De Tocqueville and Vonholst

Peter Discher

Age 16

The two great books in the past century published about America by foreigners were by De Tocqueville and Vonholst.


De Tocqueville came to America primarily to study the prison system in the US, but while he was in America he paid a great deal of attention to what was going on in this country. He was intensely interested and concerned. As a result, he went back to France and wrote his account of what Americans were like in book published for the first time in about 1841 in 2 volumes.” Democracy in America” De Tocqueville believed that democracy could eventually lead to totalitarianism.

Vonholst was an immigrant from Germany to America. He became very unfriendly to what was going on in the U.S. because when he first came to New York the first thing he ran into was Tammany Hall. Tammany Hall is a political organization that has been involved in many scandals. Vonholst wrote a multiple volume Series that was titled “A Constitutional History of the United States.”

De Tocqueville’s writings have been reprinted again and again, but Vonholst’s have never been reprinted.