Gems of American History: The Lecturer’s Art
By Walter A. McDougall.
Encounter Books, 2025.
Hardcover, 336 pages, $32.99.
Reviewed by Nicholas Callaghan.
As we rapidly approach the semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence, a question remains at the fore in our political and cultural life: What is America? Those looking for a book to better understand this question need look no further than Walter A. McDougall’s latest work, Gems of American History.
Gems is a collection of lectures given by the esteemed McDougall, who already has a list of published works any scholar would rightfully envy. But the substance of the work is what all scholars should aim to achieve in their writing. Like any good storyteller, McDougall fills the work with countless tales of famous Americans like Benjamin Franklin, and less well-known ones like Stephen Girard. Like any good academic, his work is extensively researched, the product of years of study, lectures, and writing.
The work encompasses the broad span of American history through twelve essays that start with “America’s Machiavellian Moment” and end with two essays chronicling a history of American foreign policy. The beginning is pragmatic yet hopeful, outlining how America as “Promised Land” came to be; the end is more sober, reviewing the exhausted “Crusader Nation” that exists today. Each essay can be compared to a building block, cemented on the previous level. McDougall walks with his reader through the history of America in tones both delightful and sobering.
Two themes permeate the collection. The first is McDougall’s underlying critique of American exceptionalism; or rather, Americans’ view of their own greatness. This is not to say that America is not or has not been a great nation. Rather, McDougall wants to point out our own hubris in thinking we can “make the world safe for democracy.” When we become so possessed by the greatness of our own nation, we can fail to see our own shortcomings, not to mention fail to see the world as it actually is.
In some sense, McDougall is wading into the waters debating the question of American Civic Religion, or ACR. Within the ACR, Washington is our founding deity, and the Declaration of Independence our sacred text, as McDougall outlines in “Meditations on a High Holy Day.” While reverence and patriotism for our country are worthy endeavors, they can be misplaced. McDougall points this out wryly in his chapters examining American foreign policy and grand strategy, where the “Promised Land” became the “Crusader Nation.” Led by its patron saint Woodrow Wilson, our providential land carries its divine mission to sanctify the world with the baptism of democracy. McDougall of course notes the irony that while American government is based on consent of the governed, “after 1898 Americans came to be told that Providence called them to govern others without their consent, and the Supreme Court promptly concurred.” Progressive foreign policy serves as a warning for Americans smitten with American exceptionalism. My only critique of this is that nowhere in his discussion of Wilson does McDougall mention German idealism and how the progressive view of human nature radically clashed with that of the American founders. Instead, readers are led to believe that Wilson’s progressivism somehow magically found itself growing out of American soil.
While American myths are often larger than life, McDougall deftly sifts the myth from reality throughout his essays. For example, the complex geopolitical negotiations lying behind much of America’s victories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that paved the way for American dominance in the twentieth might be called Providential—or a fluke. To some extent, I would hazard a guess that McDougall thinks it’s a mixture of both. The War of 1812 almost ended badly for the United States had Andrew Jackson not prevailed at New Orleans, and had Napoleon not escaped from his exile on Elba, thereby distracting the British from paying full attention to their former colonies. Yet circumstances gave the young United States a victory that would otherwise have been “the first and best chance Britain had to forestall the rise of the United States.”
But America is not simply a land born out of nothing in McDougall’s examination. The early colonists owed much gratitude not only to England, but Italian thinkers like Niccolò Machiavelli, whose pragmatic politics influenced later thinkers like John Locke. Here McDougall elevates theory over fact by attempting to fit the American Founding too neatly into an intellectual history whereby the colonists benefit from a line of thought that can be traced back to “a Classical Republicanism leavened by Hebrew Republicanism; a Machiavellian body quickened by a Biblical spirit; a civil government inspired by a civil religion.” While many of these influences were indeed present at the American Founding, this misses the broader theory of natural rights and natural law that pervaded the entire period. Thomas G. West’s extensive scholarship on this subject provides a helpful alternative.
Despite this small quibble, the book is excellent. McDougall surveys American history, taking aim at American myths that have formed the basis for our civic religion today, replacing them with a more pragmatic yet optimistic view of reality. Ben Franklin, the reluctant patriot, stars in “Benjamin Franklin and the Crisis of the British Empire” and a subsequent chapter on Philadelphia as central to the American Revolution. Perhaps one of my favorite chapters is McDougall’s tale of tycoon and philanthropist Stephen Girard, an American citizen who not only helped save America from ruin in 1812, but devoted himself to the service of his city and country throughout his life. Although he had a proclivity for young mistresses, a fact that McDougall wryly notes when he quotes Girard’s first biographer indicting him for “a life of serial monogamy.” Yet Girard personally tended to the sick during the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 that devastated Philadelphia. Girard also helped bankroll the United States during the War of 1812—even while under prosecution by the United States for smuggling! If that wasn’t enough, Girard personally loaned the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania $100,000 in 1829 after the state defaulted. McDougall’s final verdict on Girard’s life is that while he worked to promote his own successful career, “he worked just as intensely to promote the interests of Philadelphians, Pennsylvanians, and Americans, with the epidemic of 1793 and the War of 1812 surely his finest hours.”
The second theme McDougall explores throughout mainly the latter half of the work is American foreign policy. Implicit in this examination is a question of what America is: Are we truly a providential nation born to free the world for democracy, or are we simply another regime that, like the Venetians before us, will one day fade away? This is a sobering question, but one that any patriot must be willing to face given its practical consequences for the world we live in.
McDougall gives a pragmatic view of American foreign policy and grand strategy, offering his readers a choice between realism and idealism. American grand strategies based on the former “have been mostly successful,” while grand strategies based on the latter “have been at least partly abortive.” McDougall lays out the second half of the twentieth century as proof of the latter, with American success in the nineteenth as evidence for the former.
McDougall is careful to point out that such principles do not necessitate strict isolationism. On the contrary, America was the envy of all nations economically by the end of the nineteenth century, with her goods and citizens going all over the world. But this success came from America staying mostly out of foreign affairs. The key to successful foreign policy is avoiding foreign alliances and entanglements that might unnecessarily involve America in places we have no business belonging.
Which of course brings us back to the first theme explored, namely, America’s civil religion. America as Crusader Nation has been a disaster. Our own hubris has led us into foreign wars that have created what McDougall calls the “Vietnamization” of America. Even crises of a non-combative nature have been turned into “wars” whereby the federal government expands at an increasing rate. Better to return to America the “Promised Land,” which raised inventors like the Wright Brothers, housed devoted citizens like Stephen Girard, and convinced reluctant patriots like Benjamin Franklin that America was indeed a worthy place to call home. At the core of Gems is the notion that while America is an exceptional nation, we are not immune from the perils that beset past countries and empires. Gems serves as a reminder that our republic is indeed a fragile thing. To take American exceptionalism for granted is to fall prey to a dangerous hubris that has laid low many prior regimes throughout history. At the same time, after reading McDougall’s Gems, one understands why we might do so.
Nicholas Callaghan is a doctoral candidate in politics at Hillsdale College, where he also works in External Affairs. His work has been published in places like Pietas, Law & Liberty, and Fusion, with a co-authored chapter forthcoming on political parties as bulwarks for federalism and civic education.
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