Redeeming the Time: A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE 1920s AND THE NEW DEAL by Page Smith (McGraw-Hill: $34.95; 1,232 pp., illustrated)

Page Smith, former professor of American Colonial history at UCLA, has, with this book, completed a remarkable labor: In a 10-year period, he has produced an eight-volume (8,322 pages) narrative history of the United States from the Revolutionary War to the eve of World War II. He has called it a “People’s History,” and written it for the “general reader.”

That general reader, according to Smith, has been deserted by modern academic historians, who seem to have forgotten that the history of the United States is “a great and enthralling story.” Smith decided, therefore, “to take American history away from its jealous guardians, the academic historians, and return it to its proper heirs and guarantors, the American people.”

The accuracy of the diagnosis aside, the remedy threatens to crush the patient. Though the volumes are heavy, both in weight and detail, they are light on analysis and insight. Along with a scholarly apparatus, Smith has also discarded elements of scholarship that most general readers attracted to a large-scale history of the United States would appreciate.

His general approach--a narrative history composed of linked biographies--allows Smith to include a large number of interesting anecdotes and episodes, but does not provide much insight into the historical process or a coherent thesis. Nor does he prove the validity of his specific assumptions about American history; namely that American blacks have achieved equality and that the war between capital and labor has been resolved.

The external structure of the project is odd: 2,000 pages devoted to the revolutionary decade, 6,000 to the next 16, and 18 to the last 4 1/2. Internally, lengthy quotes from memoirs serve as the pillars of almost every chapter; thumbnail sketches of the dozens of main characters and lists of the literary, artistic, and other cultural products of the age provide the bricks. But all too frequently, the author omits the mortar of analysis, insight, critical evaluation, and now summation. Quotations follow quotations; names follow names; events follow events; chapters follow chapters, and a thesis is scarcely evident.

“Redeeming the Time” exhibits all the faults and strengths of the previous seven books. It is readable, but lacking in brilliance. It is disproportionate in its treatment of topics (seeming almost like an unshapely biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt), but does focus considerable detail on areas usually slighted (the Communist Party and the South). It offers material on little-known fascinating people (Jessie Daniel Ames and the Assn. of Southern Women to Prevent Lynching), but skims over more significant events (neutrality legislation). Many fine quotations are used, but uncritically, resulting in the perpetuation of myths (especially about Hollywood), and reliance on perspectives that are questionable (Katherine Anne Porter on the Sacco-Vanzetti campaign; Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley on Communist espionage in the United States).

The major problem with this book, as with the series as a whole, however, is the haste with which it was produced. Prof. Smith, for all his erudition and experience, could not (could anyone?) master in a decade such a vast range of material. The partial result is a set of books containing too many errors, oversimple explanations, and distortions.

The “general reader” who knows very little about American history will find in “Redeeming the Time” an enormous amount of information about a fascinating and complex time period, meet a host of interesting people, and derive a reasonably accurate impression of the key events and personalities. The general reader familiar with the period will find many areas newly or freshly detailed. The more demanding reader or expert reader, however, will find irritation with Smith’s failure to incorporate the most recent scholarship, his uncritical use of sources, the incessant focus on elites, the lack of a chapter on science, and the paucity of statistical evidence.

The best written chapters are those devoted to political events (conventions, elections, overviews of presidential decision-making). The weakest chapters are those devoted to religion, education, medicine, arts and literature, and various years (“1927,” e.g.). Those are mainly catchalls for pieces of information that do not fit anywhere else. Smith is at his best discussing politicians and at his worst analyzing European events.

The book’s basic contribution to general history is its full and objective treatment of the Left. Smith provides detailed treatments of the Sacco-Vanzetti campaign, the mass strikes of industrial workers, the Scottsboro case, and the Spanish Civil War. However, he tends to equate the CPUSA with the American Left, and he errs in placing Upton Sinclair’s campaign to End Poverty in California (EPIC) in the chapter titled “On the Fringe,” and labeling it an ephemeral movement. EPIC was the closest the American Left came in the 1930s to creating a mass political movement; it elected several dozen state legislators in 1934, several Los Angeles councilmen in 1935, and a governor and a U.S. senator in 1938.

Smith hoped that his history would “demonstrate the remarkable range of human potentialities,” that it might serve as collective therapy for what ails Americans, and that it would be a signpost to guide the nation back to the fundamentals of the Founding Fathers. He has succeeded in the first, but he would have needed much more time and thought to have approached the foothills of the last two.