We Should All Be Friends

In the October 2006 issue of Technology and Culture, John Lauritz Larson asks: "What are we doing wrong, that we cannot get the vendors of books to sell the good ones in place of the bad at a time when more people (against all prediction) buy books than at any time in history?" By "vendors" Larson chiefly means publishers, and he makes clear that "good" books, by and large, are written by academics, while "bad" ones are written by popular authors. The particular target of his ire, and the inspiration for his jeremiad, is Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation, by Peter L. Bernstein, published in 2005 by W. W. Norton.

Larson calls Bernstein ill-informed and his book derivative, "a wobbly volume of warmed-over history" reminiscent of the History Channel or, worse yet, Fox News. I have never met or dealt with Peter Bernstein, and while I think his book is competently done, I would not call it the best ever written on the subject. The writing is facile in places, and in a casual reading I noticed a few minor errors; if I knew a tenth as much as Larson does about the period, I'm sure I would have found more. Overall, though, I'd say Bernstein has done a decent job on a very complicated subject.

Still, let's assume that Larson is correct in calling Wedding of the Waters poorly written. Was he inspired to dash off a rueful essay for Technology and Culture merely because a book he doesn't like sold a lot of copies? If everybody did that, this journal would have room for little else. No, that's not the real problem. What bothers Larson, as he makes clear, is that writers of popular history are getting rich off the labors of academic historians, coarsening and often misstating their findings in the process. Ideally, he writes, the numerous academic books that combine rigor with readability would be marketed to the public, instead of pallid glosses on them.

It is instructive to look at the books Larson cites as examples of this sort of scholarly yet accessible writing. For a superior general history of the canal, he recommends Ronald E. Shaw's Erie Water West (1966). He goes on to list a number of more specialized works on such topics as the national impact of the canal, the economic context in which it was built, its effects on New York City and Rochester, and the life of De Witt Clinton. All these books, Larson says, are better written and more informative than Bernstein's.

I have read Erie Water West and it is indeed quite well done. But it's a very different book from Wedding of the Waters. Shaw virtually ignores the period before 1792 and devotes nearly half his book to the time after the canal was finished, proceeding all the way to the eve of the Civil War. Bernstein starts in colonial days and spends only three chapters out of twenty on the postconstruction era.

Shaw focuses tightly on the Erie Canal itself, while Bernstein includes extensive digressions on canals in general, contemporary technological developments, personalities, economics, local color, and other types of scene-setting. Shaw passes over the Embargo Act and the War of 1812 in a few sentences, correctly assuming that his readers will be familiar with these topics. Bernstein, writing for an audience as knowledgeable as the average student in a history survey class, gives them a whole chapter.

By contrast, Shaw devotes an entire chapter to the back-and-forth fight between Buffalo and Black Rock to become the western terminus of the canal. While he tells this part of the story quite well, you have to be deeply devoted to the Erie Canal to follow all the proposals and counterproposals and resolutions and memorials without flipping ahead to find the punch line. Bernstein, reluctant to try his audience's patience, covers the dispute crisply in three pages.

Shaw's greatest interest is the political infighting behind the canal. New York State politics in...