The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (Vintage)

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Whether or not a truer American dream may have been realized without the manipulations of the advertising industry, there is little doubt that we descended into a dream nonetheless. It was a dream we built ourselves in a spirit of optimism and infinite possibility, from Detroit to Levittown, in offices and bedrooms furnished by Eames and Heywood-Wakefield, and televised by NBC and Philco. If we are inclined look back at that era with fascination and longing, it may be less for the mid-century furniture and fashions than to comprehend the consciousness with which they were created and used. Those last wonderful moments before we drifted off to sleep.

  This book is one of the clearest missives we have from the other side of that dream. It was a dream into which Boorstin saw us drifting, and a dream from which he was imploring us to wake. By reckoning with this analysis of how we were lulled to sleep, we may finally stand a chance of rousing ourselves into consciousness again.

  Douglas Rushkoff

  Hastings-on-Hudson, 2012

  Douglas Rushkoff is a media theorist and the author of Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, Media Virus, and Coercion. He made the television documentaries Merchants of Cool, The Persuaders, and Digital Nation, and is the winner of the Media Ecology Association’s Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman Awards.

  Suggestions for Further Reading (and Writing)

  (Note: The following discussion of books has three purposes: (1) to tell the reader where he may learn more about topics I have mentioned, (2) to acknowledge my debt to the books, articles, and other materials which I have found most useful, and (3) to point out some unexplored territories.)

  The deeper, more revolutionary changes in human experience of the kind I have tried to describe in this volume enter our history books only slowly. This is usually after the new ways have come to seem normal, and therefore have ceased to threaten the respectable thinking patterns of scholars. “The Renaissance,” a European movement of awakening which began at least as early as the fourteenth century and had run its course by the end of the seventeenth century, did not enter common use among historians until the mid-nineteenth century. Not until the later nineteenth and early twentieth century did historians energetically explore the Industrial Revolution, which had begun at least as early as the seventeenth century. The more professionalized and more respectable the historian’s profession becomes, the more he is tempted to classify fluid experience into rigid categories: political history, economic history, intellectual history, etc., etc. Each of these becomes a recognized specialty with its own professional associations, its own learned journals, and with “No Trespassing” signs erected against outsiders. Inevitably, then, there is no respectable place to put the great revolutionary changes which occur in between or entirely outside of the old categories. Facts which fit neatly under traditional chapter headings are not apt to be radical novelties; facts which do not fit are apt to be left out.

  In the last several decades we have made great progress in providing accurate texts of the writings of the political leaders of the early age of our republic—of Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, and many others. We continue to gather in the national archives and the Library of Congress, in state archives, in local historical societies, and elsewhere, the correspondence files of public figures, data on the drafting of government documents, and many other traditionally important historical remains. We should continue to do so, and should still further improve our means for preserving, cataloguing, calendaring, and editing these monuments of our national tradition. But except for a few books (mostly on the history of newspapers and magazines), except for some sporadic progress in business history and on scattered other topics, and for a few ingenious projects like those of Columbia University’s Oral History Department, almost all the great changes of the Graphic Revolution have remained outside the stream of our best historical scholarship.

  Numerous subjects like the history of photography, of techniques of art reproduction, of group travel, of the hotel or the motel, of radio or of television, are still generally considered beneath the dignity (or at best on the periphery) of the historian’s profession. Despite some loosening of categories encouraged by new American Studies programs and the American Studies Association, many of the most important topics in the history of our civilization remain academic outcasts. They fit into no familiar academic category, they are not examinable for the Ph.D.; or they require a combination of scientific and humanistic knowledge which is too rare. If professors themselves do not know a subject, why should the students? Who will say, then, whether a thesis is “competent”? Our historical scholarship, including much that calls itself “interdisciplinary,” continues to pour almost exclusively into old molds, into the background of this or that tariff bill, into the proto-history of minor political parties, into chronicling the literary treatment of political or economic subjects; or, at most, into finding novel ways of relating the statistics of the new social sciences to the same conventional categories—the history of labor in the Jacksonian era, “status” and the Progressive movement, etc.

  If this book serves no other purpose, it might offer a rough map of some too-little-known territories in the new American wilderness. It might suggest how little we still know, and how slowly we are learning about the inward cataclysms of our age.

  The main impetus to this book has been my personal experience: the billboards I have seen, the newspapers and magazines I have read, the radio programs I have heard, the television programs I have watched, the movies I have attended, the advertisements I receive daily through the mail, the commodities I have noticed in stores, the salesmen’s pitches which have been aimed at me, the conversation I hear, the desires I sense all around me. The tendencies and weaknesses I remark in twentieth-century America are my own. Whether or not I can persuade my contemporaries, I suspect that some future historian, with undue reverence for the printed word, may treat me as a “primary source.” I would like to persuade my fellow-Americans today that they, too, are primary sources. The trivia of our daily experience are evidence of the most important question in our lives: namely, what we believe to be real.

  The following is not intended to be a complete, or even a basic, bibliography. Instead it is a list of items I have happened to find most suggestive and which the reader may also find helpful in opening up these subjects.

  For this purpose some of the most useful books (and some of those most neglected by the historian, professional or amateur) deal with the history of our spoken and printed language. No subject is more exacting of its scholars; but the fruits of linguistic scholarship are handy to us all. We must certainly beware of dogmatic statements concerning the first use of a word, yet this is no more than the good historian’s caution of all statements resting on absence of evidence. Those who record the history of our language give us a mine of suggestions of when certain ways of talking and thinking became widespread.

  The language record has an intimacy, a color, and a nuance hard to find elsewhere. The basic, epoch-making work here is, of course, James A. H. Murray and others, A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (10 vols. and a supplement, 1888–1933 and another in preparation), commonly known as the Oxford English Dictionary (or OED). Its American counterpart is Sir William A. Craigie and James R. Hulbert (eds.), A Dictionary of American English (4 vols., 1938–1944), carrying the history of the American language down to about 1900. For the twentieth century, we are fortunate to have Mitford M. Mathews (ed.), A Dictionary of Americanisms (2 vols., 1951), which picks up where Craigie and Hulbert left off. Mathews’ work is confined to “Americanisms,” that is, words, expressions, or usages that originated in the United States; it revises some items in the earlier work. In addition to these we have the classic volumes by H. L. Mencken, The American Language (1937), The American Language: Supplement One (1945; Chs. 1–6) and Supplement Two (1948; Chs. 7–11), all presently being revised by Raven I. McDavid, Jr., whose valuable updated and abridged version of these works will appear shortly. Th
e history of twentieth-century spoken usage is recorded in the sensible but incomplete Bergen Evans and Cornelia Evans, Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage (1957) and the brilliant and meticulous Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang (1960). A few hours spent with Wentworth and Flexner will teach the student more about the history of American feeling, customs, and social attitudes than twice that time spent with any other book I know on American social history. Of current dictionaries of the American language, I have found most useful Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language (1957). Another excellent dictionary is the American College Dictionary (1959). We may refuse explicitly to describe our innermost sentiments, but the quality of our reticence is willy-nilly recorded in the words we use to conceal our feelings. The master of the history of our language can confront us with ourselves.

  Other specially valuable sources for the history of the changes I describe in this volume are the practical handbooks (e.g., Trademark Management: A Guide for Businessmen, published by the United States Trademark Association, N.Y., 1955; William M. Freeman, The Big Name (1957), on securing and policing endorsements) and the trade journals (e.g., Printers’ Ink, Advertising Age, Variety, Publishers’ Weekly, Public Opinion Quarterly, Editor and Publisher). These are reliable and undeniable sources of what people in the profession want to know, what they discuss and worry about.

  Chapter 1. From News Gathering to News Making:

  A Flood of Pseudo-Events

  The main source for these observations is, of course, the magazines, newspapers, radio and television programs. So far we have no adequate general history of what Americans have thought of as “news,” nor on the general history of communications or of image making, although we do have valuable scholarly works on a few traditionally classifiable items like newspapers and magazines. What I call the Graphic Revolution has remained virtually unchronicled, except in popular works, practical professional handbooks and textbooks, and scattered trade and technical journals.

  The background of the Graphic Revolution in the history of the American economy is not easy to trace because, despite our widespread (and largely unwitting) adoption of an economic interpretation of history, much of American economic history remains virgin territory. Colleges all over the country vainly seek qualified economic historians. They remain extremely rare, both because the more fluid, unconventional topics have been pre-empted by the newer social sciences (political science, sociology, psychology, and social anthropology) and because, as economic theory has become more and more mathematical, fewer and fewer historians can qualify as literate in a world of graphs and equations. On all sorts of topics much valuable information for the layman is handily available in the United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957 (Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1960). Among the most suggestive books are those of the Swiss historian, Siegfried Giedion: Space, Time and Architecture (1941) and Mechanization Takes Command (1948).

  On the beginnings of an American system of manufacturing and the system of interchangeable parts, which was a forerunner and prototype of the Graphic Revolution, see Jeannette Mirsky and Allan Nevins, The World of Eli Whitney (1952), especially Chs. 13–16, and Constance McL. Green’s cogent Eli Whitney and the Birth of American Technology (1956). A book on an extremely technical subject which is nevertheless quite intelligible to the layman is Joseph W. Roe, English and American Tool Builders (1916). This volume introduces us to the master mechanics, die makers, and inventors of measuring machines who had a large role in devising our present system of manufacturing and producing our American standard of living. John A. Kouwenhoven, Made in America (1948) is a sprightly and original exploration of (among other topics) the artistic consequences of American technology. Suggestive short introductions to this subject are: John E. Sawyer, “The Social Basis of the American System of Manufacturing,” Journal of Economic History, XIV (No. 4, 1954), 361–379, and “Social Structure and Economic Progress,” American Economic Review, XLI (May, 1951), 321–329; and D. L. Burn, “The Genesis of American Engineering Competition,” Economic History, II (1930–1933), 292–311.

  A detailed history of modern machine printing techniques and especially of new techniques of speed-printing and paper manufacture would give us much of the background we still need for the history of the newspaper. We are fortunate to have the epoch-making books by Frank Luther Mott: A History of American Magazines, (4 vols., which carries the story to 1905; 1938–1957), American Journalism (Revised ed., 1950), and The News in America (1952). I have leaned heavily on Mott’s work, which is admirable from almost any point of view; it is readable, factually scrupulous, and imaginative, although somewhat lacking in large organizing ideas. A valuable earlier work which emphasizes the social background is Alfred M. Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America (1937). A briefer, more recent book, with emphasis on general trends and the newspaper profession itself is Bernard A. Weisberger, The American Newspaperman (Chicago History of American Civilization Series, 1961). An excellent survey of the literature is found in the bibliography at the back of Weisberger’s short volume; or in Allan Nevins, “American Journalism and Its Historical Treatment,” Journalism Quarterly, XXXVI (Fall, 1959), 411–422, 519. A helpful but incomplete introduction to an important related topic is Lyman H. Weeks, A History of Paper-Manufacturing in the United States, 1640–1916 (1916).

  We can learn much about the development of modern journalistic techniques in the autobiographies of particular newspapermen (like Lincoln Steffens, Autobiography (1931)), in their biographies (for example, Don C. Seitz, The James Gordon Bennetts Father and Son: Proprietors of the New York Herald (1928); Oliver Carlson, The Man Who Made News: A Biography of James Gordon Bennett, 1795–1872 (1942); Francis Brown, Raymond of The Times (1952)), or in their credos (Charles A. Dana, The Art of Newspaper Making (1900)). Newspapermen now alive—both the pioneers and the developers of news-gathering and news-making crafts and professions—could perform a lasting public service by writing their intimate professional autobiographies.

  The history of press agentry and public relations is still to be written. The best sources are fragmentary, like Edward L. Bernays’ pioneer handbook Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and his later writings, Public Relations (1952), and the collection of essays which he edited, The Engineering of Consent (1955); or topical, like the helpful article, “Public Relations Today,” Business Week (July 2, 1960), pp. 41–62, and occasional articles in Fortune. Bernays’ writings are among the most sophisticated, philosophically self-conscious, and literate works on public relations—the institution and the profession. See his valuable bibliography: Public Relations, Edward L. Bernays and the American Scene: Annotated Bibliography … from 1917 to 1951 (1951; supplement, 1957). His autobiography, now in preparation, could be a major document in American social history. See Eric F. Goldman’s useful brief introduction to the history of this subject, Two-Way Street (1948); and David Finn’s effective brief article, “The Price of Corporate Vanity,” Harvard Business Review, XXXIX (July–August, 1961), 135–143, which came to my attention just as this book was going to press. From his extensive experience in public relations Finn comes to conclusions very close to mine.

  The relation of the rise of newspapers to American politics, perhaps because it is more obviously a matter of public interest, has been more adequately, though still fragmentarily, treated. Walter Lippmann early in this century produced succinct and prophetic books, Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925), which envisaged the out-reaching implications of changing news-gathering techniques for political theory and democratic institutions. Douglass Cater, The Fourth Branch of Government (1959) is a profound and fundamental book on which I have drawn freely; it deserves a large audience. The rise of the Washington press corps and the development of its techniques and protocol are traced in James E. Pollard, The Presidents and the Press (1947), a treasure house of ne
atly arranged information on the press-personalities of our Presidents; and Leo C. Rosten, The Washington Correspondents (1937), which gathers valuable statistical and sociological data on 127 correspondents who were in the capital between September, 1935, and December, 1936. The critical views expressed by magazine and newspapermen themselves can be sampled in T. S. Matthews, The Sugar Pill: An Essay on Newspapers (1959), which attacks the effort to make news into entertainment, from the point of view of an ex-Time editor, and Carl E. Lindstrom, The Fading American Newspaper (1960), which describes the technological, financial, and social forces which help explain the declining influence of the newspaper. Some interesting suggestions are found in Oswald Garrison Villard’s collection of essays, The Disappearing Daily (1944), especially in the title essay. On the first interview see George Turnbull, “Some Notes on the History of the Interview,” Journalism Quarterly, XIII (Sept., 1936), 272–279.

  For the implications of changes in news-gathering techniques for American politics see my “Direct Democracy of Public Relations: Selling the President to the People,” in America and the Image of Europe (1960), pp. 97–117, and more generally, Walter Johnson, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: Presidents and the People, 1929–1959 (1960). Richard H. Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy (1959) is an acute and knowledgeable interpretation supported by the personal insights and on-the-spot knowledge of one of the most literate reporters of our age. We can glimpse the techniques of the first master of modern Presidential press relations in the reminiscences of those close to F.D.R.: for example,