is also an indirect but revealing picture of the society that produced them.
This society, to be blunt about it, was totally deplorable. Ned Harrigan, the more gifted of the pair, came out of the worst section of New York at a time when New York’s worst was about as bad as anything can be. His background was Hell’s Kitchen, Five Points, the Bowery, Mulberry Bend—an area which, in the final third of the Nineteenth Century, offered a ferocious medley of misery, vice, crime and poverty so much more appalling than anything modern America can show that it is almost literally incredible.
Here were whole blocks of tenements so squalid that even a conservative description of them leaves one wondering how any resident managed to stay alive as long as one month. Here were streets where no man who appeared moderately prosperous dared walk even at midday—places where the police themselves would not go, except in threes, with their weapons ready. Here were gangs of an untamed viciousness that make modern gangsters look like Sunday school boys; a web of civic corruption so widespread and all-embracing that it could not conceivably be cleaned up, or even mildly deodorized; a miserable carnival of murder, 109 graft, prostitution, rampant rowdyism and general unadorned nastiness that would seem by any rational standard to have been completely beyond redemption.
The Merry Partners: The Age and Stage of Harrigan and Hart, by E. J. Kahn, Jr. Random House. Illustrated; 315 pp. $4.75.
Mr. Kahn sketches all of this in, not to prove any particular thesis but simply to describe the milieu in which people like Harrigan and Hart lived and made their careers. And the point of all of this—the point that compels one to sit back and wonder where American society gets its fantastic, self-rectifying resilience—is not that a man like Harrigan could come out of such a background and make a decent, useful life for himself, but that the city itself could ever have survived.
For no American in the 1880’s could have surveyed the New York slum section of his day without wondering if he were not seeing the final collapse of the American dream. Any extreme of pessimism he might have reached would have been justified by inescapable facts. He could have told himself—could hardly have kept from telling himself—that American society had gone down a dead-end street from which it could not conceivably extract itself. By any rational standard, he would have been entirely right.
Yet in fact he would have been wrong. Bad as metropolitan life can be today, brutal and crippling as it visibly is, it is almost infinitely better than it was three-quarters of a century ago. There has been an improvement which, even though it leaves ever so much still to be done, is all but immeasurable. And here, it seems to this reviewer, is a whole segment of American history which greatly needs examination. How did our society work itself out of that morass? Why was the hideous threat of our congested cities (for New York did not stand alone, by any means) somehow thwarted? What is there in people that enabled the ones who lived-through that era to survive, and, surviving, to lift themselves and their surroundings by their own bootstraps?
It was done, obviously, at terrific human cost. There are few sadder chapters in American history than the story of the hopeful immigrants who came pouring into New York in those days, to be exploited and ground under and made to accept a dark nightmare in place of the bright American dream that had originally led them to the Atlantic crossing. The amount of plain, everyday misery and heartbreak that was exacted from helpless people is hardly to be thought about dry-eyed.
But things did get better. The dream did not die, although many of the dreamers died disconsolate. Perhaps there is a clue in here somewhere—a clue to some hidden reservoir of strength and faith that we very much need to know about. Perhaps it is time the historians set out to uncover it.
Debt to the Immigrant
By BRUCE CATTON
In a sense, all of us are immigrants. Our roots go back beyond the water; our fathers, or our ultimate great-grandfathers, once took the long chance, got on a ship, and came to the New World. So what comes of it all? What sort of nation do we have, how has the fact that our roots go beyond the sea affected what has been done in this country?
It is always good to get a fresh point of view, and this is provided by Mr. Frank Thistlethwaite, a certified Cambridge don, in his new book The Great Experiment, which is a concise and neatly written attempt to explain the bewildering United States to English readers. It may also have the useful function of helping to explain us to ourselves.
The British, says Mr. Thistlethwaite, entertain odd misconceptions about America. They suspect that it is still a branch of Europe; they believe that it will presently accept this fact, drift around somehow to a British parliamentary government, and in other ways will behave as proper children of northwestern Europe ought to behave. The British want to know, mostly, “Why do Americans regard themselves as a special sort of people?” In this book Mr. Thistlethwaite undertakes to explain matters.
The Great Experiment: An Introduction to the History of the American People, by Frank Thistlethwaite. Cambridge University Press. 335 pp. $5.
One set of influences, he believes, has dominated American development—the influences that come from migration. These have brought about on our shores “a new variant of western society.” All of us have been uprooted; consequently, despite the cultural heritage we have brought with us, we developed an entirely new set of values. There is a deep psychological contrast. The American version of Western society is something new, which Mr. Thistlethwaite defines, quite simply, as “the mobile society.”
It is mobile in that nothing stays fixed. The act of immigration meant a rejection of custom. “In a sense,” says Mr. Thistlethwaite, “each new immigrant arriving at Castle Garden was already more American than the native-born son of the Republic in that he himself had shown the will to make a clean break with the past.” He was coming to the land where anything goes.
Nothing stayed fixed, and so the western frontier finally vanished, and then unrestricted immigration itself came to an end. But the mobility remained; for just as the forces which might have created a static society became dominant, the great catalyst of mass production appeared, offering a new frontier in an undiscovered dimension. It intensified the drive that the old frontier situation had begun; the mobility which conditioned American growth during the period of the great migration was extended; and so, says Mr. Thistlethwaite, “the social compulsions of the caravan have continued in important ways to govern American habit.”
Thus the original impetus still holds good. In the middle of the Twentieth Century, the American people are still pursuing the ideal which shaped the Revolution itself. And that, specifically, is what?
It is, says this English student, “a Republic established in the belief that men of good will could voluntarily come together in the sanctuary of an American wilderness to order their common affairs according to rational principles.” It is an association of people bonded together by free choice rather than by destiny; a community of people “for whom the individual conscience alone is sovereign"; a society, in short, of people uprooted by their own choice, people who have thrown off the authoritative traditions and customs of the past, people who are forever on the move, creating a fluid society which is tied to no rigid values and which seeks the promise of the future by an implicit rejection of the past.
This, as Mr. Thistlethwaite remarks, is “the most ambitious ideal ever to command the allegiance of a great nation,” and it remains to be seen how it will finally pan out. We are a people who have elected to shoot the works. It is all or nothing, with us. Our concept of nationality is basically revolutionary, and we do not yet know for sure how it will fit into the responsibilities that go with a great power and a self-assertive form of nationalism. And he concludes, finally, that Walt Whitman said it, once and for all: “The United States are destined either to surmount the gorgeous history of feudalism or else prove the most tremendous failure of time.”
Leader of a Lost Cause
By BRUCE CATTON
The one great attempt which we have made in our history to turn our backs on the values which all of this uprooting brought us, and to swim upstream against the principal current in American life, was unquestionably the attempt to create an independent nation out of the southern Confederacy. It was an attempt made by high-minded men who were actuated by the best of motives, and it was doomed to fail; and the men who led the Lost Cause remain the tragic characters of American history, men who fought against destiny, lost, and went into star-crossed legend as persons who had stepped outside of the main pattern.
Of these, the most perplexing in some ways has been Jefferson Davis.
Even more than Lee, Davis has become a marble image; an image bedecked with fewer floral tributes, because Davis was a person who did not inspire acute personal loyalty on the part of strangers, but nevertheless an image rather than a man.
In Jefferson Davis: American Patriot, Mr. Hudson Strode tries very successfully to show the living man back of the image. This book is the first volume of a two-decker which will ultimately encompass all of Davis’ career, and it stops with the outbreak of the Civil War; and it is the most rewarding effort yet made to present Davis as a living, breathing human being, a warm passionate man who did his level best according to his lights and who cannot be faulted too much for the fact that his lights were situated in the wrong part of the sky.
Jefferson Davis: American Patriot, A Biography of the Years before the Great Conflict, by Hudson Strode. Harcourt, Brace and Co. 460 pp. $6.75.
Davis was a plebeian who finally came to speak for and to represent a highly self-conscious aristocracy. He was hot-blooded and impulsive, yet he comes down in history as an austere person whose veins held a mixture of ice water and acid. He was considered, in the North, a most doctrinaire bitter-ender, yet in the South he was accounted a moderate; and he commanded the devotion of hot-blooded men.
He was caught up, it appears, in a cause that led him where he might not have gone of himself. He had much of Lincoln’s background. He was, in essence, a frontiersman. He was court-martialed at West Point, and very nearly dismissed, for going off-limits for drinking bouts at the notorious Benny Haven’s; he was an indifferent student there, high on the demerit list, and not at all the devoted, rigidly controlled man of legend. It seems clear, from Mr. Strode’s account, that when he left the Army to become a Mississippi planter he stepped into a new role, shaped himself to fit it, and in essence created a new person of himself. Back of the president of the Confederate States, unseen by most biographers, there was a very different sort of person; a rather appealing man, whom it would be possible to like as well as to admire.
It seems very likely that before he gets through Mr. Strode will have produced the definitive biography of Davis. His second volume will be worth waiting for.
Men, Not Laws
by Oliver Jensen
Those who relished the impish irreverence of Thurman Arnold, whose books, The Symbols of Government and The Folklore of Capitalism, strewed the intellectual landscape with the deflated catch-phrases and shattered shibboleths of politics, will enjoy equally the latest work of another college professor, Fred Rodell of Yale, whose attitude toward the Supreme Court seeks the same level of good-humored if biting iconoclasm. Only a few judges earn his respect—from John Marshall to Earl Warren—and a great many his criticism—from the “fourth-rate” Court of Oliver Ellsworth to the recent “take-it-easy” assemblage presided over by Fred Vinson.
To begin with, nothing irritates Mr. Rodell more than the notion that there is such a thing as a “Court” opinion. Beneath the robes which he snatches away there are only men, “powerful, irresponsible and human,” wielding a power never granted by the Constitution, for life or good behavior. They are, in the words of Lincoln, commenting on the Dred Scott decision, “as honest as other men and not more so.” Chief Justice Taney, the slaveholder who decided Scott’s case, went far beyond ruling that a slave remained a slave regardless of many years spent in a free territory; he threw out the Missouri Compromise itself, the act of Congress which made the northern territories free, a law which had been in force for thirty years. So great was his power (it helped bring on the Civil War); so great was the power over the other branches of government which John Marshall, “the great chief justice,” had arrogated to the Court.
Nine Men: A Political History of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1790 to 1955, by Fred Rodell. Random House. 338 pp. $5.
And the motive behind the power? In Mr. Rodell’s book, and providing the justice in question is conservative, it is always economic. John Marshall, the eleventh-hour creation of the outgoing Federalist Administration of John Adams, seems here to be motivated solely—even though he wins the author’s grudging admiration for his skill and ability—by the desire to preserve the rights of private property from the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian radicals; nothing more. Since he outlasted the Federalist party by 34 years, there was never such a durable, or effective, lame duck.
Indeed, the lame duck quality of the Supreme Court, from Marshall’s day to the era of the New Deal and the “Nine Old Men” who threw out the NRA, the AAA and other laws dear to the Administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, calls forth the special fire of Mr. Rodell. So does the refusal of the judges—and this goes back to Washington’s Administration—to give “advisory” opinions and their insistence that they can only make a decision in an actual case they may graciously allow to be brought before them; the result, of course, is that many “cases” are somewhat fraudulent. Nothing mattered less to the Court than Mr. Marbury, in whose name (vs. Madison) the first big case was brought; or Mr. Schechter of the NRA case, whose “sick chickens” were represented before the Court by Cravath, de Gersdorff, Swaine & Wood (a Wall Street firm no small businessman could ever afford) ; or Dred Scott, whose freedom was privately promised no matter which way the official “decision” went. The author is particularly disturbed by those who look on Supreme Court history as a battle between advocates of strong central government ("broad interpretation") and partisans of states’ rights ("narrow") . It is all a matter of convenience at the moment, he says. In the time of Dred Scott, the defenders of slave property cried for a strong Federal government; a few years later they cried for states’ rights.
One can question the economic determinism which Mr. Rodell steadily imputes to the conservatives of the Court; certainly some one of them must have been motivated by something a little above and beyond the interests of the rich, by something more than the well-being of his social class alone; some one of them, certainly, must have glimpsed the mountain top. This is the fault common to all works of cynicism, the polemic quality which deprives them of lasting value. But it would be idle to deny that Mr. Rodell has written a fascinating and eminently readable history of the Court, in a style that canters along without requiring the reader to duck a single low-hanging branch of legal language. And it would be foolhardy to argue with his major conclusion respecting this most autocratic of democratic creations: The Supreme Court conforms much more to the individual backgrounds and prejudices of the highly-assorted citizens who sit on it than it does to the election returns.
