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And now it's my pleasure to introduce Leo Damrosch Professor Damrosch is the Ernest Baum Birnbaum professor of literature here at Harvard. What research interests including the Puritan imagination romanticism and the Enlightenment. His last book highjackers so restless genius was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the pen New-England Winship award. Professor Damrosch his new book Tocqueville's discovery of America describes the nine month journey that Tocqueville took throughout the fledgling United States and that served as the basis for his landmark treatise. Democracy in America ostensibly in the United States to study the nation's prison system. The 25 year old French aristocrat came away with an astonishingly well rounded and sometimes prophetic view of life in America including politics economics literature and religion. In a recent review Sean Wilentz writes Tocqueville emerges finally as all the more wondrous for all his human foibles and intellectual errors the human young Tocqueville is much more impressive than the cold abstraction and for helping to bring him to life we are in the Damrosch is dead.

Thank you very much Rachel. It's a particular pleasure to speak of this wonderful store. I depended on it for the past 20 years as Rachel described it. It was a nine month journey all over the United States under often very primitive conditions in 1831 in 1832 Tocqueville and his good friend Gustave to bomb on the trip with him were in their mid-twenties Apprentice magistrates with a career they hoped in the law and government but the 1830 revolution had just happened and because they were aristocrats by birth and in fact their family is very intensely conservative and wanted the old monarchy back again. Their employer is somewhat suspicious about their loyalty and they thought it might be a good idea to get out of France for a while and find something useful to do that would be apolitical and so they hustled the arrangement to go study the American penitentiary system which sounds not very exciting now

but in fact in those days penitentiaries were considered a new breakthrough. Jails all over Europe were just holding tanks where prisoners of both sexes charged with everything from picking pockets to killing people were just thrown together to get on as best they might. Bribing their jailers and so on teaching each other criminal techniques and the idea that a prisoner might repent which is what the term implies might come out a better human being was a quite novel program. In France the prisons were totally controlled from the central administration if you changed one you have to change them all it was inconceivable. In America there were all kinds of different local arrangements and that was the idea they would study how it's done in Philadelphia and how it's done in Boston and so on. But really what they wanted was to study democracy. They both believed deeply that it was the future. It was not going to be reversed. Whereas France seemed frighteningly unstable democracy was a dirty word in

France because everybody remembered the terror that the French Revolution quickly collapsed into fact Tocqueville's parents missed by three days going to the guillotine because when Robespierre fell they were let out instead of killed. His father was 21 at the time and his hair had gone completely point. Then it followed the dictatorship of Napoleon a kind of despotism. Why was America so stable. How would it manage for 50 years to have a thriving democracy. This was really Tocqueville's agenda. It was my own voyage of discovery when I go into this project I realize we devour books about the founders and we really don't read so much about Jacksonian America which is an incredibly exciting time and totally different as many recent historians have been making us understand from that quite patrician quite old fashioned world view that the great founders had. Jackson was the first populist president he'd been in office since 1828.

The country was expanding enormously into the hinterland. It was extremely commercial and the way it was still unknown in Europe even in England. And it was egalitarian that is to say Tocqueville saw this from the start however much there might be a gulf between rich and poor. You weren't born into a status from which you might not rise. Everyone in principle might change their life and this was an ideology or really a faith that seemed not just new to him but almost inspiring. It was mentioned I came to this from Rousseau partly because Rousseau was one of Tocqueville's three favorite authors. And I'll mention later on perhaps one way in which that was so wrong. What interested me then it has always interested me is how ideas which may seem like abstractions I think always arise from people's life experience and from their needs. It was certainly true of Rousseau as I tried to show in a biography of him and it was true of

Tocqueville not only his own needs but also from what he learned from American people. Democracy in America is written deliberately in a kind of Olympian even a little remote way. It was meant to be dispassionate to intervene in the very turbulent politics of Europe in a non polemical way. But in fact took himself was a complicated rather volatile somewhat melancholic character with many more sides to his temperament than the kind of perfected style that he developed for his political writing. And above all he was an incredibly good listener. Beaumont said that about him so much that informs democracy in America is not the fruit of his solitary meditation but comes directly from people we talk to all the way from John Quincy Adams then about to enter the house of representatives having lost the presidency probably the American you impressed Tocqueville the most all the way to

Indian chiefs literally prison warders pioneer farmers he listen to anybody who seemed to have something to tell him. And as Sean Wilentz kindly said in that review they were a very human young man. They were interested in women. They flirted all the time of the American girls. I already saw a blog online that headlined its little mention of my book. Tocqueville was really into hot American chicks. But in fact what struck them was that although American women were much freer with men than their heavily chaperoned French girls they didn't seem actually to act upon it. And there was a kind of not prudery but a kind of moral repression perhaps in America that they tried to understand as with everything Tocqueville did. It developed into a kind of deeper insight into American mores that the family I won't go into this particular topic at length but it's familiar to all of us. The family is given a kind of moral central

city kind of emotional heart of American experience as a counterweight to individualism and the way sexual relations were treated he thought was absolutely generated by this social demand it wasn't just inherited from old Puritan morality the way a lot of Europeans thought a little bit about his writing style. Translations tend to be stodgy and stiff and it is because in fact he did cultivate a very classical kind of French style balanced rather abstract. And if you just put it straight into English it does sound pretty dull. But in fact it's very eloquent in French and his writing in letters home and in his diaries and in other places that were not the final formal product is often quite romantic and always I think quite eloquent and I've tried really hard in this book to make him speak with a fresher and more human voice and I'll try to give you a couple of examples of that later on this evening.

His English not so much. And I realized quite early that this project actually got an advantage that was most of the foreigners who visited America in that period where middle class English men and women and without exactly meaning to be snobs they thought every American ism was the most appalling kind of all clarity just you know grated on their ears. And so they are forever putting Americans down in ways that are really quite unjust inappropriate. One of the worst is Francis trollop who spent two rather peculiar years in Cincinnati and wrote a book denouncing America after she went home. She is the mother of Anthony the famous novelist and in particular she collected Americanisms because she hated them. Go the whole hog. Keep cool mother. I know a thing or two and you read them and you think what's so bad about that. Of course Tocqueville liked it because he didn't have those nuances in English his English got better and better. But it was always that of

intelligent foreigner. And in fact in a lot of these British visitors thought Americans were humorless when it's obvious they were having their legs pulled and just couldn't tell Harriet Martineau's a wonderful exception. Her book deserves to be read more than it is a big book on the American character and she talks about writing in a stage coach and hearing somebody say So-and-so is a smart fellow isn't he. And somebody replied he couldn't see through a ladder. Well talk filled and collect those so much but he was interested in terminology that had no translation in French because he saw how profoundly symptomatic it was of American culture. For example you were a gentleman in France still existed but there it meant Wellborn. It could not mean anything else in America was just any adult male. He was very struck by how that term had evolved and broadened in first English and then even more in American usage. He said they don't have the word peasant.

They have farmers in America. They don't have a prison you can't possibly own his own land his you know kind of sharecropper are lucky to survive at the subsistence level. And we don't have peasants servants of course. The word existed but he said Americans prefer to be called the help they have just taken a job. They're doing their part and their employer is paying them. They are not born into the servant class and he said that certainly in America don't have the word lacquey which was common in French for you know the lowest kind of household servant Americans don't have masters with the ugly exception of slave owners in the south he said they prefer the Dutch word boss. Over and over he was seeing terminology that actually spoke to the American character. Well a little bit about the trip that is a kind of travelogue began in New York City. They stayed there for quite awhile. It had 200000 people which made it far and away the biggest city in America. Boston was next and tied I think with Philadelphia with just 60000. But it wasn't the New York we know the

grid of streets did not exist. New York stopped at Canal Street. Everything north of there was farmland. There was a kind of dirt road that led to the far away village of Harlem. At one point somebody they've met on the ship coming over invited them to his country place on the East River and it's site of today it would be East Sixty fourth Street. There was no skyline. When they got to Boston they said that's more like a city of course we have Hills New York it's all just one single story as far as the eye can see. But it was already a commercial beehive in a way that was both too then off quitting. It did seem kind of crass. All anybody talked about was what so-and-so is worth. Everybody you know is scrambling to make a fortune at the same time kind of exhilarating because the French certainly the aristocrats pretended that they didn't know how much money they had and didn't care where it came from and Americans had this spirit of initiative and energy entrepreneurship that took Phil

actually responded to and wrote quite warmly about how they spent a little time at Sing Sing and maybe I'll describe that because it's a very interesting passage. It had just been built. The idea was that maybe if the workers that is the prisoners came out every day in gangs and broke stones or whatever their job was they'd be doing something useful for society. So long as they never spoke and so amazingly enough under threat of ferocious lashing with a bull with the prisoners not only never opened their mouths but weren't supposed to even exchanged glances and Tocqueville was just fascinated by this spectacle of a thousand prisoners who could at any moment have jumped their guards and killed them and kept completely in subservience because they were helpless to gather together and make a plan. And so in the midst of the land of the free. Here was the most utter complete despotism.

It was a kind of puzzling paradox. And he spent quite awhile at Sing Sing and wrote about it at some length what he was seeing. And there's a great book by Michel Foucault called discipline and punish what he was seeing was the penitentiary really was not just a form of incarceration. It was a symptom of modern bureaucratic organization with Indeed modern surveillance in which the warden sat at the center like a spider at the middle of a web and could see what was going on everywhere in the prison that it was structural that it was. It was a conceptual development and not just a place to put criminals. After that they were desperate to get out and see the hinterland. I was once driving in Washington with an English friend. We passed the Department of the interior and he said yes in England we call that the Home Office. The idea that we had this huge in those days almost you know unexplored middle of our continent was thrilling. De Tocqueville at Beaumont they had grown up reading the novels of

James Fenimore Cooper. They were desperate to see Native Americans or in history and call them first ones they met were very discouraging Iroquois who had shown up in Buffalo to get their paycheck from the federal government and were just appallingly frighteningly drunk. And it seemed that civilization was destroying what had once been a noble race. But when they got into the north woods they saw something very different. They saw Chippewa Indians who were living exactly as their ancestors always had are with as Tocqueville said complete confidence in a forest where we would have starved to death because we wouldn't have known what to do. Reversing the power relationship of civilization and what they saw was a kind of nobility of refusal to assimilate. They just wouldn't do it. It might mean they would eventually lose everything but their way of life was too important to them and he was very moved by that. He in Belmont hired horses in what they said was the charming little village of Detroit

and went about 100 miles into the North Woods. Got as far as Pontiac which was then the fur trading post. And on the way they had a sense of what the continent was like when only the Indians they're Tocqueville wrote a very moving account of it didn't get into democracy in America with the appropriate there. It's called kans you're on the air. Fifteen days or two weeks in the wilderness and they remarked days there is a French word that means a deserted place hasn't got people in it it's a very human centric word he said in French. We don't have the word wilderness place that just isn't defined by humans at all and it's a very beautiful sort of long poetic essay. It's also kind of adventurous. At one point there lost in the dark and stumble on an isolated cabin and as they approach the fence an enormous barrier rises up which is fortunately on a chain and took a so that devil of a country is this

where they keep bears for their watchdogs and the hermit who lives in there comes and welcomes them. Thrushes some grass for their horses to eat introduces them to the bear. Later on after they've been up to Pontiac and met some more Indians who could speak French and are English. They came back and the bear he said greeted us like old friends. It was a very charming interlude but it was time to get on with their trip before they do though I'd just like to read you one passage to give you a sense of a different kind of voice from the one you know if you have as I'm sure read some or all of democracy in America this is in the middle of the forest at midday when the sun beats down on the forest you often hear in its depths a sound like a long sigh a plaintive cry that lingers into the distance. It is the last effort of the dying and then all around you everything subsides into a silence so profound stillness so complete that your soul feels penetrated by a sort of religious terror

enveloped in the beauty of nature at peace with yourself in the midst of universal peace. You listen to the steady beating of your arteries and each pulsation seems to mark the passing of time flowing drop by drop into eternity. Just wonderful writing it gives you a sense of other sides to this extraordinary man. They went up to k back because they were eager to see you know French people they thought the best of the old France that had survived there. But then they came to Boston and since we're all here I'll tell you a little bit about that. They loved it. They thought it was much more like Paris wasn't like New York. They loved the cast really it's not a class that Oliver Wendell Holmes later called the Boston Brahmins. What struck them was however privileged those people were in their beacon hill mansions. Nonetheless they were fully integrated into democracy in a way that the French aristocrats were absolutely refusing to be including their own families back home. In

fact the ancestors of those Boston Brahmins had created American democracy and they met and interviewed a number of not just intelligent very well-informed people who were asking questions much like theirs which absolutely underpin a lot of Democracy in America. I'll just give you four examples quickly. John Quincy Adams have already mentioned it was to them an example of the old dying ideal of civic virtue that is you give your life selflessly for your nation Party faction are in fact ignoble. And the new kind of populist you know vote garnering majority rule that the Jacksonian van an administration brought in was repellent to Adams and Tocqueville admired him for being willing to lose the White House rather than compromise his principles. He really was an impressive noble sort of monument of a man but at the same time a bit of a living fossil. He no longer fit in and he knew it.

And very uneasy about the future of his country. They had serious talks about slavery and I'll say more about that later. Very many people told Tocqueville one way or another this is going to lead to a catastrophic civil war. This is 30 years before it happened but you know the initial tectonic shocks were certainly happening in the 1830s. Josiah Quincy who was president of Harvard at the time they didn't bother to visit Harvard which was anyway a kind of little prep school in those days he didn't miss a lot. Quincy gave them that idea which was central to democracy in America. Eventually that the colonies were self-governing before the American Revolution. How could they not be took a month and a half for a ship to get here from England. It could not be micromanaged from London. There might be a royal governor. But on the whole the Americans conducted their own affairs more than that as Quincy pointed out. The American townships were self-governing with their town meetings. They had existed before they ever gathered together and decided to be Massachusetts so that there was a tradition of democratic self-rule. It

was a couple of centuries old whereas in France they tried to do it overnight in 1789. Change the names of the months of the year and everything else and it all caved in as a guy called Francis Leonberger originally Franz Lieber ended up a distinguished political scientist himself. A guy asked him about their own age when LIBOR was 16 he was a German. He had fought at the Battle of Waterloo and been shot through the neck and chest and left for dead. He was revived sent back to Germany and thrown into jail for political radicalism and when he finally got out he emigrated to Boston where he became an editor and indefatigable writer and a student as they were of American politics and culture. As an intelligent outsider who admired America. And he gave Tocqueville the concept I think this was my summary phrase that the concept was. Democracy is a state of mind. It's not just a legal system. It's not just the Constitution as a formal set of premises. It's

a kind of emotional faith. It's a kind of bonding and commitment to the spirit of the whole. And this is very Rousseau Ian Rousseau and the social contract says the only way there can be a true social contract that is a real shared commitment to the good of the whole it has to be if everybody feels in some way it speaks for them. Russo calls that him walk them on a common knee and Lieber was describing something much like that in American democracy. From this Tocqueville coined the phrase and you've all heard it because Robert Bellah made it the title of that excellent book habits of the heart. But as Bella emphasized it's not just heart in the sense of emotions it's all the values and attitudes and beliefs that make up a culture. One more Bostonian gun and Jared Sparks who later became president of Harvard. He gave Tocqueville the idea of the tyranny of the majority the enormous power of the

majority that control if not the actual thinking of everybody at least to make them uneasy about rocking the boat because they may be ostracized. They need to be to feel that they belong. And when we publish democracy in America Sparks was actually irritating. That's not what I meant. I just meant sometimes the majority in the legislature might you know a passel of other minority don't like well let them win the next election. But in fact hopeful's under something much more important as they so often was in that great book by the way. Whereas in France where there was a very rigid governmental repression you could bandy all kinds of crazy political ideas around because nobody thought they'd ever be put into practice in America which was far more free. Somehow you weren't supposed to advance ideas that everybody else didn't already share. That's one of Tocqueville's insights. They went to Philadelphia this isn't the time to describe that it was less interesting to them they got kind of bored. They're actually the place that turn took Phil on the most and that maybe taught him

even more than Boston was Ohio. He said In Ohio we find democracy without limit. That is to say Boston certainly was a traditionalist culture with a cast which was accustomed to privilege of all kinds even if it did cooperate in a way with the people as a whole. Aristocrats in France would not. Cincinnati was full of people who just got there yesterday the streets were still getting names. You know everything was just in turmoil. Ohio at the beginning of the 19th century had fifty thousand people in it it now had a million and all of them had just come from somewhere else. And I stumbled on just a perfect example of this perfect in that you could never know this person would later become famous. There was a 23 year old lawyer who had just arrived from New Hampshire and was a little bit put off by this sort of crassness of this you know frontier life because it was almost literally the frontier that in Ohio. He was thinking of going into politics but he said you know it's so degrading here

you can't get elected anything unless you get drunk you know with the voters. In fact Tocqueville writes believe it or not the people in this part of the country have elected a person called David Crockett to the Congress who can't even read with ease. And nonetheless this guy said it's possible you know that at the national level things will be more hopeful. Well his name was Silman pre-Chase. He later became senator from Ohio then governor of Ohio then he became Lincoln's secretary of the Treasury we used to hear about him in elementary school because he's studying the Civil War and ended up the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and took Saberi plainly person like that had an opening to any kind of possibilities in the West that he probably wouldn't have had back home. And somebody told him and he was very struck by it as fact at that time. Thirty six members of the House of Representatives had been born in Connecticut Connecticut only had five representatives of its own. So the rest of them at all fanned out into the country in order to make careers for themselves and had done it successfully. And one of the things that one of the

many brilliant things Tocqueville put his finger on was the importance of the frontier which two generations later Frederick Jackson Turner you know made the center of a famous book The Frontier was not just a line on the map it was a way of being it kept advancing further and further westward and it made possible a kind of egalitarian energy and hopefulness that could not have existed even in America back east. So that for example Abraham Lincoln who was as young as these guys at the time and completely unknown was you know just teaching himself math and Illinois Lincoln and Andrew Jackson came from absolute poverty and had a sort of minimal legal training and ended up you know giants of our history. That was the kind of thing Tocqueville is perceiving would be possible. Little more and I'll stop the trip continue to have its romantic aspects. They travel mostly on steamboats. In those days the railroads were barely getting started. And the

highways were hopeless. So the waterways were a high moved about the country. Steamboats were very thrilling because in Europe they had hardly been introduced but it was the most brutal winter for 50 years. Unfortunately 31 to 32 and Ohio froze solid. Not before they were shipwrecked just just outside of wheeling and thought they were going to drown they solemnly shook hands and said farewell and then the boat settled on a rock and didn't sink any further. Ice Flows all around it. Since the river was frozen they were told you better get to the Mississippi by going overland in Nashville and then you'll make your way to Memphis. The snow is up to your waist you know trudging through through the snow. Tocqueville got a terrible fever. They had to spend a week in a log cabin with the drafty chinks between the logs and finally got to Memphis and it was still frozen and they spent another week shooting parakeets helping in their tiny way to hasten the extinction of the Carolina parakeet which no longer

exists. They got passenger pigeons along the way too. And finally the river thawed and that steamboat came up stream. It was going to keep going but everybody pointed out it wouldn't be able to is still frozen farther north. And here's a perfect example of serendipity. Just as the captain of the steamboat is trying to make up his mind what to do with sort of beating of drums and barking of dogs a bedraggled band of Indians of Choctaws come's emerging from the forest. They are one of the very first installments of the infamous trail of tears and are being deported to Oklahoma. And so the captain accepts wages to take these people aboard all of whom are almost dying of cold and Tocqueville is just both appalled and fascinated by this spectacle. I'll read you one sentence or two of his description. There was an air of ruin and destruction something that felt like a final farewell with

no returning. One couldn't look on without a pang at the heart. The Indians were calm but somber and silent. One of them knew English I asked him why the Choctaw were leaving their country to be free. He replied I couldn't get him to say any more. You must admit it was a singular coincidence that brought us to Memphis to witness the expulsion months. One might say dissolution of the last remnants of one of the most celebrated and ancient American nations. And then talk about serendipity as they were putting the Indians ashore on the Arkansas side. Big man on a white stallion came galloping up and took passage with them and it was Sam Houston. Then time had been governor Tennessee left there after a marital scandal was not yet the hero of Texas and in fact knew the Choctaw very well and had lived among them and taken a Native American common law wife and was on his way to Washington to try to persuade his old friend Andrew Jackson to treat the Indian people

better than was the case and they had long conversations with Houston whom they found to be an extremely intelligent thoughtful person and he gave Phil the idea that became the heart of a hundred page chapter. Democracy in America on race relations. At one extreme is the Indian who cannot surrender total liberty. He has never been ordered around and he won't accept it. He will lose his life rather than surrender at the other extreme. The black slaves who don't even know what it would be to be free. They'd never been allowed to make a conscious choice for themselves. And as Tocqueville's says it's tragic they have lost their religion. They don't know their ancestral language. They are not assimilated into this white people that won't accept them into it. They don't belong anywhere. And he has a number of moving stories along those lines. Well when he got back to France all wind up he knew he still wasn't ready. He needed to do a lot more reading and thinking. He had plenty of materials trunkful

the books he'd collected and plenty of notes but he wanted to understand much more deeply than he did. It's been called his second journey to America interior journey. It took him four years to finish the first half of democracy in America which is an enormous hit immediately and another five years to finish the second half. So it's no wonder it's such a prodigious monument. It's full of ideas that not only deepen but even emerged as he went on reading and thinking during those final years. And I'll just give you a couple of examples. One of them as he saw very clearly the thing that he had most been inspired by in America which was local initiative. The fact that whereas in France if you wanted to repair a town hall in Provence you had to send up to Paris to get some official ruling and you know mountains of red tape. And finally this simple little job would be done two years later. In America they just get together and do it you know or decide we

want a new road or you know any kind of changes would be at the local level. But what we saw was it's not going to keep on. The country is going to get bigger more powerful more bureaucratic. It's going to have to have a huge army because it's going to have to start fighting wars against you know other nations as it now wasn't. And people may think they don't want a big controlling government but each of them wants something from the big controlling government that they're willing to accept. And by the time you're done it's going to swell into something enormously powerful. That was obviously totally prophetically true on even more profound was his insight into what might happen with the American ethos. And I'll just give two examples and stop one of them was a kind of conditioning that produces not the old sort of despotism the kind in which a tyrant rules from above by brute force but in which the people allow themselves to be ruled in Apparently their own

self-interest in a way that still forms a kind of despotism. It's been called by modern political scientists soft despotism and it certainly leads to the kind of thing George Orwell would describe over a century later. And I'll just read one example of what Tocqueville says in democracy in America. Above the people rise is an immense tutelary power. That alone takes charge of ensuring their pleasures and watching over their fate. Id like citizens to enjoy themselves so is all they think about is enjoyment. It labors for their happiness but it wants to be the sole agent of their happiness. The sovereign power doesn't break their wills but it softens bends and directs them. It rarely compels action but it constantly opposes action. It doesn't tyrannizing but it hinders represses restrains and numbs until it reduces each nation to a mere flock of timid and industrious animals with government as their shepherd.

Maybe I'll read just one more paragraph because it's one of the most haunting and resonant piece talking about the anime that he thinks will somehow overcome Americans for all their energy and independence. When inequality is the common law of a society as in France the greatest inequalities don't strike the eye. When everything is more or less at the same level the slightest inequalities are wounding. That's why the desire for equality becomes ever more insatiable among Democratic Peoples many easily attain a certain level of equality but they can't attain equality they desire. It keeps receding before them as it recedes it provokes their pursuit. They believe they're going to seize it and it escapes their grasp. This is the reason for this singular melancholy that inhabitants of democratic countries often experience in the bosom of abundance. So I'll pause there if you'd like to ask any questions I'd be delighted to respond.

He thought he did when they were on the ship board. They realized my gosh you know we're not understanding what people are telling us. And so they knock themselves out trying to improve it. In a letter that he was writing that he would send help when he got a chance. He said we're just putting ourselves through torture to learn English. There's a pretty young American girl who helped with the torture is that not quite as difficult but even in New York one time they got the Week wrong and didn't show up for a big banquet in their honor. There a lot of embarrassment but he was a good linguist and his girlfriend back home was an Englishwoman and eventually married. Although they spoke French then and by the time he left America I think his English was it was a little Gallic it had a funny flavor to it. But I think it was perfectly good enough to understand everything. And one thing actually I noticed in trying to translate is when translators have his American speaking they kind of forget they're translating his French and putting it back into English and maybe they didn't sound quite a step is that so

you know as possible without changing what they say to make them a little more idiomatic. It's a good question because after he got back to France he got into politics in earnest. He was kind of above mere politics at the time he came here and I think he came to see that there's a reason for parties and as a reason for compromise and that for a democracy to succeed it can't be as high minded as you know Franklin and Jefferson wanted it to be. I think I think he wouldn't have been shocked by a lot of things that he sees. And in fact he liked the idea that these two senators for every state and in those days they were elected by state legislatures. We forgot and it wasn't till the 20th century it became a popular vote. He wasn't a believer in total democracy but then neither was John Stuart Mill and neither was Henry Adams. A generation later. But mostly it's all changed so much.

I think he would be just completely it he says you know I'm not a prophet. The future is always going to be unforeseeable. I'm just describing things as I understand them of other visitors. Absolutely. Ten years later Charles Dickens made a sort of grand tour through America and he wrote a book called American notes and it's full of great writing because they can. It's a great writer and it's particularly strong on prisons. Tocqueville did believe in keeping prisoners in their place. And Dickens whose father had been put in debtor's prison when he was a boy was much more sympathetic to that. Really this fear of solitary confinement I haven't described the Philadelphia one there. They weren't even allowed to see other people. They tried complete isolation and they notice they went completely crazy. So instead they let them have work to do. They would teach them to be a shoemaker and they would bring in leather. But the poor guy would be still all alone with nothing but cricket that might have got into itself and in hindsight they went crazy just a little more slowly and Dickens saw that and he writes very movingly

about this catatonic state and these prisoners that he saw there. But the rest of the time because he's a total snob and people have said it's because he was a upstart middle class guy who was afraid he was a little bit vulgar. And so he's always putting the Americans down and being superior to them and he came over here thinking he was a political liberal and went away saying boy democracy is really disgusting. So it's all the more remarkable. Tocqueville has said I'm not by background and experience a believer in democracy. I was brought up the other way. I just see the point of it. And anyway it's not going to be reversed. Who is more open to what its virtues were. Actually I can't resist quoting some of the great 19th century French critic said Tuthill got married to democracy not out of passion but out of reason and necessity is sort of an arranged marriage. But that made it stronger. There's a great book The best book of all books about talkfest. I showed him the old one and it's called Tocqueville between two worlds and that's his theme because he

either belongs to the past nor really to the populous future. He sees everything from more perspective. Yeah I'm not a historian but I certainly you know tried to read a lot of history and my understanding is it was a time of almost bewildering transition so that the old Federalists had collapsed and were reforming into plagues and the Democrats of Jackson were just beginning to create a true party machine of the modern kind. Under the guidance of Van Buren and Tocqueville didn't even understand how powerful and how charismatic Jackson was. Unfortunately he'd been biased by all these aristocrats. You know that he met first and he actually met Jackson for 20 minutes in the White House but he was a perfunctory visit Jackson didn't know his reputation was at stake in a great book. So what we saw what he saw was that this vulgar guy who happened to win a meaningless

battle in New Orleans when that war was being was already over. Somehow has been made president and he could not see what Jackson symbolized or in fact how powerful he was he was the first president to really use the veto power just because he didn't like a bill and to feel that it seemed weird and arbitrary. But of course didn't mean a lot of sense for Jackson's program. So I think if he'd been here 10 years later he would have seen him fully develop party system would be more like the one we know at that time probably nobody knew what was going on. And his informants were they all had axes to grind and they weren't giving him a clear picture. Until now they've never been fully translated into English. There's one version that has some of them. The letters have almost never been translated. And a lot of the material they expected to read is he in Beaumont was sent home in letters that they expected their families to keep. When he came upon that idea of a soft despotism in one of his marginal notes which is collected in an elaborate French edition he said

this is it. This is the key to all my thought. The stuff I said in the first volume is so shallow compared to this. So it wasn't even from the beginning of the trip to the end that it was in pondering what it meant. But fortunately next year there's going to be a massive English translation by a wonderful translator are at their gold hammer coming up from the University of Virginia Press. And then every single word these guys wrote about America is going to be visible in one book. Well that was the tragedy of his life because the book was an enormous success and he was almost immediately elected to the Academy Francaise. You know the 40 immortals who are at the top of French intellectual life everybody honored the power of his book. But the French system is so different and it is still evolving that he never had the influence he wanted and there's always this sort of outsider. He did get into the government very briefly after the 1848 revolution and then became foreign minister. But then it turned into a dictatorship and his job was over. They had a constitutional convention. He thought I'm going to get

them to have a bicameral legislature and you know a president and in the end it ended up you know none of those things. Hugh Brogan who wrote the recent accident by Phil says Finally when Charles de Gaulle became president in this republic at last had a Tocqueville's young republic after trying everything else. Oh I think I think are several perfectly acceptable ones. Only this is true. French is difficult. All kinds of things. The issue is local. All right. Library translation which is just beautiful. That's a very good question and I hope I'm not flattering myself in saying it's been an advantage to me to be a total outsider to the field and the subject. I'm trained in literature. I was originally trained in British literature

even to our country so was already moving into a place where I had no standing and experience that I had read and thought about him a lot. I certainly am not an historian of 19th century America. So I think it allowed me to be more open to different possible interpretations and somebody who's got a stake in that particular one if that's their profession. So I read historians with a lot of different views. I read political scientists with a lot of different different interpretations of democracy in America. And I really feel like I was building up a kind of stereoscopic picture through a lot of people's eyes more than looking for my version of America. Well I will give one example. One reviewer very distinguished historian said I was I had a better take on Andrew Jackson than many historians of America do because each of them has a line in Jackson and I just read a lot of very good books about Jackson and tried to understand this very

complicated I think extraordinary person. So you know how could I not bring my own assumptions and attitudes. But I was hoping to process a lot of other people's as well as my own thinking