The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (Vintage)

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins (1948), Samuel I. Rosenman, Working With Roosevelt (1952), and in the several brilliant volumes of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt (1957–).

  A bright light on the uses of news-gathering, news-making, and news-disseminating techniques in Presidential politics is Theodore H. White, The Making of the President: 1960 (1961). On the interrelation of the media, and on the television debates, see especially Chapter 11.

  There is not, to my knowledge, an adequate history of the Congressional Record. To do it properly would require a Rabelaisian sense of humor and a Sophoclean sense of tragedy. A hint of the problems I mention can be found in Clarence Cannon, Cannon’s Procedure in the House of Representatives (4th ed., Washington, D.C., 1944). The speech of the reformer I refer to is that of Senator George Graham Vest of Missouri, delivered in the Senate, December 23, 1884 (found in Congressional Record: Senate, Vol. 16, Pt. 1, 48th Congress, 2d Session, p. 422); it is worth reading in full. A citizen with the curiosity, the time, and the stamina may secure a subscription to the Record through his Senator or Congressman. Before doing so, however, he should prepare himself to take the consequences. He should be thoroughly confident of his own devotion to democratic institutions; and there are other risks. It is harder to turn off the flood than to turn it on.

  A few sociological studies have been made of the effect of the different media and their relation to one another. One of the best is the study of the MacArthur Parades in Chicago: Kurt Lang and Gladys Engel Lang, “The Unique Perspective of Television and Its Effect: A Pilot Study,” American Sociological Review, XVIII (1953), 3–12. In more extensive form this study is available as an unpublished doctoral dissertation (1953) in the Sociology Department of the University of Chicago. It won the 1952 prize of the Edward L. Bernays Foundation, and is a study of great subtlety and originality. See also, Reuben Mehling, “Attitude Changing Effect of News and Photo Combinations,” Journalism Quarterly, XXXVI (Spring, 1959), 189–198; and Elmer E. Cornwell, Jr., “Presidential News: The Expanding Public Image,” at pp. 275–283.

  The great background changes in the Graphic Revolution still await their historians. Despite some valuable biographies like Carleton Mabee, The American Leonardo: The Life of Samuel F. B. Morse (1943), Matthew Josephson, Edison (1959), and company histories, like Robert L. Thompson, Wiring a Continent: The History of the Telegraph Industry in the United States, 1832–1886 (1947), the social history of the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, radio, and television remains mostly untold. We may hope that the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, under the able direction of Gilbert Seldes, and with the assistance among others of Patrick D. Hazard, will fill some of these gaps. We can learn about the development of the typewriter and its pervasive significance for American life in Richard N. Current’s concise The Typewriter and The Men Who Made It (1954) and in Bruce Bliven, Jr., The Wonderful Writing Machine (1954). The history of shorthand could reveal some neglected facets of our life; the history of penmanship and the decline of handwriting might also be suggestive. So far as I know, there is not yet an account of such influential techniques of duplication as the mimeograph, photoduplication (Thermofax, etc.), piano-graph, or photo-offset printing.

  We have valuable and highly readable specialized books like James D. Horan, Matthew Brady, Historian with a Camera (1955) and Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz (1960); and “picture histories” galore—of the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, and everything else from plumbing to Presidents. But we still need more comprehensive and up-to-date histories of American photography worthy of this great subject. A book which sees in photography something of its full grandeur and philosophic importance is André Malraux’s magnificent The Voices of Silence: Man and His Art (trans. by Stuart Gilbert, 1953). For the broad outlines and large tendencies in the history of the subject, the reader unfortunately cannot do better than refer to the article “Photography” in Encyclopaedia Britannica (14th ed.).

  Chapter 2. From Hero to Celebrity:

  The Human Pseudo-Event

  Much of our great literature—the Bible, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid—is, of course, a chronicle of heroes and hero-worship. Biography as a genre is relatively recent; in England it does not date much back of the Renaissance—say the seventeenth century. Critical biography—which in English literature we may date from the happy coincidences which eventually produced James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)—appeared still later. The self-conscious study of the phenomenon of heroes and of the nature of biography is not much over a century old. The most influential work has been Thomas Carlyle’s Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841). Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Representative Men (1850) was probably suggested by Carlyle’s work; Emerson’s book, a compilation of popular lectures on such diverse figures as Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe, is the best-known American statement of the “divine right” theory of the hero. Many old-time Fourth of July orations were variations on this theme of the heroism (that is, divine inspiration) of the founders of our nation. All these works usually asked the reader or listener to share the writer’s or speaker’s reverence for his hero’s greatness. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—with the rise of a cult of critical and scientific history, the growth of sociology and anthropology, the ascendancy of various forms of economic (“rationalizing”) interpretations of history, and the elaboration of Freudian and Jungian psychology—many writers in many new ways began inviting readers to look with a detached and suspicious eye on the “greatness” of all past heroes. The phenomenon of human greatness came to seem no expression of divinity (divinity itself had become a human figment), but some kind of collective social illusion. European works of world-wide influence (all delightfully readable and stimulating) which illustrated and re-enforced these tendencies were: Ernest Renan, Life of Jesus (1863), Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (11 vols., 1890–1915), and Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (1939).

  There is no quite satisfactory treatment of hero-worship as a phenomenon in American history. A brief general discussion is found in Sidney Hook, The Hero in History (1943). Dixon Wecter’s The Hero in America: A Chronicle of Hero-Worship (1941), an elegantly written compilation of American Greats, with the story of their adulation, is very much in the old style. It aims “to look at a few of those great personalities in public life … from whom we have hewn our symbols of government, our ideas of what is most prizeworthy as ‘American.’ ” An admirable book which lies halfway between the older, symbolic, and the newer, critical, view of American heroes is Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made it (1948; Vintage paperback, 1954). A valuable specialized study is John W. Ward, Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (1955). For a lively reinterpretation of the history of the making of our colonial heroes, see Wesley Frank Craven, The Legend of the Founding Fathers (1956). And for another view of the special place of the foresighted American hero in the American political tradition, see my Genius of American Politics (1953; Phoenix paperback, 1958). Adolf Hitler’s doctrine that “The Strong Man is Mightiest Alone,” along with his dogma that “coalition successes” have never built anything great, is expounded in Chapter VIII of Mein Kampf.

  Sophisticated applications of psychology, anthropology, and the techniques of critical history are found in Lord Raglan, The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama (1936; Vintage paperback, 1956), and Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949; Meridian paperback, 1956).

  More studies of the social history of American biography would be invaluable in helping us chronicle the history of American ideals. John A. Garraty, The Nature of Biography (1958), a useful book aiming at general definition, does not focus primarily on America. W. Burlie Brown, The People’s Choice: The Presidential Image in the Campaign Biography (1960) surveys the virtues attributed to Presidential candidates by their campaign
biographers. Catherine Drinker Bowen describes many of the problems of the biographer today in suggestive essays in Adventures of a Biographer (1959). Avenues into the literature of American biography can be found in Oscar Handlin and others, The Harvard Guide to American History (1954) and in relevant sections, well indexed in the admirable bibliographical Volume III, of Robert Spiller and others, Literary History of the United States (3 vols., 1948). Handy surveys are: Edward H. O’Neill, A History of American Biography, 1800–1935 (1935), Biography by Americans, 1658–1936 (a bibliography, 1939); and Marion Dargan, Guide to American Biography, Part I: 1607–1815 (a classified bibliography, 1949). Raw materials for another approach to the American hero are listed in Louis Kaplan and others, Bibliography of American Autobiographies (1961). An introduction to the hero in American folklore is found in Richard Dorson, American Folklore (Chicago History of American Civilization Series, 1959).

  The literature on the history of celebrities and of celebrity worship is meager. Few recent writers have had as delicate a sense of the transforming standards of social recognition as has Cleveland Amory. His Celebrity Register (1959), compiled with the collaboration of Earl Blackwell, is one of the most symbolic documents of our age: it is an index to the new categories of American society. The Celebrity Register is as expressive of our standards of social preference as was Burke’s Peerage (1826) or Burke’s Landed Gentry (1833–1838) for an earlier age in England. Cleveland Amory’s Who Killed Society (1960), a treasure house of miscellaneous information on changing standards of admiration, describes itself with brilliant accuracy on its jacket: “The Warfare of Celebrity with Aristocracy in America—from the ‘First Families’ to the ‘Four Hundred’ to ‘Publi-ciety.’ ” On the endorsement business, see William M. Freeman, The Big Name (1957). Leo Lowenthal’s invaluable “Biographies in Popular Magazines,” is found in American Social Patterns (selected and edited by William Peterson; Anchor paperback, 1956). See also Jerome Ellison and Franklin T. Gosser, “Non-Fiction Magazine Articles: A Content Analysis,” Journalism Quarterly, XXXVI (Winter, 1959) 27–34.

  An important book could be written on the press secretary and his role in politics and American public life. The most suggestive treatments I have come upon are Lela Stiles, The Man Behind Roosevelt: The Story of Louis McHenry Howe (1954); and miscellaneous items in current magazines, like the cover story on James C. Hagerty, President Eisenhower’s secretary, in Time, LXXI (Jan. 27, 1958), 16–20; the article on Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s press secretary in Time, LXXVI (Dec. 5, 1960), p. 57. Patrick D. Hazard of the Annenberg School of Communications has kindly let me see his unpublished paper, “The Entertainer as Hero: The Burden of an Anti-Intellectual Tradition,” which I have found invaluable.

  For the facts from which I reconstruct my account of the transformation of Lindbergh from hero into celebrity I have leaned heavily on Kenneth S. Davis, The Hero: Charles A. Lindbergh and the American Dream (1959). This meticulous book combines the vividness and warmth of a good novel with a relentless objectivity. It is brilliant evidence that the techniques of the sociologist do not require the abandonment of the humanist’s literary elegance or dramatic flair. Davis gives us a parable for our time, which no serious student of American morals in the twentieth century should fail to read. Similar studies, with comparable insight, sympathy, and objectivity, of figures like Al Capone, Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley, would teach us more about ourselves than many of the more lengthy studies of less significant but more conventionally “important” minor figures in our political, literary, and academic life. Some suggestive notions and much valuable detail, especially on popular attitudes to figures like Capone, are found in Orrin E. Klapp, “Hero-Worship in America,” American Sociological Review, XIV (Feb., 1949), 53–62, and in a longer version of the same study, “The Hero as a Social Type” (1948), unpublished doctoral dissertation in the Department of Sociology of the University of Chicago. A constantly useful tool for exploring the uncompiled social history of our time is The New York Times Index.

  George Waller’s copiously detailed Kidnap: The Story of the Lindbergh Case (1961) appeared as this volume was going to press.

  Chapter 3. From Traveler to Tourist:

  The Lost Art of Travel

  Just as a large proportion of our great literature has been the chronicle of heroes, so, much of it has been a chronicle of travel. Many great epics have been both at the same time. In fact, if one defined an epic as the adventures of a hero who travels, one would exclude few of enduring importance. This itself may be evidence to support the theses of my Chapters 2 and 3. The story of a hero on his travels—Ulysses against Polyphemus—can excite the minstrel talents of great poets; but a celebrity at his relaxation (that is, on vacation)—Bob Hope in Palm Springs—can inspire few but gossip columnists. The decline of the hero and the decline of travel have come together. Except for religion and war, travel was for centuries the most hero-producing, hero-inciting of man’s activities. In religion many epic heroes (the Buddha, Moses, Mohammed) have been notable travelers.

  The literature of travel is so abundant (even for the United States alone) that one hardly knows where to begin. It comprises some of the most readable, most exciting, and most neglected of Americana. We may divide the American travel literature into three large classes which overlap both logically and chronologically: (1) travel epics; (2) travel surveys; and, (3) travel reactions (or tourist diaries).

  First is the travel epic, whose central figure is a hero doing great deeds, encountering risks, exploring and enjoying the exotic and the dangerous. It includes some of the basic sources of American history: for example, such works as those by Captain John Smith, True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as hath hapned in Virginia since the first planting of that Colony (1608), True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captain John Smith in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, from … 1593 to 1629 (1630). The Pocahontas story, a characteristic travel exploit, is recounted in detail by Smith himself in his General Historie of Virginia … (1624). William Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation is in large part a travel epic. This first group also includes such later American classics as the History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark (ed. Nicholas Biddle and Paul Allen, 2 vols., 1814); John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America (1841) and Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843); Francis Parkman, Oregon Trail (1849); Josiah Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies (2 vols., 1844); Mark Twain, Roughing It (1872), A Tramp Abroad (1880), and Life on the Mississippi (1883); and Charles Warren Stoddard, South-Sea Idyls (1873), The Lepers of Molokai (1885), Hawaiian Life (1894), and The Island of Tranquil Delights (1904), which, like many of the pseudo-classics of day-before-yesterday, become the staple of secondhand furniture stores.

  Books of the second class, the travel surveys, sometimes overlap with those of the first. They offer us fewer accounts of derring-do, of exciting action, and risky encounter, and are primarily compilations of outlandish or useful information. Much of the writing by Europeans about America in the colonial period had this character. Such works were in demand because of the helpful information (or interesting misinformation) they offered about the New World. The rise of natural history in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries produced such works as Observations on the Inhabitants, Climate, Soil, etc.… made by John Bartram in his travels from Pensilvania to … Lake Ontario (1751), and by his son William Bartram, Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, etc. (1791); Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1784); John James Audubon, Birds of America (1827–1838), and his journals, selected as Delineations of American Scenery and Character (1926). For an excellent selection of writings by Americans about their experiences abroad (most of which take the form of social survey or encounters with famous men and women), see Philip Rahv (ed.), Discovery of Europe (Anchor paperback, 1960).

  The rise of the social sc
iences further encouraged such collection and classification of information from faraway places. Examples of such works are: again, Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1784), which was prepared expressly for a European reader, the Marquis de Barbois, secretary of the French legation in Philadelphia, whose twenty-odd Baedeker-like questions formed the frame of the book; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (2 vols., 1835; first American edition, 1838), which grew out of a stay of less than a year (May, 1831–Feb., 1832) in the United States; and George Catlin, whose illustrated Manners and Customs of the North American Indians (2 vols., 1841) was the product of eight years of travels and observations from the Yellowstone to Florida. Some of the most delightful books to come out of eighteenth-century America are the too-little-read travel surveys by William Byrd, who retails facts and fictions of natural history, geography, and social customs with a rare wit. His works include History of the Dividing Line (1728), Progress to the Mines (1732), and Journey to the Land of Eden (1733), all of which were first published only in 1841.

  In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the approaching conflict between North and South incited an additional large number of remarkable social-survey travel volumes. Important examples are the influential books by Frederick Law Olmsted: A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), A Journey Through Texas (1857), and A Journey in the Back Country, abridged and revised as The Cotton Kingdom (2 vols., 1861; ed. by Arthur M. Schlesinger, 1953). Admirable analytical bibliographies are Thomas D. Clark, Travels in the Old South (3 vols., 1956–1959) and E. Merton Coulter, Travels in the Confederate States (1948). Many of the best travel surveys of the American West are collected by Reuben G. Thwaites in his multivolumed Early Western Travels, 1748–1846 (32 vols., 1904–1907).