[Deathwatch] Daniel J. Boorstin, historian, 89

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

Thanks to another reader for this one - again, the delay is my fault -
Ed.

Boorstin, Dead at 89, Foresaw Media Shifts
Sun Feb 29

By HILLEL ITALIE, AP National Writer

NEW YORK - The weekend death of award-winning historian and social
critic Daniel J. Boorstin came in a world he had largely predicted, and
feared: News of his passing was reported quickly, electronically, by
media outlets in business around the clock. His death, at age 89, was
unlikely to capture a fraction of the attention of Sunday night's
Academy Awards.

Winner in 1974 of the Pulitzer Prize for "The Americans: The Democratic
Experience," Boorstin wrote political history, cultural history,
creative history and what deserved to be called popular history. He
wrote about the evolution of clocks, where elevators were first used
and why the Chinese didn't discover America. His books sold millions of
copies and were translated into more than 20 languages.

But his most influential work was "The Image," published in 1962. Years
before such concerns were common, Boorstin wrote that the combination
of mass media and corporate power had transformed the "language of
ideals" into the "language of images." News had become dominated by
public relations, by "pseudo-events" staged for the sake of being
reported. Our heroes were celebrities, people famous for being famous.

"To me, 'The Image' is one of the most prescient and important books of
the last 50 years," says Neal Gabler, author of "Life: The Movie,"
published in 1998, and a frequent commentator on media and culture.

"Boorstin really did understand the way the culture operated. I think a
lot of others felt the way he did, but no one had articulated it until
Boorstin did. He was interested in big ideas. He wanted to show how
history moved, in giant steps."

Boorstin, who died Saturday, was an old-fashioned-looking man who
favored bow ties and snappy conversation. He ran an old-fashioned
operation: No market research or research assistants. Manuscripts were
typed on an old Olympia, then duly handed in to his primary editor, his
wife, Ruth, who just as often duly handed them back and told him to do
better.

"It was wonderful about how modest he was," says Ruth Boorstin, a
writer and poet. "He would say, `Tell me if you don't like it, and I'll
rewrite it,' but it was always brilliant," she said.

Boorstin was not universally admired. Although he disliked making
political statements in his writing, he didn't hold back in other
settings. In the 1950s, appearing before the House Un-American Affairs
Committee, he named names of Communist Party members. In the 1960s, he
was against affirmative action and spoke harshly of student radicals.

Nominated in 1975 for Librarian of Congress, he was opposed by the
Congressional Black Caucus and black library employees. Even the
American Library Association objected ? because he was not a
professional librarian. However, he was approved and served 12 years.

A self-described amateur in history, Boorstin was viewed with mixed
feelings by professional historians. He was criticized for overlooking
the more political moments of American history, from McCarthyism and
Vietnam in the 1950s and '60s to multiculturalism in the '80s and '90s.


But few questioned that his books were highly readable. In such works
as "The Discoverers," "The Creators" and his "The Americans" trilogy,
he tried to write history non-historians wanted to read, history he
thought the professionals were too rigid to care about.

>From science to farming, Boorstin looked upon history as a conflict
between innovators and bureaucrats, those who thought for themselves
and those who let others think for them. An admirer of William James,
the great "pragmatic" philosopher, Boorstin saw the United States as
the ultimate pragmatic experiment, created out of experience rather
than ideas.

"He was a university unto himself," says David McCullough, a Pulitzer
Prize-winning historian and a close friend of Boorstin's, "and he was
an ever delightful companion. But you had to be on your toes when you
were with him. He didn't tolerate your saying the obvious or the banal.


"At his offices at the Library of Congress, he would serve a full-scale
lunch and have eight to 10 people. He would sit at the table like a
headmaster and he would pose a question and go around the table. He
liked the give and take. He liked the sparks to fly."