"Land of Hope"

I received Wilfred McClay's "Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story" (Encounter Books 2019) from Jeremy and Brianne for Christmas. In 429 pages of high-quality paper McClay tells a story of America (at least that part that became the United States of America) from the days of its pre-British settlement to the present.

"Land of Hope" is beautifully written, excellently typeset, and exquisitely printed. McClay is a gifted storyteller. I appreciated the honesty of his introduction and epilogue. He tells his readers at the outset where he stands with respect to the story he is about to tell:

As the book argues from the very outset, the western hemisphere was inhabited by people who had come from elsewhere ... drawn by the prospect of  a new beginning ... the space to pursue their ambitions  ... Hope has both theological and secular meanings, spiritual ones as well as material ones. Both these sets of meanings exist in abundance in America. In fact, nothing about America better defines its distinctive character than the ubiquity of hope ... Even those who are bitterly critical of America, and find its hopes to be delusions, cannot deny the enduring energy of those hopes and are not immune to their pull. (xiv, emphasis added)

And when he stands with respect to that story: "History always begins in the middle of things. It doesn't matter where you choose to start the story; there is always something essential that came before ..." (3) So too McClay's story begins with only a nod to the pre-British peoples and has no end. America is still moving; its story is not done. Over the course of the book McClay explains, however, how the substance of America's hopes have changed. And he expresses concern that the animating power of hope may be waning: "We close this historical survey ... with an air of uncertainty, both about where we are [in 2018] and about where we are going." (422) 

McClay chooses to tell the political history of America. He readily acknowledges that other legitimate stories could be told but believes that a political "emphasis is particularly appropriate for the education of American citizens living under a republican form of government." (xiii) In this respect I felt some inadequacy in McClay's account; one need not be a materialist to appreciate that the economic history of America is important to understanding its political history. The insights of Charles Sellers in The Market Revolution came to mind. But there was only so much an historian can do and keep a book at a reasonable length so this is a mere quibble. 

On the other hand, McClay's discussion of the Progressive Movement is outstanding. 

What we call the Progressive Era was a more concentrated and widely influential phase in a longer and more general response to the great disruptions of industrialization, urbanization, national consolidation, and concentrated wealth and power. ... Such responses were part of a larger quest for a new order, or at least for a new way of thinking about how American democracy and [personal] self-rule could survive and thrive under such dramatically changed conditions. (240)

McClay is clear on how Progressives of the early twentieth century believed that the Constitutional order had become inadequate to contemporary conditions. And while the 1920s saw a turn back from Progressivism, the New Deal once for all installed the federal government at the central source of power in American civil government. While McClay's sympathies are clear, he is also fair to the perilous conditions of the time and to the power of hope--the overarching theme of his book--mediated by FDR.

Much more could be said about this excellent book but I will end with a lengthy quote from McClay's epilogue centered around the place of patriotism, an essay well worth reading:

Much of the time [we Americans] like to think of the individual person as something that exists prior to all social relations, capable of standing free and alone, able to choose the terms on which it makes common cause with others. We have an endless fascination with romantic culture heroes ... Even our own battered but still-magnificent Constitution, with its systemic distrust of all concentration of power, assumes that we are fundamentally self-interested creatures. This does capture some part of the truth about us.

But only a part. For among our deepest longings is the desire to belong, and it is an illusion to believe that we can sustain a stable identity in isolation ... Patriotism, to repeat, is an utterly natural sentiment whose primal claims upon our souls we deny at our peril. But we should not take it in the initial form in which it is given to us. An instinctive and unthinking patriotism is not good enough. Like every virtue, patriotism is something we must work upon, refine, and elevate, if we are to make it what it should be. (424)