Lee Hall Olmsted’s America: An “Unpractical” Man and His Vision of Civilization.
Bulfinch Press/Little, Brown
270 pages, $40

reviewed by Francis Morrone

Frederick Law Olmsted was a white male. One is repeatedly reminded of this fact at the outset of Olmsted’s America, a new life-and-times of one of the most remarkable white males of the nineteenth century. Silly as it may seem for the reader to be thus reminded of Olmsted’s race and sex, one does not read far in this book before wishing that the author, Lee Hall, had continued in this vein of platitudinizing. Then the book may have been a peppery P.C. stew. As it is, Ms. Hall is relatively restrained in her overt politicizing, and her book lacks even the one demi-virtue we’ve come to associate with the P.C. productions of today’s academia: namely, that they typically are wondrous mountains of recently disgorged primary materials. Instead, this book is simplistic, dull, notably lacking in critical viewpoint or scholarly purpose, and without a single original thing to say about its subject.

That subject is a titanic and complex figure in American civilization. Born in 1822 into a prosperous and cultured Hartford, Connecticut, family, Olmsted was a student of modest attainments, and did not, as his younger brother, John, did, attend Yale College. Instead, Olmsted indulged a romantic taste for physical adventure, and went to sea. He was set on his life’s course by his experience of the degraded life of a merchant