The seeds for these rank intellectual growths were planted
by Columbia University historian James Harvey Robinson in the 1920s with his
concept of “The New History”—which is to say historiography which shifted focus
from politicians making laws and generals waging wars to the quality of life as
lived in the American democracy.
Daniel Boorstin fine-tuned this concept in his magisterial
trilogy on American history. He taught us to study the Sears Roebuck catalog
with the same care his predecessors had devoted to legal and political
documents. And, of course, the French annaliste school perfected the approach to history as a gradual shifting of
habits based on itty bitty changes in weather, trade and social power
relationships. I remember my elation at using Fernand Braudel’s volume on life
in the Mediterranean in the era of Philip II as a vade mecum while spending three months in 1977 circumnavigating
that Mare Nostrum. So my heart is definitely with the Newest Historians as they
teach us to conceptualize the past in fresher, deeper and more comprehensive
ways. It’s my mind that balks at
the stranger manifestations of the new historiography.
Those Cape Cod shacks are allegedly revered as sacred
objects because Eugene O’Neill and lesser writers like Norman Mailer worked
there. This is a disturbing trend: displacing the arduous task of staging and /
or reading the playwright’s works with genuflecting before the false idols of
the tourist or real estate industry. Analogously, if I were living in L.A., I’d
be concentrating public policy pressure on the reduction of smog in the
basin—not the preservation of trivial artifacts.
What we have here is the creation of cadres of curators and
museum administrators whose vested interest is not to improve the quality of
public life by new analysis and effective policy but to create fiefdoms with
tenure built in.
Those canny old Jesuits taught me a motto, “Quis nimis
probat, nihil probat” (Who proves too much,
proves nothing). Preservationists who want to save everything physically risk
saving nothing of historical significance intellectually. One of the saddest
paradoxes of contemporary American life is that the preservationist movement
and historical consciousness among the general public seem to proceed in
inverse proportions. Except for the upper genteels who get off on discreet
architectural tours (I consider myself one of them!), the median historical
understanding of the general public is on a slippery slope downhill—into the
sentimental swamps of Disneylands and Disneyworlds and Disneyuniverses.
It’s
Henry George’s dispiriting old paradox of progress and poverty—only this time
it’s not the simultaneous material progress of poverty below; it’s the
simultaneous boom in preserving old things for Sotheby’s and the Smithsonian
and a baseball card craze among the young. Indeed, the pathetic speculating for
Chinese jades, say, and rookie cards is equally loathsome.
It’s not the physical traces we need to save from
extinction. That’s relatively easy. It’s protecting the intellectual gene pool
of a generation that gets off on lotteries, meretricious entertainers and
circus political investigations. Rather than save those writers’ shacks, let’s
put our money into a thoughtful “Sound-print” on Eugene O’Neill which is then
stockpiled for future use in media-rich English courses. And instead of saving
that ridiculous carwash, let’s have a film documentary that analyzes the
monstrous over-influence the automobile exerts on civilized values. It’s not
the things we need to save. It’s the
intellectual discipline and media artistry that can raise historical
consciousness among the permanent dropouts in the larger society.
The day National Public Radio ran its story on saving the
carwash, the New York Times had a story
on how E.G. Marshall and some other Federal Theatre Project grads were putting
on a play about Hallie Flanagan’s interrogation by the Dies Committee to raise
money to save the FTP’s documents. Now, there’s a valid way to raise historical consciousness.
Alas, perverse preservationism has broken out right here in
Philly. Kenneth Finkel, curator of prints at the Library Company, has
op-edified in the Inquirer (July 17)
about the disintegrating state of the Cannonball House, falling apart
gracelessly on the cusp of Fort Mifflin. The house / artifact gets its name
from a lucky hit by some British cannoneer in 1777, putting a ball through one
side and out the other. In the putatively perfect universe of such perverse
preservationists, no such holy house would ever hit the skids into oblivion.
What a crock. Think of all the fine Romanesque churches in
Europe that gave way without a whimper.
From Welcomat, November
1, 1989
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