Virtually all of my reading was put on hold as I worked to finish another 800 page tome--this one on the rise of American self-identity, from our founding until the present day.
(An interesting tidbit: Black wrote this book while in prison, perhaps unjustly. What a great use of a prison term!)
In Flight of the Eagle, the author reveals himself as more of a storyteller than historian, which makes this book a great place to start a young person's intellectual curiosity about American history. Black shows how US presidents and other cabinet members left their mark, positively or negatively, upon the growth of America and her self-identity as a growing guardian of freedom and democracy. If there is a particular lasting impression of the book, it is this: Indispensible figures rose at the most critical of occasions to guide America into her present role as the world's lone super power.
The lack of a historian's desire for objectivity allows Black to make critical judgments and assessments about key figures, which enables the reader to wrestle with Black's assessments. At the same time, this book does not take a political hatchet to America's history in order to defend or attack a given ideology. It celebrates great figures in American history, whatever their political persuasion. Each assessment is critical as well, showing every figure's flaws as well as his virtues.
The complexities of our founding are put on full display, but it is clear from the outset that in spite of the massive ideological battles surrounding the founding, there was a clear conception of the exceptional nature of our country and its potentialities. Sober realists and blurry-eyed idealists would often do battle, as would the federalists (strong centralized state) and anti-federalists (more dispersed power), but Franklin and others planned for a future of worldly dominance, and Washington embodied the moderate tendencies of a revolution bound by laws, not men, setting the stage for a future of ordered liberty.
The Francophilia of Jefferson is exposed (he supported the immoral French Revolution) and shown to be the cause of the War of 1812 and the devastation of DC. While Jefferson and Madison were both substantial intellects and chief craftsmen in the making of the Constitution, they caused economic disaster and war (that we didn't win) with economic embargoes and an inept foreign policy against the most free nation in the world besides our own (Britain). Of course, Jefferson did engineer the Louisiana Purchase, which was one of the greatest American gains in her history.
The most substantial president between the early presidencies and the Civil War was that of Andrew Jackson, but I was more intrigued by the lesser-known presidencies, both pre and post-Civil War. We don't often hear of the very effective presidency of James Polk or the incompetencies of Zachary Taylor. The author makes a compelling case that a number of these presidents, led by Jackson and assisted by the great congressmen of American history--Henry Clay and Daniel Webster--effected compromises that delayed an inevitable war over slavery until the Union was strong enough to subdue the successionists.
One also gets the impression that South Carolina was really the only state that truly wanted to secede, but the others eventually followed due to a desire to maintain the immoral institution of slavery and to preserve state rights against an always-dangerous centralized government. Minus South Carolina, I wonder if a series of legislative compromises, popular will, and moral suason (a la Wilberforce in England) would've brought down slavery, without any of the deep wounds that continue into the present day.
Like Washington at our founding (who could've been king, but remained a humble citizen-politician), Lincoln proved to be the indispensible man at our nation's next great crisis. He surely made mistakes, but he did not lead the nation into war. He hated slavery, but was willing to tolerate it until it was destroyed through other means (as mentioned above). If South Carolina did not secede, there would be no war. Lincoln wasn't fighting to defeat slavery, but the notion that state's rights were supreme with regard to the Constitution. As much as I yearn for greater state's rights and a retrieval of a more federalist system of government, there was no legal or moral justification for using state's rights as a cover to deny individual rights or usurp the Consitution, to which we are all bound.
While not given great play in the book, the prominence of William Jennings Bryan in post-Civil War history deserves mention. He was a fundamentalist Presbyterian who spent much of his life crusading for a "Christian America." His crusade did not conflict with the fact that he ran on the Progressive ticket for president a number of times. This theologically-conservative Christian was likely the forefather of the progressivism of Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and a generation of politicians who wanted to repeal the Constitution as an outdated document and construct a French-like society built upon the supposed goodness of man. How did Bryan lead to these men? On the one hand, I think he gave greater sanction to government meddling in social affairs and the human conscience. On the other hand, I think someone needs to write a doctoral dissertation on this question.
I have long held both Roosevelts and Wilson in little regard, but the author helped me appreciate their virtues anew, even if I deplored their deploration of the Constitution. Teddy Roosevelt's "big stick" and "white Navy" brought prestige to America and opened the door of to her entrance on the international stage. Wilson's desire to make America a vehicle for freedom and justice in the aftermath of WWI, not vengeance (like France), helped make America a moral agent on the international scene. Had he not gone crazy in his final months in office, Wilson might have accomplished more in that regard, rather the vindictive Treaty of Versailles and the ineffective proto-League of Nations.
The author's veneration for FDR constrasted greatly with my revulsion (for a good revisionist history of the Depression, read Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man). I am an ardent believer that FDR's "throw a policy-pickle at the window and let it stick" New Deal prolonged the Depression. But his concept of "workfare" was far superior to modern welfare, as he helped the poor with work, rather than simply money. He also helped maintain and promote hope in the American experiment (a hope maintained and promoted through the better policy maker, Calvin Coolidge). And in preparing and bringing America into WWII, FDR proved to be a titan of modern world history.
Of modern American presidents, Truman was shown to be quite competent, Eisenhower strong and effective but somewhat unexceptional, Kennedy a brave but naive policy-maker (especially on the foreign stage), LBJ to be a crusader for civil rights but ignoramous on foreign policy, and Nixon to be the best of the lot--largely beloved and supported by American until the tragic Watergate scandal. One gets the impression that Carter may have been the worst president in US history--constantly changing his mind on important issues and having no conception of the realities of a broken world (brutally taken advantage of by Iran and by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan).
Reagan rightly gets praised as the greatest modern American president, following FDR in restoring hope in the American experiment. I would add that unlike FDR, he also restored the credibility of a free market. Like Wilson and FDR, he restored a realist morality back to American foreign policy (not one rooted in idealistic illusions, like Carter). He stopped playing chicken with the Soviets, correctly labeled them the "Evil Empire," and brilliant employed an effective arsenal of moral condemnation, an impossible to match arms build-up, and the promise of a future space-based missile defense to run the Soviet experiment in controlled chaos into the ground (assisted by Lady Thatcher, the Pope, and later on, with the help of Gorbachev). He also generated a 30-year economic boom with his tax cuts, which drastically cut unemployment and inflation.
None of the presidents since Reagan have carried his mantle. Some have been stronger than others, but unlike the author, I am not quite willing to make historical assessment of their presidencies.
At many points through this panoramic history of American growth in the world, the author argues that items A, B, and C would've changed a given outcome for the better. His arguments were often convincing, sometimes disputable, and always intriguing. He would argue that in preserving and guiding the American experiment, Washington, Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan were the greatest presidents. I wouldn't necessarily disagree. I gained a newfound respect for Nixon (demonized in modern education), which made his downfall all the more tragic. I can see how, alongside LBJ's inherited but personally-mismanaged war in Vietnam, American over-optimism was dashed upon the rocks of modern postmodernism. That said, in thawing the relationship with the Chinese, leveraging it against the Soviets, and along with the brilliant Kissinger, almost winning the previously-conceded Vietnam War, he deserves an immense amount of credit.
While I disagree with some of his final assessments, Black's questions regarding the health of the American experiment are certainly thought-provoking. Is American still the exceptional nation that she was founded as and guided along to become? And, if not, and if many of the present trendlines continue in a downward direction, will another leader with a claimed "rendezvous with destiny" (a la FDR and Reagan) fill the void between growth and catastrophe? Time will only tell.
But I am not bent out of shape about it. America is an island of freedom in an historical sea of tyranny. Her Constitution is likely the greatest founding political document in world history. But if she perishes at some point in the indefinite future (and highly unlikely anytime in our lifetimes), the world will go on, God will continue to reign on His throne over history, and His eternal island of freedom and peace in Christ for His people will make every man-made system pale in comparison.
