Dictionary of American Biography, Under the Auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies
Edited by . Vols. 1 and II. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1928-1929. $12.50 each vol.
IF it is true, as Carlyle declared, that history is the essence of innumerable biographies; if it is true that anyone who wishes to know the history of any period or of any country must know the men who made it what it was, this new Dictionary of American Biography is the most important contribution to the history of the United States which has yet been made. At the very moment when we seem to be entering an age of mass or even proletarian history, when a new series of volumes even now professes to chronicle the activities of the ’common man’ who has lately succeeded the ‘average man,’who in turn succeeded the ‘natural man’ of the eighteenth century, we have, in full accord with the great inconsistency of human nature, a sudden craze for biography of uncommon men. Of the present biographical movement the present Work is hardly to be reckoned part. It is not concerned so much with ’souls’ as with intelligence; not so much with ‘interpretation’ as with facts; not so much with emotion as with information — and it is none the worse for that.
It is a common misapprehension that such a work of ‘reference’ is not ‘interesting’; that it belongs on the library shelves, —public or private, as the ease may be, — to be taken down at intervals to be‘consulted ’ for a date or name; but never, never read. It is a curious fallacy; for one reason, if for no other. One half the world, we have long been assured, does not know how the other half lives; though, as the cynical newspaper paragrnpher says, if it does n’t. it is n’t for lack of trying to find out. Yet here we can find out. Here are all the life stories of our fellow men and women; here are the explanations of a hundred things we all have wondered about at one time or another; here are the ‘life histories’ and the ’human interest’ stories which the public craves, in an incredible profusion. The book is eminently readable; and though it changes the subject frequently, — not as rapidly as the dictionary, but perhaps a thought more rapidly than the encyclopædia, — it is none the worse for that, since the general subject is the same.
These are the people who have made America; and here it tells how they accomplished it. They set up and administered government; they fought the savage and the wilderness and each other; they made roads and railways; they sailed the seas; they invented machines; they made fortunes; they wrote books and painted pictures and founded or taught in educational institutions; they turned a vast expanse sparsely inhabited by Indian tribes into what it is now. Their biographies are the epic of America; and it is here set down. This Dictionary is more than a work of reference; it i> the pageant, even the moving picture, of the United States; and no one who cares to know how that has come about can fail to be instructed and even entertained by reading the lives of those who made it. So new the country, so recent its great achievements, he will read of men and women many of whom are in his own recollection, or his immediate tradition, which enhances interest; and before that great tradition goes, before their memories are swallowed up in generations to whom they must be more indifferent, or wholly forgotten, this is a fitting time to chronicle their lives ‘to stir to speech or action as occasion comes.'
WILBUR C. ABBOTT