Louis and Alan Gordon,
American Chronicle: Year by Year through the Twentieth Century.
Yale University Press, 1999.
ISBN 0 300 07587 1
1,024 pp
US$49.95
(Review Copy supplied by Yale University Press)
Uploaded 1 November 2000
As a publishing phenomenon, timetables, chronicles and chronologies have been with us since the mid-1970s, when an English translation of a German work, The Timetables of History, became a surprise bestseller. Since then a number of books have sought to both nail down – with various degrees of precision – when political and cultural events occurred and trends developed, and also show how they related to each other in time. Among these are the Chronicle of the 20th Century (named 1987 Book of the Year by the American and Canadian Booksellers Association) and Facts on File’s several large Day by Day volumes, each covering a single decade. Similar books have also dealt with specific areas. I’ve written one each on American film and theater.
American Chronicle: Year by Year through the Twentieth Century, by Louis and Alan Gordon, is in one very significant way an important contribution to this body of work. With some reservations, I think, it can be especially helpful in suggesting the feel and flavor of the time in which specific works in film, theater and the visual arts emerged.
American Chronicle, illustrated by more than a thousand black and white photographs, is quite upfront about its impressionistic aims. The authors, a professor of English and comparative literature and a psychiatrist, have included virtually no exact dates in their book. While perhaps this can help one more easily discern the outlines of the forest without tripping over the trees, our loss is an inability to spot any potential relationships between what happened within a given year. Between New Year’s Day and the next New Year’s Eve, time seems to stand still – chronicle without chronology.
A general introduction precedes each decade. The same topical and organizational structure holds for each year of the century in the book’s multi-columned pages, with variations allowing for the coming and going of art forms and technology. For example, vaudeville shares a page with movies in each year of the century’s first decade (but why does the variety stage disappear from the teens and early 1920s, when it reached its height?). Radio holds down a spot from 1920 to 1949 (again, a premature death), and television makes its appearance in the 1930s.
Each year begins with a few economic and social statistics followed by the prices of several consumer goods. In 1954, for instance, an oxford shirt was $4.95 and an Arthur Godfrey ukelele, $4.98. Below the numbers one finds a list of a few people who died that year. They are not identified and who they were is not always obvious.
To the right, on the same page, are headlines that point to the major political events of the year. The facing page of quotes from people, publications, and advertisements is often a gold mine of contemporary attitudes. In 1929, for example, Photoplay, writes about The Five o’Clock Girl, “The report has gotten out that Miss [Marion] Davies has a pronounced lisp, which may have caused the scrapping of the talkie version.” In 1950, the president of Boston University said: “If the television craze continues with the present level of programs, we are destined to have a nation of morons.” That same year a Washington, D.C. realty ad touted “Small farms – out beyond atom bombs.” Think about that the next time you see a 1950s science fiction film! And it was in 1956 that Clairol, the hair coloring product, tapped into contemporary sensibilities with its advertising tag line, “Does she or doesn’t she?”
The following sections on tv, movies and popular music have their uses, but not much more than similar sections in an almanac. For tv there’s a list of the year’s premieres (no dates), a list in paragraph form of the Nielsen-rated top ten shows (presumably in descending order), a list of the major Emmy awards and a paragraph of notable happenings. Movies offers a list of openings (not dated), with the first five titles drawn from the Oscar nominees and about a third of the titles foreign films; the top four, obligatory, Oscars – best picture, director, actress and actor; and from the Quigley Publications, the top box office stars and stars of tomorrow (unranked).
Popular music gets similar treatment, as does theater. On the one hand, to the authors’ credit, they cover events in U.S. regional theater as well as on Broadway. But in a peculiar choice of headings, they place new off-Broadway productions in a section called “classics and revivals on and off-Broadway”. Only by reading the book’s general introduction is one alerted to look there for new shows.
The classical music, art, and dance sections each list premieres, compositions, and exhibitions and note important events of the year – but again, without dates. “Books” covers critics choices and best-sellers; science and technology rates a mere third of a page; while sports receives most of a page, and fashion, a paragraph each year. Men’s fashions are not mentioned until the 1950s. For anyone interested in film, that should be a disappointment. When did the fedora come into style? When did trench coats have their vogue – spy films anyone?
American Chronicle has a tripartite index: name, title, and general, an arrangement that is common in books of this type, but something I always find annoying. It just seems to create more work for the reader. Then again, I think I’ve conveyed my feeling that this volume has limited reference value.
But as a sort of index of what people knew and when did they know it, the book does have substantial value. In this respect the quotes from people and ads that I have already mentioned are supplemented by the last page of each year, which contains a section dubbed “kaleidoscope.” In this section it’s system and organization be damned. Kaleidoscope is a collection of facts, statistics, odd sidelights, quotes, trivia, and telling trends, major and minor, that together add up to a mosaic of contemporary sensibility. If you want to know what an audience had in mind, in every sense of that expression, when they entered a theater or turned on a radio or television in any given year, this is a good place to start.
If you have a taste for such things -I’m a gourmand – kaleidoscope will nourish you and keep you absorbed throughout a long, cold winter, besides providing useful and often colorful illustrative material and for articles, books, and lectures. In 1912 Irene and Vernon Castle charge John D. Rockefeller $100 for a tango lesson. That same year Variety reports that George M. Cohan is making $1,500,000 a year, and Beverly Hills comes into existence. Hollywood, in 1922, is already playing the hypocrisy game. With a new morals code and Will Hayes hired to ride hard on it, film ads still promise “red kisses.” In 1938, Salvador Dali tries to cast Harpo Marx in a surrealistic ballet. Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History and Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury are both published in 1947. The Gallup Poll, in 1954, reports that 94 percent of the U. S. population believes in God. In 1964, on June 19 (a rare exact date!), a San Francisco bar introduces topless dancing. Mickey Mouse watches are resurrected as a fad in 1967, also the year in which “guru” and “hangup” enter the popular lexicon. And in 1983, White Rock soft drinks, for over a century embodied in the company’s ads by the iconic “White Rock Girl,” reflect the culture’s continuing worship of thinness. The “girl” weighs 118 pounds and stands 5’8″ this year. In 1874, at 5’4″ she was a heftier 140 pounds.
Limericks lit up popular culture in 1903. As one had it, “There once was a man from Nantucket/ Who kept all his cash in a bucket./ But his daughter called Nan/ Ran away with a man/ and as for the bucket Nantucket.” I hope that the next edition of this book chronicles the return of the limerick in 2001.
Gene Brown