The Go-Getters

By Mayo Mohs

THE AMERICANS: THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIENCE by DANIEL J.BOORSTIN 717 pages. Random House. $10.

Historian Daniel Boorstin is a man with an encyclopedic mind and a crusty disregard for the conventional chronicling of what he calls, with disdain, "important events." His idiosyncratic approach to history needs no better demonstration than this third volume of a trilogy that has included The Americans: The Colonial Experience and The Americans: The National Experience.

It rounds out Boorstin's version of the American experience by taking the measure of the U.S. during the last hundred years, but it is the century as no other historian has portrayed it.

Here is President James Garfield, for instance, well before he was shot down, dining at the posh New York restaurant of the gilded age, Delmonico's.

Rutherford Hayes puts in an appearance--as the man who brought the telephone to the White House. Teddy Roosevelt is seen, not as the man who dispatched the Great White Fleet to prowl the world's ports, but rather as an amateur art critic who liked what he saw at the controversial New York Armory Show of 1913.

Boorstin's bias, which he reveals in a marvelously personal, crotchety set of bibliographical notes, is toward "the universal and the commonplace." Since this is an American history, he emphasizes commerce, technology and increasingly conspicuous consumption.

But his heroes are the uncommon men whom he calls "the Go-Getters"--the tycoons, the inventors, the social scientists, who shaped the real character of American life. These, argues Boorstin, are the genuine "revolutionaries," and the book is studded with their biographies: Willis H. Carrier, who homogenized the country with air conditioning; Chester F. Carlson, the man who doomed the secret by inventing the Xerox system; R.G. Dun, the credit rating pioneer who made Everyman's private life the subject of public record.

Boorstin's breezy, anecdotal style makes his book a rousing reading experience, the sort of history that tells Americans painlessly but tartly who they really are. Remember streetcars?

They rumble through Boorstin's pages at length twice, once as the begetters of the central city and its department stores, again as the linchpins to the new suburbia. The department stores, too, emerge as a "democratic experience," the first places in the world where the poor as well as the rich could gawk at a vast array of bright new wares. Only occasionally does Boorstin ride a hobbyhorse too far. Obviously infatuated with the cowboy and all his ways, he devotes an entire section to an exhaustive --and nearly exhausting--treatise on the technology of cattle branding.

The section is worth getting through. Beyond it lies Boorstin's often critical commentary on what the Go-Getters really got--and how they got it. A lawyer himself, Boorstin seems bemused at the profession's remarkable good fortune in guiding business through the legal maze of the federal system; in 1968, he reports, lawyers took in $5.2 billion in fees.

Throughout the book runs an undertone of disillusionment. Boorstin hails the photograph and phonograph, but notes how they destroyed the uniqueness of the moment, broadening experience but leveling it. Radio and television multiplied communication, but made it an increasingly private experience. Supermarkets offered the consumer an abundance of choice, and franchises the assurance of at least modest uniform quality, but the touch and smell of food became trapped in paperboard and plastic.

Yet for a historian who deplores the "thinner life of things," Boorstin seems spare in his appraisal of the life of the spirit during the past century. His one bow to it is a somewhat ingenuous section on the American missionary impulse and what he calls "Samaritan diplomacy," though he does allude to the cultural imperialism that has often accompanied missionaries. He limits his discussion of America's inexorable technology to vignettes about the atomic bomb and the space race. His assay of the century's "democratic experience" does not include any mention of the fate of the American Indian. He also ignores the labor movement entirely.

The strangest ellipsis is his disregard of the Viet Nam War, which is mentioned only in reference to the Xeroxing of the Pentagon papers. The war, after all, was a product of America's military-industrial momentum and the missionary spirit -- at least its anti-Communist version -- as well as the Go-Getter mystique that the author so ad mires. Boorstin may dislike "important events," but that is one that no historian can ignore. . Mayo Mahs

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