SPHERES OF LIBERTY
Changing Perceptions of Liberty in American Culture
Michael Kammen
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986
191 pp., $19.50
Of all the meanings of America, none has been more pervasive than America as the land of liberty. The dichotomy that Americans have traditionally drawn between America and Europe has revolved around the contrast between American freedom and European oppression. Jefferson's Declaration of Independence justified the revolution on the basis of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The Constitution's preamble spoke of securing "the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." In December 1810, the patriot poet Joel Barlow wrote, "The object of history is instruction. The history of our country is the history of liberty; its two former periods may teach men how to acquire liberty, the last should teach them how to preserve it." Sen. Daniel Webster agreed. "Our inheritance is an inheritance of American liberty. That liberty is characteristic, peculiar, and altogether our own. Nothing like it existed in former times." In the Gettysburg Address, that most important of all American speeches, Lincoln spoke of "a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." In 1876, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., the grandson and great-grandson of two presidents, rhetorically asked a Massachusetts audience what had distinguished the American during the first hundred years of independence. He answered, "His devotion to the principle of liberty." Sixty-five years later, Franklin Roosevelt defined America's stake in World War II in terms of "Four Freedoms." This vision of America as the land of liberty has been so basic to the American sense of nationality that it has existed alongside of slavery, restrictive immigration laws, and prejudice against political radicals and undesirable religious and ethnic groups, and only spoilsports have had the temerity to draw attention to these contradictions.
Michael Kammen, author of People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization, which won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for History, is qualified to examine the diverse meanings and incongruities surrounding the American definitions of liberty. Kammen, currently Newton C. Farr Professor of American History and Culture at Cornell University, is the author of several significant books in American history, including his most recent, A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture. In none of his previous works has he tracked such an elusive quarry as the meaning of liberty. As Montesquieu wrote in The Spirit of the Laws (1748), "There is no word whatsoever that has admitted of more various significations and has made more different impressions on human minds, than that of Liberty."
Kammen first presented The Spheres of Liberty in the Curti Lectures which he delivered at the University of Wisconsin during 1985-1986, a lecture series named for Merle Curti, a longtime member of the University of Wisconsin History Department and one of America's preeminent intellectual historians. Its appearance in book form comes at an opportune time while the nation is celebrating the bicentennial of the constitution, a document which, more than any other, embodies the American understandings of liberty. As Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart noted in 1972, "In a Constitution for a free people, there can be no doubt
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