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7/31/02

The history of the United States in a comprehensive nutshell

By Jeff Minick
The American Reader edited by Diane Ravitch.
Harper Perennial, 2000. $20 — 629 pp.


America is the most revolutionary nation on the face of the earth.

A well-known writer, Ray Bradbury, once made that statement, and after holding it to the light and turning it from side to side, I saw that he was right. America is a revolutionary society in terms of dynamic change, a sense of change that exists independently of any man or political party, a drumming, vibrating, often roaring machine of change that operates, like some strange perpetual motion invention, from its own power.

For nearly two centuries, Americans conducted their love affair with dynamism and progress while simultaneously looking back at their past with deep affection, recalling stories about Washington and Jefferson, Lee and Lincoln, Crockett and Boone even as they changed nighttime into daytime with electricity or telephoned their grandparents living across the great ocean or sent men to the moon. Americans held both progress and the past in high esteem.

Nowadays, the idea of progress is regarded in some quarters with deep suspicion while the past is either neglected or utterly changed. Quite a few Americans now regard Lincoln as a dictator, Lee as a “marble man,” Boone and Crockett as interlopers in the great American wilderness. Even worse, the past seems increasingly hazy to many people, a distant place of ghosts and dim shadows shifting about in a whirling fog. Many who have recently examined our culture contend that Americans, particularly American students, know less and less about their past. Most high school students can’t tell you within 50 years when the War Between The States was fought or when the Wright brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk; some college students don’t understand even the basic points of the Constitution and occasionally are unable to name our country’s enemies in the Second World War (Students are easy to target for such tests; I’ve often wondered how older adults, who express such shock at the apparent idiocy of the young generation, would fare in a similar quiz).

The American Reader is a fat (it’s 629 pages) paperback which, if purchased and read, would help offset our national failure to remember our past. Edited by Diane Ravitch, a professor at New York University, The American Reader is a solid compendium of American documents, speeches, poems, and songs of the last four centuries.

Beginning with the “Mayflower Compact” and ending with Theodore H. White’s “The American Idea,” The American Reader takes those who enter its pages on a wonderful journey through history, moving from Sojourner Truth’s “Address To The Ohio Women’s Rights Convention,” where the former slave gave powerful testimony both for the abolition of slavery and for women’s rights, to Stephen Foster’s “Oh! Susanna” and “Old Folks At Home,” from Samuel Gompers demand on behalf of labor for a place at the American table to Theodore Roosevelt’s rousing speech “In Praise Of The Strenuous Life.”

In her introduction, Ravitch writes that “... the imagined audience of The American Reader was a group of family or friends, sharing with each other a favorite poem or discovering for the first time a stirring speech.” Her book is indeed ideal for such discussions, both in and out of the classroom. It is a book that belongs in families, a book that is easily shared, for we are familiar with parts of the book — a phrase, a snatch of verse, a mossy adage — and are thus moved more easily into selections that may be less familiar to us.”

One astounding statement in the book belongs to Ravitch herself in the introduction. She states that in the first edition of the book she had, with a certain reluctance, included pieces written after 1970. She then states:


In this revised edition, I am exercising my prerogative as editor and eliminating that section. In effect, I am acknowledging that I have not — after extensive searching — found poems, essays, speeches, or songs written during the past thirty years that both match the literary quality of the earlier selections and resonate in the national consciousness as they do. It seems to me — and I may be wrong — that cultural authority is harder to find than in the past. We tend now to turn to social sciences rather than poets and songwriters to express and understand our concerns, and they tend not to write in a literary style.


Since Ravitch herself is a social scientist, this admission took courage. Even more astounding was the idea that an author in these self-inflated times would cut out a part of a book that she herself had edited. Ravitch does go on at length to tell why she is cutting the selections from the previous work, stating that “words do not seem to be as precious as they once were” and that ours is “an age of disposable ideas, of politics-as-entertainment, of a popular culture that celebrates violence and sensationalism and that is made for the instant, not for the ages.”

Although I have one quibble with the book — it needs the Constitution, at least the Bill of Rights, included in its pages — The American Reader is nonetheless a great collection of words by our fellow Americans, a book that should be read in our schools, presented to graduates, and found on the bookshelves of our homes and libraries.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)