BOOKS
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foreign wars whose prosecution had disastrous consequences for the
civilization of the United States. They find the answer in
a.
radical per–
version of policy at the turn of the twentieth century-a breach with
historical continentalism with turned the attention of Americans away
from the internal development of their own society and, under the in–
fluence of giddy minds (which inexplicably gained control), led them
into foreign quarrels. To establish the character of that perversion, they
endow American development until 1890 with a consistently nationalistic
character. The seeds of nationalism, already present before emigration,
developed rapidly in the colonial period, and then, cut free from Eu–
ropean restraints by the war for independence, flowered in the early
nineteenth century, lending impetus to the conquest of the west. As the
American spirit matured, despite the set-back of the abortive revolt of
1861, it kept interests centred at home and consolidated the resources of
the continent .with the tools of industrialism.
To uphold this argument, the Beards are, time and again, forced
on to tenuous ground and driven to
position~
they cannot defend. They
must seek among the causes for emigration to the new world an amor–
phous and undefined
elan
that, from the beginning, cut off Americans
from those who remained behind. They must assert that American char–
acter was so well developed and so different from the English by 1774
that the revolution was a conflict of divergent ideologies. And they must
minimize the great weight of evidence against their position.
If
Tom
Paine could step from the ship that carried him to Philadelphia in Nov–
ember, 1774 and give immediate expression to the spirit of the revolu–
tion, surely its ideas must have developed in England as well as in Amer–
ica. How explain away thel fact that China in the economic life of New
England, and Britain, in that of the south, were more important in 1824,
the year of the Monroe Doctrine, than in 1898, the year of the Spanish–
American War? The very humanitarian strivings,-abolition, women's
rights, prison reform, universal education, and the rest,-which, to the
Beards epitomize the idea of civilization
in
the United States, were in–
ternational in character and origin; not only did analogous movements
proliferate everywhere in western Europe, but there were even substan–
tial organizational ties. Nor were Americans ever politically aloof from
the social crises of the old world. The young men who fought for Greek
and Polish independence in the 1820's and the 1830's, the cheering
congressmen who welcomed Kossuth in 1851, the sloop-of-war
Saint
Louis
which rescued a Hungarian revolutionary from off an Austrian
brig in Turkish waters, the Cambridge literati who lionized Bakunin,
reaffirmed Webster's assertion in a formal state paper that Americans
could not "fail to cherish always a lively interest in the fortunes of na–
tions struggling for institutions like their own." Wilson's slogan fell upon
receptive ears because Americans had been interested in making the
world safe for democracy.
