SOURCE: Angoff, Charles. “An Oriental Views America.” American Mercury 71, no. 320 (July-December 1950): 241-45.

In the following essay, Angoff offers an unflattering assessment of On the Wisdom of America.

The United States has puzzled the Old World almost from its very beginning. The English, in particular, for a long time could make little sense out of what Tennyson called the “Gigantic daughter of the West.” The poet laureate wished her well, and so did Coleridge, who looked upon the new nation as an “august conception … Great Britain in a state of glorious magnification.” But Macaulay was filled with foreboding. He predicted that some Caesar or Napoleon would seize the government, “or your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth,” with the difference that “your Huns and Vandals will have engendered within your own country...