America and Mr. Darrow

The Epic of America. By James Truslow Adams. (Routledge.

12s. 6c1.)

The Story of My Life. By Clarence Darrow. (Scribner's. 15s.)

Tar writers of histories in Europe have written dy- nastic history because the nations of Europe have been made by their monarchs, a Capet adding fief to fief or a Hohenzollern disciplining the plains, and an established convention of what history was and had to be made the earlier generations of American historians try to write American

history in the same way. The materials have not been unpropitious, and it has been possible with Washington and

Lincoln and the revolutionary and civil war to write the same politico-military history for the United States as for Europe.

The civil war was an epic struggle and threw its lurid light right back to the beginnings of the century, so that the happy historian had no sooner finished with the

little war of 1872 than he could begin to tell the story of westward expansion in terms of North and South " picking

up sides" as new States appeared, and ranging their forces for the climax. Only with the decades following the victory of the North, with political life entering into deep degradation and material prosperity advancing as the railroads claimed the whole continent, did the historians change their emphasis and begin to see American history as pre-eminently the story, from the first, of expansion. With the organized universities of the new, efficient age, the historian was equipped with scientific apparatus and expected to show that his science, too, had sociological value. The past must throw light on the present, if it hoped that Americans would bother with it. In the hands of the late Professor Turner and Professor Paxson "the frontier" as a permanent and decisive, psycho- logical influence in American history became at first a daring and suggestive new view, then a familiar commonplace, and is now in danger of becoming taken for granted and under- valued in the search for novelty. For historians, too, have to press on, for subsistence, and make new frontiers.

The Epic of America is a singularly brilliant example of the new kind of American history. The reader

finds the two patches he really learnt at school, the great years of Washington and Lincoln, disposed of in a few pages. The sweep of the narrative does not pause for particular events and the author cannot pause on the military epics at the expense of the great epic. He traces convincingly and refreshingly not only the normal experiences of the successive generations, but also the points at which specific traits that are

now part of the American character first developed. The 'thirties and 'forties are all-important, when through the growing Middle

West in rough frontier life was established the convention that anyone could do anything, in public life or in private, the equalitarianism and with it the swaggering self-assertion and the national pride in a land which offered unique opportunities for the common man.

The American dream, the ideal of freedom and oppor- tunity for the common man, has persisted from Thomas Jefferson until to-day. It was from the first highly unpopular with the well-to-do, and the upper class succeeded in carrying through a precarious rebellion against England without letting in the mob at home. But the West

was there as a safety valve and, after a generation, as a new threat a very vulgar democracy swept into the White- House with Andrew Jackson. For the hundred years since Jackson Mr. James T. Adams tells of the smothering and dis- tortion of the old ideal, as new conditions played into the hands of organized wealth.

Mr. Adams, who has lived a great deal out of his country since he retired from business, is urbanely free alike from the servile 'optimism or shrill defiance which mars so much that is written from inside the American academic system. He does not flatter, and there are souse wholesome pages to explain that the emigrant is not necessarily the boldest and hardiest spirit : often he is the marginal man, the extruded one, and selectively he is the man most indifferent to tradition, the man with fewest roots, willing to abandon home and friends as dross compared with the chance of greater wealth. Many who emigrated from Europe oon- tinued to emigrate when they reached America and arc to-day spiritual emigrants devoid of conviction.

Mr. ,Adams is so close to America that he not only perceives and shares the still unextinguished American ideal, of the common man enabled to be at his best, but believes in the future more than the strict facts warrant. He is yet too clear-sighted not to state the gravity of the challenge that the organized American life presents to that ideal. Still uncertain is the dubious experiment of a great republic, peopled by emigrants who travelled dangerously light and left behind as impedimenta the profound, hierarchic doctrines which moulded corporate life in Europe. Whether the political doctrines of the American fathers, suspended in mid-air and lacking their only, rational basis in a theological'doctrine of the worth of each soul, can of themselves rouse effective enthusiasm for a campaign. to recover the rights of 1776 against entrenched wealth and the dominance of business interests and business ideals, is increasingly doubtful. There is a gulf between the enemies of plutocracy and the movement which, under varying names and generally in connexion with the Democratic Party, from time to time expresses popular discontent, for it is divorced from the intellectual and critical revolt.. The frontal charges of Bryanism and the sapping work of Mr. Mencken are alike insufficient and the bodies and souls of the descendants of men who particularly desired to own no allegiance to anybody obey, in fact, the wills and purposes of men who only embody the principle of economic dominance, the subservience of humanity to the wealth which should be its servant and the compulsory worship of economic means as spiritual ends.

How badly things have gone for Jeffersonian democracy is yet more vividly to he seen in Mr. Clarence Darrow's The Story of My Life. Mr. Darrow, the best-known criminal lawyer in the States, is one of the most remarkable of living Americans, a lawyer who might easily have followed the common, lucrative path of American lawyers and served the great corporations and battened on them, and who has preferred to forgo affluence and to devote his life to the defence of criminals. He is quixotic and so moved by the complacent cruelty and tyranny of the majority which Jefferson dreaded and de Tocqueville could so soon describe, that it is only necessary for you to have the public for your enemy and Clarence Darrow is your friend.

He defended Loeb and Leopold and saved their lives, and nearly lost Isis own liberty in defending the Labour men who were sentenced in 1912 for dynamiting the building of the capitalist Times of Los Angeles. Displaying moral courage, being in the right with two or three, and still more being in the wrong, and standing out against public opinion, are exhausting activities, and an acerbity and waspish- ness too often comes to mark lone fighters. But Clarence Darrow has so much humanity that he is a bad hater of men and for all the intensity of the feelings which have made him travel the path he has, and the unflagging zeal with which he propagates his convictions, he is an embarrassingly popular denunciator.

He belongs to the heroic age of American political thought, and has lived on the wrong side. of the civil war. He is of that noble and vanishing company, the rationalists who are all heart. Much of his autobiography recalls his constant preaching as a disciple of Ingersoll, and his arguments, of the soap-box kind, are the presents of a kindly nature which seeks to make men happier by freeing them from the burden of their immortality. If the level of the con- troversy IS low, neither was that of Mr. W. J. Bryan, whom he opposed in the Dayton " Monkey " trial, very different, and the old freethinking has its value for the' Bible belt.

Mr. Darrow's book is diffuse, as befits the record of a life that has been lived amid sudden, desperate calls from complete strangers who appear and hold the tragic stage for a few months and disappear again. It is a book spoken rather than written, and not rich in graces. But it records a life that deserved to be surveyed in retrospect and with not ignoble satisfaction, a fearless and disinterested life on which he is entitled to be written down, like Abou-ben-Adhem, as one