Facets of American Civilization
American Immigration.
by Maldwyn Allen Jones.
University of Chicago Press. 359 pp. $6.00.
American Labor.
by Henry Pelling.
University of Chicago Press. 247 pp. $5.00.
American Philanthropy.
by Robert H. Bremner.
University of Chicago Press. 230 pp. $4.50.
These three books are the most recent additions to the Chicago History of American Civilization, which has been imaginatively, even brilliantly, edited by Daniel Boorstin. It is only with the present three volumes that it becomes possible to see clearly Professor Boorstin’s over-all scheme.
The earlier volumes dealt for the most part with single periods of the country’s history (The Birth of the Republic: 1763—89; The Nation Takes Shape: 1789—1837; The Response to Industrialism: 1885—1914; The Perils of Prosperity: 1914—32; The New Age of Franklin Roosevelt: 1932—1945; The Price of Power: America since 1945). While the authors were well chosen (they include, for example, Marcus Cunliffe, William Leuchtenberg, and Dexter Perkins), and these brief accounts of relatively short periods in American history were useful, one had, in effect, a multi-volumed history of the United States—well written and well edited, to be sure. But one did not yet see a history of American civilization.
From the beginning, the chronological volumes were accompanied with “topical volumes . . . [dealing] with the history of varied and significant aspects of American life.” But on the basis of the subjects of the first few of these volumes (American Judaism and American Catholicism, by Nathan Glazer and John Tracy Ellis, respectively, and more recently, histories of the War for Independence and The Mexican War, and American Folklore by Richard Dorson), it was legitimate to suppose that the subjects in the topical group were to be somewhat accidentally chosen.
And indeed, an extension of the normal scope of history—from politics, and more recently, economics, to all of “civilization”—attractive as it is, has always created great problems for American historians. Historians realized forty years ago that the emphasis in their writings on political factors, a chronological treatment, an exclusive concern with the raw material usually dealt with (written sources of some significance—state papers, letters, memoirs), ignored a great deal of what was equally important for history. In the course of this historical revolution, it was possible to incorporate effectively economic factors—but when the historian wrote “social history,” when he tried to get beyond the clear skeletal structure given by political events, and the somewhat less clear but still satisfying guidance offered by economic statistics and a growing number of well-trained economic historians, he found himself overwhelmed by the terrible complexity of American society, with its classes and statuses—if they are that—its vast variety of ethnic groups, its profusion of voluntary organizations, its varied levels of culture. What was he to do if he wanted to write social history, or take into account social factors? What he generally did was to present a pastiche of interesting facts and, hopefully, significant ones. American historians, in their attempt to extend the writing of history outside the boundaries set by politics and economics, have generally not done better than a somewhat academic version of Only Yesterday.
The problem was only complicated by the rise of what we may call institutional history. On the one hand, business firms and universities, philanthropic foundations and social work organizations, wanted to have their histories written: who else but historians should they call upon? And from the historian’s point of view, this was not simply a response to a patron with money. For if we have had periods of American history in which political factors were paramount, and periods in which economic factors were paramount, we can well argue that the present age is one in which institutional and organizational factors were never more important—they sometimes even appear to overwhelm the political and economic ones. And yet to write good institutional history meant to have a sense of something which barely existed even among those who were supposed to be professionally expert about it—a sense of the structure of American society.
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The problems are indeed enormous, and I do not wish to suggest that with the three present volumes we can say “solved.” Rather, to my mind, the books reflect a new level of consciousness of the range of material that must be incorporated into American history, and, more important, of the perspectives from which this new material must be approached. Two of these volumes (American Labor and American Immigration) are rather more successful than the third (American Philanthropy); certainly this must reflect in part the fact that we have a body of decent work on both labor and immigration, so that the authors were able to do more than introduce a preliminary order into the material in a virgin field. Equally important, I think, in the success of Mr. Pelling’s and Mr. Jones’s books is the ability of the authors (they are both English) to communicate to the readers a sense of the main features of American society so that their subjects appear solidly based on central realities, rather than existing, as special histories so often do, in some vacuum. There is no better indication of Mr. Pelling’s ability than the fact that his book, which must have been finished some time ago, offers all the background necessary to the understanding of the current conflict in organized labor over the Negroes. His book is consciously a history of American labor, American workers, rather than of the labor movement, but we learn more about the labor movement from it than we might from a more narrowly focused volume. As a historian of labor, he cannot ignore (as so many histories of the labor movement have) the great body of workers that was brought here involuntarily and is still not accepted in large parts of the labor movement. He describes them as slaves; he discusses the problem of incorporating them into the body of free labor after emancipation; he points out how the special organizational features of the various movements to organize workers have affected the position of Negroes. The emphasis on American labor means an emphasis on its sources and types, and on immigration, both voluntary and involuntary. The perspective thus given throws light on the history of the American labor movement and the features of labor organization.
Mr. Pelling’s book is unfortunately too short; and he says too little about the changes introduced into American society by the pattern of national collective bargaining—changes both in the nature of the economy, and in the life of the factory workers.
Mr. Jones’s American Immigration is a completely admirable book, and not too short. It makes excellent use of the large body of good research that has recently been produced in immigration history, and it is subtle in its understanding of such complicated matters as the shifting tides of American feeling and opinion on immigration. It is a tightly written book, and behind almost every sentence lies solid research and good thinking. It is in fact, the best example of the kind of book the Chicago History of American Civilization is aiming at, and one imagines how wonderful a series would be made up of ten or twenty such volumes. A satisfying capstone to the whole row of good books in immigration history, it is, to my mind, the most useful volume in the field.
Mr. Bremner’s American Philanthropy has had less to build on, and is less satisfying. It may seem self-serving for a specialist on ethnic groups to point out that ethnic factors play almost no role in Mr. Bremner’s book (there is no item in the index under “Immigration” or “Immigrants”). And yet I think there is no question that the division of the American people into different ethnic and racial elements is as important for the understanding of its past and present as its division into classes and statuses. One is left often, in this book, with the feeling that there is no social scene surrounding the events Mr. Bremner describes. Whom, one asks, were these Charity Organization Societies in the big cities in the late 19th century advising and helping? How did their clientele affect their work, and their attitudes? Where was misery concentrated—among what types, what social elements, and how did this govern the development of philanthropy and social work? Nor is there any discussion of the peculiar development of social services along religious lines.
But whatever their varying degrees of success, one receives from all three books an exciting idea of how the history of American civilization can be presented. In the past, when one looked at a history of American education, or a history of social work, one took it for granted that it had been written by and for professional educationists and social workers. And yet these and other specialized institutions do form part, and an increasingly important part, of the whole fabric of American civilization. They demand the same broad view, knowledge, training, and sophistication that have been devoted to problems of American political and economic history, and which people working entirely within special institutional areas have found it difficult to develop. The Chicago History of American Civilization helps place such subjects more firmly in the broad stream of knowledge which educated people think of as American history.
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