one Tocqueville over the line, sweet Jesus

Richard Reeves is the author of Old Faces of 1976, a book of short sketches about American politicians -- he wrote a bunch of other books, as well, including --
Convention, about the 1976 Democratic Party convention in New York City,
and
American Journey:  Traveling With Tocqueville in Search of Democracy in America.

------------In 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville came across from France, traveled around America, filled fourteen notebooks with observations, and then wrote Democracy in America, which lots of people probably remember studying in high school or college.-----------

So then what Richard Reeves did, in 1979, was travel around America, taking the same route as Tocqueville, and then wrote about that, in American Journey.

--------------------- [Amazon description, Tocqueville's Democracy in America]--------------- In 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat and ambitious civil servant, made a nine-month journey throughout America.  The result was Democracy in America, a monumental study of the life and institutions of the evolving nation.  Tocqueville looked to the flourishing democratic system in America as a possible model for post-revolutionary France, believing that the egalitarian ideals it enshrined reflected the spirit of the age and even divine will.  His insightful work has become one of the most influential political texts ever written on America and an indispensable authority on democracy.----------------------- [end Amazon site quote]

------------------- [excerpt, Democracy in America]--------------------------- America, then, exhibits in her social state an extraordinary phenomenon.  Men are there seen on a greater equality in point of fortune and intellect, or, in other words, more equal in their strength, than in any other country of the world, or in any age of which history has preserved the remembrance. ...

At the end of the last century a few bold adventurers began to penetrate into the valley of the Mississippi, and the mass of the population very soon began to move in that direction:  communities unheard of till then suddenly appeared in the desert.  States whose names were not in existence a few years before, claimed their place in the American Union; and in the Western settlements we may behold democracy arrived at its utmost limits.

In these states, founded offhand and as it were by chance, the inhabitants are but of yesterday.  Scarcely known to one another, the nearest neighbors are ignorant of each other's history.  In this part of the American continent, therefore, the population has escaped the influence not only of great names and great wealth, but even of the natural aristocracy of knowledge and virtue.  None is there able to wield that respectable power which men willingly grant to the remembrance of a life spent in doing good before their eyes.  The new states of the West are already inhabited, but society has no existence among them.------------------- [end excerpt]

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[excerpt, book-jacket essay, American Journey]--------------------- Using Tocqueville's original notes, Richard Reeves retraced those travels, going to the same places to find the modern counterparts of the Americans.

The Americans of the 1830s and the Americans of the 1980s are the subject and the glory of American Journey.  For two men, the Frenchman and the American, traveling the United States was an adventure of the road and of the mind.

Tocqueville and Reeves both began their journeys in Newport, Rhode Island, and then traveled through New York and Philadelphia, crisscrossing the country to Michigan in the north and Louisiana in the South.  But Tocqueville's ride from the St. Clair River to the wilderness of Saginaw Bay became, for Reeves, a walk in the wilderness of Detroit.

Tocqueville's conversations with an embittered ex-President, John Quincy Adams, echoed over the years when Reeves asked similar questions of Richard Nixon.  The presidents of Harvard University, 150 years apart, each presented a book to the traveler:  Tocqueville's was a volume on the duties of public officials; Reeves was given a book about coping with the stress of daily life. ...

The American is more optimistic than the Frenchman was.  Tocqueville believed that a democratic society could never rise above themselves and their own petty demands and hatreds.  Reeves discovered, almost with astonishment, a people better than his predictions, better than their leaders -- and, at their best, almost as good as their ideals.---------------- [end excerpt]

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