The March of Time: Harold Evans offers a lavishly illustrated political history of 20th-century America.
Harold Evans has set out to write what he calls ''an accessible popular political history,'' and he has succeeded admirably. The thesis of ''The American Century'' is that this country's rise to power over the past hundred years has brought about its domination of the global economy and international politics. The results of that domination, Evans shows, have been notably mixed -- sometimes, as in the Cuban missile crisis, nearly catastrophic. In spite of America's repeated failures to live up to its own ideals, Evans argues, the ceaseless pursuit of these ideals has resulted in halting yet steady progress toward human rights at home and abroad.
This idea is not original, but the way it is presented is. Evans makes few claims to groundbreaking scholarship. Instead, with the help of a research team headed by Kevin Baker, he has culled a staggering amount of information from other history books. His innovation is his magisterial synthesis and seasoned analysis of this information.
Evans shows that this country's proud devotion to democracy has had contrasting results in different periods. In the 1930's, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it fostered a blinkered isolationism that allowed Germany and Japan to fan the flames of world war. The United States next nurtured a muscle-flexing, policemanlike mentality that led to repeated showdowns with nations of differing political ideologies, mainly the Soviet Union and China. This bullying zeal for democracy, he demonstrates, led to the disastrous escalation of the Vietnam War on the specious premise that if one small country fell to Communism, many others would quickly follow.
Jingoistic Americanism, Evans suggests, lay behind both the successes and the mistakes of several modern Presidents. In the Kennedy-Johnson era, it contributed to the Vietnam fiasco and the arms race, but it also brought significant movement toward full democratic rights for women and ethnic minorities. With Richard M. Nixon, it fed into a blind belief that the President, as the world's most powerful person, was somehow above the law. But it led as well to Nixon's democratic gestures toward our enemies, gestures which with Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan paved the way for detente and the collapse of Soviet-bloc Communism.
By summarizing a vast reach of history, Evans gives us a bird's-eye view of 20th-century people and events, leading us to ask constantly ''What if?'' What if the United States had become active in the League of Nations in 1920? Would it have then overcome its insular nationalism, which was partly responsible for World War II? And couldn't the war have been averted if Roosevelt had risen above his caution and got tough with Germany early on? What if J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had pursued the Mafia with the zeal that he hunted alleged Communists? Would not the power of the mob have been greatly curtailed? What would have been the outcome had Khrushchev not pulled his missiles out of Cuba when confronted by Kennedy? World War III?
Besides raising such questions, Evans puts to rest several myths. He shows that the stock market crash of 1929 was not the main trigger of the Great Depression, which resulted largely from other factors, including income disparity and the weak structure of banks. He argues convincingly that Japan would have surrendered without America's dropping the bomb.
Evans is adept at dispelling fabricated stories about plots and conspiracies. He dismantles the popular theory that Pearl Harbor was part of a secret plan by Roosevelt to inflame public opinion against Japan. Tersely trashing Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's Communist witch hunt, he writes, ''He had nothing: no names, no Communists, no spies.'' After summarizing 35 years of speculation about alleged conspirators in the Kennedy assassination, he proves beyond reasonable doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
''The American Century'' contains 900 photographs and dozens of other illustrations. Along with Gail Buckland, Evans has created a gallery of images striking in its variety and pungency, representative without being hackneyed. Presidents from William McKinley through George Bush are shown not in stiffly posed portraits but in a vivid range of photographs emphasizing their humanity and vulnerability. The polio-ravaged Roosevelt struggling to hoist himself out of a convertible, Nixon crying uncontrollably around the time of the Checkers speech, Lyndon Johnson conferring with advisers in a swimming pool, Jimmy Carter collapsing during a 10-kilometer race near Camp David, a weary Ronald Reagan on the phone at 2:45 A.M. ordering the invasion of Grenada -- these and many similar personal moments are captured in images that remind us of the ordinary side of America's leaders.
Equally striking are the book's pictures of average folk caught in socially resonant circumstances. The violence of labor conflict is depicted in a 1915 photograph of New Jersey oil refinery workers shooting at guards and in a 1937 montage of Henry Ford's thugs beating up union protesters. The misery of the Great Depression leaps from bleak pictures of abandoned farms and homeless migrants. Racial strife is repeatedly revisited in images ranging from an 1890 photograph of the heaped corpses of massacred Sioux Indians through a 1930 one of the suspended bodies of two lynched blacks to pictures of whites assaulting blacks with clubs and dogs during the 60's.
In most books, captions merely provide identification. In ''The American Century'' they are often miniature essays that supplement the main text. The caption with a picture of Calvin Coolidge at an exercise machine informs us, ''Three times a day at the White House he rode an electrically operated artificial horse, whooping as he did.'' ''Reproach: She was a student,'' begins a paragraph-long caption of a ghastly photograph of a Japanese girl whose face was burned off by the Hiroshima nuclear blast. In another caption we learn that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the developer of the atom bomb, knew many languages, including Sanskrit, and was a chain smoker given to self-loathing. Still others inform us that Eleanor Roosevelt considered sex ''an ordeal to be borne'' and that Ronald Reagan at the age of 29 posed in skivvies for a college art class making sculptures of a modern Adonis.
The book also features statistical tables, historical chronologies and insets with historical asides. These informational segments, though not always smoothly integrated into the main narrative, contain a wealth of information. One table, entitled ''Parallels: 1890-1990,'' is particularly suggestive. It tells us that in the century after 1890, life expectancy soared from 46.3 years to 71.8 years for men and from 48.3 years to 78.8 years for women. At the same time, the proportion of eligible voters who went to the polls sank from 74.7 percent to 55.2 percent, while the numbers of those belonging to organized religious bodies leapt from 34 percent to 63 percent. These facts lead to the perception of an American citizenry, possessed of increasing physical health but declining faith in the political process, seeking refuge in religion.
The downside of Evans's extensive use of tables, inserted biographies and the like is that it makes for choppy reading. But Evans does not expect most readers to peruse ''The American Century'' from cover to cover in a single sitting. As he explains in the preface, in creating what he calls a ''history for browsers'' he has organized the book as ''self-contained 'modular' units, without runover, so that the casual reader can dip into any spread of pages and absorb what he or she chooses without having to begin at the beginning.'' Actually, the book's loose structure mirrors the texture of history itself, with its randomness and perpetual surprises. Besides, if the book cannot be easily swallowed whole, it can be savored in bits. Its individual chapters and subchapters are eminently readable, written in the liveliest historical prose I have come across in a long while.
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