Volume 1, Number 7 · November 28, 1963
The Eagle Has No Head
By Lewis A. Coser
The Americans: A New History of the People of the United States
by Oscar Handlin
Little, Brown, 434 pp., $6.95
This is still another attempt at an answer to Crèvecoeur's question: 'Who then is the American, this new man?' Earlier efforts in this vein customarily bristled with claims about American purpose. American destiny, and similar conceits. Not only historians who wrote the superior virtues of Anglo-Saxonism but even men like George Bancroft were given to see Americans as a Chosen People illustrating in their history (in Bancroft's phrase) 'the principle of freedom.' In more recent years a number of historians, from Louis Hartz to Daniel Boorstin, offered their 'exceptionalist' interpretations of America as the country embodying an ideal liberalism, thus contributing their bit to the then flourishing American Celebration. Now Handlin's book heralds a new turn. Perhaps because the current social and political scene suggests to the thoughtful intelligence a sense of masterless confusion, Handlin interprets the American past in terms of largely uncontrolled drift rather than of self-conscious mastery.
Review, 1422 words
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