More Than Once Upon a Time

Boy, do I. Best book I’ve read in a long time, fiction or non-fiction. Throes of Democracy is the second book in Walter A. McDougall’s projected multivolume history of the US. The first, Freedon Just Around the Corner, took us from the European arrival in North America to Jackson’s election in 1828. The current volume continues the narrative to Rutherford B. Hayes’s disputed election in 1876. (And you thought 2000 was bad.)

The books are smetimes glib to a fault. They are surveys of their times, not in-depth analyses. McDougall’s tone is ironic and conservative, with a touch of the gleeful cynic as well. But the conservatism is not the false conservatism of the current day, which wishes to conserve nothing but ts own power. It is an older conservatism that does not believe in the perfectability of humanity, and views all such attempts as vainglorious, dictatorial, and more than a little self-serving. In short, it is a scholarly point of view that is very much out of step with mainstream progressive American scholarship (the NY Times savaged the book), or the conservative backlash that currently represents the other side of the debate.

Whatever you think of the theme, it is a great read. McDougall has no sacred cows (except maybe Lincoln), and savages everyone from the Transcendentalists to the Know-Nothings. (Having been forced to worship Emerson and the Transcendentalists at my New England college I enjoyed their skewering very much.) He views the Civil War as a disaster for all parties, with the freeing of the slaves barely making up for the century of Black American sufferng that followed. His main thesis, that the US has always been a nation of self-interested hucksters draping ourselves in moral hypocrisy in order to justify our ambition and greed is, in my opinion, completely accurate. And very appropriate, given our current natonal condition.

It’s a beutifully written and very interesting book. If you like the bashing of sacred cows, do yourself a favor and take a look.