Americans and Americana

The Letters and Journal of Brand Whitlock. Edited by Allan T.:kills,. Two vols. (Appleton-Century. 42s.) The Man-Whd Built-San Francisco. By Julian Dana. (Mac- ; millan. 12s. 6d.)' • General Grant?s Last Stand : A Biography. By Horace Green. (Scribner. 12s. 6d.) Folksongs of Mississippi and Their Background. By Arthur Palmer Hudson. (University of North Carolina Press : Oxford University Press. 22s. 6d.) Old. Historic Churches of America. By Edward F. fines. (Macmillan. 30s.) TUE refusal of the British mind to remember any atrocities

earlier than the invasion of the Ruhr involves in oblivion the name of Brand Whitlock. . He was American Minister to Belgium when the War broke out, having been given that very unimportant post by Woodrow Wilson because he was a good Democrat who, after his labours as Mayor of Toledo (Ohio), had wanted time and leisure to write. Whitlock was thus projected into history, and his journal, as well as his letters, will recall such once famous episodes as the execution of Nurse Cavell, the resistance of the Belgians to the German occupation and other old unhappy things now better forgotten.

Yet Whitlock, if never a great writer, had been a first-class reporter and his diary makes very vivid reading. Whitlock had come to Belgium full of the milk of human kindness and of American optiinism. That optimism was not the vulgar booster's optimism, for Whitlock took pleasure in recounting. his handling of the forward-lookers who wanted him to

change All Fools Day into Optimists Day, a change which he thought more a matter of words than anything else. Never- theless, the collaborator of "Golden Rule" Jones, the Christian Mayor of Toledo, the friend and ally of Tom Johnson, the great Mayor of Cleveland, the political follower of Wil- sonian. Democracy, had. good reason, it seemed, to look on the world with pleased eyes when he came to Belgium. All that soon changed.; not merely were there the horrors of war, there was the horror of human nature, and even in the grim prison that Belgium was human nature was incurable.

The eminent Belgians, like Franequi, who were running the relief organisation, were not only quarrelling frequently

with Hoover and the Americans who were providing, most of the organisation and money, but with the Belgian Govern-

ment at Havre, for Francqui was a Liberal (in the Belgian sense of the term) and the government was Catholic. This kind of quarrel was no novelty to Whitlock, who had been an American politician, but it embittered him nevertheless.

Then came the American entry into the War, which sent Whitlock to Havre, where he saw the French with a jaundiced eye. He returned to Belgium after the Armistice, and his last disillusionment came when the United States elected Harding, of whom and whose associates Whitlock, as a citizen of the same State, must have known enough to justify most apprehensions. For the rest of his life Whitlock lived in Europe ; increasingly angry with his own country ; in- creasingly angry with the so-called human race. He retained admiration for England, a country of which he knew little,

and as he grew more despairing he grew more tolerant of the French, whose cynicism had once angered him. But above all he denounced"! America for prohibition, for high tariffs, for electing Mr. Hoover, for the conduct of Mr. Roosevelt.

There had been a time when America had been a place where men like himself and Newton Baker and others

could live and work and hope ; those days were over.

His bias against his own countrymen was almost morbid.

The Man who built San Francisco" was, according to Mr. Dana, William Ralston, the great banker who went bust and, according to his enemies, committed suicide after the closing of the Bank of California, while his partners, more prudent and less attractive men like Mills, remained millionaires, founders of dynasties. Mr. Dana reconstructi the past by lavish quotations from newspapers of events happening in San Francisco, whether they had anything to do with Ralston or not. This simple technique is amusing at first, but palls. Mr. Dana, too, is not quite at home with titles ; he makes Franklin (the explorer) a" lord," and mixes up the Count of Paris with the Count of Artois, which is like confusing Senators Gwin and Broderick. Beside the Grant controversy, the hullabaloo about Haig is a storm in a

teacup, and this new "Life" is an attempt to defend the general and even the president. It draws lavishly ,on that admirable apologia, Grant's Personal Memoirs, hilt Mr. Green is too inaccurate (he makes Grant annex San Domingo and Andrew Jackson fight Vanderbilt) to inspire confidence, and he has very little of his own to say when he leaves the beaten track. Dr. Hudson's collection of ballads recalls Europe More than America, for most of his ballads are old English

or Scottish or Irish ballads, and the indigenous American ones are mostly bad. Why this should be so it is hard to say, but Dr. Hudson's view that the American ballads are more naive and less finished than the British ones needs glossing. Most of the ballads here 'printed suffer not from simple naivety, but from a deplorable sophistication. They are marked by the ravages of hymnody. And the damage is worse when the hymns sound the modern broad, vague, note. The version of the well-known cowboy song given here tells how

"I wondered if ever a cowboy Would drift to the Sweet Bye and Bye."

since "the trail to that bright mystic region

is narrow and dim, so they say."

Here we are well on the way to" Beautiful Isle of Somewhere." The only native songs that are tolerably good are those dealing with bandits (some of them with bandits still alive). There are the famous laments for Jesse James and the song that tells of Sidney Allen, hero of a court-room massacre of the prosecuting attorney and of the judge, who had been sentencing a member of the Allen family to a year in gaol when they were bumped off by a devoted band of brothers. Sidney was caught and

" The people all gathered from far and near To see poor Sidney sentenced to the electric chair But to their great surprise the judge he said 'He's going to the penitentiary instead.'"

This is truth if not art. For art we must go to the importations, and even in them the interest is mainly in the sea-change they have suffered. Yet if the flora and the fauna change the spirit does not, and it is even possible to hear echoes of the Irish original in the gibberish refrain of Shale Aron.

Mr. Rines pursues the American past in its religious archi- tecture and all varieties (almost) of American religious experience are represented here from the Spanish missions to the first Mormon temple. The narrative is pleasant if not: critical, and the photographs numerous and handsome.

D. W. BROGAN.