A Brit Tries to Explain America
The Cracked Bell: America and the Afflictions of Liberty, by Tristram Riley-Smith, Skyhorse Publishing, 2010. $26.95, 337 pp.
The British civil servant Tristram Riley-Smith selects a peculiar frame through which to explore American religion: Halloween. His ambitious project, an anthropological account of America’s “descent,” begins with a lengthy discussion of the ghoulish October occasion. For Riley-Smith, the holiday is “the rich and complex cultural amalgam” that comprises religion in the States, a day on which “the Sacred and Profane, Ancient and Modern, Good and Evil mix, repel, and co-exist like so much oil, vinegar and mustard poured over the American salad.” It is through examples such as these that Riley-Smith continually undermines his project: in highlighting the banalities of life in the country (does Halloween really deserve all that capitalization?), he offers only bizarre caricatures. Instead of engaging in meaningful social analysis, The Cracked Bell loosely ties basic facts about U.S. history and society with bombastic, unsubstantiated claims, resulting in often strange misinterpretations of American life.
After the first few chapters of The Cracked Bell, it remains unclear what Riley-Smith’s work is attempting to accomplish. It is neither a comprehensive history nor a rigorous anthropological examination of American culture. Instead, it offers superficial ruminations on topics like American “identity” and “consumerism.” In the chapter on “identity,” for instance, Riley-Smith mostly explains elementary facts about America which even most U.K. citizens should know: all about the Native American reservation system, for instance, and Martin Luther King’s role in the civil rights movement. Instead of making a real argument, Riley-Smith closes his first chapter somewhat arbitrarily with the over-quoted passage from The Souls of Black Folk about the African-American experience of “double-consciousness.”
Nor do other chapters rise above the level of basic observation. The chapter on the concept of “frontier” merely tells a conventional history of how the West was won and describes our national obsession with cowboys. The essay on “freedom and conformity” is filled with statements as insightful as this one: “Americans are surprisingly knowledgeable about [Supreme Court cases] and historic judgments feature prominently in public discourse.” The lack of substance is conspicuous, especially given the bombastic ring of chapter titles like “The Temple of Trade – On Consumerism,” “The Lattice Constant – On Innovation and Enervation,” and “The Cicada’s Wing – On War, Peace, and Empire.”
The Cracked Bell is at its best when it reads like journalism rather than anthropology. Riley-Smith’s discussion of religious belief in the United States is perhaps his best (bizarre emphasis on Halloween aside). He describes the distinctive qualities of religious practice in this country, including the incredible popularity of mega-churches and the widespread rejection of evolution. Interesting tidbits appear in other sections as well, including the one on identity. Who knew that “ghetto existence extends to U.S. aircraft carriers,” the population of which is 75 percent black, or that “there are areas on the ships where no white officer would dare to tread”? And Harvard readers will enjoy Riley-Smith’s constant references to our fair college: he mentions the founding of Facebook, the fall of Larry Summers, the Harvard days of President Obama, and John Rawls’s quest for a theory of justice.
Yet the disorganized, rambling nature of the book ultimately overwhelms the interesting little treats it offers. In his chapter on innovation, Riley-Smith breezes through brief biographies of Thomas Edison and Mark Zuckerberg, highlights the massive number of U.S. patents applied for and granted every year, and chronicles the history of 4-H Clubs, but without any identifiable structure or argumentative trajectory. Worst of all, he often completely misses his mark, misidentifying basic attributes of American culture. For instance, in his chapter on entrepreneurship, Riley-Smith discusses at great length the impact of Greek organizations on business and government, depicting fraternities and sororities as social networks for future rulers of the nation. That might be true enough, but his central piece of evidence is the widespread membership in one particular “Greek” organization: Phi Beta Kappa.
Ironically, The Cracked Bell suffers from one of the characteristics the author assigns to Americans: overzealousness. In an attempt to interpret the whole of our national culture, Riley-Smith conspicuously flounders among an overwhelming amount of information. His effort to weave together patches of American history, custom, and heritage fails to coalesce into a coherent portrayal. Of course, perhaps Riley-Smith is not to blame. Ideally he might have offered a critical outsiders’ perspective. But in an age of instant news and American cultural empire, perhaps no one is really an outsider here anymore.
Paul Mathis ’12 is a Staff Writer.