Uncle Sam as John Bull

THE NEW AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH by Louis Heren. 366 pages. Harper & Row. $7.95.

"The youth of America is its oldest tradition," Oscar Wilde quipped more than half a century ago. "It has been going on now for three hundred years."

Louis Heren, chief Washington correspondent for the Times of London, brings this geriatrics report up to date in a brisk spot checkup on the U.S. political system, loosely paralleling the classic study performed in The American Commonwealth (1888) by another sympathetic Englishman, Lord Bryce. Measured by the age of its continuous governing institutions, Heren judges the U.S. to be the second oldest country in the world; only Britain is its senior. Despite its perpetual self-image of newness, the country is really "a mature, almost ancient land."

No Bryce in scholarship, Heren offers considerable journalistic value: he provokes Americans into looking outside the framework of favorite myths. But if Americans are not the impulsive, brash upstarts that they themselves and a good deal of the world have taken them to be, just who are they? A notably patient people, Heren believes, infinitely capable of compromise, whose society is less the product of revolutionary fiat than of constant evolutionary adjustments over the years.

Divine Right. America has not just aged, according to Heren; it started old. Far from being steamy insurrectionists, the Founding Fathers were really "eighteenth century English gentlemen" who thought of themselves as engaged in a more or less orderly "transfer of power," with the presidency being merely the "lineal descendant of the colonial office of governor." In fact, Heren likes the institution of the U.S. presidency because it reminds him of "a latter-day version of a British medieval monarchy," with the Congress cast as the barons and the Supreme Court filling the role of the church. He even goes so far as to suggest that consensus is the contemporary U.S. version of the divine right of kings, and he calls presidential staff advisers "King's Men."

At this point, Americans may feel that Heren is carrying historical metaphors too far--that the price for being shaken out of American myths is to be locked into English myths. But as he approaches the present, Heren makes increasing sense by insisting that the U.S. is an improvisation upon old traditions to suit new circumstances. Thus he sees the shift of power from Congress to the presidency as a necessary response to the "complexities of modern life." The same challenges have pushed the Supreme Court beyond its once limited role and forced it to cope with forces that might otherwise have caused "a violent social upheaval."

Muddling Through. How is Keren's Uncle Sam--looking more and more like a mellowed John Bull--making out in the hectic second half of the 20th century? Beset by technological revolution and Negro unrest at home and by costly war abroad, he is still doing quite well for an old guy. In a two-out-of-three-cheers mood, Heren defends the basics of U.S. foreign policy by pointing out that "great powers have always accepted the necessity to intervene." While reminding Americans that their concern reaches from "the moon and stars down to the gutters of the slums," he adds that of no nation has it been possible to ask so much.

The essential question in Keren's mind is whether "sheer bigness" of modern government will "create problems that may well be beyond the wit of man to solve."

Right to the end, he stays true to his own myth. Presidents who can muddle through like good old English King Arthurs remain his once and future hope. Only half in irony, he concludes with an amended English toast: "The President, God Bless him."

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