What Are We Doing Wrong?

On my campus (as on others, I suspect) one encounters from time to time a student walking backward, closely followed by a flock of strangers, necks craning, ears straining to pick up the stream of factoid, anecdote, and fable that falls from the mouth of this “professional” student campus tour guide. Lacking any coherent sense of the mission of the university or any rigorous understanding of the greater (or lesser) utility of different kinds of information, campus guides spew into the ears of prospective students and their parents a bizarre pastiche of fact and fuzz that makes passing, eavesdropping faculty positively cringe with horror. “Here is the library,” I heard one proclaim with all the certainty of the newly learned, “but you’ll never need to go there because everything is now online.” (Rimshot, please.)

Peter Bernstein’s Wedding of the Waters brought this image to my mind because in this volume Bernstein seems to be walking backward, earnestly telling his audience the story of the Erie Canal—a story that I do not believe he understands very well.{1} Amateurs tend to be amazed by things that do not amaze more accomplished practitioners. So it is with Bernstein. He is amazed that the idea for the Erie Canal does not immediately impress people. He is amazed that De Witt Clinton would exchange a seat in the United States Senate for the mayor’s office in New York City. He is amazed (and offended) that Martin Van Buren’s minions in 1824 would pitch Clinton off the Canal Commission just as the ditch neared completion, and he is equally amazed to find Van Buren disavowing any knowledge of the gambit. (He sure doesn’t know Little Van!)

All this is understandable, because amazement is what we feel when we see but do not understand. Everything in Bernstein’s story has been explained in a variety of pretty reasonable ways by historians reaching back half a century and more, but he does not understand the literature on which he draws nor the context he seeks to illuminate, and so he plays his audience with displays of amazing facts that he presents with a hint of triumph—as if the rest of us have been trying to suppress these truths. Into the prose creeps something of the tone of the voiceover narration on History Channel biographies: two parts worship of the heroic subject, two parts assurance that “the more things change the more they stay the same,” one part suspicion (à la Fox News) that liberal academics have been keeping something from you.

It should be obvious that I do not like this book. There is nothing new in it. The text mines old warhorses such as David Hosack, Memoir of De Witt Clinton (1829), Elkanah Watson, Men and Times of the Revolution (1856), and Noble E. Whitford, History of the Canal System of New York (1905), most of which are newly available online. There is nothing compelling, or even especially felicitous, in the selection of details and anecdotes offered here. The entire story of the canal was better told by Ronald E. Shaw in 1966 in a lively, readable, and historically thoughtful account called Erie Water West. The national importance of the canal (the subject of Bernstein’s subtitle?) is much better addressed by Carol Sheriff in the equally readable The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress (1996) or by Nathan Miller in The Enterprise of a Free People (1962), not to mention the much richer contextual treatment in Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand (1977) or the still unsurpassed tour de force by Robert G. Albion, The Rise of New York Port (1939, but reissued as recently as 1984 by Northeastern University Press and currently available at the Library of Congress website in an electronic edition).

If you want to understand the politician De Witt Clinton, Craig and Mary Hanyon’s De Witt Clinton and the Rise of the People’s Men (1996) is definitive, while Evan Cornog’s The Birth of Empire: De Witt Clinton and the American Experience, 1769–1828 (1998) is infinitely better than Bernstein’s portrait. Paul Johnson’s A Shopkeeper’s Millennium (1978) puts the canal at the center of a lively story of boom-time Rochester, complete with fabulous fortunes, barroom brawls, Theodore Weld’s spine-tingling temperance sermons, and the spectacle of born-again retailers smashing barrels of whiskey in the streets to the astonished dismay of hordes of tipplers (no doubt tempted to lie down and slobber in the gutters). In short, there are excellent books in print or handy enough that tell every part of Bernstein’s story better than this new work does.

So, why does a respectable house such as W. W. Norton bring out a wobbly volume of warmed-over history, from an economics writer whose previous works celebrate the story of risk, mankind’s “obsession” with gold, and the “improbable” rise of modern Wall Street? Good question. I suspect it is for the same reason that clothing manufacturers introduce designer jeans—not because they make better pants or because Levi’s are not popular, but because they do not make better pants and Levi’s are so popular that everybody wants to wear them! This is a marketing move, pure and simple, and it does not stand alone. Publishers—even the best houses—have been mining the scholarly literature with increasing regularity, not by marketing the excellent, lively, readable books that many modern scholars write, but by flooding the Christmas trade with hardback volumes on founding fathers, major wars, and (of special interest to the readers of Technology and Culture) famous inventions and entrepreneurs. Often journalists produce these manuscripts, in a great hurry, and invest in them only slightly more time and rumination than a big feature spread for the Sunday edition. If things go well, they come across the best in scholarship, suspend their preconceived notions long enough to learn from it, and produce a gloss on the historians’ work that is both handy and reliable. If not, we get Wedding of the Waters.

Two years ago a writer named Andrea Sutcliffe published an attractive little volume entitled Steam: The Untold Story of America’s First Great Invention. Steam, of course, was not an American invention, but steamboats arguably were. Sutcliffe is a journalist with some volumes of travel writing to her name but no prior experience with steam power or the culture of the late eighteenth century. Still, the book seemed a welcome addition to the strangely thin bibliography on early steamboat development. Unfortunately, like Bernstein, Sutcliffe had trouble knowing what to do with the characters (and I do mean characters—like John Fitch, Robert Fulton, and the ever-bizarre Barlows) she encountered. What she produced would not have been a very good dissertation, and an academic press ought to have sent it back for contextual development and substantial revision. But Palgrave Macmillan must have sensed a market among steamboat enthusiasts, and now that it is out it will be hard to publish a good dissertation on what is still an important and largely untold story.

Around the same time, Joel Achenbach published The Grand Idea: George Washington’s Potomac and the Race to the West, a much more creditable volume found on the shelf in Barnes & Noble stores around the country but still highly derivative, utterly dependent on the massive and expensive Papers of George Washington project, recent scholarship on internal improvements, and the dedication of Potomac Canal buffs such as Thomas F. Hahn and the late Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas. Here the harm is not in the publication itself but in the fact that the fruits of its successful marketing will never accrue to the publishers of the original scholarship, without which there would be no sales, no bonanza. I know that the presidential papers projects all share a hand-to-mouth existence, supported by grants from various (besieged) endowments and public agencies that leave them about as secure as a lump of butter in a dog’s mouth. While I do not begrudge Achenbach his good fortune, I wonder if Simon & Schuster doesn’t owe something back to the academic enterprise?

Just last autumn three writers at the Hartford Courant published a book provocatively called Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery. This manuscript sprang from a recent admission by the Aetna life insurance company that it had once insured slaves and profited from doing so. A few appropriate phone calls landed reporter Joel Lang in the office of Rob Forbes at the Gilder Lehrman Center, where a research strategy took shape for what looks like a pretty good book. But the publisher, Random House, proclaims on the jacket that:

Complicity reveals the cruel truth about the Triangle Trade of molasses, rum, and slaves that lucratively linked the North to the West Indies and Africa; discloses the reality of Northern empires built on profits from rum, cotton, and ivory—and run, in some cases, by abolitionists; and exposes the thousand-acre plantations that existed in towns such as Salem, Connecticut. Here, too, are eye-opening accounts of the individuals who profited directly from slavery far from the Mason-Dixon line. . . .

Now it may be true that this account by Lang, Anne Farrow, and Jenifer Frank was “culled from long-ignored documents and reports—and bolstered by rarely seen photos,” but the substance of every claim made in this blurb has been available in college textbooks for a generation—and those textbooks got their information from a voluminous scholarly literature reaching back all the way to W. E. B. DuBois. The publicity is nice, but why must this popular edition present well-known historical information as if it had been wrested from the unwilling hands of professional scholars determined to suppress the horrid truth? Graham Hodges, Joanne Pope Melish, James and Lois Horton, and dozens of other historians have spent their adult lives digging up this stuff, so that reporters now can find it quickly enough to make a newspaper deadline. Yet Random House rarely ventures its capital to stake unknown youngsters whose original research might really upset modern New York’s publishing applecarts.

Sometimes it is professional historians themselves who migrate to the “trade” side of the business—David McCullough and Stephen Ambrose, to name the most successful. The results are usually intellectually respectable but derivative nonetheless. It may be that John Adams can support an infinite number of biographers, but how many intriguing studies by less commercially successful scholars did not get a reading from cash-strapped presses while McCullough’s tome (2001) filled the Christmas stockings of middle-class dads across America? When Ambrose brought out Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869 (2000), there were a great many things like it in the world—including a brand-new (and better) book by David Haward Bain, called Empire Express: Building the Transcontinental Railroad (1999). But Ambrose sold twice as well (according to amazon.com) and still appears in three different bindings, audiotape, and electronic download. Simon & Schuster once more raked in the revenues. Meanwhile academic publishers issue dire warnings to all of us who train graduate students: Don’t encourage anyone to publish dissertations—we cannot sell enough to cover the costs of production!

The point of this pressing of sour grapes is simple, even if the solution probably is not. Scholarship—like the waterpowered network Peter Bernstein chronicles in Wedding of the Waters—is becoming a one-way energy system. Graduate students and academic scholars generate the evidence and insights that eventually flow downhill into wider streams of popular trade publication. But the water is not pumped back up the hill. Just as the Erie Canal’s builders relied on rain from the heavens to refill the “big ditch,” some natural sprinkling of wealth must stock the reservoirs from which our culture draws its “knowledge” (if knowledge be substance and not just performance). But current signs are not promising in academic publishing, and it is not entirely the fault of the scholars. True enough, there are turgid volumes of academic gobbledygook (horse-pucky, we called it back in Iowa) that no casual reader in his right mind would want to wade through; but there are also excellent works of sprightly prose telling great, important stories, that are printed in lots of 500, priced at $50 and up, advertised twice in academic journals, never reviewed in the New York Times, and impossible to purchase at any of the popular bookstores that grace our shopping malls. What are we doing wrong, that we cannot get the vendors of books to sell the good ones in place of the bad at a time when more people (against all prediction) buy books than at any time in history?