Amateurs, Professionals, and Popular Histories

Dan Allosso

As I look at the historiographical “tree” I drew, it strikes me that the books on it have all been chosen by historians. I wonder what it would look like, if it included books that were especially important at imparting historical ideas to the general public?

The other day, Lisa responded to Chris’ post with a comment about appreciating older scholarship, and the “parents/grandparents” element of our intellectual lineage. I’ve been thinking about that, as I’ve been reading professional historiographies (John Higham, Peter Novick, Ian Tyrell) this week, along with assessments of the influence and popularity of books: Frank Luther Mott’s Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (1947) and Cowley & Smith’s Books that Changed Our Minds (1939). Malcolm Cowley and Bernard Smith's book, dedicated to Charles Beard, consists of a series of essays on authors or books deemed especially influential by American intellectuals responding to a New Republic inquiry. While it does not provide first-hand information about the books that influenced regular people (or even women, since all the respondents were apparently male), many of the people they polled had written books that did influence large groups of Americans. Carl Becker, for instance, nominated William Graham Sumner's A Study of Mores, Manners, Customs and Morals (1907), “which impressed me with the relativity of custom and ideas,” and Hans Vaihinger's The Philosophy of 'As If ' (1911), which “confirmed me in the notion that social thinking is shaped by certain unexamined preconceptions current at the time.” (quoting Becker’s letter, 6) Beard said “Brooks Adams’s two books are thumping,” which the editors took to mean The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895) and Theory of Social Revolutions (1913). Both Becker and Beard recommended Benedetto Croce, History: Its Theory and Practice (1923).

Beard himself was the second-most widely recommended author, just behind Thorstein Veblen (really!); An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution and The Theory of the Leisure Class got an equal number of votes. Authors popular with the surveyed intellectuals for their body of work rather than a particular title included Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, George Bernard Shaw, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Autobiographies included Henry Adams’, Theodore Dreiser’s, Joseph Freeman’s, Robert M. La Follette’s, and The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, which is called “the key book of the depression...[that] came at exactly the right moment.” (12)

Several of Cowley and Smith’s picks also appear in the lists of popular, “amateur” history I’m compiling from Higham, Novick, and Tyrell, which focuses more on the question of whether or not an author was academic, and how he (yes, 99% of the time, he) fit in the growth of the profession, but nevertheless offer some guidance regarding popularity. For example, former Senator and amateur historian Albert Beveridge’s Lincoln (1928) earned $51,000 in royalties in its first six months (Higham 75). H.G. Wells’ Outline of History (1920) was “issued by a hesitant publisher at an exorbitant price . . . it sold one and a half million copies--one copy for every twenty homes in the country--within twelve years.” (Higham 74) Although the multi-volume set is global in scope, it deals extensively with American history and perhaps contextualizes it in a way that resonated with readers. Volume Four begins with back-to-back photos of Lincoln at Antietam and Bismarck at Versailles. Novick compares sales of Wells’ Outline with J. Franklin Jameson’s American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (1926), which sold less than a thousand, and John D. Hicks’ Populist Revolt (1931), which “took seventeen years to sell fifteen hundred copies.” (Novick 193) Allan Nevins, always interested in popular history, said that Mark Sullivan’s Our Times (1926) had “probably done more to interest people in American history than anything else written in our generation.” (Tyrell 49)

Cowley & Smith mention that Robert Lynd responded to their survey on the most influential books, with authors like Alfred Adler, John Dewey, William James, Veblen, Thomas Huxley, and with Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. These suggestions, the editors noted, were much different from the “books taken from the Middletown public library in 1935,” which Lynd described in Middletown (Chapter 17) and Middletown in Transition (Chapter 7). Those chapters probably deserve a closer look, alongside the titles I’ve pulled together on reader response theory and interpretive communities.

See also:

Waldo Frank, Our America

Van Wyck Brooks, America’s Coming of Age

Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World

Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams

Herbert Croly, Promise of American Life

Louis Brandeis, Other People’s Money

Joseph Krutch, The Modern Temper (said to be “very influential in the colleges,” 13)

V. I. Lenin, Imperialism

John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World

Graham Wallas, The Great Society

John Strachey, The Coming Struggle for Power

Gustavus Myers, History of the Great American Fortunes

James Frazer, The Golden Bough

Books that Regular People Read

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Today's post comes from Dan Allosso, a PhD student in history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He reflects on the bestsellers of ages past and what we can learn about regular people from the books they read.

Dan Allosso

Since historians rely heavily on written records of the past, they often wonder about the audiences of the literary subjects they study. And about the reading habits of people who didn't bother to preserve detailed narratives of their lives and thoughts. How many people (and which people) read Emerson's "American Scholar" essay, Ben Franklin's Autobiography, or Thomas Paine's controversial Age of Reason? We've all heard that Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best selling book of its time; how many people also read H. R. Helper's Impending Crisis?

Frank Luther Mott (1886-1964) is best known for his Pulitzer and Bancroft Prize-winning A History of American Magazines. He also wrote a book called Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States, in 1947. As the title suggests, Mott identifies about 324 books that were the biggest sellers of their day. This is extremely valuable, for people who want to know what regular folks in America were reading. It’s a little surprising that the library doesn’t contain a whole shelf-full of books like this, but Mott’s is the only one I’ve found so far.

There are a lot of surprises in this book. For example, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the bestseller for 1776, is preceded by Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son in 1775 and followed by Milton’s Paradise Lost (originally published in 1667) in 1777. In the early 1820s, people were buying a lot of Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper. They avidly read Washington Irving’s Tales of a Traveler and Sarah Josepha Hale’s Sketches of American Character; but not Timothy Dwight’s Travels in New England and New York. They did read George Bancroft’s History of the United States, but not as much as the delved into Jared Sparks’ Life of Washington or Daniel P. Thompson’s The Green Mountain Boys, published in the 1830s.

Possibly the most interesting thing about Mott’s list of American bestsellers is that nearly all of them are available “full-view” on Google Books (and now on Google ebooks). I think this is a game-changer for people interested in the past. We no longer have to depend on the judgment of previous scholars, who might have preferred Timothy Dwight over Sarah Hale, even though Hale was widely read in her time (and was the author of the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb”). Not that Dwight’s work doesn’t contain valuable material, but we no longer have to assume it gives us the best view of what interested people at the time. Using guides like Mott’s along with resources like Google, the Internet Archive, and Project Gutenberg, we may be able to better understand what regular people thought and cared about. This might tell us why Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and Harvey’s Coin’s Financial School (1894) were so much more widely read (and influential?) in their day than Marx’s Capital (1889).