The Americanization of Edward Bok
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1920. 8vo, ix+461 pp. $5.00.
[The editorial hand is withheld from this notice, which the reviewer has written, in the vein of a personal letter.]
The Americanization of Edward Bok and The Education of Henry Adams lie on my desk together.
Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet; but I have brought them together on my desk, so as to read them together, now a chapter of Adams, now a chapter of Bok — Adams and Bok, and, finally, Bok, for the hope of democracy is in such as this Americanized Dutchman. Adams and Bok are not of the same generation, though overlapping; but the strangest thing in the striking contrast is that Bok should have come after Adams -should have come into this silly, cynical, senile world that Adams was leaving, and should have gone to making it all over with the Ladies’ Home Journal! And with such gusto! It beats the Dutch!
I had never read much in the Ladies’ Home Journal, except ‘The Heart-to-Heart Talks.”and all I knew of Edward Bok was his enormous circulation— a real recommendation to a writer for the magazines. I began to read Bok’s book in my study; but the middle of the second chapter found me reading aloud to the family in the living-room, and the next day I was reading the chapter on ‘ A Boston Pilgrimage’ to a chap in overalls who sat next to me in the street-car. I took that chapter into my classroom for the students, and that night one of those students persuaded the janitor to open my office so that she could get a book that ‘ had been left there.’ She got Bok’s book, and sat up all night, to finish it before I should arrive in the morning!
‘ What shall I get my boy fora Christmas present?’ a man in the New York train asked me the next day. ‘ The Americanization of Edward Bok,’I replied. ‘It’s a stirring story. Santa Claus ought to slip a copy of it into every American sock and stocking, big and little, on his round this year — and a translated copy into the luggage of every newcomer through the gates of Ellis Island.’
Bole’s specialty is the public. He lives, and moves, and has his being in other people. Autographers, subscribers, the buying public, or the individual contributor, all are Bok’s by right of his intense humanity. He seems to have been born half-person, half-public. The chapters of his book are public gatherings, with Bok in the chair. And without a bit of literary pretense, he presides in his Autobiography, now as collector, now as reporter, raconteur, preacher; as reformer of the general taste and morals, as universal educator, preserver of the public health, and foreordained editor, who lacked a paltry few of having the complete United States Census on his subscription list, and so lacked, to the end, complete Americanization! Tie was a Bok, and born Dutch. He will die a Bok, and die Dutch; but what a wholesome, useful, thoroughgoing, manly American he has lived! His book makes me feel at fifty like fifteen, makes me wish to begin all over again — and come from Holland! It beats the Dutch —by its Americanism, I suppose, this book of Bok’s. D. L. S.