Brogan on the U.S.

THE AMERICAN CHARACTER--D. W. Brogan--Knopf ($2.50).

When he was seven, his attention was attracted by an account of the inauguration of President Taft. That started Denis William Brogan off on a lifelong transatlantic career. He grew up to study at Harvard and become one of Britain's foremost authorities on the U.S. At 44 voluble, high-spirited Denis Brogan is professor of political science at Cambridge, wartime chief of the BBC's American Section of Intelligence. He has taught U.S. history at the University of London and U.S. Government at the London School of Economics, visited 40 States of the Union and written numerous articles and five books on U.S. affairs, including one of the best books on U.S. politics, Government of the People. His latest book, The American Character, is intended to explain Americans to Britons, but it is the U.S. Book-of-the-Month Club's November joint choice (with Herbert Best's Young 'Un).

Denis Brogan is a new and apparently nattering kind of debunker: he thinks that Americans have played up the romance of their history, played down the realities:

P: American pioneers were often crusaders. But they were chiefly "solid, sober, cautious" citizens who firmly believed in hanging on to their scalps. Crafty pathfinders like Daniel Boone were not glamorous storybook characters; they were "heroes because they were . . . men who did not get lost."

P: Americans like to think of themselves as horselaughing individualists. In fact, says Brogan. ever since pioneer days the American wife, mother and schoolteacher have done a pretty successful job of making the menfolk conform. Town-proud Americans have felt that free-for-all "crab bing" is no way to build up a continent, have had short patience with individual ists and dissenters.

P: American romantics like Walt Whit man have cried that democratic Americans "rise at once against the never-ending audacity of elected persons." But the U.S., says Brogan, "was made by politicians" -- types who readily indulged in romantic rhetoric but were basically "matter-of-fact men . . . with a clear head for bookkeeping." "To have created a free government . . . without making a sacrifice of adequate efficiency or of liberty is the American achievement. . . ." <

P: Americans have also romanticized their military qualities. The Union, says Brogan, has been admirably preserved from the time of the Indian Wars to World War II by "patience, prudence, the massing of superior forces." A soldier like General Custer is simply a "horrible example, to be digested and then forgotten."

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