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The Education of an Americanist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Herbert Nicholas
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Extract

The America of my infancy was, perhaps to a great degree than would now apply, the America of classic juvenile fiction – the West of R. M. Ballantyne and Fenimore Cooper, the South of Uncle Remus and Uncle Tom's Cabin and, a little later, the Gothic of Edgar Allen Poe and the Mississippi Valley of Mark Twain — a country that had about as close a relationship to one's direct experience as the Spanish Main or the African jungle or the Scotland of Bonnie Prince Charlie. The real America of Coolidge and Hoover offered little to attract and hold attention – apart from gangsters and G-Men (about which I recall writing and acting in a school play Dull Days in Chicago). As appetites grew a little more discriminating the realism of Sinclair Lewis and the satire of John P. Marquand took over from the Hollywood America of thrills and comedy. Even so, America was, in every sense, a far-away country, full of portent and significance of course, but not exciting and relevant, still less attractive.

The coming of Roosevelt and the New Deal should have changed all that, of course. Honesty obliges me to admit that for a third year undergraduate at Oxford, absorbed in Greats, the American re-birth was infinitely less real and challenging than the Nazi eruption in Europe. There is a memory of a dapper, bouncy little figure lecturing to avid audiences in the North School in 1934. But to me Felix Frankfurter, then the visiting George Eastman Professor, was just another American whose lectures on the New Deal and the Constitution held one up en route to Henry Price's expositions of the Theory of Knowledge.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , April 1980 , pp. 9 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

Was born in 1911 and educated at Mill Hill School and New College, Oxford. He was a Commonwealth Fund Fellow at Yale, 1935–37. He has been a Fellow of Exeter College and New College at Oxford and has been a visiting Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton and the Kennedy Institute of Politics at Harvard. He was Rhodes Professor of American History and Institutions at Oxford University from 1968 to 1978. His publications include The American Union (1948), The British General Election of 1950 (1951), The United Nations as a Political Institution (1959), Britain and the United States (1963), The United States and Britain (1975), and The Nature of American Politics (1979).

1 There was nothing particularly original in this. The idea had already been made to yield valuable results by Ostrogorski in his Democracy and the Organisation of Political Parties (1902). But it had been allowed to fall into disuse.

2 Published by Chatto, and Windus, , London, and The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, as Britain and the United States, 1963Google Scholar.