Volume 4, Number 11 · July 1, 1965
Herbert Croly's America
By Christopher Lasch
The Promise of American Life
by Herbert Croly, edited by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
Harvard, 454 pp., $5.95
One reason why Herbert Croly remains a somewhat mysterious figure in American political thought is that the first forty years of his life are largely a blank. Croly left neither private papers from that period nor a public record which in the absence of letters and diaries would at least permit inferences about what kind of person he was. All that is known of his childhood is that his parents, Comtean intellectuals and reformers who came to America from England, brought him up in the Positivist faith, in a household which appears to have been emotionally a little austere. His career was a long time getting under way. Born in 1869, he did not even receive his B.A. from Harvard until 1910, a year after he published The Promise of American Life. At Harvard he had taken courses from Josiah Royce, George Santayana, and William James. For a time he edited The Architectural Record. He wrote two books on architecture, Stately Homes in America and Houses for Town and Country. At one point he suffered a nervous breakdown and went to Europe to recover.
Review, 1584 words
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