The Disuniting of America:
I have just read the 1998 edition. Mr. Schlesinger has written a serious, nuanced set of essays about our multicultural society. Although the book is greater than the sum of related of essays: they were not published separately. The common theme is expressed in the Forward: "The more people feel themselves adrift ... the more they crave a politics of identity."
Mr. Schlesinger is no enemy of multiple cultures. In 1947, Schlesinger, together with former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Minneapolis mayor and future Senator and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, economist and longtime friend John Kenneth Galbraith, and Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, founded Americans for Democratic Action. He favors diversity, which may confuse some readers, as his thesis is not to eliminate it, but to be wary of its stridency.
He favors a single America, "governed together ... instilled by shared history, values, and language." The book is punctuated with stories and writings of 19th and 20th Century writers. (One of the more interesting features of the book is the Appendix, in which Mr. Schlesinger lists and summarizes a (baker's) dozen works that epitomize America, from "The Federalist," "Democracy in America," to "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and Henry Adams "Education," among others.
He cannot abide the erasure of history. "For better or for worse, American history has been shaped more than anything else by British tradition and culture. To deny this perhaps lamentable but hardly disputable fact would be to falsify history." "The purpose of history is to promote not group self-esteem, but understanding of the world." He would not favor the destruction of monuments, now so prevalent, as it is in and has been recently in Iraq.
Mr. Schlesinger traces much of the enthusiasm for multicultural extremism to the academic world, who, on the whole, define what we are taught and how -- and beyond. "The University of Pennsylvania gives blacks - 6 percent of the enrollment - their own yearbook." (His quote from Reinhold Niebuhr is resonant: "The chief source of man's inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to other men." Today, many would dismiss this statement because it uses only the male personal pronoun, as tribalism has grown steadily worse since the author wrote it.) Ironically, the assault on our history is being led by the "analytical weapons" developed in the West."
This book is easy to read and thought-provoking. It is a prophecy of worse to come. It was written over twenty years ago. It has come.
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