His creed is a fixture.
—Walter Bagehot on Macaulay

It was said of Macaulay’s History of England that its author never tired of drawing comparisons between the backwardness of earlier times and the progressiveness of his own. Whig orthodoxy—Whig complacency, too—became the measure of all political virtue, became, indeed, the measure of virtue itself. As a consequence—and not withstanding its high achievement in other respects—his History was said to have done much to advance the tide of moral complacency that was one of the least attractive features of the Victorian age.

Something similar might be said of the otherwise very different histories which Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has devoted to the life and times of Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Kennedy brothers. Like Macaulay’s History, Mr. Schlesinger’s histories have enjoyed a huge readership and won their author many plaudits among professional historians and in the larger world of literary and public affairs. And there is another important respect in which these histories resemble Macaulay’s. They have likewise been conceived to advance a political interest—in Mr. Schlesinger’s case, the interest of a liberal orthodoxy that is wholly identified with the fortunes of the Democratic Party. What Bagehot called the “party-spirit” shapes their every utterance and makes of their every narrative a fable of moral combat in which the forces of enlightenment (the Democratic Party) and the forces of benightedness (the Republican Party) struggle for ascendency. What Bagehot said of Macaulay’s Historymay therefore