American icons.(Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America's Founding Ideas)(Book Review)

Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America's Founding Ideas, by David Hackett Fischer (Oxford, 864 pp., $50)

ABY WARBURG, scion of a Hamburg banking family, had no interest in ledgers or letters of credit; he had, however, a passion for books and pictures. He resigned his interest in the family firm and in the 1880s embarked on a career as a collector, critic, and aesthete. He devoted his extensive leisure to the collection of a celebrated library, and in his studious hours he examined the way the painters of the Italian Renaissance used Greco-Roman motifs--Apollo's lyre, Proserpina's flowers--in their art. The result was a new approach to the study of art variously known as "iconology" or "iconography," an attentiveness to the traditions giving images their authority.

David Hackett Fischer has now applied the techniques developed by Warburg's school to American images of liberty and freedom. "Every American image of liberty and freedom," Fischer writes, "has a story behind it." The purpose of his book, Liberty and Freedom, is "to tell those tales, one by one, in a way that centers on individual actions, deliberate choices, and contingent events." Fischer traces the iconology of the Stars and Stripes and Yankee Doodle, American eagles and "Don't Tread on Me" rattlesnakes, Brother Jonathan and "I Want You for U.S. Army" recruiting posters.

Whether Fischer has succeeded in his effort to apply the techniques of iconography to such artifacts as Willkie buttons and the motifs of the flower-power movement is another question. Liberty and Freedom is a broad book but not a deep one, and though Fischer faintly attempts to distinguish the different shades of meaning of "liberty" and "freedom" by glancing at their etymological roots, he too often neglects to show how these differences are reflected in the images he discusses. "Liberty," from the latin liber and the Greek eleutheros, he connects to ideas of "separation" and "release" as well as to "privileges" that "may be given"; "freedom," however, he associates with the German frei, with notions of kinship, rights ("that which must be given"), and "soul freedom"--"becoming one with God." Such verbal distinctions are not easily captured in pictures, and Fischer fails to pursue the inquiry with much diligence.

One has only to compare his discussion of the "liberty trees" that flourished in New England during the American Revolution--venerable oaks and elms consecrated to the struggle against the Crown--with Warburg's analysis of the frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara to sense what is missing. Warburg probed beneath the neoclassical facade of Renaissance art to reveal a core of mysticism and magic. Fischer, by contrast, is content with surfaces. His treatment of the liberty trees' cultural antecedents in Europe is perfunctory; the tree, he argues, is an American creation--"invented," he says, by the Loyal Nine, a party of Boston Whigs, in 1765. The assertion leaves the reader puzzled. In a 1787 letter to John Adams's son-in-law, William Stephens Smith, Thomas Jefferson said that the "tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." Five years later, at the height of the French Revolution, Bertrand Barere concluded an address to the Convention by declaring that the "tree of liberty, as an ancient author remarks, flourishes when it is watered with the blood of all classes of tyrants." It is most unlikely that Barere knew of Jefferson's letter, which for many years remained unpublished. The more plausible explanation is that both Jefferson and Barere, in their meditations on the liberty tree, drew on an anterior source, probably not an American one, for Barere had little knowledge of American affairs. What might the aboriginal source of the liberty tree be? J. G. Frazer's The Golden Bough sheds more light on the question than Liberty and Freedom.

Fischer's failure to dig too often leaves him without enough to say about his subjects, a poverty of analysis he imperfectly conceals by inserting moribund adjectives--"deeply" is one of ...