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The Conservative Tradition in America. By Allen Guttmann. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Pp. viii, 214. $6.00.) The rhetoric and romance, and to a lesser extent, the reality of the American experience has been democratic, secular, forward looking, increasingly equalitarian and libertarian. John Crowe Ransom's remark some years ago that "Burke's total Conservatism is scarcely recoverable now" is misleading. In actuality, as Allen Guttmann reminds us in this collection of essays (the best of which have previously seen print), such a Conservatism never took firm root in American soil. After the removal of the Tories and the demise of the Essex Junto, only a handful of men ever again approached the purity of the master's ideology. In the urbane, graceful, and learned style we have come to appreciate in those schooled in American studies, though with less originality than is characteristic of these scholars, Guttmann argues that the Conservative tradition in America has endured primarily in the field of letters. Nineteenth century northern novelists ( Irving , Cooper, Hawthorne, James ) and Faulkner in the twentieth reflected the Conservative vision in their use of the ancestral mansion as the symbol of order, tradition , and permanence. The author introduces, but, disappointingly, does not develop , the idea that Conservatism symbolized by the metaphor of the house offered an alternative to the dilemma of primitivism ( the virgin land image ) and progress (the machine in the garden image). To varying degrees in this century, Santayana, Eliot, and Cozzens, and the Humanists, the Agrarians, and the New Critics have been keepers of the Burkean flame. The author's secondary theme is that particular people and institutions sometimes thought to be Conservative can be accommodated, for all their ambiguities, within the Liberal framework. Thus the Adamses, John and Henry, were "pessimistic Liberals "; Hamilton was Liberal in his "ready application of human reason to the problems of social innovation"; Calhoun paradoxically forged a Liberal constitutional theory in support of a repressive slave system; the New Conservatives pledge their allegiance to the Liberal laissez-faire past. In a separate chapter on religion in America, Guttmann traces the steady drift toward liberalization by Protestant, Catholic, Jew. As a major example, America's chief spokesman for the Conservative theory of Church and State, Orestes Brownson, is remembered, if at all, chiefly for his early radicalism. In a particularly provocative essay, the author contends that the military establishment has been compatible with the Liberal and, more recently, the social democratic tradition. Yet, the military's partnership with the industrial complex, spawned in the nightmarish sea of the modem age, produces and represents values that sharply depart from this tradition. Paul Goodman correctly labels this militaryindustrial misalliance "the most dangerous body of men at present in the world." The relevance of Conservatism today, Guttmann maintains, lies in its criticism of Liberal values, its recognition of the need for community, and its sense of the past. Guttmann makes his own low key plea for "socialism with a sense of the past." One might add that implementation of the best that has been thought and said by Conservatives , Liberals, and Socialists is essential for the sane and productive world envisioned by the caring Left. William F. Cheek San Diego State College Origins of the War with Mexico: The Polk-Stockton Intrigue. By Glenn W. Price (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967. Pp. xiii, 189. $5.00.) In his reexamination of the origins of the Mexican War, Professor Price directs particular attention to the nationalist bias of Americans. They believed it their duty to spread their civilization to the backward areas of the continent in the name of 55 56CIVIL WAR HISTORY political liberty, Christian religion, and the Anglo-Saxon race. During the early nineteenth century, Price observes, two of the most ardent nationalists were President James K. Polk and Commodore Robert F. Stockton. They evidenced no doubts that the annexation of formerly Mexican territory to the United States would serve the interests of mankind. In a perceptive chapter on historiography, Price notes that not only the contemporaries of the period but later historians as well reflected the nationalist bias. Directing his major criticism at the works of Justin H. Smith and Eugene...

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