Kit Candlin on Zeff Eleff *The Greatest of All Time: A History of an American Obsession*

Written by a prominent scholar of Jewish American history and the current president Gratz College, Zeff Eleff, The Greatest of all Time attempts to chart the concept of ‘greatness’ as it developed broadly across the United States in the twentieth century. Eleff’s research underscores the variable and often competing ways that this idea was conceived in this period. As a central premise, interrogating what Americans thought was “great” across a wide temporal frame is a novel and potentially useful idea. What is considered great can serve as an illuminating device for exploring the vicissitudes of the United States in the twentieth century and Eleff is to be commended for identifying this nebulous concept as one worth exploring and using to highlight American society. In this work context is the key element and each of the five chapters of the book highlights, in a loose framing, different moments in US history to demonstrate the commonalities but more often the contestations over what Americans thought was great. While every chapter was essentially a ‘compare and contrast’, the work does an admirable job of painting the often-fluctuating fortunes of luminaries and tying that history into the times.

Both in its conceptualization and in its structure, however, the book is deeply flawed. For a book that is supposedly predicated on the idea of identifying nuance and change, it is bizarrely, and anachronistically, far too generalist, assumptive and static in fatal ways. This is odd for a scholar who is a recognized leader and advocate for pluralism in American life, education and government. The research that underpins this history is similarly narrow and all too often taken uncritically, at face value. While the book does shed some illuminating light on several contentions in the history of American fame and notoriety and in little known aspects to some people’s lives, the result is too flawed to be of any profound use.

While focusing on change, the basic model used by the author to denote ‘Americans’ never changes. The ‘American people’ are, from the start, an undifferentiated mass. As the writing unfolds it becomes increasingly clear that this term ‘American people’ and others like it such as ‘public opinion’, are used, for the most part, to describe the views of white, middle class Protestant men. Moreover, a book that sells itself as a study of ‘Americans’ that does not cover women in any real specificity throughout is not just suffering from a masculine bias however but one that is old fashioned, ahistorical and contributing to female erasure. When we do get a discussion of women (almost as if it is the token moment) it is not even a full chapter and it concerns two elite women, Eleanor Roosevelt and Jane Addams almost entirely from the perspective of the male gaze. This omission is made more offensive when chapter five casually refers to the differing opinions of seventies American women and what they considered great without any exploration at all. Despite this admission that (white) women preferred such individuals as Kathryn Hepburn, Mary Tyler Moore and BJ King, Eleff is not persuaded to go back and reappraise his totalizing view as to what “Americans” thought. Presumably to this author white Protestant middle class women thought the same as their husbands, even though, as this tid bit indicates, they clearly did not.  Given that Protestant women were (and remain) the largest group in America, the totalizing masculine bias of this work is astounding. Even if one were to argue (incorrectly) that men ran everything and dominated public space, this book’s focus is not that. The book is about ordinary people and what they thought not those that may have dominated public space or the archive. There is no attempt to differentiate therefore even between genders, let alone all the other groups that make up this multifarious nation. The clichés continued in the last two chapters of the work with a tired discussion of black male American sports stars and for the most part what ‘white males’ thought of them.

The motto for the United States is “from many we are one” but to any visitor this is not the case. The United States is a clearly a nation of difference and one made up of a vast array of peoples from all backgrounds and ethnicities. Moreover, the nation is not just divided by ethnicity but by economics, class and location as well. Even if the point was to stress a uniformity among some groups over the legacy of certain individuals, the author could not do that because the basic premise is too generalist. Similarly, the author assumes much from a narrow field of evidence. While these surveys, polls and votes are key to this debate, we get no real critique of who was filling out this data or who was canvassed or where. We get no appreciation of the fact that a rural Hispanic farm worker in Texas may have had a different conception of greatness at any given time to say, an urban seamstress in New York from the African American community. There is, in short, nuance in the appreciation of the way greatness changed and what may have influenced that change but connecting that effectively to the broad array of peoples within America is not attempted. I was left asking who are the “Americans” and the “American people” that this book refers to?

Part of the problem is also structural. In the first place, while purporting to start at the twentieth century, the book spends a lot of word count at the beginning and again later, discussing the post-civil war era (while making very little reference to ongoing north/south divisions or those of race). There is much discussion with the relative greatness of luminaries such as Robert Lee or E.A Poe even Mark Twain, later there is talk of Washington and Lincoln. This begs the question though why was there not a chapter that dealt with the founding of the nation before this? The chapters are also overly long and try to do too much. A smaller word count for each and therefore more chapters overall, may have allowed for a more variable discussion about difference in American society than the masculinized and lobsided view on offer.

Despite these flaws this book is extremely well written in modern, accessible, lively prose. There is, in addition, much detail and intelligent reflection on the fluctuating biographies of many famous American luminaries and contrasting between them is a very effective way to demonstrate difference. The book helps to open a door to understand the vagaries and changeability of many words and phrases that are often taken for granted as static and immovable. The book therefore holds value in what it suggests. In so doing the work causes one to think more about the mutable nature of America in relation to these concepts. Ultimately however, the lack of women across this book, the lack of appreciation of difference in the American people, the anachronistic framing of this subject and the failure to understand the nation from anything other than a white male gaze cloud and diminish the potential of this work.