Faith in the Founding Fathers

The American Future, by Simon Schama

This is the most exhilarating book that has been written about America for at least eight years, although it depends on the premise that the influence of George W. Bush is over and that Barack Obama will be the next president.

Simon Schama is fortunate that this outcome looks more likely by the day. He has not been helped, on the other hand, by the suddenness of the financial drama which has overtaken the world’s most powerful economy, and which calls into question some of the American future he describes. All the same, this intricate and ambitious account of American inspiration and of the heartbeat of the national character is as good an answer to those doubts as anyone might give.

Schama sets his ebulliently combative tone in the prologue, which begins: ‘I can tell you exactly, give or take a minute or two, when American democracy came back from the dead because I was there’ — at the Des Moines caucuses on 3 January earlier this year, watching the first signs of Barack Obama’s eventual victory over Hillary Clinton. It is an instantly engaging account, as he makes fun of his own reflex as the ‘helpful professor’, trying to warn the Hillary campaigners of the potential misinterpretation of their sign ‘If the people are disinterested, move on!’). Having inserted himself in the narrative, as the wry but energetic commentator from a far-off country, part academic and part vivid reporter, he then launches into his analysis of the essence of the American spirit, weaving the immediate present with its earliest history.

He divides his account into four sections; it was inspired of him to begin with ‘American War’, given the doubts and divisions which are the legacy of Iraq and which, in similar form, troubled the new country from the start.