Synopses & Reviews
In 1914, a brilliant young political journalist published a book arguing that the United States had entered a period of “drift”—a lack of control over rapidly changing forces in society. He highlighted the tensions between expansion and consolidation, traditionalism and progressivism, and emotion and rationality. He wrote to convince readers that they could balance these tensions: they could be organized, efficient, and functional without sacrificing impulse, choice, or liberty. Mastery over drift is attainable, Walter Lippmann argued, through diligent attention to facts and making active choices. Democracy, Lippman wrote, is “a use of freedom, an embrace of opportunity.”
Lippman’s Drift and Mastery became one of the most important and influential documents of the Progressive Movement. It remains a valuable text for understanding the political thought of early twentieth-century America and a lucid exploration of timeless themes in American government and politics. Distinguished historian Walter Leuchtenberg’s 1986 introduction and notes are retained in this edition. Ganesh Sitaraman, who has provided a foreword for this centennial edition, suggests that Lippmann’s classic still has much to say to twenty-first-century progressives. The underlying solutions for our time, he believes, are similar to those of Lippman’s era. Sitaraman contends that American society can regain mastery over drift by reforming finance and reducing inequality, by rethinking the relationship between corporations and workers, and by embracing changes in social life.
Review
“Sacvan Bercovitch is a giant in American Studies. This book was his first classic work—and others followed. He stands alongside Perry Miller and F. O. Matthiessen as indispensable figures in our understanding of American civilization.”—Cornel West, Princeton University
Review
“This is an auspicious time for a new edition of Sacvan Bercovitch’s masterwork. At a moment when pundits, academics, and even presidential candidates feel compelled to declare their beliefs about American exceptionalism, Bercovitch’s landmark study of the ‘fusion of dissent and assent’ in American culture is as relevant as ever. In a provocative new preface to this edition, Bercovitch finds similarities between recent turns in American Studies and the very exceptionalist modes of thought examined so astutely in American Jeremiad. Sure to be controversial, the preface is a spirited extension of a brilliant book.”—Nancy Bentley, University of Pennsylvania
Review
“For more than three decades, Sacvan Bercovitch's work has both charted the most promising path and posed the most profound challenge to the academic project of radical political critique of U.S. literature and culture. So long as ‘change we can believe in’ amounts, by definition, to ‘forms of renewal that confirm the basic tenets of the system,’ as Bercovitch deftly puts it in his new preface to this classic study, The American Jeremiad will remain new and necessary.”—Evan Carton, University of Texas at Austin
Review
“A deeply learned, revolutionary break with the dominant consensus models from Perry Miller through F. O. Matthiessen, The American Jeremiad rediscovered the prophetic core of American literature and culture, and it demonstrated how fully our national identity has been forged from conflicted narratives of self-examination and redemption. The author’s brilliant and searching new preface brings this classic work boldly into the twenty-first century.”—Eric J. Sundquist, Johns Hopkins University
Review
“With Perry Miller—perhaps his only company—Sacvan Bercovitch stands above everyone else as America’s cultural and intellectual historian, and this new edition of The American Jeremiad, with its powerfully updated preface, is a striking reminder of that enduring fact.”—Frank Lentricchia, Duke University
Review
“A truly seminal book. . . . the most illuminating study of the root paradigm of American culture yet written.”—Victor Turner, University of Virginia
Review
“The American Jeremiad is by far the finest work in American studies of a generation. The scale and ambition of its agenda—its daring attempt to see the ideology of America whole—is one we have since shied away from, but this new edition, with Bercovitch’s incisive, brilliant, and eloquent new preface, will certainly provoke and may well inspire still another generation.”—Christopher Looby, University of California at Los Angeles
Review
“This welcome new edition of The American Jeremiad makes available a major classic of American literary and cultural criticism. In his hard-hitting new preface, Bercovitch usefully reformulates and updates the book’s cogent critique of how opposition in America has a way of becoming a celebration of America.”—Gerald Graff, former president of the Modern Language Association
Review
“A dazzling performance. It supplies conceptual links between phenomena where historians have often sensed a connection without being able to describe it adequately, between the Great Awakening and the Revolution, between Edwards and Emerson, between the Puritan vision of a city on a hill and the ‘manifest destiny’ of American expansion . . . [Bercovitch] has written intellectual history at the highest level.”—Edmund S. Morgan, New York Review of Books
Review
A very important piece of scholarship in the burgeoning literature on religion and war.”Andrew Murphy, Rutgers University
Review
As McCullough shows in rich detail, the Spanish-American War marked the critical juncture where American foreign policy instincts shifted from isolationism to interventionism. He proves this transition could not have taken place without the active role of churches and clergy in explaining to Americans, paradoxically, how they could be imperialistic and altruistic at the same time.”Harry S. Stout, Yale University
Review
Drawing on an impressive array of sources, Matthew McCullough maps thoroughly and accurately the flow of Christian theologies and rhetorics into the ideological reservoirs of American imperial power. This book presents a convincing case that the splendid little war deserves a great deal more attention.”Jonathan H. Ebel, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Review
For readers who are interested in the history of ideas and in twentieth-century politics,
Drift and Mastery will make fascinating reading. It is brief and easy to read, and yet it has depth of thought. Lippmanns masterful writing style and the pungent statements he uses to define the issues of his time are remarkable for a young man in his early twenties.”
The Social Science JournalReview
Devilishly well-written . . . altogether a delightful fresh piece of writing and thinking.”Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Review
“Although not without its critics, the conviction that the US was destined to spread democracy and Christian values became synonymous with nationalist aspirations. . . . This valuable study provides a much-needed cautionary tale in nation building.”—Choice
Synopsis
When Sacvan Bercovitch’s The American Jeremiad first appeared in 1978, it was hailed as a landmark study of dissent and cultural formation in America, from the Puritans’ writings through the major literary works of the antebellum era. For this long-awaited anniversary edition, Bercovitch has written a deeply thoughtful and challenging new preface that reflects on his classic study of the role of the political sermon, or jeremiad, in America from a contemporary perspective, while assessing developments in the field of American studies and the culture at large.
Synopsis
Recovers a forgotten history of how U.S. Christian leaders, in the era of Spanish-American War, began using Christian ideas to promote an American responsibility for extending freedom around the worldby force, if necessary.
Synopsis
The Cross of War documents the rise of messianic interventionism”the belief that America can and should intervene altruistically on behalf of other nations. This stance was first embraced in the Spanish-American War of 1898, a war that marked the dramatic emergence of the United States as an active world power and set the stage for the foreign policy of the next one hundred years. Responding to the circumstances of this war, an array of Christian leaders carefully articulated and defended the notion that America was responsible under God to extend freedom around the worldby force, if necessary. Drawing from a wide range of sermons and religious periodicals across regional and denominational lines, Matthew McCullough describes the ways that many American Christians came to celebrate military intervention as a messianic sacrifice, to trace the hand of God in a victory more painless and complete than anyone had imagined, and to justify the shift in American foreign policy as a divine calling.
Synopsis
One of the most influential documents of the Progressive Era,
Drift and Mastery remains a valuable text for understanding the political thought of early twentieth-century America and a lucid exploration of timeless themes in American government and politics. A new foreword (by a former advisor to Elizabeth Warren) argues that Lippmans analysis of societal problems, and political actions needed to solve them, is highly relevant today.
About the Author
Walter Lippmann (18891974) was an American public intellectual, Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist, and widely read columnist on American politics and foreign policy. He cofounded the
New Republic magazine, advised several presidents, and notably was the first to popularize the term cold war,” in his 1947 book
The Cold War. William E. Leuchtenburg is the William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ganesh Sitaraman is an assistant professor at Vanderbilt Law School and former policy director and senior counsel to candidate and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).
Table of Contents
Foreword
Walter Lippmann's Drift and Mastery
Introduction
Part One
1 The Themes of Muckraking
2 New Incentives
3 The Magic of Property
4 Caveat Emptor
5 A Key to the Labor Movement
6 The Funds of Progress
"A Nation of Villagers"
Part Two
8 A Big World and Little Men
9 Drift
10 The Rock of Ages
Part Three
11 A Note on the Women's Movement
12 Bogeys
13 Poverty, Chastity, Obedience
14 Mastery
15 Modern Communion
16 Fact and Fancy