We Should All Be Friends

In the October 2006 issue of Technology and Culture, John Lauritz Larson asks: “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 predictions) buy books than at any time in history?” By “vendors” Larson chiefly means publishers, and he makes clear that “good” books, by and large, are written by academics, while “bad” ones are written by popular authors. The particular target of his ire, and the inspiration for his jeremiad, is Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation, by Peter L. Bernstein, published in 2005 by W. W. Norton.

Larson calls Bernstein ill-informed and his book derivative, “a wobbly volume of warmed-over history” reminiscent of the History Channel or, worse yet, Fox News. I have never met or dealt with Peter Bernstein, and while I think his book is competently done, I would not call it the best ever written on the subject. The writing is facile in places, and in a casual reading I noticed a few minor errors; if I knew a tenth as much as Larson does about the period, I’m sure I would have found more. Overall, though, I’d say Bernstein has done a decent job on a very complicated subject.

Still, let’s assume that Larson is correct in calling Wedding of the Waters poorly written. Was he inspired to dash off a rueful essay for Technology and Culture merely because a book he doesn’t like sold a lot of copies? If everybody did that, this journal would have room for little else. No, that’s not the real problem. What bothers Larson, as he makes clear, is that writers of popular history are getting rich off the labors of academic historians, coarsening and often misstating their findings in the process. Ideally, he writes, the numerous academic books that combine rigor with readability would be marketed to the public, instead of pallid glosses on them.

It is instructive to look at the books Larson cites as examples of this sort of scholarly yet accessible writing. For a superior general history of the canal, he recommends Ronald E. Shaw’s Erie Water West (1966). He goes on to list a number of more specialized works on such topics as the national impact of the canal, the economic context in which it was built, its effects on New York City and Rochester, and the life of DeWitt Clinton. All these books, Larson says, are better written and more informative than Bernstein’s.

I have read Erie Water West and it is indeed quite well done. But it’s a very different book from Wedding of the Waters. Shaw virtually ignores the period before 1792 and devotes nearly half his book to the time after the canal was finished, proceeding all the way to the eve of the Civil War. Bernstein starts in colonial days and spends only three chapters out of twenty on the postconstruction era.

Shaw focuses tightly on the Erie Canal itself, while Bernstein includes extensive digressions on canals in general, contemporary technological developments, personalities, economics, local color, and other types of scene-setting. Shaw passes over the Embargo Act and the War of 1812 in a few sentences, correctly assuming that his readers will be familiar with these topics. Bernstein, writing for an audience as knowledgeable as the average student in a history survey class, gives them a whole chapter.

By contrast, Shaw devotes an entire chapter to the back-and-forth fight between Buffalo and Black Rock to become the western terminus of the canal. While he tells this part of the story quite well, you have to be deeply devoted to the Erie Canal to follow all the proposals and counterproposals and resolutions and memorials without flipping ahead to find the punch line. Bernstein, reluctant to try his audience’s patience, covers the dispute crisply in three pages.

Shaw’s greatest interest is the political infighting behind the canal. New York State politics in the early 1800s was a notorious welter of factions and alliances, and Shaw dwells lovingly on every betrayal and reversal and secret deal. Historians eat that stuff up, but general readers would find their heads swimming after a few pages of Bucktails, Martling Men, Quids, and Livingstonians. Bernstein must be forgiven for poking at this snake pit with a very long pole instead of diving in headfirst.

So Shaw’s and Bernstein’s are different books, written in different styles for different if overlapping audiences.{1} As for the other works Larson mentions, I’m sure they are as fascinating and lively as he says, but it’s asking too much of an ordinary person to track down half-a-dozen aspects of a story in a dozen different books—especially when that reader may know nothing about the subject to begin with.

And this is why, contrary to Larson’s suggestion, the popular-history industry (in which I work, though not on books) does in fact add value to the facts it appropriates. Just like the Erie Canal, the writers, editors, and publishers in our field provide a smooth pathway that brings merchandise—in this case, information—through the hills and thickets of scholarship and delivers it to the public. Larson, with evident disdain, calls this “marketing”; we call it “serving the reader.” When Larson compares popular history to designer jeans, which he claims are inferior to Levi’s, he sounds like your father wondering why anyone listens to this new-fangled rock and roll when we’ve got Stravinsky.

When popular historians address a topic, they select the information that will be most interesting to a general audience, and they tell the story compactly, at a length and in a form that won’t scare people away.{2} They bring divergent strands together in a coherent fashion; they liven up the proceedings with pictures and anecdotes; and they do it all with a brisk writing style. That is what they aim for, anyway, and if Bernstein’s book misses the mark, it is no reason to condemn the whole enterprise, any more than the occasional existence of poor scholarship should invalidate the much greater volume of excellent work.

Scholarly writing may try to accomplish these things and may sometimes even succeed, but they are not its primary goal. Scholars provide all the facts needed to understand a subject fully, whether interesting or not, and they sometimes sacrifice narrative momentum for clarity or completeness. They generally have little budget for pictures and little patience for anecdotes, and they omit much background material on the assumption that their readers will already know it.

Moreover, while some scholars, like Larson, can put together sparkling sentences, writing is not the main talent for which they are selected; a scholar who writes well for a popular audience is like a pitcher who is also a good hitter. Finally, if my sketchy reading is any guide, most academic publications seem to be aimed at establishing a conceptual framework. I personally would not know a conceptual framework if it bit me on the left leg and demanded a bowl of Purina Conceptual Framework Chow, and I suspect that the same goes for most casual readers.

So, to return to Larson’s question: What are academics doing wrong? Nothing. They are producing excellent scholarship that sometimes works for general readers and sometimes does not, but rarely is written with them in mind. If scholars want to sell more books, they should consider making the accommodations I’ve mentioned above—though I must warn them that not every work of popular history sells as well as Wedding of the Waters or the latest biography of John Adams. In the end, though, if scholarship is not its own reward for academics, they are in the wrong line of work. If you are looking for money, fame, or recognition, going into academia is almost as bad an idea as going into publishing. (If, on the other hand, the goal is to keep lousy books off the shelves, all experience since Gutenberg shows that this is hopeless.)

The only thing Larson and his colleagues are doing wrong is what we all do wrong: wishing that people would stop acting like human beings. I wish women would swoon over middle-aged magazine editors in bow ties, but for some reason they do not. Similarly, Larson wishes he lived in a world where folks come home after a hard day at work, feed the kids, do the dishes, pay the bills, and then curl up with a nice, sprightly biography of DeWitt Clinton or “a lively story of boom-time Rochester.” He wishes for a world where, instead of buying a new book after reading a review or seeing it in a bookstore display, people spontaneously conceive an interest in a subject, research the best scholarship, visit libraries to read the key papers, and then troll the Internet for copies of a forty-year-old survey and an assortment of monographs.

In the end, which is better: If the public reads a possibly imperfect book, like Bernstein’s, and gets a decent understanding of an important historic technology, or if no such book is published and the public watches a hockey game instead? My guess is that more readers pick up scholarly works after reading popular books like Bernstein’s than would ever do so on their own.

Larson says that academics are producing a wealth of enthralling scholarship and that all publishers have to do is sell it properly. Regardless of whether the first part is true, the second simply won’t work. Even the best scholarship is written for a specialized audience; in most cases, the topic is too narrowly focused for mass sales; and if it happens to respond to market conditions (that is, what buyers want) it is an accident. College students may read what they are told to (though in my day we certainly didn’t), but for most adults browsing the history shelves, the attitude is: “Here we are now, infotain us!” Marketing and popularization are not frills but necessities, and if Larson objects to giving nonscholars information in a form they might actually be interested in reading, he risks fulfilling every Fox News stereotype that he so eloquently decries about out-of-touch academics.

{1}To take just one small matter, Erie Water West uses footnotes rather than endnotes. Strange as it may seem, this one typographical decision probably costs a book at least half its potential readers. Putting notes at the bottom of every page is like wearing a bow tie—no matter how charming you may be, people take one look and assume you’re a nerd. (I speak as a longtime bow-tie wearer.)

{2}Larson complains that Nothing Like It in the World, Stephen E. Ambrose’s history of the transcontinental railroad, sold twice as many copies on amazon.com as David Haward Bain’s much superior Empire Express. Bain’s book did not do badly; among other things, it was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. But one obvious difference between the two is that, in the editions I have on hand, Ambrose’s book is 431 pages long, while Bain’s is 797.