seacoast. These he would observe in the earliest stage of
association, living under no law but that of nature.... He
would next find those on our frontiers in the pastoral state,
raising domestic animals to supply the defects of hunting,...
and so in his progress he would meet the gradual shades of
improving man until he would reach his, as yet, most improved
state in our seaport towns. This, in fact, is equivalent to a
survey, in time, of the progress of man from the infancy of
creation to the present day. And where this progress will stop
no one can say.^6
The idea of progress dominated American culture in the nineteenth century
and was still being celebrated in Chicago at the Century of Progress
Exposition in 1933. As recently as the 1950s, more was still assumed to be
better. Every midwestern town displayed civic pride in signs marking the city
limits: WELCOME TO DECATUR, ILLINOIS, POP. 65,000 AND
GROWING. Growth meant progress, and progress provided meaning, in some
basic but unthinking way. In Washington the secretary of commerce routinely
celebrated when our nation hit each new milestone—170,000,000,
185,000,000, etc.—on his “population clock.”^7 We boasted that America’s
marvelous economic system had given the United States “72 percent of the
world’s automobiles, 61 percent of the world’s telephones, and 92 percent of
the world’s bathtubs,” and all this with only 6 percent of the world’s
population.^8 The future looked brighter yet: most Americans believed their
children would inherit a better planet and enjoy fuller lives.
This is the America in which most textbook authors grew up and the
America they still try to sell to students today. Perhaps textbooks do not
question the notion that bigger is better because the idea of progress conforms
with the way Americans like to think about education: ameliorative, leading
step by step to opportunity for individuals and progress for the whole society.
The ideology of progress also provides hope for the future. Certainly most
Americans want to believe that their society has been, on balance, a boon and
not a curse to mankind and to the planet.^9 History textbooks go even further to
imply that simply by participating in society, Americans contribute to a nation
that is constantly progressing and remains the hope of the world. As Boorstin
and Kelley put it, near the end of A History of the United States, “Americans
—makers of something out of nothing—have delivered a new way of life to far