Land of Hope: An
Invitation to the Great American Story
by Wilfred M. McClay
Philip Tervian’s review at Commentary concludes:
. . . [McClay] begins at the
beginning—the archaeological evidence of our aboriginal inhabitants—and like
most American histories, McClay’s tends to pass a little quickly over the first
century-and-a-half of European settlement. But this is a minor complaint. His
description of America on the eve of revolution is perceptive and succinct, and
capacious as well. The reader never doubts the author’s perspective on the
colonists’ revolt, or British government in America, but he tells the story
with illuminating clarity and, above all, fair-mindedness. The answer to
ignorance is not indoctrination but knowledge.
This virtue in the writing of
history is not necessarily self-evident. The American Revolution, like any such
episode, was a complicated matter, reaching back in history and forward in
effect; and both sides—one is tempted to say all sides—were benighted and
heroic, generous and arbitrary, products of their various places and time.
George Washington was not without his flaws, and the Loyalists were not without
their reasons. McClay sets all this out in crisp detail, balancing his judgment
in conjunction with the evidence, flattering his readers to draw their own
conclusions.
Which is what distinguishes this
from other history texts. The present sits not in judgment but inquiry. And to
the extent that we can understand people and events in circumstances far removed
from our own experience, the past is revealed in Land of Hope to the
present, without prejudice. The dramas and their actors—the drafting of the
Constitution, Andrew Jackson, westward expansion, John C. Calhoun, the Mexican
War, Samuel Gompers, women’s suffrage, Woodrow Wilson, the Great Crash, Ronald
Reagan—are given the chance to speak for themselves in explaining themselves to
modern sensibilities.
This is especially useful in
contending with subjects—slavery and its relative significance in national
life, the Civil War and its aftermath, the condition of African Americans in
their own country—that routinely disrupt the historical profession, and are
just as routinely distorted by ideology. This is no small matter, and no small
achievement. McClay’s skill in furnishing context to emotion, in introducing
modern presumption to past evidence, puts the history of the American republic
in a new light by revealing its inward and outward complexity. This makes Land
of Hope important, compelling, essential reading.
“Nothing about America better
defines its distinctive character than the ubiquity of hope,” he writes, “a
sense that the way things are initially given to us cannot be the final word
about them, that we can never settle for that.” I hope he’s right.
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