Parlor Games

By John Skow

FOR WANT OF A NAIL. . .

IF BURGOYNE HAD WON AT SARATOGA

by ROBERT SOBEL

441 pages. Macmillan. $12.95.

At last, justice for John Burgoyne! To descend through history tagged as a fool and tarred with the nickname "Gentleman Johnny" is hard duty for a commander whose ineptitude certainly was no worse than what is customarily thought acceptable, even praiseworthy, in general officers. Burgoyne bears the responsibility for England's defeat at Saratoga during the American Revolution. He planned and executed the campaign of 1777, but this crisis in the struggle between England and her American colonies came much nearer to turning in a different direction than is imagined in schoolboy history.

Now comes Historian Robert Sobel to change the familiar story and report Burgoyne's "splendid victory" at Saratoga, the subsequent crushing of the American rebellion, the execution of Radicals Jefferson, Sam Adams, John Adams, Patrick Henry and Tom Paine, and the sentencing and life imprisonment of the bumbler Washington. Sobel, professor of history at New College, Hempstead, N.Y., goes on to describe the formation under the Crown's benevolent authority of the Confederation of North America with Burgoyne as first viceroy. Hamilton, Madison, Nathanael Green and the other irreconcilable dissidents lead thousands of former rebels on what was to be remembered as the Wilderness Walk. It was an exodus to the new and forbidding lands of the Southwest, where, in 1782, the survivors founded the new nation of Jefferson. There follows, naturally enough, Jefferson's stormy transformation into the C.N.A.'s troublesome rival, the United States of Mexico.

Spirit. This is revisionist history carried to the most amiable extreme. It bears a distant relationship to George MacDonald Eraser's superb Flashman memoirs. But while Eraser has produced some remarkable light entertainment, Sobel has manufactured an obsessive parlor game. He is a master pedant who, without cracking a smile, plods through heavily footnoted mock details of North America's internal and external struggles from 1775 to the present. Indeed, there is so much beady-eyed detail that a reader can argue as well about the C.N.A.'s 1966 election (Carter Monaghan, of the People's Coalition, beats his liberal opponent easily) as about the French Revolution. As for the latter, it never happened because the crushing of the American rebellion left revolutionary spirit in France too feeble to ignite the country, and the Bourbons misruled for another century.

There is no one named Napoleon in Sobel's history. Aaron Burr does not shoot Hamilton. There is no Civil War, although the C.N.A. and the United States of Mexico fight the Rocky Mountain War in 1845-52. Karl Marx remains an obscure German professor, but Bernard Kramer, an inspired monopolist, builds a business empire that becomes a world power by the middle of the 20th century.

There is no World War I and no Hitler, although a devastating global war does develop in 1939. The immediate cause of the war was a clash between Britain and Germany for the oil of the Ottoman Empire. Television and the widespread use of airplanes begin earlier in the C.N.A. than they did, in fact, in the U.S. But the atomic bomb is developed about 20 years later. Russia never grows into a power, but Mexico frightens the world.

Among the glories of Sobel's history is a bibliography of several dozen volumes (Green, Davis: A President Dies; the Assassination of Omar Kincaid. New York, 1960. Harper, Alexander: Banking Policies in the United States of Mexico During the Arkins Years, Mexico City, 1950). If Sobel and other players who take up his parlor game carry his obsession a small step further to absurdity, they can be expected to flush out some of the books behind these titles, then publish scholarly articles that take issue with the books, then letters to the editors, pointing out the errors of the articles. Author Sobel, in the meantime, can take pride in his strange art. Like any good games player, he knows that reality is what you make it.

--John Skow

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.