The purpose of David McCullough's The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For is clear. A collection of a Pulitzer-winning historian's speeches, many of them commencement addresses, bound boldly and attractively in a volume with thick paper, lots of white space, and many colorful pictures, and making appeals to timeless ideals of national and cross-generational unity and just happening to come out in April—this is Simon and Schuster's effort for this year's graduation gift market.
My advice to doting grandparents and family friends would be to spend the extra ten dollars on one of McCullough's historical works. The speeches in this volume are by no means bad. They are pleasant and colloquial, sprinkled with charming historical anecdotes and broad optimism about the American project; they are exactly the pleasant ephemera expected from occasional oratory. Academic ceremonies and meetings of Congress and historical societies are not the proper contexts for controversial or substantive rhetoric. Philippics and deliberations are better conducted at other times and places.
So if McCullough's speeches do not quite live up to the promise of the muscular title, he must be forgiven. The platitudes ("It's said that you and your generation are apathetic, that you care only for money, that idealism is in decline among you. I don't believe it") are inoffensive; the advice ("Take an interest in people") is sound, if not terribly groundbreaking; the historical examples are delightful. Whatever programmatic or political statements he makes are uncontroversial and uninteresting: "Let's do something about public education. Let's stop the mindless destruction of historic America. Let's clean up our rivers and skies, and while we're at it, let's clean up our language." Some of his statements have not aged well—a 1994 commencement address at the University of Pittsburgh lionizes urban technocracy in a way that is jarring to post-Crash ears—but McCullough's insistent conversation with the past gives the newly degreed reader a virtuous example to follow, if nothing else.
Unfortunately, students are generally swine. Changeable, naïve, self-righteous, craven, susceptible to the outsized influences of academic fads and professorial personalities—their vices are many, their virtues few and often compromised. They booed Solzhenitsyn and tried to break Charles Murray's neck. Saying "Read history" (as McCullough does several times verbatim) or telling a few stories about Teddy Roosevelt are not measures likely to change the fresh college graduate's ethos, which is often predicated on the rejection of history (when it has a coherent method at all).
On the other hand, a more concrete approach might take the recovering student by surprise and actually do some good. A gift copy of McCullough's The Great Bridge, for example, might lead the reader to reflect on valuable cautionary lessons about infrastructure spending and mismanagement. John Adams might lead our student to reflect on the concrete difficulties of balancing freedom and order in a society. The American Spirit, if it has any pedagogic effect at all, will just lead him to think that George Washington and Franklin Roosevelt were great men without making him grapple seriously with the intellectual or political legacy of either president. When the upshot of American political and intellectual heritage is under scrutiny, as nativists and socialists alike rear their heads again in the public square, soothing, non-confrontational appeals to the past tend only to confuse matters.
McCullough's historical works are written to inform and to argue. His speeches seem written to please, or at least to avoid offense. There is nothing wrong with that; everyone who has ever had to give a speech, even just an after-dinner thank-you, is aware that sometimes politeness and nothing more is what is needed. The difference is that most people's after-dinner thank-yous are not collected and published in $25 hardback editions. The American Spirit is a pleasant book, but is not much more than a footnote on McCullough's corpus. The interested reader and gift-giver alike would be better served returning to McCullough's scholarly writing. His true strength is there.