Book Reviews

A REVIEWER'S NOTEBOOK JOHN CHAMBERLAIN Builders of the American Dream THE WORD Hmyth," as it has come to be understood in America, has a derogatory connotation. It means that someone has been spreading a fake story. But in Europe, as James K. Fitzpatrick points out in the in troduction to his Builders of the American Dream (Arlington House, 165 Huguenot St., New Rochelle, N.Y. 10801, 374 pages, $9.95), a myth is a tale coming down from prehistoric times that, likely as not, had some original validity. There really were chivalric knights. If Prometheus never actually reached close enough to the sun to bring fire back to man, certainly some Pro methean character was the first to make fire by rubbing sticks together or striking something hard with a flint. Myths were perpetuated around hearths and campfires be fore men had written alphabets. They were the best that ancient man could do to account for his origins.

In America we don't need myths. We have our history books. But, as 62 Mr. Fitzpatrick says, presumably echoing Russell Kirk, we do need heroes who represent the high prin ciples and moral convictions of a culture. We need the moral imagi nation. Luckily we can find it in certain larger-than-ordinary-life characters who have refused to set tle for the mediocre, who have tried to exemplify admired characteristics at their best. Mr. Fitzpatrick might have picked many people who have done much for America. But his test is not who should have become an American myth, but who actually did. George Washington Carver, the black scien tist who developed so many scores of ways of making peanuts useful, may have done more for the country than Babe Ruth. But the Babe, with his mighty swing and Gargantuan ap petite for hot dogs, captured the pub lic imagination. He may not have been an exemplary man in his pri vate life, but his worshipers took him as a combined Bacchus and BUILDERS OF THE AMERICAN DREAM 63 Alger hero who could be forgiven much for his prowess on the diamond and his climb from an or phanage that might have left him an incorrigible delinquent but didn't.

The test which Mr. Fitzpatrick has applied to his thirteen· chosen builders of the American dream is a double one. First, the virtue and the value must be there. But, second, there must have been something of a breakthrough nature that made their names part of what Mr. Fitzpatrick calls. ~(the vocabulary of our people." Daniel Boone In establishing his double test Mr. Fitzpatrick is almost as interesting in talking about his rejects as he. is in seeking the ((why" for the popular acceptance of his thirteen builders. His chosen frontier hero is Daniel Boone. Boone was not the first to cross the Appalachians to the ((dark and bloody.ground" of Kentucky-a man named John Finley preceded him. In opening up the land between the Ohio and the Mississippi George Rogers Clark did more than Boone for the white settlers who poured West after the Revolution. But it was Boone's flair, his ability to cajole hostile Indians, his reverence in the belief that God had ordained him to open the wilderness, that made him the people's legendary hero. His reputation was based on a sense offairness andjustice as much as on bravery. And he kept to his mission-his worshipers had to bring his body back from the Mis souri territory to take him to a Ken tucky graveyard in a hearse drawn by four white horses.

Naturally ,George Washington engages Mr. Fitzpatrick's attention as the builder of the dream in our revolutionary epoch. Others solid ified the dream-Hamilton, who wrote Washington's Farewell Ad dress, Madison and Jefferson, who gave us our defining charters. But if it had not been for a Virginia planter who had the acumen to com bine the strategy of Fabius, the Roman delayer, with guerrilla tac tics learned from the American In dians, we would never have had the dream to make palpable. In assess ing Washington at his true worth, Mr. Fitzpatrick vindicates Parson Weems' mythologizing biography after all, Washington could have thrown a dollar across the Rappa hannock, and if he did cut down a cherry.tree he would not have lied about it. In the Civil War period Fitzpat rick rejects Sherman and Grant as dream builders, though it is incon testable, as he indicates, that the slugging, victorious Northern gen erals pioneered the strategies of modern total war. Lee and Lincoln are picked over Sherman and Grant 64 THE FREEMAN precisely because they fought as gentlemen. Oddly, they both be lieved that slavery was doomed and they both hoped that it could be abolished by voluntary action.

Why, in dramatization of the Pro gressive Era in U.S. politics, didn't Fitzpatrick make Theodore Roose velt or Robert La Follette his chief protagonist? He chose William Jennings Bryan, who has gone into myth as a blabbermouth and ig noramus. Actually, as Fitzpatrick demonstrates, Bryan was a prairie G. K. Chesterton who had a well reasoned Distributist ideal for his country. Bryan's essay, HIndivid ualism Versus Socialism," might have been written by Chesterton or by Hilaire Belloc. The doers rather than the intel lectuals take over when Fitzpatrick gives us beautiful portraits of Thomas Edison, Walter Reed, Charles Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, and Eddie Rickenbacker. Will Rogers is something of a mixed bag, part cow boy comedian, part folk philosopher. WaU Disney is treated, interest ingly, as a savior who enabled American parents to give their chil dren a not negligible substitute for the myths that our schools fail to prescribe as part of their cur riculum. True, it would be better if American children were to know C.

S. Lewis, Tolkien and Hans Chris tian Andersen, or even A. A. Milne. But if we must substitute TV and the movies for the written word, it is good that we have such Disney feature-length films as ~~Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," ttBambi," ~tPinocchio" and ~tAlice in Wonder land." Douglas MacArthur Fitzpatrick's thirteenth ~tbuilder" is General Douglas MacArthur, who was both doer and intellectual. Why MacArthur rather than General George S. Patton if we must have a modern military hero? Because, as Fitzpatrick says, there is a notice able reluctance in America to glory in war for its own sake. We prefer a Sir Galahad to a pagan warrior like Thor or Odin. MacArthur was just as good a fighting man as Patton, but he always held out for an econ omy of means in war. Head-on slug ging was something for Neander thals; MacArthur preferred the flank attack or the leapfrog surprise. He felt there was no substitute for vic tory, but his idea of victory was to bring habeas corpus to the Philip pines (as his father did) or to Japan.

MacArthur was no imperialist. And what about ttimperialism" as part of the American dream? We drove Spain out of Cuba, but Mr. Fitzpatrick sees it as more impor tant that our Dr. Walter Reed drove yellow fever out of the whole Carib bean basin. This, it might be noted, includes Panama, which was a fever swamp before we cleaned it up. @ t t)(~ Freeman VOL. 28, NO.2. FEBRUARY 1978 Some Ideas About Business P. Dean Russell 67 Explaining to the customers and other beneficiaries the facts about business profits. No Continuing City: The Paradox of a Christian Society Edmund A. Opitz 73 Dislocations on the political and economic level cannot be cured at that level, because they stem from a malady rooted on the spiritual level. The Real Exploiters Scott D. Palmer 85 Not the savers and investors but the confiscators of capital are the exploiters of the poor. Regulation and Energy Transport: An Unnatural Disaster John Semmens 90 Widespread economic benefits would follow even partial de regulation.