Social Philosophy

The Americans: The Democratic Experience.
by Daniel J. Boorstin.
Random House. 717 pp. $10.00.

After fifteen years and three-quarters of a million words, Daniel J. Boorstin has completed his trilogy, The Americans. In 1959 the first volume, subtitled The Colonial Experience, deservedly won a Bancroft prize. Seven years later, the second installment, The National Experience, received the Francis Parkman prize, recognizing history of outstanding literary excellence. Now the final, longest, and best volume, The Democratic Experience, has appeared and it ought to be a strong candidate for major honors and awards.

A best-seller and a selection of the Book of the Month Club, The Democratic Experience is tautly, and at times brilliantly, written, with scarcely a superfluous phrase or sentence. It is enormously learned; Boorstin has apparently read everything. It is unbelievably comprehensive, giving extended treatment to matters as diverse as rural free delivery and air conditioning, divorce and life insurance, market research and space exploration. This vast history finds room for the seemingly trivial as well as for the obviously important. Boorstin's index includes references to full-frequency-range reproduction and gangsters, to “Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer” and scientific management.

Unlike much social history, The Democratic Experience is not an aimless collection of miscellaneous data but a cogent argument of a novel thesis. In the last century, Boorstin believes, Americans have experienced “countless, little-noticed revolutions, which occurred not in the halls of legislatures or on battlefields or on the barricades but in the homes and farms and factories and schools and stores.” The most remarkable of the changes was the shift from the face-to-face fellowship of the 19th-century ethnic, religious, or political community to a new world of impersonal relationships among consumers. Consumption became an end in itself; shopping was the major American pastime. For city people the daily newspapers with their pages of advertisements served as “streetcars of the mind” that led directly to “the great consumers' palaces,” the department stores. In the country, rural free delivery made it possible for farm folk, using that “Bible of the new rural consumption communities,” the Sears-Roebuck catalogue, also to join the “everywhere communities of consumers and national-brand buyers who would never meet.” In these consumption communities each man was attached “only by the thinnest of threads and by the most volatile, switchable loyalties, to thousands of other Americans in nearly everything he ate or drank or drove or read or used.” The total result, Boorstin argues, was an alteration of “human experience itself, the very meaning of community, of time and space, of present and future.”

_____________

Though this remarkable book has already found a large popular audience, it is safe to predict that it, like its predecessors, will have very little impact upon the historical profession in the United States. There is no “Boorstin school” of historiography, no coterie of loyal disciples and imitators. Even when Boorstin was a professor at the University of Chicago he had few graduate students completing dissertations under his direction; as director of the National Museum of History and Technology—a post he recently left—he has had none. The pages of the Journal of American History and the American Historical Review are not filled with essays testing and evaluating the theses Boorstin has advanced in The Americans;¹ indeed, the leading historical journals have not always bothered even to review the books.

For this curious situation it would be easy to place all the blame upon the history professors. By and large a serious-minded lot, they are put off by authors, like Boorstin, who have a sense of humor. Perhaps, too, they suspect that anybody who writes as well as Boorstin cannot be entirely sound. Concerned more with forces and movements than with individuals, they dislike Boorstin's technique of telling his tale through biographical vignettes, like his brilliant brief portraits of George Washington Seldon, the man who patented the internal combustion motor, and G. Stanley Hall, the originator of child psychology in America. Finally, history professors are busy people; when they read the work of other historians, thev tend to choose short, analytical books with clear-cut controversial theses, rather than a long, subtle, and elaborate argument like that of The Americans. It is not accidental that among historians Boorstin's most influential publication is also one of his briefest: The Genius of American Politics (1953).

But Boorstin himself has been in part responsible for the indifference with which the historical profession has received his vast trilogy. Announcing that his purpose in writing it was “to see what our civilization promises, and what unsuspected possibilities it may reveal,” he nowhere explains what methods he used to attain his goal, what standards he employed in selecting his data. Boorstin's version of the American experience may well be correct; but it is a unique and highly personal interpretation, not subject to testing by other scholars.

It is, moreover, an interpretation that does not rest heavily upon historical data. For all Boorstin's formidable learning, he is not much concerned with the chronological development of ideas and institutions. For example, his account of life insurance in America begins with a happy vignette of Elizur Wright, the pre-Civil War insurance reformer, skips hastily to a portrait of Henry B. Hyde of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, and then rushes to conclusions about the democratizing effect insurance has had upon society as a whole. Boorstin thus uses the past only to illuminate the present; he reaches back into history less for proof of his assertions than for the anecdote or biographical detail that will, in W. S. Gilbert's words, give verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

It is, moreover, harder for professional historians to accept Boorstin's vision of America because it has so markedly changed during the writing of this trilogy. The Americans began as a celebration of our nation, as a tribute to a people so vibrant and promising that not even their warts could disfigure their true beauty. Even in The Democratic Experience Boorstin often reverts to this boosterish tone. He clearly admires his go-getters, his hucksters, his captains of industry, even when—or perhaps especially when—they were slightly shady. He rejoices at the perfection of American technology. But increasingly a note of pessimism and discouragement has become evident in Boorstin's writing. Advances in technology have puzzlingly not been accompanied by advances in civilization. “Democratizing everything enlarged the daily experience of millions,” he continues to argue, but he also admits: “spreading meant thinning.” “Was it inevitable that a democratized experience, however rich and technologically sophisticated, should be impoverished?” he now asks sadly. “Was there an inherent contradiction between the aim of democracy—to enrich the citizen's everyday life—and its modern means?”

With such questions Boorstin's central purpose becomes clear. All along he has been writing not history but social philosophy. Perhaps the professional historians have been right in unconsciously sensing that The Americans is the work of a first-class mind, but not necessarily of a first-class historical mind. It is not to be compared with the great monuments of American historical scholarship, like Edward Channing's History of the United States or Allan Nevins's Ordeal of the Union. Instead, it is an astute and learned commentary upon American society and deserves a place on the shelves alongside Crèvecoeur and Tocqueville, Bryce and Laski.

¹ John P. Diggin's “Consciousness and Ideology in American History: The Burden of Daniel J. Boorstin,” in American Historical Review, Vol. 76 (February 1971), pp. 99-118, is only apparently an exception. It gives passing reference to the two volumes of The Americans then published but deals primarily with Boorstin's The Genius of American Politics.