The New World at Middle Age

By John Skow

AMERICAN JOURNEY by Richard Reeves

Simon & Schuster; 399 pages; $15.95

On Dec. 5, 1831, a steamboat got caught in Ohio River ice. The 26-year-old passenger from Paris, Alexis de Tocqueville, dispassionately wrote in his notebook, "Just now the vessel is cracking from poop to prow." There was nothing to do but go ashore, and once there, no way except by walking to reach Louisville, 25 miles away over a snow-covered trail. But Tocqueville had limitless energy and curiosity. As Political Columnist Richard Reeves observes in this book retracing the French aristocrat's nine-month journey through the U.S., even after the freezing forced march Tocqueville was still restlessly observing and asking questions.

A wealthy merchant of Louisville, then a river settlement of 13,000 people, spoke to him in evangelical tones of growth already seen and vaster growth still to come. Preachers of religion, on the other hand, sounded like hawkers, "businessmen of religion." And although Tocqueville found religious observance to be widespread, he judged faith to be shallow, like the belief of his ancestors in spring tonics. He and his companion, Gustave de Beaumont, were supposed to be studying the penal system in the U.S., but in fact they did their best to see everything and talk to everyone. They were friendly observers who very much liked the 24-state nation they saw, despite the rawness of its manners and the crassness of its mercantilism. ("More money--there in two words you have the American character," Beaumont wrote home.) Tocqueville instinctively feared democratic excesses, but he had a rare gift for standing aside from his prejudices. When the two volumes of his Democracy in America appeared in 1835 and 1840, they were bestsellers in France, then roiled by its own democratic currents, and the work is still the clearest view of the U.S. ever written by a foreigner.

It was Richard Reeves' brave notion to accomplish a rough duplicate of Tocqueville's tour, seeking out the same sorts of Americans--the mayor of New York City, the president of Harvard, businessmen and editors in quantity, and an embittered ex-President (John Quincy Adams for Tocqueville. Nixon for Reeves). The result is a spacious and thoughtful introduction to a classic. The author's theme is Tocqueville's: the national character formed in a state of fragile liberty by government, commerce, the press and the huge continent itself. Tocqueville found an exuberant nation, at times irritating in its self-satisfaction and its brassy patriotism. Reeves found resignation, inward-turning and irritability, although the social system he saw was in fact working far more efficiently than Tocqueville would have predicted.

Was the modern reporter right to confine his travels to a retracing of Tocqueville's journey in the older and possibly more fatigued half of the U.S.? Louisville, for instance, seemed to Reeves drained of all local character (and, ignominiously, of its local Falls City beer, now produced elsewhere). Louisville was "just a place where a few hundred thousand Americans happen to live at the moment." Could he have said that about Dallas or Seattle? And would even the worn and scuffed Eastern cities have seemed fresh and strong if Reeves, like Tocqueville, had been a foreign observer?

What Reeves does very well is throw important ideas, his own and Tocqueville's, into the air. Are American political leaders generally second-raters? So both Tocqueville and Reeves were assured, and so their eyes and ears told them. The French visitor worried about a tyranny of the majority, and the American sees crude sloganized opinions percolating up by means of incessant poll taking to control the nation's political discourse. Tocqueville brooded about the place of blacks in the society. Reeves, in his gloomiest moments, thinks that if violent repression ever does come to the U.S., it will be through hysterical efforts to control street crime. A general feeling among whites, he reports, is that "We've done enough for the bastards." A widespread belief among Detroit blacks, he learns, is that whites flooded the city's black slums with "skag"--cheap, low-grade heroin--as a deliberate pacification measure, cheaper and easier than giving machine guns to the police.

At times Tocqueville was so eerily prescient that he seemed to have had a private view of the future. His comment about critics of the Federal Government--"It was by promising to weaken it that one won the right to control it"--might have been written about the 1980 election. Reeves' observations have a cogency of their own. Discussing what he perceives as the modern tendency to appeal to government to solve all ills, including governmental ones, he writes that "government, trusted and feared, obeyed and avoided, revered and disdained, had become very much like a religion. Its role was to confront evil for the rest of us." Reeves' reporting and analysis compare well with Tocqueville's own, which is to say they are first-rate. His journey through a middle-aged nation that Tocqueville saw in its youth took him through uneven terrain somewhere between smugness and despair, among a population going fairly steadily about its business.

--By John Skow

Excerpt

"Tocqueville wrote, 'I do not think that the white and black races will ever be brought anywhere to live on a footing of equality. But 1 think that the matter will be still harder in the United States than anywhere else. It can happen that a man will rise above prejudices .. . but it is not possible for a whole people to rise, as it were, above itself'

I was not so sure about that... The golden time for black Americans--the 1970s--was not only the result of violence. It was also partly a result of the ability of black leaders--particularly Martin Luther King, Jr.--to force America's white majority to face up to and prove there was some truth in the American rhetoric."

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