Alumni Gazette

The American Revelation

Does the power of ideals ever really disappear? By Neil Baldwin ’69

In three months, it will be 40 years since September of my freshman year when I found myself in the audience of a lecture called American Intellectual History taught by a charismatic associate professor in his late 30s who had joined the faculty two years earlier.

Loren Baritz did not “lecture” in the conventional sense. As he paced back and forth across the front of the room, jacket open, tie swaying—were we in Morey Hall? I seem to remember a gently sloping theater with wooden desks —his mellifluous voice carried along a fluid succession of insights, and my impression was he did not refer to notes. I scribbled to keep up with Baritz’s stream of erudition, thinking smugly how “cool” it was that I had placed into a course restricted to upperclassmen predicated upon Baritz’s new book, City on a Hill: A History of Ideas and Myths in America.

“Abstractions do not think,” he declared on the first page of the preface. “Individual men do. . . . It is time now to view individuals, not in some reversion to a hero or devil theory of history, but as a way to continue a serious study of ideas.”

Baritz took on six iconic figures—John Winthrop, Jonathan Edwards, John Adams, John Taylor of Caroline, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville—and through exhaustive penetration of their minds revealed the formative personality of this nation.

For those of us teenagers raised on a steady diet of memorized dates and places and battles, the notion that you could approach the subject of history through a different portal was nothing short of revolutionary. I was proudly an English major—God forbid back then if you didn’t declare a major—and I liked to read, and that was what the professor demanded of us—reading, reading, and more reading. I still have his book, pages yellowed and bruised with time, and I’m bemused by the rampant underlining and effusive marginalia—“Yes!” “I totally agree!” “OK!”

The road of my career since then has been paved by the hard labor of more than a dozen books, as I have forged the way from poet to essayist to biographer to social critic to historian. With 20/20 hindsight I see that Baritz’s course revealed its significance and staying power over a long period of time.

Movers and Shapers

Baldwin’s book explores the work and legacy of 10 people he says have helped shape American identity:

Puritan leader John Winthrop, who first used the phrase “City on a Hill” to describe what would become the United States;

Revolutionary Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense;

Artist Pierre Eugène Du Simitière, who added E pluribus unum to the Great Seal of the United States;

Ralph Waldo Emerson, author of “Self-Reliance” and other essays;

Newspaper editor John L. O’Sullivan, whose “Manifest Destiny” became the cry of westward expansion;

Writer Henry George, whose book Progress and Poverty described a changing country in the late 1800s;

Activist and reformer Jane Addams, whose work greatly expanded the roles for women in American society;

Playwright Israel Zangwill, author of the 1908 play The Melting Pot;

Historian Carter Woodson, who helped launch the study of African-American history as its own discipline;

Gen. George C. Marshall, whose plan for restoring Europe helped rebuild the continent after World War II.

“Ideals cannot exist without idealists,” I wrote at the beginning of The American Revelation, a study that, like City on a Hill, includes chapters on John Winthrop and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

It is hard to write about the development of your own mind (or, more charitably, intellect) when as a nonfiction writer you spend most of your energy trying to figure out the torturous progress of your subject’s mind. Sometimes in constructing my books I have felt as if I were using the compulsion to be secluded in a room all day or to sit anonymously in a library as a pretext to look for something within myself; and yet, if you asked me in the thick of the process what that “something” was, I would be hard pressed to tell you.

William Carlos Williams, the subject of my doctoral dissertation at SUNY Buffalo and of the first biography I published, used to say, “I write to find out what I am thinking.” He also wrote that “A new world is only a new mind.”

I do know that the subject matter I choose is decided upon very carefully. If I’m going to commit myself to however many years it will take to put a book together, then I have to be unsparing with myself from the outset—do I really want to do this? The desire and motivation to write always end up more important than the actual reason for writing, which is usually not apparent until the book is done.

In the case of The American Revelation, I have continued to ruminate about the 10 ideals that I identified and about the idealists who engendered them. As we face a world that these idealists could not have imagined, why do their ideas about what America represents continue to resonate?

I am ever mindful that anyone who tries to select 10 ideals from a potentially infinite roster could come up with his or her own list. But the enduring result of the exercise would still be the same.

An ideal has the half-life of uranium. Just because it may have been forgotten or corrupted does not mean it no longer has the potential for rebirth. Perhaps we think we do not feel the power of a given ideal; nevertheless it is there, awaiting release through recognition.

In the course of becoming revisited, understood, and perhaps, if we are fortunate, re-implemented, citizen-by-citizen, an ideal will take on momentum. This is the mode of humanistic thinking I discovered as a brand-new freshman in a long-ago history course.

Neil Baldwin ’69 served for 15 years as the founding executive director of the National Book Foundation. His book, The American Revelation: Ten Ideals that Shaped Our Country from the Puritans to the Cold War, was published in June by St. Martin’s Press..