Contradiction and Dilemma: Orestes Brownson and the American Idea (review)

358CIVIL WAR HISTORY tourists have visited the residence of Davis in his last years on the Mississippi Coast, Beauvoir. Even more have seen the fine restoration of the Confederate White House at Richmond, maintained by the tireless ladies of the Confederate Memorial Literary Society as the Museum of the Confederacy. Now a most interesting restoration is underway of Davis' childhood home, Rosemont, near Woodville, Mississippi, financed by Percival T. Beacroft. Along with this volume, the scholar and the layman alike may soon be able to view the entire life of Jefferson Davis, through his residences. Haskell Monroe Texas ?&? University Contradiction and Dilemma: Orestes Brownson and the American Idea. By Leonard Gilhooley. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1972. Pp. xv, 231. $10.00. ) Leonard Gilhooley's systematic chronological exposition of Orestes Brownson's views on the American "idea" as reflected in his magazines is an important study of the changes in the thinking of that nineteenthcentury intellectual. The American "idea"—of progress and optimism stemming from God's will, and of mission—is analyzed and related to Brownson's growing pessimism following the failure of the democratic process in the election of 1840 and his change to guarded optimism through his union with the Roman Catholic church. For Brownson had come to believe that the government impeded individual development while the church dealt with spiritual behavior and left material behavior to the individual. The timelessness of the dilemma of liberty and authority should not be lost on our floundering generation. If the past can indeed instruct the present, Gilhooley has to his own satisfaction illustrated that instruction. Important to the criticism of this book is Gilhooley's almost total reliance upon Brownson's reviews and essays to explicate his changing views from pessimism to optimism. If Brownson rejected the American "idea" because of the demagoguery of the presidential election of 1840, then Gilhooley should explain why. If Brownson rejected the optimism and liberal thinking of the Transcendentalists, a group which one could hardly call democratic or united on reform, the thought of the times should have been developed rather than seen through Brownson's articles . If there were Catholic influences on Brownson, then the author should have discussed American Catholic thought; for example, a defense of the views of Isaac Hecker should have been provided along with Brownson's denial of them. A study in intellectual thought which does not focus on the time and illustrate the views Brownson first rejects and then amends is at best an incomplete work which does little justice to Brownson's own intellectual development. Undoubtedly the Catholic church influenced many Americans in the late ante-bellum period. But Brownson was considered an eccentric book reviews359 among Catholics. Brownson came from fundamentalist Protestant stock, yet Gilhooley shows neither how his religious past influenced either his thought or his conversion to Catholicism. Some more careful study into Brownson's life might provide more understanding of his conservatism , explain why he actually converted, and demonstrate how the church helped to mold his views of the American "idea." Similarly, the needs of a society in flux over the rampant ideology of individualistic democracy was evident in such work as Hawthorne's Marble Faun and even Emerson's Essays. Who would study their views without studying the times and the personal biographies of those important figures? Professor Gilhooley has written a timely book. He has made Brownson more important to American political thought than earlier studies of that mercurial man. But his neglect of the nineteenth century's influence on other thinkers dulls rather than sharpens his study. Brownson 's views did not develop in a vacuum, nor is his changing thought understandable purely through an explication of his reviews and articles in magazines. Jon L. Wakelyn Catholic University From Union Stars to Top Hat, A Biography of the Extraordinary General James Harrison Wilson. By Edward G. Longacre. (Harrisburg: The Stackpole Company, 1972. Pp. 321. $10.00. ) James Harrison Wilson was one of the two most prominent "boy generals " of the Union. Only Custer has outshone him, at least in publicity. While Wilson's name was prominent in the days of the Civil War when he was establishing an outstanding...