The Persistent Errand

A NATION SO CONCEIVED, by Rienhold Niebuhr and Alan Heimert, Scribner's, 155 pp., $3.50.

The great fact to be learned about about American history, the idea that moves any study of the American mind, is this: that America was begun on purpose, that it began deliberately, for a reason. This sense of mission, first religious, then political, has persisted from the beginning. Perry Miller has defined the mission for colonial New England in his rich metaphor of an errand into the wilderness. Seeing a play on the word "errand," he has explained how the first Puritan settlers came to America running one sort of errand, for a higher power--the Puritan Church in England--and how they ended the seventeenth century running, necessarily, an errand that was its own cause and justification.

The Messianic Conception

In A Nation So Conceived, Reinhold Niebuhr and Alan Heimert explore this peculiar Messianic conception Americans have of their own history. The authors organize their material into three major categories: 1. "The quest for national unity and identity." 2. The impact of industrialism on an agrarian state. 3. "The transformation of the nation's original sense of mission to its present sense of responsibility...." Each of these categories is treated in a single chapter, and the entire book runs only to 155 pages. Such brevity on so sweeping a theme creates difficulties. The authors present their work in a wonderfully clear, concise style, but often their conciseness serves only to conceal complicated and important points. The book will excite specialists in American studies with its scholarship and its implications for further study. But a non-specialist can only be confused by sentences like this one:

A too consistent Protestantism would not be consistent in the sense that it would be destined to swing between a cultural obscurantism of orthodox Protestantism, intent on guarding the 'revealed truth' of the Bible, and a liberalism tending to equate the Christian gospel with a noble idealism demanding that all men become as Jesus Christ was.

One of the best examples of original scholarship in the book is contained in the discussion of the quest for national identity. Examining the idea of American unity, the authors make new use of Jonathan Edwards' long-neglected thought. They disclose how Edwards proposed in 1747 that all the colonies, from Maine to Georgia, join in a common day of prayer and fasting. Edward's sense of American unity goes far beyond a simple exploitation of geographic or economic entity. "His delineation of union as 'one of the most beautiful and happy things on earth' informed, for more than a century, a distinctive American nationalism. His declaration that the 'life and soul' of true union is neither interest nor mutual prosperity but 'love of the brethren' controlled, for an equal span of years, the prevailing American definition of patriotism." They go on to show the persistence of this element of the errand, the drive toward American union, in men like Whitman and Lincoln.

But the book is more than just a review of the American past. It is also an indictment of America in the present. As up-to-date as the Katanga Province crisis, A Nation So Conceived probes at some length the political consequences of America's sense of mission in the Twentieth century.

The Errand Today

Recent history, according to Niebuhr and Heimert, reveals two such consequences: a sometimes embarrassing anti-imperialism and an unreasonable belief that American constitutional democracy will--and should--serve for all peoples. "The challenge," they explain, "is so great because it meets a nation which has always been certain of its virtue and which has a new sense of its power." The ambiguities of our present situation in international politics, they say, is in many ways a result of our phenomenally rapid transformation from relative obscurity to world leadership. "In every aspect of our national life we have been forced to re-enact in a specific drama the old pattern of humanity, for we have been driven from the garden of Eden and an angel with a flaming sword has barred our return."

John William Ward, in The Reporter, describes the book as a latter- day "jeremiad," that first peculiarly American literary form wherein Puritan reverends took their congregations to task for real--or imagined--sinfulness. His description of this aspect of the book is particularly apt. William James defined the uneasiness that produces religious feeling as "a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand." His observation applies to nations as well, especially to one so given to jeremiads as our own. Historians, like individuals, tell and retell their stories, hoping finally to tell them right, to arrive at a definition of the past which carries its own sort of eloquence. And even as impending national maturity crowds the historical errand into new postures, the grand old jeremiad, when well told, retains its impact, and its relevance