An Ideal World
Author and historian Neil Baldwin talks about learning from the past
By Laura Raskin

Baldwin: “This is the first one that came to me in a flash. There was a certain imperative about doing this book that was different.”

Independent Arts Writer

Neil Baldwin has written seven books, but after Sept. 11, 2001, the founding executive director of the National Book Foundation was compelled to leave the 15-year post to write one in particular. The devoted historian needed to redeem his own faith in democracy and in a country consumed by the ideals of faster, better and more.

In “American Revelation: Ten Ideals That Shaped Our Country from the Puritans to the Cold War,” Baldwin asks readers to look back in order to go forward. It is a simple message and not an original one, which Baldwin readily admits. But he believes we are not doing it.

“I wanted to focus on the things people take for granted – concepts that are so much a part of our tradition, we already know what they mean. It’s especially the things we understand that we know the least,” said Baldwin last week in a telephone interview from his Glen Ridge, N.J. home.

He will speak about his book at the Nantucket Atheneum on Thursday, June 23, at 8 p.m. in the Great Hall. His lecture is the first of the Geschke Lecture Series.

Baldwin has written about the photographer Man Ray, William Carlos Williams and Mexico, all topics that, in essence, are also about the texture of America.

“This is the first one that came to me in a flash. There was a certain imperative about doing this book that was different,” said Baldwin. “After 9/11, like many people, as a writer, I was very much up in the air. I didn’t know what was next. I wanted to do something redemptive about America.”

When Baldwin began to write, he knew where he wanted to begin and end, and his job was made easier by not choosing “the” 10 American ideals.

Baldwin begins his book with John Winthrop, one of the most distinguished Massachusetts Bay colony citizens who founded what is now Boston. He famously used the biblical quote, “A city that is set upon a hill cannot be hid,” to describe the world across the Atlantic.

“It’s such a powerful metaphor for America, 140 years before the founding fathers,” said Baldwin. He ends with the Marshall Plan. “I felt like I needed a half a century between me and the (last ideal). Otherwise it would be too soon to be objective,” he said.

Rather than simply recount pillars in American history, Baldwin tells them through the people with whom they originated.

“That was my major standard, that (the ideal) entered the culture in a positive frame of mind by the person who thought of it. I found the actual instant when the ideal was sparked in the culture. It’s really a mini biography of the ideal through the person who thought of it.”

The ideals, like manifest destiny, may have become distorted once they became the rhetoric of leaders and government, which is also part of Baldwin’s “unspoken agenda.”

“The ideal of responsibility comes with the gaining of power and maybe we’ve forgotten about that. It’s cautionary,” he said.

“Well, look what happened with (manifest destiny). When it was dreamed up it was very spiritual and reverential, that the country was put here by God to stand for something. Then it was a prescription for world domination. It didn’t start out that way,” said Baldwin.

He wrote “The American Revelation” to slow himself down as much as his reading public. “Reading and writing makes you slow down. How did this happen, whatever ‘it’ is? What you mean by ‘we’? Do you mean the country, the leadership, the state department, the culture?”

“My belief is that these values, these ideals are still here. They could be brought back to life if we thought,” said Baldwin.

Asked to decide whether or not the roots of modern ideals have room to grow in the present culture, Baldwin, who spent his working life in the nonprofit sector, points to the response to December’s Indian Ocean tsunami.

“American charity is very unique. This is a field I’ve been involved in for a long time. (Look at) the tsunami relief effort that just happened, before President Bush made a pledge, there were already Web sites overwhelmed by regular people,” he said. “Ideals can spring to the foreground when you think they’re not there; spontaneous and grass-roots, without Colin Powell or Bush asking Americans to step up.”

Baldwin said his hope for the book is that it begins a dialogue among those who read it.

“That they think about what happened in our culture before we stepped on the scene,” he said.

Baldwin is on a multi-city book tour and will spend a week on Nantucket with his wife. His friend, Nantucket resident and author Nathaniel Philbrick, introduced Baldwin to the Atheneum.

“It was kind of a nice way to have it be my first time here,” he said. Baldwin is conscious of the institution’s tradition, which has a connection to his book. One chapter deals with Ralph Waldo Emerson who spoke at the Atheneum in 1847. Emerson was working at the time on the essay “Representative Men,” when history was equivalent to biography, said Baldwin.

“I’ve been studying Emerson since I was a freshman in college. I was finally ready to deal with him. He was the most important American thinker,” he said. “I’m mindful of the tradition I’m stepping into.”