John C. Calhoun (review)

78CIVIL WAR HISTORY Cambria Company's Pennsylvania farm boys, who had never seen a Bessemer converter, proved to be better workmen than thoroughly-trained British workers who had been imported by Cambria's nine competitors. Again, some might be taken aback when Morison seems almost to agree with the naval officers in the Wampanoag affair [p. 119]; or when, in discussing modern times, he argues for a planned slow-down of the technological process. A machine, he points out, tends to create its own environment and draws men into it; and since a machine is designed to do only a part of what a whole man can do, it tends to wear down the parts of a man not included in the design. The message is simply the familiar one, and I think a truism by now, that with all our mechanical triumphs we have yet to answer the question asked by Thomas Huxley: "What are you going to do with all these things?" in a way that takes satisfactory account of the whole of man, including his inner needs. Although the question remains sound, his answer is no more satisfactory than all the others that have been given for the past hundred years or more. The society as a whole needs to become an "adaptive" one which looks upon change as a normal condition. Society needs to preserve an experimental attitude toward new things, to try them out in a variety of ways, and then work them into a satisfactory context by a series of conscious choices among a wide range of alternatives. This is excellent advice when directed to an individual, but without means of implementation, it boils down to very little when directed to an entire society. Nevertheless, if one does not take the promise of a program very seriously, this remains an excellent book for what it does do. Morison gives us, in extremely readable form, a number of views of human beings acting and reacting as they face the ominous prospect of changing circumstances. Moreover, the analysis of why they acted as they did is, in most cases, penetrating and sound. If he has failed to provide a workable program, so has everyone else. And in his role as historian, this is a job that he took on gratuitously anyway. George H. Daniels Northwestern University John C. Calhoun. By Richard N. Current. (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966. Pp. xxx, 182. $3.95. ) With the publication of Richard N. Current's John C. Calhoun for the Great American Thinkers series, the interpretation of the South Carolina statesman has come full circle. Eighty-odd years ago, Hermann von Hoist was writing of the 'lurid intensity" that surrounded the name of Calhoun. He was so much the personification of an idea, the evil that was slavery, the cause that was lost. Over the past thirty-five years, reappraisals of the great Carolinian have poured from the presses; scholars as diverse in their thinking as Russell Kirk and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., have united in viewing him as a patriot who deplored the sectional tragedy that he foresaw and as a philosopher whose insights are still valid. BOOK REVIEWS79 Now a revisionist sets out to revise the revisionists. Dr. Current presents a clear, lucid exposition of the complexities of Calhoun's thought, tracing its origins, fathoming his motivations, dissecting his errors; but he falls into one cardinal error himself. He writes from bias; his book is not so much an analysis as a tract, written under the shadow of the Civil Rights Acts, and seeing Calhoun in terms of the Negro question today, as the abolitionists saw him in terms of the slavery question yesterday. Once again, Calhoun appears as the evil genius whose arguments (as indeed, did those of Jefferson and the early Webster) led straight to secession and civil war. Dr. Current resorts to moral judgments; not for him the tolerance of an Abraham Lincoln, who could say that the southern people were exactly what the northerners would be in their position. He sees Calhoun as a secessionist, not as the national leader who used threats of secession as a tactic, not an end; and who...