Historical lessons and tidbits

Booknotes: On American Character

People, Politics, and Conflict in American History

Brian Lamb

PublicAffairs: 592 pp., $29.95

*

Brian LAMB’S new book of interviews, which he conducted on C-SPAN’s “Booknotes” program, is, like its three predecessors, a useful grab bag for both little peeks and thoughtful contemplations of U.S. history and its meanings for the present.

It ranges from gossip -- how Ronald Reagan desperately wanted that last chocolate cookie his maid provided for an interviewer -- to new looks at important episodes of history, such as Margaret MacMillan on the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 when her great-grandfather British Prime Minister Lloyd George joined with President Wilson and French leader Georges Clemenceau to remake the global map after World War I.

Some of the books and interviews based on them offer commentary on America’s contemporary situation. The liberal historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. asserts that most historians are liberal “because they see the necessity of change, that change is the essence of history and, therefore, are more sympathetic to change than conservatives. If change were not the essence of history, there’d be no point in writing history -- if everything stayed the same.”

His observation is pertinent to the contemporary clash between modernity -- which is defined by the constant introduction of change, whose outcome cannot be predicted -- and conservatism, which, as the scholar Louis Menand has observed, is the hope that tomorrow will be just like today, or, better yet, yesterday. Present-day conservatism manifests itself in, among other places, radical fundamentalist Islam, the more traditionalist elements of the Roman Catholic Church and the resurgence of predestinarian Calvinism among U.S. Protestants.

But historians are by no means uniformly liberal in outlook, Schlesinger says: “History ideally strives for objectivity above the battle and so on. But historians, like everyone else, are prisoners of their own experience and their own times.... The selection of facts from the past involves an interpretation, a sense of priorities, a sense of values as to what matters. History can be a very strong weapon for people who wish to construct a certain movement in a certain direction.”

The current popularity of President Theodore Roosevelt with the Bush administration gets, in Lamb’s book, a revealing gloss from the late Warren Zimmermann, career U.S. diplomat and author of “First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power.” Roosevelt and his four influential contemporaries -- Secretary of State John Hay, naval theorist Alfred Mahan, Massachusetts Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge and statesman Elihu Root -- had a vision of U.S. military power as a means of projecting American values around the world. Their view, Zimmerman says in Lamb’s book, came about in part because in U.S. universities from 1870 to 1900, young men were commonly taught that Charles Darwin’s natural selection made the Anglo-American and the “Teutonic” “races” superior and the natural rulers of mankind. You can read this sort of stuff in Rudyard Kipling -- but Kipling knew its limitations from experience.

Zimmermann, whose wife was the great-granddaughter of Teddy Roosevelt’s beloved sister Corinne, recounts how the United States acquired the Philippines almost as an afterthought at the end of its war with Spain over Cuba, and then promptly fell into a brutal war with some of its insurgent inhabitants. Both sides committed atrocities; the Americans specialized in the “water cure,” forcing water down the throats and into the stomachs of their captives. Roosevelt, “to his discredit,” Zimmermann says, “tried to argue that it was a very humane way of dealing with prisoners.”

Strong opposition to such activities arose within the U.S. from influential people such as Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie. The president dismissively called them “goo-goos” -- short for good-government types. Zimmermann notes that some of those who opposed the Philippines adventure argued that it would introduce lesser races into the United States, spoiling sturdy Anglo-Saxon supremacy. Thus can history bite back in unexpected ways.

Lamb, who was the founding chief executive of C-SPAN, presents these transcripts of his talks with writers as a continuing conversation with his viewers and readers. It is sometimes surprising, occasionally irritating -- do we really need more of Ann Coulter yelling at us or Michael Moore lecturing us? -- but mostly enlightening.