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Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City. By Edward L. Widmer. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. x, 290 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-19-510050-6.)
Edward L. Widmer has written a highly readable account of the amorphous Young America "movement." With John O'Sullivan, the founder and editor of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review as its pivotal figure, Young America represented the most vigorous manifestation of the Democratic party's anglophobic tendencies. It dismissed whiggish New England as an extension of Old World values and sought to establish New York City as the center of an authentically national culture. As a political phenomenon, too, Young America pulled the horns of John Bull, demonizing it as a "royalist" threat to the continental advance of the United States.
Widmer argues that a principal explanation for the murkiness of Young America lies in the failure of scholars to discern a quasi metamorphosis in the...