THE PROBLEM WITH CANONIZING FDR...:

Democracy’s Keeper: a review of ARK OF THE LIBERTIES: America and the World By Ted Widmer (DAVID OSHINSKY, NY Times Book Review)

What made America unique, Widmer says, was the millennial outlook of the Europeans who first settled here. A vast and isolated continent gave them the freedom to save what was precious from the Old World and to seek perfection in the New. From the top of society to the bottom, these colonists “lavished attention on obscure bits of Scripture that seemed to favor the wilderness, the West and the defeat of large powers by small ones.” Their settlements became the fulfillment of a biblical prophecy, guided by divine will.

Widmer is adept at tracing the pull of millennialism over generations, from Puritanism to the Great Awakening to the American Revolution and beyond. And he shows how seamlessly it entered the political realm. Most colonists had welcomed England’s authority so long as it remained distant and ineffective. When that changed in the 18th century, big trouble followed. Political resistance now became a religious duty, a sign of obedience to God. As Widmer makes clear, the ensuing struggle for independence took place against the backdrop of African enslavement. Still, the extraordinary changes it produced — the debunking of monarchy, the insistence on representative government, the catalog of rights for white men — gave the world a glimpse of what the future could be.

“The American Revolution,” Widmer writes, “was also a foreign policy revolution.” Though the infant United States lacked the military muscle to impose its will beyond its own borders, it plunged forward with the moral certainty of a chosen people. (How else can one explain the audacious Monroe Doctrine, which proclaimed an end to European colonization of the entire Western Hemisphere?) Over time, as the nation’s strength began to match its aspirations, Americans expanded their divine mandate to include the acquisition of territory by force. “Manifest Destiny,” a term coined by a New York journalist in 1845, justified expansion on the grounds that God had chosen the United States “to overspread the continent” with its “yearly multiplying millions.”

The result was war with Mexico, which Americans remember (if at all) as an easy land grab and a nice training ground for future Civil War generals. Widmer carefully reminds us of the conflict’s seamy underside — the anti-Catholicism and strident claims of racial superiority. It was, he suggests, a war waged solely to advance America’s “lust for land,” and it aroused furious opposition. Among the critics was Representative Abraham Lincoln, whose world vision for America included tolerance and restraint.

But then Widmer veers off course. He races through the rest of the 19th century, explaining only that “American foreign policy was notably calmer” in these years. He loses the threads of his argument while all but ignoring the forces of immigration and industrial technology, which turned the United States into the New World colossus. When he picks up the story again, around 1900, the narrative is less about tracing the impact of powerful ideas on America’s global vision and more about ranking the foreign policies of modern presidents, ending with George W. Bush.

For Widmer, who worked in the Clinton administration, Democrats outperform Republicans. His heroes include Woodrow Wilson, whom he describes as the guiding spirit behind the United Nations and movements for human rights. Many historians would agree, while also emphasizing the rigid, self-destructive behavior that kept Wilson from achieving his key goals as president, like America’s entry into the League of Nations after World War I.

If there’s a president who doesn’t need further buffing, it’s Franklin D. Roosevelt. No such luck here. In Widmer’s hands, Roosevelt becomes Superman, vanquishing the Great Depression, global fascism and “the colonial system that had governed much of the world.” He might have achieved even greater things — though it’s hard to imagine what was left — had it not been for those annoying conservative Republicans, who pop up periodically in the book to start trouble. “Frankly,” Widmer says, “it is a wonder that he accomplished a tenth of what he did.”

...is that you have to accept that God didn't want us to take Eastern Europeans, Chinese, Africans, etc. aboard the Ark, but to leave them instead in the Gulag.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 12, 2008 1:22 PM