The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities

National Review, Nov 30, 1992 by Nicholas King

The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities, by Richard L. Bushman (Knopf, 304 pp., $40)

SOCIAL climbing through American history is a good idea for a book, an idea that occurred to Professor Richard Bushman of Columbia and produced this well-intentioned if over-long study. Americans have always wanted to improve themselves in the eyes of others, and it is this story, often humorous, sometimes cruel, but always instructive, that Bushman wishes to tell. He takes the reader firmly into the front parlor and presents it as the central moral and social dilemma of the nation, beginning in the eighteenth century (earlier there was neither time nor wealth to spare for putting On airs) to the mid nineteenth. The front parlor satisfied frontier pride by signifying the achievement of gentility, but at the same time its class-consciousness, for that was the reason behind it, undermined the society's commitment to egalitarianism. The book is densely written, with detail piled on detail, and yet Mr. Bushman often gives the impression that no one had ever read anything or thought anything about American society until he came along. Fanny [sic] Trollope, who wrote the book on early American social pretension, is hardly mentioned; Mark Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, the experts on American arrivisme, not at all.