More than 200 European writers toured the United States in
the decades after the Napoleonic Wars, publishing mostly
contemptuous accounts of the makeshift nation for the delight of
their own provincial readers back home. Perhaps none of them
[5] was so ill equipped as the ambivalent aristocrat Alexis de
Tocqueville, and perhaps no work so unlikely to endure as his
portrait Democracy in America. Tocqueville was just 25 when he
began his journey in 1831, a capable but undistinguished student
who had become a provincial administrator. He lacked the literary
[10] stature of Charles Dickens or Frances Trollope or his cousin
Chautebriand whose reveries for the majestic American
landscape largely invented the Romantic tradition in France.
Tocquerville's purpose was somewhat narrower. He had come to
prepare an administrative report on American prisons.
[15] It was not his book on prisons that mesmerized American
audiences, however. Edward Banfield called Democracy in
America "certainly the greatest book ever written by anyone about
America" - to which Gordon Wood has added, " not only on
America but also on democracy itself." George Wilson Pierson,
[20] praised Tocqueville's "essentially 'binocular' " vision, and
presented the man who possessed it, a royalist scion, as a
prophet of the democratic era. Tocqueville has been cited so
often and so variously that the critic Caleb Crain has called him
cheekily, " the Nostradamus of democracy ".
[25] In fact, Tocqueville seems nothing more than an
impressionable amanuensis. Tocqueville praised New England
meetings but never bothered to observe one. Nor any revival
camp meetings. He didn't visit a single American college.
Tocqueville stayed a month in Boston but declined to visit the
[30] factories in Lowell. Or any other factories. A putative prophet of
the American century, Tocqueville was remarkably blind to the
unfolding 19th-century revolution in American industry and as a
celebrated chronicler of the American character he missed
perhaps the most striking feature of the nation in the age of
[35] Jackson - that it was changing, and very fast.
(from Democracy in America, by David Wallace-Wells in NEWSWEEK, April 26, 2010)
From lines 1 to 3 we infer that in the decades after the Napoleonic Wars
