The American Mentalité: Book Shorts by Longinus

By Longinus | Wednesday, May 22, 1996

Greetings from Baker!

When called for, brief notices will appear herein of books you will enjoy and find variously valuable.
—Longinus

Russell Kirk, The Sword of Imagination

Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana appeared in 1953, a most suspicious moment for this book. The U.S. war at war with Communist China in Korea. The Soviet Union was menacing. An important sequence of books had appeared about the drastic and anti-human character of Communism: 1984, The God That Failed, Darkness At Noon, Homage to Catalonia, The Captive Mind, Witness. Communism seemed to be not only a potent military threat externally, but a threat internally: Hiss, Rosenbergs, etc.

At the same time the liberal tradition seemed increasingly attenuated.

Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind elucidated a tradition counter-to and older than the liberal tradition, and did so through chapters on Burke, Adams, Coleridge, Newman, Santayana, Eliot (in later editions) and other conservatives. It did not matter that these conservative writers were not in agreement on many things; their core of agreement counted. And they were unquestionably very distinguished. Kirk had a way of making conservative tradition a sort of historical poem of powerful appeal. The book went through seven additions.

Mr. Kirk died last year. The present autobiography, told in the third person in the manner of Henry Adams, recounts his extraodinary life as a scholar, author of many books and articles, columnist, political activist, and one of the founders of the modern conservative movement. In his notable collection The Liberal Imagination (1950), Lionel Trilling confidently said that there 'are no conservstive ideas in general circulation.' At that time a case could then be made for that assertion. A few years later, Russell Kirk helped to begin the process of putting them there. A reading of The Conservative Mind and The Sword of Imagination provide a good introduction to this major figure of our time.

David Fromkin, In the Time of the Americans: The Generation That Changed America's Role in the World (Knopf)

David Fromkin, Professor of history, International Relations and Law at Boston University, has written a scintillating book. It is rich in anecdote and its narrative has great conceptual sweep. He begins in the era of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, but his main focus is on the men who won World War II and laid the foundations for victory in the Cold War: FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Marshall, and MacArthur. (The term Cold War probably ought to be retired. We lost a combined total of about 100,000 men in Korea and Vietnam; Our opponents perhaps 8-10 million.)

Professor Fromkin begins with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson because they epitomize divergent tendencies in U. S. foreign policy: expansion and Realpolitik in T. R., idealistic universalism in Wilson. His account of Wilson's disaster at Versailles is heartbreaking. His hero is FDR, whom he believes made a viable synthesis of what was best in the two divergent tendencies of T. R. and Wilson. Beautifully written and full of lively and often surprising details, this is a splendid account of a momentous period in American and world history.

It is no accident that so fine a scholar as Professor Fromkin teaches at Boston University. The single great university president of our era, John Silber, has transformed Boston University from a second-rate institution to one very close to first-rate, if not first-rate already.

The American Mentalité: Book Shorts by Longinus

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