The “canon” in the title of Jess McHugh’s “Americanon” (Dutton) consists of thirteen American books, from “The Old Farmer’s Almanac,” first published in 1792, to Stephen R. Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” which came out in 1989. It includes Webster’s Dictionary, Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” “Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book,” and “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask),” by David Reuben.
The works are all mega-sellers. McHugh tells us about the McGuffey Readers, textbooks first used in nineteenth-century homes and schools; they sold more than a hundred and thirty million copies—and, since most copies had multiple readers, the total circulation was even larger. Carnegie’s book came out in 1936, has sold more than thirty million copies, and is still in print. Louise Hay’s “You Can Heal Your Life” (1984) has sold more than fifty million copies, and Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” has sold more than forty million. Betty Crocker’s cookbook has sold more than seventy-five million copies. At least a hundred million inquiring minds have read “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex.*”
These sales figures are way beyond the range of even the most acclaimed fiction. Some of the books, such as “The Old Farmer’s Almanac” and Emily Post’s “Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home,” which was first published in 1922, are continually updated and reissued, and still maintain market share. McHugh says that “Etiquette” used to be the second-most stolen book from the library after the Bible (which presumably is taken by people unfamiliar with the Ten Commandments).
Fifty-seven million copies of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary have been sold (I have a copy of the fifth edition, owned by my mother, which was published in 1936), and there are some two billion word searches on Merriam-Webster’s apps every year. The books in McHugh’s canon are not books so much as appliances. They are not read; they are used. And probably many of them have been bought by people who do not otherwise buy many books.
The term “canon” is also, well, loaded. Canons define a tradition, a culture, a civilization by excluding things that don’t belong to it. The claim of “Americanon” is that the enormous and enduring sales numbers of the books McHugh discusses mean that they can be understood to be promoting a national ideology, or what she calls a national myth. She does not think that this is a good thing.
In fact, McHugh disapproves of every one of the books she writes about. “Americanon” is, in effect, a critique of American society in the form of thirteen book reviews. It belongs to a critical strategy of attacking current inequities in American life by attacking prior representations of those inequities. This is an entry in the new culture wars.
It may be that the books in McHugh’s canon were received as summing up a sort of national consensus about how life should be lived in the United States, but, as she tells us, their authors’ “vision of the ideal American all too often collided with who they themselves were.” Catharine Beecher, the author of “A Treatise on Domestic Economy”—a work, first published in 1841, purveying the notion that a woman’s place is in the home—never married, had a career as a public figure, and seems to have been disliked by many who knew her, including members of her own family. (Harriet Beecher Stowe was her sister.) Carnegie grew up in deep poverty and suffered from a debilitating inferiority complex until he discovered that he had an amazing gift for public speaking (which most people do not).
Emily Post wrote her “Etiquette” book because she needed to make a living after divorcing her husband when it was publicly revealed that he had been having an affair with a showgirl. (How rude!) And Betty Crocker did not exist. She was a fabrication of what became General Mills, which eventually employed forty-five people to keep the brand going and to answer the letters—as many as five thousand a day—it received from women writing to ask Betty Crocker for advice.
The books McHugh writes about are all how-to or self-help books. These are overlapping literary domains, actually, since people tend to believe, not unreasonably, that knowing how to do things for yourself also makes you feel good about yourself. Our desire to learn (and share) “best practices” for everything from collecting maple syrup and pronouncing unfamiliar words to baking brownies, having sex, and eating asparagus in company is deeply ingrained. Even if there may not be a single best way to do these things, we know that there are many worse ways, and we feel that avoiding the worse ways has to be one ingredient of a happier life.
Given her thesis, it’s a little strange that one of McHugh’s most frequent epithets, in criticizing these books, is “arbitrary.” She accuses Emily Post and David Reuben and even Noah Webster of arbitrarily imposing their own norms on their users. But, as she herself points out repeatedly, every book in her canon was one of many just like it being published around the same time. There were at least a hundred eighteenth-century almanacs competing with “The Old Farmer’s Almanac,” and many dictionaries of the American language competing with Webster’s. Numerous domestic manuals besides Beecher’s came out in the nineteenth century, and there was a deluge of self-help books in the nineteen-eighties. It seems fair to assume that the books that made it onto the best-seller lists and into the canon are the ones that captured the prevailing wisdom the best.
For isn’t the prevailing wisdom what these books are selling? We don’t want to know how Emily Post eats asparagus when dining out. We want to know how people who are regarded as having impeccable manners eat it, and we trust Emily Post to know the answer. We normally want to fit in, not stand out.
Part of what makes these books seem arbitrary to McHugh may be the single-author format. The online world has produced a torrent of how-to and self-help advice, but that advice has a thousand authors, not just one. The books in McHugh’s canon are really not that different. When the medium is the printed book, the thousand authors get squeezed into a single name on the title page.
The effect is to make it appear as though the author were a fount of original wisdom, as though Dale Carnegie invented the idea of salesmanship, when all he was doing was summing it up, or as though Betty Crocker were a real person who had useful life advice, when “she” was mainly selling General Mills products. Emily Post was teaching etiquette in the same way that a mathematics teacher teaches math: this is how the best people do it, or aspire to do it. We can say that these authors understood what was better or what worked better than other people did. But they were not creating a new field.
McHugh is also annoyed that all her books seem to ratify existing social arrangements. (This appears to contradict her complaint about arbitrariness.) And they do. But isn’t that their raison d’être? “We cannot entirely blame Post for not revolutionizing etiquette in a way that shattered old ways of doing things,” McHugh says. Certainly, etiquette and “shattering old ways of doing things” are not exactly congruent concepts. People buy an etiquette manual in order to learn how things are done, not why they shouldn’t be done, or how they might be done. Even iconoclasts need to know that much.
McHugh says that her books “continually take the pressure off the system and put it back on the person.” That is true, too, but that is the nature of do-it-yourself and self-help books. The problem is not other people, they are saying; the problem is you—not getting up at an early enough hour, not setting aside enough “me time” in your day, relying on someone else to make your maple syrup. Benjamin Franklin, whose autobiography is in the canon, pulled himself up out of nowhere, and you can, too, even if you do not happen to be a genius of business, science, and diplomacy. Perceived barriers to success are illusory. This is not Karl Marx.
Is there something distinctively American about this belief? McHugh thinks that there is. “Self-help,” she says, “is in some ways the most American genre of literature.” It’s true that both the American pioneer narrative and the American immigrant narrative have themes of self-reliance and individual entrepreneurship woven into them. Even though all Americans enjoy benefits paid for by the state, from federal highways and product-safety rules to veterans’ pensions and food stamps, few Americans like to admit it.
Still, as Beth Blum has pointed out in “The Self-Help Compulsion” (2020), reading books for life advice is an ancient practice. Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics” can be read as a guide to virtuous living. (Like many of McHugh’s writers, Aristotle was only summing up the characteristics of people generally counted as virtuous in his time and place—that is, the eastern Mediterranean in the fourth century B.C. You want to be thought virtuous? Be like them.) Blum calls Boethius’ “The Consolation of Philosophy,” which was written in the sixth century, “bibliotherapy avant la lettre,” an idea that Alain de Botton, the leading contemporary bibliotherapist, acknowledges in the title of his 2000 book, “The Consolations of Philosophy.” People don’t generally describe the Bible as a how-to book, but it partly is—as is the Quran.
Books like these address a fundamental existential puzzle: although everyone knows what it means to be a dog or a honeybee, no one really knows what it means to be a human being. A honeybee flies out, collects pollen, and brings it back to the hive. Next day, it does everything all over again. The honeybee doesn’t ask itself, Is this all there is? But people do ask themselves that question. We think, This is my one shot at existence. Could I be doing it better? And there have always been other people eager to tell us (sometimes for a fee) how we could. Why shouldn’t we listen to them? We could pick up a helpful tweak. Whatever else we might want to say about the books in McHugh’s canon, millions of people have clearly found them empowering.
The most famous self-help book ever written is not American, however. It is Samuel Smiles’s “Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct,” and it was published in London in 1859. It was one of numerous “self-culture” books that appeared in England during the same period, and it defines success by enumerating the traits of successful people in the world of Smiles and his readers, the world of Victorian Britain.
“Self-Help” won the self-culture sweepstakes and became an international sensation, translated into many languages, including Arabic, Russian, Korean, and Persian. In Japan, samurai were reported to have waited in line all night for a copy. (Japan recently returned the favor with “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” by Marie Kondo, which has reconfigured closets across America.) Blum tells us that self-help books were popular in Nigeria and Ghana in the nineteen-fifties, and are widely read in China today.
To the extent that self-help and how-to genres flourish in modernizing societies, we could speculate that people consider them useful when they think that their fate is not determined by the accident of birth, when they believe that they can rise above their parents’ social station (or fall beneath it)—when people see life as a game of chutes and ladders. Since the United States was founded on the principle of “no aristocracy of birth,” which was supposed to distinguish the New World from the Old, it makes sense that how-to and self-help should be central to American life—and that a book about those books should be called “Americanon.”
It is no surprise, therefore, that McHugh’s chief criticism of her canon is that these books do not represent America, only a select portion of it. They are not inclusive. More pointedly, they are fake-inclusive. They are written as though anyone could profit from their advice, even though Americans are differently situated according to race, class, religion, immigration status, sexuality, and gender, and, for most of American history, those have been barriers that no amount of bootstrap pulling could overcome. Although she does not use the term, McHugh basically argues that her books represent the ideology of the Wasp ascendancy. They promulgate the values of what she calls the “white, Protestant, and physically and mentally fit.” They erase difference. They are mechanisms of assimilation.
She complains that “The Old Farmer’s Almanac” embodies “a rural nostalgia [that] is often male-centric and almost exclusively white.” Of “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” she says that “the power of outside influences—generational poverty, institutional racism, or even just bad luck—is suppressed by the Carnegie vision of America.” She calls Reuben’s “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex*” homophobic, and describes it as “a violent standardizing tool, much like some of the other books in this collection, penned by an author obsessed with ridding the country of difference.” McHugh ends her discussion of every book in her canon with this criticism, and the reader comes to approach those pages with dread, knowing that the mighty hammer of diversity will soon come crashing down. This is a very predictable book.
Still, who can argue with the thesis? Even if her books only reflect the unequal social dispensation out of which they arose, they also project that dispensation back. Within a world in which success was defined mainly in terms of what white male Protestants had achieved, and manners and mores mainly in terms of how middle-class heterosexuals behaved, these books can be read as telling their millions of readers, This is normal. Other ways of doing things are not.
The diversity critique is now ubiquitous, and there seem to be two approaches to dealing with it. One is to acknowledge the biases and prejudices of the times in which a book was written but to assume that we can hold our own values constant as we encounter minds from an earlier era. This is another way of acknowledging difference, with the recognition that some differences are not so desirable, but that differences from our own ways of thinking ought not to put a work on the Index of Forbidden Books. The other approach is more a (figuratively) “Ban the books” strategy. Just stop recirculating prejudice.
McHugh is a “Ban the books” person. Even Noah Webster and Betty Crocker, she thinks, are guilty of pretending that the way they and people like them pronounce words or cook dinner is the American way of doing those things. She argues that her writers do not merely ignore diversity; they actively seek to marginalize it and stamp it out. She believes, for example, that the definition of “immigrate” in the 1828 edition of Webster’s Dictionary as “to remove to a country for the purpose of permanent residence” has had the effect of stigmatizing the foreign-born.
Actually, the case of a dictionary or an etiquette manual is a lot simpler than, say, the case of a novel by William Faulkner. You can’t change Faulkner, but user manuals are built to be updated. Betty Crocker now has international cookbooks—not what McHugh has in mind, probably, but headed in the right direction. The online Merriam-Webster has pretty much the same definition of “immigrate” as the 1828 edition. But how else should it be defined? Should we just not have a word for this phenomenon? To the degree that the national consensus is now centered on diversity, and that the national consensus is “there should be no national consensus,” you would expect successful how-to and self-help books to reflect that.
One reason the “Americanon” books, and books like them, have been so popular in the United States may be that they fill a vacuum left by the absence of civic education, or what McHugh calls “civic religion”—that is, a widely understood account of the privileges and responsibilities that come with living in our version of a democracy. If you don’t have the Bible, which is civic religion enough for many Americans, there is not a lot of guidance out there. The Declaration of Independence, after a few inspiring sentences at the start, is just a list of grievances against George III. The Constitution is a rule book.
We tend to teach civics to schoolchildren by rote. When I was in school, in a relatively enlightened state in a relatively enlightened era, we had to recite, every morning, the Pledge of Allegiance (hands over hearts) and the Lord’s Prayer (heads bowed). We also all learned Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want”), and, in middle school, we were required to memorize the Gettysburg Address.
Those texts were made to appear to belong to some common fund of national faith, such that it was fitting that they be recited in unison. And they all sounded good. But I don’t think we had any coherent idea of what they meant, and I doubt they had much effect on our subsequent behavior as citizens.
I imagine that McHugh would think it’s fine that those texts were ineffectual means of socializing. She seems like a person who does not believe in creeds or canons. She prefers, she says, ambiguity and change to the myth of a unified national narrative. But ambiguity and change are just the keywords in a different narrative. The position that we should not want to make all Americans think alike has an exception, which is that we want all Americans to think that we should not want to make all Americans think alike. I would subscribe to that, but it is a creed. And diversity, too, has a canon. Betty Crocker is excluded. ♦
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