A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1970-1950.(Review)

His creed is a fixture.

--Walter Bagehot on Macaulay

It was said of Macaulay's History of England that its author never tired of drawing comparisons between the backwardness of earlier times and the progressiveness of his own. Whig orthodoxy--Whig complacency, too--became the measure of all political virtue, became, indeed, the measure of virtue itself. As a consequence--and not withstanding its high achievement in other respects--his History was said to have done much to advance the tide of moral complacency that was one of the least attractive features of the Victorian age.

Something similar might be said of the otherwise very different histories which Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has devoted to the life and times of Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Kennedy brothers. Like Macaulay's History, Mr. Schlesinger's histories have enjoyed a huge readership and won their author many plaudits among professional historians and in the larger world of literary and public affairs. And there is another important respect in which these histories resemble Macaulay's. They have likewise been conceived to advance a political interest--in Mr. Schlesinger's case, the interest of a liberal orthodoxy that is wholly identified with the fortunes of the Democratic Party. What Bagehot called the "party-spirit" shapes their every utterance and makes of their every narrative a fable of moral combat in which the forces of enlightenment (the Democratic Party) and the forces of benightedness (the Republican Party) struggle for ascendency. What Bagehot said of Macaulay's History may therefore be applied with some justice to Mr. Schlesinger's histories as well:

 
   When he inclines to a side, he inclines to it too much. His opinions are a 
   shade too strong; his predilections some degrees at least too warm.... The 
   Whigs are a trifle like angels; the Tories like, let us say, "our 
   inferiors." Yet this is evidently an honest party-spirit. It does not lurk 
   in the corners of sentences, it is not insinuated without being alleged; it 
   does not, like the unfairness of Hume, secrete itself so subtly in the 
   turns of words, that when you look to prove it, it is gone. On the 
   contrary, it rushes into broad day.... As far as effect goes, this is an 
   error. The very earnestness of the affection leads to a reaction ... we 
   cannot believe so many pages. 

In the many pages which Mr. Schlesinger has now devoted to the first volume of his memoirs,(1) Republicans are indeed routinely depicted as "our inferiors"--Teddy Roosevelt is just about the only exception--while Democrats who remained loyal to Franklin Roosevelt, though not invariably treated as angels, are nonetheless seen to be superior in intellect, wisdom, character, manners, and social vision--even at times in their sense of humor--to any other political species that attained public visibility in the author's lifetime. This, too, "leads to a reaction," for the reader of A Life in the Twentieth Century who is not himself an abject believer in the beneficence of the Democratic Party is unlikely to be persuaded that so many candidates for sainthood could really have been confined to a single political party in this country during the first fifty years of the last century.

In the past, Mr. Schlesinger has often shown himself to be a master of both narrative history and political polemic. Yet the first of these gifts seems to have deserted him in the writing of this voluminous memoir, which devotes over five-hundred pages to its author's first thirty-three years; and his command of polemic degenerates here to exalting his academic mentors, praising his political comrades, and settling old scores with his ideological adversaries. At times this relentless liberal preening verges on the intolerable, and it is not only in regard to politics, moreover, that the author's impulse to complacency and his sense of moral superiority reign supreme.