Vintage Reading (11 page)
Authors: Robert Kanigel
Contradictory? Perhaps. But except in the most narrowly literal sense, it hardly matters. These ideas and sentiments plainly
could
have been expressed. Whether Thucydides expressed them—or Pericles or Alcibiades or Cleaon— they suggest what the Greeks thought worth saying. Their logic is, mostly, compelling. They are laced with appeals to human nature, self-interest, and common sense.
Perhaps three-quarters of the book records the movements of soldiers and ships, battlefield geography, the numbers and arms of opposing forces, the ebb and flow of battle, who died, who didn’t, what revenge was exacted on the losers, and so on. Even in this day of laser-guided missiles, generals will draw lessons. Those of unmilitary bent, meanwhile, will find these accounts appealing to the imagination as human drama, and to the intellect as puzzles:
How can we dislodge the Spartans from that rocky island at Pylos?
During a break in the siege of Pylos, Spartan emissaries go to Athens and appeal for peace. Don’t be greedy, they say. You have the upper hand now, but who knows how things will go? Let’s put our mutual enmity behind us; do not impose terms too vengeful. For “no lasting settlement can be made in a spirit of revenge, when one side gets the better of things in war and forces its opponent to swear to carry out the terms of an unequal treaty.” Those who imposed on Germany the harsh Treaty of Versailles which ended the First World War but planted the seeds of the Second, plainly never read their
Thucydides.
During a revolution, Thucydides observes, words lose their meaning. “What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member... Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man... Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect.”
Is this Corcyra in the wake of its civil war in 427 B.C.? Or France during the Reign of Terror of 1793? Or even America, wracked by the spasms of terrorist violence, today?
____________
By Alexis de Tocqueville
Originally published in 1835
What gifts of perception and intellect equip one to meet a callow teenager and predict his personality, quirks and all, as an old man? Whatever they are, Alexis de Tocqueville had them. The “teenager” was America of the early 1830s, when Thomas Jefferson was dead barely five years. America today, a century and a half older, its arteries clogged with the detritus of history, can only marvel at the precision of Tocqueville’s insights.
The son of a French aristocrat, Tocqueville came to America in 1831, stayed nine months, traveled 7,000 miles. His ostensible purpose? To study the American penal system. In fact, nothing about America, its institutions or its people, escaped his fresh eye and penetrating intelligence. He returned to France in the late winter of 1832, and soon set to work on what would be his enduring classic,
Democracy in America
, published in two volumes, in 1835 and 1840. To this day no book about the American national character is so often, and so profitably, quoted.
America is something new, says Toqueville—the most advanced expression of a universal and irresistible human urge to break down the old feudalism and all its rigid class distinctions. “I saw in America more than America,” he tells his readers in an introduction. “It was the shape of democracy itself which I sought, its inclinations, character, prejudices and passions; I wanted to understand it so as at least to know what we [in Europe] have to fear or hope.”
He is not American democracy’s unalloyed admirer. There is, first of all, the maddening mediocrity that seems to flourish on our shores. And a lowering of the level of intellectual debate to that below what a Parisian could expect in any sidewalk cafe. And a “tyranny of the majority” that leaves little
room for originality of either thought or opinion.
But overshadowing these defects are, among other things, American respect for laws; American democracy’s tendency toward slow, peaceful change; the difficulty faced by evil-doers in controlling enough levers of power to do harm; and a narrowing of extremes of wealth.
Though disquisitions on lawmaking and other such textbook staples occupy their share of it,
Democracy in America
will interest not only students of history and government; virtually every aspect of the American national character swings into focus under Tocqueville’s microscope, from race relations, to the family, to religion, to manners, to the arts.
Occasionally, as when he sees Americans as little more than transplanted Englishmen (without benefit of immigrant cross-fertilization), or when he pictures Americans as unlikely to make major advances in theoretical science, he is revealed as merely human. For an instant, the reader may actually feel miffed, only to abruptly realize he’s so disappointed Tocqueville is wrong only because Tocqueville is right so astoundingly.
Tocqueville describes Americans as people whose lives are “so practical, so confused, so excited, so active, that little time remains for them for thought.”
He says of democratic institutions that they “awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never satisfy.” He could be describing Edison as well as the Apollo Moon Project when he says that “in America, the purely practical side of science is cultivated admirably... The Americans always display a clear, free, original and creative turn of mind.”
Tocqueville even anticipates mass production. In a democracy, the people’s desire for goods “outrun[s] their means and [they] will gladly agree to put up with an imperfect substitute rather than do without the object of their desire altogether...” One solution “is to find better, quicker, more skillful ways of making it. The second is to make a great number of objects which are more or less the same but not so good... “
It would be the best part of a century before the first Model T came rolling off Henry Ford’s assembly line.
Making Hard Work Easy:
the Great Popularizers
Only Yesterday
— Frederick Lewis Allen
Microbe Hunters
— Paul de Kruif
Coming of Age in Samoa
— Margaret Mead
The Outermost House
— Henry Beston
The Amiable Baltimoreans
— Francis F. Beirne
What to Listen for in Music
— Aaron Copland
Gods, Graves, and Scholars
— C. W. Ceram
The Stress of Life
— Hans Selye
_________________________________
To some, “popularization” verges on a dirty word. A recent cartoon shows one elderly scholar saying to another, “At least, we haven’t stooped to popularizing.” Even when not condemned outright, popularization normally carries little cachet, is rarely seen as a nonfiction genre in the way that science fiction, say, ranks as a distinct, if lesser, fictional one.
But it takes talent to bring an inchoate mass of arcane material to life. A new generation of writers has made “popular science” something like its own genre. But not only science benefits from the popularizing impulse; so do history, anthropology, music. And as we see here, some of the best examples of it long predate the current crop.
An Informal History of the 1920s
____________
By Frederick Lewis Allen
First published in 1931
On October. 24, 1929, in the offices of J. P. Morgan & Company, reporters eagerly awaited the words of Thomas W. Lamont, a representative of the mighty financial house. Lamont looked grave. “There has been,” he said, “a little distress selling on the Stock Exchange.”
October 24 was the first panicky selling day of the Crash of ‘29. In the first two hours of trading, United States Steel dropped 12 dollars a share. Montgomery Ward plummeted from 83 to 50. Dozens of stocks lost all they had gained in the preceding months of the bull market.
That was Thursday. Monday brought even more precipitous declines. Then came Black Tuesday, when the bottom dropped out of the market altogether and panic reached its heights: With a scream of financial agony the Roaring Twenties were over.
Today our image of the tumultuous Twenties is apt to be colored by nostalgia, distorted by TV and movies, or simply dimmed by ignorance. To us it was the heyday of our parents or grandparents’ generation. In 1931, on the other hand, when Frederick Lewis Allen wrote his “informal history” of the decade, the Twenties were still “only yesterday.”
At the end of World War I, the country was exhausted. It craved what the next president, Warren Harding, would call “normalcy.” America wanted to keep out foreigners and kick out Reds; both were European, alien, and dangerous. It wanted nothing so much as to be left alone to play, and to make money. The Klu Klux Klan was resurgent, its membership reaching 4.5 million by 1924. Bolsheviks and those suspected of sympathizing with them
were rounded up on a scale worthy of the McCarthy era three decades later.
Meanwhile, hemlines rose. Women stopped hiding behind Victorian bustles. Sex and Freud became the stuff of dinner party conversation. Automobiles, and automobile culture, spread across the land. Prohibition brought speakeasies, and hip flasks, and Al Capone’s beer trucks roaring across Chicago—and Al Capone’s thugs shooting up anyone who tried to get in the way.
And everywhere—except on the depressed farms—big bucks were being made. By Florida real estate developers. By publicists for the waves of stunt fliers who followed in the wake of Lindbergh’s heroic solo Atlantic crossing. And by everyone—everyone, it seemed—on the Stock Exchange, where it was buy, buy, buy, and still the chattering ticker tape in your local broker’s office told the tale of fortunes to be made, always and forever, world without end.
Until finally the great, overstretched balloon of American prosperity burst.
The stock market collapsed. Consumers stopped buying. Factories stopped producing. Workers stopped working. The ballyhoo days were over. The world became a more serious place.
The same financiers who in the Twenties had offered their pronouncements as gods, had no answers for the unemployed of the Thirties. The need, Allen writes with prescience, was for someone wise enough to know what to do and strong enough to get the chance to do it. The name of Franklin D. Roosevelt appears nowhere, not even parenthetically, in Allen’s account.
Everything had happened so fast. The face of America transformed overnight. How could Allen make sense of it, from a distance in time offering such meager perspective, while the country was still immersed in a terrible Depression whose end was not yet in sight? That he did, somehow, is
Only Yesterday’s
triumph.
It would be like writing, in 1971, a history of the 1960s—surely no one would take the trouble to write one of the 1970s—with the national mind still reeling from hippies and acid trips and assassinations and Black power and
the insanity of Vietnam. No one has done it, even now, not the way Allen did with the Twenties. This is one measure of his achievement.
Another is that while
Only Yesterday
mostly remains as fresh and immediate as when it was written, its interpretations have stood the test of more than half a century. In his introduction to a 1957 edition of the book, one critic, Roger Butterfield, wrote, reasonably enough: “It is time to say what has long been apparent—that this is an American classic.”
____________
By Paul de Kruif
First published in 1926
Among the pioneers of medical research Paul de Kruif portrays in
Microbe Hunters
, none are soulless technicians, grey accountants of dreary fact, or objective seekers after truth unmoved by visions of glory; de Kruif thus makes short work of some of the more common stereotypes about scientists.
But not all—not, for example, that of the Mad Scientist: Most of the author’s microbe hunters are, in fact, just a bit daft.
Not certifiably insane, maybe, but surely driven, arrogant, and obsessed. Preoccupied with their scientific quests, they’ll go to any lengths for The Answer. Their persistence is pathological, as is their confidence: Emil Behring, in search of a cure for diphtheria, fairly massacres whole herds of guinea pigs. Louis Pasteur, fearfully protective of his achievements, responds to an attack on his theories, writes de Kruif, with a paper whose arguments “could not have fooled the jury of a country debating society.”
Some years ago, Tracy Kidder won a Pulitzer Prize for
The Soul of a New Machine
, an intimate behind-the-scenes look at the frenzied development of a new computer and the impassioned men who did it. For many people, bits and bytes and silicon chips make up a world overwhelmingly alien and gray; but Kidder pictured it as burning with a white heat of intellectual and personal ferment. He reported the gritty dailiness of the work as much as the high drama; yet it was a romanticized portrayal for all that. Romanticization, it seems, is an occupational hazard of the genre, a genre whose prototype is, by any measure,
Microbe Hunters.
“This plain history would not be complete if I were not to make a confession,” de Kruif writes on its final page. “I love these microbe hunters,
from old Antony Leeuwenhoek [inventor of the microscope] to Paul Ehrlich [discoverer of a syphillis cure]. Not especially for the discoveries they have made nor for the boons they have brought mankind. No. I love them for the men they are.”
De Kruif finds his subjects full of grievous flaws: Antony Leeuwenhoek is sadly unimaginative, failing to guess that the microbes he sees under his microscope bear disease. Koch, who discovered the tuberculosis bacillus, is a cold technician cursed, to pathological excess, with German thoroughness. Louis Pasteur is an arrogant showman, impossibly rash and sloppy. But none of this detracts from de Kruif’s awe of his subjects; rather, it humanizes them— and helps to forge intense reader interest. The author could doubtless fashion a story of Attila the Hun that recounted every particular of his savagery, yet managed to “humanize” him.