Daniel J. Boorstin (2006)

1 OCTOBER 1914 . 28 FEBRUARY 2004 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS THE CAREER of Daniel J. Boorstin, who died at the age of eighty-nine on 28 February 2004, was marked by the honors and appointments that characteristically distinguish the lives of great public figures: the undergraduate awards, the Rhodes scholarship, the precocious academic career (Harvard, Swarthmore, Chicago), and then appointments in Washington, first as director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of History and Technology (196973) and finally as Librarian of Congress (1975-87). Along the way he collected more than the usual honors, including decorations by the governments of Japan, France, Portugal, and Belgium, and in 1981, a little belatedly, membership in the American Philosophical Society. As with other public figures, the milestones of the career, the badges of honor, indicate only that the people of his time thought well of him. As a very old friend and admirer, take it on myself here to say why. first encountered him in 1938, when we both tutors in the same department (History and Literature) at Harvard. His warmth as a human being, his lively sense of humor, his avid intellectual curiosity already evident. We became close friends and allies as academic Young Turks. In those years he met and married Ruth Frankel, who was to remain a source of emotional stability and intellectual stimulation throughout his life, his collaborator and anchor. thought then that Dan generated more exciting, original ideas in conversation than anyone had ever known. Unlike many authors, he liked to talk his ideas before he wrote them, and his friends have been the beneficiaries. As his ever-proliferating thoughts generated book after book, found them, as found his conversations, the most exciting, most original interpretations of American history, not to say world history, that have encountered in a life of studying history. Curiously they have not prompted a large school of Boorstinians. They are perhaps too original, too much the product of a unique intellectual curiosity, to be carried further by others. They go outside the usual channels of academic historical inquiry. Probably the book that has had most influence in the academy is an early one, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson, which emphasized the challenge of the American environment in shaping the ideas and assumptions about nature that Jefferson shared with his associates in the American Philosophical Society at the end of the eighteenth century. The book is more nearly intellectual history in the usual sense than his later works. Already in those early years he was becoming impatient with intellectual history in the sense of the study of developing systems of thought. I think am in love with facts, he said to me about this time. His next book, The Genius of American Politics, was the first product of that love affair. The gist of it was that the success of American government lay in the absence of ideology, the absence of systematic ideas that could have stood in the way of making politics work. And he had no doubt that American politics did work. He was already thinking about a new large-scale interpretation of American history embodying this theme. In the first volume, The Americans: The Colonial Experience, he argued that even the New England Puritans, the group most driven by systematic ideas, were less interested in theology itself than in the application of theology to everyday life, and especially to society, while the settlers of Virginia developed a godliness that produced religious toleration without a theory. In the next volume, The Americans: The National Experience, he gave scant attention to the succession of presidents and parties that formed the framework for traditional histories. Instead he celebrated the practical triumphs of people undisturbed by dogmas and conventions, for example the New England entrepreneurs who met the challenge of their land of rocks and ice by quarrying their granite for public buildings all over the country and by successfully exporting their ice by sailing ship to the East Indies. …