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challenge the fate held out by an increasingly illiberal future." Hartz,
on the contrary, with rare dialectical brilliance, treats American history
as "the bizarre fulfillment of liberalism," producing a nation so rooted
in the liberal individualistic assumptions of Locke that it can under·
stand neither itself nor others unless it learns to transcend its own
perspective.
Ekirch's protest against the usual optimistic interpretation of our
history in terms of a "rise" or "growth" is refreshing, and his account
reminds us of many a dark chapter in what most Americans accept as
the greatest success story of all time. He doggedly documents the
re–
pressions of free speech and the rights of minorities in times of crisis,
the frequent callousness of American dealings with the Indian,
the
Negro, and the Oriental, the recurrent hostility to Catholics, Jews, and
the newer immigrants, and the petulant invasions of social and cultural
freedom by self-appointed censors of popular morality. These virtues
of his book, however, are overbalanced by the distortions of his frame
of reference. Despite his justified criticism of the conventional dualistic
view of our history as "a continual struggle between radical and con·
servative points of view," which has supported the optimistic narration
of our past, he perpetuates the same Manichean categories, only
this
time some of the names have been changed and the villains win.
In Ekirch's book the doomed heroes are always the liberals, though
after Jefferson becomes President they seem to be the vanishing Ameri·
cans. This drastic shortage is easily explained: by his definition a liberal
is, like Franklin or the early Jefferson, a child of the late colonial
period. He is committed to limited, representative, decentralized gov.
ernment, civil liberties, free enterprise, and a basically agrarian
s0-
ciety, and he is hostile to standing armies, a big navy, conscription, and
international involvement. With this static definition Ekirch naturally
finds that with the coming of industrialism, the expansion of federal
powers, and the end of isolationism there has been an atrophy of liberal
values.
His thesis has the merit of making it clear that democracy, na·
tionalism, and progressive reform have not necessarily entailed liberal
principles or nurtured a liberal temper, yet his whole approach is
vi·
tiated by his ahistoric assumption of a frozen liberalism. No one can
deny him his evidence that the J acksonians, the Progressives, or
the
New Dealers were not wholly liberals in his pristine sense of the word,
but Ekirch writes as if liberals should live on nostalgia for a golden
age in an idyllic agrarian past. He makes no attempt to question or
evaluate traditional liberal ideas in the light of modern developments.
