A Fine Mess We’ve Got Us In
• Larry Schweikart, Seven Events That Made America America (And Proved That the Founding Fathers Were Right All Along), New York: Sentinel, 2010, 258 pages, $25.95

Larry Schweikart, co-author of A Patriot’s History of the United States, writes, “The most important – and interesting — parts of history to understand are those that spark deep and significant changes but are not necessarily obvious.”

This can be as simple as looking beneath the whitecaps of Yorktown, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11 to seek the ocean currents underneath; any decent high school history teacher will do it. Schweikart goes far deeper in Seven Events That Made America America, but in the process tells us something about the historian as well as the history.

Implicit in the title is Schweikart’s definition of “America.” This historian’s view of the U.S. is affectionate but disappointed. It’s a land of overgrown bureaucracy, a nanny state which imposes wrong-headed remedies on a culture increasingly accustomed to its meddling. Its leaders bring deep-seated philosophical errors to the diplomatic table and junk science to the dinner table. Even its revolutionaries are bogus, posing as faux radicals in order to peddle records and “image.” This is reported dutifully by a hypocritical news media pretending to report facts while promoting their own partisan agendas.

And that’s just the highlight reel.

Even so, Seven Events is an interesting collection of connections and trends many of us haven’t thought about. Schweikart’s style is entertaining, sardonic, and lively; the professorial grasp of facts and currents is always at the surface, but it’s never sedate and it never deadens the narrative.

Because of the premise, too, Seven Events always connects to the present. These events created the country we inhabit today, and many of us are trying to fix the problems created or exacerbated by the history he recounts. This is not just a chronicle of people and dates, but a map recording both the pathway from the past and a possible course to a brighter future, if we care to backtrack a little.

The best chapters may involve the nature of life and the government’s responsibility for fostering and protecting it. The section on federal disaster relief compares the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 with the cleanup of the Johnstown Flood in 1889 and several disasters in between. While Katrina displayed the fecklessness of government leaders at every level, with thousands displaced and homeless while waiting for tax-funded assistance, Johnstown was saved by private initiative. Residents who had barely dried off from the torrent organized themselves to rescue the stranded, bury the dead, and shelter and feed their neighbors. Pennsylvania militia helped with law enforcement, but private businesses and individuals rallied to rebuild the town and relieve the suffering.

In a massive flood of Dayton, Ohio, in 1913, the head of National Cash Register Company, John Patterson, turned his headquarters staff into emergency management teams. His employees built 276 boats to rescue survivors in the first three days of the flood, while others served 2,700 meals a day from the company commissary. While government does its prescribed duties like defense and diplomacy quite well, Schweikart writes, its efforts at expanded roles generally fall short.

More to the philosophical side, Schweikart takes another look at the Dred Scott decision. While we’ve all heard that Dred Scott failed to uphold the dignity and personhood of African-Americans, it also resulted in widespread bank failures and the Panic of 1857. How so? Schweikart points out that as long as slaves were protected as property, many plantation owners held more wealth invested in the form of human lives than they did in land and houses. That wealth was safe under Dred Scott. The uncertainty the decision produced in the Midwestern free soil/slave state controversies wrecked Eastern financial markets.

“[There] is a smoking gun tying the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision to the ongoing events in Kansas and a further expectation about that kind of civil war and lawlessness spreading throughout the territories,” he writes. When immigrants and small farmers in the north realized they would have to compete against slave-labor plantations in the new territories, midwestern migration dropped. Overextended railroad speculators found traffic drying up and their bond markets collapsing. The reasons behind the failures were misunderstood at the time, and “[that] flawed analysis of the causes of the Panic of 1857 was piled on top of the other disastrous fruits of Dred Scott to push the nation to war.” By overstepping its authority, the Supreme Court may have made secession inevitable.

Although the book’s subtitle references the Founders, Schweikart spends most of his time on later events. Like any list-maker, he chooses his favorite subjects and omits others. The professor admits he played in a rock band once, and was delighted to count the sham revolutionary movement of American rock as one of the “events.” He barely touches on the expansion of railroads, the rise of Progressivism under the two Roosevelts, or the cultural shift from a largely Protestant Christian milieu to an officially agnostic, or at best deistic, relativism. He does make a nice package by starting the book with the frank, flaming partisanship of newspapers in the 1830s and closing with the election coverage of 2008. Truly there is nothing new under the sun or in the Times.

Schweikart has given us a powerful reminder, though, that there are many things both known and unsuspected which bring us to the present day. “I think it is clear,” he says, “that it is not always the declaration of war, inspirational speech, famous piece of legislation, or other well-known event we learned about in history class that has had the most long-lasting impact on our lives.”