Yet Tocqueville's great work is also, as a critic put it, 'one of the world's least-read classics.' I took that as something of a challenge, and set out to read every word. (He let Beaumont handle the prisons report.) Then Tocqueville went home and wrote Democracy in America, an instant bestseller when the first of its two volumes was published in 1835. He was an indefatigable reporter, asking questions of ordinary workmen, doctors, senators, professors, governors, Daniel Webster, Sam Houston, President Andrew Jackson, ex-President John Quincy Adams and Charles Carroll, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence and the richest man in America. Ostensibly, Tocqueville came to study American penitentiaries, which were of great interest to French prison reformers, but he had in mind a larger agenda, 'a great work which will make our reputation someday.'

For nine-and-a-half months, they traveled the nation (with a brief foray into Canada), amazed, he put it in a letter home, at 'the quantities of things one does manage to stuff into one's stomach here.' They ventured south to New Orleans and as far north as Sault Ste. He was only 25 and a sort of apprentice judge when he journeyed to America, in 1831, along with a friend, Gustave de Beaumont, a deputy public prosecutor. Born 200 years ago this month, the author of Democracy in America wound up explaining this country better than anyone before or since. So I welcomed Alexis de Tocqueville as a fellow outsider who had also set out to understand Americans. Still, even after many years, I sometimes felt like a stranger in a strange land. But soon enough I was enjoying it all, including the rivalry. At first it seemed strange to be competing with my colleague in the next office, rather than being in league with him against management's follies. Within a few weeks, I was working in New York City, where the pace was faster, the voices louder and the opportunities greater than in Canada. I was born and raised in Canada, but because my father was born in the States, I'd unknowingly been a Yank all along.

I got the surprise of my life when, at age 36, I walked into the United States consulate in Montreal to apply for a visa and was told I was a U.S.

Tocqueville america