PICTURING OUR CENTURY
Caldwell, Christopher
PICTURING OUR CENTURY Peter Jennings and Harold Evans Do History By Christopher Caldwell Historians distinguish between a “long twentieth century”— the century as you’d see it on a calendar—and a...
...If Evans's book is worthy of joining Hobsbawm's and Johnson's, it's because it respects narrative and respects the idea that people have a purpose...
...While deploring McCarthyism, of course, Evans praises (with faint damnation) Nixon during his tenure on the House Un-American Activities Committee as "the fairest and most scrupulous of a vindictive bunch...
...petty when it wasn't cruel...
...Evans addresses more than America, with a broad sampling of international politics (the Locarno conference, the Mukden incident...
...But if the profit motive was a persuasive element in the decision to allow trading with belligerents, it cannot explain America's own transition from neutrality to belligerence: Why risk a good thing...
...Here, in full, is the history of the military campaign in Europe between DDay and the surrender of Germany: By August, [the Allies] had freed Paris and turned east...
...The two latest attempts— The Century, by ABC News anchor Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster, and The American Century, by Anglo-American editor and newsman Harold Evans—are strikingly similar...
...Still, just as often the anecdotes transport us not into the broad sweep of history but out of it...
...Evans performs, in fact, an impressive feat in assimilating the 1960s anti-war movement and the Reaganism of the 1980s into a Vital Center reading of America...
...This mix of domestic leftism and hawkish interventionism abroad is, of course, the pragmatic, non-ideology ideology of the immediate American postwar generation...
...The section on America's drift into World War I is a good example...
...For the 1960s counterculture, the problem was that Vital Center America could be administered only through corporate management and a government that operated like a corporate management, and citizens under such a government must choose between becoming social outcasts and becoming as obedient and conformist as corporate employees...
...He deals with both these movements by praising their modest reforms and condemning their "excesses"—con-vincingly for the most part...
...When I danced, I wasn't just moving my legs up and down, I was flowing with the music...
...With the short century a decade over and the long one within a year or so of its end, it’s not surprising that the summings-up have begun...
...Take, for example, a single two-page spread from his account of the 1960s...
...Any Daddy Warbucks could calculate that America's entry into the war would sooner or later end the war, and with it the trade in its instruments...
...And scattered among the text like graffiti are snazzy graphic elements: the lyrics of the “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” that was sung by Country Joe and the Fish at Woodstock, a photo of students occupying Columbia University, an incomprehensible aphorism from a placard at the 1968 Democratic-convention protests (“We are the delicate spoors of the new fierceness that will change America”), and George Wallace’s challenge to the anti-war movement (“If any demonstrator ever lays down in front of my car, it’ll be the last car he’ll ever lay down in front of...
...There is a lot to like about this book, including the thousands of photographs, all of them in black-and-white, of which the most extraordinary is the one appearing on p. 213 beneath this caption: "At a Chicago game in 1931, catcher Gabby Hartnett of the Cubs signs a baseball for Al Capone's 12-year-old son, Sonny, but the movement of a popcorn seller behind Capone is enough to send the bodyguard reaching for his gun...
...And does...
...But "a time frame does not by itself make a history," as Jennings himself observes in his introduction...
...It is rather the dozens of one- and two-page interviews with eyewitnesses to history that make up the meat of the book, with the sketchy narrative serving merely as a trellis on which to hang them...
...Without that idea, there's no such thing as history...
...Victor Reuther, Walter's brother, describes the Depression-era travails of organized labor...
...whom Evans mentions no fewer than nine times...
...Jennings, meanwhile, views the world exclusively through American preoccupations (Spanish Civil War = the Abraham Lincoln Brigade + Picasso’s Guernica...
...Similarly, here's bar owner Gus Rodriguez on disco: "Dancing to disco provided me with this incredible release...
...This is both all right and all wrong...
...The Reaganite critique was not all that different...
...It contains 1,100 words of text that try to cover: Robert Kennedy’s assassination, race riots, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, the May 1968 student demonstrations in Paris, the Prague Spring, Eugene Mc- Carthy’s campaign for the presidency, the Yippies, LSD, the rise of George Wallace, and the return of Richard Nixon...
...But none of this dooms Evans's book...
...It's the Studs Terkel method, but with a Rolodex...
...Still, until we come to a better understanding of what really drove history in the twentieth century, we need them—because without them, we're left with what Jennings gives us: history as the last draft of journalism...
...That these histories both remain engaging—so contradictory that if one is undeniably right the other is undeniably wrong—is evidence that history is ultimately a discipline about narrative and a contest between the viewpoints those narratives serve...
...I found that all of this depression, all of this worry, all of this fear, just left, at least for that brief period of time—forty-five minutes to an hour that I was out there running...
...vicious when it wasn't murderous...
...When Eisenhower’s forces broke that offensive, too, the march to the Rhine was easy...
...Here he is on the civil-rights movement: The full fury of the white reaction in the South has been gradually diminished in the popular mind...
...Like the autobiographical passages on jogging by Kathy Smith (author of the Ultimate Video Workout): "Luckily, a friend of mine who was a runner asked me to go out jogging with him...
...But it immediately announces itself as more a history than Jennings's...
...It is probably fair to say that the average German today experiences more shame over the Hitler years than most white Americans do over how they tolerated a cruel persecution of their fellow citizens...
...It was that Vital Centrism naturally drifts leftwards, that the Best and Brightest who of necessity run a Vital Center society are always imperialis-tically looking for new venues in which to display their Bestness and Brightness, and that the bill for such adventurism is always paid involuntarily by the non-Best and non-Brightest...
...Then, because of unemployment, absolute evil triumphed...
...Many of these anecdotes recapture things that were important once but have been forgotten—partic-ularly when they come from witnesses who also shaped events...
...Millions died...
...That can make riveting television narrative...
...If this is history, it's a history that has given up on judgment and analysis...
...But as history it's taxidermic: not a living, breathing process but random anec-dotage stuffed into the carcass of a grade-school syllabus...
...the recently deceased Kwame Turé (Stokely Carmichael) covers civil rights...
...Mukden was not an impulse"—it's a delight to read, and would be even without the photos...
...With little deviation from its proclaimed neutrality, America was by 1916 doing only a million dollars in annual trade with the Central Powers and $3.124 billion with the Allies...
...But Evans never admits that the challenges they posed to the Vital Center were systemic—they went to the core of its viability...
...Evans's book, too, is heavy on photographs, timelines, and sidebars...
...People who nowadays praise the Vital Center tend to view it from its strongest point—say, 1949...
...The only two successful histories of the century thus far—Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Extremes (1995) and Paul Johnson's Modern Times (in its 1991 revision)—have similar strengths and weaknesses...
...That's a good sampling of the prose, a brawny, 1930s-modernist, urban Americanese...
...Europe’s bored statesmen decided to go to war for no particular reason...
...PICTURING OUR CENTURY Peter Jennings and Harold Evans Do History By Christopher Caldwell Historians distinguish between a “long twentieth century”— the century as you’d see it on a calendar—and a “short twentieth century”—the seventy-five years from the outbreak of World War I to the fall of the Berlin Wall...
...To spell it out: The white response to the movement was nearly always indifferent when it wasn't hostile...
...They’re both heavy-as-abucket- of-sand, big-as-a-phonebook, Christopher Caldwell is senior writer for THEWEEKLY STANDARD...
...Jennings’s is yoked to an ABC/History Channel mini-series, and Evans refers to his as “history for browsers...
...photograph-filled tomes that think the trick lies in throwing all the century’s imagery and noise and explosiveness together in one place...
...Washington buzzed...
...The music had this fast beat with a great melody behind it...
...Since then, there have been threats from fundamentalists and Republicans, but history—through stock-market crashes and violence against women— keeps acting in such a way as to reaffirm our faith in . . . well, whatever...
...It notes that changes in policy were carried out primarily through trade...
...They mounted one last strike at the Allies through Belgium in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge (because it pushed a fortyfive- mile-wide dent into Allied lines...
...With all this information flying around, there is scarcely a name here that one does not recognize or an event one hasn’t heard of, and it’s all embedded in an astoundingly simple narrative...
...Evans's idea of freedom—as the gradual extension of rights to those whom history has left without them—is more of a problem...
...And he views the Venona cables released by the National Security Archive in 1996 as establishing once and for all that the Soviet spies Julius Rosenberg and Alger Hiss were guilty...
...You can buy this book as a compact disc, if you like, and view—rather than read—it...
...It begins not in 1900 but in 1889, with the centennial of the American Constitution, and ends in 1989 as the Berlin wall comes down...
...But to young liberals, he is sure to sound anachronistically rightist...
...This is real history, engaging debates with a many-angled fairness...
...Hobsbawm, Johnson, and Evans, in their different ways, give us myths that are insufficient and in need of repair...
...But the postwar generation, acting in perfect wisdom, fixed up the world and cleaned up a few injustices (like the plight of women) that had been utterly ignored before...
...Neither of these books is meant to be read, per se...
...And yet, The American Century is not subservient to its photos and interviews...
...They ignore that it tends to evolve into something less vital and less centrist...
...That narrative goes like this: Things were fairly peaceful at the turn of the century, although a lot of people suffered from disease...
...Even when it reaches the level of self-parody, with sentences like—"Poor Herbert Hoover...
...His indulgence extends even to Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon...
...To young conservatives, Evans's breezy comparison of Jim Crow and Nazism will reek of the old—the very old—Left...
...His praise for America's largely successful foreign policy—based on Wilson's idea that America fights wars "because we have always said we were the friends and servants of mankind"—is unstinting...
...But the Germans were not ready to give up...
...The question of why America decided to fight still remains, of course, and Evans answers it forcefully: In the thirties, revisionist historians and politicians of the left attempted to portray Wilson's decision to go to war as part of a deep-laid plot...
...Both argued from strident points of view: Hobsbawm as a chastened Marxist, Johnson (after an earlier edition ruing the legacy of "relativism") as a prematurely triumphal capitalist...
...It is the liberalism described in 1949's The Vital Center by Arthur Schlesinger Jr...
...Jennings aims at something like history-by-collage...
Vol. 4 • November 1998 • No. 12
