Buy this book and a good cigar and savor them both in an overstuffed chair at the club or at your neighborhood cigar bar. It is a wondrously good read and a long, slow delight (976 pages plus notes) that flatters your refined taste by associating you with a skilled raconteur as he skewers "the fly-blown philacteries of Political Correctness." This cigar of a book offends your cautious associates, disregards both the old and the new Puritanism, reassures you of your success and independence of mind, regales you with tales of the smoke-filled deeds of great tycoons and politicians, and reeks of all three Nineties: the Federalist 1790s, Andrew Carnegie's 1890s, and Bill Gates's 1990s, especially of the latter. It is a most entertaining bit of what the author calls "club talk" with a decidedly English air to it.

If you lack the time for a cigar, the book, or this review, be content with a brief bottom-line summary of Johnson's theme: Reader's Digest was right all along.

English historian and essayist Paul Johnson has added a very readable, almost novelistic, history of the United States to his earlier Modern Times and A History of the Jews. His History of the American People is great narrative, with a vigorous unifying theme—the greatness of the American people (he dedicates the book to us)—a strong story line that avoids hard-to-explain subplots and focuses on well-known events and leaders, vivid characterizations of major male leaders (and a few female ones), telling anecdotes, and effective satirical sketches. Johnson covers the centuries from Jamestown (1607) to Clinton more compellingly than do the standard politically correct academic texts, partly because Johnson's editor gave him free rein and partly because his book achieves a better fit with the post-Cold War world of global capitalism. Indeed, A History of the American People is often uncannily up to date, as when Johnson focuses on the sexual escapades of Democratic presidents Wilson, FDR, Kennedy, and Johnson.

In his conservative reading of the American past, Johnson stresses the development of laissez-faire free-market capitalism and the blessings it brings. He does not omit the accompanying curses of slavery, the displacement of Native Americans, and the victory of materialism over Christian self-sacrifice. Nevertheless, showing the defects of even the best narrative, he minimizes these by simply recounting the tragic episodes without analyzing what they mean for his grand theme. Thus, Johnson describes the Civil War as "the central" and "most characteristic event" in U.S. history without explaining how it is that the most characteristic event in a highly successful history can be a tragedy.

Plantation slavery and the slave trade are narrated as givens, facts of history, as if nothing can be deduced from them about the supposed Christian faith of the Europeans who practiced them. Devout colonial New England is granted 22 pages of text while less-religious colonial Virginia has only four. Johnson makes South Carolina the scapegoat for southern extremism while Virginia gets off nearly scot-free.

Christian faith plays a prominent role at the beginning—at the Landings at Jamestown, Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, and Saint Mary's (Maryland)—and at the end, as a bulwark for conservativism in the culture wars of the eighties and nineties. But it is largely lost from view during the lengthy voyage from John Winthrop to Dan Quayle. Johnson claims that before World War I "Americans enjoyed a laissez-faire society which was by no means unrestrained but whose limitations to their economic freedom were imposed by their belief in a God-ordained moral code rather than a government one devised by man." Yet his history largely ignores the moral code (and the possibility that it could have shaped the government one) in order to emphasize the battle between laissez-faire and government intervention. The Lord of Sabaoth is just a word in the hymnbooks here, a word that inspired conservatives and one that Johnson does not mock, but not an active Providence achieving His goals.

Johnson begins with quasi-theological questions: Has America's success atoned for the sins of its origins, has it combined altruism and acquisitiveness in redeeming ways, and has it lived up to its claim to be a City on a Hill? He answers a resounding yes to all three without inquiring too deeply into the theology of them. Near the end, Johnson teases us with one of his many little-known yet fascinating facts:

In 1992-94, Americans spent less on maintaining Protestant ministries, $2 billion a year, than on firearms and sporting guns, $2.48 billion, illegal drugs, $49 billion, legal gambling, nearly $40 billion, alcohol, $44 billion, leisure travel, $40 billion, and cosmetics, $20 billion.

By that point he has skillfully narrated the tale of Prohibition, the resulting rise of organized crime, and the moral excesses of early Hollywood and of consumerism, but he has failed to interpret them. We are at a loss even to guess at how the world's most religious and most generous people could display such embarrassing statistical measurements.

Like the Republican coalition of Wall Street and the church aisle, Johnson devotes far more attention to the grandeur and elan of the first than to the more humble ethos of the second. His writing is superb, and he warms to his theme when describing the great nineteenth-century tycoons: Carnegie, Morgan, Vanderbilt, Gould. He marshals statistics and amusing anecdotes to prove the greater efficiency of their methods. His text here is "the American plutocracy ultimately benefits the American democracy," and he convincingly explicates it by pointing to the high culture financed by the captains of industry.

Indeed, Johnson's history of the American people has a decidedly high-church flavor. In his telling, the follies of an egalitarian, fundamentalist, populist democracy without nobility or culture—"a land of righteous persecution, whether under the banner of Calvinism, purity, anti-Communism, anti-racism, feminism, or Political Correctness"—are redeemed through the exertions of a few gifted entrepreneurs and inventors who make their pile, give the land of commoners the gift of themselves as a noble class, buy or commission great art, and so uplift the masses more than the English nobility ever did. The free-enterprise system thus happily combines English and American virtues by democratizing good taste while it cements the Anglo-American alliance in foreign affairs.

This conservative reinterpretation is most vulnerable when dealing with Reconstruction and the New Deal. In a quite anachronistic way, Johnson sees the former through the lens of the latter—with the Freedmen's Bureau miscast as a meddlesome, unnecessary federal bureaucracy and "America's first taste of the welfare state"—and views the latter from the perspective of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs. African Americans in the devastated South of 1865 had dire needs that laissez-faire free-marketeering could not supply. The most important New Deal programs merit only a paragraph in Johnson's text, which downplays the extreme suffering that gave rise to them. The American economy of 1933 was not that of 1965, but Johnson sees 1933 and even 1865 as simply early versions of 1965.

Johnson is most unfair in his account of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He drastically revises the usual assessments of the presidents of the twenties and thirties. Harding's stock is up and Coolidge's closes significantly higher, while Hoover's loses all the ground it had gained since 1933 and then some, but Roosevelt's is the most overvalued and overdue for a drop. Johnson even devalues what are usually seen as FDR's assets. He gives Roosevelt no credit for the Lend-Lease Act or for other measures to aid Great Britain after the fall of France. Bernard Baruch gets the praise for Lend-Lease, while Johnson ignores the vicious attacks aimed at FDR because he pressured Congress to aid Britain.

Johnson's view of the proper approach to the Great Crash of 1929 and the succeeding depression differs not at all from that of Coolidge's secretary of the treasury, Andrew Mellon: "liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate." The more nuanced perspective gained after nearly seven decades is not Johnson's. His curmudgeonly treatment of Hoover gains the immediacy of direct involvement. The reader gets the impression that Johnson was at the cabinet meetings giving advice—all of it rejected. But he loses the credibility and sophistication of more distant reflection on events.

This is also a cigar of a book in that smoking a cigar tends to inflate one's sense of tough-minded rationality and decisiveness. Johnson's decisive judgments—let the economy drop until it rebounds; bomb Vietnam to smithereens or get out—underestimate the complexities and constraints faced by real policymakers. He tends toward hyperbole: for example, in writing that the slight Peggy Eaton scandal in Andrew Jackson's administration changed the way the United States was governed.

As if to emphasize his contempt for received opinion and his confidence in his own judgment, Johnson relies heavily on ancient secondary sources from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries while ignoring many better sources from the Age of Political Correctness. He falls into some errors: Jonathan Edwards demolishing Calvinist doctrines, a majority of African Americans willing to fight for the Confederacy, Theodore Roosevelt roughing it in South Dakota. But he writes in such a refreshingly entertaining way that a reader forgives these.

Implicitly, A History of the American People raises the question of the future of American historiography. Will it take a conservative turn; is Johnson's tome a harbinger? Peer review, tenure, the power of faculty to choose their own successors—in a collective, not individual, sense: all the rules of the academy tend to perpetuate the revisionism that came to campus in the 1960s and 1970s. Much attenuated and altered, this often leftist approach to American history has survived despite conservative victories outside academia.

By achieving a better interpretive fit with the booming 1990s, Johnson's history highlights the vulnerability of the reigning interpretations, and it seems sure to prove more popular with the history-reading public than any of the texts on current course syllabi. It will make little headway among what Johnson disdainfully calls the cultural elite, but very likely some unforeseen permutation of interpretations will oust the present ones.

Addressed to the American people, Johnson's epigraph—"Be not afraid of greatness"—is taken from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (act 2, scene 5). There is more to it than meets the eye, however. By using it, Johnson has unwittingly introduced a note of ambiguity and irony where he intended surety.

In the play, tricksters place this advice in a bogus, flattering letter that the commoner Malvolio supposes is sent to him by an admiring Countess Olivia in order to encourage him to ignore his humble origins ("some are born great, some achieve greatness") and thereby to win her proffered love. By following its advice to wear yellow stockings with garters and to smile perpetually, Malvolio only succeeds in getting himself committed as a madman by the countess, who cares not a whit for him.

Is Johnson's tale of American success, underscored by the peace and prosperity of the 1990s, an accurate interpretation of our history and a reliable guide to our future? Or is it a seemingly plausible yet false view, a bogus letter dropped in our path that lures us on to a quite different fate? Does Dame Fortune smile on our market-driven, secularist meritocracy, or are temporary trends only encouraging self-deceptive dreams that she does so smile on us?

Perhaps the clown's closing analysis in Twelfth Night is closer to the truth. After quoting the phony discourse on greatness and citing the consequences of taking it for real, he concludes, "and thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges." Johnson's History of the American People is a clever revenge on post-1920s historical interpretations—on all of them, the New Deal liberal view and the Cold War consensus, as well as on the post-Vietnam, critical-of-America revisionism and all its variants. Yet the whirligig will seek revenge on Johnson, too. And on cigar bars.

Steven J. Keillor is the author of This Rebellious House: American History and the Truth of Christianity (InterVarsity).

Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.