The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage: High Culture vs. Democracy in Adams, James, & Santayana by Robert Dawidoff (review)

240 Canadian Review of Amencan Studies fluencing the attitudes of FDR and other policymakers than the efforts of the airmen . How important are the strategic visions,career ambitions, and political tactics of militarymen in a new era of high-technology weapons? Underwood seems poised to offer insights on this key question, but doesn't deliver. The Wingsof Democracy is useful as an introduction to early military aviation in the United States. It iswritten in an engaging style that somehow overwhelmsthe author's unfortunate tendency toward the lame conclusion and cliche. The book's main title reads like a wartime morale poster. One chapter begins with this sentence: "Events in Europe influenced President Roosevelt's thinking about warfare" (73). The growingconflict between the United States and Japan in the Far East during the interwar period is called a "test of wills" (5). By the time the concluding chapter on the events leading up to Pearl Harbor is reached, itstitle has already been predicted: "The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men." Jacob VanderMeulen National Air and Space Museum Smithsonian Institution ++++++ Robert Dawidoff. The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage: High Culture vs. Democracy in Adams, James, & Santayana. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992.Pp. 218. This study reworks some old ground to provide a seminal insight into how American democracy not onlystood in opposition to a traditional "high culture" of the European past, but indeed encouraged that undemocratic high culture to flourish . Cultural historians might well look to Dawidoff's study as a model. In hispreface to this volume in the North Carolina series on Cultural Studies of the United States, Alan Trachtenberg notes that the words "democracy" and "culture" have long been removed from historians' vocabulary because the new particularism-based on unravelling the codification of substructural forces of gender, class,and race, and the hegemonies they represent-shuns such universalist concepts. Dawidoff is surely aware of this deconstruction oftenns because his thesis is that those persons in privileged positions who most heralded their concern for democracy, often had contempt for it, and used it to set forth their own elite credentials and to marginalize "the otherness" of the common people. However, Dawidoff goes beyond this simplisticcondemnation by articulating how the dualism BookReviews 241 isactually a dynamic founded on a rhetoric of objectivitythat pervades American life to the point of being invisible. To be sure, the simplified dualism of democracy and high culture seems evident in the cases of Henry Adams, Henry James, and George Santayana. They sharedthe same formative education (at Harvard); the same sense of exile from an America that they had inherited from ancestors (who were important intellectually, asin the case of Adams and James, or at least were economically prominent, as in the case of Santayana); and-most important-they sought the "high road" of history , literature, and philosophy because of their personal disillusionment with American society. Dawidoff passes quickly over the well-travelled path of Adams's failed political expectations, that made him create the ironic stance in The Education of being unprepared to partake in the hurly-burly of a democratic culture open to political manipulation. However, in analysing Adams's novel Democracy, Dawidoff analyzeshow Mrs Lee, after a failed love affair with a senator, evidenced Adams's indictment of democracy. That is,to maintain what she believed wasthe true essence of an American democrat, according to the strategies of the novel, MrsLee must become an expatriate (and thus adhere to high culture) as this was preferable to livingin an America in which the machinations of the senator were abusing democracy . The key to the novel, argues Dawidoff, is a posture of objectivityin analysing American political democracy, a posture of processing information that goes back to deTocqueville'sDemocracy inAmerica. Dawidoff repeats many of the telling insights of de Tocqueville, as did many other commentators (such as J.P. Meyer), but he notes their context, suggested by their language, and what that language ignores. That is, de Tocqueville was a member of the ancien regime, who sought to observe what traditions he cherished might survive in the world's first democracy; he created the posture of an objective observer, but his biases...