History of the United States From Hayes to McKinley: 1876-1896
by . New York: The Macmillan Co. 1919. 8vo, xiv+484 pp. $2.75.
MR. RHODES’S latest volume would not be his if it were not a simple effort to tell the truth, kept short of the highest excellence — if indeed it do fall short — only by the unpolished simplicity of his always clear but never highly distinguished style. In conception and in mood it has, like its predecessors, what seems very like the freedom from self-consciousness of unconscious intellectual greatness. But compared with his previous work, this new volume is rather a sketch, or perhaps a series of bold sketches, than a deliberately finished work. The seven volumes of his History of the United States cover a period of twenty-seven years; the one volume of his Civil War confines itself to a single great topic; this ensuingvolume etches, in firm stroke, the general outline of our national history from the inauguration of Hayes in 1877 to the election of McKinley in 1896. He has wisely sped to the point where he can hereafter write of presidents who were his personal friends.
It is one of the pleasures of reading Mr. Rhodes that you may always be sure of his facts, or at least that he has honestly tried to discover and to state exactly what happened. He is not inhumanly impersonal; but he always takes pains to make you feel the difference between his own sympathies and inexorable truth. His work, accordingly, can hardly help settingreadersto thinking for themselves. So doing, they will be constantly helped by the fact that, so unobtrusively as hardly to let them know it, Mr. Rhodes has quietly kept them aware of two distinct factors variously important throughout all history the relentlessly inflexible course of events, and the characters of the men thereby brought into prominence. As one puts down his book, for example, one does not clearly remember vividly delineated portraits of any of the five presidents with whose administrations it deals; but one has impressions, hard to eradicate, of Hayes, of Garfield, of Arthur, of Cleveland, and of Harrison. Each with his own limitations, they display a spirit encouraging to such of us as now and again despair of the Republic.
That last phrase brings us to the sort of light which Mr. Rhodes can cast on our own times. It happens that the first year of Hayes’s administration, with which this book begins, alarmed everybody but revolutionists by an outbreak of labor troubles, fantastically smaller in scale than those now seething about us, but hardly different either In general character or in their disturbing effect on the comfortable habits of security. The story Mr. Rhodes tells dispassionately, but not so dispassionately as to keep you from disquiet when things look dark or from relief when the light gradually breaks. On the whole, your ultimate feeling is that, forty years ago the constructive tendencies of our country proved insuperable, and that there is no reason why they should not do so again and again. B. W.