Customer Reviews

The Promise of American Life

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Considering that Teddy Roosevelt was the first to buy into the Croly line of thinking, followed by Wilson and FDR, it is little wonder we have become the entitlement, anti-business, anti-capitalist, pro-labor nation we are. Croly wrote this book at a time there was much debate as to which direction the country should take. This book is extremely well written. It is impressive how Croly was able to put his thoughts to paper so well. The book is a must read should you wish to gain insight on how America has changed since the Civil War. And from a conservative perspective, I must add, it's very scary.

The stars are not for agreement. In fact, H. D. Croly argues from the opposite pole of the Great American Debate as myself. The stars are because he does such a good job of it (other than the long-winded first chapter). Five stars for a deep and revealing understanding of American history, the American character, and individual American politicians - especially Lincoln. Minus a star for occasional windiness. Croly also got my attention by framing the debate exactly as I do, and then framing the entirety of American political history, like I do, in terms of the debate.

For example, from the get-go, Croly establishes the opposing visions of Hamilton and Jefferson as the fundamental philosophical split in America and traces the dispute up to the present. Of course, his present is a perfect century earlier than our own, but even now the game is still the same even as party names and ideological labels have changed with some regularity. Now we might name the split progressivism vs. libertarianism.

I also give Croly fairly high marks for maintaining a generosity of spirit and understanding for the "other side." Such generosity is unusual in the best of times, so even "fairly high" is fairly rare. His generosity doesn't quite extend to the principal figure representing the other side, though. His skillful demolition of Jefferson's personal qualities is merely skillful, not generous. In the case of Jefferson, anyway, Croly can't help seeing philosophical differences expressed through personality deficiencies.

Croly's excellent explication of the frontier culture of the "Western Democracy" would be worth the price of the book, if it had a price (free on Kindle, as of this writing). "Western Democracy" added an aggressively militaristic attitude to Jeffersonianism, a contradiction that infects both modern neo-conservatism and modern liberalism alike.

This book was great inspiration to Theodore Roosevelt, the imperialist progressive who opened the gates to big government and Pax Americana. Croly's name may be forgotten but his ideas, with the help of T. R. and others from that pivotal generation, are the underpinning for our modern world. Has America's Promise been fulfilled? Some would argue yes, I would say it's barely holding on as Croly's descendents drown us in debt and militarism.


America's Forgotten History, Part 1: Foundations
America's Forgotten History, Part 2: Rupture

Herbert Croly was a journalist and writer who wrote his most significant work just after the beginning of the twentieth century. He makes the case most simply: there have been two contending forces within liberalism fighting for the soul of the country from the very beginning. That is, there have been two distinct liberalisms. One was the Hamiltonian emphasis on the nation as a whole, as something transcendent over narrow interests. He called for a national purpose or interest to structure political dialogue. On the down side, the individual American might be forgotten in the process. The Jeffersonian view, on the other hand, valorized the individual and deemphasized a larger national purpose. Croly argued that both had serious flaws, but that the time was right to try to meld the two together for the good of the republic.

His contention was that we had to wed the national purpose orientation of Hamilton with the focus on ordinary people from Jefferson. His appeal was for "positive government," the use by government of various tools to advance the national interest and the welfare of the people. This was an early salvo on behalf of the Progressive movement. With the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, this orientation became the dominant thrust of American politics for five decades.

My review concerns the quality of the "Qontro Classic Books" paperback edition, not the content of Croly's book. Croly originally published the work in 1909 and it apparently has passed into the public domain. This Qontro edition is an oversize paperback, but is very hard to read because it is set in a small and hard to read typefont - I think it's just Courier. I would guess the publisher scanned a library copy into Word and hit the Print button. The table of contents doesn't give page numbers for the beginning of chapters. There is no forward or other comments by recent scholars, just the bare text of Croly's book.

The book was written as a kind of half-time review of US history. "Half time" of course as seen hundred years later, with over 200 years of history.
The title is at first a bit repellant, smelling of "chosen country" sentiment. That's not what it really implies. The "promise" was something real for many immigrants, it meant opportunity and equality. Why then make a title out of it? Because things were moving into a direction which seemed to indicate that the promise was about to be lost. Croly asks what can be done to keep it. His solutions look a bit like the "social market economy" of Germany in the 50s to me.
The language is in parts amazingly fresh and contemporary. The chapter on Jeffersonians versus Hamiltonians could have been written today, same as the short Lincoln bio chapter. The chapter on government by lawyer is a gem.(I am aware that his focus on Hamilton is not generally accepted. Why not Adams? But somehow Mr.Hamilton must have had a period of superiority in estimation, as proven by his face on money, where there is no Adams.)
On the negative, in some places, the language is roundabout and absolutely not to the point, to the extent that the point remains hidden. I suspect this is done by age. We have another wave length in many respects. Or maybe Croly actually sometimes wrote less than clearly.
I opened the book with some reservation not only due to the potentially ideological title. I read the 89 reprint, not the 2005 version. That was at the end of the Reagan era and the book was sold like some kind of Reagan prophecy. Don't blame Croly for that.
He wrote at the time of Teddy, when the US was developing into something new, away from the pioneering age, into industrial monsterdom, on the back of several decades of economic revolutions after the civil war. Society was changing. The old individualist view of democracy was clearly becoming inadequate, a new Hamiltonian view of things towards protection of progress and efficiency of government seemed needed. Society had outgrown romantic start up notions of freedom and equality.
Another negative observation: the chapter on the reformers is just sub-standard, no real analysis of their programs, more like contemporary newspaper leader articles. His view of TR is on the level of a state owned newspaper's praise of the Chief.
It is not just a book about history, but essentially about ideas and interaction of structure and content.
I find it particularly fascinating to watch how words change their meaning over time. Croly uses the word nationalism in a sense which baffled me at first, until I got it: he uses it in opposition to "all states for themselves", building a nation out of a group of less-than-nations. Being European, I am so used to understand nationalism as something which says: we first, above the others. (Deutschland ueber alles, literally...)
Another instance of changed paradigm is Croly's naive assumption of racial stereotypes. He takes it for granted, that "negroes are inferior". He couldn't have written that at the end of the Reagan period.
One editing comment: my 89 edition has a very incomplete list of contents. All chapters have several subtitles, but the content list gives only the first one of each. That might be repaired in later editions; if not, it should be.

This Filiquarian edition is in a good quality binding and paper but it is not a facsimile so pagination is off. The original had an extensive index [see Gutenberg e-copy]; there is absolutely NO index in this edition. Look for another edition for academic usage. Amazon as usual supplied a copy in Very Good condition even tho they only claimed "Good".

Croly was a radical and an avowed believer in centralized power for gorvernment, business and labor unions. He had no use for the U.S. Constitution and inveighed against it frequently in the New Republic magazine which he co-founded in 1914. He expressed consternation that a document that as he believed, had been foisted on the American people and had been used to oppress working people (his words) had come to be ¨deified.¨
In fact, the entire book could easily have been written by President Obama, the degradation of the Constitution included). It's interesting that a new edition has just been reissued when the American public is about to administer its verdict on Obamaism, Big Government, socialized medicine and centralized planning.
This book foresaw many FDR New Deal policies, enacted and implemented a quarter-century later, but soon it will read as a period piece, as the U.S. finally puts paid Bill Clinton's remark from 1996, that ¨the era of Big Government is over.¨ R.I.P.