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m& To My Mother and Father with Special Thanks to Bill Williams Lillian Frary Jon Reilly Warren Susman Sal Sebastian Donald Hilgenberg Paul Vanderbilt the Doanes Caroline Hoffman Marsha Peters Morris Edelson Elizabeth Spalter Mark Knops can see, "the visible man," to discover "the man invisible," or that center that is "the genuine man," that mass of faculties and feelings which are the inner man. We have reached a new world, which is infinite, because every action which we see involves an infinite association of rea sonings, emotions, sensations new and old, which have served to bring it to light, and which, like great rocks deep Preface seated in the ground, find in it their end and their level. This underworld is a new subject-matter, proper to the historian.' It is in fact that "underworld"-or at least a small part of it -that this book proposes to explore. But in the course of that exploration the author soon discovered (and this he shares with many other creative young thinkers, scholars, and artists of his generation) that the old forms, be queathed by a great historical tradition developed with enor mous skill and energy most especially over the last century, v.ill no longer serve his purposes. The structure of experience that most interests him cannot be captured by the logic of ob servation, description, or explanation traditionally deployed in the narrative (which tells a story), the monograph (which permits systematic analysis), or even the documentary (which records the "facts"). Many historians have become convinced that there was a major crisis in American life during the 1890s; some Writing over a hundred years ago, Hippolyte Taine have gone so far as to call it a "psychic crisis" and have at congratulated those fellow historians who had preceded him tempted to explain its existence or, even more commonly, to for making "the first step in history" leading to a "revival of use the presumed existence of such a crisis as an explanation imagination" through a reconstruction of the past, no matter for a v.ide series of developments in American domestic and how incomplete, that enabled them to "see approximately the men of other days." In a particularly brilliant passage he · Hippolyte Taine, History of English Literature (New York: .John Nurtele now urged the ~aking of"thesecond step": using what the eye Lovell, 1873), p. 19. international political life. But none of this interests Michael -the kind of record these people wished to preserve (itself an Lesy; his concern is rather with the psychology of a people in important type of behavior) for themselves. a particular time and place. Eschewing the hotter theories or For at the very time that the Frontier Myth or the generalizations, he prefers to present what he believes to be vision of a happier agrarian America was reaching its apogee the authentic structure of the experience of the people them (witness Turner's classic essay of 1893) there was also a grow selves, especially that aspect of the structure that might be ing awareness of awesome problems of death, decline, delin regru·ded as pathological. Again, in common with so many of quency, and even degeneracy as phenomena associated not the ablest of his generation, he wishes us primarily to know only with industrial and urban America but with rural and "the real thing" firsthand so that we may better understand. agrarian America as well. It is this consciousness that Lesy His first obligation as an historian, he clearly believes, is to demonstrates. Many historians have concerned themselves find the patterns and rhythms of lives and to present them in with American aspirations and hopes; few with its fears and a manner sufficiently artful so that we too sense those pat nightmares. Lesy offers us a unique opportunity to face not terns and rhythms. the American Dream but the American Nightmare, a night Lesy might have opted for a method more in tune mare reflected not only in the mind but in other kinds of be with the modes of behavioral analysis now commonplace in havior as well. It is this general phenomenon and not a set of history and the social sciences, more particularly, the gather abstract ideas that attracts his particular method of inquiry. ing of data about types of human behavior readily quantifia That method of inquiry is certainly not traditional in ble so that a series of statistically valid correlations might the historical literature. It reminds me, if only by loose analo have been attempted. In point of fact, he has not failed to in gy to be sure, of Hannah Arendt's description of the method vestigate, and make use of, some of the kinds of records com of Walter Benjamin in her brilliant introduction to his series monly consulted by such behaviorists. But he realized that of critical and historical essays, Illuminations. In discussing there were other kinds of behavior-in language and gesture, one of Benjamin's more important works, Arendt says, "The in persistent images preserved in newspapers and other writ main work consisted in tearing fragments out of their context ten accounts, and perhaps most significantly in those extraor and arranging them afresh in such a way that they illustrated dinary visual images captured by a local photographer. Not one another and were able to prove their raison d'etre in a only are these kinds of behavior crucial for what we can come free-floating state, as it were. It definitely was a sort of sur to know about Taine's "inner man" by interpreting them, but realistic montage." Benjamin's ideal, we are told, was to pro they take on special meaning when we realize that the record duce a work consisting entirely of quotations. In a sense, this of this behavior was not simply an accidental accounting left was Lesy's original objective also, although he proposed to for the historians of the future but in fact represents-espe use another kind of quotation than presumably Benjamin cially in the photographs, newspapers, personal documents had in mind and added to the very idea of quotations the use