BOOKS & ARTS
BOOKS
W hat does it mea n to be a n America n?
America is often seen to represent the search for something – which Trump’s populism
is failing to provide. Tim Stanley tries to identify what that elusive thing might beCapitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Allen Lane, £25, pp. 486
These Truths: A History of the
United States
by Jill Lepore
Norton, £30, pp. 932
Donald J. Trump has sparked some soul-
searching among US historians: has this hap-
pened before? Does it mean America has
changed? Cue the self-laceration, cue the
book deals. Two impressive volumes illus-
trate both agreement and disagreement,
both concurring that America represents the
search for something — but the jury’s out as
to precisely what.
Capitalism in America: A History is by
an Economist writer (Adrian Wooldridge)
and a former chair of the Federal Reserve
(Alan Greenspan), so you can guess where
they’re coming from. The book celebrates
the American thirst for self-improve-
ment and argues that the country has long
benefited from a ‘creative destruction’ driv-
en by the market and entrepreneurs.
Here’s the story. In the beginning, Amer-
ica was a frontier, rich in natural resources
and conquered by businessmen: Alexis de
Tocqueville wrote: ‘I know of no country,
indeed, where wealth has taken a stronger
hold on the affections of men... the entire
society is a factory.’ At first it was domi-
nated by farmers and craftsmen, rugged
individualists; but as industry blossomed
and agriculture shrank, so the laissez-
faire dreams of the early republic became
unrealistic. Corporations flourished; the
government decided to help them. Time
itself was nationalised. It used to be that
local worthies set the town clock accord-
ing to the position of the sun in the sky, but
railroads needed national timetables and
so, in 1883, ‘America divided itself into two
standard time zones’ in order that the trains
could truly run on time.
America flourished, say Greenspan and
Wooldridge, because it took plenty of cheap
labour from abroad; it embraced new tech-
nology; it traded in global markets; and it
was willing to let old industries go to the
wall — freeing up workers and resources
for start-ups.
Proof that all this worked was what hap-
pened when it stopped. In 1929, a spec-
ulative bubble popped and Wall Street
crashed. A recession was maybe inevitable,
but a worldwide depression perhaps not.
The problem, argue Greenspan and Wool-dridge, was that the federal government for-
got what America was all about and did the
wrong things: immigration had earlier been
restricted, bigger tariffs were now slapped
on imports, and Franklin D. Roosevelt pro-
longed the agony by expanding the state
and fiddling with the market.
A second crash that occurred under
Roosevelt’s presidency, in 1937, was by
some metrics worse than the first: stocks
lost more than a third of their value and
unemployment hit 20 per cent. From this
we are invited to deduce that while some
welfare goodies contribute to growth —
education is one form of government
spending that Greenspan and Wooldridge
go gaga for — on the whole America has
done best when the state lets the pioneers
off the leash. The authors are therefore
stumped by Trump: they like his deregula-
tion and low corporate taxes, but his protec-
tionism, the reader can infer, risks a return
to the suicide of the 1930s.
From this blunt economic survey, we fol-low Jill Lepore to a much more nuanced
political history of the American experi-
ence. These Truths: A History of the United
States has an apt title, for there is no one
truth of what it means to be an American,
and it’s from the contest between identities
that we get the unholy mess we’re in today.
The pioneer narrative is hopelessly subjec-
tive and has no relevance whatsoever to the
Native Americans stripped of their land,
the slaves ferried across the Atlantic to
build the exciting city on a hill or the mil-
lions of working-class whites who never had
time to invent anything. They just worked
every hour God sent to make some rich
genius even richer.
Lepore examines the political expres-
sions of these experiences and notes that
American populism, although often rac-
ist and conservative, has also sometimes
been progressive. Creative destruction in
the 1880s and 1890s, for instance, meant
dying farms and appalling urban condi-
tions; and the first great populist, William
Jennings Bryan (a Democrat from Nebras-
ka and my own personal hero), tried to
ally these two constituencies in three radi-
cal presidential campaigns. His platforms
now look economically illiterate; Bryan
vacillated confusingly from easy money to
proto-socialism and ended with a cam-
paign against the teaching of Darwinism in
the 1920s that has cast him as one of his-
tory’s fools. But his point about Darwin
was that if society rejects the Christian
notion that weakness is a virtue and embrac-
es the ‘survival of the fittest’ doctrine, it will
inevitably throw the weak on to the funeral
pyre. Time, I think, proved him right.
When Roosevelt came to power in the
1930s, it seemed as if liberals had conquered
the US establishment, and so it was inevi-
table that there would be an equal and
opposite reaction from the Right. The por-
trait Lepore paints of America in the 1950sThe pioneer narrative has no
relevance whatsoever to the Native
Americans stripped of their land