December 26, 2002

Plains Folk: Brokaw Book

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

Tom Brokaw says he is A Long Way from Home. That’s the title of his new memoir, published by Random House. It’s subtitled Growing Up in the American Heartland, because of course, he’s a South Dakota boy.

The viewing public knows Brokaw for his career as reporter and anchor for NBC News. The reading public knows him for his tribute to Americans of the World War II era, The Greatest Generation.

That previous work was enthusiastically received (and bought) by citizens but sometimes panned by reviewers. Some, especially academic types, said Brokaw pandered to the sentiments of senior citizens to sell books. What the reviewers resented was that this journalist had shown them up, had done too well what historians should do, else they lose their public.

In The Greatest Generation, Brokaw identifies what cultural historians call a "memory group" — in this case World War II veterans and their generational peers — hungry to have its story told, and he tells it. If he makes a bundle in royalties by filling the need for remembrance, then well and good.

My approach to the memoir is skeptical. I try to keep an open mind, but my suspicions are that the author is trading on his personal fame, counting on his name to woo buyers; that he is trading also on the image of the plains, on that vague hunger among Americans that somewhere in the middle of the continent there must be a heartland, where they would not want to live, oh no, but where someone is staying to keep the home fires of national virtue lit; and that Tom Brokaw has little to tell us about life on the plains.

Mostly my suspicions are confirmed, but you know, maybe that’s not a bad thing. Brokaw cannot tell us plains folk much we don’t know, other than the specific details of his situation, and he isn’t particularly profound in his commentary about the life he describes. Rather he is a sort of expatriate everyman. He speaks for a whole generation of plainspersons who departed in the direction of bright lights, generally made good, and then paused to think fondly of their prairie homes.

I know that many of you reading this column are doing so in suburban homes or studio apartments somewhere around Minneapolis or Denver or some such nexus, where you get the old hometown paper by mail. You will see yourselves in Brokaw’s book. If, on the other hand, you are reading in Souris or Glendive or Cottonwood Falls, you’ll see other people in the book. People you perhaps recently saw at a Christmas Eve service, or a funeral, or some such homecoming event.

As you look across the church or gymnasium or whatever is the venue of such encounter, and you see that old sweetheart now living in Rochester, or that old buddy now living in Overland Park, you may wonder what he or she is thinking. A Long Way from Home is where you can find out.

I’ll say this: Brokaw’s chapter "Boom Times," about the society associated with Pickstown and the construction of Fort Randall Dam, is worth the price of the book. The book moves from there into his high school years in Yankton, where he got his start in journalism.

It’s sort of interesting, too, to learn that despite his solid, working-class parentage, which he says gave him the values that governed his own life, Brokaw himself was an obnoxious snot as a youth. (The kind of guy we use to enjoy knocking down in high school, but now we have forgiven, almost.)

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, isern@plainsfolk.com
Editor: Rich Mattern, (701) 231-6136, richard.mattern@ndsu.nodak.edu 

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