U.S. Protestantism's foremost theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr.*has written a thoughtful and hardheaded essay on his country's political philosophy. The Irony of American History (Scribner; $2.50) is an odd-sounding title—most native commentaries on U.S. politics stress such words as "challenge," "promise" or "hope." Niebuhr uses his word advisedly. Not so final as tragedy, not so hopeless as pathos, the ironic view is a Christian study of the "unconscious weakness" by which classic American strengths and virtues have subtly developed into shortcomings.
The ironies in the U.S. position, as Historian Niebuhr sees them, are sad and deep. There is "the irony of an age of science producing global and atomic conflicts and an age of reason culminating in a life-and-death struggle between two forms of 'scientific' politics . . . We are drawn into a situation where the paradise of our domestic security is suspended in a hell of global insecurity . . . Our own nation . . . is less potent to do what it wants in the hour of its greatest strength than it was in the.days of its infancy." Connecting all of these incongruities—and the cause of some—is an unrealistic and complacent American "idealism," boastful of its superior virtue, and still dangerously confident that it can order events as neatly as its people can build a new factory or produce a Thanksgiving Day proclamation.
God's American Israel. Niebuhr finds that the roots for this idealism, ironically, were planted by Thomas Jefferson and John Calvin. In the days of the Founding Fathers, the Jeffersonians, good disciples of the French Enlightenment, believed that "nature's God" would always favor a nation which had broken with the tyranny of the Old World to live by the light of reason in the New. The Calvinist
Puritans of New England saw their country as "God's American Israel," where the Lord would create "a new heaven and a new earth." On this point, the two philosophies blended.
The early American conviction of divine sponsorship grew with the richness of the land and the vastness of the frontier. Prosperity was regarded as a divine right, to be worked for—but always ultimately awarded. The beloved combination of morals and mechanics called the "Pursuit of Happiness" became an article of national faith. So did a strange feeling of national "innocency." The Founding Fathers had permanently crystallized the images of "a virtuous new democratic world" and "a vicious tyrannical older world" of Europe. Down to the 20th century, Americans grew up with a feeling that a higher group morality, as well as a higher standard of living, distinguished them from the rest of mankind.