March 28, 2004

'Freedom Just Around the Corner': Rogue Nation

his unusual book by Walter A. McDougall is the first of what will be a three-volume history of America. If this volume, which covers the period 1585 to 1828, is any indication of the promised whole, the trilogy may have a major impact on how we Americans understand ourselves.

McDougall, who is a Pulitzer Prize- winning historian at the University of Pennsylvania, opens ''Freedom Just Around the Corner'' with an arresting statement: ''The creation of the United States of America is the central event of the past 400 years.'' Imagine, he says, some ghostly ship, some Flying Dutchman transported in time from the year 1600 to the present. ''The crew would be amazed by our technology and the sheer numbers of people on the globe, but the array of civilizations would be recognizable.'' China, Japan, India, Russia, the vast Islamic crescent, South America and Europe are not all that different now from what they were in 1600. ''The only continent that would astound the Renaissance time-travelers would be North America, which was primitive and nearly vacant as late as 1607, but which today hosts the mightiest, richest, most dynamic civilization in history -- a civilization, moreover, that perturbs the trajectories of all other civilizations just by existing.''

McDougall's declaration is the kind that most American historians are very wary of making these days. It smacks of ''exceptionalism,'' a forbidden word in the academy today. It suggests superiority, arrogance, unilateralism and perhaps neoimperialism. Indeed, even making generalizations about Americans or the American character is suspect. There are genders, ethnic groups and races, but no Americans, and certainly nothing resembling an American character. Maybe even these several identities do not exist, and there is only a multitude of individuals. Some historians have concluded that they cannot write national history anymore, but only microhistories of specific persons and small events.

McDougall has no such qualms. He unabashedly writes of Americans and assumes throughout that there is something called an American character. Only the character he describes may not be what many Americans would want to admit about themselves. Unlike other national narratives, which he says tend either to celebrate or to condemn America -- and in righteous seriousness -- his book aims to do neither. Instead, he wants to tell the truth about ''who and why we are what we are,'' and to tell it entertainingly. His is thus a ''candid'' history. Its major theme is ''the American people's penchant for hustling.'' We Americans, he claims, are a nation of people on the make.

Take, for instance, the fact that ''American English is uniquely endowed with words connoting a swindle.'' McDougall lists (excluding obscenities) over 200 verbs and nouns, from ''bait'' to ''thimble-rig.'' But we have more con men and hucksters than other nations not because we have a different nature or are worse than other peoples. It is just that ''Americans have enjoyed more opportunity to pursue their ambitions, by foul means or fair, than any other people in history.''

Of course, he admits that there are many hustlers in a ''positive sense: builders, doers, go-getters, dreamers, hard workers, inventors, organizers, engineers and a people supremely generous.'' These qualities are what justify Americans' faith in themselves and their destiny in the world. But the negative connotations of hustling and swindling are very strong and dominate much of our literary and popular culture, and, indeed, our entire history. ''If the United States . . . is a permanent revolution, a society in constant flux,'' then, McDougall writes, we would expect all periods of American history at all levels of the society ''to be washed by turgid, overlapping waves of old and new forms'' of what he calls ''creative corruption.''

Because our high and noble ideals of freedom and individual rights contrast so vividly with the often grotesque realities of American life, every period of our history, McDougall says, is marked by disharmony. He then quotes Samuel P. Huntington to clinch his point: ''America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope,'' a hope expressed in Bob Dylan's words as ''freedom just around the corner.''

If today we are shocked by shenanigans like the Enron debacle, insider trading, mutual fund abuses and the prevalence of special interests in politics, we need to get some perspective on our history. Americans, according to McDougall, have always been scramblers, gamblers, scofflaws and speculators. Nearly everyone in early America, it seems, wanted to know not what's good for the English crown or the colony or the nation, but ''what's in it for me.'' Of course, there were honest righteous people, religious and high-minded people, who spoke out against excesses and abuses. But their idealistic voices only made Americans feel good about themselves without seriously diminishing the overall scramble for profit.

The price of all this hustling was high, and McDougall does not flinch from describing the violence created by the dynamism of white Americans, including the elimination of hundreds of thousands of native people, mostly from disease, and the enslaving of hundreds of thousands of Africans. Other historians have graphically described the chicanery and greed of white Americans in their scramble for power and profit in early America. But these historians have usually written out of anger and righteous indignation. Not McDougall. He cynically, or he would say realistically (since cynicism suggests a moral judgment that human nature might be different), accepts, even celebrates, all the bribery, land-jobbing and double-dealing as the consequence of Americans' having so much freedom.

Despite his emphasis on greed, trickery and hustling, however, McDougall aims to write a comprehensive history of early America, and he succeeds to a remarkable extent. All the major events are covered and many minor events as well. In fact, he seems to have missed nothing of importance; he even takes the time to describe the ways wool was woven, leather was tanned, tobacco was produced and cotton was processed. Because he wants to ensure that his ''new history'' will give to every region and state the attention it deserves, he has included four- or five-page descriptions of states admitted to the union after the original 13, each set apart in a highlighted portion of text. But naturally much of his narrative focuses on individuals, and he demonstrates an unusual ability to sum them up in a few well-chosen sentences. His beautifully produced vignettes include not only the major figures like Hamilton and Jefferson, but also lesser ones like Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Eli Whitney and ''a true American hustler,'' Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Together with the prose, which is fast-paced and full of shrewd judgments, what is most impressive about McDougall's narrative is the range of sources he has used. Few articles or books, it seems, have escaped his grasp. His synthetic history is a justification for all those specialized and often unread monographs that pour from the presses year after year. McDougall doesn't just cite them or pull some colorful anecdotes from them; he has an extraordinary capacity to capture their central point or argument. His endnotes are sometimes almost as informative and entertaining as the text itself.

But there are problems with McDougall's approach to America's past. Since he believes that cunning, greed and hustling have always prevailed in American history, he cannot clearly convey the fundamental changes in society and culture that actually took place between 1600 and 1800. As far as he is concerned, the emergence of America from a premodern to a modern society never happened: ''I don't know what 'modern' means,'' he writes, ''beyond 'whatever is.' '' Moreover, as coldeyed and as realistic as McDougall's description of Americans' behavior may be, in the end it cannot satisfactorily explain the prevalence and role of idealism and institutions in American life. When he says such things as ''Whatever triumphs in a democracy is by definition democratic,'' he turns our values and institutions into little more than illusions that we use to hide the sordid reality of our persistent hustling. That seems to be carrying realism and candor a bit too far.