Changing America
The Big Change, 1900-1950. By Frederick Lewis Allen. (Hamish Hamilton. 15s.) MR. LUBELL has written the most original essay in interpreting American politics that has appeared for a very long time indeed. It is too early to say whether all the suggestions that he throws out will prove equally valid, but, since the book was published in the United States before the election, he has acquired further reputation by correctly forecasting its outcome. There ought to be some connection between political analysis and political prophecy. What Mr. Lubell has done, in brief, is to add to the " frontier theory," which has so dominated American historical writing for the past half-century, a new theory of what he calls " the urban frontier." Mr. Lubell looks upon the development of American society over the past two generations as being the product of the assimilation into it of successive immigrant groups, each beginning at the foot of the social ladder and rising to middle-class status, at least in a large enough proportion of its membership to give it a footing in state and federal affairs. He sees the Roosevelt victory of 1932 as having occurred at a particular point in this process, and the two decades since then as having seen the process carried further, with the result that the Democratic Party, the natural home of such groups, has become increasingly conservative.
This analysis has many further ramifications when explored in the light of regional diversities. Southern politics, for instance, seem to Mr. Lubell to be largely the matter of a new urban conservative middle-class seeking to integrite itself in national politics by break- ing away from the single party pattern of the region. Again, on foreign affairs, Mr. Lubell discounts the alleged geographical isolationism of the Middle West in favour of a belief that isolationism anywhere is a function of. German or Irish predominance in the local racial make-up. In the future he sees it incumbent upon both major parties to become more truly national in their outlook, so that the strains put upon America by external developments do not, serve as they have served in recent years, to embitter her internal politics. Although Mr. Lubell is not a graceful writer and tends to bombard his reader with his store of information, this is an interesting and even an exciting book.
By comparison with Mr. Lubell, Mr. Allen's social history of the
last fifty years is rather a light-weight affair. His argument that European intellectuals overlook the magnitude of the social changes that have occurred in the period is perfectly valid, and he is probably on firm ground in suggesting that the capitalist versus Socialist controversy has little application to the kind of economy which has come about in the United States. On the other hand, foreign readers will tend to find him over-complacent in some of his attitudes, particularly on questions of education and culture. What they will go to him for are not social generalisations but the intimate snapshots of social life at particular junctures. No one, for instance, has des- cribed better what the motor-car has meant in American life, and he has the social historian's gift of selecting the significant detail. He writes well about his subject for which he is clearly an enthusiast, but, whereas the student of contemporary America cannot overlook Mr. Lubell's book, he can, at a pinch, manage without Mr. Allen's.
MAX BELOFF.
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