ABSTRACT Title of Document: HISTORY LIMITED: the HIDDEN
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ABSTRACT Title of Document: HISTORY LIMITED: THE HIDDEN POLITICS OF POSTWAR POPULAR HISTORIES. Erik Barton Christiansen, Doctor of Philosophy, 2009 Directed By: Professor James B. Gilbert, Department of History This dissertation examines popular history and collective memory in the mid-20 th century. Each chapter studies a different source of politicized history, exploring who created the history to be disseminated, what their goals and motivations were, why the historical trope particularly suited their needs and objectives, how they managed to convey ideologies through representations of the past, and how this popular history related to contemporary social and political issues. All of these “historians” – DuPont’s radio and television show, Cavalcade of America ; the History Book Club; CBS’s historical news program, You Are There ; the American Heritage Foundation’s “Freedom Train”; and the Smithsonian Institution – attempted to mold collective memory into an ideological foundation for their agendas. During a tumultuous period, at home and abroad, the past became a safer forum for political discourse, and reexamining these sources of historical information and interpretation sheds new light on postwar politics. Surprisingly, deep ideological divisions persisted well into the age of apparent consensus. However, despite significant differences, the key people in all of these cases shared the same basic assumption about the relevance of history to contemporary society. The widespread acceptance of a strong relationship between past and present in postwar American society contrasts with later attitudes toward the past. The new technologies that enabled the communication of particular historical representations and interpretations changed too, and rapidly matured into forms less suited to the dissemination of historical lessons. As these attempts to control the public’s views of the past began to fail, popular history was increasingly driven by marketplace considerations and was less confined to perspectives carefully chosen by a particular group of elites. HISTORY LIMITED: THE HIDDEN POLITICS OF POSTWAR POPULAR HISTORIES. By Erik Barton Christiansen. Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2009 Advisory Committee: Professor James Gilbert, Chair Professor David Sicilia Professor Saverio Giovacchini Professor David Freund Professor Jonathan Auerbach © Copyright by Erik Barton Christiansen 2009 Dedication To Shanna, who has endured this thing with me. ii Acknowledgements I am grateful to a number of individuals and institutions for various types of assistance. The Department of History at the University of Maryland has employed me the past six and a half years as a teaching assistant, which allowed me to focus on the requirements of the Masters and PhD programs. One semester the department awarded my effort with a fellowship. More directly related to the dissertation, the department funded necessary trips to archives at Stanford University and the Wisconsin Historical Society. The Hagley Foundation generously awarded me a research grant that facilitated two very productive weeks at the Hagley Library outside Wilmington, Delaware. I must also thank the Maryland state legislature for several senatorial and delegate scholarships that helped to defray some of the miscellaneous costs of graduate work. My dissertation committee actively supported and critiqued my work and I thank them for reading the final draft extraordinarily quickly. I am especially thankful to Jim Gilbert for years of challenging and enlightening conversations, not only about the dissertation but also covering a wide range of cultural, intellectual, political, and even musical topics. I wish him a very happy retirement. “The Group,” especially Kate Keane, Jeremy Sullivan, and Claire Goldstene, read so much of my work over the past several years, and I know that I would have failed miserably without their constant and consistently wise advice. The Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania and the History Graduate Students Association at the University of Maryland offered opportunities to present my work and receive valuable criticism, which certainly helped me to turn amorphous drafts into more iii structured chapters. Finally, I am so very grateful for the support, great in quantity and variety, given me by my wife, my parents, and all the rest of my extended network of family and friends. My dad gave me Herbert Muller's The Uses of the Past when I started graduate school six and half years ago; in a sense, this dissertation is an unintended consequence of that gift. iv Table of Contents Dedication ..................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents .......................................................................................................... v Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Who Defines the Remembered Past? ........................................................................ 1 Sources of Anxiety, Sources of Reassurance, and Multiple Sources of History ...... 6 History, Memory, and Authority in Democratic Society .......................................... 8 Chapter Outline ....................................................................................................... 16 Chapter 2: The Past as an “Image of Ourselves”: The Origins of the History Book Club ............................................................................................................................. 28 The Founding of the Club ....................................................................................... 31 The Books ............................................................................................................... 43 Troubled Waters….................................................................................................. 65 …And a New Crew ................................................................................................. 71 Chapter 3: “Where Time Has No Meaning”: History as Myth on Du Pont’s Cavalcade of America ................................................................................................. 79 Du Pont and Education ........................................................................................... 94 Defining the Cavalcade, Defining America ............................................................ 99 The New Medium ................................................................................................. 121 Identifying and Evaluating Content ...................................................................... 136 Selling Bigness...................................................................................................... 145 The Long March Comes to an End ....................................................................... 154 Chapter 4: History as News: CBS’s You Are There ................................................. 159 Radio: CBS is There (and You Are There too) ..................................................... 168 CBS News Documents History ............................................................................. 179 The Writers and the Blacklist ............................................................................... 185 Defining News, Shaping Memory ........................................................................ 225 Endings ................................................................................................................. 233 Chapter 5: Narrow Gauge History ........................................................................... 238 The Great American Railroad ............................................................................... 241 All Aboard the “Civil Liberties…” …er, “Freedom Train” .................................. 247 Complex Motives, Simple Freedom ..................................................................... 252 Defining Freedom: “Is it for real – or just a show again?” ................................... 260 Onboard................................................................................................................. 273 “The time for rededication has arrived!” .............................................................. 282 “A permanent residue of patriotism will be left in all the regions” ...................... 294 Chapter 6: “Authentic Original Relics” of an Emerging Empire: The Cold War Birth of the National Museum of American History ......................................................... 298 Museums and Historical Memory ......................................................................... 300 The Prewar Smithsonian ....................................................................................... 311 Postwar Changes ................................................................................................... 318 Revolution in Exhibit Design................................................................................ 329 v A Visit to the Museum .......................................................................................... 334 The Corporation on Display.................................................................................