America Reflected: Language, Satire, Film, and the National Mind (review)

Drawing upon his strongest areas of historical interest, Peter Rollins has knotted a handful of germane topics that reaffirm the nation's way of life from the 1920s through the Vietnam era. Beginning with the homespun philosopher Will Rogers, followed by Benjamin Lee Whorf's linguistic theories, continuing with four major wars, and concluding with reappraisals of diverse figures such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Amy Lowell, and John James Audubon, America Reflected: Language, Satire, Film, and the National Mind—a twentieth-century voyage amplifying a country's culture, myths, and ethos, while echoing the poet's belief that memory is the business of man—covers enormous ground with insightful explanations of events half a century ago.

With Oklahoma's favorite son, Will Rogers, as a starting point, Professor Rollins limns a vast panorama detailing the final phases of rural life as machinery, newspapers, automobiles, and even airplanes pushed small-town values aside, creating the urban society where cities now ruled. But Will Rogers—who represented the vanishing prairie—wore many hats: a popular journalist whose daily column reached millions of homes, an aw-shucks movie star whose down-to-earth persona delighted film watchers, a gee-whiz radio personality whose distinctive voice entertained listeners everywhere, and, finally, a recognizable icon, the loveable Uncle Will.

While Will Rogers' simplicity appealed to everyone, the linguistic theories of Benjamin Lee Whorf initially challenged the best of minds with their intricate formulas and hypotheses. Basically claiming that specific languages create specific thoughts, Whorf's voice crying in the wilderness attracted many disciples and—along with that of his mentor, Edward Sapir—expostulated revolutionary ideas about human behavior. Together, these thinkers fostered a complex understanding about cultural anthropology's influence in shaping mores, while, conversely, taking numerous potshots at modern science, arguing that its offspring, technology, seemed, at best, overrated and, at worse, barren.

Barren? What about the relationship between technology and war? How did the nation react to decades of on-again, off-again conflicts fought with the latest technology that instantly reduced the individual to a cipher, a meaningless nonentity caught in the cog of a runaway, mechanized behemoth that, later, would be romanticized (or distorted) on the Hollywood screen? Beginning with the Great War (later, known as World War I), the real issue of America's trench warfare still remains unfathomable even though numerous books, photodramas, and stage productions have proffered numerous interpretations.

But this early conflagration seemed pale compared to what followed. World War II—the twentieth century's exclamation point—created carnage that eclipsed the 1914-1918 conflict. Carpet bombings, massive frontal assaults, even two nuclear explosions challenged rational thought while, again, print, film, and drama offered one interpretation after another. As for its legacy, what happened? Within months, the Cold War—with its omnipresent threat of instant annihilation—rattled everyone's nerves. Years later, over in Southeast Asia, this east-versus-west standoff, as predicted, turned hot. Rollins engages these all of these conflicts, checking the differences between the reel history and the real history of the conflagrations.

And, finally, Professor Rollins—with his sharp eye—brings his historical analysis to a coda by analyzing four luminaries from eclectic intellectual movements. Both an abolitionist and author, Harriet Beecher Stowe reached international fame with the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, an antislavery novel that impressed Abraham Lincoln, purportedly, to remark, "Is this the little woman who made the great war?" At the same time Frederick Henry Hedge created the transcendental movement, while years later Pulitzer Prize winner Amy Lowell—with her imagist verses—replaced sentimentality with concise poetry. Similarly, the naturalist and ornithologist John James Audubon explained nature with precision paintings of everyday bird life, revealing (and generating) a new ambivalence toward frontier expansion.

Certainly, America's culture offers much complexity, and Peter Rollins sheds needed light on the national psyche, with its changing patterns and unpredictable decades. Containing numerous first-person narratives, this 742-page [End Page 108...