Nocking Door-to-Door

Dwight Macdonald, in his influential shoestring little-monthly (later quarterly; 1944-1949) politics for April, 1945, in a short item in the "Popular Culture" roundup:

Whatever Became of Addison Sims?

The kind of question it might be fruitful to answer is: why was self-education so much more popular several generations ago than it seems to be now? Pelmanism, Chatauqua, the Harvard Classics ("Fifteen Minutes a Day"), the International Correspondence Schools, the Roth Memory Course ("Why of course I remember you--Mr. Addison Sims of Seattle!"), 

Cooper Union--these have become innocent archaisms. At the turn of the century, book agents roamed the country ringing doorbells and selling sets of "standard authors" (Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot) encyclopedias and multi-volume historical works. The book-agent has vanished; people read for amusement, not instruction, and authors are no longer "standard" or sold in sets. Does all this perhaps show the growth of a popular instinct that education is not the golden key to progress which the Victorians thought it was? Is the myth of the self-made man fading? Is the modern world at once so irrational and so totally organized that the mass-man simply gives up, no longer hoping to understand or "improve" his situation?

A study of self-education in the last fifty years might be a good way to answer such questions--as Orwell in his "Ethics of the Detective Story" (POLITICS, November 1944) was able to trace in that field the deterioration of ethical standards during the same period. I can't help feeling that American critics might more profitably concern themselves with such rich and relatively unexplored areas than with trying to find something new to say about Henry James.

The item by Macdonald directly below, on the research by Leo Lowenthal into the shift 1901-1941 in the subjects of biographies in the popular magazines, from "idols of production" (political leaders, inventors, scientists, business founders, artists) to "idols of consumption" (movie stars, ball players, oddball political figures of the third rank), is quite suggestive also.