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Who Was Harry Truman?
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19965 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
5,323 Words |
| Author
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Alonzo L. Hamby
Alonzo L. Hamby is professor of history at Ohio University
and a fellow for 1991-92 at the Woodrow Wilson international
Center for Scholars in Washington,, D.C. Most of his writing
concerns the post-1932 history of the Democratic Party and
the nature of modern American Liberalism. He is the author of
Beyond the New Deal: Harry S. Truman and American Liberalism
(1973), The Imperial Years: The United States since 1939
(1976), and Liberalism and its Challengers (1985, 1992). His
current project is a full-scale biography of Truman. |
TRUMAN
David McCullough
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992
1082 pp., $30.00
Can any living person have done more to stimulate popular interest in history than David McCullough? Known to tens of thousands of readers as the author of five well-crafted books, to millions as a narrator of film documentaries and public television host, McCullough is a natural in his chosen profession. His many fans, captivated by his substantial, scholarly appearance, his plain-style prose, his flat and unaffected voice, must consider him a quintessential educated American who simply by virtue of his ability as a narrator places them in contact with a recoverable, and perhaps even relevant past.
Given the public he has acquired in the course of his remarkable career, given his Pulitzer Prize and numerous other well-deserved awards, any book by David McCullough is bound to attract wide attention, and Harry Truman might seem an especially apt topic for him.
The promise and perils of popular history
Popular history has long endured the rap that it is superficial, that it sacrifices analysis to narrative, and that, above all, it places disproportionate emphasis on personalities at the expense of less palpable but more important underlying forces in the historical process. More recently, the trendsetters in academic history have invoked the wrath of Clio upon any scholar malign enough to write histories of mainstream politics and the doings of Great Dead White Males.
It is tempting, and far from wholly inaccurate, to dismiss such complaints as the jealous ravings of a professoriate incapable of writing for a wide audience or as the fulminations of left-wing ideologues unable to face the success of democratic and pluralistic politics in America. Yet, there is a glimmer of truth to their accusations.
Popular history is usually as two-dimensional as the pages upon which it is written. It may tell a good story in an entertaining fashion, but it rarely makes demands on its readers. Its arguments and moral conclusions, when evident, are unlikely to be complex or ambiguous. Many of its practitioners assert that whatever they have to say is revealed in the narrative and that it is artless literary masturbation to indulge in
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