The Penguin History of the United States of America by Hugh Brogan (Second Edition)
London: Penguin Books, 2001 (first published 1985) ISBN 014025255X
"Anyone trying to make sense of the story of the American people must notice, I think, that two themes persist. One is continuity: this is a nation which, born in the seventeenth century, has developed along one line ever since. The other is challenge and response: changing times have periodically required radical alterations in the organization of American life. The alterations have seldom or never come in time to avert great troubles, but come they have, so that the great experiment of American freedom has been enable to continue."
Hugh Brogan makes this statement on page 644 of this edition, and in the preceding 643 pages he shows us how this unique mix of continuity and change turned a faltering English colony into the greatest world power in history.
This history is mostly political, partly social and not un-opinionated - in fact Brogan has definite opinions on which moves by the United States were good and which were not so, and is quick to back up his opinions with well-chosen facts. With so many facts to chose from, even 700 pages isn't enough to be comprehensive, so Brogan choses his topics and themes carefully.
He shows how the democratic temper of the United States was formed right at the start of the white man's arrival. The earliest colonists needed to work together to survive, and they did so by getting together and making decisions by vote. So from very early times, the average American not only became skilled in working through ideas and compromising with others, but expected to be able to have a say in how his life and times were organised. From that everything flowed.
Brogan debunks the myth of the great progress of the United States - it was rare that the powers that be were able to gather together all the strands of government to move the country forward as a whole. In fact it was probably only FDR that managed to to that with anything approaching coherence, at the cost of skirting the edges of constitutional legality.
The early story of the United States is the story of the development of the land, which occurred in three fairly distinct ways. The Northeast was the home of the independent farmer; the yeomen of the US. The South became the home to the cotton barons, with their poisoned legacy of slavery. The West was the territory of the pioneers, and a theatre of broken dreams, with immigrants lured to poor country on false promises.
The legacy of those developments have been played out in ways both bloodily and politically challenging. The fight for equality between men has cost the US much - Civil War and the battle for Civil Rights rent the nation twice, a century apart. The Founding Fathers wrote many fine words, but when it came to the real world they wanted to maintain control of government and the country, and to do that they blinked when it came to slavery. The stain was expunged only through a terrible war which changed everything, but left the black Americans still benighted and under the yoke of their white masters.
The agricultural lobby also had a pernicious effect on the American polity - their votes meant more to potential Presidents and congressmen than those of the big cities, because there were more of them, and they were harder to corral into big blocs of votes which Tammany Hall practices made possible in the urban conglomerations.
The West in many respects could be ignored until War made it important. While the Civil War set the US on the path of modernism, it was World War Two which cemented not only America's power amongst nations, but the power of the Federal Government and the President.
Generally speaking up until the War the President did not have the overarching power and prestige that we know today. FDR, when tackling the Depression, unleashed the potential that always existed in the office, but had never been realised owing to the power of congressional lobbies and senatorial control. The Depression changed the balance of power, and with the creation of huge federal agencies, the central government finally became more important to the American people than their states.
As an Australian with only a basic grasp of the arc of US history, this book is both enlightening and entertaining. It busted a few myths and re-aligned my views of important moments in history. Reading the book in 2024 has helped me take a more sanguine view of the current Presidential race - there is nothing happening this time that hasn't happened before in US politics, and it seems that the system works its way slowly back to equilibrium after each shock. The fact that the Founding Fathers implemented a political structure that has no centre of power is both a frustration and a blessing for the US - it means that any rogue element in the system (President, Congress, Senate, Supreme Court) can be held in check by the other elements. That is a source of some solace.
If you like broad narrative histories with a political flavour and a strong authorial hand, you'll like this book. I did.
Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell
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