The American Past
The Ground We Stand On. By John Dos Passos. (Routledge. as.)
THE authorship of The Ground We Stand On is almost more significant than its contents. The student of the American melting- pot will relish the paradox of this Portuguese signature underwriting testimonies to " our Anglo-Saxon political tradition," and the con- noisseur of time's revenges will be tempted to purr at the spectacle of the author of The Big Money pronouncing on the fundamental good health of the English-speaking democracies. More seriously, the historian of American letters will chalk up Dos Passos as another, spokesman of the between-wars generation who has emancipated himself from what he so admirably calls the " delusion of the ex- ceptional Now," and has found in his researches into the American past a new purchase on the American—and the world—present. " When we rack our brains for hope and understanding for the future, it does us good, I think, to remind ourselves that in spite of hell and high water men in the past managed to live for and establish some few liberties."
His plan, Dos Passos says, is to reasFure " the angry young men of today," the sceptics and the doubters, of the validity and vitality of the American political tradition by showing it personified in such figures as Roger Williams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Joel Barlow. He does this, however, not in the in- ductive spirit of the political scientist, producing reach-me-down maxims of political conduct, nor as a historian concerned with the explication of cause and effect in a particular context of time and place, but primarily as an observer of human nature and behaviour, in fact, as an artist out to catch the elusive individuality of his subject. If this book were a mere analysis of the American political tradition one might well complain that it neglected all those aspects which lacked appeal for the author's own taste—the discipline of Washington, the bookkeeping of Hamilton, or the fence-building of Monroe. But to assess it so is to be deceived by an ill-chosen title. With all deference to the author, his book treats less of the ground we stand on than of the air we breathe—those elusive winds which, blowing where they listed, found momentary lodge- ment in such creative personalities as Thomas Jefferson's. It is these vagrant winds of freedom which Dos Passos has tried to capture. He has set out to give us not the catalogued achievements of these protagonists of his tradition, but rather the flavour of their creed and the personalities behind their actions.
For his success in this he may claim indulgence for shortcomings that would be very reprehensible in orthodox historical biographies. He is less than fair to what he dislikes ; to speak of the persecutions attending the Restoration of 166o as "one of the most successful blood-purges in history," evinces both ignorance of the past and forgetfulness of the present, which both abound in blood-lettings that make the Restoration look like an operation for ingrowing toenail. Again, led on by his affections and interests, he is often betrayed into irrelevancies that, however delightful in themselves, serve principally to blur the proportions of the picture as a whole ; four pages on Milton's travels tell us nothing about Roger Williams, indeed, only distract our attention from him. But for these and similar deficiencies Dos Passos may plead the novelist's justifi- cation that whatever his methods his people do come alive in his pages, and the great virtue, which historians more often aspire than attain to, that his pages glow with the conviction of the
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