The American Century

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The making of an American historian

After 12 years, two children, three jobs and a decade in the Yankee limelight, British-born journalist Harold Evans unveils a tribute to his adopted country.

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BY CAROL LLOYD
Few Americans have set out to write such a thorough and passionate valentine to their country as Harold Evans has done in his book "The American Century." The fact that America is his nationality of choice rather than arranged at birth only makes his love affair more rhapsodic and more lucid. "The American Century," a silver, five-pound tome filled with fine paper and finer black-and-white photos, illustrations and cartoons, has the look and feel of a nostalgic picture encyclopedia published by Life magazine in the 1950s. Wanting to create a "history for browsers," Evans has broken the chapters into magazine form: analytical essays, narrative features, personality profiles and bite-size capsules. But unlike its visual forebears, the book doesn't reflect the knee-jerk patriotism that skirts difficult issues while gushing over great men and their great wars.

With a journalist's eye for detail, he argues that the pursuit of freedom has set in motion the particularly American experience of politics we enjoy today. Focusing on the years between 1889 and 1989, Evans addresses most of the big events in America's history but gives special attention to the fights for individual and group freedom -- from the Pullman strikers of 1894 to Rosa Parks' decision to become the centerpiece of the civil rights movement. Even when these reformers fail, he shows, their causes often work their way into the fabric of mainstream American life. Although Emma Goldman was driven from the country, now many of her so-called radical causes -- from birth control to homosexual rights -- are widely (if not universally) accepted. The four murdered nuns in El Salvador -- raped and mutilated in the process of delivering food to homeless peasants during the height of the U.S.-funded civil war -- did not escape with their lives, but they and other human rights workers in Central America now can be seen as fighting for humanitarian causes.

Evans' historical perspective is not particularly new, nor does he claim that it is. But as a seasoned journalist with access to a diverse array of people in power, he was able to suffuse the book with primary research from conversations with Gerald Ford, Colin Powell and other luminaries. This investigative flavor adds a particular immediacy to stories that are already well known. We see Ronald Reagan posing in boxers for a college life-drawing class; we learn that in the South lynchings between the years 1918 and 1927 were often advertised beforehand; that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, pictured in frosty lipstick and elegant earrings, concealed her pregnancy in baggy clothing to avoid being fired from her position as an assistant law professor at Rutgers.

Evans is something of an American myth himself. The husband of former New Yorker editor Tina Brown, the publishing powerhouse edited the London Times from 1967 to 1981. After founding Condé Nast Travel magazine, he ran Random House from 1990 to 1997. Now he works as the editorial director for the New York Daily News, U.S. News and World Report and the Atlantic Monthly. On a recent trip to San Francisco he visited Salon's office with the casual conviviality of a college professor dropping in on some old students. Dapper in a vivid blue shirt and red suspenders, he spoke about America's historical amnesia, criticisms of his tenure at Random House and how the book radicalized him.

What inspired you to embark on this book?

Well, I came here in 1956 and I lived in San Francisco. I'd been to New York. I'd visited 40 states and I was impressed by the amazing number of stories. I met the last surviving member of Geronimo's tribe in Oklahoma. I met people here who were being interrogated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and then I went south and I was the first person, certainly the first foreigner, to interview the White Citizen's Council, which was just starting up, getting ready to terrorize the blacks. I saw the dissonance in the society between those wonderful people who gave me dinner in those pillared, white, plantation homes, and their attitude toward the Negroes, which was kindly, but they also treated them as children. So I had a view of this society with the highest ideals that was failing in many areas and yet still had a marvelous excitement to it.

I had all that when I went back and looked at the country as an editor at the London Times. I wasn't aware until I began editing the Times just how free the American press was. I gave a lecture called "The Half-Free Press" in England pointing out that we had restrictions in confidence, contempt, defamation and official secrets, and no First Amendment and no Freedom of Information Act, so we were actually half free. And at the Sunday Times, as soon as we started doing investigations, whichever direction we went in we'd run into a lawyer. It was an injunction. A prior restraint.

I realized when I began looking into America and its freedoms that you couldn't understand them unless you learned the history. And that you couldn't get the history, actually. As soon as I began to read I discovered that what I wanted to know, which was the whole sweep of the century and the individuals in it, wasn't available in any one place. So when I sat down to write a 400-page book, mainly photographs, I realized after a year or two that I needed a lot more space for text. And to read a lot more. In the end I read 4,500 books in the bibliography. Then I got fired by Murdoch and came back here. In '84 I felt that if I was going to live in the country then I really wanted to understand it more than I did. So I began wide reading. I began my reading with Jefferson and all that, the founding fathers. But then when I began to read for my own book, I focused on the past hundred years. I've just been reading a biography of Gen. Grant and another one on Lincoln because I might do the first hundred years next.

What do you think are the virtues and the limitations of being a foreigner and seeing American history from the outside?

I became an American citizen because I felt inhibited making criticisms as a foreigner. That was one thing. But as for the virtues and advantages, you begin with a clean slate. Americans don't understand how close to them their history is. Here it's so close you can almost reach out your hand and meet Geronimo. Also, I was not taught American history in school, therefore I don't have any certain takes on it. So it was an unexplored territory. And I was hoping that the blank sheet of my mind would be affected by what I read, rather than what I'd been taught.

Of course, the real American thing to do is to not know your history at all. Did you think about the project in terms of America's historical amnesia?

How many people have said to me, "Why did you begin this book in 1889?" And I say, "Do you know what happened in 1889?" I think one person on the entire book tour has answered me. And what began in 1889 of course was the second hundred years. But almost as important as that calendar celebration is that the frontier has been conquered in 1889, the first skyscraper is completed in 1889, the first Kodak camera is invented and distributed in 1889. America's about to turn from being inward-looking to being outward-looking. Not yet the most prosperous or powerful nation, that's still England. But it's catching up rapidly. And it's also going to have in 1889 a laissez-faire philosophy of letting business do what it likes, and the creed of individualism is going to be chartered from the West by the populists who've become the Democratic Party. So you're in a philosophical shift. When I say this, everybody understands it. But I'm surprised that it was up to me to say it.

N E X T+P A G E+| It's too early to tell about the '90s, but the impeachment business will make the cut