After a long run of popular books about the American Revolution and its heroes, Foun­ders fever may have run its course. 

 is a compelling invitation to move on to the next great epoch of American history. The period from the end of the War of 1812 to the conclusion of the inglorious ­Mexican-­American War in 1848 was defined less by its leading ­figures—­from Kentucky statesman Henry Clay to abolitionist Frederick ­Douglass—­than by the rapid expansion of population and industry that transformed the United States into a modern ­democracy.

Daniel Walker Howe, an emeritus professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Oxford University, takes his title from the mes­sage that Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, tapped out in 1844 when he demon­strated his creation to national leaders in Washington. It was the climactic moment in a revolution in communications, Howe writes, that “laid a foundation not only for widespread economic betterment . . . but also for political democracy: in newspapers and magazines, in post offices, in nationwide move­ments to influence public opinion, and in mass political parties.” Tellingly, the telegraph had its first practical application in reporting the results of the Whig Party convention that year. The other revolution of the age was in transportation: Canals and the booming railroads unified the nation as never before. Andrew Jackson arrived in Washington for his 1829 presidential inauguration in a carriage and left eight years later on a ­train.

But Howe is having none of the convention that dubs this the Jacksonian Era. Universal white male suffrage, the great political achieve­ment of the era, owed little to Old Hickory. Howe’s Jackson is a vain, strutting, ­power-­hungry figure, an imperial president if ever there was one. A ­die-­hard white supremacist, he worked to extend slavery and regarded the rising abolitionists as “monsters.” When the new printing and paper technologies gave rise to a vigorous abolitionist press, Jackson successfully connived with his postmaster general to prevent delivery of its publications in the South, perhaps “the largest peacetime violation of civil liberty in U.S. history.” With guns and bogus treaties, his brutal policy of Indian removal drove some 46,000 Native Americans from their lands east of the Missis­sippi to make way for white settlers. “The president personally intervened frequently,” Howe writes, “always on behalf of haste, sometimes on behalf of economy, but never on behalf of humanity, honesty, or careful planning.”

Many academic historians only grudgingly acknowledge the influence of religion in American history, but Howe is careful to trace its powerful currents. The reforming Protestant spirit animated the nation’s belief in progress, rationality, and ­science—­it was no accident that Morse chose a phrase from the Bible for his message—­and reform campaigns such as those against slavery and Indian removal. The era’s final year saw the birth of the modern drive for women’s rights at the Seneca Falls Convention in upstate New York, sparked in part by the Quaker evangelist Lucretia Mott (who thought the ordination of women a more important goal than suffrage).

Howe illuminates the era’s great ­debates—­should the federal government promote econ­omic modernization by investing in roads and other “internal improvements,” operating a second Bank of the United States, and maintaining protective tariffs?—and shines a welcome light on many ­less ­known subjects, such as the Anti-Masonic movement. He incorporates material from the past few decades’ “history from below,” with brief excursions on subjects as various as slave rebellions, the advance of dentistry, and minstrel shows, but never fails to keep his eye on the larger events, trends, and people that defined the ­era.

Connoisseurs of scholarly debates about the period will find plenty of delicacies, but Howe’s arguments—America really is an “exceptional” nation, for example—are submerged in his masterly narrative. Even at more than 800 pages, this book is somehow still a marvel of compression, with vast amounts of scholarship integrated into a vivid history that shows Americans their nation in all its greatness, and its occasional ­squalor.

"What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848"

 by Daniel Walker Howe, Oxford University Press, 2007. 

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The era usually referred to as “Jacksonian” may actually owe little to Old Hickory.

The Age of Jackson, Minus Its Leading Man

It’s almost impossible now to imagine an America in which a plant breeder could become a national celebrity and idol of millions. But that’s precisely the story of Luther Burbank (1849–1926), “the Wizard of Santa Rosa,” as he was styled in countless magazine articles. Helen Keller, the king of Belgium, and football star Red Grange made pilgrimages to his home in California’s Sonoma Valley. A photo from 1915 shows Burbank sitting on the steps of his house in genial conversation with the two men who were most nearly his peers, Thomas Edison and Henry ­Ford.

, Jane S. Smith, a former academic and the author of a book on the history of the polio vaccine, blows the dust of a million ancient textbooks off Burbank’s remarkable story. “No matter what kind of hero you wanted,” Smith writes, “it seemed Luther Burbank was a leading candidate”—scientist, sage, guardian of nature, steward of New England virtues, herald of the California ­dream.

"No matter what kind of hero you wanted," writes biographer Jane S. Smith, "it seemed Luther Burbank was a leading candidate."

The association with Edison and Ford is telling. Born into comfortable circumstances in Lancaster, Massachusetts (near the birth­place of Johnny Appleseed), Burbank was inspired by Charles Darwin’s 

The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domes­tication

 (1869) to see that he could use his love of nature to join the ranks of the era’s heroic inven­tor/entrepreneurs. Reading Darwin’s meticulous documentation of how plants evolved in response to environmental changes, Burbank realized that a shrewd and energetic Yankee could speed up the process by “perturbing” nature and bending it to human ­needs.

Even before he lit out for California in 1875, Burbank created the ­blight-­resistant Russet Burbank potato, still one of the world’s most widely grown varieties. Settling in Santa Rosa and later establishing his experimental farm in nearby Sebastopol, Burbank arrived just as California was being transformed from a raw frontier of cattle ranches and wheat farms into a new Eden, yielding fruits, vegetables, and nuts, and he would play a leading role in this transformation, creating more than 800 varieties, including everything from the Satsuma plum to the Shasta daisy, as well as more exotic offerings such as white blackber­ries and a ­tomato-­potato cross. Most breeders pursued slow improvements of existing vari­eties; Burbank aggressively used tech­niques such as crossbreeding and grafting to create entirely new ­varieties.

Burbank himself was an exotic hybrid. Fanatically ­hard-­working and a shameless ­self-­promoter, he nevertheless exuded an easygoing charm and an almost contagious serenity. In the California sun, the ­nature-­loving boy weaned on the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau ripened into something of a West Coast guru. In 1907, divorced and childless after a disastrous ­six-­year marriage (his adoring mother and sister kept house for him until he remarried at 67), he published a popular child-­rearing guide in which he opposed formal schooling before age 10 and expounded on the value of exposing the young to nature. He called it 

Burbank’s pioneering hybrid­ization of the New England and California sensibilities is one of several subjects Smith could have analyzed more deeply in her fine (and admirably concise) biography. Another is the change in the status of science that Burbank’s story ­illustrates.

The late 19th century brought the rise of agricultural science, and its leading lights were eager to bring the legendary plant breeder into the fold. In 1904, the Carnegie Institution awarded Burbank an ­open-­ended grant of a ­then-­astound­ing $10,000 per year; that same year, Stanford University named him to its faculty. Yet by 1910, both the grant and the appointment were with­drawn. Burbank had begun his work before Mendelian genetics that revealed the mechanism of inheritance became widely accepted, and he rejected some of its sterner dictates (in some cases correctly, Smith notes). There were other problems, such as Burbank’s haphazard records of his experiments, but it was his mysticism that probably made a break inevitable. Not only did he talk to his plants, he believed that all organ­isms are connected to one another by larger forces that he variously described as electrical or magnetic, or simply as “vibrations.” There was no room for such talk in the new ­science.

Burbank never grew very rich from his creations. Plants did not enjoy protection under U.S. patent law until 1930, so he was forced to sell each new variety to commercial growers with no hope of royalties. Today’s bioengi­neered crops—including the Bt Russet Burbank ­potato—­do enjoy such protection. What they and their very ­un-­Burbank-­like creators do not enjoy is the rapturous admiration of a public that believes in the unalloyed goodness of science.

The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants

 by Jane S. Smith, Penguin, 354 pp, 2010.

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Green Thumb and Then Some

When I traveled to the struggling ski-resort town of Davis, West Virginia, this past winter, all the locals I met seemed to want to know how I had gotten there. They talked about the highway that has been inching their way for years. Most looked forward to the flood of tourists and prosperity they thought the project would bring, but others saw only the prospect of unwelcome change. Although Ted Conover writes about far more exotic places than hard scrabble West Virginia in 

, he sees its conflict everywhere: The coming of new roads distills the modern dilemma over progress and its discontents.

Somewhere in Conover’s mind is the analytical intelligence of a social scientist, but his book is mostly a bracing immersion in a half-dozen places that have been or will be changed by highways, with a few brief excursions into subjects such as the history of Roman road building. In Africa, he joins truckers hauling freight between the Kenyan port of Mombasa and the African interior, the route many believe carried AIDS to the wider world. China, the West Bank, and the Peruvian Amazon are among his other destinations.

In the tiny Himalayan village of Reru, the village headman consults a Tibetan Buddhist monk before giving the signal that a small group can set out on the treacherous Zanskar River—the ice “just the frozen skin of a hibernating giant below”—for the outer world. In the wintertime, the river is the only way to get to larger towns. Conover does not need to point out what we can plainly see: The road the Indian government is building to the Zanskar valley will undermine the authority of the headman and the monk, along with the villagers’ traditional culture.

There is a refreshing absence of sentimentality in Conover’s writing, but at times one wishes the social scientist in him would step forward with clipboard in hand and ask some direct questions. What do the villagers think about the oncoming road? The debate is left instead to a Swedish linguist who sees only purity in the Himalayan villages and corruption in the West, and a local teacher, who fiercely contends that the people of Reru are steeped in “too much culture, too much religion,” and lacking in the doctors, teachers, and new ideas that the road will bring. As for Conover, he is sad to see a local family replace its beautiful thatched roof with a corrugated metal one, but, he asks, can you tell people they must live with a leaky roof for the sake of their traditional culture? The linguist’s stance ultimately depends on an idealized, leak-free vision of Reru’s way of life.

In the West Bank, Conover joins a Palestinian student named Khaldoon as he negotiates the web of checkpoints, patrols, and limited-access high ways that are effectively restricted to Israeli settlers. (in his typically fair-minded way, however, he weaves in a sympathetic portrait of an Israeli officer.) Conover’s last book, 

 (2000), was about Sing Sing prison, and he sees a similarity between the two places. By dividing space into “discrete pieces and forbidding or restricting movement between them,” the overseers can protect them selves while punishing the prisoners. “A blocked road,” Conover writes, “is thwarted intention.”

Roads are about freedom. In China, Conover rides shotgun with hard-living factory owner Zhu Jihong on a seven-day road trip with a group of joy-riding nouveaux riches, frequently reaching speeds of 100 mph or more. Like Americans in the 1950s and ’60s, the Chinese can’t get enough cars or build enough roads. Their high-speed rail projects may wow us, but in the next 25 years the government plans to build a freeway network bigger than the U.S. interstate system. The Chinese are going to create a riot of traffic and spew pollutants into the atmosphere, Conover concedes, but who are we to tell them they cannot have the kind of freedom—and fun—we have had? Freedom is the essence of progress, whether in China or West Virginia, and its costs and sheer, inescapable messiness are not reason enough to keep anyone at home.

"The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World, and the Way We Live Today"

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Freedom to travel is the essence of progress, and the open road remains the most alluring mode of transportation around the world. 

Paths of Progress

Daniel Patrick Moynihan was the kind of figure who almost makes you wish there were more intellectuals in American political life. The problem is, there was only one Moynihan. Professor, bureaucrat, presidential adviser, ambassador, and finally U.S. senator from New York from 1977 to 2001, he could as easily write a White House memo citing Jean Paul Sartre as a warm note to Tammany Hall’s Carmine DeSapio, telling the imprisoned New York City Democratic Party boss in 1972 how sorry he was to hear that federal authorities had denied his request for parole. “If you are ever around Boston,” he wrote, “you should know you have a friend on the Harvard faculty.”

At the time, Moynihan (1927–2003) was enjoying one of his brief sojourns in the academy, having served as domestic policy adviser to President Richard M. Nixon and in lower-level jobs under Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy. Soon he would become the U.S. ambassador to India, and then ambassador to the United Nations, where his angry, eloquent (and unsuccessful) crusade against that body’s infamous 1975 resolution declaring that “Zionism is racism” made him a hero to many and probably won him his seat in the Senate.

Just to list these accomplishments—and the list does not include his 18 books and much else—is enough to leave one panting for breath. I’m happy to report that this collection of Moynihan’s letters, journal entries, and other writings, superbly edited by former 

 reporter and editor Steven R. Weisman, is an apt, even riveting testament to Moynihan’s public life. Weisman’s succinct introductions weave the entries into something like a Moynihan memoir. The book displays all the man’s energy, wit, wide-ranging interests, and determination, along with (to Weisman’s great credit) his weaknesses—his insecurities, political flattery, and occasional whining. It’s as vivid a portrait of a political life as you could ask for.

Some have called Moynihan a gadfly, but the writings collected in this volume underline the constancy of his concerns. Moynihan’s father deserted the family when Moynihan was 10, and his boyhood in a single-parent working-class family, in Manhattan’s rough-and-tumble Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, influenced everything he thought. In 1965, as an aide in the Johnson Labor Department, Moynihan wrote the memo that still, for many, defines his career. Alarmed by the rapidly rising number of black families without a father present, Moynihan called for “national action”—and was branded a racist for pointing out the unpleasant facts about the plight of the black family.

Moynihan’s reality-based politics made him a critic of orthodox liberalism as it developed during the 1960s. One of the most extraordinary entries in this volume is his anguished letter to Edward Kennedy after the assassination of Robert Kennedy, accusing the slain leader of having abandoned the “tradition of stable, working-class urban politics”—“your people,” he reminded Ted—for the voguish liberal “salons of Central Park West.” (It appears the letter was not sent.)

Moynihan followed his own path. He worked steadily for welfare reform, yet bitterly opposed the Clinton administration’s 1996 welfare overhaul as disastrously harsh. (He wasn't always right.) After the end of the Cold War, he campaigned relentlessly for a larger role for international law and against excessive government secrecy and the CIA, which he regarded as an incompetent monstrosity.

One cannot turn many pages in this collection before coming upon yet another letter or memo penned in pursuit of one more of Moynihan’s abiding concerns: his goal of creating public architecture symbolizing the “dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability” of American government, and especially his long campaign, inspired by President Kennedy, to revive a bedraggled Pennsylvania Avenue. He prevailed. The nation’s splendid “Main Street” runs past my office at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, an institution Moynihan was instrumental in creating, which itself is only one tenant in a large, handsome Moynihan-inspired building bordering the avenue. These are stirring achievements.

Moynihan was fortunate enough to see a good number of his words become deeds, but even those that did not are a powerful reminder in these rhetoric-filled times of the importance of considered ideas in public life—and the rare people who put them there.

"Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary"

 edited by Steven R. Weisman, PublicAffairs, 2010. 

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Daniel Patrick Moynihan was the kind of figure who almost makes you wish there were more intellectuals in American political life. But there could only be one Daniel Patrick Moynihan. 

The Thinking Man's Politician

Sitting at the family breakfast table late one recent morning

, I looked around bemusedly at the band of sleepy, late rising college friends my daughter Liz had assembled: Sabeen, a Pakistani American; Daniel, a Korean American; Brinay, an African American; and Jeff, a white guy who is gay. It is the sort of scene that would have been unimaginable, impossibly exotic, to whoever owned my suburban house just a few decades ago. Now it’s the kind of tableau that could probably be seen in any house in the neighborhood. Utterly conventional.

Nineteen seventy-six was the year I returned to as I surveyed my breakfast guests. That was America’s bicentennial, and the year the first issue of 

 appeared in print. How much America has changed since then, I thought, and as troubled as our national situation now seems, you couldn’t pay me enough to go back to 1976, splendid though it was. America was the great subject in the heart of the 

’s founding editor, Peter Braestrup, the ever-grateful son of immigrants who had found refuge from the Nazis in the United States, and he established certain themes that have animated the magazine ever since, themes that were already my own when I joined the staff years ago. So it wasn’t mainly the diversity of my little breakfast crowd that struck me most that Saturday morning, but what it represented. Freedom. Change. Opportunity.

America is hardly perfect, but it is remarkable—let’s say exceptional—in the way it constantly opens new doors, whether for individuals and groups or for economic and technological innovations. The belief that one has the freedom to create one’s own life, regardless of family background, social status, or any other factor, is uniquely strong in the United States. Earlier this year, the Pew Global Attitudes Project reported responses to a revealing survey question, one that pollsters have posed for many years, always with essentially the same results. Asked if “success in life is determined by forces outside our control,” 72 percent of Germans said yes, as did 57 percent of French and 50 percent of Spaniards. Among Americans, only 36 percent agreed.

America is hardly perfect, but it is remarkable in the way it constantly opens new doors.

Yet as the great social scientist Seymour Martin Lipset wrote in these pages a dozen years ago (“Still the Exceptional Nation?” Winter 2000), American exceptionalism is “distinctly double-edged.” The individualist, achievement-oriented American Creed yields exceptional wealth and opportunity for upward mobility but at the cost of higher rates of poverty, crime, and economic inequality than other Western nations. America’s levels of taxation are much lower than in other advanced societies and the state less interventionist, but its social welfare system is not as generous. Its less fettered capitalism insures that the unemployment rate is much lower—but so are benefits for the unemployed.

There is a painfully simple yet often overlooked principle at work here, one that is increasingly absent from the nation’s political discourse: Virtually every good thing involves tradeoffs. That idea has always been central to the ethos of the WQ, expressed through our commitment to presenting both sides of the issues. In order to make wise choices, we need to confront what may be lost as well as what might be gained. Pancakes at breakfast are a wonderful thing, but they will make you fat. Opportunity is a blessing, but it comes at the cost of inequality.

Since the 1970s, there has been a steady shift in that tradeoff at the heart of American life. The economic inequality we accept as the price of freedom and opportunity has been steadily increasing. Fabulous opportunities remain wide open at the upper levels of American society, from corporations and hedge funds to the media and the political elite, to an extent no other country can match. Talent is still welcome at the very top, no matter where it comes from. Just ask Barack Obama. For many, though, a ceiling has been lowered.

For a long time, it was reasonable to accept the rise of economic inequality as a necessary but temporary tradeoff

. Historically, times of fundamental economic change have yielded lots of outsize winners for a number of years before greater balance was restored, and the developments of the past few decades—the rise of globalization and new information technologies, with all the “creative destruction” they have yielded—are nothing if not fundamental. But the imbalance that began in the 1970s has not stopped growing, and it shows little sign of abating.

My daughter Liz and her college-educated friends will not necessarily have an easy time of it in the future, but for them the sky still really is the limit. And many of those who lack a college degree still have solid prospects. But there is a whole class of people for whom the new terms of our national tradeoff are completely inaccessible. America’s education system has many shortcomings and it has let down a lot of people, but none nearly so much as those who do not even make their way through it.

In 1976, it was plausible to think that a person without a high school degree could hope for a decent life. It no longer is. There is little chance for such people to make their way in the modern economy, much less to participate as citizens in our public life and to live fulfilling lives. And there is a national cost. Especially at a time of growing international economic competition, these are lives we cannot afford to waste. Yet 25 to 30 percent of America’s young people drop out of school. In hard numbers, that means, for example, that 1.3 million of the 4.3 million Americans who entered high school in 2006 failed to graduate in 2010. This is a national tragedy. It is also, more than anything I can think of, a national disgrace.

A telling fact about American social and economic mobility is that for all the openness and fluidity at the top, the very bottom is a sticky pit. There are many reasons for this, but none greater than the fact that so many of the nation’s poorest people lack high school diplomas. About 40 percent of children born into the lowest fifth of the income distribution will find themselves in the same place as adults. Few of those who rise will go very far. According to researchers Julia Isaac, Isabel Sawhill, and Ron Haskins, only one in three will reach the middle class. By contrast, 60 percent of children born into the top two fifths can expect to live in comparable affluence when they grow into adulthood.

The process of renewal and reinvigoration has continued, often unappreciated and under the surface. Who, after all, would go back to 1976?

Yet there is good news. Dropout rates are notoriously difficult to calculate and numbers are often contradictory, but it is clear that high school graduation rates are on the rise, climbing according to one count from about 70 percent a dozen years ago to 77 percent in 2008.

This is a case of American strength meeting American weakness. Ever since the Reagan administration raised the alarm about the state of education 

, a slow revolution has been building in the nation’s schools. This being the United States, the challenge could not be addressed by diktat from on high. While the federal government has played an important galvanizing role—the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind legislation, the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative, which has awarded $4 billion to innovative states since 2009—most of the energy has come from below, in the form of state and local reforms and countless experiments by local school districts, nonprofit organizations, and education entrepreneurs of many stripes, such as the leaders of Teach For America. There are now, for example, more than 5,000 charter schools in the United States, startups operating largely independently of local school boards and pursuing a huge variety of education strategies. Some are wonderful, others are terrible and are destined to be shut down. All are products of the American capacity for experimentation and innovation.

Much more needs to happen. Graduation rates must be pushed up (Japan graduates 95 percent of its young people) and high school should be made more academically rigorous. Yet we ought to abandon the harmful fantasy that all young people need to go on to college. Dignified work is available to those who don’t wear white collars. Pathways must be opened so that students who are not going past grade 12 can get a real education while also preparing for decent careers. It is a lot to ask, but experiments have begun in some communities and there is no shortage of ideas about what to do next.

Slowly, America’s schools are reinventing themselves. It is not only the schools. From its beginning, the 

 has had an abiding concern with American institutions and the elites who are responsible for them—the schools and universities, the news media, the military, the organs of government—and the history of the past 36 years has not often seemed uplifting, to say the least. Yet the process of renewal and reinvigoration has continued, often unappreciated and under the surface. Who, after all, would go back to 1976?

Looking around the breakfast table that Saturday morning, I thought that we don’t need to be overly concerned about the kinds of futures Liz, Sabeen, Daniel, Brinay, and Jeff will have or the kind of country they will inherit. And there is every reason to be very hopeful about what lies in store for their less fortunate peers. They are all endowed with what George Washington called “the sacred fire of Liberty” and they all live in a land ready to give full compass to their talents. Yep, I said to myself, just another morning in America.

is the former editor of The Wilson Quarterly.

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For 36 years, it has been The Wilson Quarterly's central preoccupation: What's on the horizon for the great American experiment?

Steven Lagerfeld