The Scale of Things
How do you encapsulate a century that saw agriculture fade into industrialization and then into technology, which started with bullets and ended with the Bomb, which transformed our cultural landscape with race riots and gender revolutions and above all which handed world power to a bold democracy--America? How do you capture what was important and incidental, beautiful and ugly, profound and trivial?
Perhaps you try to do it with numbers; perhaps with anecdotes or symbols of our progress. Historiographers have within their grasp many ways to tell the same story, and Henry Allen’s “What It Felt Like” and Theodore Caplow, Louis Hicks and Ben Wattenberg’s “The First Measured Century” are representative of two very different approaches to recording history and, in doing so, to telling the story of the last century.
Caplow et al have assembled their book as a companion to the PBS series “The First Measured Century” and, like that series, the book attempts to tell the story of the last hundred years using charts and graphs to detail everything from the usual population, inflation and wage-rate statistics to the more obscure measures of our society’s worth--the price of a Harvard education, the number of blind people receiving public assistance and the tonnage of domestic freight carried by rail.
The book is a series of two-page spreads, each representing a different trend in American demographics. But this is no coffee-table book; the diagrams and their explanations are stark, to-the-point and well-sourced. Most of the trends won’t surprise the demographically literate. Tag lines seem to state the obvious: “Unemployment rates fluctuate with the business cycle and military manpower needs.” Or “Control of the U.S. House of Representative and the U.S. Senate oscillated between the two major parties.” Or “The health of children showed spectacular improvement.”
Further, the authors reserve their judgment, for the most part, about why any of these trends occurred. They write, “We have not advanced any general theory to explain them [the trends] as a whole. However, we encourage readers to think through their own interpretative designs based on the data.” Their reserved tone combined with the lack of any proscriptive language makes this book a starter reference book, not a work that identifies any larger trends or makes predictions about our future. Is it valuable to “measure” the century in order to evaluate our achievements and setbacks? Must we understand more than the sheer velocity of years and numbers? Is the act of measuring a century an act of historical and specious hubris? “The First Measured Century” raises all of these questions but, because its authors reserve judgment, giving us little more than summary, we never get the answers.
If “The First Measured Century” overwhelms the reader with numbers, “What It Felt Like” reads like a breath of humanity with nary a statistic or footnote in sight. Henry Allen has written an American pastoral, a string of wondrously descriptive ruminations--a combination of his own adventures and his parents’ memories illuminated by his own rich imagination--which form a kind of pop culture walk through the ages. His is a poetic prose that produces a surprisingly concise portrait of our people’s collective memory.
If Caplow et al are the last century’s guardians of facts and statistics, then Allen is its poet. A writer who wants you to experience the last century with all of its many diverse touches, tastes, sights and sounds, he chronicles “the dead, sweet smell of coal smoke” at the turn of the century; the “boop-boop-a-doop” girls, the roadsters and the Jazz Age of the 1920s; the peeling paint, the Fiesta Ware, government cheese, fewer cars and babies of the sober Depression years; and the candy ease of the 1950s--Pall Malls, Vitalis, penny loafers, the Mickey Mouse Club.
Allen has a romantic nostalgia for the fading rural and early industrial America of 1900 to 1930. In contrast, he paints the last half-century with a harsher brush, displaying disdain for the post-World War II sameness and suburban sprawl and rancor for the contradictions of 1960s and 1970s, spurning our present environment in which mankind seems to be running “stridently away from all that makes us human.” For Allen, the world has “lost its perfume because we’d grown older and lost our physical susceptibility to the ache of lilac or the possibilities in an old trunk.”
Allen is a master at conjuring up visceral responses from the reader, making us feel that, having lived in this last American century, we are part of something bigger than ourselves. His words have all the power of fireworks on the Fourth of July or a New Year’s Eve celebration. What is disappointing, however, is that Allen’s book is so predictable in its voice. Allen, as narrator of the last century, has the sensibilities of a stereotypical “geezer” who seems to say, “You have no idea, kid, how much better the world was in my day, when people had values. The food tasted better; kids were cuter and well-behaved; women were women and men were men.”
Allen paints a bleak picture of the modern world, forgetting, it seems, many of the human advances we have made over the last century--extending civil rights, furthering workplace equality, experiencing an overall improvement in the quality of life for all--a view supported by the statistics and trends of “The First Measured Century.” Indeed, whether using measures of the gross domestic product, equality of income or education levels, our nation has achieved higher living standards for our people. Allen might argue that wealth does not equal happiness and that we have lost our soul in the process of modernization.
Of course, the underlying question both books are asking the reader to consider is: “Are you better off than you were years ago?” This question, which Bill Clinton made popular during his first presidential election campaign, seems to hover in the pages of both of these books, and though it fundamentally drives their research and writing, the question is never overtly answered by the authors.
Like art, the answer is in the eye of the beholder. Allen has one view--we’re not better off. We’ve lost our humanity. “The First Measured Century” gives the reader, if not comprehensive arguments, at least ammunition for both sides of the debate. Perhaps singer Billy Joel put it best: “The good ol’ days weren’t always good and tomorrow’s not as bad as it seems.” *
