America, America

By Mayo Mohs

THE GREAT REPUBLIC by BERNARD BAILYN, DAVID BRION DAVIS, DAVID HERBERT DONALD, JOHN L. THOMAS, ROBERT H. WIEBE and GORDON S. WOOD 1,319 pages. Little, Brown. $20.

A CONCISE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC by SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON, HENRY STEELE COMMAGER and WILLIAM E. LEUCHTENBURG 851 pages. Oxford University Press. $25.

In 1930 the late Samuel Eliot Morison and fellow Historian Henry Steele Commager published their first version of The Growth of the American Republic. The book swiftly became the standard by which competing histories were measured. Now, just as an abridged and updated version of the Morison-Commager classic appears, there comes a new contender: The Great Republic, written by six scholars--five of them winners of Pulitzer or Bancroft prizes. Their work is handsomely amplified with hundreds of black-and-white and duotone photographs, paintings and detailed maps, and interspersed with pictorial essays in sumptuous color.

The prose is another matter. Each author has hewed strictly to the period assigned him, and no overall style has been imposed. The result is disappointingly uneven. In part two (1760-1820), Gordon S. Wood discusses the celebrated 1801 Cane Ridge revival, a bizarre religious event in Kentucky where, according to contemporary accounts, thousands fell into frenzied ecstasies. Wood captures none of its manic exuberance. In part three (1820-1860), David Brion Davis by contrast manages to make the often opaque character of Ralph Waldo Emerson both fascinating and comprehensible. Davis, who won his Pulitzer for The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, also offers a splendid essay on the Mormon experience as a paradigm of American dissent: a people at odds with society while yearning to be part of it.

John L. Thomas, who writes of the decades from 1890 to 1920, offers a series of trenchant analyses. His aphorism about the first World War is typical: "Both sides, driven by contrasting but strangely complementary illusions, had succeeded in proving that in total war it is the war that wins."

High Color. Throughout much of its length, The Great Republic reflects the complaint of an early U.S. scientist, who observed in 1800 that "the universal roar is, Commerce! Commerce! at all events, Commerce!" Ideology may have impelled many Americans, but for most, it seems, it was the purse that had its reasons. Though John Cabot had scouted the shores of North America as early as 1497, the English hardly deigned to look at their discovery until after 1551 when the wool market in Antwerp fell apart. The first plantations were get-rich-quick schemes, the colonists left to fend for themselves if they did not produce a quick return on investment. Occasionally, as the book amply illustrates, the greed was enlivened by some remarkable characters, like the 18th century Governor of New York, Lord Cornbury, a flaming transvestite who prowled his fort in women's finery.

For a volume that should benefit from the vast store of recent revisionist views, there are unpardonable omissions. Davis tells at length the tragedy of the Indians of the East, uprooted and sent West on the Trail of Tears. But in the next section, Colleague David Herbert Donald (who writes crisply on the Civil War) reduces the entire Indian conflict in the West to one paragraph. Americans of Puerto Rican or Mexican origin are given hardly a nod, and then a misguided one: the book asserts that Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers movement "declined in the '70s."

There are strange misproportions too. High Noon, as a parable of the cold war, merits a paragraph. Mark Twain's career is summed up in a sentence. Chief Joseph's picture is in the book, but not his moving farewell to his Nez Perce Indians: "I will fight no more forever." The Great Republic has long and genuinely informative passages on demographics --but too often the people are simply numbers, without faces or names.

For those who still view history as an exercise in belles-lettres rather than statistics, William E. Leuchtenburg's revised and abridged version of Morison and Commager, retitled A Concise History of the American Republic, remains a permanent refreshment. The book is not the physical bargain that The Great Republic is: its illustrations, though superb, are only black and white. But its accounts have a high color. The mission of Franklin, Deane and Lee to secure France's aid during the Revolution, for example, becomes "a spectacle to delight the gods--smooth Ben, sleek Silas and suspicious Arthur selling a revolution to the most absolute monarch in Europe." Morison was correcting the manuscript of this revision just before he died last year at the age of 88. What a way to go. Mayo Mohs

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