A History of the United States
By . New York: George H. Doran Co. 1919. 8vo, xix + 333 pp. $2.50.
MR. CHESTERTON, who died in service, was a Fabian, a Socialist, a Roman Catholic, and a journalist of courage and persistence under difficulties. He made a brief visit to the United States during the war, became interested in what he saw, and wished to explain the America of today by its past history. After some little reading, he wrote in the field and on the march, away from authorities. The result is a hasty compilation, lacking in proportion, confused in chronology, and containing errors which a little care would have corrected. The volume is readable, and instructive in parts, because it gives the point of view of an intelligent foreigner; yet it is disappointing as a history. It will not greatly enlighten an English reader on the history of the United States, and it will not hold the interest of an American reader.
The personal opinions offer something tangible. Mr. Chesterton believed that the victory of Andrew Jackson over the Whigs was the turningpoint in American history, deciding that the United States should be a democracy and not a parliamentary oligarchy. His sympathies are with the Southern colonies, notably Catholic Maryland, and against Calvinistic New England, whose faults he exaggerates by drawing upon misleading sources. With all the defects of colonial life, the substance of democracy existed, never seeing ‘an unequal law as anything but an iniquity, or government divorced from the general will as anything but usurpation.’ Jefferson, influenced by Rousseau, embodied the principles of the Revolution in the Declaration of Independence, and laid down the political formula that ‘no temporal authority on earth is superior to the general will of a community.’
The colonies became free — would they become a nation? The solution of that question forms the main subject of the book. America, in the writer’s opinion, affords ‘the one conspicuous example of the Secular State completely succeeding.’ In the Constitution the ‘revolutionists founded a republic acting with impersonal justice towards all citizens,’ with a dread of Cæsarism in its executive, but with a Senate which ‘always tends to become an oligarchy.’ Slavery, wars, foreign relations, and domestic political history and social progress are sketched with a free hand, at times with a bias that repels, or with the discrimination of a not unfriendly critic.
Judgments on individuals are a surer test of merit or weakness, for the foreigner gives what no American is in a position to offer — an international measure of reputation. Jefferson and his creed, Jackson and the ‘sovereign people,’ Calhoun and his defense of state rights and slavery, Lincoln of the mathematical mind, Thaddeus Stevens, and President Wilson, command his praise, because at the proper times they contributed something to advance the American republic. The Federalists and Whigs — Clay excepted — do not appeal to him, and his comment upon them and their successors is severe. On Sumner he becomes vituperative.
If Mr. Chesterton’s presentation of what impressed him in our history is colored by a natural prejudice and superficial knowledge, it is kindly meant and does full justice to the United States in the trying years since 1914. W. C. F.