2JĄ. Suggestions for Further Reading
house of miscellaneous information on changing standards of ad-miration, describes itself with brilliant accuracy on its jacket: “The Warfare of Celebrity with Aristocracy in America—from the ‘First Families’ to the ‘Four Hundred’ to ‘Publi-ciety.’ ” On the endorsement business, see William M. Freeman, The Big Name (1957). Leo LowenthaPs inva!uable “Biographies in Popular Magazines,” is found in American Social Patterns (selected and edited by William Peterson; Anchor paperback, 1956). See also Jerome Ellison and Franklin T. Gosser, “Non-Fiction Maga-zine Articles: A Content Analysis,” Journalism Quarterly, XXXVI (Winter, 1959) 27-34.
An important book could be written on the press secretary and his role in politics and American public life. The most sug-gestive treatments I have come upon are Lela Stiles, The Man Behind Roosevelt: The Story of Louis McHenry Howe (1954); and miscellaneous items in current magazines, like the cover story on James C. Hagerty, President Eisenhower’s secretary, in Time, LXXI (Jan. 27, 1958), 16-20; the article on Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s press secretary in Time, LXXVI (Dec. 5, 1960), p. 57. Patrick D. Hazard of the Annenberg School of Communications has kindly let me see his unpub-lished paper, “The Entertainer as Hero: The Burden of an Anti-Intellectual Tradition,” which I have found invaluable.
For the facts from which I reconstruct my account of the transformation of Lindbergh from hero into celebrity I have leaned heavily on Kenneth S. Davis, The Hero: Charles A. Lindbergh and the American Dream (1959). This meticulous book combines the vividness and warmth of a good novel with a relentless objectivity. It is brilliant evidence that the techniques of the sociologist do not require the abandonment of the humanista literary elegance or dramatic flair. Davis gives us a parable for our time, which no serious student of American morals in the twentieth century should fail to read. Similar studies, with comparable insight, sympathy, and objectivity, of figures like Al Capone, Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, and EIvis Presley, would teach us morę about ourselves than many of the morę lengthy studies of less significant but morę conventionally “important” minor figures in our political, literary, and academic life. Some sugges-tive notions and much valuable detail, especially on popular attitudes to figures like Capone, are found in Orrin E. Klapp, “Hero-Worship in America,” American Sociological Review, XIV (Feb., 1949), 53—62, and in a longer version of the same study, “The Hero as a Social Type” (1948), unpublished doc-
(and Writing)
toral dissertation in the Department of Sociology of the Uni-versity of Chicago. A constantly useful tool for exp!oring the uncompiled social history of our time is The New York Times lndex.
George Waller’s copiously detailed Kidnap: The Story of the Lindbergh Case (1961) appeared as this volume was going to press.
Chapter 3. From Traveler to Tourist:
The Lost Art of Travel
Just as a large proportion of our great literaturę has been the chronicie of heroes, so, much of it has been a chronicie of travel. Many great epics have been both at the same time. In fact, if one defined an epic as the adventures of a hero who travels, one would exclude few of enduring importance. This itself may be evidence to support the theses of my Chapters 2 and 3. The story of a hero on his travels—Ulysses against Polyphemus —can excite the minstrel talents of great poets; but a celebrity at his relaxation (that is, on vacation)—Bob Hope in Palm Springs—can inspire few but gossip columnists. The decline of the hero and the decline of travel have come together. Except for religion and war, travel was for centuries the most hero-producing, hero-inciting of man’s activities. In religion many epic heroes (the Buddha, Moses, Mohammed) have been notable travelers.
The literaturę of travel is so abundant (even for the United States alone) that one hardly knows where to begin. It com-prises some of the most readable, most exciting, and most neglected of Americana. We may divide the American travel literaturę into three large classes which overlap both logically and chronologically: (1) travel epics; (2) travel surveys; and, (3) travel reactions (or tourist diaries).
First is the travel epic, whose central figurę is a hero doing great deeds, encountering risks, exploring and enjoying the exotic and the dangerous. It includes some of the basie sources of American history: for example, such works as those by Captain John Smith, True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Notę as hath hapned in Virginia sińce the first planting of that Colony (1608), True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captain John Smith in Europę, Asia, Africa, and America, from . . . 1593 to 1629 (1630). The Poca-hontas story, a characteristic travel exploit, is recounted in detail by Smith himself in his General Historie of Virginia . . . (1624). William Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation is in