The great thing about being a historian is that you can write
about almost anything and get away with it. Everything that happened in the
past that left chronological records is fair game. If you're really good, you
can even fake the chronology.
Of course, most historians don't write, once they get their Ph.D.
degrees. They write term papers in college. They write longer term papers in
graduate school. They write a Ph.D. dissertation. Then they stop writing.
There is another major problem with writing social history.
Historians are specialists. They survive by being specialists. Yet there is no
form of history that is broader than social history. It is distinctly a form of
history in which specialization is a liability from the beginning. The mindset
of the specialized historian is completely wrong for someone who wants to write
the history of a particular society.
People can write fat histories of Western civilization because the
timeline is so long, and the documentation is so varied. Somebody can read a dozen
textbooks, get the general drift of what went on, and write one of his own.
Maybe somebody will assign the textbook to college students, but probably not.
Half a century ago, the best universities required at least a year's course on
the history of Western civilization. Today, virtually no university does. The
student radicals of the late 1960's got their way: "Hey, hey, ho ho,
Western civ has got to go." About two dozen private colleges still teach
it, but you have not heard of most of them. You probably have not heard of any
of them.
THE CHALLENGE
How would you write a history of 20th century America? There were
wars, and wars had influence for brief periods of time. But the war in
Afghanistan has been socially irrelevant, despite the fact that it is the
longest war in American history. World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War
did transform American society. The Korean War did not. The wars since Vietnam
have not. Furthermore, military history, while popular with military history
buffs, is the abandoned child of all history departments. There is no grand
theory of war. There is no grand theory of battlefield tactics and strategy.
There really is no integrating theory of how wars start, how they are fought,
and what the results are. So, military historians, except at the military
academies, are rare on any campus. It has to be a large university that offers
a course on American military history.
What about American social history? The problem here is the
breadth of it. It involves popular culture. In the 20th century, that meant
magazines, movies, radio shows, television shows, sports, wars, the automobile,
courtship, marriage, divorce, inter-generational relationships, retirement
homes, women's fashions, language, popular music lyrics, best-selling novels,
video games, changing neighborhoods, and the allocation of both time and money
to all of these. Then toss in public opinion polls. This was the development of
the second half of the century. Which ones would be best to look at? Why?
Then, after you have a good understanding of all of these, plus
some topics that I have forgotten, how do you assess at any given time which
are the dominant factors in shaping the way real people actually lived?
Basically, it's guesswork. You have to be able to tell a story
that other people will believe. You have to sell your narrative to
intellectuals, but it had better be believable to people who lived through the
era.
When I was an undergraduate, the most popular social history of
the 1920's was a little book called Only Yesterday. It is still
probably the most widely read social history of the 1920's. It was written in
1931. We read on Amazon:
Prohibition. Al Capone. The
President Harding scandals. The revolution of manners and morals. Black
Tuesday. These are only an inkling of the events and figures characterizing the
wild, tumultuous era that was the Roaring Twenties. Originally published in
1931, Only Yesterday traces the rise of post-World War I
prosperity up to the Wall Street crash of 1929 against the colorful backdrop of
flappers, speakeasies, the first radio, and the scandalous rise of skirt
hemlines. Hailed as an instant classic, this is Frederick Lewis Allen's vivid
and definitive account of one of the twentieth century's most fascinating
decades, chronicling a time of both joy and terror--when dizzying highs were
quickly succeeded by heartbreaking lows.
I can't think of any other book written about a decade within one
year of the end of the decade that, 86 years later, is still plausibly
described as definitive. It was not written by a professional historian. Allen
was the editor of Harper's. He was a great writer. Somehow, he
seemed to be able to get the essence of the 1920's, and nobody has persuaded
readers that he has written a better book than Allen's.
The problem is this: anybody who wants to write about the 1920's
is going to start with Only Yesterday. Allen's account is going to
shape what a modern writer begins to think about the whole decade. We just
can't get away from Allen.
What did the average Joe and Jane really think about America in
the 20th century? What influenced how they analyzed the world around them? What
sources would you go to in an attempt to answer these questions?
Here is where I would go: Reader's Digest. No other
magazine ever captured the heart, mind, and soul of the American people, month
by month. Somehow, the editor, DeWitt Wallace, really did understand what
Americans wanted to read. Wikipedia reports:
Reader's Digest is
an American general-interest family magazine, published ten times a year.
Formerly based in Chappaqua, New York, it is now headquartered in Midtown
Manhattan. The magazine was founded in 1920, by DeWitt Wallace and Lila Bell
Wallace. For many years, Reader's Digest was the best-selling
consumer magazine in the United States; it lost the distinction in 2009
to Better Homes and Gardens. According to Mediamark Research
(2006), Reader's Digest reaches more readers with household incomes of
$100,000+ than Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week,
and Inc. combined.
Global editions of Reader's Digest reach an
additional 40 million people in more than 70 countries, via 49 editions in 21
languages. The periodical has a global circulation of 10.5 million, making it
the largest paid circulation magazine in the world.
Here is the kicker: you can't find a set of the Reader's
Digest in a local library. Maybe the New York Public Library has a
set. Your local library does not. Your local research university library
doesn't. Research universities don't allocate shelf space to popular magazines.
You can't find the Saturday Evening Post, either. Yet that would be
the second magazine I would go to in an attempt to figure out what the average
American was thinking from the 1920's at least through the 1950's. Again,
quoting Wikipedia:
The Saturday Evening Post is
an American magazine published six times a year. It was published weekly under
this title from 1897 until 1963, then every two weeks until 1969. From the
1920s to the 1960s, it was one of the most widely circulated and influential
magazines for the American middle class, with fiction, non-fiction, cartoons
and features that reached millions of homes every week.
In a research university, you also cannot find the Ladies
Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, Vogue, and almost any other popular monthly
magazine. Shelf space is simply too expensive, in the minds of librarians, to
devote to popular magazines.
If these magazines were all available online in digital form, then
it really would be possible to begin to do a comprehensive study of American
society in the 20th century. It would take a lot of graduate students to work
on it. It would take a dedicated historian an entire lifetime to begin to get a
sense of what American society was all about, 1901 (Teddy Roosevelt) to 2001
(9/11). (Technically, a new century begins in 01. Oddly enough, for American
history, it really did begin in 1901, and it really did end in 2001. Everything
before 1901 was different, and everything after 2001 was different.) He would
have to resist the temptation to specialize. He would have to connect the
thousands of dots, but to do that, he would have to get inside the heads of Joe
and Jane Lunchbucket. But being a professional academic involves a lifetime of
avoiding the hopes and dreams of the Lunchbucket family. Even the concept of
the Lunchbucket family is archaic. It basically did not exist after 1950.
White-collar professions replaced blue-collar professions within five years of
World War II.
I have left out an important aspect of American society: the public
school system. To understand what college professors wanted the American public
to believe, you would have to study American textbooks at the high school
level. University libraries don't have these on the shelves, either. The
advantage is this: you would only have to study the work of one man, David
Saville Muzzey. He wrote the American history textbook that the majority of
American high school students read from 1911 at least to the mid-1960's. He did
this invisibly. Parents paid no attention. The public didn't know who he was.
Intellectuals didn't know who he was. Year after year, decade after decade, his
publisher generated huge revenues from his books. I don't know what he was
worth when he died, but he must have been a multi-multimillionaire off the royalties.
He was a Progressive. He was a graduate of Columbia. He was a graduate of the
liberal New York seminary, Union Theological Seminary. He was a social gospel
advocate. He shaped the thinking of probably half of the high school graduates
in America for half a century. You cannot find his textbooks in university
libraries. Libraries don't collect textbooks.
It is mind-boggling that one man shaped the thinking of half of
American high school students from 1911 until at least 1966, yet nobody knew
who he was at the time, and nobody knows who he was now. How could you begin to
understand American social history if you had no idea of what history textbooks
and government textbooks taught to the masses? Here is the Wikipedia entry on
him:
David Saville Muzzey (1870-1965)
was an American historian. His history books were used as textbooks by millions
of American children. He was accused of being a "bolshevik" by the
Better America Federation.
That entry never changes. I have seen it for years. It conveys essentially
zero information about him.
At some point, I do plan to post all of his textbooks on my site
as PDFs. I don't know of anybody in the future we want to write a master's
thesis on his changing interpretations, and perhaps a doctoral dissertation that
would discuss the print runs of each of the editions. I know this much:
somebody ought to.
I have only read one book that even mentioned him: Frances
FitzGerald's America Revised. It is a history of American history
textbooks. It was published in 1979. There had never been a book like it
before, and there has not been a book like it since then.
Intellectuals speak about the pulse of the nation. They speak
about the climate of opinion. Yet intellectuals live in bubble worlds. The best
example of this was seen in November 2016 as the electoral college results
rolled in. The impossible took place: Trump defeated Hillary. It would take a
self-disciplined intellectual to trace the development of American thought and
culture in terms of the people who really made American culture.
Then there is this. This scene really may be true. I am certainly
not attuned to women's fashions. But if this is true, and it may be, then there
is the question of causation. Where do the ideas start? Can we trace them back
by following the money?
There is a subtle and complex interaction between innovators and
the masses. Intellectuals are very good about identifying innovators. But the
big question is this: do the innovators selected by the intellectuals as the
change agents of society actually change the society? If so, how do they do it?
What is the transmission belt, to use Lenin's term, between the innovations in
the minds of innovators and the decisions of the masses? If you don't
understand the masses, it doesn't do you much good to discuss the great ideas
of the innovators. It's what took place in between that makes the difference.
If you don't understand social history, you cannot begin to
comprehend what is in between. This is what is missing in almost all academic
historical monographs: an understanding of social history. As for textbooks on
American social history, there isn't one that I can think of that is widely
respected by intellectuals, and yet would be recognizable or even considered
worth reading by a B-average graduate of an American public high school. That
is why Only Yesterday still sells.
Then there is the question of chronological organization. Do you
do it by presidential elections? Do you do it by wars? Do you do it by decades
that end in zero? If so, why?
THE 1950's
I'll tell you this from my own experience. The 1950's ended on
November 22, 1963, in Dallas.
For my generation, which is the generation of the 50's, the 1950's
probably began with the white guys' cover of Sh-Boom in 1954. This was not an
auspicious beginning for anyone's social history.
On the other hand, here
is what it replaced. It replaced Perry
Como. He was pleasant, but Time-Life doesn't sell golden oldies CD's
on late-night cable TV with Perry Como as the hook. The people who listened to
Perry are short of both money and time.
There is only one name that goes from then until now: Tony Bennett. Here, I give my seal of approval --
not that it will help him at all. If you want to start with what's good about
American culture, start with Tony Bennett and work backwards.