Hostages to Despair: Panic in the Republic of Nothing, from the 1960s to the 1990s

When I prepared for graduate general exams in the 1980s, Gerald N. Grob and George Athan Billias were my best friends. The two-volume survey course supplement edited by Grob and Billias reduced each of twenty critical epochs in American history to one, fundamental, either-or question. The Puritans were “Bigots or Builders,” the American Revolution was “Revolutionary or Nonrevolutionary,” the Constitution reflected “Conflict or Consensus,” the Civil War was “Repressible or Irrepressible,” and the New Deal, “Revolutionary or Conservative.”

This approach in Interpretations of American History: Patterns and Perspectives, first published in 1967, turned American historiography into poetry and philosophy. Reducing eras to two warring perspectives generated a poetic simplicity, an economy, a lyricism, and a lightness to a discipline that so easily triggers data-avalanches of names, dates, events, and places. Underlying these admittedly oversimplified, even reductionist, clashes were fundamental, cosmic, philosophical questions about life—especially the inevitability of events and individuals’ impact on history—as well as about American history, including the enduring battles between liberty and equality, between majority rule and minority rights.

At the same time, our favorite president was Franklin D. Roosevelt. If an earlier generation had to “get right with Lincoln,” as my advisor David Herbert Donald once wrote, our scholarly “parents” and “grandparents” usually had to “get right with Roosevelt.” Many leading historians offered presidential interpretations conceived “in the shadow of FDR,” in William Leuchtenburg’s apt words.

As a result, even while trying to escape the Presidential Synthesis, we felt stuck in a pre-digital RSS feed—the Roosevelt Superhero Syndrome. We often felt we only needed to master the history of the New Deal to understand every other administration, or at least the critical benchmarks shaping the reigning interpretations. Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948) culminated with FDR, this “public instrument of the most delicate receptivity,” whose New Deal was “a series of improvisations” implemented expertly, gracefully.¹ The Age of Jackson (1945) by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., sought to make Andrew Jackson the Roosevelt of his day. And John Morton Blum explained the commanding, charismatic president who first dominated the Bully Pulpit, Theodore Roosevelt, in the context of his younger relative, defining TR as The Republican Roosevelt (1954).

Reading some of the latest monographs about the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s prompted this nostalgia, because many new books, while adequate, often lack the poetry and philosophy my graduate studies taught me to crave. More encyclopedic than fundamental, more comprehensive than cosmic, more overwhelming “Facebook feed” than targeted “WhatsApp” group, the prevailing views of the presidency are less Rooseveltian; few presidents are seen as superheroes. Today’s presidential scholars have been somewhat Reaganized, learning from Ronald Reagan to weave the contemporary culture and big ideas into a discussion of the modern presidency. But they have also been Carterized. They are so enmeshed in detail that, while they might paint an impressive pointillist portrait, they lack the grand masters’ poetic simplicity and cosmic sweep. And, rather than celebrating stories like the one about how a mortal man paralyzed by polio rose to tame a Great Depression and win a World War, today’s scholars often report how feeble recent presidents seem in the face of the country’s mounting challenges.

In truth, Randall B. Woods has a touch of the starry-eyed Roosevelt historian. His Lyndon Johnson is larger than life, reversing the currents of basic political dynamics often by wielding his domineering Johnson Treatment. But Woods’ title, Prisoners of Hope: Lyndon B. Johnson, the Great Society, and the Limits of...