U. S. Reality v. U. S. Dream

AMERICA'S TRAGEDY--James Truslow Adams--Scribner ($3).

Three years ago James Truslow Adams described (in The Epic of America) what he called "the American dream"--that state of spiritual somnambulism in which all men were to have an equal chance in a brand new world. Like most patriotic U. S. citizens, Author Adams regards this idealistic belief as the essential promise of his country. Last fortnight, in more realistic vein, he described one of the tragic fulfilments of the U. S. dream. Soundly documented and popularly written America's Tragedy traces U. S. sectionalism from its colonial beginnings to the aftermath of the Civil War.

The nigger-in-the-woodpile, says Author Adams, first appeared in August 1619. The woodpile was a Dutch man-o'-war, which unloaded "twenty Negars" at the struggling English colony of Jamestown, Va. But Adams knows too much about history to singularize plural causes. Slavery, says he, was only a contributing factor in the widening divergences between North and South. Even in 1700 the antagonism between Massachusetts and South Carolina, "the two protagonists in our tragedy," was already latent. For the "rope of sand" that held the 13 colonies together was substituted a Constitutional chain of iron, which had to be tempered in blood before it was proved indissoluble. Historian Adams shows convincingly the inevitable drawing apart of agrarian South from industrial North, an incompatibility be coming more & more coherent. Just before the Civil War Northerners were speaking hotly of South Carolina as "that bullying State ... let the damned little thing go." Southern journalists were spiritedly responding: "Not a breeze that blows from the Northern hills but bears upon its wings taints of crime and vice, to reek and stink, and stink and reek upon our Southern plains." In 1830 the argument between Massachusetts and South Carolina in the U. S. Senate was still parliamentary, but by 1856 it had descended to murderous fisticuffs.

When the South finally put secession to the proof, it found there was no stopping the dangerous principle; sectionalism was one of the causes of the South's defeat. Says Author Adams: "The united Confederacy was built upon the quicksand of shifting local loyalties." In 180 pages Adams retells, with balanced impartiality, the story of the Civil War, concludes: "The essence of our national tragedy has been that the section of our new country in which the humane view and way of life developed first should . . . have been forced ... to expend its intellectual energies against the trend of the age, to lose its wealth, and to be left in rum and without its proper and essential influence on the rest of the nation, which sorely needed, as it needs today, what the South had to give." Because "no type of property now owned in the United States is sectional, as slavery property was," Author Adams sees no future irreconcilable conflict between the States, but thinks that "we might have . . . civil war again, though not sectional" as the "ultimate and bloody solution of any Constitutional deadlock."

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