Overview

This text suggests that only in appreciating that there are few concrete definitions of history, can we recognize how important democracy's arrival was, how extraordinary its spread has been, and how uncertain its prospects are. As Wiebe explains why the original democracy of the early 19th century represented a sharp break from the past, he recreates the way European visitors contrasted the radical character of American democracy with their own societies. He then discusses the operation of various 19th-century democratic publics, including a nationwide public, the People. Finally, he places democracy's white fraternal world of equals in a larger environment where other Americans who differed by class, race and gender, developed their own relations to democracy. Individualism, once integrated with collective self-governance in the 19th century, becomes the driving force behind 20th-century democracy. During those same years, other ways of defining good government and sound public policy shunt majoritarian practices to one side. Late in the 20th century, these two themes in the history of American democracy - individualism and majoritarianism - turn on one another in modern democracy's war on itself. Finally, it assesses the polarized state of contemporary American democracy. Suggestions on the meaning and direction of today's democracy are included here.

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9780226895628

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A historian celebrates America's democratic past with an overview of fundamental changes in American culture. Wiebe (History/Northwestern Univ.; The Opening of American Society, 1984, etc.) admires the raucous hurly-burly of 19th-century American popular politics. Conceding that it was a white male democracy, he documents brutality to Native Americans, the subjugation of slaves, and the exclusion of women from public life. But Wiebe finds value in the political process itself aside from its outcomes and deficiencies. He is at his best when he allows himself to become indignant at 20th-century middle-class and professional elites as they strip away the political rights of the lower class with such disparate strategies as professional municipal government, legal barriers to immigration, restrictions on black and lower-class voting rights, and red-baiting. Setting this book off from Wiebe's earlier histories, which tell a similar story, is his attempt to engage the ideas of 60 recent authors - publicists, philosophers, and social scientists - who have attempted to define democracy. Never really coming to terms with their arguments, Wiebe asserts that these writers misunderstand American democracy because they do not appreciate the intrinsic value of popular self-rule, but he fails to use his story to sustain or even illustrate that argument. Worse, his writing often lapses into a colorless style: The American people are lumped together into abstractions - like a distinctive bourgeoisie or a differentiating process - that interact in history like balls on a billiard table; and with little faith in the ability of individuals to make a difference, Wiebe frequently resorts to a passive voice that drains the story of any personal reality. Democracy arrives; open conventions emerge; social insurance never materializes. A good idea, executed in a manner that will reinforce the widely held opinion that history is boring. (Kirkus Reviews)

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