Books March 2001
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s “Innocent Beginnings”
A review of A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950, by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
His creed is a fixture.
—Walter Bagehot on Macaulay
It was said of Macaulay’s History of England that its author never tired of drawing comparisons between the backwardness of earlier times and the progressiveness of his own. Whig orthodoxy—Whig complacency, too—became the measure of all political virtue, became, indeed, the measure of virtue itself. As a consequence—and not withstanding its high achievement in other respects—his History was said to have done much to advance the tide of moral complacency that was one of the least attractive features of the Victorian age.
Something similar might be said of the otherwise very different histories which Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has devoted to the life and times of Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Kennedy brothers. Like Macaulay’s History, Mr. Schlesinger’s...
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