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Personality by the Numbers
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19185 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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7 / 1991 |
2,862 Words |
| Author
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Edward S. Shapiro
Edward S. Shapiro is professor of history at Seton Hall
University and author of The Letters of Sidney Hook:
Democracy, Communism, and the Cold War (1995). |
THE DECADE MATRIX
James O. Gollub
New York: Addision-Wesley, 1991
368 pp., $22.95
Do Americans share values as well as a political, social, and economic framework? During most of the twentieth century, historians assumed that they did, and that one of their tasks was not to debate this question but rather to discover the source and nature of the things that bound Americans together.
The most exciting development in the writing of American history in the fifteen or so years after the end of World War II was the rise of American studies. The American studies aficionados believed an interdisciplinary approach encompassing history, literature, sociology, anthropology, and psychology could discover the values, myths, and images that underlie American culture. Thus Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950) explored the agrarian myth; Leo Marx's The Machine and the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964) examined the relationship between the competing values of pastoralism and technology; John William Ward's Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (1955) and Marvin Meyers' The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (1957) discussed the diverse meanings attached to Andrew Jackson and Jacksonian democracy; and Merrill D. Peterson's The Jeffersonian Image in the American Mind (1960) related the evolution of the imagery of Thomas Jefferson during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The fundamental assumption of the Americanist cult was that Americans, despite their regional, economic, cultural, racial, ethnic, and religious diversity, were all part of a distinctive culture. The Americanists emphasized the role of the mass media--radio, movies, magazines, and especially television--in spreading this culture geographically and culturally. In the 1950s, sociologists even began speaking about the danger of a homogenized "mass culture" in which everyone spoke, dressed, and thought alike.
If there was a deity in the Americanist cult it was the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, whose great book Democracy in America, published in the 1830s, was the most important statement of American uniqueness. According to Tocqueville, the modern forces of democracy and equality had shaped a distinctive civilization across the Atlantic, albeit one that the European nations would in time come to resemble. Not surprisingly, the heyday of Tocqueville scholarship
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