A History of the American People by Paul Johnson Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 925pp, £25 in UK
This book has the audacity, thoroughness of research, and elegance, characteristic of Paul Johnson's work. A History of the American People was born, he writes, "out of enthusiasm and excitement" and a forty-year relationship with the United States. A bibliography of nearly a hundred pages sustains a monumental literary achievement. The long narrative always flows smoothly, with brilliant cameos of personalities and some delightful aphorisms. The story is told so well that the reader, often driven to desperation by the author's cunning plausibility, is entertained as much by a defiance of accepted versions of history as by challenges to what normally passes for common sense. Despite some bewildering interpretations of events, this study will stimulate intellectually and give pleasure, mixed with exasperation, to those who want to see a first-class mind at work, if sometimes perversely.
Johnson's first sentence sums up his book: "The creation of the United States is the greatest of all human adventures." He admires its entrepreneurial capitalism and thinks that the atomic bomb was its most characteristic single product. He has little enthusiasm for trade unions.
Eloquently and skilfully, he traces the course of American economic growth - immigration, the advance of the frontier, the cultivation of the wilderness, the links between cotton and slavery, steam and technology, as a response to the needs of the situation and the building of the railways. He has fine insights into the American genius for creating significant institutions, and is very impressive in assembling arrays of statistics, even if his economics has the caution of a merchant banker.
Until the middle of the present century, religion played a decisive part in Johnson's America; it is, however, a vague religion without benefit of clergy. It sustained the founders of the early colonies and inspired leaders in the Civil War; Lincoln often invoked God's name, but his God belonged to no coherent system of belief.
Johnson's treatment of the Civil War is very good, but a structural imbalance of style leaves until late in the discussion a recognition that President Lincoln's "paramount object" was to save the Union and not, as he declared, "either to save or to destroy slavery."
There are many fascinating pen-portraits in Paul Johnson's gallery. Of Benjamin Franklin's "Poor Richard's Almanac", he writes, "He pinched the idea from Swift but made it his own. First, it introduced the wise-crack - the joke that imparts knowledge as street wisdom. Second, it popularised the notion, already rooted in America, of the Self-Made Man, the rags to riches epic by handing out practical advice." "It was just as well," we are told, "that Jefferson had no sense of humour; he constitutes in his own way an egregious comic character, accident-prone and vertiginous, to whom minor catastrophes accrued . . ." Johnson reminds us that most American Catholics in the middle of the 19th century "then and later, wanted badly to win the acceptance of fellow Americans by fitting into the citizen formula. And, less defensively and more enthusiastically, they accepted the fact that America had a free market in religion as well as everything else."
Of Henry Clay, of Virginia, "perhaps the ablest man, next to John Calhoun, who never quite managed to become President of the United States," Johnson writes: "Clay was a passionate man. That, one suspects, is one reason people liked him . . . Tears jumped easily into his eyes. So did rage. When Humphrey Marshall, cousin and brother-in-law of the Chief Justice, and an even bigger man than Clay (six feet two) called Clay a liar in the Kentucky legislature, Clay tried to fight him on the floor of the House but was separated by a giant man with a strong German accent - `Come poys, no fighting here, I vips you both' - and the two antagonists crossed the river into Ohio to fight a duel . . ."
Johnson is particularly good in sizing up some of the great industrialists and so-called robber barons. Of one of the greatest, Andrew Carnegie, he has at least one quotation which modern advocates of synergy might keep in mind: "Put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch that basket." He is perceptive in his treatment of Woodrow Wilson's role in laying the administrative foundations of modern states. Without any convincing evidence, however, he tries to challenge the view that the Harding administration was a disaster. Harding, he asserts, "inherited from the comatose Wilson regime one of the sharpest recessions in American history". He and Mellon (at the Treasury) cut government expenditure by 40 per cent, "the last time," according to Johnson, "a major industrial power treated a recession by classic laissez-faire methods, allowing wages to fall to their natural level" - and the economy was of course soon booming again.
Johnson writes with brilliant authority on the Jazz Age and the emergence during prohibition of the dry martini, immortalised in Dorothy Parker's quatrain: "I like to have a Martini/Two at the very most/After three I am under the table/After four I am under the host."
He dismisses as myths the greatness of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Of President Kennedy he has little good to say: "From the start, he was taught by his father that bluff, freely laced with money - or outright mendacity if need be - could remove all difficulties . . ." Of Kennedy's presidential campaign, Paul Johnson believes that his "disadvantage was, or was thought to be, his Catholicism". Cardinal Richard Cushing, of Boston, Old Joe's tame "red hat", who was, according to Johnson, "a kind of house-chaplain to the Kennedy family, later admitted that he and Joe had decided which Protestant ministers were to receive `contributions' of $100 or $500 to play down the religious issue". He goes on to say that the "money used for outright bribes came partly from the Kennedy coffers and partly from the mafia, following a secret meeting between Jack Kennedy and Sam Giancana, the Chicago godfather". (Some of these statements appear to be drawn from a source which Johnson warns should be used with care.) Kennedy's handling of the Cuban crisis is described as a defeat, and Richard Nixon as a victim of spurious liberals and intellectuals. Even within his own idiosyncratic canon, Johnson does not scintillate as an historian in his evaluation of F.D.R., Kennedy, Nixon or Adlai Stevenson.
There are minor errors. Proofreaders may be responsible for some of them, but George Tucker, whom he quotes, should surely have been chided for listing Maria Edgeworth as a Scot (she was born in Oxfordshire). Real erudition is often revealed, however, in scholarly details in a book which for all its aberrations will instruct and please as well as provoke.
Patrick Lynch is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at UCD