ALAN TAYLOR: A REVIEW OF “BETWEEN TWO WORLDS- HOW THE ENGLISH BECAME AMERICANS” BY MALCOLM GASKILL
http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-between-two-worlds-by-malcolm-gaskill-1422224287
When Boston Was the Frontier Colonists thought the New World was a place to be discovered. It was also a place where they discovered themselves as Americans.More than a century ago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner asserted that the colonial frontier turned European emigrants into American democrats. Having crossed the Atlantic, colonists plunged into a wild world of dense forests and savage people. In braving the dangers and seizing new opportunities, the newcomers gradually shed their European heritage, which valued cohesion, tradition and hierarchy. These newly made Americans would come to cherish individualism, innovation, equal legal rights, and the unequal economic results of geographic and social mobility. With his “Frontier Thesis,” Turner codified a long-standing version of American self-explanation that went back at least to the 18th century, when John Hector St. John de Crèvecouer in his “Letters From an American Farmer” famously asked: “What, then, is the American, this new man?”
Migration to a strange land inevitably changes people, but “American exceptionalism” insists upon a stark, indeed a complete, transformation in which Americans became the utter inversion of Europeans. Shades of gray will not do. In his lively “Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans,” Malcolm Gaskill seeks to qualify, but not forsake, the exceptionalist story by applying a shiny coat of ambiguity and contradiction.
On the one hand, he says, “settlers balked at compromise because their environment did not compromise, and it had changed them.” On the other hand, “more than has been recognized . . . American ‘innovation’ used English models.” Those models included the pursuit of “prosperity and liberty for some” by requiring “others to be poor, subordinated, dispossessed, and shackled.” Indians died, and African-Americans worked so that some Englishmen could get rich (but others remain poor) in a new land of inequality. Mr. Gaskill stops well short of denunciation by dwelling on the “courage—the quintessence of adventure” in those striving and conquering immigrants.
A professor at the University of East Anglia, Mr. Gaskill has read widely and well in the sources and shows a gift for telling examples. He reports that “by 1615 coin-operated vending boxes were appearing in London taverns” to dispense Virginia tobacco. He writes with verve: “America, like the theater, offered both entertainment and truth. The New World was a place to be discovered, but also a place where people discovered themselves: their lives in England and their strange transformations.” “Between Two Worlds” is an entertaining romp through kaleidoscopic images of colonists coping with the shock of the new while clinging to the older verities of their origins.
Save for brief forays into the West Indies, particularly Barbados and Jamaica, Mr. Gaskill sticks to the usual historical turf: the English colonies along the Atlantic seaboard. He treats the French, Dutch and Spanish colonizers in passing as mere enemies rather than as contributors to the American future. And we see Indians only through colonial eyes as savages, either noble or brutal or both. America again emerges primarily from Jamestown and Plymouth without any significant assists from Santa Fe, St. Louis, New Amsterdam or the Cherokee. Consequently, Mr. Gaskill dwells on reassuringly well-known stories: the lost colony of Roanoke, the starving time at Jamestown, the marriage of Pocahontas to tobacco-growing John Rolfe, the piety of the Pilgrims, John Winthrop ’s celebrated “City Upon a Hill,” the Indian captivity of Mary Rowlandson and the tragic executions of supposed witches at Salem. Fortunately, all are well-told, and there is a fresh clarity to this jaunt through English colonization.
ENLARGE Between Two Worlds
By Malcolm Gaskill
Basic, 484 pages, $35
Throughout the 17th century, the colonists struggled with harsh conditions that gradually alienated them from their former neighbors at home: “Men who had left England to grow tobacco fought ferocious warriors in appalling conditions. They were right to think that people at home had no idea what they were going through.”
But Mr. Gaskill also notes that subsequent economic, cultural and social trends produced an Anglicization that partially reversed the Americanization of the 17th-century colonies: “Eighteenth-century English America drew closer to England economically and nurtured a middle-class ethos united in imperial Protestant pride and deferential in clothes, furniture and books.” The leading colonial towns increasingly looked like the newer neighborhoods of London. Reading English books rather than local ones, the elites of America drank tea, wore imported clothing, lived in knockoffs of English mansions and worshiped in copies of the latest English churches. Far from being an Old World, England was the source of the latest fashions in 18th-century America.
Ultimately, Mr. Gaskill interprets the colonists as conflicted: both venturesome and traditional, American and English, bloody and pious, egalitarian and unequal, degraded and innovative, democratic and domineering. Colonial America was, he concludes, an “Old World fantasy cut with New World reality.” Colonists revered the king, but he was “a hazy notion” who allegedly guaranteed their liberties, which they themselves defined as their most cherished legacy as Englishmen rather than as an innovation of the frontier. Proud of their very English liberties, the American patriots were quick to block new taxes levied by Parliament but slow to seek full independence. Anticipating the coming American Revolution, Mr. Gaskill scuttles back to the old stereotype of Britain as “a repressive Leviathan of endless taxation” that provoked revolt by its hitherto devoted colonists. “It was almost inevitable that a language of liberty created in England would one day be used against it,” he concludes.
Readers can delight in Mr. Gaskill’s winning narration of the old certainties in a new style. We still cling to the tradition of our origins in the English encounter with a long-lost, but somehow enduring, frontier. If that frontier did make Americans innovative, its effect has perhaps been least felt in our popular histories.
Mr. Taylor is a professor of history at the University of Virginia and the author, most recently, of “The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832.”
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