A Review of Paul Johnson's A History of the American People (HarperPerennial, 1999).

Read any good history lately? This past summer, I picked up Paul Johnson's A History of the American People whenever I could: a 1000-page chronicle of our great country that reads like it was written in the epic age of Herodotus. From my perch in the cramped cafes of over-urbanized Europe, I was swept away onto the great vistas of North America, awestruck as the first Europeans must have been by its unimaginably fertile river valleys, endless prairies and soaring mountain ranges.

Johnson's book had a powerful effect on me, in part because it was the first work of strictly American (as opposed to European) history I have read for a long time, but more fundamentally because Johnson's old-fashioned narrative style lives up to the grandeur of his subject in a way that few authors today would dare even attempt.

What a story: the settlement of America! And yet so often told so badly. Recalling the many dry, overspecialized, and usually left-leaning monographs assigned in my American history courses at college, I was simply amazed by Johnson's flouting of contemporary orthodoxies. Undaunted by the "fly-blown philacteries of Political Correctness" which require historians to continually interrupt their narrative to condemn putative injustices perpetrated on anyone, anywhere, anytime — especially if the perpetrators were white Americans — Johnson declares boldly in the book's opening paragraph that "the creation of the United States of America is the greatest of all human adventures," and he then sets out unapologetically to prove it.

Johnson's book demonstrates triumphantly that it is possible to write history from a conservative perspective, but not, as I learned upon returning to the U.S. recently, without stirring up a hornet's nest of angry anti-American naysayers. Curious about the reception of Johnson's exceptionally reasonable book by the academic Left, I consulted the reader reviews at Amazon.com, which often contain a revealing cross-section of intellectual fashions percolating around America.

Sure enough, Johnson's old-fashioned tome has not passed muster among PC academics and their goose-stepping student followers who together wish to police our collective historical memory. Some of the negative comments at Amazon.com are stupid enough to be almost humorous. Two quasi-illiterate liberals brand Mr. Johnson a "rascist" without so much as proferring one iota of evidence to support this misspelled accusation. One of these brilliant wits adds the presumably devastating insinuation, again unsupported by any citations from the book, that the author of A History of the American People is, gasp, pro-life.

But other anti-Johnson tirades are more insidious. An American history professor at Washington State University apparently went so far as to require students in a History 110 lecture class to attack Johnson's book on the Amazon website. Judging from the laughably redundant reviews — a suspicious number of reviewers mention the inventory of George Washington's household possessions, a topic obviously discussed at length in class — it is much less clear that any of the students actually opened the book. One hapless WSU student unwittingly gave the game away, confessing that "in my class, Johnson always seemed to get bashed on a lot for what he talked about in his [book]." Would that more of these budding PC zealots had tried reading it.

The winner of the "trash Paul Johnson" one-upping competition at Amazon.com, though, is undoubtably the reader calling himself "Firefall," who deemed A History of the American People "one of the very few arguments in favor of book burning — a fate I intend to consign my copy to." Now that's a reviewer I have to take my hat off to. It takes guts to spell out what most PC critics really believe in their heart of hearts: books by conservative historians should be destroyed, literally, to preserve the current orthodoxy.

What on earth had Johnson done to inspire such visceral hatred? How could a work of history provoke such sweeping condemnations from Americans, of all people, who have always been notorious for their relative indifference to history, including their own? Is it because Johnson is British? Or because — despite his nationality — he actually likes Americans? Surely we have entered a remarkable phase in American intellectual life, when an admiring tribute to our greatness, written by a humbled Englishman, incites such wrath for being insufficiently disdainful of our country.

I won't pretend to understand how we arrived at this point, but I do think the hostile reactions accorded Johnson's book at Amazon.com is a significant argument in favor of its importance. There is something inherently dangerous about a book written by a thoughtful foreigner, who observes another country with fresh eyes, unburdened by the tired assumptions and arguments natives obsess over. To some, it seems unfair that an Englishman like Mr. Johnson can waltz in and tell "our" story without paying lip service to all the polemics currently flying around our universities. Blithely side-stepping the ever-delicate contemporary nomenclature of race and ethnicity, for example, Johnson does not even try to be "up-to-date" by referring to "native" or "African-" or "European-Americans": he simply declares, "they are all Americans to me: black, white, red, brown, yellow, thrown together by fate in that swirling maelstrom of history which has produced the most remarkable people the world has ever seen."

Like de Tocqueville did in Democracy in America over a century and a half ago, Johnson makes it seem so easy. He notices all that is remarkable, unique, or emblematic about our history, unsparingly observes our many strengths and our often related weaknesses, and backs up his claims with colorful detail that brings it all to life. And yet, unlike de Tocqueville, whose book was well-received at the time he wrote it and has never yet gone out of print, Johnson's critical-but-admiring study of the American way of life, although politely praised by most mainstream American reviewers, has, on a number of university campuses, run into a brick wall of uncomprehending hostility. I would like to suggest several reasons for this.

First, Johnson places due emphasis on the importance of religion in major historical developments. He salutes the piety of ordinary people, whose beliefs progressively cemented the moral fiber of a country whose "passion for justice no nation has ever matched." The Great Awakening of the 18th century, which Johnson describes as a kind of moral Enlightenment of the "masses" that complemented the secular political rationalism of the Founding Fathers, plays a crucial role in A History of the American People: it ensures that the American Revolution, unlike the French, remains "a religious event," and thus moral. Johnson's corresponding lament about the "decline and demoralization of mainstream Protestantism" in our own century is enough to make card-carrying members of the ACLU squirm: to him, Christian morality is inseparable from the ethos of American freedom, which is imperiled by Christianity's retreat from public life. Johnson's tone of optimism, his admiration for the American people, never really wanes in the book, but in its last chapters one senses a palpable fear that the great experiment of American democracy may yet perish if religion disappears from the schools entirely.

Second, although the inane reader reviews at Amazon.com invariably claim that Johnson adheres to the mythical "Great Man" version of history, in fact he conducts a love affair with all sorts of little-known American heroes in his book, with the caveat that he prefers farmers, inventors, architects and entrepreneurs to the array of self-promoting political rabble-rousers and fashionable intellectuals one encounters in many current histories. A History of the American People is a powerful corrective to Marxist tomes which excoriate all industrialists and small businessmen as "oppressors": Johnson is a fervent admirer of self-made men, whose inventiveness and hard work turned America into the world's predominant technological powerhouse. His book is full of lyrical odes to unsung innovators like Thomas Moore, a Maryland farmer who invented an ice-box for taking dairy products to market that later evolved into the refrigerator; Richard Warren Sears, whose Sears, Robuck catalogues brought reliable, technologically advanced consumer goods such as refrigerators cheaply to the masses; F. L. Olmsted, who designed New York City's multifaceted Central Park while land was still cheap and available; and Erza F. Scattergood, an engineering genius who brought electricity to millions of people in the American Southwest.

Third, in his discussions of politics Johnson stresses the unfashionably conservative theme of "character." Johnson, better than any author I have ever encountered, knows how to read between the ideological lines to disentangle the activities of powerful men from their utterances. Thus we learn that Jefferson sincerely believed slavery was wrong and wrote stirring passages exhorting his fellow citizens to live up to the principle of equality, but failed to free his slaves because his lavish lifestyle, wholly out of step with his democratic pose as a simple farmer, made it economically impossible for him to do so. Or take the case of Jefferson Davis, who in most outward respects led a morally exemplary life but ultimately led the Confederate South to its ruin in the Civil War because, blinded by the relative benevolence of his own plantation (where flogging of slaves, for example, was strictly forbidden), he was unable to grasp the evil of slavery.

By sympathetically describing such nuances of personality, while still holding leaders up to moral standards, Johnson exposes the hollowness of most PC posturing about historical injustices, which is really just relativism posing as morality. Johnson's own criticism of a controversial man like Thomas Jefferson rings true, because unlike most contemporary anti-Jefferson polemicists, Johnson makes a real effort to understand him.

When it comes to politicians, Johnson reserves his strongest praise for perennially underrated, taciturn types like Harding and Coolidge, who generally preferred to leave Americans alone to pursue their own dreams instead of bombarding them with fancy phrases and expansive welfare programs. Even Lincoln, by general consensus our greatest President laureate, is praised here less for his beautiful speeches than for the blood-and-gut decisions he made that held the Union together. Overrated Presidents like FDR and JFK are, refreshingly, knocked down to size as Johnson unsparingly contrasts their lofty rhetoric to the venality and blundering incompetence that plagued their administrations. In Johnson's book we are introduced to Camelot as observed by then-British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan soon after the corrupt 1960 elections which vaulted the Kennedy clan to power: "it's rather like watching the Borgia brothers take over a respectable North Italian city." This is not a quote you are likely to encounter in Time and Newsweek.

Sometimes Johnson's harsh judgments are simply astounding. His explosive chapter on the Depression, which draws on his superb earlier history of Modern Times (1983), is itself worth the price of the book. Johnson assigns a grave moral responsibility to Herbert Hoover, although not for the reasons we have been hearing about for most of the past half-century. Hoover's mistake lay not in "failing to act" after the Stock Market crash of 1929 as the traditional leftist explanation would have it, but rather in excessive federal meddling in the economy. Hoover, in Johnson's view, needlessly prolonged what should have been an ordinary recession by propping up thousands of failing businesses and slapping on debilitating wage controls, all of which allowed the lucky few who kept working to live luxuriantly while millions were priced out of their jobs. This shocking explanation of the Depression is enough to make Marx, Lenin, Keynes and all the other great market interventionists of modern times roll over in their graves. Laissez-faire just isn't done anymore, but no one bothered to tell Johnson.

With shockingly "incorrect" opinions like these, it is unlikely that Paul Johnson will ever get the recognition he deserves from the current generation of American history professors. If enough students read his book with open minds, though, there is reason to hope the next generation of teachers will not be so intolerant. Johnson's epic history of America is not merely a needed antidote to the stultifying "revisionist" (read: leftist) orthodoxy of most books published today, it is an inspiring expresson of all that is possible with the historical art. This is the kind of intelligently structured, fact-rich storytelling about real historical individuals which brings us to the heart of the human condition.