In his new book, “The American Revelation: Ten Ideals that Shaped Our Country From the Puritans to the Cold War” (St. Martin’s, 272 pages, $24.95), Neil Baldwin focuses on individuals who developed and promulgated ideas that helped shape the American ideal. These profiles, of people like newspaper editor John O’Sullivan (who coined the term “Manifest Destiny”) and British playwright Israel Zangwill (who popularized the notion of the American melting pot), illuminate the galvanizing beliefs that unify Americans–even as blue and red states battle over their interpretation.
Baldwin, author of biographies of artist Man Ray, author William Carlos Williams and inventor Thomas Edison, as well as “Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate,” was executive director of the National Book Foundation. A chapter of “The American Revelation” spotlights Jane Addams and her battles to improve the lives of women and children, and literary editor Elizabeth Taylor spoke with Baldwin at the Jane Addams Hull House in Chicago:
Q. Does a connective thread tie your varied interests and work together?
A. My first three books were straight, classic biographies of individual people: William Carlos Williams and Man Ray and Thomas Edison. Those three books I do think are connected, because they are all about imagination.
William Carlos Williams said, “Only the imagination is real.” I got into the imagination of modernism and the whole aesthetic of modernism, and from that I got into the imagination of convention and technology. I got to [Henry] Ford through Edison, because when I was writing the Edison book I came across the intersection of those two people and their friendship. I didn’t really want to do a regular biography of him. It is a biographical approach, but it’s informed by [Ford’s] anti-Semitism, which is a very, very important matter that I felt needed to be clarified.
Q. And how did you move to the question of American idealism?
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A. “Henry Ford and the Jews” was finished on Sept. 13, 2001. That was very significant, because I felt like I’d just finished a book about the dark side of an American icon, and I finished at a very dark moment in our history, in our time, and mentally for me and emotionally for everybody.
I decided that my next book was going to be the flip side. It was going to be a redemptive book. A lot of the motivation of “The American Revelation” has to do with almost a desire for a corrective in my own emotional life as an author, because of the sort of downbeat, downward theme of the [Ford] book and the theme of the times and the mood of the times. Part of it was to try and draw myself out of that, and part of it was to draw American history out of that.
Q. Are you merging biography and intellectual history?
A. Yes, intellectual history, which was a big turn-on for me in college. My freshman year was the first time I ever heard the term, which was 40 years ago, in 1965. I had a course on American intellectual history, and it just seemed so perfect for me, because I love ideas and have never felt that ideas should be treated in an abstract way; they have to be connected to people.
Q. With this book, which came first, the ideas or the people?
A. The title came to me in sort of a dream one night. I know it sounds corny, but three words, “The American Revelation,” and I thought, well, this is going to be a book about quintessential American values that we think about almost as cliches. So, I felt sort of like when this happened with the Edison book. I liked the idea of going behind the cliche. I loved the idea of focusing on things that people think they know everything about, and they’ve already learned in school and taken the exam. And they already know about this and they already know about that.
So my first sort of shopping list for this book was the biggest American cliche things I could think of. “Melting pot” was one of the first ones. Then “common sense.”
Then I thought in terms of a time frame. I wanted to have it be very broad rather than touching down in only very select places. But I knew I wanted to begin with the westward movement, the prefounding fathers. I wanted to focus on the Puritans, because they often get overlooked. They are like the forgotten founding fathers. And then I wanted to end with an eastward trajectory, like after World War II, when America reached out to help Europe.
So to have the brackets of the book with a nice, historical, dynamic feeling–like going one way and then going another way–that’s why I purposely ended the book with George Marshall traveling to Europe to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.
Then after I got through all of that–this sort of cliche concept and the structural concept–I decided I needed to build a real progression of ideas. That was the hardest part. The connective tissue, as I tend to think of it. It wasn’t like these things had any normal affinity with each other, except in my own head. But I thought, well, if I dig deeply enough and I get to the most archetypal level of Americana, there will be connections. And so that is basically how I filled it out.
Q. Any people and ideals you had a difficult time dropping from the book?
A. In one of my initial lists, I had “Go west, young man, go west.” But after looking into that more deeply, I began to feel that it would be subsumed by Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny to me was more of a challenge, and I liked that, because it is one of the ideals that became perverted. It was born in a very purist, religious way, and within 50 years it became the slogan for American’s prerogative to take over the world.
I originally had John Dewey in there. Dewey wrote an essay for an American periodical about the American syndrome of the local, small town and the origins of so much of how we think and being rooted in where we are from. And no matter where we go, we take that with us wherever we go. He probably wrote that because he was in China and homesick. And I thought that would be good, because that would give me a chance to talk about Williams and about the “spirit of place” and things that have always interested me like that.
But once I got into Jane Addams, I realized she would subsume Dewey, because she was a more interesting figure to me because of the details of her life and [because she was] a female who was praised by William James and Dewey. Dewey was a huge fan of hers, he was on the board of Hull House. It just fell more into place that she would be in the book. So he was out; well, he is in the Jane Addams chapter.
The third big decision I made was not to go into the ’60s. Martin Luther King and “I have a dream” and Kennedy, you know, “Ask what you can do for your country.” I felt like as a child of the ’60s myself, I didn’t have enough objective distance on that period. I was too nostalgic about it. So I decided that the ’60s would not be part of the book, because I couldn’t be a historian. I couldn’t live up to my standard of how I would be a historian. I was still too emotionally invested in the ’60s.
Q. This is a relatively short book–especially when it stands next to books on the founding fathers.
A. I gave myself only 25, 30 pages for each chapter. The first draft was exactly 300 pages long.
I handed that in and my editor said to me, “You have too much going on in your mind that is not on the page.” She could see what I was trying to do, that I was trying to stay within the form, but I had as a result inhibited myself too much in the other direction. So the next draft was 15 percent longer. It is usually the other way around. And it turned out to be better.
Q. Your career seems to be animated by democratizing ideas: It seems you are good at getting books out to the masses, and, in a sense, this book does that. It gets these ideas out to people.
A. That’s a very big part of my whole life. Right after I got my PhD in English in Buffalo, I started running a poets-in-the-school program. And I’ve always been a believer in getting out there and doing literary things in a public way. I’ve spent my whole life trying to proselitize for writing and teaching kids how to write. I wrote a poetry-writing handbook. I wrote a whole handbook on how to teach kids how to write poetry, which was a best seller. And I did workshops in prisons and drug-rehab centers and schools. I made a living for a long time out of just being a poetry teacher in non-traditional settings.
That is my background. I think it is totally a logical extension of my public literary feelings.