What does it mean to be an American? We might think of ideas like a melting pot or middle class values, apple pie or baseball. But being “American” is also a brand, one that has been assiduously cultivated from the founding of our nation and continues to this day. The belief in education, hard work, and thrift. That wealth is obtainable to anyone willing to work hard. The power of positive thinking. These ideas and others are central to Americanon, where Jess McHugh curates nearly 250 years of writing into a tidy thirteen book bibliography explaining our nation’s definition of itself.
But contrary to the book’s subtitle that it is an “unexpected” survey of American history, McHugh focuses on blockbuster best sellers that sold in the millions or tens of millions (and in at least one case, more than 100 million!) marketed to and bought by the predominant class of people (white, protestant) that have, by and large, controlled our nation since its founding. In other words, focusing on the imprint Noah Webster and his speller and dictionary have had for 200 years, the folksy aphorisms attributed to Ben Franklin that still inform our work ethic or that a generation of wives and mothers wore out their copies of the original Betty Crocker cookbook, is unsurprising.
These books as well as others like The McGuffey Readers, The Old Farmer’s Almanac, and Catherine Beecher’s A Handbook to American Womanhood, may seem like relics to our forgotten, horse-and-buggy past, but as McHugh shows, they not only formed the scaffolding upon which we hang our national identity, they are still with us today. Franklin’s quip that “early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” and its implicit suggestion that clean living is a means of success finds purchase in self-help books like Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The McGuffey Readers, first published in the 1820s to teach Bible-based lessons to school-age children, are still used today by home-schoolers who have turned their backs on secular education.
Americanon can also be seen as a running commentary on our nation as it evolved from agrarian to industrial. For example, Emily Post’s Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home arose as fortunes were being accumulated in the early part of the 20th century. To be sure, it was targeted to (and to some extent targeted at) high society, but for Americans who believed that great wealth was obtainable by dint of their own effort, it offered a press-your-nose-against-the-window aspirational view of a possible future. Ultimately, the concepts Post espoused on polite company trickled down into popular culture and are now so pervasive that anytime social rules are needed for something like whether to turn your cell phone off at dinner, Post’s name is immediately associated with it even though she’s been dead for more than 60 years.
As McHugh journeys closer to our current day, we see the blending of advertising and aspiration in the form of Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book and Dale Carnegie’s (nee Carnagey) How to Win Friends and Influence People. That Crocker was conjured out of thin air, like something out of Mad Men, to exemplify the perfect housewife while Carnegie, was truly self-made, are just two sides of the same coin. Each trafficked in the dreams and insecurities of their readers. Crocker represented what was expected of housewives in the 1940s and 1950s, whose mission as wife and mother was met by putting food on the kitchen table. Carnegie’s “fake it ‘till you make it” leitmotif with heavy doses of self-affirmation would be adopted by traveling salesmen and CEOs alike for decades to come.
But implicit in these and other Americanon books is that not reaching these goals is entirely your own fault, thus creating the vicious cycle that has spawned an entire self-help movement that is now so big, the New York Times devotes a separate bestseller list to them. McHugh combs the General Mills archives, plucking heartbreaking letters written by women to Betty Crocker - who they thought was a real person - expressing their anxieties about their marriages and whether they were failing as wives and mothers if they did not meet some just-out-of-reach ideal. It does not take much to draw a straight line from these letters to the current day “mommy wars” and back and forth over whether (or how) women can “have it all.”
Of course, myth making is part and parcel of the American experience. Whether or not George Washington actually chopped down that cherry tree is less important than the underlying message that story sent – do not lie. McHugh’s authors were no different. You may never eat a meal where you have to know which fork to pick up for the salad course, but courtesy and manners matter. If you want someone to swipe right on your dating profile, you need to know the difference between “your” and “you’re” - something 18th and 19th century writers like Beecher, Webster, and Franklin would surely approve of.
If there was a missed opportunity in Americanon it was in using the book’s tenth chapter as a broader survey of modern self-help works by people like Covey and Louise Hay that mostly reinforced what McHugh already said. That real estate would have been better served focusing on books that have helped flip our nation’s narrative. For example, McHugh points out that Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask drew a bright line between conventional, heterosexual behavior (good) and homosexual behavior (bad) thereby tagging millions of Americans as deviants. So too Beecher’s attitudes toward other women, who she championed when it came to education but spoke out against publicly when the topic was suffrage. Surely there was an opportunity to highlight how books like Letter From Birmingham Jail, Silent Spring, and Fear of Flying elevated the voices of the disenfranchised and dispossessed and nudged our own understanding of being an American in a more just direction.
And this is not to say that the foundational beliefs these authors instilled in us are bad. Individualism and risk taking have informed the lives of everyone from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs. Post’s elevation of etiquette is the lubricant that greases our every social interaction. A cottage industry of cook books has sprouted in Crocker’s wake and expanded the field well beyond expecting a stay-at-home mom to do all the work. But there is also a dark side to our nation’s credo of self-reliance. As McHugh points out, a devotee of Hay’s power of positive thinking? Donald J. Trump.
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