A Nation With a Past

Harold Evans remembers his first impression of America. It was 1956, and the then-28-year-old, a reporter and an editorial writer for England’s Manchester Evening News, had arrived in New York as a recipient of a Harkness Fellowship, a two-year postgraduate program for study and travel in the United States.

“ ‘Find the real America,’ is what they said,” Evans recalls, noting that the project ultimately took him from New York to Chicago and on through the South and West--a total of 40 states. But if, in the course of his journeys, he often found himself confronting such mid-century nightmares as the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings and the specter of racial discrimination, he also became utterly captivated by what he characterizes as a uniquely American kind of energy, the nation’s deep-seated, if not always deserved, heroic sense of itself.

“When I first came here,” Evans says, “I came from a country that was gray with austerity. And it seemed to me that New York was populated by fascinating people--Damon Runyon in every bar, and every taxi driver was Groucho Marx. I lived with a guy who made a fortune making metal coat hangers. He played Bach all the time in his apartment, and it seemed a very civilized life.”

Forty-two years later, Evans is still compelled by the energy of America--he became a citizen in 1993--even as he remains the very model of an English gentleman himself. At 70, the former president and publisher of Random House presents a rather formal persona, dressed in a tailored three-piece suit and speaking in the low tones and oddly hesitant manner of the British educated class. He’s pursued something of a roundabout process to arrive at such a posture; the son of a train driver, Evans benefited from the nascent strains of postwar English democracy, working his way up to the editorship of the Times of London before moving to this country in 1984 with his wife, former Vanity Fair and New Yorker Editor Tina Brown.

The Product of

a Decade’s work

Now editorial director of U.S. News & World Report, the Atlantic Monthly and the New York Daily News, he has finally crystallized his fascination with the United States in a new book, “The American Century” (Random House), a 20th century history of his adopted homeland, lavishly illustrated with more than 900 photographs, on which he’s been working, more or less steadily, for better than 10 years.

At first glance, the idea of an Englishman fixated on America seems somewhat incongruous, as if Evans had gone through the looking glass and never returned. The time-honored model, after all, is that of the American in thrall to continental culture. Yet while this attitude remains prevalent, there’s a lesser known counter-tradition in which a European observer is transformed by America, going back to Alexis de Tocqueville’s early 19th century masterwork “Democracy in America” and extending to such modern observers as Alistair Cooke. “The American Century” tells the story of America’s ascendancy to world-power status episodically, in almost a newsmagazine format, relying on short snippets of text, enhanced by related sidebars that portray history as diverse and accessible at the same time.

A Popular History

in Digestible Chunks

“I certainly didn’t think I was doing de Tocqueville,” Evans admits. “I set out not to do a book of generalized insights, but to do a book which actually told stories, and then pulled them together in 15 unifying essays. I had an idea I should try and write a popular history, presented in segments so people could dip in and out of it, rather than something along continuous themes.”

While Evans has lived in the United States long enough to dispel the notion that “The American Century” is nothing more than the musings of an outsider looking in, he does focus on several themes that have special resonance because of his background as an Englishman. One is freedom of speech, which, from his perspective, is a particularly potent right.

“You have to have had the experience as searingly and burningly as I have,” he notes with a rueful smile, “to realize that there is a dramatic difference between England and the United States. Most Americans see the debates in Parliament, or hear somebody at Hyde Park Corner attacking the queen, and England seems to be the freest country in the world. But I must have been in the High Court three or four times every year, arguing for freedom of the press.”

Still more important is the role of individuality in the development of national identity, although Evans sees this as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s a source of America’s essential optimism.

“You need optimism,” he suggests, “to leave your native land and come to a strange country.” At the same time, he is concerned by the rise of “identity politics,” which, he thinks, may ultimately leave American identity itself in disarray.

“One reason I’ve done the book,” he says, “is that I want everybody who’s here--the population is far more heterogeneous than ever--to realize that common identity lies in fidelity to the rule of law and the ideals of the Constitution. The unity of America is very much bound up with its identity, and without a common identity, I worry that the society will become increasingly fragmented, even Balkanized in a way.”

The Individual’s Role

in a Greater Tale

If the dichotomy between common and individual identity sounds somehow contradictory, it’s a contradiction that, Evans believes, resides at the heart of the American experiment, with its mythic metaphor of the melting pot, and its focus on personal expression and freedom as the cornerstones of political life. Because of this, he has built “The American Century” around these issues, looking for the broader patterns of history in the individual moments that make it up. Partly, you can trace that intention to Evans’ training as a journalist, which has left him with an appreciation of the face in the crowd. But it’s also a matter of personal philosophy, and his own ideas of how divergent forces interact in framing social questions, the way the smallest personal moments resonate beyond themselves.

“I don’t go for the Tolstoy theory of history,” Evans explains. “I don’t ignore social forces, but I think social forces generally come in human form.” As an example, he cites the case of Sam Shapiro, a Minneapolis dry cleaner who, in 1927, refused to pay off a so-called “protection association,” setting in motion a bizarre sequence of events that culminated with the Supreme Court deciding, in Near v. Minnesota, against the restrictive tactic of prior restraint.

“Because Sam Shapiro reached down for his law books,” Evans says, “prior restraint was ruled unconstitutional, and that became part of the American fabric. And in the end, the Pentagon Papers case goes on the precedent of Near vs. Minnesota, which depends on Sam Shapiro taking down his constitutional law books.” The point, he believes, is that “these stories, all of them, exemplify the political, philosophical nature of American society. The individual caught up in the maelstrom of social forces may lose sight of the fact that he or she matters. But the individual counts.”

Of course, as the epoch Evans calls the American century yields to what, it seems inevitably, will be a global future, the issue of the individual’s influence or impact on history has never seemed more in doubt. Already, we live in a world where multinational corporations and political entities like the European Union have rendered traditional concepts of nationalism or identity all but obsolete.

That’s a development with which Evans has firsthand experience, having seen his former employer, Random House, swallowed up by the German multinational Bertlesmann Bertelsmann in recent months.

“One of the dangers,” Evans says, “is for the individual workers. If we have a global economy, who’s going to look after the individuals who may get crushed by it? Does that become a national responsibility, or does it become some kind of international responsibility? How do you legislate it?”

Yet even as he calls globalization “a very contradictory and paradoxical situation,” Evans argues that America still has a significant role to play. “Global capital may have made it a smaller world,” he explains, “but although this means America won’t put its name on the next century the way it has on this one, there must be leadership. And I can’t think of anybody better to do that because, one, America has this moral ambition, and secondly, it has the capital and military resources to take the lead.”

In the end, such questions return to America’s own notions of manifest destiny, which have a lot to do with the optimism and energy that first attracted Evans all those years ago. In large part, this may be attributable to the relative youth of the country, which seems to provide equal access to both our future and our past. It’s something Evans calls the “proximity of history,” a concept he refers to in “The American Century” when he writes about the odd phenomenon of having met both the astronauts and the last surviving member of Geronimo’s band.

“Last night,” he says, “a woman came up to me who knew William Jennings Bryan. Talk about the proximity of history indeed.”