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BOOK REVIEWS 85
Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States. By
MEYER REINHOLD. Foreword by WILLIAM M. CALDER III. Afterword by
GEORGE A. KENNEDY. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984. Pp. 371.
$27.50.
The classical tradition has been an ever-embattled subject in American culture.
Meyer Reinhold's Classica Americana traces the debate from colonial times
through the 1970s, from the broad cultural context of the tradition in the
eighteenth century to its current base within select precincts of the modern
academy. The terms and scope of that debate have changed but not its intensity
and certainly not its capacity to divide intellectuals of every persuasion. Many will
want to enter, or reenter, the fray after reading George A. Kennedy's lively
afterword on the place of the tradition in twentieth-century education.
Professor Reinhold gives special attention to what he calls the "Golden Age of
the Classical Tradition in America" from 1760 to 1790. "[N]ever since antiquity,"
he writes of this, the revolutionary era, "were the classics, in one form or other,
read by a greater proportion of a population." And yet even here scholars have
disputed the importance if not the presence of the classics in American life. Is
Hannah Arendt correct when she argues that the Founding Fathers would have
lacked the courage to act without classical examples before them? Or does Clinton
Rossiter come closer to the mark when he writes that the Founders learned little
from the ancients? Should one turn to Richard Gummere, who celebrates the
impact of classical works on early Americans, or to Bernard Bailyn, who finds the
same sources to be illustrative but not determinative of thought? R. is ideally
suited to ponder these matters because he can claim to be both a classicist and an
Americanist in an area where classicists have magnified and Americanists have
minimized influences. Perhaps in consequence, Classica Americana disappoints
just a bit in the end when it restates the questions without giving answers. A more
subtle strategy, in fact, prevails. R.'s sympathies lie with the classicists, but he
resists final judgments in order to clarify discussion and the bases of investigation.
Classica Americana generally succeeds on these terms, and the result is a useful
work for all concerned.
86 BOOK REVIEWS
of these difficulties. After the golden age, R. presupposes a silver age of the
classical tradition, 1790 to 1830, to emphasize the sharp break in American
history after the generation of the Founders. In the context of the classical
tradition, however, there was no dramatic break, only a steady decline in
perceived usefulness, acceptance, and vitality. The conceit, while coyly apposite to
classical divisions, actually distorts a historical situation in which key terms
remained the same but took on different meanings.
In all fairness, R. is dealing with complex issues that require narrative simplifi-
cation.The heartof ClassicaAmericanaconsistsof two separatechapters:one on
the quest for useful knowledge and the other on a similar quest for virtue among
late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American leaders. Calls for a useful
knowledge and for virtue are everywhere in the language of the formative period,
and the two come togetherin the classicaltradition.It is not too muchto suggest
that virtue, knowledge, and useful learning form a natural and central constella-
tion of concepts in eighteenth-centuryAmericaneducation. Moreover, these
concepts remain in place as long as study of the classics is thought to make men
virtuous.Whenthingscome apartin the nineteenthcentury,ClassicaAmericana
describes the pieces, but it never quite tells the whole story with a proper
weightingof the conditionsand forcesat work.
The story is all the moreinterestingbecauseit involvessomethingof a tragedy
in Americanintellectualthought.An eighteenth-century classicaleducationrein-
forcedcommunalaspirationsand identity;the lessonsof citizenshipwerea large
part of its presumed value. Virtue, as early Americans found the idea in their
readings of Cicero and Plutarch, signified a concern for the common good. This is
what John Adams meant when he declared that "public virtue is the only
Foundation of Republics." And this is also what Jefferson meant when he said
that "self-love is the sole antagonist of virtue, leading us constantly by our
propensities to self-gratification in violation of our moral duties to others." For
the Founders, the key to liberty was virtue as social responsibility. Meanwhile, the
notion of a useful knowledge developed along two lines. As R. summarizes the
situation, "the practical value of knowledge as useful for self-improvement was
balanced by an operative conviction of the social function of knowledge."
Somewhere along the line, certainly by 1830, Americans lost sight of the balance.
Immediate practicality became the criterion of utility, and this sense of practi-
cality simultaneously aggrandized self-improvement over communal service and
condemned large segments of formal learning as idle speculation. The ever-
widening debate over the kind of knowledge useful in a new country soon took on
anti-intellectual tones that condemned classical learning altogether. The admini-
stration of John Quincy Adams (1825 to 1829) would close the era in which
classicism determined intellectual thought in American life. And with that closing,
the high ideal of creating an educated moral community based on a common
notion of shared virtue also ended. The intellectual bases of American citizenship,
community, and education have been immeasurably less ever since.
Whatever its limitations, Classica Americana brings to life the precise nature of
an intellectual idealism that was crucial to national beginnings. It also contains
invaluable suggestions for future study. A closing chapter, a survey of existing
scholarship, performs a service that is as useful as it is rare. Here, a senior scholar
BOOKREVIEWS 89