The Image (41 page)

The rise of the modern American hotel is difficult to study, except by personal exploration. This rich and colorful subject deserves more attention from historians. The kind of thing which could be done is illustrated in Doris Elizabeth King, “The First-Class Hotel and the Age of the Common Man,”
Journal of Southern History
, XXIII (May, 1957), 173–188. A remarkable piece of Americana is Conrad N. Hilton,
Be My Guest
(1957); for naiveté, self-revelation, and unintended confession of American mores—in business, publicity, celebrity, marriage, and religion—it has few equals in the whole of recent literature. The book is made available to guests in Hilton Hotels. Although it was obviously written with some technical, ghostwriting assistance,
these ghost writers have done their job admirably; they allow their “author” to speak unmistakably in his own voice, to ramble, to “enthuse,” to pat himself on the back, and to moralize in his own unghostable fashion.

The motel, still unchronicled except in movies, novels, and on the television screen, must be traced through the statistics of government agencies and the publications of professional associations. Valuable sources are architectural planbooks, like
Motels, Hotels, Restaurants and Bars: An Architectural Record Book
(F. W. Dodge Corp., N.Y., 1953).

On the history of museums, a useful starting point is George Brown Goode, “Museum History and Museums of History,” in Smithsonian Institution,
Annual Report … 1897, Report of the U.S. National Museum
, Pt. II (Washington, D.C., 1901), pp. 65–81. See Walter Pach’s
The Art Museum in America
(1948); and, on the relation of wealthy collectors to the museums, Aline B. Saarinen’s amusing, anecdotal
The Proud Possessors
(1958). Some of the profounder aesthetic implications of the rise of museums and of photography are explored again in André Malraux’s magnificent
Voices of Silence: Man and His Art
(1953), especially Part I, “Museum without Walls,” and Part III, “The Creative Process.” On the rise and significance of world fairs, see Merle Curti’s suggestive article, “America at the World Fairs, 1851–1893,”
American Historical Review
, LV (July, 1950), 833–856. For a general survey of museum history one must still turn to the article in
Encyclopaedia Britannica
(14th ed.).

While sailing ships, steam navigation, canals, turnpikes, wagon trails, and railroads have attracted the expert interest of many scholars, the automobile and the airplane have yet attracted too few serious historians. John H. Morrison,
History of American Steam Navigation
(1903) and John L. Stover,
American Railroads
(Chicago History of American Civilization Series, 1960) offer admirable introductions. For wider implications of these older innovations, see George R. Taylor,
The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860
(1951; Vol. IV in the valuable Rinehart Economic History of the United States). All these subjects have, of course, attracted buffs and hobbyists; there have been a number of useful picture books.

The automobile is an epic subject; a panoramic history of the automobile could make a grand parable of modern America. The most useful works so far have been biographies or company histories, like Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill,
Ford: The Times, the Man, the Company
(1954) and
Ford: Expansion and
Challenge
(1957), which incidentally touch the social effects of the automobile. Roger Burlingame, in
March of the Iron Men
(1938),
Engines of Democracy
(1940) and
Machines that Built America
(1948), covers a broader subject, but hints the possibilities of more narrowly focused works. Hints are also found in works of sociology like Robert S. and Helen M. Lynd,
Middletown
(1929) and
Middletown in Transition
(1937). Social epics of America in the twentieth century, like F. Scott Fitzgerald,
The Great Gatsby
(1925), John Dos Passos,
U.S.A
. (1938), and John Steinbeck,
Grapes of Wrath
(1939) inevitably give the automobile a leading role; they probably remain the best expositions of its importance for a future historian.

The history of motor highways and highway practice is important as a chronicle of the man-made motorist’s landscape, a major episode in the homogenization of our continent. A brief introduction is United States Public Roads Administration,
Highway Practice in the United States of America
(Washington, 1949).

The airplane and air travel generally are much in need of historical treatment. We have admirable histories of the Air Force in World War II, but we could still learn much from a scholarly and detailed history of civilian air travel and air tourism, compiled while pioneer figures are still alive. On the airline stewardess, see Joseph Kastner, “Joan Waltermire: Air Stewardess,”
Life
, X (April 28, 1941), 102–112; and “Glamor Girls of the Air,”
Life
, XLV (August 25, 1958), 68–77. On the increasing speed of civilian air travel, see George A. W. Boehm, “The SST: Next Step to Instant Travel,”
Fortune
, LXIII (June, 1961), 159–164, 238–244.

Tourist guides should be consulted as a source of what people have been told to look for, and what they like to think is important. I have toured France and Italy with the constant companionship of Baedeker. Most large libraries have a collection of old Baedekers, which can be consulted with much amusement and profit. I have found
Japan: The Official Guide
(Japan Travel Bureau, Revised and Enlarged, Tokyo, 1957) especially helpful for underlining the characteristics of modern guide books, although it is almost useless for any other purpose. It is a caricature of the tourist guidebook, showing how a mechanical following of the tourist-guide pattern can multiply trivia and omit matters of the greatest significance. The reader is told which items are considered “Important Cultural Property,” and is given the dimensions of every garden, pagoda, palace, shrine, and temple, but he is almost never told the meaning of social
customs or the uses of buildings. On Baedeker, see Francis Watson, “The Education of Baedeker,”
The Fortnightly
, CXLVI (Dec., 1936), 698–702; Arnold Palmer, “The Baedeker Firmament,”
The Fortnightly
, CLXXII (Sept., 1949), 200–205; W. G. Constable, “Three Stars for Baedeker,”
Harper’s
, CCVI (April, 1953), 76–83; Arthur J. Olsen, “A Tour of Baedeker,”
The New York Times Magazine
, Nov. 29, 1959, pp. 92, 94; and “Peripatetics: Two-Star Civilization,”
Time
, IV (Jan. 9, 1950), 15–16. To my knowledge there is no adequate biography in English either of the first Karl Baedeker or of the Baedeker enterprises, nor is there a satisfactory history of travel guidebooks. All these are most amusing and instructive subjects. Unfailing and omnipresent sources on attitudes toward travel are, of course, the articles and advertisements in current magazines and newspapers, travel posters, advertising brochures, and television commercials—to all of which we have much better access than will future historians.

Academic critics, however little they may understand the processes of artistic creation, still determine which forms of art are to be considered “serious.” This they do mainly on pedagogical or professional grounds. Subjects which have “always” been lectured on and examined about are of course those which continue to be easiest to lecture on and examine about. If you have nothing else to say, you can always comment on what others have said on the same subject. This situation is worst in the most respectable institutions. At Oxford University, England, for example, the study of the English common law and of English literature entered the curriculum only very late; there the study of American history has hardly yet come to be taken seriously. Such institutions set a tyrannic pattern: books on American history still have a surprisingly small audience in England.

In our age of fluid art forms and rapidly changing techniques of art and dramatic reproduction, the customs of the academic community have a more insulating effect than ever before. These customs inevitably lead us to ignore the profound implications of great current changes in our forms of art, literature, and drama. I do not know of a regular course on the art of the movies in a department of literature in a single major university, although there may be such. A result is that many of our
scholars who are best equipped to judge contemporary dramatic forms against those of earlier ages ostracize the leading forms of our own age. Meanwhile, there are numerous courses on the far less significant dramatic works (written in conventional form for the stage) of minor playwrights.

One symptom of this freezing of categories is the long separation of the study of the history of printing and of publishing from the history of literature. An admirable introductory volume which helps bring all these together is Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt and others,
The Book in America: A History of the Making and Selling of Books in the United States
(2d ed., 1952).

A comprehensive history of the popularization of knowledge could help us understand the effect of the rise of liberalism and democratic institutions on our ways of thinking about everything, and on our very conceptions of “knowledge” and “art.” An important chapter in this story is the history of translation. See, for example, F. O. Matthiessen,
Translation, An Elizabethan Art
(1931). There have, of course, been numerous histories of Biblical translation; but we could learn much from a broader study of how in recent times paths have been made from works in learned or foreign languages to the masses of the new literates who read only their own vernacular.

Donald Sheehan,
This was Publishing: A Chronicle of the Book Trade in the Gilded Age
(1952) draws on the records of Henry Holt and Company, Harper & Brothers, Dodd, Mead and Company, and Charles Scribner’s Sons (and the files of
Publishers’ Weekly
) to produce a valuably detailed and unromanticized account of publishing practices between the Civil War and World War I; this was a crucial period for the purposes of the present volume. The chapter by Malcolm Cowley, “How Writers Lived,” in Robert E. Spiller and others (eds.),
Literary History of the United States
(3 vols., 1948), II, 1263–1272, is a knowledgeable and incisive account of the relation of new publishing techniques and opportunities to the writer’s profession between World War I and the mid-1940’s.

We are fortunate to have some excellent books—both meticulous in facts and readable in style—on the history of popular and best-selling books in the United States. Frank Luther Mott,
Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States
(1947) was a pioneer work and remains a lively and readable introduction to a miscellaneous subject. Defining a “best seller” as a book that had a sale equal to 1 per cent of the population of the continental United States (or the English Colonies in the years before the Revolution) for the decade in which
it was published, Mott carries his story from Michael Wigglesworth,
The Day of Doom
(1662; required sale before 1690: 1,000) to Kathleen Winsor,
Forever Amber
(1945; required sale 1940–1949: 1,300,000).

James D. Hart,
The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste
(1950) deals with a broader, subtler, and less statistically precise subject, namely the relation of popular reading tastes to social pressures. Besides providing a treasure house of information, Hart offers many penetrating observations on the relation between the popularity of books and their enduring literary value. He is especially shrewd in showing how a capacity to “re-create the sense of the present” tends to make a book popular. In other words, he gives evidence to show how the increasing prevalence of “popular” or “best-selling” books increases the mirror effect in literature. Hart (p. 290) objects to Mott’s criterion of best-sellerdom: “Using population statistics of one period and sales statistics of another, Professor Mott finds that Mark Twain’s
Life on the Mississippi
is one of the best sellers rising from the 1880–89 decade (when population was about 50,000,000) because in 1946 it reached a sale of half a million copies as the first of a series of 25-cent, pocket-size reprints. Thus Professor Mott includes as best sellers
Leaves of Grass
, Poe’s
Poems, Moby Dick
, and other works that when related to the periods of their first publication are found to have interested only a very small public.” Hart concludes that the most popular books of past eras tended always to include a larger proportion of ephemeral works than of classics. Alice Payne Hackett,
Sixty Years of Best Sellers: 1895–1955
(1956) is valuable for its year-by-year lists and its figures on actual sales, separated also by hard-cover and paperback.

Much valuable information about the problems of book publishing—as seen from inside the publishing trade—is found in O. H. Cheney,
Economic Survey of the Book Industry, 1930–1931
(1931), a study undertaken for the National Association of Book Publishers, which nevertheless is unsparing in its criticism of prevalent trade practices. A more recent survey especially instructive to the layman is Chandler B. Grannis,
What Happens in Publishing
(1957).
Publishers’ Weekly
(established 1872) is an indispensable source with which the layman should become more familiar.

The book club phenomenon can be examined in Charles Lee,
The Hidden Public: The Story of the Book-of-the-Month Club
(1958), full of many valuable little-known details about the “BOMC.” Yet it has the unmistakable character of an “authorized”

company history; it is defensive, even when defense is not called for. On how the BOMC and other popular book clubs re-enforce the mirror effect, see Lee’s conclusion in his final Appendix C: “
Publishers’ Weekly
’s regular best seller lists show that BOMC titles almost invariably score on its monthly popularity listings. In
PW
’s annual summaries of the 10 best sellers in fiction and in non-fiction, the Club has registered between 1926 and 1953 the remarkable total of 129 best sellers (exclusive of dividends). Of the 560 titles reported, the Club accounted for 23%. With dividends, the Club score rises to 25½ %.” See also Dorothy Canfield Fisher, “Book Clubs” (R. R. Bowker Memorial Lecture, 1947), interpreting her twenty years’ experience on the selection committee of the BOMC and offering a sensible defense of book clubs as one of many mechanisms “to keep up the book habit” in a democracy. For a sampling of the book clubs and their selections, see Leo M. Hauptman (compiler), “Current Monthly Book Clubs: A Descriptive Review” (mimeographed), compiled for the Research Division of the National Education Association (1944).