Wouldn’t it be rewarding to sit back and read a comprehensive history of the United States written by a historian who has thought long and carefully about how America became what it is? Someone who could guide you through its triumphs and tragedies and show how they are linked? Surely the time spent would be worth as much as hours devoted to the latest biography by David McCullough or Ron Chernow: it would give you a sense of the full story.
Now you can do just that. Wilfred M. McClay has written Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story.[1] It’s meant to be used as a textbook in homes, private schools, and charter schools—places where the dictates of public textbook commissions and education-school ideologies don’t hold sway. But it’s also written for “readers, young and old.”
The Wall Street Journal has described Land of Hope as a “counterpoint” to A People’s History. That popular history by the late Howard Zinn recounts the story of the United States as a country in which power dominates over the oppressed. Zinn wanted to tell the story of the victims—the Arawak Indians in Hispaniola, for example, rather than Columbus, the European intruder who “discovered” them.
What McClay and Zinn have in common is interest in telling a story—Zinn’s was about oppression, McClay’s is about hope.
It has been a lifetime since I read an American history textbook. However, I’m familiar with textbooks about European history—many are written by a slew of authors all combined into an “omniscient” author who tells you facts, one after another. This doesn’t make for meaningful reading. In fact, a few years ago, even though I read the textbook twice, [2] I still couldn’t remember which French king replaced Napoleon; when Louis Philippe turned up; and what actually happened in 1848. These are big, big events in France but they were eminently forgettable until I began to see the history of modern France as a story about the struggle for political stability and economic growth in a country deeply divided by class, religion, and geography.
A Land of Hope is a story, the political story of the United States over its lifetime so far. Yet in telling that story, McClay ventures into uncommon realms. For example, to understand the early English settlers, he explains the religious conflicts in Europe that pushed them to North America. He also explains that there was “nothing inevitable or foreordained” about the British becoming dominant in North America. Except for the defeat of the Spanish Armada by the English in 1588 (which was a stroke of luck for the English), Spain might have been in charge.
Because the American story, as McClay tells it, is so compelling, he can avoid the anecdotal introductions that pepper a standard textbook. Desperately trying to capture a student’s interest, my European text starts its chapters out with little-known people like Frieda von Bülow, a German adventurer in Africa in the 1880s; Mary Shelley, inventor of Dr. Frankenstein; and Boris Pasternak, the Russian author of Doctor Zhivago. In contrast, McClay tells us about individuals who are crucial to the story.
For example, Thomas Jefferson was “not an especially gifted public speaker, but he was well known for his dazzling intellect, personal magnetism, and similar charm . . . . There was an iron fist beneath the velvet glove, however.”[3]
And Abraham Lincoln’s anguish comes alive in McClay’s careful attention to three speeches—the Gettysburg address and Lincoln’s two inaugural addresses—that illustrate Lincoln’s mixed emotions and his changing understanding, over time, of the war’s meaning. McClay quotes from Lincoln’s second inaugural, which invokes the possibility that God was punishing the country for slavery: that perhaps “every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”[4]
Of course, Franklin Delano Roosevelt appears. “FDR was an inattentive student at Harvard, spending most of his time playing the social butterfly and editing the school newspaper. . . . But he had something equally important to compensate for that: a sunny and hopeful disposition, an unsinkable optimism and upbeat personality that were inspirational and infectious and gave the public reason to believe that . . . ‘Happy Days Are Here Again.’”[5]
McClay thinks aloud about important subjects. A persistent theme is to warn his readers against being intellectually complacent. “As with the American Civil War, so with the Second World War. Because we all know how the war [World War II] came out, we tend to underestimate the degree to which it was actually a very close-run thing, with the outcome deeply uncertain to those who had to live through those harrowing times.”[6] Similarly he asks, “What if Calvin Coolidge had still been president when the great stock market crash of October 1929 had occurred? What might he have done?”[7]
The book is conversational and sometimes eloquent because it is written by a real, thinking person, not an academic committee. For example, in describing World War I, McClay shares his sense of how unfathomable it is, even today. The war “descended upon Europe in summer 1914 like a violent thunderstorm shattering the stillness of a peaceful night.” It was fought with a “nightmarish ferocity . . . using weapons of unparalleled destructiveness and cruelty.” It “seemed out of proportion to the ambiguity of the war’s causes and the vagueness of its purposes.“[8]
I hope my description conveys that the book achieves what McClay is seeking to do. In his introduction, he says the book “extends a come-as-you-are invitation, and as such it attempts to be a friendly point of entry for all sorts of readers and students of history.”[9] Welcome!
Note: Both Wallace Kaufman and I have written about the “stories of history.” You may wish to look at them: Wallace’s “History: All Story All the Time” and my “A Treasure Trove of Stories.”
[1] Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story (New York: Encounter Books, 2019).
[2] Lynn Hunt, Thomas R. Martin, Barbara H Rosenwein, and Bonnie G. Smith, The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures, Volume II. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s (this is the concise version as I can’t find the longer one I read).
[3] McClay, 93-94.
[4] McClay, 187.
[5] McClay, 303.
[6]McClay, 321.
[7]McClay, 297.
[8] McClay, 259. William McNeil tried to fathom the war in his book The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000, which I discuss here.
[9] McClay, xiii.