Political Sermon

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS--Herbert Agar--Houghfon Mifflin ($3).

Five years ago Herbert Sebastian Agar won the Pulitzer Prize for history with The People's Choice. Critical beefing about Pulitzer Prize selections has gone on ever since there has been a Pulitzer Prize, but that time reached a crescendo. Historians called The People's Choice inaccurate. Leftists said it was fascist and critics said its selection on literary grounds was preposterous. Some of the outcry arose because half-a-dozen better works of history were published in 1933 but most of it came from opposition to Mr. Agar's thesis--that democracy was a dismal failure.

Last week, with the publication of The Pursuit of Happiness, it was plain that Author Agar had swung all the way around the circuit from Right to Left. Jefferson, called lacking in character in The People's Choice, emerges as his great hero. Bryan, damned as ignorant before, is pictured as an heir to Jefferson's ideals. And Author Agar, in his best book to date, is more eloquent and convincing in defending democracy than he ever was in attacking it. If anything unifies the U. S. enough to justify its being called a nation, he says, it is Jefferson's slogan: "Equal rights for all, special privileges for none." Worn smooth by innumerable stump speakers, preached by thousands who did not practice them, these are nevertheless revolutionary words; they involve a great moral principle, imply a belief in plain citizens, and a greater degree of economic justice than any nation has ever possessed. If everyone acted upon them "we should not be saying that 'everybody ought to be equally rich'; but each year fewer of us would care whether we were rich or not."

By Author Agar's standards, Jackson, Lincoln, Bryan and La Follette were Jeffersonians, and Franklin Roosevelt is one; Calhoun, Jeff Davis and many a later politician who considered himself a Jeffersonian made principles of what were only methods to the sage of Monticello. Tracing this division through the familiar story of Jackson and the Bank of the United States, to Bryan's part in Wilson's nomination, Author Agar often wanders far afield but enlivens his account with pungent political sermons. Indifference, self-seeking, the vulgarization of politics outrage him most, and the apathy of citizens before political corruption he considers one of democracy's great dangers: "the wages of cynicism," says he, "is death."

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