Popular History and the Literary Marketplace, 1840–1920

Introduction: “Whatever Popularizes Vulgarizes” Defining Popular History

Introduction “Whatever Popularizes Vulgarizes” Defining Popular History In the summer of 1908, fifteen-year-old Huey Long went door-todoor in the parishes of central Louisiana selling books on consignment for a Texas book dealer. Long, who later bragged to his high school friends that he could “sell anything on earth to anybody,” made a decent living that summer peddling a stock of volumes ranging from “trashy books to the finest literary and scholarly works.” One can picture young Huey Long as an ambitious junior book vendor, cultivating the arts of sweet persuasion, shameless cajoling and relentless pursuit that would become the trademarks of his later career as a politician. A favorite tactic of his was to memorize and quote verbatim lengthy passages from works such as Ridpath’s three-volume “popular” History of the World (1885) as a way of startling and impressing customers with his striking ability “to photograph whole pages in his mind.”1 Noting that Ridpath’s trilogy “stressed the role of powerful leaders” in world history, William Leuchtenburg has argued that this mental exercise provided Huey with models of “unadorned power” on which he relied so heavily later in life.2 As the biographer T. Harry Williams has added, Long knew that “an audacious action” of this sort “could shock people into a state where they could be manipulated .” Huey was “challenged by the possible resistance of buyers” and the “feeling of power” he experienced when he overcame it.3 Long’s success as a book peddler suggests the impact popular historical literature had on certain kinds of readers. The novelist Thomas Wolfe, born in 1900, was among those affected as a young boy by Ridpath’s popular histories . In his autobiographical work, Look Homeward Angel, Wolfe explained the powerful visual and emotional impact of the volumes on his alter ego, Eugene Gant. Gant enjoyed nothing better than sitting by the hearth, “spitting clean and powerful spurts of tobacco-juice over his son’s head into the hissing fire,” and “poring insatiably over great volumes in the bookcase, exulting in the musty odor of the leaves,and in the pungent smell of their hot hides.” The books he enjoyed most were “three huge calf-skin volumes called Ridpath’s History of the World,” wrote Wolfe, in whose pages “the past unrolled . . . in separate and enormous visions.” The volumes were “illustrated with hundreds ............................................................. Advertisement for John C. Ridpath’s History of the World. Defining Popular History { 3 of drawings,engravings,wood-cuts” that were so narrative in their storytelling elements that they allowed Gant, even as a child, to follow “the progression of the centuries pictorially before he could read.” The images of battle “delighted him most of all,” and his “brain swarmed” with visions of “unending legends” built “upon the pictures of kings of Egypt, charioted swiftly by soaring horses.” Something “infinitely old and recollective seemed to awaken in him as he looked on fabulous monsters, the twined beards and huge beastbodies of Assyrian kings, the walls of Babylon,” Wolfe noted.4 Ridpath had an even more persistent hold on Huey Long’s historical imagination. Years after he was done selling books, Long continued to quote Ridpath’s History of the World, as he did in the 1930s during one memorable speech on the floor of the Senate in making the case for his “Share Our Wealth” program.5 Almost fifty years after it first had been crafted, Long, at least, felt that Ridpath’s historical prose still had relevance. What types of books were these “popular” texts such as Ridpath’s History of the World, and what did their large sales suggest about the ways in which Americans like Huey Long and Thomas Wolfe absorbed lessons from the past? To answer these two questions, which is the central purpose of this book, we must consider these popular histories both as material and as cultural artifacts. First, the material. Reduced to their simplest components, these volumes were works of popular literature every aspect of which was designed to increase sales among readers. Their wide influence began with aggressive prepublication advertising campaigns of publishers intended to attract readers to widely circulating books in a new mass-market economy with vast implications for historical literacy and learning in America. From the point of view of publishers , the key to success in this literary marketplace was to witness economies of scale that came...