The Usable Past
Sometimes
you read a preface by a writer who doesn't seem to have absorbed the book he
purports to be introducing. In his opening remarks for Eyes of the Nation: A
Visual History of the United States , Librarian of Congress James H.
Billington strikes a fondly nationalistic note: "What makes the American
narrative unique is the ability we have displayed time and again to remedy our
mistakes, to adjust to changing circumstances, to debate and then move on in
directions that seem better for all." These words, which might be appropriate
for a Time-Life coffee-table volume titled, say, We
the People! ,
seriously misrepresent the downbeat, contemplative collaboration of picture
editor Vincent Virga and historian Alan Brinkley. Far from being a celebratory
collection of inspiring American images, Eyes of the Nation is--in
stretches, at least--a lavishly illustrated bad trip through 500 years of
heavy-handed nation building. Though it's hard to sustain a point of view when
the goal is to be best-selling and definitive, the book's reigning mood is
progressive populism tempered by realistic pessimism.
After a bit of visual
throat-clearing, Eyes of the Nation begins in earnest with a drawing of
the Indian village of Secota on Roanoke Island in what would become North
Carolina. It shows neat rows of corn. Ceremonial dancers. A central
marketplace. The drawing, done by an expedition mate of Sir Walter Raleigh's,
portrays the state of native grace that the rest of the chapter ("Encounter,
1492-1600") depicts a falling away from. The emphasis is on European ignorance,
backed by engravings of fanciful New World monsters and references to
Shakespeare's The Tempest , a play inspired by explorers' journals. The
rise of Spanish-English conflict marks the exit from Eden: "From the moment the
European rivals began fighting among themselves for territory, ... the security
of villages like Secotan came to an end." What follows is several pages ("The
Garden"), linked thematically rather than chronologically, picturing
sunflowers, rattlesnakes, and bison. The color plates are pretty, the captions
neutral and informative, but the metaphorical message is sharp: Behold what was
lost. Chapter 2 drives home the point. Titled "The World Turn'd Upside Down,
1600-1800," it opens with an apocalyptic watercolor, America: A
Prophecy , by William Blake.
Though it resembles a
standard high-school history text, with chapters on the Civil War, immigration,
imperial expansion, and so on, Eyes of the Nation is a book one flips
through, not a book one views and reads in sequence. It speaks through clusters
of words and images, not through argument and exposition. Open to Page 240, for
example, and you'll find stills from D.W. Griffith's Intolerance
juxtaposed with a pencil sketch of the Lincoln Monument and, on the facing
page, a photograph of a charred and limbless lynched black male surrounded by
smiling whites in coats and ties. combine a black-and-white shot of Dust Bowl
farmers, a fertile California tomato field captured by Edward Weston, and a
Technicolor Emerald City from The Wizard of Oz . The ironies aren't
always as blunt as these, but in general it is tension, not harmony, that
governs the arrangements.
The richest part of the book is its middle.
Visually, there are just more sparks to strike after the invention of the
camera and the flowering of modern advertising. The writing brightens, too.
Brinkley, a highly class-conscious historian, is better at robber barons,
depressions, strikes, and grass-roots politics than at wars and natural
history. He knows how to isolate cultural decision points--the moment, say,
when the populist cause was lost and William Jennings Bryan became a fool--and
how to pin down such phantom entities as social conformity between the wars and
Southern agrarian idealism. Though Brinkley's sympathies clearly lie with the
progressives, he has a knack for portraying reactionaries. His Klansmen and
red-baiters are people, too--not just bigots but also misguided dreamers. And
though hindsight sometimes breeds determinism, Brinkley is alert to alternative
histories and paths just barely not taken. The book concludes in orthodox
multiculturalism and a surprisingly bitter estimate of America's democratic
potential: "America approached the century's end as fractured along social,
racial, ethnic, economic, gender, and regional lines as it had been in all but
a few moments in its history; with a culture so diverse and so contentious that
it seemed to lack any coherence or shape; with declining faith in its
government, its leaders, and its principal institutions." The facing page shows
a picture of a brick wall scratched full of chalk marks tallying enemy deaths
in the Gulf War.
Less conventionally ambitious, and possibly more affecting
because of it, is Michael Lesy's Dreamland: America at the Dawn of the
Twentieth Century , a collection of turn-of-the-century photographic
postcards that are both graphically gorgeous and spiritually haunting. Silvery
and immaculate, with hallucinatory depth and detail, the pictures of Western
mines and Eastern skyscrapers, cotton fields and battleships, boomtown main
streets and metropolitan train stations have a strangely deserted
Sunday-morning feel, as if they represented the first day, or perhaps the last,
of American modernity.
The first thing one notices,
paging through the book, is that objects, both natural and man-made, looked
larger and more heroic in those days, if only because the people were fewer.
Call it the age of titanic capitalism. Shots of the Flatiron Building under
construction are weirdly short on human passersby, implying that the growth
required to fill the place is still a hopeful article of faith, not yet a
practical reality. That the American Century was built before the bulk of its
tenants had arrived is one of those facts that shouldn't be any surprise but
comes as a revelation nonetheless.
Lesy's text--a filled-in time
line that notes such events as the founding of department stores, the rise of
banks and financial institutions, and the erection of famous public
monuments--creates, in combination with the pictures, a retrospective mood that
isn't nostalgia but a finer, more elevated yearning. The sadness is not for
what was, or even for what might have been, but for what always comes between
the two--the feeling of being in the eternal, dream-absorbing, imperfect
present. On Page 13 there's a shot of New York schoolboys admiring a sidewalk
assortment of metal windup toys. One boy, who looks wiser than his friends,
glares at the camera, seemingly aware that his image is being delivered to the
future. He appears to anticipate, and resent, our patronizing spying. He
doesn't like us. We're from now and he's from way back when and he already
seems to know we've let him down.
