The Man Who Sees Tomorrow

The story of the redemptive content of the Obama bid and victory has been told many times,and most often very well. Schama is not just among the liveliest of them,he is also incredibly inventive and insightful.
As is the custom with British historians teaching in American universities,The American Future is based on a television programme Schama did. (Curiously,the book is only just out in its American edition.) Schama reaches into the past to find telling historical detail and biographies that illustrate the best of America’s striving for a different future. If this kind of telling appears to be a liberal statement of American exceptionalism,so be it. Because it a robust telling of the debates that underpinned an actualisation of that exceptionalism.

Schama looks at various aspects of the American crisis,a crisis that gained traction as the presidential campaign romped to its closing stages,with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 confirming the coming recession,forebodings of which the candidates must have gleaned as they canvassed coast to coast. In fact,once the Democrats and the Republicans “had settled on candidates not cut from the conventional cloth of political fabric”,they had to,for just a little while,come together in a unified plan to take emergency legislative measures to deal with the crisis.

Can the overlap of so much turbulence rob Obama of his potential? Schama worries. But after his stories of extraordinary persons in the far reaches of American history have been told,he can claim hope,with Obama’s very election providing the scaffolding: “… this is a moment in which the two forces that made America formidable— capitalist energy and democratic liberalism—get weighed in the balance. That America can depend on the robustness of its free society,and the demonstration of political inclusiveness supplied by the election,to arm itself against the social unhappiness to come,is just as well. For in most other respects,it’s impossible for any attentive historian not to notice that the proliferation of multiple crises looks suspiciously like a pre-revolutionary moment.” In other words,where 18th century France and late 20th century Russia failed to keep their balance amidst imperial overreach,the US is likely to manage. It should do so,believes Schama,because its own founding revolution set it apart: it made the country reliant on credible and representative institutions,it enshrined liberalism in the constitution,and it gave America a tradition of fierce contestation of the values that must sustain government action.

Among the examples Schama uses to arrive at this conclusion,casting historical light on its current debates on its wars,race,immigration and the economy,the chapter on war is the most engrossing. He uses the founding of the military academy at West Point to illustrate the tension between the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian visions of military preparedness. An embodiment of Jeffersonian liberalism is found in the life story of Montgomery Meigs,a man with long military lineage who supervised the construction of Washington Aqueduct and the dome of the Capitol building and was quartermaster general of the military during the civil war.

Jeffersonian idealism was always in tension with the more muscular Hamiltonian way,and Schama argues that the latter took deeper root after World War II. But in a consolatory moment,and in what must have been even more dramatic on television,he meets a descendent of Montgomery Meigs by the same name who took part in the First Gulf War,commanded the NATO stabilisation force in Bosnia in 1998 and now teaches a university course on “Why presidents go to war when they don’t have to”.
Schama’s enthusiasm for the American future may at times appear too unbridled and deficient in caveats. But it is never boring.