The Admiral's Legacy

THE OXFORD HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE by Samuel Eliot Morison. 1,150 pages. Oxford. $12.50.

In compiling this 500,000-word chronicle, Historian Morison had the amiable notion of lacing the chapters with the appropriate music of each period. He starts off with an old Navajo war chant and the Salve Regina sung by the Spanish sailors bound for the New World. He ends, so many chants and prayers, hymns and ditties, marches and dirges later, with Camelot.

For all its charm, this Broadway show tune makes an oddly off-key conclusion to a sequence that began on uncharted seas and in that vast, primeval, nearly empty continent. This sums up both the virtues and the faults of Morison's volume. It does present the incomparable sweep of the American story in the words of a justly respected historian. But it is also often disappointing and, as the account approaches the present, it becomes superficial and at times trivial.

Mongols & Puritans. The book is heavily indebted to retired Admiral Morison's earlier works; in fact, it is built largely around their sturdy bones.

His 1927 Oxford History of the United States, a two-volume survey of the U.S. from 1783 to 1917, melts detectably into this volume. There are recognizable other debts to By Land and by Sea, a 1953 collection of essays, to Admiral of the Ocean Sea, his definitive and immensely readable life of Columbus published in 1942, and to his exemplary 15-volume History of U.S. Naval Operations in World War II.

At his best, Morison has the power to lift his country's past from textbook constriction and invest it with his own insight and understanding. He is notably effective in writing about the Puritan settlers, whom he interestingly compares with 19th century Roman Catholic Americans, about the vigorous life of the colonial seaports, about the true spirit of the American Revolution "a civil war," he calls it, reluctantly entered upon by men who "were thinking of preserving and securing the freedom they already enjoyed." Yet he is oddly disappointing on the Civil War, and some of his afterthoughts seem to trespass on his earlier writings; one of his new judgments comes perilously close to being an apologia for slavery when he points out that the slaves in America were really better off than they had been in Africa.

Freeways & Broadway. Although the book is terse and sometimes cramped, Morison takes time for digressions--for instance, an unimportant but charming section on the sporting life of New England gentlemen. Perhaps the book's dominant note is nostalgia, and Morison avoids involvement in most concerns of other historical theorists, including the urbanization of America, the new influence of the Supreme Court.

In a hasty appraisal of the contemporary scene, he" has added comments on everything from the alarming decline in morality to the regrettable decline of the housemaid. Most of those views, like his language--"marplot," "whilst," "burthen," "blatherskite," "milch cows" --have a 19th century texture. "Probably some oversexed persons were injured by their efforts to be faithful to the Christian ethic," writes Morison of what he calls the sexual upheaval. "But how many of the 'pure in heart' have been ruined by the present stimuli striking at them every day and from every direction, urging them to surrender to the cruder demands of the flesh?" Freeway construction appalls him--"No home is safe." So does the modern stage: "The favorite Broadway themes are chicanery, murder, rape and incest."

Apart from his descriptions of naval warfare, Morison is perhaps most zestful in delineating American party politics. Although his sympathies clearly lie with Jeffersonian democracy, he can fairly assess the virtues of Hamiltonian conservatism. Still, at times he abandons his detachment: "From 1912 on, the Democratic Party replaced the Republican as the party of new ideas and positive leadership."

His evaluations of recent Presidents offer few new insights. Even his view of Franklin Roosevelt leans on a conventional paradox: Roosevelt not only "saved the capitalistic system," but he was "the most effective American conservative since Alexander Hamilton, the most successful democrat since Lincoln." Apparently Morison lacked the time to assay the late John F. Kennedy; the book only reveres his memory.

Morison, now 77, produced this volume, as he says in the preface, as "a legacy to my countrymen." But his countrymen have long since received the legacy in the historian's impressive lifework that preceded it.

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