In the beginning, America was the place where dreams could come true. It seemed to have land for everybody, and unlimited riches to go with the land. It was empty to all intents and purposes—the Stone Age tribes could be quietly exterminated or pushed off into a corner somewhere—and because it was empty it was a place where a fresh start could be made. Here, for the first time on earth, men were entirely on their own.
Out of all this came as profound a challenge as men’s spirits have ever faced. For the essence of life in the New World appeared to be the fact that everything was up to the individual. He could get just about anything he wanted if he wanted it badly enough and had the nerve and energy to go after it.
The corollary, of course, was that if he failed it was probably his own fault. In a country where anything is possible, the man who finds himself unable to do all the fine things he set out to do has no alibi. The compulsion to success is overwhelming; the man who cannot get what he wants convicts himself.
This was all very well, for a while, for there was a measure of truth under the legend. But the country filled up and developed, and as it did so conditions changed, and presently the legend was outliving the truth. Yet the strength of the legend did not diminish—it had the vitality of the dreams men give their lives to—and men were forced to measure themselves against it when it was no longer properly applicable. And out of this there came torture for the human spirit, with a tragic misunderstanding of the meaning of American life.
It is this situation that forms the basis for Kenneth Lynn’s fine new book, The Dream of Success.
Mr. Lynn begins by addressing himself to none other than Horatio Alger, the fabulous hack-novelist who devoted a lifetime of unrewarding labor to the assertion that pluck and luck will take any man to the top of the heap. Ironically enough, Alger made a flat failure of his own career, measuring it by his own inexorable standard. He formulated the success mythology so effectively that before he got through he had created a whole new school of literature and had stamped the legend indelibly on the American consciousness—but he himself never made any money out of it all. He wrote more than a hundred books about young men who came up from poverty to riches, but he was quite unable to master the trick himself.
What concerns Mr. Lynn, however, is not Alger himself but a number of much more substantial novelists who came after him; men whom literary and social historians have acclaimed as dauntless rebels against the American cult of success. Specifically, he considers Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, David Graham Phillips, Frank Norris and Robert Herrick, and he concludes that these men, as much as Alger himself, were enmeshed in the legend. They were concerned with the problems created by life in a society dedicated to the success myth, but they were not estranged from that society; they took their values from it and in the end they were themselves fatally limited by it. They seemed to be fighting against the dominant business group, but imaginatively and emotionally they belonged in that group themselves. Far from being “leftist,” they worshipped material success as devoutly as anyone, and “in their maturity accepted it as the key to the meaning of American life.”
One result is that each man’s creative work was handicapped. Each of these “iconoclastic” novelists, Mr. Lynn points out, had a fatal inability to bring his novels to a significant conclusion. Dreiser, for instance, wrote a famous trilogy about a business giant, Frank Cowperwood, tried unavailingly to set his hero apart from the common herd, and in the end “had to go on writing more and more pages of his seemingly endless trilogy in the vain attempt to make Cowperwood something more than an Alger hero.”
And as for the others: “The smoke and violence which shrouded the ending of London’s The Iron Heel simply obscured the fact that London had no idea as to how he could make Utopia seem attractive. Phillips’ Messiahs always disappeared from sight just as they were about to change the political and economic face of America. Norris’s novels generally ended with his heroes about to set off for somewhere—New York, the Arctic, Cuba, India—where, they insisted, life would be different, but the heroes only asserted this and their assertions were never proved dramatically. Conflagrations, departures for the Far West and bleak despair were the signs of Herrick’s calamitous inability to conclude his novels satisfactorily. Success kindled the American imagination, certainly, but it stifled it as well.”
Thus Mr. Lynn disagrees sharply with a long line of critics, from Van Wyck Brooks to Henry Steele Commager, who have held that during the long literary generation ending in the late 1920’s our major writers were sharply estranged from the society that nurtured them: “The society which was portrayed in their fiction was not one which was split into two warring camps, Left versus Right, good versus evil, or what you will, but a society which, as William James has said, exclusively worshipped a common deity, which was locked in the struggle to get ahead, not separated by a struggle between opposing ideals.”
Thus the five writers considered in this book did not resolve the great literary, psychological and emotional problems to which they had addressed themselves. We have not, in other words, escaped from the old legend. We still worship success, and we still have a deep horror of failure because we have not yet convinced ourselves that failure can be anything but personal. Dreams not only can come true, they must come true if the dreamer has the right stuff in him.
So there is still a gap between myth and reality, which means that we have not yet adjusted ourselves to the world we have created. We persist in looking at that world as if it were a very different sort of place, and because we do we have a profound disquiet, a maladjustment that grows progressively more costly. And yet the final answer is not merely neurotic unhappiness. We are up to something tremendous in this country, and the fathomless energy and drive that come out of our favorite myth are a basic part of it. The tragic price we pay for our adherence to the myth is that we do not yet understand fully what we are all about or what we are really driving at. It is above everything else important that we get that understanding, and Horatio Alger somehow stands in our way.
Mr. Lynn sums it up very well: “More obsolete than the Model T, Alger continues to be our myth-maker; until we show some of the same sort of ruthlessness about discarding outworn mythologies as we do about outdated motor cars, we shall never be able to get at the unprecedented meaning of American civilization today.”
The Dream of Success, by Kenneth S. Lynn. Little, Brown & Co. 269 pp. $4.
Heavy Victorian Father
By Bruce Catton
In the brave old days when the long-suffering Army of the Potomac had most of its heartbreaks still ahead of it, one of the army’s favorite legends held that its own commanding officer, General George B. McClellan, had once successfully competed for the hand of lovely Mary Ellen Marcy with a young army officer who later became the Confederate commander, General Ambrose Powell Hill.
According to this legend, Hill still nourished a grudge against McClellan, and therefore fought against him during the Civil War with more than ordinary vigor. Whenever the Confederates attacked the Army of the Potomac (which happened fairly often, back in the summer of 1862), the Union soldiers ascribed it to A. P. Hill and his personal feud with McClellan. The story is told of one Union soldier, aroused from sleep early in the morning by the crackling musketry from the picket line where Hill’s division was opening another assault, detaching himself grumpily from his blankets and apostrophizing Mrs. McClellan in these words:
“My God, Ellen! Why didn’t you marry him?”
Unlike some legends, this one had a certain foundation in fact, and the facts are set forth in W. Eugene Hollon’s book, Beyond the Cross Timbers, which is a biography of Mary Ellen’s father, Randolph B. Marcy.
Marcy was an army officer who gained a good deal of fame, in the decade just before the Civil War, as an explorer of the unsettled West; a solid, strictly-business regular who blazed trails across the prairies, paved the way for the opening of the plains country, and all in all was a most useful public servant.
Along with everything else, Marcy could be the heavy Victorian father when need arose, and need did arise (as he saw it) in the 1850’s when dashing young Lieutenant Hill began paying his addresses to Mary Ellen.
Young Captain McClellan had worked with Marcy in an expedition along the Red River, a few years earlier, and Marcy had been much taken with him; so much so that when McClellan began to court Miss Marcy the father did everything he could to persuade the girl to accept him. He had no luck; Mary Ellen simply did not love McClellan, she did love Lieutenant Hill, and anyway she was two or three inches taller than McClellan—a matter of no especial importance but still something worth thinking about. So she wrote to Captain Marcy, telling him that she was going to marry Hill. Marcy promptly blew his stack.
Any woman, he told his daughter, who married an army officer was simply asking for trouble; pay was low, absences from home were frequent and extended, and military life offered no particular future. (McClellan was a soldier, to be sure, but he was planning to leave the army and enter private industry, his family had money, and anyway Marcy liked him personally.) So Mary Ellen was to abandon all communication with Lieutenant Hill, and “if you do not comply with my wishes in this respect I cannot tell what my feelings toward you will become. I fear that my ardent affections will turn to hate . . .”
Mary Ellen was stubborn. She obeyed her father to the extent of letting the matter rest for nearly a year, then she returned to the fray. Marcy was still obdurate; she was too young to know what she was doing; an army officer’s wife led a dog’s life; and besides did she realize that McClellan had now left the army and was doing very well in the railroad business?
In the end, Captain Marcy had his way. Lieutenant Hill at last faded out of the picture to become a lieutenant general for the Southern Confederacy, a red-shirted fighting man with a gallant name that lives on in legend. Miss Marcy finally did marry stocky little McClellan, who was everything Hill was not and practically nothing that Hill was, and who wrote voluminous self-revealing letters to her from his unhappy headquarters tent in the Army of the Potomac. Hill was killed in battle one week before Appomattox and McClellan lived on to argue interminably that if he had just had better breaks he would have been a great soldier—and if Ellen Marcy ever regretted the turn events took she left no record of it, coming down in history as a pretty, rather sad young woman looking out of the Brady photographs, standing by her husband’s chair, one hand resting on his shoulder. But one cannot help wondering what her own thoughts about it all may have been.
It should be added that Mr. Hollon’s book is mostly concerned with Marcy, not with Mary Ellen’s love affair. It is a solid, factual sort of book, redeeming from obscurity a deserving soldier whose present claim to fame is that he was General McClellan’s father-in-law—a tenuous hold on fame, if ever there was one—and the man seems to have been worth knowing. But somehow Mary Ellen steals the show.
Beyond the Cross Timbers:the Travels of Randolph B. Marcy, 1812-1887, by W. Eugene Hollon. The University of Oklahoma Press. 288 pp. $4.
The Gray Poet
By Bruce Catton
One of the difficult facts about American life is that while Walt Whitman’s poetry is something that lifts you up and gives you a glimpse of unimaginable truths beyond the horizon, biographies of the man himself tend to be rather dull. Perhaps part of the trouble is that no literary man is apt to make a really thrilling subject for a biography, unless indeed the book devotes itself largely to his eccentricities rather than to his art. Perhaps, too, Whitman revealed himself so thoroughly in his poems that he left his biographers a comparatively narrow field.
Yet it is impossible to leave him alone. As he himself perhaps overemphasized, Whitman was a more or less uncouth, untutored sort of person sounding his “barbaric yawp” across a land that was devoting precious little time to self-analysis. He was not at all a typical American; he wholly lacked the “get ahead” spirit, he stood well aside from the national urge for conformity, and he was more than ready to talk out loud about forbidden subjects at a time when most of his fellows were very mindful of what Mrs. Grundy might say. But he had the poet’s eye, which is to say that he saw what America was all about at a time when things were more than commonly confused, and he stated once and for all some of the basic fundamentals in the democratic faith.
Gay Wilson Allen handles his difficult subject very well in The Solitary Singer, and the result is about as close to a definitive biography as we are likely to need for some time to come. The facts, apparently, are all here, to the extent that it is possible to marshal them; not merely the facts about where Whitman worked, how he earned his living, what places he frequented and what people he knew, but the facts about his development as a poet and as a thinker. The material on his Civil War experiences struck this reviewer as particularly well-handled.
There is, of course, the perennial question: was Whitman homosexual? Mr. Allen considers the case objectively, and in effect lets the reader decide for himself, on evidence much of which can be interpreted either way. Quite properly, he refuses to let the question engross him unduly. In the last analysis, the answer seems to be: what earthly difference does it make now, anyway?
It is as a poet and a prophet that Whitman is important, and this book serves excellently to tell the story of the man against the background of his times. He was one of the giants of American literature, not only because of the moving, glowing quality of his verse, but also because, as Mr. Allen says, “with sustained originality and insight he was exploring problems and presenting empirical answers that actually gave a preview of the main course of American philosophy for the next century.”
The Solitary Singer:a Critical Biography of Walt Whitman, by Gay Wilson Allen. The Macmillan Company. 616 pp. $8.
Frontier Versailles
By Bruce Catton
The American story has a way of running off into unpredictable little bypaths. The great drama of history is of course very sober and momentous, full of high purpose and vast significance; but there are many side shows which never came to much of anything but which often manage to be of greater human interest than the main event.
As, for instance, the story of the frontier settlement of Azilum, which did not last very long, never fulfilled the dreams of the people who established it, and eventually came to nothing at all, dying out so completely that it barely made a scar on the landscape—and which somehow remains a heart-warming story more than a century and a half after the last cabin was abandoned.
Azilum was a little town on the Susquehanna River established by émigrés from the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. It drew together briefly about as odd an assortment of pioneers as the American frontier ever saw—titled folk from the disrupted French court, cultivated expatriates who made a valiant, amusing and rather pathetic attempt to plant a new Versailles in miniature, a Versailles-with-the-bark-on, on the edge of the American wilderness. For a time, the venture looked as if it might prosper. Its handful of settlers even hoped that the deposed king and queen of France could join them, and the biggest log cabin in America was erected to house them, although both of those luckless majesties were beheaded before the building finally got completed. Then, at last, the terror ended, legal disabilities on noble émigrés were lifted, and in a few years the settlers went back to France and the village went back to grass.
All of this is set forth, along with much else, in Carl Carmer’s engaging The Susquehanna, the latest and one of the most readable in the “Rivers of America” series.
Mr. Carmer is out to present one small slice of American history in terms of the things that happened in one of the country’s river valleys, that of the Susquehanna. A good deal happened there, from first to last, beginning with a visit by the redoubtable Captain John Smith, and the book is less a connected narrative than a collection of informal, discursive chapters on subjects ranging all the way from Indian massacres to the doings of early Moravian missionaries. The tale of Azilum is perhaps the most fascinating single nugget in the lot, but it is tolerably representative of the whole. The realm of American history contains many mansions; this is one of the smaller ones, perhaps, but is a very pleasant one which will well repay a visit.
The Susquehanna, by Carl Carmer. Rinehart & Co., Inc. 493 pp. $5.
Current Books in Brief
By Bruce Catton
The Town that Died Laughing, by Oscar Lewis.
Little, Brown & Co. 235 pp. $3.75.
The editor of a newspaper in a western mining camp was rarely a man to let a passion for objective news gathering and presentation stand in his way. He knew that his readers wanted the news, to be sure, but he knew that they also wanted to be entertained, and he aimed to please. As a result, mining camp journalism tended to be informal, highly personal, and somewhat haphazard, with editor and readers alike getting what fun they could out of it. This unassuming little book deals with the ninety-year history of the Reese River Reveille, set up in Austin, Nevada, during a silver boom in the 1860’s. The boom quickly faded, and Austin has been declining ever since, the Reveille along with it, and the book describes the whole process as it was recorded by a succession of editors. Perhaps there may not have been enough solid material here to make a full-length book, but if things are stretched a bit thin there does emerge a pleasant, not-too-serious picture of the quick rise and long fall of a typical Nevada silver town.
Main Street on the Middle Border, by Lewis Atherton. The Indiana University Press. 423 pp. $6.
The American small town, says Mr. Atherton, is by no means a museum piece. It still has a vital part to play in American life, and—despite the increasing pace of urbanization—it is playing it effectively and has no reason to distrust the future. With this statement of faith, Mr. Atherton takes a detailed, thoughtful and affectionate look at the history of the middle western small town, discussing its rise, its development and its frequently difficult adjustment to the pace of modern life. His book is no mere exercise in nostalgia, but is a scholarly, documented study of small town life in the last couple of generations. Never uncritical or given to fond reminiscence of “the good old days,” it nevertheless finds solid values in the small town and argues cogently for their survival.
Poltroons and Patriots, a Popular Account of the War of 1812, by Glenn Tucker. Bobbs-Merrill Co. Two volumes, 812 pp. $10.
Glenn Tucker is a veteran newspaperman who has applied the techniques of news gathering and news writing to the production of history, and in these two volumes he has produced a highly readable account of the oddest war this country ever engaged in. The young nation stumbled into this fight for reasons not easily defined, fought it with—for the most part—a maximum of inefficiency, and came out of it with nothing gained except a stout reaffirmation of its own independence. Some of the chapters about atrocities along the Canadian border make highly uncomfortable reading for Americans who like to take pride in their own past, and the story of the loss of Washington is a fine study in governmental incompetence. Mr. Tucker gives a good account of the Indian fighting which made up so large and usually ignored a part of the war, and winds up with a good picture of that traditional set piece, the battle of New Orleans. Here is a breezy venture in historical writing, competently handled.
Politics in America, by D. W. Brogan. Harper #38; Brothers. 467 pp. $5.
British Denis Brogan has a better eye for the ins and outs of American politics than a good many homebred observers, and in this book he considers what it is that really makes the American political system tick. Mainly, he concludes, it is the system’s loose-jointedness that has been its salvation. Enjoying the oldest written constitution in the world, he remarks, the American people have made it work—and he holds that by and large it has worked very well indeed—through a genius for adaptation; specifically, through an elaborate and ingenious two-party system which is nowhere provided for in the basic law but which has furnished the flexibility to meet changing times and conditions. Not the least of this fine book’s virtues is the fact that Mr. Brogan knows how to write his critique without sounding like a pundit or an oracle.
Chesapeake Bay and the Tidewater, by A. Aubrey Bodine. Hastings House. 144 pp. $10.
For more than a quarter of a century Mr. Bodine has been taking pictures of the Chesapeake Bay country. Here he has assembled 220 of his best photographs to present a pictorial account of that famous region, and the result is a truly delightful book. Some of the pictures are strictly contemporary, and others portray scenes that have long since vanished, but all of them give the flavor and color of a charming section of America in a most striking way. For anyone who can respond to first-rate camera studies of interesting and picturesque scenes, this book is warmly recommended.
Three Lincoln Masterpieces, by Benjamin Barondess, with a preface by David C. Mearns. Education Foundation of West Virginia. 156 pp. $3.
For the Lincoln student Mr. Barondess here presents three of Lincoln’s best-known speeches—the Gettsyburg Address, the Second Inaugural, and the Cooper Institute Speech—putting each one in its proper context by examining its origins, tracing the development of Lincoln’s thought, and describing the gathering before which the speech was delivered and the general effect which it had on its listeners. As Mr. Mearns remarks in his preface, Lincoln’s own estimate of his powers—“I am not a master of language”—was very wide of the mark. As no other man has done, he spoke for America. This volume presents three of his greatest speeches in their historical setting.
Fremont: Path-marker of the West, by Allan Nevins. Longmans, Green and Co. $6.50.
Here is a reissue of the standard biography of one of the truly fantastic characters in American history—John Charles Fremont, who got about as good a press for his exploratory ventures in the West as any venturer could ask and who, aided by that and by excellent political connections, once aspired to the presidency and a little later was held by the anti-slavery radicals a fit person to command Union armies in the Civil War. The man was woefully inadequate for either function, a fact which happily dawned on everyone in time to prevent catastrophe, but he was an interesting sort of lightweight and Dr. Nevins does him full justice.
History of Nebraska, by James C. Olson, with line drawings by Franz Altschuler. The University of Nebraska Press. 372 pp. $5.
Here is the sort of state history that ought to appear more often—thorough, solidly based, and readable. Aimed primarily at the student, Dr. Olson’s book nevertheless has its appeal for the general reader, and it provides a good history of an interesting part of the country, from the Indian period down through the Kansas-Nebraska troubles to the present day.
Westward the Way, edited by Perry T. Rathbone. City Art Museum of St. Louis. 280 pp. $3.95.
Close behind the Indian fighters and pioneers who opened up the Louisiana Territory followed an adventurous band of artists and writers. The record they made forms the basis for this unique book, compiled by the City Art Museum of St. Louis to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase. By marrying each painting or sketch to a contemporary account of the same scene, the book evokes a vivid picture of the plains and rivers and mountains, the birds and animals, the Indians and settlers of the vast Territory.
The Changing American Market, by the editors of Fortune. Hanover House. 304 pp. $4.50.
There are many ways to consider the great American citizen, and one of them is to look at him in his capacity as purchaser. Selecting this approach, the editors of Fortune find him a fellow of infinite and rapidly changing variety—which, from the producer’s viewpoint, is a great part of his charm. The American market is a fearful and wonderful thing, constantly absorbing more and more goods—a reflection of the constantly rising level of productivity, which has the market expanding faster than the population itself. The editors hasten to point out, in addition, that this also reflects the American’s refusal to become a type; as a buyer he is highly volatile, which means that the market is forever ready to soak up large quantities of entirely new products. The moral appears to be that the end of prosperity is not in sight.
Henry Ford: a Great Life in Brief, by Roger Burlingame. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 194 pp. $2.50.
People have been writing about Henry Ford for quite a time, and they will certainly go on doing it for years to come, and hardly anybody agrees with anybody else about the man; as Mr. Burlingame remarks, “the fires of enmity and anger over moral issues must die down before a proper estimate of Henry Ford can be made.” Meanwhile, Ford is a fascinating, tantalizing, often irritating figure, and this is a very compact and an extremely well-handled study of him. Mr. Burlingame does not try to sum him up, pointing out that much time must elapse before a real synthesis can be made; he treats him as one who “never once allowed the impossibilities of the past to limit the possibilities of the future,” and in brief compass he presents him very ably.
Fires and Firefighters, by John V. Morris; illustrated by the author. Little, Brown & Co. 393 pp. $6.
This, of course, is a book for the fire engine buffs—that apparently large slice of the population which responds instinctively to the whine of the siren and the clang of the bell. In essence, it is the history of America’s great fires from colonial times down to the present. All of the old favorites (if the word is permissible) are here: the burning of the Great Republic, the Chicago fire, the fearful conflagration at Peshtigo, Wisconsin, the great fire in Boston, the General Slocum disaster, and so on. There is also an extended discussion of fire-fighting methods and equipment, from the days of the bucket brigade to modern motorized equipment.
