Word: gabriel
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Course of American Democratic Thought, the Larned Professor of History at Yale agrees with Bates that, as many religious faiths contributed to democracy, democracy itself became a national religion. Professor Gabriel's early chapters supplement Bates's later ones, but Gabriel's book deals mainly with a century-1840 to 1940-in which vitality passed from religious to secular thinkers. Among the first and most powerful, Gabriel places Herman Melville...
...common democratic optimism of his day. In a whaler's forecastle he learned the worst about human nature, in the vast and empty sea he discerned the unknowable mystery of God, in the earthly paradise of the South Seas cannibalism reminded him of evil. He concluded, says Gabriel, that "he who would be a man must stop running with the Christians to the everlasting arms, must cease deluding himself with Emerson that the constitution of the universe is on his side." Democracy he saw as a moment in history, not as history's goal. He had two absolutes...
Such hardihood was not welcome to Melville's time. But Melville had a spiritual successor in William Graham Sumner, a hardheaded thinker who began at Yale in 1872 a study he called the "science of society." Professor Gabriel is as trenchant, critical and readable on Sumner as he is on Adams, James, Royce and 19th-20th Century thinkers generally. And he rescues Sumner's importance from the forgetful obloquy it has suffered (outside New Haven) in recent years...
...conquest, and if we ever get any more, it will be because we make it or win it." He fought the sentimentality and venality of the Gilded Age, wrote his revolutionary Folkways (1906) to show the determining effect of social customs on conduct. "His conviction," says Gabriel, "was that the forlorn and probably futile hope of democracy was that the men who profess it should understand what they are doing...
Thus U. S. democracy, which began with the simple fervor of Roger Williams, entered the 20th Century with more complex and troubled beliefs. Trying to uncover a central, durable and indispensable tenet for modern U. S. democracy, Gabriel finds it, as did the late, great liberal, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in the one among the 18th-Century "rights of man" which still seems indubitably "natural": individual freedom of thought and speech...