| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The American Discovery of Tradition, 1865–1942. By Michael D. Clark. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. xii, 268 pp. $44.95, ISBN 0-8071-3041-9.)
As conventionally understood, the term tradition denotes a source of social authority derived from past experience and custom. Conservatives have long embraced it. One virtue of Michael D. Clark's study of the "discovery" of tradition is to complicate this understanding of tradition, even though his claims are not completely convincing.	1
In his book, Clark does not provide a comprehensive survey of traditionalism in America between 1865 and 1942; he discusses no particular American traditions nor does he pretend to survey the broad cultural discourse on traditionalism. Rather, along with an introduction and conclusion, he provides four essays covering five thinkers (the New England historian John Fiske, the Virginia historians Philip A. Bruce and Lyon G. Tyler, the architect Ralph Adams Cram, and the sociologist Charles H. Cooley) for whom tradition figured as an important concept. The choices are somewhat idiosyncratic and arbitrary, as Clark claims neither that these five were the most significant American thinkers on tradition nor that tradition was uniquely the center of their thought. The notably less successful essays on Fiske, Bruce, and Tyler are, in part, exercises in historiography.	. . .

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