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Buy this book and a good cigar and savor them both in an overstuffed chair at the club or at your neighborhood cigar bar. It is a wondrously good read and a long, slow delight (976 pages plus notes) that flatters your refined taste by associating you with a skilled raconteur as he skewers "the fly-blown philacteries of Political Correctness." This cigar of a book offends your cautious associates, disregards both the old and the new Puritanism, reassures you of your success and independence of mind, regales you with tales of the smoke-filled deeds of great tycoons and politicians, and reeks of all three Nineties: the Federalist 1790s, Andrew Carnegie's 1890s, and Bill Gates's 1990s, especially of the latter. It is a most entertaining bit of what the author calls "club talk" with a decidedly English air to it.
If you lack the time for a cigar, the book, or this review, be content with a brief bottom-line summary of Johnson's theme: Reader's Digest was right all along.
English historian and essayist Paul Johnson has added a very readable, almost novelistic, history of the United States to his earlier Modern Times and A History of the Jews. His History of the American People is great narrative, with a vigorous unifying theme—the greatness of the American people (he dedicates the book to us)—a strong story line that avoids hard-to-explain subplots and focuses on well-known events and leaders, vivid characterizations of major male leaders (and a few female ones), telling anecdotes, and effective satirical sketches. Johnson covers the centuries from Jamestown (1607) to Clinton more compellingly than do the standard politically correct academic texts, partly because Johnson's editor gave him free rein and partly because his book achieves a better fit with the post-Cold War world of global capitalism. Indeed, A History of the American People is often uncannily up to date, as when Johnson focuses on the sexual escapades of Democratic presidents Wilson, FDR, Kennedy, and Johnson.
In his conservative reading of the American past, Johnson stresses the development of laissez-faire free-market capitalism and the blessings it brings. He does not omit the accompanying curses of slavery, the displacement of Native Americans, and the victory of materialism over Christian self-sacrifice. Nevertheless, showing the defects of even the best narrative, he minimizes these by simply recounting the tragic episodes without analyzing what they mean for his grand theme. Thus, Johnson describes the Civil War as "the central" and "most characteristic event" in U.S. history without explaining how it is that the most characteristic event in a highly successful history can be a tragedy.
Plantation slavery and the slave trade are narrated as givens, facts of history, as if nothing can be deduced from them about the supposed Christian faith of the Europeans who practiced them. Devout colonial New England is granted 22 pages of text while less-religious colonial Virginia has only four. Johnson makes South Carolina the scapegoat for southern extremism while Virginia gets off nearly scot-free.
Christian faith plays a prominent role at the beginning—at the Landings at Jamestown, Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, and Saint Mary's (Maryland)—and at the end, as a bulwark for conservativism in the culture wars of the eighties and nineties. But it is largely lost from view during the lengthy voyage from John Winthrop to Dan Quayle. Johnson claims that before World War I "Americans enjoyed a laissez-faire society which was by no means unrestrained but whose limitations to their economic freedom were imposed by their belief in a God-ordained moral code rather than a government one devised by man." Yet his history largely ignores the moral code (and the possibility that it could have shaped the government one) in order to emphasize the battle between laissez-faire and government intervention. The Lord of Sabaoth is just a word in the hymnbooks here, a word that inspired conservatives and one that Johnson does not mock, but not an active Providence achieving His goals.
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