Daniel J. Boorstin's long-awaited full-scale portrait of modern America chronicles the Great Transformation that has come about in our daily lives since the Civil War. The Americans: The Democratic Experience recaptures the drama and the meaning of the countless and sometimes little-noticed revolutions which occurred, not in legislatures or on battlefields but in our homes and farms and factories and schools and stores—making something surprising and unprecedented of our everyday experience.
The revolutions in our daily life have been the work of a peculiarly American galaxy of talent—from cow-town builder Joseph McCoy; Edwin L. Drake, the retired railroad conductor who was crazy enough to "drill" for oil; R. G. Dun, the self-made Ohio merchant who made a career of reporting the credit rating of other merchants (to build Dun & Bradstreet); the railway agent Richard Warren Sears, who started the greatest general merchandising operation in the world; Raymond Smith, who democratized gambling and helped build Reno; Robert Bonner, flamboyant publisher of sensational novels who forced newspapers to use display type for advertising—from these inventors and businessmen to the educators who sponsored a New Higher. Learning and the linguists who brought the colloquial into the classroom, the psychologist who reinterpreted our sexual mores, and the scientists who escalated us into a New Momentum.
While Dr. Boorstin takes a new look at everything from Christmas to air conditioning, from the rise of the candy bar to the decline of grammar, he does not relate facts simply because they are themselves interesting, amusing, and enlightening—though they are that, too. For he uses them all to help ask: What has life come to mean—and ceased to mean—to us late-twentieth-century Americans? He shows us how we became a nation held together by what we buy and the ads we read, defined by how we count ourselves and how others count us, characterized by the way we describe our wealth or our poverty.
The new American technology of food and drink and construction, of education and communication and travel—including the "mass-produced moment" via photography and the phonograph—dilutes our daily life with "repeatable experience" in the very act of enriching it. The endless streams of property created b y the American corporation, the new ambiguity of ownership in a nation of franchised outlets (for everything from car mufflers to hamburgers), and the new democracy of packaging, in which the wrapping of items often costs more than their contents, add up to the "thinner life of thing." The quest for novelty—from the multibillion-dollar efforts of Research and Development producing solutions which then must go in search of problems to the annual (and semiannual) automobile models and the idealization of newness in art—-has brought, along with its rewards, a new bewilderment over what we really mean by something new. The very idea of Progress is displaced by the Rate of Growth.
All this adds up—in Dr. Boorstin's phrase—to the Democratic Experience. Few books about the U.A.A. since De Tocqueville have the sweep, the scope, the originality, and the intimacy of The Americans: The Democratic Experience. Reaching back to the roots of all this in the era of the Civil War, Dr. Boorstin makes his history into a kind of national autobiography, reminding us of how we have made ourselves what we are. While this book will long be a subject of controversy, it aims at a balanced assessment of the price and the promise of what American civilization has done with and for and to Americans.
