Great Leap Backward

By Melvin Maddocks

THE GLORY AND THE DREAM

by WILLIAM MANCHESTER 1,397 pages. Little, Brown. $20.

In 1932 William Manchester, the son of a Massachusetts social worker, was ten years old. Boys five years older than he were earning $2.78 a week in the sweatshops of Brooklyn, as Manchester might already have learned. (Even at ten he was a compulsive newspaper reader.) But then prime rib roast cost only 21-c- per lb., and young Manchester could buy a ticket to see Jackie Cooper in the "talkie" When a Feller Needs a Friend for 10-c-. The real trouble was that 28% of all Americans had no income at all.

Three wars and a couple of eras of affluence later, Manchester has looked back at his younger country (and presumably his younger self) and asked: What happened in the 40 years between? A natural, even a commonplace question, but to Manchester a question deserving a literal answer, and for over 1,300 pages he tries to give it.

The Glory and the Dream, depending on how one reads it, is Pop history, a nostalgia trip or the world's biggest trivia contest. Manchester (as he showed in The Death of a President, 1967) is one of those writers who find their supreme joy only in the presence of a fact, and sometimes it doesn't seem to matter what sort of a fact it is. When Astronaut Neil Armstrong took his "one small step for man," the reader is going to know it was in a boot sized 9 1/2B. The day President Eisenhower suffered his coronary thrombosis, Manchester, you can bet, knew what he had for breakfast: "beef bacon, pork sausages, fried mush, and flapjacks." Statistics tumble on the reader's head like the rich chaos from Fibber McGee's closet. Who else would know that the average height of American women increased 1/2 in. between 1945 and 1954 (from 5 ft. 3 1/2 in. to 5 ft. 4 in.)? Or that they were "being impregnated," in Manchester's phrase once every seven seconds?

Manchester gives decent journalistic summaries of issues like McCarthyism in the '50s, civil rights in the '60s and Viet Nam. A recurrent device labeled "Portrait of an American" allows him to draw vignettes of his favorite fellow countrymen: Ralph Nader, Dr. Benjamin Spock and, perhaps above all, Norman Thomas ("He was the American Isaiah"). But the Manchester method of history may finally be described as stream-of-schlock, often fascinating though sometimes overwhelming. Figures like Marilyn Monroe ("She exulted in her carnality") and Fiorello LaGuardia ("swashbuckling five-foot-two-inch mayor") coexist in a kind of cartoon version of American folklore. About three pages are devoted to the life and times of Frank Sinatra--juxtaposed with a mini-history of the atomic bomb. In the spinning mind of the reader, the Bay of Pigs and the Edsel seem to loom as equal disasters. The Cliquot Club Eskimos and the Chicago Seven, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Howdy Doody--one is no more weightless than the other in such a time-capsule vacuum.

The liberties of a novelist are taken for granted. There is a lot of "Harry-Truman-stirred-on-his-pillow'' writing. Worse, during the 30-page death scene of Franklin Roosevelt the privilege of author's mind reading is abused ("it is not too fanciful to suggest," etc.).

Fan Dancer. Despite a helter-skelter documentation that can leave Sputnik orbiting in space next to a Barbie doll and an old script from The Shadow, Manchester finally makes his basic point. It was another world--that 1932 America of his childhood when one out of four Americans was a farmer (compared to one out of 20 today), when the U.S. had only the 16th largest army in the world (behind Turkey and Rumania, among others), when Fan Dancer Sally Rand, not Deep Throat, was regarded as "obscene."

Here is continuity in the form of a quantum leap to which no orderly summary can do justice. So The Glory and the Dream--sprawling, profligate, bust ing at the seams with history's self-contradictions--becomes in the end its own illustration, as authentic a case of Americana as any that it serves to collect.

Melvin Maddocks

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