American icons.

Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America's Founding Ideas, by David Hackett Fischer (Oxford, 864 pp., $50)

ABY WARBURG, scion of a Hamburg banking family, had no interest in ledgers or letters of credit; he had, however, a passion for books and pictures. He resigned his interest in the family firm and in the 1880s embarked on a career as a collector, critic, and aesthete. He devoted his extensive leisure to the collection of a celebrated library, and in his studious hours he examined the way the painters of the Italian Renaissance used Greco-Roman motifs--Apollo's lyre, Proserpina's flowers--in their art. The result was a new approach to the study of art variously known as "iconology" or "iconography," an attentiveness to the traditions giving images their authority.

David Hackett Fischer has now applied the techniques developed by Warburg's school to American images of liberty and freedom. "Every American image of liberty and freedom," Fischer writes, "has a story behind it." The purpose of his book, Liberty and Freedom, is "to tell those tales, one by one, in a way that centers on individual actions, deliberate choices, and contingent events." Fischer traces the iconology of the Stars and Stripes and Yankee Doodle, American eagles and "Don't Tread on Me" rattlesnakes, Brother Jonathan and "I Want You for U.S. Army" recruiting posters.

Whether Fischer has succeeded in his effort to apply the techniques of iconography to such artifacts as Willkie buttons and the motifs of the flower-power movement is another question. Liberty and Freedom is a broad book but not a deep one, and though Fischer faintly attempts to distinguish the different shades of meaning of "liberty" and "freedom" by glancing at their etymological roots, he too often neglects to show how these differences are reflected in the images he discusses. "Liberty," from the latin liber and the Greek eleutheros, he connects to ideas of "separation" and "release" as well as to "privileges" that "may be given"; "freedom," however, he associates with the German frei, with notions of kinship, rights ("that which must be given"), and "soul freedom"--"becoming one with God." Such verbal distinctions are not easily captured in pictures, and Fischer fails to pursue the inquiry with much diligence.

One has only to compare his discussion of the "liberty trees" that flourished in New England during the American Revolution--venerable oaks and elms consecrated to the struggle against the Crown--with Warburg's analysis of the frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara to sense what is missing. Warburg probed beneath the neoclassical facade of Renaissance art to reveal a core of mysticism and magic. Fischer, by contrast, is content with surfaces. His treatment of the liberty trees' cultural antecedents in Europe is perfunctory; the tree, he argues, is an American creation--"invented," he says, by the Loyal Nine, a party of Boston Whigs, in 1765. The assertion leaves the reader puzzled. In a 1787 letter to John Adams's son-in-law, William Stephens Smith, Thomas Jefferson said that the "tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." Five years later, at the height of the French Revolution, Bertrand Barere concluded an address to the Convention by declaring that the "tree of liberty, as an ancient author remarks, flourishes when it is watered with the blood of all classes of tyrants." It is most unlikely that Barere knew of Jefferson's letter, which for many years remained unpublished. The more plausible explanation is that both Jefferson and Barere, in their meditations on the liberty tree, drew on an anterior source, probably not an American one, for Barere had little knowledge of American affairs. What might the aboriginal source of the liberty tree be? J. G. Frazer's The Golden Bough sheds more light on the question than Liberty and Freedom.

Fischer's failure to dig too often leaves him without enough to say about his subjects, a poverty of analysis he imperfectly conceals by inserting moribund adjectives--"deeply" is one of them--into his sentences. "The presidency of Andrew Jackson," Fischer writes, "deeply divided American opinion." The New England reformers "deeply cherished the achievement of independence." "Deeply worried" about the country's response to his Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln for a time hid the document in a drawer.

This is not Fischer at his best. The flawed writing in Liberty and Freedom derives from its flawed premise. Much of the civic kitsch with which Fischer deals--magazine covers and paintings by Norman Rockwell--does not repay the kind of analysis to which Warburg subjected the Schifanoia frescoes. Political art is not necessarily bad art; Virgil's prophetic musings on Rome's mission in the Aeneid reward aesthetic study, just as Aeschylus' vision of Athenian justice in the Oresteia does. But Mae West dressed as the Statue of Liberty will be more profitably studied in the lamp, not of Warburgian connoisseurship, but of Gibbonian irony. Those images that might justify the scrupulous investigation of what Warburg called Pathosformel--the latent forms of cultural feeling that give pictures their power--are too often passed over with a hasty glance, as Fischer hurries on to the next object.

The extent of ground that Fischer has to cover in Liberty and Freedom betrays him, too, into uncharacteristic lapses. Robert Lovett did not go to Groton. The analysis of Theodore Roosevelt's theory of political economy belongs in a textbook. Fischer's discussion of the Greek belief that in a tyranny only one person is free obscures the more important Greek insight that no man is less free than the tyrant (Republic, 579 d-e). Yet the book is by no means unrelievedly bad. There are fine portraits of such "iconic" Americans as Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Robert E. Lee. These studies of the intersection of character and tradition are Fischer's forte, and they possess many of the qualities that made his previous books, Albion's Seed, Paul Revere's Ride, and Washington's Crossing, first-rate histories. But however compelling they are, these sketches of souls are separated by long stretches of barren text, and the promised "narrative lines, all braided together" do not emerge with anything like the force needed to carry a reader through the book's more than 700 pages.

In Liberty and Freedom Fischer fails to deliver the advertised story, and he lapses into the bad habits of the professor. In his earlier books he attempted, with considerable success, to reconcile the demands of academic scholarship with the narrative art of earlier generations of historians; but he has so far failed to perfect his storytelling technique and write the classic historical work of which he is perhaps capable. This sort of failure is not uncommon in the university; the professional historian who has spent years mastering his sources and cementing his reputation as a scholar supposes, when he sets out to write narrative history, that his academic attainments qualify him for the task.

Gibbon and Macaulay were more modest in their estimate of their abilities; to live on intimate terms with their sources was, they knew, only the beginning of their craft. The historical art, as much as any other, requires a period of preparation; and both Gibbon and Macaulay early apprenticed themselves to master craftsmen. The historian of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire went to school to Tacitus. The historian of the Revolution of 1688 studied at the feet of the Greek masters; Macaulay's "sense of his own inferiority to Thucydides," his nephew George Otto Trevelyan wrote, "did more to put him out of conceit with himself than all the unfavourable comments which were bestowed upon him, (sparingly enough, it must be allowed,) by the newspapers and reviews of the day." What might so formidably industrious a historian as Fischer achieve if he devoted his hours to the composition not of catalogues raisonnes but of narrative gems? We close without reluctance the present volume and hopefully await his next.

Mr. Beran is the author most recently of Jefferson's Demons: Portrait of a Restless Mind.