American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the Twentieth Century

ALSO

B Y ,MICILAEL,

KA,MhtilES

I??the P ~ JIdme: T EXmr-cnl fi~rpernreson A.pr,e?-tcn'~z Cultare (1997) TI?eLlrc~rjl? ilrrs: Gr/bel-;t.,5"el~Ie.crrrzll tl~eTra~?~fir-murion ofC"ultidri,l Cd':r-iirt:-tmzm rhe U P ~ IStates U ~ ((I996) hfcfidnw.r of2\/ier~ogt:1rtt~ge.r9f"Iir~ze mtld Yhdttlon ~ r A@?err~*un z Art a ~ i dC:u/tu?-c* (I 992)

~My.~tlc Char-dr orJ".iI4nrfu?~f: "IBe %zr~~fb~nzartal? g'"Ir11~ilt~oe 171Amencgr? Cfklture(1991) S~ifer-er~g~~g uzd 1,zberq: IA':071.etrrltlon,cl/Disc*ozlrr-scrm i4mer-t~v:ri.1? Ca'ultidfae{I 988) Selv11~gesund Bzms: 777e Fi~brzc~ ~ ~ I I -211~rlrn~~tc1In o P J ? Czrlti~rtv(I 987) ~1d1./I16~178?~c 7'blrr bfi5uId I';o oJJXtse@i Tbe C:crrz.dziirldszorz !a~1~~evrcun GIEII~NT-~ (1986) Spbel-esOJ'J,1l7eqv: CI~/a~tg~lg Per-t-eprz~r?~~ o_('l,zberqm ilrner*t~v:urz Cglflkre(r $36) A ,?eflzon oJ'YOarh: 73e Ar~?er.tc@l? Retolutzorr irnd the Ilz+fto?rcn/ Imag~?zrftzorr (I 978) G"o/onmd=\lea?Erk: ~1Xlrsrory

(I 97 5 )

People nJ'P~~rifdox: '4~1brgulfy T,'"cnz(.c;.r-ttt~zg c?~eO~tgfmz $AIPIIL"~IL.~IZZ Ctz*t/tzatmfz(X 97 2) Erq~treund ITZ~LTCA?: "I7e A@?r~tcn?? Colorrzesand the 1Uolztzc.f of l'c.fer.mntl/.~ (I 976)

Ctepu9e.r & Lzl~eqres:T?>e0rtgr;trs!fRepr-;r;enr@reC;ozjenzr~mr rrz GirlonmlA~~evrcu (19691 A Rope oJSS@rzd: TI?eCot~rzlalAgents, Bmttsh Polttt~~> crnd the iilmet-z~-~ln Reifol;~ltmn ( 1 968)

The Or-tgrr~sd'tbe R~ttevrc~z~~ dirrz.dziirldsror7: R Dot,ullr,e.~lrtzq Xltstory (1986) TI?ePan Bejb~-eUs: C"cnztt#~t~u~-@~y FIE~~~P-~L~:UI Wf-lttqg1'11 E ? IC'rrlted ~ ,Trare.s (19 Ro) Wbnt l r the Good yf'Ift.t~ory?"k?e/cz~t~d Lattcrs $Cnrl L. B~pi-ker;rgarr--ryq5 (I 97 3 )

"

The EXmr3t q'tl~eProorace d'hh?-lT"orkf bjt jlizEll@~?f Smzrb,,jk (1972) TI?eC~t?fl~upurntul Cd'zz~tttzixnor?: F:crq~~-;rOwn7-(!11 .VL"U* C'~z~l~*f:n111?dz~tg $the ~ilmet-z~-~l~z Exper~tt~zt-e (1 97 I) PO(ltf~:r ~12dk?o~-zetjt Co/o?~~fzlA@?r~tcn: L ) ~ ? P I o c ~ "QT ~ ID$ir-enl-e" L~

I 967)

Arnerican Culture American Tastes

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erican Cu erican Tastes Change and the 20th Century

i"t1 rigllts reserved. Printed in the Ij'liited States of ihlcrica.

No part of diis book may be rc~)roduccdin any rrlanner tvhasoevcr without wrinen perrrzission except in the case of brief quotations err~badicdin critical articles and rwiews. Fcrr inf~jnr~alion, address Basic Books, 10 East 53rd Street, Sew Xki,rk,S'li 10022-5299. First printed in 19999 by ,Ufred A. f(nopf, Inc.

Kamtnen, ,Z'LichacIC;. ibr~ericancutfirre, ik~lcricantastes: social change and the t\vencieth century / ,jlichaet Karmnen. 13.

C"'.

Iacltrdes index. ISBS 0-46 5-03729-1 I. U~iitcdS~tcs-SociaI life and cttstctrr~s-zot11 century. 2 , 1301mu).ar culture--Unit& S t a t e s 4 iistory- 20th century. 3. Social cliange-Utsited S t a t e s - H i s t o ~ y - century. 4. ~icsthetics-Social aspect:s-United States-EIistory- 20th cencurlr, 5 . Gonstu.1-rptior-r(Econonlics)-SociaI aspectsUnited States-I Iistory- zot11 cenmty. I. 'I'itfe. ~ 1 6 9 . 0 45. ~ ~ 1999 3oCt'.a973'090~- clczr 98-43155 GIP

Manufacn~wlin the Cnited States of America

Love cr3nsis.rtiin &is, &at two soiitudes protect ancl tc~uch, and greet each other.

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Contents ...

Xlll

Selective Chm.rlology

mi

3 27

d"srzsrk~&c~-i~%r, AmeraciJrla'sn, artd the 12br1sii.lg P~pgknrC~tlturc:

of

R l ~ ~ ~ ithe p t gRullrrilirries Bemeen 7;lsteLeuelr Cf/lttii*tzlC~-itici3'nfnrld the Ptzngb~wnntion ~f CztlttarnlAtithority The Grgdz~filEmeryence ofq~Wg.r.rCrlltnre asd i t 3 Critics ,Mass Ct-~lttrre in ,Itfop-eRecent Tiw/e.c: Prkssive

izntli$v Pa.~lricipatury? Hi~~o!-i&?ts a.nd the 12roblemof fl-"tpularCfdlftire hr Kerrent Tir~~es Mreti~lgsofihr iMiads? Moving Bqjo~dCl~.smnt~~y Cijrte~%)r-ies Appendix: ~ ( L F H ~ Oopt S ~ Tzpe~ttieth-CICpitr~ G PCI-C~~~~OPJS nfCulru9-e i z tbe U~rit~.d Sttzttl~

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Illustrations I. Grzey I~-LgndBe~zcb(1935) by Regisiinald Nfarsh (etclrind, 7'he \Rltiam Belltoll hfuseusn of Art, 'l'he Ilrriversity of Connecticut, Storrs, Col-rn,Gift of I le1ex-rBerltoll Boley, 23 2. H. L, i"1.rencke~zand George Jeun Natban (1947) by Imix-rg Pcx-rn (pIi1tinum-p3lladium print). I/npe, Febrrrary r, 1g48, Portrait (mtlery? Smithsonian Inslitucion. Cl;ift of Itvitlg Penn, Courtesy Vope. C:a~"yrigltrt O 1948 (re~zewed1976) by Cond@Nast i)u1>lications, fnc, 39

3. E ~ e s d ~Eue~zi~zg y g t be ,5"~voy B~~ll~-oo.nr (1 9 3 0 ) by Reginald Marsh (tempera on panel), Rose Art Lliluseum,Brandeis Universiy, %%Taltbam, 79 Llilass.C2ft of tlre f Zcsnorabte mTilliarnBenton, New York.

4.. KIISSFIILynes (I 949). Vatc Caltcctioxl of American Literacure, Beineckc Rare R w k and Manuscript Libraw Vale Lii~iversi~); New 1Saver-r,Conn, 96 P .

5. lasre-level chart drawn by Plhm Funk for L$ magazine, April I, Gourtesj~ of ?bm Funk. 98-99 6 , iilrtzlr"~Es~-gnij~r.i (I 939) by 1Icrbel-t Ckhr (gelatin silrrer print), Natiox-ral Portrait Gallery?Smithsonran Jtlstitutiox-r. 112

7. Edw~'B"dL. Beg-rzfr_y(1984) by Patri-zda 7;te (oil on canvas), National Portrait C;altery, SmithsarGarir tastirution. Gift of kchard t linds, E 12 8, Jeanne Ckordon of the Nfetropolitas~Opera crowning Paul %%fliternan as the "King of Jazz" in r 926. From Paul k%%iternan, Jazz (hTewb r k : j. E 1. Sears & Companj~~ 19261, p. 206. E 14

9, Bcm~ry(;oo117~11~1?il (1960) by Rent2 Robert Bortchtir:(oil on canvas). National T30rtrait C"rllery9 Smithsonian Institu~iion, Gift of Benji C;oodma~~ Lasseau and Rachel C;oodman Edelsan. E 15 10. Tgstc-level chart from The A ~ Z KepuhIic? L~ &)larchz, 1992, p, 26, C:orzrtcv of Tdd Friend. 127 t-

*

Iaste-level clrart from Tbe U&e Kegde4 Sept.-Oct. Courtesy of "E'ad Iirie~zd. I I,

12 .

I 992, p.

83. 128

H. L. LWkf~cke~ ( I 949) t9y At Hirsctt felci (hrc~rracheon I~oarcii).

Natior-rat 130rtrait Gallery, Smithsonian 1tlstitutlox-r. C c ~ z r t c vof A1 1Iirsclrfeld. I44

13- H o l I p ~ ~ d ( r g 3l7~) "E'homas y I: Tart Bexirton (tempera with oil on cai~vas),'f'fie Nelson-Atkns hfuseuxn of Art, Ka~~sas City, hfissouri (bequest af the artist), 63 '1: H. Bes-rton and R. P, Bcr-rton 'res~amcr-reav Tmsts/Lices-rscd by VAGA, New York, N,V, S4

14, The LWew Eievis~r,Set (I 949) by hT<3rmanRockwell (oil on canvas). ,Ygnrrdny E v e ~ ~ i k ~ g cover, November 5, I 94.9. L a h l g e l e s Count17 hfuseuxn af Art, gift of Mrs. Ned Crowell. 184 15. A n ~ bWarbol(x975) by James Browning Wyetk (gouache and pcllcil on paper)-),hTational Pcrrtrait C;atlery9 Smirhsoniarn Institution, I92 Gift of C:oe-Kerr Chlleq,

I g 1 . s ~&louse says to (>ffisa Pup: Ig~arz'samt>idonsga befic1nd the mere flat ccl~r~ic strip: the inuicate plot of Kr~tz-yhit enccllrlpasses fgnatrds citiabolicaily contrik~edefforts to aanscend &c fiiimiliar two dimensic>ns,h e l a d y Aadanril of poprdar culture, and stain to &e rorxndness of high art. X p a a explains his intendons to (Iftisa Pup: ""Like other iininig~intsaal~rilh e i r children . . . Xknlready to give America a hig Chanrrkatl-tpresent: back-a new ixnage of the self. Brrt. this ti~newhy lock orxrselvcs up in the pop-calmre ghettc;l".$Ihy not strut uptown to the mansion of high art, of roundness, 2nd say &at or~rgift tro Amel-ica codd rank with Eugene 0Weill"sr Llienry JarlsesS? a traily de7iiucrgfic high art. America needs the America ~~eells rc>unrilcon~lcseip!"

\&Yi&out.wadition there can be no taste, and what is worse, there can be little for taste to act upon.

Good taste citoes pay off, wirhorxt. any question, l---

l a r y Sclzel-xnan, fox~nderof the Book-of-trl1e-,2.1011th Club (1926)~ reinilliscing in I

\&Yeneed to recovcr the hisrorjr of the concept of ""popular crrle of cermin sorts of ture." We have tc1 understand d ~ ori&ns judgexnents about. poptxlar axlt-c~sc:as cjebased, as bast-ion of authendci~,or as irrelevant. 15%have to see poprdar culture in its fristclrically shi%x>grelation to dorrlinant cuitrzral forms, in order to avoid the tcmptatian to rlatlrrafize e;iiistiag social arlcf cuttural relations. Allow all, we must not tose sight of the fact that: poptxlar crrlnrrc matltrcrs: it has clearly mattered to those who have sought to cIassi$ it or tc1 control it. --&Torag Shiach, 1Jiscuur.se 011 12aj?at.llur(;"zrlf~~,-c j r 989)

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Introduction This book is essendally an extended essay about chntlging views of teisure and h e r i c a n preferences coi-rcerningits growing array of uses. tt also exa&nes perceptioi-rsof popular and mass culture in tile United cfifSates during the past cenmty 'Tl>opularna d u ~ ~ ahsa w ~ meant " fcrent things to diEerent people at ififferent times, hcrweveo; so quite understandably the terms have commonly tleen interchanged and confused, often because they have not been viewed carefully in histctrical coiltext, Such casual usage has been encouraged by aur eyuaitly loose and accasianafly frivolous invocaGox~sof highbrow, middlebrow, a11d t w b t - o those ~ ~ ~ all-tau-t'amiliar yet elastic categories of cultural taste that have sometimes been apptied with excessive (tncax-ringundcxnonstrable) precision, but at otl-rer times with reckless (meaning unreliable) caprice. Just ask ten educated hiends to differenriate bemeen popular and mass cuft-ure, I predict that you wilt receive ten Gairfy dbergent answers, and fcw of them will be historically informed,' Afthctngh the author of this project is a practicing hise~rian,we will not prcrceed decade by decade, or even gc-eneration by generation, wlriclr would ke meehallical and perlraps lethal, Change over time matters immensely, and it must receive due attention, (IIenee tlre Selec~ve C h r o i - r a t a ~of la~~dmarks in popular culture immediately following this t~ztroductiox~.) But the arga~~izational scheme that follows is &;Idamentaf ly topical within a flcxit~lechronological framework. M y ? First, because this is an i nqrriry concerning the pmbkrn of popular culture and its cc>lltestedmeailings rather tlran a comprehensive histoq of popular culture, And second, because I can develop my assertic~ns more ctearty and economicaify ti~rougha ti~ematicapproach rather than a strictly sequentiaf one. Atthough the book contains episodes, it: is not a narradve, Rather, it is meant to t9c an explanation ofr-rumerous narratives Or accawltS that readers may afrea* have eneonntere& many of them, because of their apg-rarentimplications, contradicatr?y: I eta, trctwever, rake up my topics with t1II's s a i d logic: they appear in the approximate arder af their historical salience, that is, when they

re~ectivelybegan to influence or affect h e r i c a n untlerstanding oP taste levels and their rote in mentieth-centuq leisure and desire. Chapter 2 , therefore, will be devoted ta the hesitaxirt, colzflicted search for a compelling rationale for leisure pursuits appropriate in a democratic culture with a very str013g work ethic, a radox-ralc that could achieve .nridesprea$ appeal without I9eing tainted by charges of coarseness or degradation-a quest most uisikjle during the early decades of the mentieth centrt7, but especially iis the 1920s. Ghapter 3 concerns commerciafizatim aiird cultural consu~nerism,aiir importra~ztptlenomeIzan from the t-urn af the century that has intensified apace ever since, That chaptem.c\-illalso cake note of the retationship t9emcen poptrialculture and national identitgr, a x-rems that invt~jvcdshiftil-rg attit-udes toward Old nTc]rldct~lruresas well as reconsideratiorns and appropriations from the American past, particularly during the years from around xgaa ti~roughN70rld N7ar X I , Chapter 4, seeks to locate and define pas-traditia~zd, comznercialixed ptrplttar ~ v t t u r eduring its most effenresccnt and prtrminent period, the late nineteenth and first hatf of the t-uventieth c c n m q with particular esnphasis upon its interactive and p a r t i c i t qualities and the culture of c e l e b r i ~that esnerged between the m o world wars. Chapter 5 explores the gradual l~lurringof traditiaxzal boundaries l~etweerztaste Ievels-the loss af meaning and the evenmat irrelevance ctf strictly defined ctlitural strata correlated in pecrplc's minds with class, educatiox-r, and degrees c~faffiue~-rce-mainly aker micJcet~tuv. Chapter A will look at two distinct barometers of ambivalence and contesation: tlre Cheat I2el-tate about mass cultrxre that donrinated the x y~os,and public aplnian palldrom the E 940s ti~roughthe 1970s concerning attitudes toward the uses of leisure aiird toward popular as well as mass cr;liture, 'T"hat chapter also exnphasixes the decline of cvtmrai allthclrir~rlespeciaily that held by critics, in the later mentieth centuv, and tlre increasing importmce of cultural power, usually sustaiised by We will corl1or"e capital rather tlran by valczrized critical autbrzri.;itr~. wit~zessthe rise aiird decline af respected cuft-ural expertise bemeen the x y zos and the 1980s. Chapter 7 looks at what 1perceive as the emergcllcc of ""ptrto-mass cdture" during the irttewar years, foliowed t9y the first problematic phase of r~verlaioand fuzziness in marks of difference between popular and mass culture, circa 1930-60, (C:hronolctgtcal distissctions made throughout tile boolc are only meant to be suggestive in order to clarify

the inevitabte messiness of strclr overlaps, 7'hey are plot i ~ ~ t e ~ l dtoe be tl a new gospel or precise gauge of historical measuremalt,) tn chapter X 1 describe and define mass cultare as we L~avelcxzown it in our awn time, "Ehe persistence of popular by which 1rnear-r since the 1960s and 70s. culture as a recogr-rizable reaim wili not he ignored, however, and areas c~fintersection or convergex-rccmust t9e ackx~c~wledgecf~ Clrapter g exarnirzes the curious and sornetisnes dif-iict~ltrelationship bemeen historians and poloular as well as mass culture, mainly since the 1y8os, and does so using two case studies: Ken Burs-rs's television doclurnentary The Ciuii War (1990) and the lkfuseum af A$odern An5 extremely conn-oversial exhjbition High & Lv;;L~: &Vodei"~~ Art il8~II Poprtlgr C~~lt&re ( 1 ~ ~ - ) v rFir-ratiy, ). chapter r o seeks to p ~ d these i various strands together by ciiscussing the cjngoing prevalence of ct~lrural alnt~igrritiesand contestation in recent years; by making brief cornpal.-isor-rs with trer-rds averseas; and 197 assessing same rather apocalyptic cfaims quite recently asserted about the cor-rditiar-raf hnerican culture at the close of the century; For severat decades starting in the sixties, x-rumerousschc~larson the left sought to redefine the interactive relationslrip bemeen high and popular culture, out of a desire to demonstrate the cultt~ralautonomy and widening influexzce of taste preferer-rcesarnaltg working-class peaple. Depictions of the lifesyles of ordinary folk went Eron? s-rcariy nonexistent or else tri.iiaiized to "subnitern," or at least quire separate in their origins and evotiltion, More d p ~ a m i cand ctsmplex theories, influenced by studies of European culture, stressed that ""so-called high ctrlture has been and will continue to be renewed from below>just as popular or even rnass cuft-ure derives much of its ex-rcrgies from above, The boundaries shift and dissolve, the categories harder1 and sof%ex-r.'?2 f am in frlfi agxement with that, att-hough &e "isrmer (impact from the buttorn up) is more difficult to demonstrate than the latter: It can be done, however-the iMoim exhibition High & LW being a case in paint, A large nurnber of art critics found fault-with it for myriad reasons, tjut the kriewing pul~lic,by and large, liked it and learned a great &a1 from it, Kirk Varnedoe, tire curator, ar-rticipateif controversy but held fast to his ctsil.victions and survived a firestorm. "The relationsirip of high art to mass culnrre," he dectaretl, "is sme of the great subjects crucial to what made moder11 art modern," "7"t-rinspiration for the sfrow had bee11an article by Adam C;oprink, a writer for The Me?;. &~-Keq

showing the influence of cartoons and cal-icntrtre on Iqcassot.; portrairs bewee11 1905 and 1912 . 3 '1'Ke critics\ultixnate complaint, Ezowevem; was that "the promised cirmity of exchange between art and popular culture is sfrown to go one way only: from IOW to 11jgIr.'" Although this objection was exaggcrat"d, perhaps hmectoe ar~dC;opni had cmrcompemat"d because fc~rs s lczng it has been much easier (or at least far more common) to krnonstrate patterns of "trickle down" rather than graviq-de+ing pulsatio~~s of ""fiter up." "'f'lze basic point, of course, is that the Bow l~etweenc u l ~ ~ rtaste a l levels is not usindirectional. Ratl~er,it is a process af interactiot~,and sometimes more tike the continr~ousactiot~of a circwjt. Be that 3s it may; I feel a certain envy for writers who describe 2nd explain ctrlmral phenomena at a particular taste level, whetl-rer it be h i g l ~ lcerebral, j~ avant-g~rdc,middlebrow, or mass Not that theirs is arir easy task, by ary xneaIls, but it is somewhat less coxnplicated, perhaps, than presenting a stcsy of 13emeakility; where categories casuatly interpenetrate ar-rcf conventional lines of stratification collapse into one another. 'f'tte history of cultural taste levels in the mentierh centuy l-ras increasilsgly been one of fluidiv, blending, and the atte~zdantt~lurringof boundaries, Because that is one of the cerztral propositions of this book, it warrants some advarirce ~zatieehere, particularty as a preview for chapter 5 betow. At the turn of the cenatry Georgc h m a n Kittredge, a prestigious Shakespearean scholar and folklorist at ICIarvard, observed that educated h e s c a n s jumped back and forth from the "karned" fire the ""popufa~;"a ssentime~-rt: ecl~oedl14r I: 1. L. ;Mencker-r a generado11later. In 1937 poet and p l a ~ r i g h tkchibald ~MacLeishmade a determined eflort to use radio as a bridge between high anif pop~llarculture, His play The pal! offhe civ (1 937 ) called upot~serious wri ters to recogrIi ze the cult~rralreach and possibilities of radio, T h e art of Thomas IIart Bellton egeccively and indissolubly integrated folk, high,and popular traditions, Car-rsequentty, an O m ~ ~ i b utelek$ision s program in 1953 explicitly presexzted Be~zton+paintings as a hsios-r of cuItural levels. h d h r more than a decatfe sarting in 1964, S u a n Sorlmg insisted that pemeptio~~ls of a gulf exisring between high ar-rct IOW art arcre iilusoy, 'f'he emergence of new metlia exernpItfieti ""not a conAict of cultures but the creation of 3 new kind of: sensibilit-y which is defiantly pluratiseic and dedicated 110th ta excmciadng serialxsr-ressand to h n , wit, and ~lastaigia."""

P .

1his book seeks to explain lrow that kind of cult~~raf, pluralism came about and to describe some of its implications as a bistc;lricalprocess, I will devote particular attentiarir ta the major sources olculmral authority3such as critics, and their increasingly corir8iceed relationstrip with such as corporate sponsors and major repositories of culmrat pc~~i\'it.r, media executives. T h e c.)~-rce delicate tralar-rce bemeen these two forces hns been marketlly altered in the past three decades?thereby rendering l-crmy of the generaf,izac.ionsin the best of our atlalyses reductive and misleading. IIere is arir emmple from a pioxleering study that l~efongs to the same genre of inquiry as the preserirt work: ""Vople pay much fess aftention to the rnccfia," wrote the sociolc~$st FSerbcrt J. Gans in r 97% '%arsd are much fess swayed by its content than the critics, who are highly sensitive to verbal and other symbc~licmaterials, believe. * I hey [ordinary per~ple]use the media for diversion and would nor think of appI$ng its ronterirt to their own liveseH7A wide range of ~zatio~ial opix-rian studies made in the 1970s (emmined in chapters 7 and 8 t>elc~vrr), however, fforcehltg cot-rtradictssuch assertions. Ai~tef+ican72irs"tlr~.wilt conUltimatel!~, 1 hc~pcthat Artre,-iic~z~C'l~Itrlre, vey to readers a sense of the swikly expanded meanings and perceptions of ""eulmre" in m e n t i t - c e n t h ~ e r i c a ,Back in 1914 the young NTglterLippmann, already a precocious pundit, oFFered a warking defixli~onthat seemed remarkably inclusive for the time: t-

Culture i s the x-ramc for what pec~pleare ix-rtcrested ix-r, their rhougks, their moitels, the bcmks they read a d rhe speeches rhey hear, their table-rdk, gossip, conwoversies, hisrrtrical sense and scierirtil-ic training, the values they appreciate, the cluality of life they admire, M l co uriities have a cult-ure, It is the cfirnate of their civitizatiion." Nfuch of the swift and moving drama of moder11Al~ericanculrural history can be found in the mj~iad.ways in which that description has perbrce become even Inore expansive in recerzt decades-and has geIzerated a disparate l~odyof writings from students in xnariry disciplines a d from I~eyondthe walls of academe as arcll, I have &awn quite heavily upon that literature: trorrowing and agreeing in some areas, skeptical and offering dternative exptanatictns elsewhere. I have relied a great deal upon public opinion palts concerning aspects of h e r i c a n culture, ~zotbecause the polls are so acmrate-indeed, they xnaririfest Izumerous co~ztradictiozzs-but: l~ecausethey supply such aburirdant etpi-

dence of variabte pubtic perceptions of h e s c a n culture and leisure, wlricb is the core subject of this essay. Atmost a cluarter of a centurq. ago tile British cufmral critic Raymond Willii~~ns reminded us that the word-cor-rcept ""cuft-ure" has undergone severat major si-riksin meaning over ti-rc past half a niiilenniurn, Its most common usitgc during the last centlrry-as an abstract noun referring m music, literat~ire,painting and sculpture, theater and film, and so forth-dates only from the later nineteentlr centuy and emerged in the wake of discussions prompted by hfatthew Arr-rold's C"zlkurenrzd Ajlzd~cky(I 867). Anold associated culture with authoriv. Doing so seemed inescapahic t-cl him because hc regarded culture as "'a priftciple of authorirq:, to ccJunttlract the tendency to anarchy" k%f?lliarnsadded, moreover, that the adjective "cultura19\eems to date fri-rtm the 1870s and only became common during the ~Sgos,h \Rlliams observed, '"he word is only akrailable, in its moder11 sense, when the indcpender-rt noun, in the artistic and iatellecelxal or anthropolct&at sex-rscs, has become familiar," He added that kostiliq to the word "~xltllre'~ appears to date from the contr-o-versy prr~vokedby Arnoldg views." In sum, Arneric~;lrCfdltwre,Anze~-icx~.it X z ~ is a written in response to an enorxnaus (and cor-rstantly growing) corpus of writing that has appeared in recer-rtyears about taste levels, cultural stratificatiion, and a process of ""ibrmatization'2itl the United States,'" 'rhe creators of that corpus, ncedcss to say, arc usualiy a d inhmmed and thoughttitl. Some of their work is outdated, lrr~wever,in part because it was alristorical to begin with-obfivious to colnplex changes wrought by tirne. Aspectmf their work suffer from being excessivefy prese~zt-minded, But in additior-r, swift and unexpected derrefopments during the past decade or so have made their conclusiox-rsnlinerable for reasons they could not readily have anricipated. Thc passage of tirne wilt undoubtedly wreak havoc with my own interprewdons, too, yet I indulge a Cfdlttire, conceit that the l-ristorical perspective informing Arne~icir~.it Americlan) Estes may slrppfy it with some staj~ingpower. Although it is palenvcal in places, it is not meant to be a tract for our ti~nes,Rather, it is ix-rtcx-rdedto serve simultanemzsiy as a wrapan~ur~d window and as a rearvlcw mirrc~r,as wcll as an ancillav side mirrof; to assist thme who need to neptiate tlre confusilsg culturaf traffic of our centtiry. Whenever an interviewer asked Duke Ellingti-r~nto caregmize a musical mode, or inquired about music and race, or about the skills ofzz

lnusiciail the Duke greatty admired, Ire liked to quote ""re words of the LMaestrol "Ibscanini, who said concerning singers, Zither you're a good musicia~iror you%-renot.91n terms of musiciantst-rip [for examptc], Ells Fitzgerald is 'Beyoiird Categuy.,' '""'Elfingtort's phrase is eit.gantlj7 hc.tpf;ll in reminding us that pigeonholes are highly conlining; t 9 u t our scope wilt not he exclmiveiy restricted to exccltencc, h e r i c a n s now spend more than a trillion dollars a year in their pursuit of leisure---far more than they spend on health care, or cars and trucks, or on lrousing.'? ~ X O W that level of expenditure gradually came about, arrd I-he d ; l v e ~ ~ rofp preji~*encesx~zdn~ifullest-h-katgccmgpanies it, warraiirts our a~ention.

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Czhades IVilison Peak creates a mtlsetlni of rr-Liscellaneaus atwactions in I%hiladelphia, Earliest America11 circuses begin to appear. 'The first America11 cclr1nt-y fair is organized in Pittsfietd, 34ass. First statc fair is Izetd at Syl-aaxse, hi.&'., featuring citoxnesric manuhc~rres.

I?."1: Bamum takes over and transfc~mmsthe Alnerican It?luseum in S e w k r k . Enjoys peak ffaxne in the 1850s. ,G1instrref shows with rrrban-based t-rorrpes begin to achieve great popldar success.

I?."1: Bamum t>ringssingerJes~ray1,ind kom Sweden for a national toirxr. Fisk Jrrbilee Singers make their pimeering t o x ~in concert settings in border states and the Nosh. hlontrgomely IVard iswtes the first mail-order camlogue. t>ecomes , the site of an asselnblp for Czhaumuqua Lake, hT.Y. aainim~gSrrnday school teachers, a progfijxn that gradrrally expaxls to include general eclucation aslrJ popular entertainment, such as cs>ncertr;, 'The Sadonal T,eahwe is created, the frtegi~sniligof modem professional basehall. hrxserican 1,eague created in rgoz. Barnuni asld others begis1 to matre h e i r circrxses by railroad. Slleet mrisic begills to be produced for home use. BuEalo Bill C:r>dy achieves popular success with his 'TC4likIIVcst Sliors; first opened in C7)maha in 1883, 'E \V, \4roolwort.Et creates the first 5-and-xo-ccnt store. By x yoo there will be fifv-nine such stores,

E. E Mbee aslrJ U, E Kcith reduce the cost of admission to h e i r va~rde~ille show to xoccnts, the start of a price revolxxrian in entertainment.

'Thornas Edison il-ttrentsa g~honographtxsi~tgcyiindrical wax rccords. 'I"he Eastman Cct~r~pany introduces the Kodak, a simple box carnera containing a xoo-cxposure roll of film: the beginning of rnoderrs amateur photography. 14ror1ci5CC:oXumhianExposition helci in C:kicago$ \&[hitreC:ity, 'I"he Sears catalogue hegigss to appear as a semi-a~~nrsal. First: aniuseinent park opens a t Grjney Island, BrooMyn. r3dvcrlising intensifies in IOW-costmagazldnes Iike ~'CIz/rz.~t:yk~ which displayed 300 itetns per issue by r 895. Reveslue firm ads will tleco~r~e rrlore ilr~portantthan srsbsa-iptions, The first cr3inic cartrlctn, "?'he Yellow Kid,'%ppears inJoseph Er-k F?;or-/d$and is stote~rin 189613~7i4fiItiam Pulitzer's Randolph Hearst for his paper, theJozrif-rirn/. 'I"hornas Edison de\reXog~skinetoscclpe camera that can grc3jject picmres on a screen. L)ublisatioxl of tl be Wondc@i:lWiznrd i$'r)z by I,. Frarlk Barrm. hTationalsyndicadon of comic strips begins when Lliearst:sells the right ta reprodr~cehis strips to o&er newspapers,

7i"Je Cr'ru~t7i~zi)a~ Rol?!~e?y is one of the first:corx~rrserciaflysuccessful story films. The first box of Ckayoia crayons is produced: eight cr3lors far 5 cents, First frtaseijafl l\&)rldSeries (Boston defeats 12ittr;burgh). i)cnny arcades begin to appear: Rise of the nicla-clodeon tra poptxlaricy.

X1"ei&iId:r F o / h enjoys great apped and er r~ufation. PbutopIefy appears, the first rnctvie fan rnagazirre. The genesis of cetebrift. crrfrtrrc. ,b&ur IVynne creates the first: crc>sstvordpwzzle. It appears it1 XII-k mrfd 01s Srinda.~i, I2ec. 2 I . the 'Fhe first aanscctnlinental telepl-toneIine is con~~~letecf.

ASCAP (A~l~erican Socieq of Cctmposers, Authors and Xztzhlisl-ters) fotxndeci. It esljoys a monopoly on fees for &\reny-five years.

R i f ~ ohf'a ATrrtio~z,D. M? Gri%th$ innovati- and influe~~tialarlcf strbseqrrently cantroversiat-fil111~ appears, "Highbrow and I,ourbrow" ptxblished by Van \Vyek Brooks in his America (,aome,r @ge.

johnstan ,G1cC,ulIey$ serialized novel 'I3e Ctt.rse sfCapi.r~-afzo introduces the character Zorro, who later serves as the protoypc for Srrpcrxnan, Batman, and other heroes with attcr egos. jack 136txnpsey wins the h c a v c i g h r charnpianship from Jcss z ant3 loses the rematch Mriflard, toses it to Gene 'knney in ~ c ) 6, ta "firnncyin x y 2 7 in the conaoversial ""long (3ount75in Czhicago. Ilempsey becorxies the first fighter to draw a $I miltion p t e . 14rax recordings are int.l.odrrced.

'The first tafrtlititt newspal3ers are ~3rit~lishedl in S e w York City Radio as a ptxblic e n t e ~ r i s ebegins in 13t~burgb.

"IZ7~fe m a p zlrre is started by Z3enry Lrsce arlcil Brit X ladden, Book-af-the-ililE~nt:hC~II:,is created. Dempsey loses to 'hnncy in Pliiladelphia on Sept. 2 3. CharIie Czhaplin, LMJoison,and IVilliam Randolph Ilearst are a t ringside in a huge ci-ourd. Eight lztrndrcd earrespandents cfevolrc mro million words to h e match, The age of the ms3del-n newspaper sports department:has begun.

KBC and C&Semerge as nahonat nemrork; large ntrxnbcrs of local affiliates by rg35. 7i"JeJ~zzz Sizzger with Af Jotson becr3mes h e first widely distrihrited film with sori~zd. Chartes 1,indbergh makes the first sofo fligl~t:across the r4dantic. The Amos

'E' And31radio

con~edyseries makes its debut.

"A4ickq h1ouse7%nrJ"'UlonrJie" becorxie syndicated cr3mic strips.

'The CrossSey systetn far rating the size of radio prograIr1 aridienccs is established, followed in I 935 by the Il looper sysf-em. ,G1ipel C,ovarnjl,ias"sca~caturcs, ""impossible lnten4ews9" appear in fin@ Fni~s:

Wait Dis~ley"slm 7Xe 7ilrt-eeL,irrle. Pigs creates a sensadon. First frtaseijafl All-Smr garrle, won hy the American I,eagtze, Colo~~iai !\~?lliarrlsbut-g opens to the ptiblic. Xilqo?- Bwe.r'Am~~ztc.ur. Iltlvr t>ecor~lcs the niost popular radio program, arlcil is fntacfi imitated,

George Gallup est-;ltllishesthe Arrlerican Xnsdmte of Ritllic Clpirrian, the beginning of poling, jcsse Clwcns wins four gold xnedals at the Berlin Cllyxnpic <;arxlcs as HitSer watches. 1,uce tatrllches L@ rrlagazine, a swift success. Disney" s$~zou$ CliTbl;l.e and the Serezz Dma19, the first featuretength an imaited cartoon appears; allother success, joe L,oxxis defeats jaxnesJ. Braddock in C h i c a p for the Izeavyweigl-ttcl~arr~piond-tip, and holds the title for twelve years. (>rson 'TcVetles"slarn1ing radic.1t>roadeaston Oct. 30, "War of the !\~c~rtds,""crates a nationvvjde scare. Benny <;oodrllan and his s%vingbancl perforrrl at Carrzegie Ilafl. I%cket Book begins tc1 publish inexpensive sok-cr3tier edirions. C,lernenr Grcenbcrg ptxblishcs ""iavant-Carde and Each," an attack rxpon the advent of vulgar popular culture.

Billl (Broadcast ,G1usic Inc.) challenges ASClU' as a pwforr~-tncerights organizadon, eliding AS<:APb ~no~~opoly. Jerclme Rot>binsand 1,eanard Uemstein collaborate on Pant7 R e e , Rohhins"srst ballet: three sailors 011 the town. 'The Grand Ole Opry is tlroadcast live fro111fisPtr~an Auditorium in Pl'ash\7iIle on ilcc, 8. Perfor'orxnersinclrrde Roy Acuff* ,G1innie Ibarl, Eddy ,hnold, and the Fruit Jar Drinkers. More &an zoonew mass-oriented magazines appear.

Jatckie RC)IIIIISOR lxx~rnesthe first African-American to play major-Ieap~cbaseball sincc blacks were expclled in the Iatc r 870s.

'The emergence of ctl~r~rr~ercial teIet4sion. Inveslcion of the long-playing record. "Highhroxv, IT,c>~vbrc)wy 34iddlebrow" by R~isselIEqnes appews (Fcbntav) and is abridged ixr I,@ (ripril). in FXa~.pf~-"s

'IT'moves from 6% pcncwat-ion of ~kncricanhomes to 76%. It will rise to neariy 90% hy 1960. Diners Club issues the first wedit card.

'The cc.~axialcable makes posij~>e tr-anscox~tinentat transmission of telecasts. I+esidendal non~inadngconvendons receive television coverage for tl-te first dme. Harry Srnitll issues Rnz~hok(mqf *i1~~ericgrz Folk :l/lti.~l"c,which hclps ra inspire the folk revival aEt11e x ygos.

E~~0r.y at yet^, V.S. naval histosy during IVorld IVar IT, is a big hit OR tele14sion.

'The Great Debate arrlong intetlecttlals cox~cemij~g the ""prolrIem" of mass axlmre takes placc, 7'VGzcide first: published, an instant success. Saap operas daminat-e afternoons cm all nemorks,

Large shopping ccnrcrs (nralls) erncrp in the mid-xy 50s. ,G1cDonald's lzas mrency-one franchises and ixr 1955 Ray Kroc opens his first McDonafdS in Ues Plaines, 111. 1Jny (,'~o~-kettis serialized on Disney5 weeMy tlecornes a natio~~wide sensation.

show ancl

Dis~leytandopens in Anal-teim,CaIif.

Elvis Presley appears far the first d ~ r on ~ eThe Ed SulIZrgn Show, West ,"icrCe Sroty, a hit mrzsicaf with dassical roots, appears on Broadway.

Se-c.e~~t?; rr~ilIiionpeople watch the first 1,residendal detlate on televisic~n(Sept. 2 5 ) : Kennedy vs. Nixrm.

"h4asscult & 34idtwlt," an attack;on middtetlrt>%v and mass cmlnrrc by X2"ilright ,%ilacdanafd,appears.

Cassius Clay wins the Izea~5rcightchampimship from Sonny Idiston in Miami a d cl-ra~lgeshis name to lljrtliharrlrrlad Ali. "Xotes on Camp" hhy Susan Sontag identjlies a new tnode of kitscl-r in a neutral way (unlike Gree~~frterg in r c)tg). r

*.

lirwe cover story (April z) devoted to "The Comptiter in Sociev. "

'I"he first fc~otballSuper Bowl: G r e e ~Bay ~ defeats Kansas City. 'I"he Pop~darCulture Association is founded and tl1e 70z4rj1a/ rj' fiprdlar L"zdlff~.lu begins ptxhlicaGon. Satellite transmission from TaLyo to New York hegins, Apotjo r I arrives at the rr1oon. <)nJtxly 2 0 , xeil Armstrong becomes the first hr~mantro walk on the moon,

'I'he 14~oodst;ock ?IlrrsicI;csti\val is held in rrpstatc New York, " T a k )radic19'begins in Bostcln witl-t tetepl-ror~e cafls to fill tfeat3 spots. Par~cipatorjrprogfijxns on "1"V follow in the I y80s.

Satellites hegin ro speed the tr-ansmissionof "F%'13rograrns around the tvortd.

I lorne Box Clfficc (IIESO) begin~modesdy;by r 997 it 2 3 ~nilliosl subscribers.

have

an epic fight with hluhamtnad ,!di beatsJoe Frader in It?las~ifa, an international teIe\<sionattdlience, ,!ex I laley"shook Roars enjoys success and then becon~esa susprise hit: as an eight-part 'W series on ARC (Januav 1977).

EIvis Presley dies at Gracela~~d, age fortytwo. h f lV first appears, C N X begins. "iz7~tecover story (Jan. 3 ) celebrates the "A~lachineof the Year" ( h e cr31nputer) rather than a Man of the %as.

Ken Burrls3 T h e Cixiii Wtirq an elevcn-part doclrmenray, appears on PRS.

I 990-y I

I-figh & l,ow: ,140dern Rr-t mzd I'opz&Zt6,-Ctt1tztre exj~iflitionis sl~own at the i\lrrseuxn of iG1odern rlrt in New York, and then at venues in Czhicago ailcl Los Angeles.

1c)yj

A plan to tocate a I)is~~tytheme park near a Civit I%ar battlefieid in i7irginia is defeated by a coalition isilclciting indictments of Disnq's trersions of Aniel-ican history ailcl of commerciaiis~r~ encroacl~iagon historic presenrat.jan,

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American Cu American Tastes

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I. P,'o~ey lsi&ndBedch (I 93 5 ) by Re@naldMarsh (etching) z, Fie I;. 1'1/leipr&e~zgund Q;t.orgeJea;tz A51rhtsn (1947) fryXrvixlg Penn (piadnum-palladium print) 3. rltes&-y Evfip~irir~g at the IliavojlKalkoum (I 930)fly Reginald 34arsh Cecxnpcrl~on pancl) 4. RzlfseR ltyi~e".r(I949) 5 . 'lkslre-level chart drawn by " k m E"kzn1; for I,@ hlagadne, April I I, 1949, pp. 100-01 6. R~~-itu~"o rl;ist-~f~zi~zi f rgjg) by E-ferl>ertC;ehir (gelatin silver print) 7 . EJu.?nrdL. Betrrnys (I 984) by i'a~icia 'ktc (ail on canvas) X. Jeanne Gordon of the hle~opofitars Opera crc~~vning Patif 14rltit.ernan as the ""King of J a m " in 1926 g. B ~ I PGOO~TFIIP'I F~ (I 960) by IZenG Roberr:Ulotlchi (oil on canvas) ro. Taste-fetrel chart from The hTrtRepub&, 34arch z, r ygz, p. 26 I I. "Ikste-te~rel chart koin 7Xe Utne R~l~der; Septezrlher-C3ctc>11er rwz, P.83 I 2 . H. Id,~Cle~fcken ( I 940) by r2t X lirschfelcf (gorraci-reor1 board) I 3. l1!0l&uvoad (I93 7 ) by TT"11omasI lart Bentcl11(tempera with oil on canvas) ,%r (1949)ty Nornzan Rockwell (oil on 14. The NLW 72kez"isi!0~z callvas); kT~itttrdl~y RzfeipzingPost covert Koveml~er5 , I 949 X 5 . An4y Wt7rhoi( x 975) by jaxrles Bro~r~iing \4ryet:h (gorxachc and pexdE on pqer)

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Coming to T e r n s

A decade ago, when I began to teach courses on the evoluticzn of taste tevels and cxitural stratificatjot~in the Unitecf States+ourses cuncerned with culture in a democratic sscicy, the c o m m o d i f i c a t of culture, the clranging nature and uses of leisure, culture and nadonal identity9those kinds of issues-a troublesome lack af defixlitional clarity and precislax1 in tile pertinent literature quickly I>ecameapparer-rt. Sincc thcn &is $isarrq I-ras become a genuine challei~gc,not just tcr me personalty, 1 believe, t9ut tcr arlyone scrir~~~stg interested in understanding popular culture, Adding to my perplexiry, this lack of clarity even appeared evident among the best and brightest-sociologist.;, L-ristarians, literary scholars, art historians, those warhng in cuft-ural studies, h c r i c a n Smdies, and jaumatism; the problem fooked to be ubiqui tous. 'The most obvious puzzles, in my view, arose from the habit of using the phrases " p o p ~ t culture" ~r and ""mass culture" interehatlgeahl_t;as t h u g h there were and are no &scernible differences. I shall offer anly a few represexxtative examples an the grounds that: giving excessive evidence of I-tact I-rabitsmay only cnccnrt-age them (rt tjatting coach shows players what to do rather &an what not to do.) In rg84, ti)r instance, an innovative allrural historian wrote the foHc11virrg in an orhercvise 1930s joined the brilliant essay titled ""Bczoksand G~tlture":'""'lik European mice to the hnerican perceptioxl in a sirnation where the fear and distaste of moder1-r mgss or-pspzilar cuft-ure seemed justified by the twin tota1itariar-r viciousness af hscism and ccsmrnunisrn [emphasis

added],"" We even have scric~uswriters who cas~tallyrefer. to "'mass popdar ~ u t m r e " ~ nNational d Put~ljcRadio ncrw has a Pcrpuiar Chlture commentator who mostly seems to report on mass culture plrenomena, such as film.' It must be achlowledged that sometimes the congation of mass and popular culture occurs in the colltext of (or with referer~ceto) the Great I>ekate aver the evils of mass ct:lxlturc that occurred prirnarity during the mid- and later 1950s. In these ix-rstanccs, it is freqrrentty unclear whether the autlror is directly at fault or simply repeadng the ~nrrddtedusage of p~"'ic"essors, Either way? lrr>\vever,the reader who r~eedsdefinitional clarity gets fuzziness instead.' Vet another cause for conhsian occurs when a writer cf'rooses to ifis~xsspopular cdture within the framework of something casu'ally tabelcd {'mass societ_t.'"n which "'mass communication" has h e p n tcl occur, Mass ssciey is a des~ograplricpl-rencsmernon(dramadc populatit111 growth) once commonly associated with vrrlnerabilicl\r to clrarismatic demagopes capal~leof svaq"ig the masses toward either sociatisxn or fiascism, pxtieularty during the second qu'arter of the menticth ccs-rt-ury; ~Vlasscornmtlnication involves a technological transklrtnation once identified with universal access to newspapers, ~nagazines,radio, and nlevision, but now snore fi-equently idenrified with satellites, computers, and the Internet. &fass sociey may very well serve as a host or context for mass cuft-ure; bttt i'ristoriically~the former arztedated the tatter in ordinary usage, whereas the latter seems to have outlived the former in cornmos-r parlance, Mass communication certainly kciiitates the dissemination of mass culture; and troth are undesliably dependent u p ~ ~ the n uenr-uresomeness of innovative enmepreneurs, Yet to intermingle the two only eonhses the vehicle with the t i o l u ~ ~ n oload w it is supposed to distribute, T h e one has wheefs, wires, and wavelengths. "E'heother has comic books, cartoons, sitcoms, and viideocasset-tcs." A few writers have bt~tkeredto differentiate thctughtfillt~i;but they have not done sn systematicafb or in depth. Atmost four decades ago Oscar Elandlin remarked that mass c u l t - wlriclr he meant culture disseminated througi-r the xnass media-had a ""disturbing" effect up011 both popular and refined cultures, each of which predatemass cuttvrre, H e wiscfy noted a common misconception that the mass culture of 1960 was merely an extension of popular cultures of the past.' Richard Slotki~s,wlrose discipline is Alnerican Smdies and whose

specialty has long been tl-rc role of dominant myths in tl-rc United Sates, acknt~wtedgcsthe need for discrimination, '"'l"he procfuctions of the cultural industGes are indeed varied and ubiqdtous," lre writes, from tile Izewspapers and Inass ex-rtertainxnent to the textitaolcs that teach our clrildren tile authorized versioxzs of herica1-r history and litcramre-but the authoriclp af thcsc "mtns ctdmre" pmductions has been and is offset t9y tile influence of other forms of ct~lrureand expression that are genrrinely 6'~~c>~3t~li~r'5: produced by and for specific cultural cornlnunities like the etlrnic group, the Earnily-clan, a town, neigl-rborhood,or region, the worick>lace, or the street corner=hlthough few of these subcufmral ex-rtiticsare now isolated from thc influence of mass media, they are still, cagakte of generating their own myt1-r~and their own u~tiqueways of interpretii~gthe productions of the rrredia."

t listorian jaclcsoxz Lears adamantly rehses to mix the two, and does so for a reason sexxsitoly separate from Slotkikin%yet altogether congruent with it: g i o ~camat ~e aker all maintain a coherent or sopl-risticatcd notitm of class and still equate mass culture wish "poplar culture.' "l he disposirios~to co~lfuseor conflate tlre two phenomena is due, at least i i ~part, to disciplinary alegiailces and ideological commitmen&. Because, for example, the phrase ""mass cuft-ure" is commonty perceikred as carrq.ing pejorative co~motatior-rs,manjr af tllose who really enjoy it and write positively about it prefer to use the term ""popular ct:lx.fture,"almost as a syi-ro~-rym, when they actually do meax-r mass cutmre: record-breaking attelldance for films anci television slr~ws, compact discs that self in tlre millions, apparel like jeans and sneakers, Gast-food chains, standardized products sold at N7al-~kfartand h a r t , axzd so forth."'f'he use aF euphemism in this context has increased in recent years, but it certaixsty is not new. More than a gex-rerationago an astute young d t r r r a l critic, Robert W'arsl-rc~w,caswally used 'bpopdm" anci ""mass" islterchangeal~lj~, l~ucalso referred with almost clinicai care to a transformation given explicit recognitim following mTctt.ldWar It. """l'hcmass culture of the educated classes," he obsewed, "the culture af tire "middle-brc>w,?as it has sometimes been called-had come into existcx-rce,"'l A British culttlrat critic has called attex-rtion to a similar paradox in the realm of film reviews. It is nest unusual for writers to praise intelleeP .

tuatly unpretex-rtiuus popular mo~viesfor reasons that are not merely u~~reiated to their "parent appeal but even seem inimicai to it, According to C. ?%C E. Bigsby, 'Top~tlarcuIt~rre,then, can apparently be transformed into "highhart by a simple critical act of alog-rropriation, tizdeed so insecure are these categories that the popular culture of one generadoll can become the L-rigti culture of the next aird vice txma-a Fact which applies not only to il~dividualartists but to genres (tl~eatre, ncwei, film), SU~>E;CIITCS(farce, sciencc: fictdon, detective fiction) and styles (rc)manticism7realism)."""' =tTeedlessto say, popular culture nor only existed but thrived for centuries prior to the period from 1885 to 1935 that 'Ishall Ezigfrfight. I draw a marked diseinctio~lbetweerr what British scholars refer to as "'ct-aditionztl'\peputar culture (flourishing in the sixteenth t-cl t~inetee~lthcenturies) and the consjderakty more commcrciaXized and technologically transfc>rmedpopular culture that emerged at the close oF the nineteen& centuy and tl-ren blossomed exuberantly early in the meiltieth. 'liadirianal popufar culture has atso been called pretechnological aird preindustrial, A fine example from tile Ul-rited States is the &me museum, which flourished during the nineteenth cerltuay but ifisappexed aher rgoo I~ecauseof the emergence of nicketodecrns, film, and rnechanizecl amctselnent ~o2rks." When we mrrl to folk ctrlmre and contemplate its advc~catesover a L~istaricalspair of, say3sevenlry years, notable changes aird even more diversity become appareirt. Back in the 1930s Coxzstance Rourlce made an ardent yet isolateif case fbr folk ~ d t u r eas the very essence, not merely of popular culture, t9ut c~fnational identit-y-in the Ux-rited States. Despite tlre plaudits her work received, lrer particular elnphasis did not gain many adherents for more than a generation." In recent years we L-rave professiorzal students of folk culture deeply concerircd to maintain a clear distance l>emeerr L-randwrougirt folk traditions that tf3e-y chefisll arrd a Itlass consumer C U I C I J ~ ~&at they dislike," And we have historians of pclputar culture who pcrccive its roots deeply embedded in folk culture, who find agency rather than victimization in popular culture because they do not believe that consumers are helpless in the hands of producers and eirtreprei~eurs.'~

By x-row the no~~spccialist reader may very wet1 feel avewltetmed by a surfeit of citations and contradicto;lv points of view. If suclr browsers

are still bearix-rgwith me, they surely rntlst sense that the study of popular cutmre is clearly tl-rri.iingin it~stinltionsof higher learning. Schoiars Inay slcst be a11 of one mind, Fzut they cerminly are sissgle-minded if not do\vnriglrt feisty in their pursuit of popular culture. Ijaradoically, L-rowever,that is not the impression that one gets from casual browsing, particularly in the press or even among the cognaseenti. ta x 9-74.t lerbert Gans declared that "'piputar ~vlltrtireis not smdied much these days either by social scientists or hurnax-rists. . . ." Twenty years Iatcr the retiring Secreray (direct09 of the Smitl~soniai~ Instirution threw his lrands lip in despair at rising interest in popular and mass ctrlmre dispfays at the Natior-rat lkfuseum of h e r i c a n 1E fistory "How the hell do p u &"fie pop culture ai-ryay?" ire dcxraanded." Much of &is book will be devoted to anmering that questio1-r from various angles of vision, Ifere at the start it seems prrrder~tto begin with an even more basic question on wbiclr there is no consensus r e ~ e c t i n ginetusiveness: What is culture? If we took at two famous respolrses to that query (offered well after 'Waiter Lippznann's) which on point of deparmre, we will gain from the second one a definition of pop~darcttltllre by r~egativereference: culture is ctrciiit~ary rather ti-rm rarefied, a marter of quotidian meanings rather than the gleanings of formal etlucatiotl, Both definitiotls still have their devotees today, tlrougl~the balance of opinion lras surely slri&ed from 1 ' : S. E:liot"slicist v i e w to fiaj~tnoi-rdWifliamsk m m p~,loutistview. Let's begin with Efiot in 1948:

By "Lcnitrrre," then, 1 mean first of alt what anthropologists mean: the way of life of parecular people living together in one place. "T"hat culture is made visible in tlreir arts, in their soda1 system, in their habits and customs, in their religion. But these things added together do not constimte the cuftrure, though we often speak for ctsnvenicnce as if they did. 'I'hese things are simply the p r t s into which a ctliture can be anatomised, as a human body a n , But just as a man is sometlring more that1 an assemblage of rhe various consriment parts olhis body, sstt a cultwe is more than the assembfage of its arts, custoxns and religious t~efiefs.'lTkeset h i n p ail act upon each other, and fully to under~ ~ to u ~ ~ d e r s t a2111.~ ~NOW d there are (of course stand one y t have higher cultures and Icowcr cultures, and the higher ~vtltrtiresin general are disting~~ished by differentiation of function, so that

you can speak of the less cuft-ured and the more cuft-ured strata of societjr, and Anafly, you can speak of indi~riduaitsas being exeptionallp mlcrired, The cdture of an artist or a philosopher is distinct from that of a mine worker or field tabt~tzrer;the cutture of a poet will be ssmewlrat different from that of a politician; but in a healthy sociev these are all parts of the same culture; and the artist, the poet, the pl~ilosopher,tile pofkician and she labourer wilt l~avea cuft-ure in comznon, which they do not share with other pecrple of the same occupations in other countrjcs.'" h b o r r g h Eliot acknowledges the existencl: of mine workers and field tat~orers,he assumes that in same ~nysteriausway they will share the ~zatio~zal cultural identiy of those with more education and xnoney 2nd higher social status than thexnsclves, FSOW they choose to use their teisure and what distinctive pleasures they may enjoy are beyond his realm of concern," Twenty years later, in I 968, Raymond Wiliams did not repiltdiate Eliot so ~ n u c has find his de5nitioi-r incomplete: P .

In talking af a common ~ d t u r e then, , oi-re was saying first of a peoplc, as well as the viral

&at culture was the way of life

and indispensabic contl-zbuGons of specially giked and identifielement the g idea of the corn~~~ol;l able persons, and one was u s i ~ ~ of the cuIture-its community-as a way of criticizing that divided and frawented cuft-ure we aemaitly have, If it is at all tme that the creation of meanings is an acdvit-y. which engages all men, then one is bc~untfto ire shc~ckedby all); s o d e v which, in its most explicit culture, either suppresses tlre meanings and values of whale groups, or which fails to extend to these groups the possibility of articulating and communicating those xnea~~ings. At the close of that extract, writing just ~ J I C J I the study of popular culture begail to require recognirirtn if 11cst outright legitimacy in acadieme, kfilliams antidy~atedthe inelusivencss that would occur in * For an unusrxat indication of Eliot's enthusiasm for. popular culture, see his essay "?liItaric L,lrrqid" i11 ,Telct-ted &l~st
pnrgressive stages during the 1970s and '80s. &tlcanwhilcthe historian I" l? "r'hornpscrn, WxltiarnA contempor-av, made a usefill distinction (in writing ahtrltt tlre eighteer-tthcenmy) l~etweenthe 'j9aljte cutmre" of more genteel folk and a "ctxstol-crary poputar culture" of ordhar). people so dif'ferent that it would lie beyoi-rd the recognition af even pious or affiuexzt meml~ersof the middle class who had no aspil-ations for learned ~ x l t u r eyet longed for the geatiliv of '"dite cultul"e,'?" Studes-rts of cojoniat and x-rineteenth-ccnmv hnerica, however, exalnirlillg a less traditional and less rigidly stratified societ-y; have narr w e d the distance between l~ooklears~iilgand wllecriw beliefs, Ilavid 13, I: Ialf has warx-rcd ag~instthe presu~nptianthat ordinary peopfe possess a culture totally separate from that of an educated elite, and has argued that there were always intermediaries able and ready to interpret or-re s e p c n t of societl~rto another. Rridgix-rg the ninetees-rth intcr the twendeth centuy, David Ckimsred lras discovered common ground for bookish and popular culture; hut even more importatnr, he has punctured the cusmrnary distinctios-r that elite culture was untainted by pecu~iianyambitiaxzs, unlike popular culture, w1zic.h was not merely tarnisilcd hut dclunright mercenaT. Cirnsted 172s wggcstt"'f that 'k desire to create, and a need tcr live, and a yen frtr mctrley or recognition are not warrii~gbut joined clemems in lrumatn beings. Such a gross truism would hardly be worth making did it not relate to ane af the rnost popular explawatov put-downs of papufar culture, 'E'? decry popular culture t~ecauseit"snvolved with profir: rnotives i s to disparage all levels of culture, alt similarly tinged with personal adulterated motives,"""" Btrtlr C;rimsted and I Tall achowledge tlre cxistellce of diverse levels oP wlrrrral taste, while minimizing their distinctiveness or the distal-rce that separates ti~ern.'f"he process of chaxzge over time, however, has Izat been neatly linear "Dt Inore nearly cyclical, with widely shared culmral tastes more notiiccafile early (seventeenth to mid-ni netecn th CJFculccnturics) and late (sincc the rgdos), whereas the sepcr-reatiot~ tural tastes was more prominent in between, Inquiries lrave certainly demonstrated that sharp distincdons between high ctslmre and low did Izat jet oi~tainduring the first half af the nineteexzth century, whether ane looks at museums, carnivafs, the audier-rces for painting or for Shakespeare,""' 'I'he sirnation in wctorian A ~ c r i c ais more complex, and there is considerably less consensus ;zmong srudents of tlre tater nineteenth

c c t ~ a t qOl-rekpreferences depej-rda great deal upon the modes af cultural, experience or-re chooses to examine. Ltsoking at museums, symphonic music, and opera, for example, Lawrence ?%t Levine finds culmral hierarchy becomiisg much more pronounced iis this period, C;enteel taste, exclusiveness corirtrary to museum and zoo cf-rartersthat proclaimed arir educaGonal ~nissiosirto the Inasses, aiir cmpf-rasisupon decorum within the hallowed precincts of temples devotecf to art and music, admission fees that knifed off the .n.t_trkingclasses, all contributed to a marked iiscrease in segmentatic>~~ and stra~fication." I hose who conce~ltrarclmore on hooks and reading habits, howeve& are impressed by the broad appeal across taste-level tines of such writers as tlarriet Beecher Stawe, IIorace Bushnell, IIe~zryWadsworth L~ngfetlow~ a l ~ dXXenry Ward Beeche~Hence tl-rcir beiief that e not yet exist dear dichcrtomies between high ar~dpopular ~ d t u r ifid even in Victorian herica.'" h intermediate position can be found if one examines the controls over mapzine contere exercised by Victorian editors who c a r e h l b monitored the propriety of public taste. O r tile way hericaxz folk heroes, sucl-r as E t Carscn-r,displayed 11cltal9ievariations in their diction depending upon whether their venw was a dime novel 09- a play directed to the middle class, nest to mention diverse regional audiences. After lczokiisg at a uari-iev of cultural institutions in the Ullited States during the tater iirineteenth cerztumy, Neil IIarris reached a ~nuftiGaceted co~zclusio~z: Functioning within those institutions he found ""unstable mixtures of prescwation and pop~~iarizatior-r, dogmatism and tolerance, opposition to and acquiescence in mass taste," He saw a surprising blend of ""high and popular culture in unlikely places. . . . m e t h e r the popular was ack~~o\vledged out of respect for its integrity or from a desire to reshape it is not always cfcar." Yet f larris concfudes that these instiruGons "adopted a stance toward mocier~Gr~r that was both more skcpticat and more probing tl-rian easy wisdom would sugges*"i E3arris and otlrers have noted that popular as well as high ctrlrure progral-crs and exhihitions cjcc~rrr-edat the numerous world fiairs that took place in the United States tjemeerz 11376 and E ~ I S .E n t r e p ~ e l l ~ u ~ ~ recog~irizedthe need for both and provided for tllem-but in carefully contro)led w q s , such as noncontip o u s locittjot~s. At Chicago's (.:oiumbian f3xposition in 1893, for erampte, Frcc1erickJacksct1-rT i m e r addressed the h e s c a n Elistor;ical hsociarion about the frontier West P .

within the pristine ct~slfillesof the ~parkrjngWPfliteCity while Buffalo Bill and his philistine Wild 14'est Shtw pcrhrmed on tile ~VidwityPfaisance. Culrural segregation, plain and simple." AS late as the 1 8 ~ o s ,taste levels and stratification lrad not yet becoine rigid or infiexible; but they were perceptibly hardening. In 1871, for example, Ralph N7aldo Emerson and wlliam Koscoe Thayer (a proper Bostclnian who puhfisi-rcd extensively on rtaiia1-r l-ristoay a d politics) made a transcontinental trip i9y railroad (riding in a private car) and clljriyed a look at %semire, In Salt Lake City the two preeminent innllecmals attended a melodrama, iVn~*r-i~ge by ~WoonIight; or tbe Wiidc&t:sRmertge, a i d were not impressed. A month later they went ta a "notorious theater" in San Francisco, one said ta be a favorite ctf gold miners, It mt~sthave i9een a kind of burlesclue-opera honsc. In any case, Emcrson and 'T"hayerhux-rd it ""At and dreary" As Americar-r s o c i e ~became more lreterogenerius, crossing cultural boundaries became increasingly problematic.25 One year tater, yet another old-line New Endander puzzled over Presu~nthe big cluestion, though this time cluite publicly in ,X'r:~*ibt.le;."s, ably others shared his concerrr about the optimal corlnectiorls between high culmrc and the working class. "WPhatare the relations of ctdtrtrc to common life," asked Charles Ilttdley k%Karner,""of tlre scholar to the day-laborer? k%%atis tlre value of: this vast accumulation of: lriglrer learning, what is its point of contact with tile mass of humaniq . . ." \Varner suggested that pul~licintelfecmals l ~ a dcivic responsibilities; but ";W among his contemporaries shared ti-riatcor-rcertl,and his cri de coeur would hardly i9e l-rcard again h r almost a ccnmty.'" It is undelliahly true that "1: S, Elic-)twanted a larger reading puljlic for poet% but m i n t y because he also hoped to lnave a bigger audience for his social a i d religious ideas. ""fbelieve that the poet namral.ty prefers to write for as large a i d miscellaneous an audiezzce as possible,'? hc. once .c\-rote, but then continued enigmatjcaily: "'it is the hatfeducatccf and ill-educated, rather than the unedrrcatccf, who stand ix-r his way: I myself should like an audience which could neither read nor write," Eliczt later modified that oddly patronizing llcstion into a theory lligllly represe~~tati~.re of the tripartite " h o w level" "doctrine that domi~zatedAnerican thinking during the ~niddlethird of the mezztietil century He explained that a writer reatly needed three corrccsltric publics: ""a small public of substantially the same education as himself, as weXl as the salne tastes; a l a g e r public with some colnmnn t~ackgrorrtnriwith

him; and fin.altg he should have something in comxnon with eveTone who has intelligence and sensil~itityand can read his language."" Other cultural critics tended to foIlow a tripartiite division while using different labels and vaqing grounds fcir differentiatiiorn, Leslie KedZem; for example, with a more wItirnsical wisdom than EIiot's, defined taste levels in terms of what peopfe preferred to read. I Ijs correlations wcrc clear-cut and made x-ro altowancc for overlap, Highbrrrws read rhe little reviews. 'l'he philistine middle class read '"the slicks." h d tlre masses were consuzners of the pulps, m%ereas Fiedler's smasses siinloly took wlrat was availal-~le, afbrdable, and cornprehensible, hfici-raet Ilenning has offered a very difkrent t.xsian of warhng-class culc-~xvalautoxzamj7 in which the writers of dime novels were w p a t l ~ c t i cto worlring-class adture and readers from that culture interpret4 dime novels in a highly p a r t i d a r way that coincided sensiMy with the acmal world they inhabited. """l'becultural formation of the dime novel," Denning writes, "derives its enerm and cnrdity from the conjuncture of the 11irtf-l.of 2 culture industry with the emergence of an hnerican woridng cfass, its narrative forxnulas gain their resonance ial-gefy from their closerless to .c\-orkingclass idct,logics, from the mechanic accents of the p r o b e r ~ v t t u r eto which its readers, writers, and earliest gr~blishershel~nged."'~ In 1984 the American lristorian bVarren St~smanwondered (and asked) whether popular culture operated according to formulas while 1-rigL-r culture furtrr-rctiartrr-redin response to conver"rioxts. The cluestion is inlpcrrtant though Cli%cult, but perhaps we can respond to it in terms af the vcrricd pattcrx-rs af repetition that may be absewed at CliEerent taste levels," In high culrure, repetition acctrrs becactse participants fully expect to see iliEerent stagings of tlre Rittg Cycle or E9a~y1Itrtand then compare ti~em,always with certain co~trr-rve~ttioxls in mind tftough not feefing bound by them untii, perfraps, H g ~ ~ f lise tset in 1 Iousmn features I-Ietl"s~lgcls. with recfneck guards or Die G6tter~I8nr~~e'~"i~ng &"Tclstx-rewspapcrsread 1937 middiebro~rspresume that you have not follo\ved a s t a y fiaithfully, s s repetition is built into each insallmeat as l~ackground,In the realm 01; popufar culture, a great Inany people 1ze5~erseem to tire of old fatrorites like Lalvrence Nrelk, formulaic raxnarrce Gctioxt, certain l~everages,and cartoon characters. Famifiariq and rcliabjtity are more desirable than noveIy."W7ith mass culture, hy contrast, I I C I V is~ ~necessary ~ in order to maximize sates, ix-ritiate fads, and excite audiences, Repetition is also i~tevitaMe,nonetheless, for two

reasons. First, x-rothix-rgis copied so cyuick-iy as a success, so that a hit prrrgl-am elicits a muitinairrored i~dlof look-dikes. h-rd secor-rd, the secret of egective advertising is repetition witb minor variations. EIence we see certain ads so often that we come to learn them by rote. Departing too radically from co~~vention nviirs tile risk of rejection and abject iiilure, Yet rigid adherence ta co~~vention also ex"rtails the risk of stag~-radonand a1ienatioi-r. Only the avant-garcfe, by defirritio~~, seek to flout conver-rtior-r,In fact, their most promir-res-rtconver-rtion is their unconventionalilry;.

t laving ackxzowledged the L-ristorical existence of "brow levefs?'used as a kind of shorthar-rd for culturat stratification by caste Jeve1s9and also having indicatccf that I want to differer-rtiatct9emccn mass and pop~rlar cutmre, perhaps I Inay appropriately recognize that what appears m he a current trend-the mixing and consequent blurrillg of taste levelshas L~istoricairoots that date back roughly four decades. '1"he recent \rope is lrighly visible. In 1996 the culmral histaria~zh n Douglas p~~blishccf an essay titled "High Is L~sw"in which she anx-rouncccf that a wait dividing the art worifd had disix-rtcgratcd. Some of her particrrlars, however, suggesed that it had been heading toward cotlapse for ~nrrch of the twentieth centttry. Early in 1997 LUichikr, Kakutani" 'XCulrure Zarirc" column for the New firk Tir~zes.called atte~ztianto a blurring of preferences in apparel across class and raciaf lines, As she provocatively put it, "'why arc hornetr~sysand sui~urbaI-ritcswearing each other's clothes?" A few monti~stater an essay absewcd that 4'deconstmctic>~~'? had entered the lexicon of daily life, Afthough it Inay often be used improperljr, that word-concept has curic-,uslyentered tlre realm of popular writing.'" 'ZBlce~ztagether, do those examples t~eginto suggest that some sort ctf cvttut-ai *Mixmasterhas been activat:ed"~:orsooth, perhaps even a paradigm shift? Let5 scr~flback to 1955 ar-rd read Jol-trs,Berger, art critic at that time for the AWra*'Yf~zteg~an in England and The iliatio~zin the United States. EZe ridiculed the notion that an iron divider loomed large bemeen L-rigltrl~rows and fowtzrows. X Te insisted that ""a great deal of L-rigl-rbrowand lowbrow culture derive from exactly the same attitude of fife and differ orltg in their degree of self-conscicrusness." Berger acknowledged tile e*istencc of "different star-rdardsof appwciation": Sczme people witb an "unrrsually developed visual sensit)ility" see

works horn the perspective CJFthe artist; they appreciate ~ C J W the artist has solved ccrtaill aesthetic and technical prolrlemn A majoriv, meanwlrilc, identi+ slcst with the artist but with the content of the art. """T"heywill. applaud not the process of creation but the result, "I'his difference, Llowever, is not tile same as that 1ser-weer-rhighbrow and lowbrow. Both these attimdes of appreciation are nccessasy to one an~)ther,""W a r : Berger saw as an arbitrary and wrongheaded divisiotl bcmeen highllrw and l o w h r w was, in his view, ""based on a misreading of histc>y," We may or may not agree wiclr Berger; masly of his contemporaries in 1955 did not. Bat eventually$during tile decades that followed, his rejection of strict lines of demarcatiorir woufd be reiterated by critics in &verse fiettls, His attack an cnitrrral snobberq~was only an opening salvo, and what we have react in reces-rtyears is mainfy an ix-rsistcx-rtelaboration, Iior myself, as Suprelne CIourt jusdces say, I callcur in part and dissent in part, t dissent from Berger because for most of a cerzmmy, from the 1870s until the ~y6os,a great manjr Americans did in !&actbelieve that ~l-tlturaistratification existed and they respcrndcd accordingly 11% r 949 the editar of Hmperk magazine received the fallowing I~andwritten letter from a man in Bard, New :tifeGco: "ust a line to let you know that I do slcst tbissk your magazine is what it used to be, It seesns to me evry [*ric]thing you print:is too much high brow, or it may be that t am just low brow." "ready in 1 892, a literary reviewer was xirating the irony that Watt W ~ i t m a ncelebrated the masses and yearned for their approval, yet was chiefly read by the "cultivated few."" Countless exaisnples of taste-level awareness will appear in tfre chapters tlrat follc>\v* But I afso concur with Berger because manjr of those who read and invoke L~istoryin order to elucidate taste levels in the Uruted States do SO in such a vztricrqj. of ways that "'l~istory"ggcts to he a grab hag, ransacked almost randomly in support of oken contradictory conclusions, A few cxasnples should suffice. Ricbard C>hmalm, a Iristorian of h e l - l catn Eteramre, sought to atlswer the queseon: "%%ere did mass culture come from?" He found his a ~ ~ s win e r the transfor~~aGox~ of American journalistic pubfishing (newspapers and mapzines) at the end of the nineteenth and during the early years of the wentieth ces-rmry. In the r 880s~he exptai~-.lccf, "editors and publishers first succcecfed in tlasing their flusiness on low prices, targe ckcuiations, and advertising rev-

enucs, And the great ecfitars of the r8gos, who turnecf this principle into even greater profits, understood it wclJ." Consequently9ex-rterprising puljlishers btes~dedtwo business pracdces that were already effective but lrad until then been ilsdepcndent of eaclr other. 7"bey borrowed from tine worne~-r"sagazines and the clreap weeldies the coxzcept of making a large group of consumers more accessibtr: to advertisers, and tl-reytook from the most promincs~tmorlthiies the idea ctf appealing to people who wanted to be part of a newly emer@ng national audience. By about 1go5, according to Ohmas~n,monthly l-cragazines had become "the 1-cr;ljor farm of repeated culmral cxperiencef' for hericaxzs.'" 'l"ke difficulty here, sy~ptoxnaticof problems posed by so xnuch of the material treated in this ~ P S I is O that ~ , the clicntetc for these magazines cais he (and has Ixen) viewed in highiy variaklc ways, During the decades cxas-crilsed intensively by Ohmasm, 1885 to 1go5, the most inf-liuentidnational motlthf ies were Elniperk and 7be I:rrrrtury. Scarcely a~zyoi-rcreprds these as progel-ritors of nzass culture, A few smdents even place them in the Llighbraw category; but most cor-rsider them wl-rat subsequently came to he cailed middle- ctr upper-middlebrow. in s H W 7 , T h e i4rllr~zr-i~ iWonth4 T h e a r n e is true of Scribner-k; fc~u~-rded undement a revival afr-er r 898, wlretl k%%lterHines 13age mok over as editor. It must be acknwledged, however?that sales of the l,rrdi:r Home Jaurt~nIrose from 600,000 in 1891 to a millioxz I I J ~1903, And I I J ~xgaa iWu~2sq)~ L W a g ~ z i ~ lL~ad e l~ecornethe first g e ~ ~ c r a -iiilustra t ted mapzine to achieve a gcrluinely high cir~xlation,Rut, again, do any of these prrbtications qualil;y as prcrducts of l;r~&.~s culture? Jud$ng I P their ~ contents, and by other kinds of attractive read.ing material (like gazettes) that would have had their greaxest appeal ior working-class hnericans, 1 would prefer ta categorize them-xcept perhapdor iW2~~2sqy %-as mani festatians of popular culture, aimed xnainly at the prtrtean and capacious rvriddle class.ii Richard Ohmanrr even acblowtedges that Mu~seykwait mainlp tcr middle-class people rather than to farmers and workers, and therefc~re that configuration is less inclusive than what we mean by mass er~1rut.e. Yet OI-rxnann ner,rertheless claims that an ""mtegl-ated mass cuimre" emerged in tine 1890s~though the xnea~~ing of ""integrated" "remains uIl~jear*{~ 'The same kinds of difficrtlities arisc when we turn to other criteria "I"ke of cr~lrvralstrarifieation in search of the ges~esisof snass c~~lrro-e.

historian Kartky 13eiss lc~ok?;at the divcrsioi-rs pt~rsuedby workir-rg women in Ncw York at the turn of the centurty and finds what she calls the elnergence of "mass leisure."" Because the paid vacation did not become a reality for workng-class Amel-lcans until well after World 'War If, howevem; rnass leisure surely did not mean in xgoo what it would come to mean by the E g6os. ;Moreover, caxs mass leisure of any kind imply the existcx-rce of hll-scale mass ct:lxlmre in the abser-rcc of such mass media as radio and television? Similarly, Lary Afay locates the birth of inass culture between I g I I and 1929, but especially during tlre 1920s because of tlre appearance then of large and gaucfy movie palaces. t le dtes ""an unpreceder-rted mass audier-rcecentered in the growing cities." k ~I-ris t operative rneaxsing of mass d t u r e remains elusive because l7e is really describing the uses of leisure in urban s e ~ i n g sprimarily for middle- and lc~wer~niddle-incomeAmericans, 'Ihcse glitqy movie palaces cost more and were less physically accessible than tlre much smaller and unadorned ~seighborf-roodstrucmres patronized by ncart~jrworhng-class folk, especially &e newer ixnmigrarrts.gVCurrsetluerzttp,the film audicrsce in the United Sates during the first three decades c~fthe wenticth century remained more s e p e i l t e d by ciass and task levels than sorne ohsewers have been wiIling m recognize. Club in Writing about tlre elnergence of the Book-of-the-Afc~~~rh the Inter E ~ ~ Jaaice O S , Kadwq expfains that clontroversies generated l ~ ythis e~strepreneuriicllin1zovatio1-roccurred as part of the "A~nerican anempt to come to terns with the process of massification."' She frequently refers to a ''huge mass audience" a' nd to a "'modern mass society.'' Raitway believes thar Henry Seidef Canby, a prohssor of h g l i s h at liale wlro sewed as chairman of the club's selection committee, included tile masses in his assessment of culmral maricets and their dyrza~nicsin the til-rited States. Yet Kadlvay and others achowfedge that the Book-of-tl~c-.ModClub is best described by a new category (or label) thar made its fit-st appearal-rce during the 1920s: middlebrow.3" NU one can plausibly claim the BOMC and its imitators as exemplars of mass cult~kre.Po~g)ular,perhaps, and midcllebro\v surely, but not mass. Its subscribers were numerous though L-rardiytyrast-tens of thousands but not yet rniUior-rs. 'IWO more iltustratio~lrsshould suffice, In iloting the poputarir). of "'auto-camping'" by the en"d"fhe 1920s--atitornobile holidays accornpanied by camping in the our-of-doors-histcfriail mTarren Belasco

ifesignates &is protean activiv (its motfus operantli changed every few years) as a "mass insrimtion.'"AIthollgh it is true that XXenry Ford had dieirroeratized access to the automobile by the end oftfie 1gzos, olvnership remained particularly an upper- and middle-income phenomeIiagi. NeitIizer the urban Inasses nor the rural poor went auto-ca~nping. l\feaxiwhile historia~zsof fe~ninisxnas aiir idealow$and of the cfianging roie of women in hmcrican socict)i, tend to place the emergence of mass culture it-r &c i y~os,"" C;learly, tlren, &ere is no agreement among st-udent-sof Americgn cutmre in the tcventieth centuy as to when mass er~1rut.eeirher began a r achieved h11 Bower. One of the prindpat puposes of this tmok is to cfarify that uncertainq. 1 am persuaded that the appearance af news(ca. rgo8-38), along with many other paper and then radio sy~-rdicatiot~ itcvelopments, including tl~crsejust menrioned, comprise an era that night properly be categorized as proto-mass culture; but I Retieve that the nat-zrre and uses of mass leisure prior to the 1g6os, along with the teciriirotogies that sewed mass leisure, differed appredat~lj~ from mass culture as we have knowxi it since the later r 950s. Because the availability ctf leisure and widening access to it I-rave undergone such a dramatic transformiltion during the past ccntrtv, my concern with mass and popular culture in this book will focus particularly upon changing Alnerican attitt~destoward leisure and their uses af it. 't'he rise af recreation in its broadest pasible serirse and changing modes af e~itertainme~irt will be at the heart af tny story: f-row Anlericans have amtlsecf themselves and how they have felt a b r ~ r ~their t amuscFnents aw ccs-rtral to our rrnders~andingaf the so-caltecf h e r i cat1 Centtlrq: hdeedi, the gro\ying legitimaty of amusement itself in manifest ways is crucial, For emmpte, the law creating the National Zoo in bvashington, D.C., enacted ly Congress in i 888-89, radonalized its existe~icel ~ y emphasizing &at it aronicf be '"or the atlvancement of science a d the instmction and recreation of the pcople.'"ut realities and tile recognirioll of clrange brouglrt llelv p-iorities to the fore. Zn 1891 a staff Inember pleaded witlr tlre Secretary (director) (of the Smithsonirzn t~istimtionthat exotic a~~irnats be added to North hericaxir wildfife at the zoo "for the X F ; E I U S ~ P S Sand P ~ F ~instnxction ~ af the people." By ~xyol, as the near centrrrqP opened, the s e c r e ~ r yacknowicdged to his diary that the new Natiorzai Zoo offered '?in admirable place for health, r*ecre(xfiorz and e ~ z t e ~ ~ a i r z m e ~Scz r ' t .an ~ ~ institution intended for the

advancement of seicrtcc had, within a dccadc, become vastly more imporpant as a source of entertainment," That trartshrmation is highly symptc~matic,and it provides an essen~a-ial context for my fc~cus throughout tlris book upon popular culture during the past centttry as entertaiment, first: and foremost, IIe~lcemy cmpI-rasis upon the cf-rangingnamre and uses of leisure as matters of degree as well as kind in distinpishitlg kcmeen mass m d peptiiar culture,

Its most ellthusiastic advocates have defined mass culture as ""everything that members of an industrialized socieq share with all other mernbers. Anjqhing not universally shared may be less t h z '~nass,'an aspect of a ' I n i a o r i ~ k %scrb'-culture,"""": r Fine. Let us bear in rtlir-rcl that as late as the 1930s marty hericax-rs, especially in the South and WPest, did nor yet live in a fully industrialized sociey; and up until midcentury there were a great matly aspects of Americain culmre that most certainly were rzot univcrsalty shared. Conseyuentt-y, according to their awxz criteria, devotees ought to ackxzowfedge that mass culture could not become truly pemasivc until welI aker WPc)rldWPar XI, &)lassculture, then, must bc no~tregional,highly startdardized, artd compfcteiy commerci;zl, Elandmade quilts, fc~rexample, dc:, not qualifiras mass culture, not because they lack cc>rnmercialvalue (for they most certainly possess t11at), but because they vary so much by region or locale, sometimes by religious sect, ancl also in the reasoils for their making, f2or the sake of ctarifimtion, then, let me suggest SOW of the Cffaracteristics CIF mass culture as WC have knc~wnit for atlout four decades so that readers can understand why 1 consider the significant develop1-crent;c just desa-ibed, along with others, as being better perceived either as popular cufhzre or as proto-mass cuft-ure, We must begin with. tele\risio~z,which went from t~eingexpensikre a d thereft~reexclusive to being perceived as an aBc2rdabte necessity during the mid- to later rr)sos. *ernoort scrap operas did not t~cccrme stalldard fare on all of the major nemorks until 1954~when hTBC: re1ucr;lntly capitulated because it could not compete with tlre huge success enjoyed by soap operas on CBS. By the early E 960s telelrision execuGves systematically started ta "dumb down" their progmms for a mass, undiEcrentiated audiexscc-far more than radio had ever cta~te, For tl~iatreason, the presumed or potej-rtid homogertization of Ameriof can viewers, T Twould contribute cc>llsiderablymore to tlre slra~~ing

mass culture than radio had. Keep in mind, atso, the sheer x-rumt~erof tocaX radio statior-rs along with stadox-rs that targeteci pitrticxlar ctienteles compared with the severely iirnited nu~nber of dominant, national television networks.'3 Fast-food chains like ;Mcl)or~ald%gae started in the mid- r y 50s but did not ""tke afphntil the sixties a r becorne ubicluitous until the seventies, They should x-rot be cc;lnsidereci a true compolzent of mass culture until the early ry)?ss, because initially they targeted a iargc but specific clientele: suburban families rather tlran urban workers, the customar). habitnCs of White "Ibwer 2nd White Castle hamburger L-rouses, Unlike their predecesars, l\fclb)onald"seatured clearzlincss. "E'hey were not ""joints" arzd had rzeirher juiceboxes rzor kre~zding machixzes. They aimed to please the baby bourn middle class rather than the urban .n.t_trkinpanand -woman. Atl of that changed during the rtr).jos and 3 0 s when McDonalcl's rapidy began to add dow11tom lczcations for reellagers and busy single pcrrpfe who did nor have time to cook and who ate on the run.44 Nrhen regional shopping ceriters started to emerge in tile mid- and tater rggos, tile comrnuniy marketl;liacc characterized by personal reiatiorzships shiftcci from the ofd ""d~wntoun"to the m{Jre anonymous suburban shopping center; anchored by major nadonal chain stores with standardized products, suclr as Sears, Pernneys, and &fontgomery 'Ward. 'f"be prepandcl-ance af chain stores and rzatio~ialfranchises brought- shoppers all of the latest national trends, rirae anty in prrrducts t ~ uix-r t mereha~-rdisingtecl-rs-riqucsas well. Sr-andardizathn was atso perceived as the key to sucecss frx national motef &ins be$nning in the 1g6os. ITranchising meant lczcd o\vnerslrip but predictable nationwide similarities, A nationail naisne conveyed reliabiliq and security to poter~tialpatroizs." On September 2 6 , E 960, sevexiv million peopfe watched the presiifential debate 11emcej-rJohn I m e n n e d y and Richard M.Nisolz-an unprecedtlcnte number of viewers who c ~ ~ u exchange ld ~d"acti~1r-r~ the next day about wlrat they had seen, h d tlren there is :Monday night football, a newly routinized mass phenomenon in which people in maIzy thausarzds of cities and towxis watch two teaxns from some other part of the countmy compete, All sorts of ritwals developed in resparise to rhe rnagr-retic am-action ctf Monday night hothail, such as places where women with x-ro ix-rterest in football could gather and socialize, Not until 1967 wasit possible to relay film by satellite from "Ibkyo to

New b r k , and then at a very high cost. By 1970, however, we know that a majority of Americans received their news coveragc from television, most notably news about the war in Vetnam.'" Finally, M round out a seteccive m m of mass culture5 disenguishing feamres in our own time, we have the inu~ldationof bulk mai1 catatopes, special promotios-rs Eor credit cards and life insurance, tele-adwrtising ard direct sales, philanthropic and medical research solic.inrions-mostly made possible by the sale of computerized mernbership lists, It has to be mass culture when tlre process depellds upon targeting zip cotles and census data based upan houxhdtd incos-cres,all from vast electronic data l ~ a n hNre , can call I-Boo nurnbers seve1-r days a week, twenc?;-four L~oursa day, and be answered by a recorded voice that presents us with a list ctf options we can only opt if we have a touch-lot~ct e i e p h c ~ n e ~ ~ ~ All of that and more, compounded of pixels, adds up to mass ctrlmre of a character u n h o w n and unirnagirned by most per~pleprior to the tater I 950% (On April 2 , 1965, Erne magazine devoted its cover story January 3, x 983, Time chose to celto ""'l'he Computer in Saciev." 011 ebrate the "h%achineof the Year" rather than a Man of the Year. Its cover s t ~ r was y entittccf ""'TheComputer &"T~ves In" and the lead visual fearured a man and a woman sitting at tabtes scaring at compurers.) , mass c u t m e as we bsow it was relatively nek%Tridngin r p b ~when two ~zotabfy in8uerztiiaf British writers, Stuart E Ialt and Paddy WX-sa~z~zet,produced a sophisticated text that predictably ~ningledmass and popular culture into a multi-ingredient omelet. They defined mass cuttvrre as art that is macl1i.r7e-praduced according to a brixnla. 'l%ey &voted a closing chapter to critics and ciekntfers of mass culture, and like most of the aggressively defe~~sive partisans of popular and mass culture at that time, they rejected a i y spurious distinctiori between the serious and the popular or betweer-r entertainmel-rt and high culture e seriously themselves values, They took mass and popular ~ d t u r quite and resented those critics and schofars wha regarded their own chc~sen 1-creatas ~)c>ison.~' 1here is a strikissg contrast between their upbeat perceprion of mass culture and that of CIernent C:reer-rberg in 1939 and Dwight 1\facdor-rald9stwo decades later (I-juildingupon C2reenbergv. I: Ialt and M a n n e i highlighted t e h n o t o ~and the hrmutaic element-mass prr~ductionmoving ahead in a marlner jndcpencjei~tof older models or art fc~rms.7 b its advocates, mass culture was caloable of innovation or T

t

even ~~~rvelty. It could produce repetition t9ut not uniqueness; yet the prcrduction of repetitio~~ was altogeti~erapprrrpriate if one subscribed to egalitarian values,""" h importmt reason why CSfreenberg and Llilacdc>~~ald so despised mass culture derived from their belief that it imiwted and therel~y degraded high cuft-ure-a pattern of reasoning that made less and less sense with the passage of time as polts tlemor~strated&at ctrciiit~ary Amerians /lad fittle jnkrc?;~ in high cdturc., never mind its send-ups. But as Greenlrerg wrote in one of lris most celebrated essays: """T'he precondition for kitsch . . . is tl-re availability close at hand of a fully mamred culmral traditioxt, whose discoveries, acquisitior-rs, and perfected self-cor-rsciousr-ress kitsch c a n tale ardvar-rtage of for its own ends," &lacdonaid put it even more sirnpt-~"; atbeit rnorc pemcrsetg: "Masscvlt is a parody of High Culture.""' I shall have muclr more to say alrc>utmass culture in chapter 8cri-lcical,albeit nest for the reasolls that prompted CSfreenberg and &lacdoi-rald to be. ta closing this introductov chapter, howevem; 1want to alert the reader ta several other centrat themes of the book First, 1 regard the haif centuv from 1885 to 1935 as the heydq of commercialized popular arlt~lrein the United Spates, from BuRato Riil's Wild %%TestShow to the demise ofirurlesqne and vaudeviIle, with a great deal Inme ululating in beweetn. Second, t see a crucial and vital period of overlap invotving what 1 L-rave called prota-mass culture and the prime of popular culture, an averlap that 1 date f n ~ m apprcrsirnately 1930 to rg65 The word 4bovertap" (rather &an "transition") is deliberately ciloxn because there was, untletliabty, a great deal. of simulmneitry. I-low does a l e csngc)rize a Norman Rockwell illustration on the cover of the lS~ztwdnyEve~zh?g Pos~when its circulation edged dose to three ~nif1io1-r-popular cufhzre or xnass"z'lTkear-rswermust be both, of course, because Kochetl"sllustratior-rsarc, in their UM;II mrious way9beyor~dciitegoryry5' "Whythen do I reject the word 'ktransitim'?? Becatrse pupuiar culture did nest die and is not ready for interment. It: remains very rnuch with us, albeit more easily oljsewed in smaller towns than it1 large cities, in rural America more than urban or suburban, yet ubiquitous ~to~ze&eless in revivals as well as in some new 'ITVshows and radio programs, for example. hjoreover, t9ecausc of technologicat changes, popular cxiturc always has been and remair-rs more ephemerat and evanescent than mass c u l t ~ ~ rAlthough e, &lae LVest".iisl-inctive humnr

mn~iveson fiim fri~rnthe 1930s and '+S, for example, her many years in vaudevi1lc and n i g h t d d s can never be recaptured or repmduccd. What then of the a-iteria that 1 use for diE%eretlriatingbetween popular and mass cult~sre?"I'he somewlrat less important criteria i~svolve matters of scale-such as ti~ausandsaf peopfe at an amusement park as appax"do maIly tens of millio~~s worldTNide watchia~gthe Super Bowl in Janrrary, for example-ar~d increasing depender-rce rrpo1-r technotogies of visual access, ei~tertainment,and inhmmation rather than avenues of personal access, sellri~sstructionor amusement, and kncs\vledge for its own sake rather tlran practical utility. "10 ' make the abstract more concrete (itbeit reductive), it's the difirence bemeen games of skill. at the state Eair and video garnes, a r betweer-r ""soping" d ~ boarde walk at Coney XsIal-rd or Atlantic City and sufrrng the Weit at 130rne*j2 bC"hicb leaifs to the d i s t i ~ ~ e t that i ~ n matters most. I regard popdar cutmre---not [zlwi~ys br,t mnr-e +er$ ~hrnlant-as participatory and interactive, wl-rereasmass culture (until the 19805, when computers caused sigrrificar~tcl-rangesthat lrave yet to Ite fully charted)," m m o$e~ rhnrz rzot induced passiviry and the priivatizatiar-r of culture, In writing about l? T. Rarnum and his puMtic in the nineteenth centuv, Neil FTarris ifescrjt9cd a degree of responsiveness on the part of patrons who &lighted in disenmngling issues of vnlidicy 2nd deception, IIence the participatory aspect of popular culture, In I 870 the famous landscape architect Frederick Law t)lmsted described two capacides or qu'aliees latent in all peop le: the "exerti~re"and the "receptive," t arn persuaded that pc~puiar~ d t u r calts e fort11 the exertive while mass ~vlltrtirecan rely far more upon the re~eptive.'~ Being "exertive" or participatorq. may occur either in the makjng orin tlre consuming of a product or 3 pleasure. (A quilting bee provides 3 goad example,) Ilow people used or responded to what was offered them rnatters a great deal. It ance was coxnmon for kids to create their awn toys, combining vivid imaginations wit11 miscetlanec>usmaterials at l~and.T l ~panerr1 t is much less tme today; not absolutety, ctf course, but significantly so, hTovv7tlrey are more likely to want particular manufactured items seen on 737 or at tlre mall, Particularit-y.means autlrernticity: just like Jotlnny"srJudy$+ 'l"be culmral historia~~ f l a n 'lhachterlberg has made a useful distinction t9cmeen experience and ix-rhrmation,Neccfless to say, they are not mt~ctialiyexclusive--re act upon ix-rformation, and x-rew know1edge lnay prompt us to seek experienceii Nonetheless, wllcn popular cul-

Corni~zgto Er~tzrwith Drfini~qErmr

mre was in its prime, h e r i c a 1 - r ~seemed ta sexrch for experience, wl-rereasin recent ifecades they have had cause to privilege information at9ove experience, a parallel in symmetrfr with the relatjve shift that 1 perceive from participatoy to more pamiveS5(" At the close of the I 87os,tlre major cultural tension that seemed to attract the attentiar-r of journalists, preachers, ancl social critics got subsumed ui-rder the polarized rubric " V ~ i I p r i qand f;entiiiy,?' which t9ecarnc the mtlject of a major editorial in the i%TmVork 7?vtesSRc~narkat9fy egalitarian in tone, the essay sox~ghtto minimize any ix-revitable connection between class and taste, between social status and brow levels---a sure sign that tllis very issue had become vexing in Lktorian hnerica. 'T"here are people who are coarse and vulgar, and there are others who are refined and gentle; t9ut they cannot be distinguislred from each other by ally garb or circumstance apart from character, It is true that a certain leisure, with opporturniy for the cufti\ratioxl of taste and for the pursuit of social satisfaceions,

favcors a life that may be caltecf gex-rtle, and that hard work and rough competition tend to coarsen the Inal-rrrers and tab the patrician tone fri-rtmthe speeclr. Yet it will not do to say that they who get their own living are the vlrlgal; atld that they who do not: work at all, or who work only for pleasure or for honor, are &e only gendefoIks,'"

A ccs-rt-urylater that widely noticcd dualism had been supplanted by a very dif-ferent one: "hTarcissism and iJitrruism," ""fe social critic and historian Cbristopher Lasclr caused quite a stir in 1978-79 with his a work that prompted Presprovocative book TIECztlttare ofNnrcz"s~~inn~ ident Jirn~nyCairter to invite Lasch to tile White I: Touse. Lasch derided wrorzgheadcd critics of rzarcissism fbr their naivet6 in FaXIing to make connections bem-een the naircissistic personatiy type and certain clraracterisec patterlls of contemporav culture, such as the intense fear af old age and death, altered ser-rse af time, fascinadar-r with celebrity9fear of cornpetition, decline af the pia).. spirit, deteriorating relations between men and women. For these critics, narcissism remains at its loosest a syl-ronym h r selfishness a d at its most precise a metapho~;and norhing more, that describes the state of mind in which the world appears as a mirror uF the seif." 'rhe proklexn af passivit-y.and privatization in a x-rew p i s c with new manifestations! Within the span of a cenrriv a dorninal-rt l i f e s ~ i e arnong Americans bad come full circle, but with a troublesome m-ist. 13et>plei-iad shiked. ficzrn a culture of dornesticitry centered on hearth and frome to a culture of entertainment in pubflc places, made possible in wondrous waj~sby urban electrii6catiar-r at the close af the nineteenth cetztuv. By 1910-zo""going out" meant more than the ~xstomarJP fare of popular culture: the cirtxs and the carnivilf, the minstrel show and the ?%?let West show9Barnurn and burlesque. It meant illumilsated arnusernellt park9 and trolley parks, nickelodeons and movie L-rouses,vaudeville and musical relriews, dance halls and cabarets,.Stepping out made papufar culture lively, and vice versa, during the first half of the mtzciedr C W - ~ C U ~ . " 'rhen came television and mburkia, almost simultanemzsiy; and within a qmrter of a centuy a remarkaMe shift back to privatized

teisurc accurred with astoi-rishix-rgspeed. 11% 195I a Caltup pcrit asked: "Mi& C 1 0 you enjoy most-radio, television or the mwiesl'TRadicl got 50%, ' I T 2 4 X I at1d nov vies 2 1 % . Late in a Ropeqpc,lt of 2,m7 lclnericans pursued a more comptex but i n e i p ~ i n g issue: l3eopfc L-rave been tralking recer-rtly about the 6 ~ c that t they are chnging some of their living hakits. I"d like to ask you about &is list of things .c\-hi&you are doing 1xol-e than you were a p a r ago and which you are doing less than a year ago.""

t lcre are some of the respoi-rses to what people were doing m0r.e than they used to, ('l"he aiirswers tataf more than loo% owing to multiple respcm"""") Spending rime at home tching tclevisic>n Reading books Entertaining friends in p u r L-rome Goil-rgout to places of ~mutllicex-rtcreainment

54% 42

34 22

rb

In terms of public places and privarc: spaces, it almost seemed as t h u g b tile clock hail been turned back one hzrntlred years. But not quite, We had acf-rievedan interesting mix of mass aiird popular cuXmre; but above all, a partid retreat frarn the pubflc sector ta the haven of home and even specific spaces within the home. 'l'he privatizatifln of teisure, h retro prcrcess thatl ali in all, seems to have transcended customary patterns of categc)rizatit~n,"' I cerminiy do nor believe that television is cxclosively a passive experier-rce,nor do t deny that it cart have participato~and interactive cozzsequexzces, 'Ekfevisioxt gave a genuine lift to the civil rights movement, 1963-65, and to opposition against the war in \?etr~axn, 1968-73. Some people stilt watch television together, and they may very well disct~sswhat they watch, But if the program is really irnportarlt (such as a nominadng convendrtn or a State of the tinic-,naddress), the audiexice at home is most XilceXy to watch people discuss what they have just scexz and L-reard. It seems clear that we can ix-rvc~kea histc~ricalo r t h o c f t ~that ~ still persisted less than i-riatfa cenmry ago, so ictr-rgas wc acknc~wledgethat it never went entirely unclrallenged. T h e template for that orthodoxy

touked something like this: High cdturc is expected to cor-rnect: humilnkirul t-o its h e s t past acilievements, whereas popular ctdtrtrc provides more eplwmeral access to amusement and experience across class lines in the here and now Eligh culture is meant to create as well as preserve. P o p f a r and mass cuft-ure function in Inore transitory ways within a car-rtemporary time frame, 'f'hcit- principal oi~jecti~re is not: enduring excellence but pleasure and commercial appeal. How those orthodoxies rrndemcnt modificatior-rsand transformations will concenl us in the chapters ahead.

A madcap episode that occtxrred 011 the edge oFNcw %>rk'sGree~~wich \'illage in C)ctijber 1963 Garl serve as an allegory of the ongoing tensions arising ii-orn the practice of cultural poputism in the LIniteil States, "I'hree agenrs of the Internal Revenrre Service tried to close down a second-Boor loft that served as home to the Living 'f'lzeatre, an a.rraxzt-garde drama companjr run by Jllliail Beck and his wife, Judiith Maiina. Over its sevo-rtcen years of existence, tile cornpally had achicved jnternationaf renown for staging contrc~versial, popuiist plays. But the company also happened to be flat broke, belrind in its rent, and $2 8,000 in arrears on federal tax payments+onsiderabty less than the interest paylnent deductions claimed by xnary wealthy hnericans. Be that as it xna)2; Beck and lkfalina recnxited friends and falls to stage a sit-in desiped to frustrate tile IKS5 intenticms. WPflat then ensued T M O S ~cI~)seIyresembled an early fitm farcc featuring the Keysrclne Kops, A banner strung from tlre Living eI'heatre's office wintlo\v (at the same .rrenue) cf-rarged: "U.S. government stops art!" Reporters and television crews arrived on the scetle to cover the story. Food and supplies were ""ariiked" up from the street in a wastebasket Ic~wcredfrom the windows. T h e next dab Beck and Matiaa decided to stage a find performance of T%eBp-ig by Kenneth ?%C Brown, asslrlnitlg aker a series af telephone catls that rippled out like a chain letter that: their audlerzce could be admitted t11raugh two urisealed firedoors. 'l'he revenue agents responded by pulling a fuse anif plunging the theater into

darkness, When the T V creas raised a fierce prcrtest, the IRS relented and restored the lights, Mearwl-rile,an arrifience managed to asscml~le by clirnbing ladders and aossing over the roofr-op of an adjacent tmilding. "I"heplay went on, but by I : ~ Oa.m. some performers and atrendees who rehsed to leave were arrested. 'l"ke Living "E'heatre was then cf oseci." End af the saga"rOFco~;rrscnot. Within days a real eseate operator a d tileater owner l-rad offered Bcck and Malina the use free of chargc of another, better tlrearer, k%f?tlri~r a few weeks tlre Living 7"heatre had reorganized, rising like a phoetlix from the ashes. 7%e Brig was back anstage, All the prisoners had been released witkn twenfy-four hours af the dor-nlybrook at Sixth Avenue and 14th Street, Beck: and hfalina atone stood trial, arrd not b r tax evasion but rather for impeding federal officers in the excrcise of their duty! "fhe whale episode represented a perlraps ilrevitable claslr between governmental aurhori.;itr~ and cultural forces so radically democradzed that they ref'used to recognize that authoriy* Yet however bizarre the story may sound, it bad a~ztecedcntsin the cabarets and speakeasies of the I)rohitoitio~zyears, rg-xgto rg33.

"E'he coxnpfex relatiionsfrip betweer-r popular culture and a progressikre a r democratic ethas seems to have foilowed a distinctive path in the Unitcd States, in part because democradc values enjc~yedsuch rhetcrrical pnrminencc fri~rnthe 1830s onward and in part because a sociey at least formally committed to such values ogered unusual opportunities for elltreprenews eager to malrimize the potential of br-oad market appormiincies. Walt N'hit~nan's assertion that 'h have great poets, there must be great audier-rces, too" i s ambiguous for interesting reaPerhaps. Qrrtalsons. What cfid he mean by the second "'great"? L~,argc? itativcfy great, remal-kabiy discenringi Possiblj~.Ihpcrty appreciatiw? Very like15 t h u g h without excltldinff the first two possibilities. In my case, mThitman surely understood that cultural excellcnce would be dcfi~zedin Izew and differer-rtways in a democtraicy, yet his response to the qualitative character of taste levels in &cl-nineteenth-cerztury America clearly must have been more complcx than we might casrralty assume, I farking back almost half a cenruls; to lris cultural entlllrsiasms as a young rnan in the 18qss,k%f"hitmanf; fascinating recollection itncludes a

dear sense of stratification d e s ~ ~ iour t e recent emphasis upon an accessil.tle, shared publjc ~ v t t u r ein the antebelturn ycars, '"l spent much of l-crytime in the theatres then," he rel-crarked, "going everywhere, seeing everything, high, low, middling--absorbin theatres at every l,ore."' t Te expXidtly recalled a degree of ~egmer-rtatiar-r that we do rirot customarily associate with nucl-nineteerzth-cenmry hnerica. f 3is most recent biographer emphasizes the esistcrlcc at that time of a "'piirrticipato~ cuttvrre" that dcep(y influenced t'v'hit~~an, who wanted his verse to dissolve the boundaries bemeen taste levels, ""Itlink of art as sornethirsg to serve the peopfe,'Vre wrote, "tlre mass: when it fails to do that it's Gdse to its promises.'?' 'l"kat is exactly the attimde that we associate with Nrhitxnan, of toy course?and in his later p a r s he railed against the grrr~ringt e j ~ d e n ~ telescope the concept of culture into high culture, a resporlse erltirdy consistent with our sense of incr-easimg hierarchy during the last three decades of the nineteentlr centuy, Referring to ""re enemy, this word Culmre," Whitman advocated " ~ r a g r a m m eof culture, drawn out, not for a single class alone, or for the parfors or lecture rooms. . . ."' As mmy have noted, h o ~ ~ e v e\/\i:hit~~an r, never achieved the large, appreciative alritiencc among the masses that he yearned fbr and, at times, eagerly expected. ?'he adoring admirers of his poetry came largely horn the more educated strata and fror-n those wham we regard in retrospect as avant-garde. It is entirely possible, therefore, that b a i r n a n 8 m e m o v and ser-rsibilir-yplayed tricks on hi111 in his declining p a r s , and that hc projected back to the 1840s and '50s a degree of stratification in taste that did not really emerge llrltil the 18705, W know9for example, that art union competitirtns and exlribitions during the r 830s and I 840s were open to talent and well aeentled by a cross section of the popufation. Nre have also learx-rcd that: oil painting-s wefl as prints enjoyed braad appeal because of a ""dmocratic drive to t w e r the barriers Of high culnrrc.." Art ieapes, exhibitions, and galteries emphasized nationatistic pictums to hightight a sense of cohesive identic~rthat rrazrscended class lines,' r. To tlre extellt that a shared public culture existed in h e r i c a during the ~niddledecades of the ~zineteer-rthcerztumy, natior-ralisrrr may l.remy wefl have been at its core. But other stirnuli were present and patent as wetl, A gcrtldty number of workinpen's associations, for e m p i e , fiiltowing the exampte of F r a n k l i n o a centur)i eariier, had self-help and cultural uplift as prirnary 01-tjcctiives, 7'heir activities, morerlver, often went well beyond the rnrrndane or tlre rudirnenbrq: In March

r 853, for instance, the Metrapofitan Mechanics' I~~stitute of Washington, D.G., assernt9fed to hear an address from Joseph FSex-rv, S c c r e ~ v of the Smitbsonirzn Institution and the most disdnguished scientist in America. Such wganizadons did xnot just exist in 1-cr;ljorcities, We need Indiana, only look to the 1nstitute"sounterpal-t in tiny New E Iarmon;~: at mldcentury,"" On the other hand, many of tile Shakespearean prctducticzns in the United States during the middle third of the nineteentl-r ccntrurfp pandered to the lowest common denomi~samrsof public aaention by interspersixsg songs, slalostick, and melczdr;zma ullrelated to plays written by the bard of Avon, From an affirmative perspective, those people respox~siltlefor such productiox~stherel~jrdemocratized them l ~ maxiy mizing their acccssil-,ili~.' From a more critical perspecrim, lrowever, the entrepreneurs orltg anricipated the cominess ar~dcoarseness of kitsch by aLmost a century. A sculptor xla~nedJolrn Rogers prr~videsa less ambipous example of inte~lselypopular art that cut krerticatly throug1-r Wctorian taste levels. Working with clay, Kogers modeled famous hericaxz 6 p r e s as wet1 as sentimental domestic scenes. People admired his ""documentaries" b r their patriotic authcnticiv and his family grclups for their humamirqi: Standing sixteen to menty ixlches in height, these works enjoyed instaxlt recognition and broad appeal as icons for the l-rome. Kogers always insisted that he did not wish to attempt ""any high art"; a~zdJarnesJackson Janves, a praxninent art critic, meant to coxnplixnent R0gcr.s with the observation that "hisis not high art,"'" In val-ic~usways and h r mlrttipte reasons, hc~wevel;the appearancc of democratization in Vctorian h e l - l c a can be quite deceptive, Manufacc~irersof sporting goods, for example, responded with alacrity during the 1880s ancl 30s to new enthusias~x~s for phjrsical exercise and tile growing leisure to pursue it, 'l'ke marketing efforts of these firms certainly did expand interest in and oppormrrities far cts-gsnized play. 13articipation in sports t9ccamc an important compol-rent r ~ fpopular culture, But the mamrrfiactul-ers ~ L s c ) recognized tlreir commercial stake in the developmenr of standardized products for games with char-cut rules. Cox~sequex-rtIy,participato~innovation by tile coxnpetitors became a casualty of alliarirces bemee1-r sporting goods Arms and coaches, professiox-rat athletes, journalists, and the administratc~rsof teapes and asscjciations, The sale of pidebooais, o k c t ~makit~ga spurious claim to be "official," became especially lucrative. As one autlrorir-y

has written, however, "ever).. mccessfiJ partnership hlside the indust9 esal9tished f i r ~ ~boundaries er on the range ar-rd styles of sports ogerect to consumers on the outside," "7"h cornmercializati~~~ of sport dirninisbed democratization t~ecausetlre manufacturel--s and professionals wanted authoriy and control over this burgeoning area of popular culture and enti~usiasm.' A very &%rent illustration ctf tbe desire br control had comparat9le cunscquex-rccs in ar-rother sphere, Durix-rg the last cyuartcr of the nineteellth centuy authorities used newspapers, brochures, and guidebooks to inform audiences of the behavior expected at theatrical and musical events, 'l"ke attentiveness, restraint, and pofite appreciation that were incufcated seemed cor-rstraining and undemocratic to some in the middle class and to mar-ry ""bclow" them, T h e requltiite gcntiiity and p a s s k i ~may very wcll have been as ct6utting as the actual substance of the perfonnarrce,""" fere we encounter quiescence as a required qualicy of refined culture-ill conwast to tlre cornmoniy criticized passivity that would later accompaxly Inass culture, especialfy following the advent of telel~ision.t listoricalfy cor-rsidered,then, passivity has t9ecn demanded as wetl as deplorecf, but ix-r quite different contexts and for very different reascrns, Overlapping with that increased demand for civility at refilled entertainments, an extraordinarq. convergence of developments starting in the fater 1880s greatly cxpai-rded audiegzces for popufar cuft-ure, therel~y.democratizing amusernel-rts for tile working class, especially, but also for many in t17e '%middling'\lasses as well. 'rile must essential fcatrire kciiitating this new nclusiverress was a dramatic drop in "'popular prices," a phrase associated with the name of Benjamin FranHin Keitlr, the most famous of all the vaudeville and early ci~sernapic-,neers. Kcithho-called dime Inuseurn in Boston (expaxlding from ail array of L-ruma~~ a d d i ~ e sto a small theatrical troupe) tapped the come-and-go transient market in a respcctat9le ver-ruc that he called "refix-recf vaucicviile,'Vfle thereby seemed to oger cfernocratic distinctior-r arhilc attracting the midcile class as well as the worki11g class. He succeeded in drawing a mixed alrtlience that itlclutled women antl childretl. 'l"ke sirnufta~leityand wide range of this "entertainme~~t discount revolution" i s truly astonishing. 'E'he war l~etweenWilfiam Kandoiph F-learst and Joscph Putitzer to dominate the penny press at the endof the ccs-rtrit-;l.is .ndl known, So is the availai~ilityof ~M~~~zsey? iilzlstl-ated l-cragazitlefor fifteen cents. In r 887 &ith antl Edward I:. AIbee hcided

to charge only ten cents for their performances, ' f i e so-calted ro-m30 price scale emerged at tile turn of the centrrly and drew large crowds for melodrama in particular, (The upper balcc~nycost a dime.) Frederic 7'hasnpson's I Iippodrome, a massive theater in New %rk Ciry; offered seats at 25 cents to a dollan; rather than up to the two dollars demanded l y the mmpe tition.' l 'T"his price rcvt~lutionwas not contined to the lowest tastes and the tightest trucigets. 11-1 r 894. Wr;alterhjorosco ~ v prices t dramatically at the Ckand Opera IIouse in New 'Eiork. k%!?tbilsa decade, aff;ordaWe entertai~sment of every conceivable sort was available to aL1. In 1903-04, Kolm and Zukor oper-rcd their Automatic One Cent Vaudcvillc Emporium, where a penny operated every viewing machine, 'By rgag, admission to amusement parks across the countv h& ieveted down to ten CCII~S. The earitiest nickeiadeons, having started ixs Pjttsburglr, spread rapidly in tlre years following 1905. The 5-and-10-cent stores l~egunI-ty Frank k%<~ ~ s ~ o l w oin r t h1886 proliferated by rgao, when there were GET-nine, Pe~z~zy arcades begm ta appear in x 905, and within a few years became a socially inclusive term referring to amuserurents aBc2rJabte by all." Scverat key points must Ire kept ixs mind here, First, this dexurocrntization of entertainment was slcst confined exclusively to large urban areas, and cheap did not necessarily mean tawdry. In small h e s c a n towxis matpie ti~eaterswere filled with respeceat)le middle-class citizens, just as they were increashgly in big cities aker \Vorld N7arI, Second, the sirnultaneit-~r of this swifi and easy access t~ so marry modes of popdar culture would not be repeated llrltil 1946,when more than two hundred brand-tle-cv mass-oriented magazines appeared, helping to mark tlre onset of inass ctrlmre as we ~ S I C I Wit," Boosters of tile nicketodeon earty in the twencieti~ceritumy liked to call it ""dmocraey5 theatem="And the speed with which nickefodeons a~ractecfex-rthusiastic patrolls in the ces-rt-tiry5 first decade would ire regicatcd (and then %)me)by the rocketing success of television aker 1948,'~In fact, the patters1 is deceptively simple: mtwing pictures l~ecametlre most appealjng fcjrm of cs>mmerciaIenterminmenr dtiring the first half of the twentieti~centumy, rapidIy repfaced by televisios-r as the most successtrul in the second l-ralf. 111 E y7 x a Louis Ilarris poll of r ,600 hericarzs indicated a prefcrencc for w'atc11ing films on f~.lruis-ia~r aver going to a movie house, and arr even more positive response (66%) to &is statement: "iMovies on televisiall have taken the place of going to a movie theatre for us." A Koper pall of more than 2 , 0 0 0 per-

sons in 1977 found only zE% "very i~-rtcre~ted" in moviegoing and 36%, not very or not am"i inttlrcstcd. 'I'hc. remaining 43% felt ""moderately interes~d.'""' I hat problematic era for film during the 1950s to 1970s provides an arresting t~asisfor comparison-and a i-rotable sense of change aver time-even though it p r o j e c ~us rather 6ar ahead af our foms here, wl-ricl-ris tl-rc earay dcrnocratiz~tionof entertainment, When film was all tllc ragc during the I ~ Q Sone , ~fbsemercalled the glittering near movie palaces ""shrines to democracy" because all sea& were equal: none was resemed, there were no privileged tiers, and clrairs on the bafcary were exactly tile same as those on the main Boor. Lfoyd Lewis, a well-knowxi Chicago jourr-ralist, put it this way in 1929: ""lthis suave atmosphere, tile $iffcrences of ~xt-rning,charm, and wealth, that determine our lives outside, are forgotten, All men enter these porrals equal, and tlrus the mr>vies are perlraps a sjfml-tolof democracy Let us take heart from this, and not be downcast because our democratic nation prudently resenjes its democracy for the temple af day dreams,"""" Just as ~zotabfe,thougi-r less evident ti1a1-r the car-rtrastbemeen pubtic attialdcs toward m t ~ ~ e g o j nbefore g and aker rpjo, is the alterecf vicw c)f critics toward films during the fikcen years prior to rr)z9,when Lcwis wrote ""?'he Ile L w e 13icture 13alace." "5lliam Dean EIowells warmly adrnired the teclmoloo that made film possible but lmented what movies could not do: "conlrince the taste and console tile spirit." Brander ~Vattilews,a pronunent t11ougll highly traditional theater critic, wondered jxs I 9 x 7 wl-reti-rcrcit-remawas a ""me~-race to the drama,'" T h e very same tex-rsion and pofarization of attitrudes-gentccl realism)"tJrauglrtfut. laughter" versus the "hTew 1l[umor9~(eomic existed at that time concerning vaudeville." htost arresting of all, however, was the complex response al.: the critic Raxzdolpf-r Bourne, as culmrafly radical in E y I S as 1 Iowells and M atthemvs uTcregenteel and coi~sen~ative, Aitht~ughRourne recognized that film ass-rrredly tlemocratized because it was the art of the people, its poor wbstmtive qualiv as culture caused him profound concern, wlriclr Ire expressed in a Cascinating way-by ackr.rcs\vledginga hierarchy of taste levels and instimtions sewing them, yet despising them just the same, t Ie ge~ieralizedhis deep disappointxnen t with 611x1in ti~is way, an indictment ofcr;litural star~dardsold and new: P

l

I feel even a certain brxlh~lbglee at rhis wholesale rejection of what our fathers reverellced as culture, But I don't feel any glee

about what is mbsti-tutcd For it. W'e seem to ire witnessing a towirrow sr-robbery.Its. a thousar-rd ways it is as yranx-rical and arrogant as the other culture of universities 2nd rnillicznaires and museums, . . . It: looks 3s if we should have to resist the stale culmre of the masses as we resist the stale culture of the aristocrat." IEorrrne5 reaction is significant For several reasons, It not only recognized the existencc of a culmral hierarchy in h e r i c a , but cunwhen dernned the qualiq of all levels at the very same moment, 1915, Van Wyck Brook;, lris fellow radical critic, did so in the famous essay titled "IIighbrow and Lowbrow." Athougi-r these Young 'Eisrlcs certainly cor-rsidered themselves cultural democtrats, they were fully prepared to impc~setheir own agcnifa upon ordinary Americans: what Brooks would call a "usattfe past" and what Burrrne would calt a transnational America, that is, the meaningful importmce of history when the public mood could not have been more present-minded and the izecessity for cosmopofitanism when the pubflc mood could not: have been more i-ratior-ralistic2nd Ilernocratic cultural critics can be stridently ant of tcjuch with the temper of orciiit~aryAmerimns; and their desirc to see their own values prevail could be just as arch as the atdtudes of tlre cultural aristocrats they so hotly repudiated and hoped to replace. "rhe developme~-rtof seriotrs 6lxn critic is^^ required a full generation to emerge because for severaf decades, even through the 1920s, many putllishers and ecfitors mistaker-rfg perceived moviegoing as primarily a vulgar mindlcss phenomenon. Vlihei-rNunnallyJohnso~s.asked to review films far The AVm* f/nrker;I Iarold Ross, its founder and cditrtr, dismissed tlre proposal archly by deelal-lng that: ""movies are for old ladies ai-rd fairies." Eveatuaitly, however, Rass reconciled himself to this upsart industry and decades later some of the ltest-how11 film criticism in the l-rathn, writt~lntty Pauline Kael, appeared reptarly in 7"he N m fibdel7 prwicting yet another compelling titrnus of ~vImra1 change.'"

*

I he infiuence of critia and j o w l s of opinion as welf as artistic ctrganizations raises 3 related yet different aspect of cult~~ral dernoeratiza-

t-

tior-r, "fhroughout the r~ix-reteenti~ centuT a dominant impression prevailed at the upper levels of the social pyranid t l ~ aarlt~lral t values and ai~preciationtrickled down from lriglber to lower social strata, from cri-irlcs and "taasternakers" "down to ordinary folk who took their cues from their betters. 'l'hat was eqlxally true af art uririozrs during the x 840s, the founders af nruseurns in the 1870s, and powerhl editors tike Igdward Bok of the L~kd1'~f' HO'MI~ your-n&l at the &se of the centuay, Irdith WPt.~artonar~dLouis Comfcjrt liffany both shared that assum~~tio~~,'~ 1hey were not ctntirely wrong, either, T h e Uilited States Sanitary Caxnmissiasir, created during the Civil Nrar, emerged as the largest and most frighly orpnized philanthropic activity ever known in the United Spates. It was m11 by meml~crsOF the northern social efite who mccesstitlip instilled in the popular mind an acceptancc of principles of order and stabiliy along with enhallced reverence far cultural instit~~tions. * I he commission exemplified an sltruisrie organization that lrad s pmfound irnpxt upon t ~ o t hpopular and nationaf culture, As C ; e o r ~LM. Fredricho~zhas written, the comdssio~z'ssuccess encouraged conservative activists to believe that a greater reverence fbr the erltities they favc~red"'could bc instilled in the popular mind t9y an aristocratic efite operating in a private or semi-official capaciv5""" Very few viewers seemed to recognize that the ways in wlriclr people enjoyed their leisure time, cven when they were being entertained liy song-and-dance men in nus sic halls, often filtered up fmrn the folk rather &an trickled down from a handftil at the top, rr&omas1:). Rice, for instance, along with other four~dcrsof minstrel acts in ar~tebell~~m America, borrowed heavily from close observatims of f i i c a n American styles of singing and dancing, especially during the decade following E 828 in the South and the border states, 't'he same woulci be true a cerztumy later with jazz, af course, when elements of btack folk culture tiltwed up in significant ways and profoundly altered the tr-ajectory of 13c"~"lar music in the U~~itecS Spates, starting notably in the 1920s and 30s. "I'he demand for black fiddlers and banjo players during the nincreenth centLrry9importatnr as it was, wodd he surpassed by the irnpxt of fipres like Lauls Arxnstrozrg and Dirke Hlington in the mezrdeth.' " It reaity should he n o surprise, of cortrse, that the dissemination of cuttvrre oc~xrs,at least partidy, throngh the process of filter up; yet many of us still need to hc rernilsdedi that trickle down does l-rave its democratic inversion, hToris tlre brtttrim-up process at 211 llew or cven c .

t-

American, Ltsuking at children's stforics in early modern Frar~cc,for example, Rubcrt Darnton found that elite and p o p ~ ~ iculture ar did not occupy discrete realms, 7'he audiences for Racine5 plays lrad imbilled folklore with tlreir m o t h e r h i l k ; and Mczrher Choose tales circulated A conh r n i-rlrrsesand rrarmies to bourgeois and aristocratic j)ares~r?;.LJ siderable amour-rt of classical music writte~iin ninctee~lth-cerituny Europe built upon or incorporated traditionat folk ttines. Ancj in rpoo (.:laude Debusq .c\-rote"'GctlliwogS (.:akewaikP after visiting the Paris Exposition and being inspired by Scott Joplin playing his own livefy ragirne compositions on rhe piano. Joplin's preser-rcein Paris and his impact upon IJehssy leads us to yet another cornpiex aspect of the relatioliship beween dernacracjr and cuttvrral prefc;;rences,Very clearly, new fcsrms of popular ~ v t m r eflourand ished during the hatf centrrrq. following ~ H g abecause t-c.chnotct~ entrepreneurial ilmovarions made tlrern so rnuclr more affcjrdable tlran they l-rad ever been, Cansequenrly, popular ct~lrurealso became more socially inclusive, though the basis for that inclusive~~ess is xirot entirely clear. Ilavid Xasaw has argued that race (is a i-rcg;ttive reference) mattered ccrnsiderahly more than class as the basis fcrr bonditlg socially diverse auciiex-rccs,That is, so long as trlacks were excluded or segregated-the intolerant rejection oT a presence---whites from assorted socioeconomic backgrounds felt comfortable s i ~ i n atld g lauglkg side by side. Xasaw insists that the exelusiox~a r segregatioi-r af people of color was a necessany condition for the ""dexnoctratizatio~z'?of theatrical and mtwie a~~diej-rces." Other schc~larsare less impressed than Nasaw t9y the degree of class inngt-arion ai-crong whites at leisure entertainmetlrs ranging from film to burlesque and vaudeville, Instead, Lary &fay and Robert C,: M e n are struck by the way that producers a i d ex-rtrepreneursski1h;jttlyaimed their progmms"tddle-class audiei-rceswit11 self-consciously middlectass values, In the case ctf Ziedelclk FoIII'es, that even made the iilusiorl ctf semin~rcfitl~t9y the shc~wgirlsacceptable to birth the police ar~dthe gender-mixed aurlietlce, In &c: case of fill11 stars, Hollywood studios presented rhern in the 1920s as ""ordinary folks whose lavish lifesvles could be democratized." h this way9 the sears might be perceikred as L-reraicmodels rather than sources of resentment for the middle class.'""

Even as the concept of ""ctmocracy" uunaccompanied by modifiers can t ~ ae vague atld ~nuddledterm, readily deplc~yedin various ways, there is Izo dcfl~zitior-ral cos-rser-rsusabout the meaning of cufmrai dexnocracjr or a dexnocratic culture, Culmral democracy may imply the repudiatios-rof cultural stradficadon and the belief that x-ro taste level or preferer-rce i s any more worthy than anc~tber,&lore radicailj~,it can mean the rejection or elirni~sationof ail sources ofc~xlmralauthority. O r it Inay simply refer to the most inclusive conditions of access and participation in whatever the ~nernbersof a sociesy deem culmratljrworthwhite, ranging from entertaiment to Chautauqua-tl~peinstnxctioxl to leisure activities in places of narurai I-teatlty. As W'alter Lippman~~ remarked in I)F*I$ wntl Ma~2er-y: "Bcfclre you can begin to have a democraq yr~uneed a countrq~ in which cveqolle has some stake and some taste of its promises"27 1hus far we have concentrated on the clranging realities of access> incfusivei-rcss,and diversity in hnerican cuftrure during the generatios-rs prior to the rgzos. \Ve ~zeedto turn next ta the explicit mea~zingsthat contemporaries ascrihed to the democratization of ~l-tlmrein the United States, hrot surprl~ingfy~ those pcrceptiol-rs range from sirnyfistic to complex and fri-rtmambivalent to affirmative. hTeedlessto say, the al-crbivalent and complex reactions are not only more interesting hut most revealing about the ixnpact of cultrural clrange as well. If we begin at tile dawn of the cexitumy, we find both simplicity and complex'ttl~,though respol-rcfing to fairitg diverse cor-rcers-rs,Iuwarct F. Aitree, for instance, regarded vaudeville as very democratic trecause it ogered something for everyone, Aclciiressing quite ciigerent matters, EIarvard5 first t-aculttt;.member to ""profess" bericart. literature, Barrett Mrcndell, explained why he idealized writers of the hnerican Keszaissar-rce (ca. 1840 to x870), a view echoed one gencl-atioxl later l ~ y Lcwis Mumfiird. Literature in the age of ISrnerscm, I:fa.n-ti~ome,and &)letVjlIewas not aristocratic or even eiitist, Rather, wrote W7ex-rdeX1,in their getleration "the warring ideals of detnocrary and of excellence were once reconciled." CC;enrge E. mqrodl,erryg %%Tendell'seonreinpar a y at Columbia, felt absolute ~zostalgiafor that era when democtraicy combined and merged with excellence, by which he xneaxzt high ideals.'" P .

'T"hat kind af concern with excellence persisted for several decades, notably u17til the close of the 1920s and most o k c t ~articulated by American writers and critics still infir-lenced by the ctslmral st.;lndards of Mattbew htlold, I'or some, wmplexicy lay in the challenge oT dexnonstrating that culture in the C;ermanic sexise of Ktiltznlr-high, polite, and not at all mediocre as 'l"ocque\Tille had predicted4ould actwalty 11i: achietred in a democracy. As the playright Georgc Cram (.:ocrk said of himself 2nd his peers: 'Tt is fr~rus t-cl prcrvc that the finest cutmre is a possitjility of democracy," MTriting of "Democrae~rand 13ut~lic*l"aten in 1927, Percy I Tollnes Boyntc~nof the Universitry of Chicago xnanaged to reveal a preference for high cuft-ure and described middftbraw culture in pejorative terms. Vet he concluded 0x1 a hopeful note by expressing the belief that h e r i c a n s would he able to level up. Somehow, democratization .nrauld ocmr when as many people as possible aquired an appreciation for rbe finer things."" 1 he most curious of these complicated elitists who made a halfhearted effort ta adjust foFotlowing a full generadoll of dramatic cha~lge was N7illiam C. Brawnell, the most prominently devout disciple of Matthemr Arnotd in the tirlitcd States, Jn a 1 9 7 essay fix kY~ibrrw:f concerning "hpputar C:ulture," dtl-rcaging Brownell tried to put the best &ce possiMe on develc~gjmerntswhose implications he really did not comprehend, Commenting on ""te promise of our cultural gjrc~gress~" Brownell proclaimed it to be bright because "the format addir_ioz~ of popular cuftrure ta for~naleducatioxl is tile saXie11t contribution of our time to the democratic distiinctiot~EIC) d ~ u f iobscurecf t but X I C I ~obljterateif by cvrrent tej~dencicsthat arc curable because conm@ous ratl-rcr than intrinsic," "ownell liked the phrase ""democra~cdistinctic~~~," used it often, and, despite his obvious elitism, did llcst seem to regard it as a potential O ~ I X ~ ~ ~ O I L , ' ~ Like Nrendell and ;Mumfard, Browxiell caufd be optimistic t~ecause he saw class as much less of a t~arricrto extetldcd education and cultural uplift in the United States than in Great Britain, W a r he memt by "popular culture" wlren he used the term in a positive way is exempliGed by the uniniirrrned coslcertgoer who carefully reads program notes prepared by a professional-in sum, an ardinax?;lperson wha defers ta cuft-ural authority, 1Ie~icethe satishction Brawnell derived from a perceived trend: "the reactiness with which p o p ~ ~ lresponds ar to prrrfcssional culture bhich] shoutd tend to ailay alarm as to the vulgarizing effects of popularizadrtn, . . ." He acknowledged tlrat Amel-lcans held to an undefined democratic ideal, and tl-ien made an unelaborated P .

2 . Ei, I;, ~'CIenberz a ~ l dCeorgtJeafz AVgtbaa (1947)by Irving I'enn (platinum-pailadiuni print)

distinctioxz bemeen ""the popularization of cuft-ure and its vulgarizatior-r," Utiltixnatetg he seemed to find sofacc in the breadth af A1xericar-r. education and curlseqrlentiy tile capaciry for wide-rarlging uplik. "Our general culture is probably more gencrd-getlerat enough at all evetlrs to hold our the promise both of becoming more sn and at the same time ri$ng m a higher level.?'3' As late as the end of the I C ~ Q the~-r, S , relics from another era, like IZrc~w~-reii, conid only enr;ision a process of trickle down and then level up;blrt a t least they did r-r.cltordinarily verbalize an overt contempt for d.el-croc.raticculture as ciid I-I. L,. iMencken and George feat1 Narhan, Democratic distinction seems to have been a less progressive concept than "E'homasJefkrsonB aristocracy of talex-rt rather ttra~zl~lrth,Bath required education, the more the Getter; but JefaEersoxz did not expect that those with namraf af~ifitieswurzXd cor-rstax-rtlydefer to the judgrncr-rt of professionai cultural authorities, 'l'heir d e n t and initiative

would make them self-reliant. Right or wrong, their taste worztd ire their own.j2 7'he decade following World nTarI would be the last time when men and women considered reasonel~leand progressive could csndictty express doubts about den~ocracy.h z d when they did so, their eoncerl-rs invariably co~mectedwith cufhzre 2nd social relations rather than the d f l ~ ~ t i 0jSHe1"~p~s 0~1 A~BYIIS, a national political systern or process. T ~EP t~cst-sellerjn r g rg, co~-rvcyed anxiey about the dimint~tionc~ftvtmrai enerm that might result from complercl democracy, "Art is something for the few?" "dams remarked, "md wlro those few are is umpredictable," He j~earx-redfor a ""critically alert cuttrure," and feared that that objective coufd i-rot be realized in a total dcxnocracjr. Edit11 Alvard, a 13rogressjvc and prominent social rcforxner in Detroit, rcct~rdcdthis entry in l ~ ejournal r after vjsiting a neighborhoctd movie honsc in r 919: "I am democrsl-ic but I hate rlre odors of democracy," Atrhough wome~~'s clrlbs grew rapidly &ring the r ~ p a and s became xnore inchsive, older members tended to regret that cha~zge,"E'hey cornpfalned that maIzy women wanted the social prestige "but are ~zotwilling to work for c ~ l m r e . " ' ~ During the I g2 os a genuine ctialc~gucocctlxrred, whicl-r occasionaltg burst into open debate, over the potential role of traditiollally understood ctrlmre in a modern democracy and in wlrat some critics also regarded as the emergex-rceof mass sociietjr, Edward L. Bernays, known as the Eoundcr of p b l i c refatior-rs, seemed to view demoracy rather cj7f-ricaliy-not as a politjcaj philosophy regarding the ethics of power but as a forxn of social organi7=(1tionthat maximized ctpportcrnities for persuasion if not manipulation, Suclr an outlc~okwas commonplace among intellectuals during the 1~20s." Other critics, writers, and infiueneial editors during the intewar years developed less ambipous and more affirmative ser-rtimentsconccrrring cultural democratization tl~artthe likes of Bern2ys, Brownell, and Rc~ynton,T h e most excxnplav and imporpant c~fthese may have been Stuart Pratt Sherman, a prolific writer on hnerican literamre I editor of the wlro left the Universitry of Illinois in 1924 ~ F become Herfir.l Tribune$ new literary supplement, a positior-r in wIzictr he genuinely stlaped opixzians about writing in the Uxtited States, Iris essays in Anrericr;kns( I gz 2) and Ti5e Ge~ziids of Avreric~(I 9 2 31, along with his extet-rsivecorrespot-rdencc,reveal his stror-rgiyfett desire not only to recover the native literarjr tradition but to do so in a way that would meet tlre challenge of a truly democra~cculture. "The line I lrave

taken and ixirter-rd to foitow," he wrote to Brt~wnelt,"is the encouragemcjirt of the 11atiw tradition, with all its imperfections on its head, the 13u;ritan,the pioneer, the jacksonian strain, the adventurous, daring, explori~sgspirir, democracy-wlratever it can be made tts mean, and an including, at ary race, a growing fraternity.""In 1923 S h e r ~ ~ made the following declaradox~to a colleague who had comrne~~tedi on "dire democracy of a m m of letters": '""I'here is EIC) question at the present time recluiring more thinking, caliing for a more definite stand, and kmatlding more explicit expression for a mat1 of letters than precisefy the yueseon: What does demt~cracymeall to S h e r ~ ~ would an ~zothave been hostile to teveling up and to some aperati~remeaning for a culture of ""dexnacratiic distinctiox~"";jtrt his deep c o m m i t ~ ~ e ntot putdic education and to the i~~tellige~irtsia's responiibiliy for outreach to a brwad a~~ciience meant that his advocacy was a lot less arch and disdainful than Brownelfk+ve~~ though Sherman hiinself became just the kind of professional vcrde mlrczrm for the unentighcened that Browxzell had c~~visios-rcd. 'f'lze key differer-rcegeneradox~alas welt at tempel-amental-lajr in S h e r m a ~ ~ h t r o coxnng of standards." His role m i t ~ ~ e to n t g% gcnuinciy democratic diff~~sion. as a cvtmrai authoritgr wo~ziidbe gexirtle rather than genteel, deiiheradve rather than didacec, cajoling rather than c o n c l e ~ c e n d i n ~ , ~ Like so many d~fri~sg the intenvar years?Sherman's id eaf ot;cufrrrt-al dcxnacracjr was inseparable from a form of xxatiox~alismthat had more to do with shaping a clearer sense of natiar-ral identiy than it did with t~latantr~atjot~at chauinism, Paul Rosetlfeid, fbr example, a versatile critic who wrote about mt~sic,art, and literamre, obsenred that artists could ""hlp enormously to create a democratic sociey in h-rrerica. In investing h e r i c a n essences with worth and presetlting them with l~eautjr,they help to cox~veythe national idea. . . ." During the Inter x y3os, xnar-ry pard~ipa~lts in the Popular Front coatition felt deeply committed to the de~~ocratizatitrn of cuttvrre,;its tlid thousar~dsupon thousands of participants in the vario~usW'orks Progress Admiriristration programs that supg-rorredartists, writers, and tlreater people. EIolger Cahilf, director of the h t l e r d Arcs L3roject, res-rrarked in its operating ma~zualthat ""re aim of the project will be to work toward an integratiox-rof &e line arts and the pracrical arts,'"' f
mtlst ire the rritimate cultural autbc~rity.I have in mind iWnj~rBowes" AwtgTer~rHold5 a radio pnlgram that utterly srfrprlscd the x-remurh in 1934-31 by becoming the most successful broadcast in the U ~ ~ i t e d States. It followed the gesluine popularit-y of vaudeville's amateur ~zigl-rtqa1zd feamred nonprofessioxzal unknowxzs performing Eor tile acclaim af highly diverse, nor-rspeciatist audiences. 'f'lze irnrne~zse appeal of this populist braacfcast evenmally inspired as many as eight hundred ~ ~ a t i o nand d iocal radio prctgrams that found some sort of role for amateur talent.3" To reinforce the democratization fostered by that partidpatory phenomenon, mai1y of the iirccessarify affordable h d s and cra7X:s of the x y3os, such as dance marathons and walkathons, added to the sense the grass roots and were accessjf9le to that cultural activities arose f n ~ m a n p n e with energ3: and 1 - k ~inhihitions,'TThe creation and dcveloplnellr sjt: the Gallup POLEalso sjcct~rredin the later rgjos, undemrieen financialty by newspapers that bought George Gallllp5 s w i c e , His replal- reports 011 "what America thinks" became available to milllions af readers through tile press. ft @vc: those readers a sense that what they thonght really mattered.* By 194.0 America k i t that it was able to take its awn pulse and irlc~odpressure, 'Fhat gave new meaning to WPalter LippmanmB motion of public oljinion, Public sjpissian was becoming a democratic force in an empirical way rather than merely an isnpressiasGstlc one, "Gsome people?.that made it seem more certaixz. By midcenmmy, however, others began to wolzder wllether the advent of cultural dcxnocracy-would rrndertnine at1 forms c~fir-rteltectual and cultural arrt110riv.~" P .

"%ward the middle decades af the twentieth cermry an interesting contr-ast emergecl I~emeenthe taste Ievets people Felt most comfortable. I~eingidentified with (MOT high) and the cttltural aspiratiorls cor~veyecf by critics for the sociery as a whole (rq~~*#B"d), "Ihe former was certainly not a new phenomenon, Evaslgelist Billy Sunday had received warm praise from an fawa Izewspaper earty in the century because he seemed down-to-earth, a Inan of the people: "Me is not in Eavor of L~igt-rerculture and 17i917er criticim" During World War I the Committee on *This is when eolu~xmisr:ancl colmnentator iVaXter TVinchell quippeci that ""f)el.rrocracyis where we~ybodycan kick : k ~ ~ e ~else"ss5~" I~~dp

13ut91ic Itrformatiot~ designated ""Kuttur" as a socially unacceptat~le word (1 917-1 8),110t merely because Kultur was erni~kmatieof the cvd 13russian sscie.cy; but because it represented hierarchical values undesirable in a democraric s ~ c i e y . ~ ' FVoocty Ciuthrie, tile legendary folhong writer and performer, erciaf motives or to please resisted any pressure to "level up9YorCO the banal astes of upscale folks. As he wrc~teto a fi-iend early in the r lr)~os,referring to folk skgers Pete Sceger and Lee Flays: ' W d t Ict 13ete and Lee go highkrow on you," 'It: also asked Jobn Loinax how "tco get some of our upper crusts m listen to tlre real thing," A very different sort of person, the entertainment mogul bVilliarn S. Paley of CBS, declared: " h m not a highbrow. 1 do not loalc dowxi on popular taste. Ofi-entimes popular taste is my taste," In 1957, after Chariie (.:hadin made A Ki~zg ijll iVeal E4-k3 a film critical of the antiC:ommunist Red Scare, Edward R, Murrow asked C:h;zplin wlry his treatment of the United States w2s s s one-sided. "If you give bc~th sides," CChaplin replied, "it t:ecomes bfoody dull. t'm iroe a L~igl~browt?m an instincti~reartist." Repudiating the identity (i~ideven the category) of h i g l r h o ~had ~ become a ruranma for many by rurirlcc~iturqi,""' During the decades that spanx-recf 1936 to 1966, we eve11 find diverse, learned cultural critics, individuals recognized for their good taste and discrirnillating high staildards concerning a I forms of cultural creati\rity9 deprecadng the pretentious snobberies of would-be L~igl~brows, In 1996 C;ifbert Seldes criticized writers who only hoped to please a cultured elite, a d who felt that they had failed if they somehc~wachietred bread popularir);, Jmeph W'ood Knltch would echo that sentimellt in 1966, dasnning the s n c s b b e ~of those, like Ilwigbt A%facdonald, who scorned middlebrow culture precisely because of its wide appeal.'j Public opiruoxz by then seems to have bee11 very much on b t c h ' s side and rrnsyurpathctic to highbrow taste, A Gallup pojl (the topic t9cing ""'18ste"")akcn in 1975 asked r,g61 Americans "Which CJNE of the categories on tl-ris card would you say I~cstdescribes your own interests and tastes?" Here are the responses:

1Iigir brow Upper-middle trrow Lc~wer-middfc brow Low brc3w Drtn"t:know

T h e vast majoriv saw themselves as some kind of middlebro~r.'rhe c t r ~ t ysurprise, &or r9ysr is &at wen fewer people saw themselves as lowbrows than as highbrows." n T edo slot Iclzr~wthe margill of error on s not feel this sample; and as we shall see, by 1975 most h ~ e r i c a n did very comfartrabte being asked to identify exclusively with any sing.le a t e g o y . By then the pasmar oI~sessionwith discrete and meaninghl cultural pjgear~tfc~fes seernccf not merely trlurry t9ut even silly to large numtjers of bn~ericans, Yet more often than not tlre ctrlt-ural asf3iradrtns of eI-lcics-above all those who ohsewed and commented on the media-hoped (and in some cases ger~uinelyt~efieved)that it would be passible to ""level up" the taste and cularral cor-rsuxnptios-rdesires of people in the United Spates. 'They nurtrtired no secret wish to make everyone a highbrow, nor did they scorn whatever seemed creative and erlgaging in popular culture, And they did slcst believe that popular ctrlmre and its audiences were inevitabty dczosned trt m e d i o c r i ~and banaliv. ""A steady infiltration of culmraI efexxlents into the commercial program can be accoxnplisfred," Gilbert Setdes predicted in 195r. The following peas Joseph Frank asserted that 'Vemocratic society does not necessarily lead to a rt pclliticd democracy teveling of culture so tong as one tli~esi ~ ~cc~nhse with rrrajul-il)i rule in cultural matters."'5 In 1956 Daniel Bell publislred in d"sm~11enr,a1:31 a widely noticed essay tided " h e r i c a as a mass Sodev: A Critique." h it he respoz~dedto the Erethl Cassandras warning against ""xass societlir," mx~@ngfrom fos6 Ortega y Gasset to H amah hrendt. In Reflb ganpine assessment; of the population than ever before was participata great""prcrportion ing in what Ire deemed w~~rthwhile ctrlrural aetivides-a consequence, in part, of tloubting the h e r i c a n srandard 01; Living since the early me11tiet1r cenmrq;: Betl found it ""curious that in tirese %aristocratic?critiques of xnadcr~~ societlir, refracted as they are through the glass of an idealized fc~1d;lfpast: democraq is identified with equaliv alone," 'rhe ifepiction of modern cl-tlmre, I-re declared, '%S debauched I:ry concessions m popula m c t e a ~ticturethat leaves out the great rise in the general appreciation of culture-is equally overdra~vn."~' Unlike so xnar-ry ix~teflectlxalsduring the xgsos, Bell did not f i ~ z c l l~imselfdistressed t ~ ytire prospect af a ""vast xniddlebrow sociey." Me acknc~wledgedthat trroact-gauge participation in cultural activities was the inevitable concomitant of democratic citizenship and increasing affluence. BelI even assailed the basic assumptions of the ~nass-society

crldquc by citing the vigor af ethnic suf9cuIturesand vc?luntavassociations in the United States, F-le chailenged &e notion that a rootless mass existed. "The rising levels of ed~cation,~' he insisted, "have meant a rising appreciation of c~lrure."'~ Other cultural critics witit a more intilllate laiowledge af the media and their spokestnen attacked the saphistry af those who defended "'tcveling down" wuri th tile ratisnde of rccoiiciling demc~craticpractice a d theory Frank Spanton, rhe presidcr-rt of CIES, pruvided a p r i m exal-crpleof this castlistv when he testified before a congressicltlal committee. ""A mass media can only achieve its great audience," he declared, "by practicing . . . culturr-tl democracy , . . l ~ ygiving the majoriy of the people what they want. . . . Nre find that most of the pcrrple, most ctf the time, want entertainment from tllcir mass me~fia."~' C2ilbert Seldes, by tlre 1950s prisnarily a11 analyst of television and radio, answered Sranton with scorn, "When a broadcaster says, "Ye give the people what they waxtt,\the tl-anslntioxt should be, ""2"hpeople would rather have sosnething than nothing, so we give them sornething,' a d "fhe pectplc don't tlisfike wlxt we give them, . . ."Yelcies agereit a more extended riposte to the media m o p l s in 1956: "'I'he physicd ~tropertiesof t l x pubtic arts give m their matlagers certain social powers, but the managers do not generally accept responsibilit-y for the creation of audiegices; they say they satis@ pt~Micderna~id.'fb abricige a long arpment, let us say they car-ri-rotpretexxd, as they do, that they create alldienccs fbr Shakespeare and symphonic mlfsic but do not create arr audier-rccfor crime serials,""""

Starting in the 1960s~ather students af the Inass media and major instimtians af popular culture offered occasios-ral defenses or expfanations 011 their behalf on the grounds that they contril~ntedtcr ~vlmral ifernocratimtio~i*But none appeared as thollgkthl or compelling as Bell's argment,c had been, and most seemed either speciousor silnpty impressio~~istic, Example: television democratized wlrat traditionally had been an elitist, box-seat view of theatrical spectacjc l ~ ygiving evemyone tile same view af an eves-rt a r perhrmance regardless of wealth or status, Or, G n ~ u c h oLMarxdexnocratixed entcrtair-rmex-rtby interacting with ordirtafy people un television,"" "Ilese kinds of arguments at the level of red16ctio nd ixbs141-dz.1711came

from writers consjdcrakty more s ~ p a t h c t i cto popular and mass culture than the fierce crldcs of the rgqos and 30s had t9eer-r. h we shall see, they would be supplanted in the last quarter of the mentie& century tjy llumerous writers, most often in the new field of cultrural studies or the emerging subdisdpfine of popular culture studies, who prese~sted a fairly positive picture of Inass culture as a means of exnpowerxnent rather than, as "fheodar Adorno and his Frankfi~rt Schoof cojleagues had il-rsisted during the ~gqos,a dastardly narcotic. :Most recently one observer has plausitjly declared that the major media "make possible the free Bow and clash of r9pIrlions essential to the hnctiuning uF democrac);.'"i" Others might dispute that view as simplistic, but it is wiclely shared. '!"he o~-rgoi~-rg democratiz~ticj~~ of culture has unqrrestior-rably accelic erated over the past three or four decades, if we mean that the r ~ d ~ ror categor). of ""culture" itself has al-g~~ahty I-teeome more inclusive. Accepdng that point, one must concede that major changes have occurred if Gracefand in lkfemphis attracts almost as m a n j ~tourists per year as the Nrhite I rouse and xnar-ry Inore peojlle visit museuxns and historic sites than attend sporting events. 16 on the other hand, visitation t i p r e s for Monrtt Vcmcsn and Colonid wlliarnsburg- have declined while those for Disney %%%>rld and assorted theme parks have risen, that suggests that entertainmetlt enjoys grearer clltrvral appeal than educatiox~alexperiences, and that amusement outrar-rlcs ex-rrichmeslt in desirtlbili~." Hc~wever one prioritizcs such experiences, we are obliged to acknc~wledgecttanges in the batancc of what the public expects and supports. For better or for worse, we have nor ael-rieved Brownell's democratic disdnctiorn-at least not with any consistenq. LMeailwhile, some of our cultural heritage seems to be headed for extinctiar-r, and those wha lament that trend are likely to be Inbefed as snobs, As Alexis ife 'lbcqueviile wrote to a chse friend in r 83 r , the t e v e l k tenifency "'is either i n full prctgress in some states or in i t s hitest possil~Iedevelopment in others, It is in the cusri~ms,in tlre laws, in the opinions of the majorirqi. Those who are oploosed to it lride themselves and are reduced to adopting its owr-r coIours ixs order to advan~e."~' 'X"l~evalidity of that assertiox~became much Inare xnea~~inghl a cerstury later, wl-rcn those who fett conccrn about trends le@timized in rhe name of democracy had to be very careful test their cor-rccrns expose them to charges of elitism.

Consurnerisrn, Americanism, nrrd tlze Phasing

Quite a &MY\of tire most innt~vdtiveand engagecl students of mass swiery and cdcure have been neo-ilXarxisrs who place a prominent ernphasis upon the commodiiieation 01; culrure, Mtlrongh rbey agree on maIly things, their views are not ~zecessarilyinterclharlgeabte and sig~zificantdifferences exist among ti~ern.O n the Britisfr side, for emmin ple, &ere is a tendency to iocate the genesis of commercialixatic>~~ cities as a major irnpetlls h r poputar crrlmre much earlier in tirnc than hmericanists do for tlre United States. Otlrer radical critics, irrespec~ an a1nn~)stconspiratorial view of cultural enwetive of n a t i o n a l i ~take preneurs, painting them in ma~zipulativeand even malevolent tones. Stil others are wilting to acknowledge the powerhl role of cultrural entrcprerlcurs hut ascribe rrrlinterlcfcd benefits to their activities, such as the democratization of leisure and the a@c~rdaktepleasures that it ~lrakcspwsil-lie." I he most pemasive prohlel-cr t b r 1 encoutnrer arnong neo-&far~st interpretations of cufture, lrowever, involves their tendency to tetcscope time, From a Ezistoriaxz~er~ective, progressi~resociologists, mcrnhers ctf tire crrlturat studies p i l c t , anif literary histcrriadcritics do not aiiow sutiicierltty h r nuanced perioctization based upoil gradual transformations. hlan Swingewood, far instance, a British sociologist, believes tlrat popular culture had its social basis in mate-ial production, Cansequentiy, he and others call it "coxnmercial culmre," He appears, P .

at times, tcr diEerentiate f~ctwcenp o p ~ ~ l and a r mass culture in nineteenth-centuay Brimin; but the grcjunds for $istinction are not made clear. Swingewood does imply that popular (commercial) ctrlmre emerged first, and that mass culture was stil in embryo when the EngIish novelist Witkie Cotlins wrote his fi~mousessay "The Urrknown Public" in 1858, T h e unknc~wn puhfic, C:oiiins wrotG is "'hardty beginning, as yet, to learn to read. The members of it are evid.etlrlgi, in the mass, from no fault of theirs still ignorant of almost ever).thing wlricb is generally known 2nd understc,od arnong readers whom circumstances have placed, socially and intellecmallyv; in the rank above them," ht Swingewaod"streatment of The iW~thofi;l/ra.r.r Gkrrre, we get cmde distinctions t9cmcej-r &c nineteellth and twcntieth cetlturics, but t~ccausehis prowc~cativehjamiist appro~c"tfistotaltg topical, chronologicd subtleties anci nuances of charlge are 1ni11imized.' 'l"ul-xling ta hnerican sociologis~on tile left*Elizabeth and Sarart of Ewen, in their study of the social basis of consumer societlir, C"hnn)l.;tels Degke: &Wasfvt~zge.~ NPZJrhc Shflpi~tgof Arrreriican (lopzsciol~~:r?less~ also tef escope time problernatimlly in describing m American, tr-ajcctory that skips almost ~vernightfrom aparian sirnpliciq to industrial complexity. According to tlre Ewens, mass ctrlrure in the United States-by which they mean a social landscape mariced l ~ ycor-rsuxner industries, mass media, and inter-rsive merchandising-"c-IeveIoped just when a former1y mt-al or otbewise non-industrial perrple were being transformed into a permanent3 mass jncfustriai population. T h e panorama of a mass ctrlmre was a bridge between the aspirations of an old ctrlmre and the prioriLies of' a new one.'"" No, I say: Too fiat and unhistorical, "E'he transformation that they refer to was, in my view, ck7erso gradual rather than swift. l\foreover, because the trai-rsi"ormado1-roccurred in stages t~ctwcenthe r 880s and the rg6os, and because it cor-rnects premodern with contempcbrav h c r i c a , the trax-rsforxnadon itself is 5ascinating, worth more than just an allusion, T h e transformation, in fact, with particular reference to the uses of leisure, is primarily wlrat thk book is all about. Because it is possibfe to paint ta the braad dissexnination of Sears, Kc~ebuckar~dMongomerq. Ward c'ataiopes by 1910, it becomes all the more x-reccssary to distinpish tresc;veen mass culture and protomass culture beyond tlre obvious difference of sheer scale, Lines of dis-

Consumerism, Amcricanis~~, and the Phasing of' Pqpglal- Czlltftr-e tinction can t9e too readily cjverdrawn; but some f9asjc contrasts nevertheless seem evident as bemecn, say, rgro and a half century later, A strong and entirely appro~3riateemplrasis in recent writing has diverted our attention to the rise of deparment stores and mail-order companies, which of course had natioxzalizing irnplicatioi-rs. &%at has unfortuxlately been lost for the period from 1870 to 1930 is the continuing importance of face-to-face ct~mmerceby meat-rs c~fgeneraf stores and traveling salesmei~.In a world when face-to-face commerciaf relaticms still mattered, personal selliisg strategies remailled extremely important, (At the end of the nineteentlr centur?y;just before publishing The mnde@bI Wizard of Oz I r r)oa], L. Fralzic Baum earned l-ris living as a door-to-door salesman.) Because door-to-door canlrassers and "dnutnmcrs" who sold to the traifc still played a vital roXc, the commerciai tandscixge was more decentralized than most recent titemure has acknowledged. "I'hat has been the price paid for a preoccupation with d.etermii~ii~g the gencsis 01; our higbfy rarionalized, bureaucratizetl, axzd impersonal coxzsulner culture.' Let us then, for the sake of convenie~zceancl succinctness, use tile at~breviationsPMC (for proto-mass culture) and &K(far mass culture), PMC: featured the procurement of aE:oritable g o d s to hlfill basic fiarnily needs, wlrereas i!lilC= facilitated the consurnp"cion of information and extensive entertainment from mass media barely irnagt~sed in xgro, 13ilslCinvolved a culture of aspiratior-r that still required a great deal of delayed gratification, whereas MC: involved a culture of hifillmcr-rtthat minimized delayl;d gratification t9y means of u~~preccdel-rtecf afflt~enceand extcnsiw credit sehcmcs. Iluring PMC, taste was heavily determilled by means of finite resources, whereas the ethos of passessian in &%C: made it commonplace to own more than one actualy ~zeededas well as more than one could afhrd. Daniel IXorowitz has dcxnonstl-ated that prior to the r y3os, data from L~ousehold"Ddges do not point to a world in which mass ~ d t u r and e commercialized leisure predominated in the lives of most fa~nilieswith IOW to moderate incomes. Susan Porter Bellson has aLst) S ~ C I W Ithat P prior to World k%Kar 11, most workiisg-class families in the United Stares "remaiised on the margins of the ernergi~zgworld of cor-rsumptionbecause their incornes were 1zeir;her large enough nor steady enough ta allow the wick raxzge ctf tliscr-etiona~yspending usually asscrciated with mass ccrs-rsumpticm," Until the r gzos, morecjver, traditional moralistic assumptions remained. prevalent in the realm sf wurEng-class consumption,'

During TWC:, travel for most A ~ c r i c a n sremair-recf tirnited rather than extex-rsive, whereas MC witncssecf travel 011a scale that would have k e n inconceivable a t the turn of the centLsry. Dro-ing PM(:, regional and local idclltity remailled extrelnely importmt, almost prit whereas llatlr af those consiclcramary in the lives of ~ n o sAmericans, tios-rs became less cnxcitlf in MC, when a sense of national identiv t9ccarnc more pcwasive and meax-ringht, By the rg7os, for example, more than haif of the perrple living in Xew Hampshire had not been born tlrel-e, a first in the state5 histoy, Ilespite the convenrinnal wisdom, I suspect that standardization of basic products may have been greater in 1910 than Inter in the cenmrqr; Certainly the range af choices (and the array of specialized camlopes) is far more exknsive in our awn time, If-\ 1910 a potential wstclmcr might have been delighthlly cjvewhelmed hy innovation and the affordabiliv of mail-order items. Several genel-a~onslater novelty had come to be expected as the norm (eve7 Christmas a totally new craze for the kids), a~zdbasic affordabilit-yfeft more ncgotiabte t~ecaurseof the eagerl-rcssof comznercial enterprises to extend credit. Prior to the frrtl natjot~atimpact of radio during the micJ-1930s and the advent of tclcvision some tifieen years latea; maffazines I-rad been the priinary IC~GLES of modern, widespread advertising. With electronic media, ads simply Acrw at and over the listeners. 7'hey become literal "receivers" despite their pater-rtialcapacity to respo~zdpo"ti~.refy,Izeptivefy, a r not at all. hfagazinc ads, however, are much easier to ignore, A person must make some sort cjf effort to look them over, consider them, perhaps even clip a few out as reminders, Responding to magazine ads, therefcrre, is a more proactive process. M e r e a s television atlvertising is more insistent, people are not likely to get angT at magazine ads us-rless they are tasteless or eqfoitative. Radio and telel~isian commercials are more likely to become one a r t~oth;t>ut they do not demand the attentiver-ressthat magazit-reads call for, "fetevisionads, by comparison, normally elicit an inactive response except for special sirnations like pledge drives or channels devoted exclusively to sales for buyers at home, a recent phenomenon. r Z he full emergence and impact af mass media aker midcerztumy diminishecl re&ox-ralism and increased the simuteaneitgr with which prrrducts (rangiflg from gcrods to errtertainmenr) ctnrid be exposed to a nationwide audience. By tlre time Daniel J, Boorsdn first coilled the phrase and wrote about "consumption cornmuniees" in 1967, their X

Consumerism, Amcricanis~~, and the Phasing of' Pqpglal- Czlltftr-e distributiot~ ar-rd contiguratiox-r had t~ecorne more pewasive than Irdward Rcrnays or anpcrl-re pioneered in marketing might have envisioned half a centLIry earlier, Iioreigsl as well as h e l - l c a n sclralars have effectiveb demonstrated tlre protligious and swik spread of mass media and the dramatic cxpa1irGo11 of collsumer culture starting in the mid-zggos. That f-refpsus to coxnprehe~ldsome of the basic differences ctf degree hemcen mass cxiture and what I have designated as protomass culture earlier it-r the mentieth century."' In tlris clrapter, therefore, we will lczok at tlre commodil-icatim of culture, a prcfeess that has proceeded apace, albeit with acceleration after NTorld War I, and compare that process with the influence of ~zatio~zalism upon hericaxz cultllre, a pxteern that has pufsated at an in-epiar pace over the past r 20 years,

IJuring: the last years of tile nineteenth cenmmy, advertising sudde~lly became crucial for the sustenarirce of commercially ambitious Arnerican m a p i n c s and helped to make some ctf dlem affordable tcr a far t9n~aderaudiencc. In most instar~cesadvertisixsg rever-rue became more importmt to publislrers than cczurnter sales and subscriptions, That shik was sj~mptomaticof the advent of a new era. Advertising as a voeati01-r gained irnxne~lselyin sapf-ristication and impact during the decade lletwee1-r E yog and E y l 5. Ear~zestJI:lmo Calkns first published LWoder..r? Adus~"~.isirng in 1905, a Kex-rchmark and a hax-rdbook PC)C those wka sought to shape ar-rd even domixsate the x-rascent constimer sodey. k%%enhe pubtislred a revised edition ten years later, C:alkins could point to new contribut-ions by others in tlris b~iddingfield and declare that aherdsing: had l~ecome"i~rorescientific and more certain ti~anit was, 977

As WC have already seen, the marketix-rg efforts of sportir-rg goods manufacturrers became t d y intense during the tast two decades of the nineteenth cenruq, Extes~siveadvertising campaigtls used deceptive techniques to promote the sale of e q u i p e n t , manunls, and guidebooks that they desig~zatedas "offieiaf" in order to cx-rhance desira"u1ity. 'f'lze ma~zuFacturersalso wariced collusively with coaches, trainers, a d sports entrepreneurs in an eEc3rt to increase demand for their goods. Misleading advertising, devised fc~rother kinds of products, became standard usage in comeet-iotl with so-catled medicines and

hc.atth prtrducts. flemccn 1885 and xgro the commodifimtion of exercise, cornpetit& sport, and l-realth cures became major manifestations of popular c ~ ~ l m irr r e the United S r a t e ~ Why . ~ do I deliberately use popular rather than mass? Because the slumbers of people we are talking about are significant but i-rotyet vast cornpared with, s q the lg7ss a~zdly8os. ;Moreovet-, the ~necirarinsxnsfor reaching audier~ceswith inforxnation and then actually making sales were ct:lxmt>crsomecornparecf with television advertising, x-rational distrit~utiot~, and sates 011 credit during the later decades of the mentieth century," We have diverse indications along wit11 illustrative material fri-rrm L-ristoriai-rs that the carnrnercialization of leisure did ~zotcause an imznediate or direct transition to mass culmre, Nre know, for example, that heytrnd the big cities aridicl-rcesfix vaudeville during its halcyon days were segmented try geography by their abiliy to pay, o k e t ~t>y ethnicity9and by access to transportatiiorn and snobili~.Between I 880 and 1 9 2 0 most promoters of vaudeville accepted and catered to that diversity. During the internal- years, slowly but steadily, touring acts began to set Inore coz-rsistex-rtstandards of performance, and car-rsequentiy to raise expectatior-rs, Acts trecame less re&or-raX, less ethnic, ~ As Robert W. Snyder has tess routed jn a particular scx-rsc C Jplace. written, when companies took their acts on the road, '"performers made popular culture less a part of a place and more dependent on the partaHe offerings of an entertainmex-rt industry" "jrder then adds a crucial distinction, however, one that r e ~ n d us s of the extent to which we are now three full generatior-rsremoved from the 1920s. ""Atth~~ugh vau<-levi)tepaved the way for ft~rcesof centralization and standardimtion in Anerica11ct~lrure,"he be~1-tsewes,"it was itself far more attentive to cullrural particulariries than the electrollic forms that followed it.""' Loakng carefully at the Cafd N7aryears foltowing Nrorld NTar11, Jaclaon Lears has even remariced that casual asstl~nptiansthat the United States hccarnc covered by a seamless web of cor-rsurnerct:lx.fturc not only ignore psychologid complexities but also ol~sc-crrcthe variety and vitality of subordinate cufmres flczurishing outside or beneatlr the mainstream. &fajar respoz~"lbility for this presuxnpti~.reculmral Ezomoge~zization of the United States-a~zd pxtieularly for tile perception of homogcni~xtion-rests with those who cor-rtrolledthe mass media at midcentury. In rgg+FE culturat critics Cilbcrt Scldcs and Gharitcs A. Siepmann independently yet sisnultanerrusIy called attesltiorn to a sclf-

Consumerism, Amcricanis~~, and the Phasing of' Pqpglal- Czlltftr-e senring cor-rccptionaf the masses co~~vel-rient (indeed necessav) for the m o p i s who prefcn-ed to think of the Uniteif States as prciding a uniform audience wit11 a limited number of idelltical interests ratlrer than a plural socierqi composed of &verse groups, Men such as Frank Stanton, the loz~gtimepresidex-rt of CBS, cherished the ideal of a single grear: audience," Frarn the rg6os through the 1980s they yragra acccrritingly ard erzjayed considerat-lle succcss in making their reality, During that period tile major i~emorkscontributed mightjly tcl the sramdardil,;rl.ionof media &re and tlrereby helped move the countl-y. toward mass culture as we know it, Far too much af the serious writing about the a d v e ~of ~ tcoxnmercial cufture around the t-urn of the century implies that more tradiitiox~al forms of popular ctliture simply $isappeared ctr elsc became inconsequential. A more comprehensive took at the evidence (and at the er-rtirc Unired States, tnot just a few large ciries) reveals tfrat organized recreation (by elltreprerneurs as well as by social rehrmers) did nor dramatically displace the custoxnary9 informal af leisure, Caxnmercial acei~riiesdid not ex-rtirefysuppla~ztnonc rciaf ones, Saciaf dances ctf ail kinds remained widely popular through the rgros and rgzos, including square dax-rccs,trarx-r danccs, ar-rd open air dar-rccs, 'That may have k e n the great age of vandevilIe a.nd of Ziegfeld's I'ollies-the latwhen ctwr image of the h e r i c g n showgirl was ciaf and more traditior-ral popufar cuft-ure coexisted a n an equal footing througi-r the xy3os, especially when we consider &c courltv as a whole,"' Popular culture and PMC hr"lvlTcre manifestations and expressions of increased leisure and the rise of American recreation, What sclrolars from a broad range of tlisciphes tlo seem m agree upon, however, is that the Bowering of cozlsumer culture dates from the 1920s. 'f'lzat is the pivotal period when commerce and cufhzre could no lorlger be tidily compartmentafized, a trend that thrcatcj-red the social sccruric)r ar-rd convictior-rs af hxerica"r;traifitionai ~vlmral elite, h Smart Ewen has correctly ol-tsemed, "ccznsumel-lsm, the mass participation in the values of the mass industn-zalmarket, thus elnerged in the 1920s not as a smooth progression from eartier and less 'develaped "atternmf cor-rsuxnption, tmt rather as arir aggressive device of corporate sun~iwa1,'WMannfa';ictrlrersard entrepreneurs wanted high wages in the 1920s so that workers could I9ectrme viable a d reliable consumers, 7'he etlras of consump.cion did nest just elnerge because

wages and &sires rose in tandem. It happened as a C O ~ I S ~ C J L E ~ of IIC~ intense and conscious manipulasion,'" ltnd it happemd because wlverrisittg and public relations aclrieved prolninellce as well as respecrabiliy during the 1920s. 7'hey received tlre offidal blessings of Cabin. Coolidge and f lerbert t ioaver. Advertising trargeted young peopfe as iirever before, and in ways that made young pec~piearbiters of taste. hlany of tl-rcrn tilerefore became mare knoa-liedgcat~leabout tile new .c\-orlti of commodities tilan tlleir parents-13articularly if the latter were iinmigrants. EIenceforth tlre consumer preferences of youtlr would be respected as llever before, By 1963, just to peek ahead oilcc again, Amer-ican aclolescents spent $29. Itillim, an arnount duuljfe the gross national procfuct uf Aust-ria." 'I'hat b m i l i a pi-rrasc, '"he man in the stl-ect," first sul-faced during the 1920s. It is symptomatic of the intensified (and of-i-ennewfc~urrd) d.eterminatio11 of people ellgaged in mal-keting to tearn more about: anci reach ordinary people, Nevertheless, although we associate a hrll surge of rnasspradzictili~l with the xgzos, we must be carehi not to confuse that devetopment with the hll-blown emergence of Inass cuft-ure. Not everq'am in the United St-ates urorked in a $nctc,r)r;Not: e v e w n e shared a ccsrnrnon taste in music or other leisure ex-rtertainments;and as the social philosophers Louis Adarnie and f lttzrace Kallen dernonstrated at the time, many distinctive cllclaves of traditional ctrlture persisted."?Moreo\rer, the author of a brilliant. historical study of General Electric has prot4ded this persuasive obsewatiox~: It is 110t pcsssible to srwey the forms of mass cxiture in the mentietlr cenr-uq with tlre assumptions [of the nineteentlr]. 7'he corpor"ion creates patterns of meaniisg whc>tesaleand sells tlrern to the public, It divides s o d e v into rnaricets wl~ileignoring fundarne~~tal divisions t~emeerxworkers and white-collar persaimel, between regions, and Letucen edlr~icg r ~ u p s . ' ~ Stuart Ewen has shrewdly ncstiiced that duriisg the quarter century bemeen tlre I 920s and the later I 940s, the ability of h e s c a n capitalism to expand markcts commensurate with its growing productive capxity was lirnited in rnanj~ ways, Not until the xgjos, in &act,did the dreams af entrepreneurs and marketers track in the 1920s really begin to be fully realized. And only after midccntrurfp wcl-rld the pemasiw extension of credit and the maxiinizadon of advertrising potential be fully realized. Before 1950, for example, radio and televisicrn generally

Consumerism, Amcricanis~~, and the Phasing of' Pqpglal- Czlltftr-e stc~ppeclRroactcasting at ten o'clock in the ever-ring*S0o1-rafter 1950, ventrires into late-night broadcasting would expand arzd open potential ~lrarketswith simultaneous and rnernorably conveyed messages,"" Itence my strong preference for digerentiating berovecn proto-mass culture in the decades prior to 1950 ancl mass culture since thcl-r,h we sfralf see, there are numerous other reasolls as well.

flll ~~c~~~i?~~i?ercirnlizu~ion arzd IJI~JIJ"r.ccnsiir'on to ,13'lf4sqs C l 4 lt/C R? \VIiat needs to be kept upperlBast in mind, 1 l~elieve,is that consumerism and its implicatiot-rsfor mass ~ u t m r eoccurred in discernible increments rather than all at once in rgoo or 1925 or rgso. J0111-r Dewey observed in 1930 that the need to buy had become as much an American ""dl_tty5' as saving had once been, T h e Lynds' book iWz'lIdIe;~TYU.VZ (1929) quotes from the leading Izewspaper in A4uncie, Indiana: """l'hehnel-xcan dtize119sfirst importar-rce to his couiitry is no tos-rgcr that of citizet-rt9ut that of consumer. C:or-rsumptiot-r is a new ~ ~ e c e s s i ~ . " By the mid- and tater 1930s the Depression reinforced that pervasive ethic as a new llcstion in potirleal economy took hold: namely, that the productive capacir)r of the Ullited States could only be restc3red if people pt~rchasedwhat manufacturing plants produced.'" Needless to say3not m a n j ~people had very muclr disposable incorne during the rgjos, so self-hefp I9oe~ksstarted to emergc and enjoyed witlc-ranging populariy-a trend that has groMTndramatici31ly in our own time. Sorne of these g~~idel.~ooks ailned to make a person more successful I-firougl-rself-improvemenr; but others were primarily concerl-rccf with persallal self-hlfilllnent. h Eiredericlc Lewis AZlen told his sister in 1937, h i w i f e was writing such a book, but urilike Dorothea Brar-rdck Wgke Up and Live (xg~Ci),a t9cst-seller, Agrscs Aiten " ~ s I I ' ~ interested in helping people to make more money, t c ~becume popular, or to achieve virtue: she is merely dispensi~sgsuggestioi~son how to make your life more satisfactt)ry to you yourself."2" Other ma~~ifestations of self-11efp during the mid- ancl tater 1930s reveal resistance to the advent ancl pote~itiafimplicatior-rsof mass culture, l'he ccrllvenient month1y publication (,ir~z~~zrn?er Kepoes arould eventwaily have internarional ccJunterparts; hut the American version tur.ned out to be the proroqpe-just what one night expea in a straitened consumer ct~fz-ttrein which brand-name goods appeared on a t

t9n~adscate. "When the jojrzrnal began publication in 1936 as Couz~.zlme~:: Uzion R ~ ( I ~it sadvoated , consumer acdon in order to Z3rcssure manufacturers to improve factov working conditions as well as tlre qualit-y of goods produced and sold." When Pocket Books started to publish inexpensi~repaperbacks in x y 39, and then accelerated production through the next two decades, such hooks could readily reach millioxrs rather than thousands of readers-which augment4 a major breaktbrougi~to the emergence of mass culture at midcentur?y:Unlike previous books, cheap paperbacks were handled by perioclical distributors and sold in drug stores, chain stores, bus stations, and ait-flort terminals-~nass market pul~lication sales as we usirdersta~irdthat corircept. 'f'lze paperback revofuGoxz at midccntrtrfp most cer~ainlyhelped to demcratize artture in terms of access to trooks, h d the dynamics of that process did not simply ""levci down1' in terms of mjsteries, romances, self-help, and do-it-yourself books. "fiade bc~oksand quality paperbacks also flourished during the x y ~ o sand %OS, sold main117 tlrrough college and ge~zeralbookstores rather than drug store and transportadon terrninal racks, Eventually the distinctiorl between mass market ar-rd quality paperbacks ibecame incrcasitrgly blurred when both types hcctclmc avaiiabie in many of the same places----a spptol-cratic phenomenon affectitlg our perceptit111oP cultural stratification as bring in decliile ever sii~cethe 1~60s." Coinciding with inexpensive paperback books in the 1940%a paraltel trend appeased that had important implicatiorirs for our own time: corporate spcrnsorship ctf public sewice events that c o n y e d a highly positive image fiir big business. In rgGo, fiir example, a LMlanhat&nbased public relations firm arranged for one of its clients, Pepsi-Cola, to sponsor a Peace Luncheon ""dedicated on behalf of A ~ e r i c a nbusiness to the hope of the world again at peace," "'l'he desigwated day for this festive tuncireon, June x 7 , coincided with tile anniversary of the first Gexreva 13cace Cox-rferencc in 1905. hlrouncements explaixred that celchriries of today a d yestevear worlld bc present, includitlg * Ieddy Roosevelt, :tifark "rwain, Lillian Russell, h n a ITeld, and * I homas A Edison, "Masks are now being modeled in tlre physiogIzomjT of each ofthe above and maIzy others . . . with the greatest possible accuracjr in cormectioxz with this 35 year celebradoxz of the bottling of Pepsi-Cots,"'"' Aside from the cr;lri(~usblend of attrrtjsm and commercialism (in this instance the commodificatit of internationail peace ef-forts), the

t-

t-

Consumerism, Amcricanis~~, and the Phasing of' Pqpglal- Czlltftr-e configuration of i~istoricalcelcbrities mlpports a rttscil-rating tinditlg made by the sociologist Leo Loarcrrthal in 1114.4--a revealing one in terms of changes in popular taste levels ci~tritlgthe first four decades oP the m-entietlr centLtry. Using biographical artides that appeared in Collier's and the ,Ciztzlrdlay Everzi~zgP O Lowentl~al ~ ~ fourird that even in these popular ~naga7,iines-mass-circ:ulation l ~ ytile starirdards af the daymost biographical attex-rtion cot-rcet-rtratedot-r men in politics, captains c~fin dust^, or people from the scri(~usarts, J<~~tertainers and sports fipres did nest become prominent subjects until the later 1920s and especidy the rgjos. Before that time, biograpl~icalessays, even in popular magizines, were mainly presented in order to provicle educatioriraf model S. '2'hey did not become "frivolous" and anticipate the tikcs of Peupke magazine until the second cparter of the mentietb century. This transhmation supplies an interesting chaltenge to t/~ose wlro would locate the perceived cmergellce of celebritry-oriented mass culture in the decade I 8g5-1905,'4 hforeo.rrer, Iookng at the substzlinti~recantere af these articles, Lowerirthal found a strikng sl-rift in the most admired attributes of Amerimn heroes from ""agents of social pmtfuction" to '"'agents and methods of social and individual ccrnsumptior-r." In atlnition, irrespective of the heroesbdalk of life or uocat-ion, Lowenrf-tal'scontent analysis found increasing emphasis upon the private lives of heroes rather than their public perso~ae,and more paaicufarly on what these people liked to consume: their perso~attaste preferences. By the Inter 1920s and "OS, according to Lo~;cnthai,"these new heroes represent a e r n ing for haVIng and taking tl-lings fbr grax-rted,They seem to stat-rd for a phmmsmagoria of world-wide social sec~trity;fc~ran arrimde which asks for no more than to be served with the things needed for reproduction arird recreation. . . ."2' 'l%e Nrorld bKxr II: years pfaj~edarir absolutely crucial (and hitherto ur-rderesdmated) r o k in accelcratiir-rg the trax-rsitior-r from pnlto-mass cuttvrre to the '"real thing." I<~nploynents+ocketed, ar-rd up with it went disposabte ilscome. ~Mol-eover,because certain kinds of commodities, like cars and clc>thing,were not readily available, h e r i c a n s spent unprecedcsirted amourirts on cxirtertainxnent and recreatiorir af all sorts, 'War workers Bocked ta see filxns, and the movie industry fiourished as never before. Nightclutzs and caf6s were consistentiy crc~wdeddespite rising prices. hllarkers for music and books shot up also, mmt noakty for rrrurder lnysteries, self-hell? books, and bc1~1k9about health.26

'T"here were just 3,9oz;, superxnarkets in the United Spates in r 939, but more than r6,ooo by rgw. In the cjctsing years of the war the atlvertising indrrstly achieved the largest budget in its histoy and began to prepare rhe public for posmar goods. Roherr W Wc~odruff (long-time chairman of the t~oard)used B'orld Nrar X I to cstablisf-r a global thirst for Chca-Cola. 'E'hc Snmrdq Eveni~zgP o cxgoyed ~ declaring, with a rhettrricai flourish directed at the dcspisedJapanese: "Your pcrrple are gi.sing their lives in useless sacrifice. Ours are fighting for a glorious future of mass employmentl mass production, and mass distribution and o\n;ner&ip,"'?? Most observers with a historical orie~ztatioxzseem to agree that the commerciafizatlm of cufture accelerated rapidly aker \VorLd N7ar 11, As the sense of natiot~aland inrcrnatjot~alcrisis caused by fascism was-red, ctrmmitlner~tto altruistic goals dirninisllcd accordingly, 'l'he media gradudy lowered their srandards atld traditional a-iteria of cultural stratification were relaxed as a consequence. i!lilass leisure and mass commurincation, which are essentiaf for the intensibre co cation af popufar culture, l~ecameincreasingly nor~naGveand pemasive for large numbers of Americans be$x-rnir-tg in the rgsos. W5rren Susman obsemecf that for many fa~niliesthe ~Erlminationof a visit tcr Disneyland after 1955 wasa special exlribit called " h e r i c a n Journeys," a selective, ncsstalgic reprise of the h e s c a n past, ""Immobi,ilized and passive," Susxnarir remarked, "having visited a world in which one can coxzsume to the preslrrned srztisfactiar~af all desires," visitors confirmed the sense of ~reIl-bci-rgthat wcompan'ied corlstant remintlers that they enjoyed the world's highest standard of living.'* Similarly, lczoki~sgat rhe r gjos, Tirietoria de Ckrazia contends that "a universal Language of commodi~esnow colmected Anerica8 vast empire of goods." "E'hat decade ~nasicedthe true begiming af mass co~zsumptioxzas we lcxzow it, and henceforth Inass ~narketsswlftjy f9ecam~a ""rcal fixture" in inx-radox-rallife. Sixntxitaneousfyde Grazia also sees a marketing revulution taking place in IGnrope during the rgi;os anci %as, when chnnges in markering rechniques were accompanied by a dramatic ina-ease in consumer spen"di"g. 111sum, similar things were j-rappening in non-Cornrnunist E~rrope,but at a more hesltarirt pace than in the United StateseZ9 From the perspective af a historias-r,it is essential that we recugr-rize these gradations of change w e n withi11 such a concentrated phase as the post-World nTar I$ generarion, That happens to be exactly the

Consumerism, Amcricanis~~, and the Phasing of' Pqpglal- Czlltftr-e period, a ger-ruinetg pivotat era, when the chvgalis CJF proto-mass culture broke open a d the maturre fiirrn emerged, not merely tiberatcd but quicMy ubiquitous. Lizabeth Gohen has shown that tlre llew suhurballites of tlre 1940s and 30s still depended upon the city for all sorts of major purchases, and they used small, locally owned commercial outlets in ~zearhjrtowns to serve their mixlor ~zeeds.A 11ew maricet stmcsure dependent upon re&or-raX sI~oppi~-rg cef-rters (so-called malls) a d aimed at the mlburban mass consrtmption scscicv $id not begin to emerge until tlre nzid-rg5os. Witlrin a decade tlre comlnunity marketplace shiked fri-rtmcity 2nd tow11 centers to privately owned suburban s r y 7os, the uses of leisure time and shopping cen ters, By the ~ g d o and the process and places of consumptioxz were l~ecominginseparably intermit-recf, thereby arranging a great mar-ry cornmttnit-y-experiences (sirnufcaneotls t i ~ o ~ ~not g hordinarih interactive--the '"herd of indcperldent minds" again) according to tlre cultural tastes of predominantly white, middle-class suburbanites."' Wl~enjournatist-turxzed-sociafcritic Vance Pacbrd published h i s nunaway best-sef ler The H i d d e ~Persuaders (18571, he popfarized the notion cand the perception) of a mass of consumers being coi-rstantly, pliil.dy marzipdated t9y corporate schemers. By the end of the rgsos, critic P a d C:oarcls ol~serves,"'enhanced purclrasing power and a massive extension of the educational system.----among other facajrs-had rer-rdered the produces of Inass cufhzre so pemaGive as to secrete the dubious antidote of a new sensibiliy: that of camp.'""' Adwrtisernents t9y sponsors of television prrrgrams &ring the fikies swiftly began to exercise an increasing amount of control over not merely the kind of program they made possible, but its cc>lltellt2s well as its mallller of presentadon, Camel cigarettes sponsored iZlan A g i r ~t"l.ilip2.e . ~ on CZBS. Nrriters for that program received in miineographed form detailed instnxceions, such as: never show a disreputable person smoking a cigarette, AndJohn Cameron Swaym, the most popular television neMTscasterof the rgsos, had a lighted cigarette trurning on his desk thoughout the broadcast with a pack prominenrly displayed so that the camera could. not fail to reveal the sponsor's brand.'2 '1-he separatio~z2nd subsequer-rt segmex-rtatior-rof youth cufhzre played a significant part in the commerciaf enhancement of mass culture, Once again, this was a gradual process that occurred aver a period ctf several decades at midccntil~.'I'he creation of .$"evezteenmagazine in ~ g i t dl~igl-rliffhted , the fact that teetnagers had developed an idenrifi-

aide, discrete sr~f~culttlre with attendar-rt dress, behavior, sfyitcs of teisure--and thcrefr~remarketing possit~ilitics,Well over a decade after that, mainly in the rgsos and 1g6os, television bought intense (rather tlran casual) commercialization into the lives of children, 7'he full ernergex-rce of "kdvid" a11 Saturdajr morxungs in the 1960s, for instance, Gacilitated an ovemhelming variety of ads for child-ohex-rted toys and food.'" Mthongh much attej-rtionhas Ixen devotc:d to the groaring importance of yrtung people as consumers witlr considerable amounts of money available to spend, especially since the ~gAos,the cntrepre~zeurialirnputses of young people during the caunterclulmrd intensiy af the later x 960s have been virtwally ig~zored.Yet they too played a key roie in brindng the commerciatiratim of poprilar and mass d t l r r e tcl new levels, not to mentior~adding new dimensions 'I'he famous kTTtjodstock Iiesdval held in upstate hTew York in August 1969, for example, owed its conceprion and precisely calculated development to four jToung entrepreneurs who intended from the outset to make a y the project. '2ko af them mi&r be called great deal of ~ n o ~ i efrom prrrto-pppies who supplied the necessarq. capital for development, T h e other two were ge~~uincly anti-esmkiishmcnt young men, Mici-raci Lang and Artie Komfeld9 whc-, envisioned a scenal-io of love and peace-aIczng with wondrc-zus wealtlr for tlremselves, "I"he most thoraugh history of N700dstack puts their activities urider a caxzdid spotlight. 'rhe two were ""movers" in a microcosm af foitowcrs, your~g men full of confidence and purpose wl-ro could lay back and ullwind over a joint and still take care of business with unyielding tenacity. t lere was that beautihl irony indicative of the ge1-reration8 and-Establishme~~cL-reroes who wallowed in the splendt~rsof cutthroat capicajism--fighting to excel in the very t-lting tile movement rejected. 'I'hey masqueraded as ilippies although rhey d s o shared an aBeccictn fc,r spending large sums of other pei~pte"sc~ney~" Ever since the 1960s there has been an increasingly coxnplex, contested relationsl~ipin the Unitcd States between capitaf and culture b r r r d y conceived, &at is, between po~~erfill corporations and their opponents in vvlrat amounts to a series of cclllAicts over tlre control of rampant consumerism. In 1965 the ITighway Beautification Act, com-

Consumerism, Amcricanis~~, and the Phasing of' Pqpglal- Czlltftr-e mot-rly k~-rrswx-r as the trillboard passed in the C:~~~-rgress f ~ aysingle vote. Scr other legislation that sessior-r caused so much heated ccbr-rtroversy and required so much effort to persuade senators to support it. CIommercial Alnerica seemed to l~elievethat the use of a d w r ~ s i n gon Itillboards surely inust Ite a right protected bp the First Ame~ird~nent." By the I ~ ~ O Son , tile other l-rand, corporatioxzs increasingt-y regarded the accluisitirsn and display of art as wefl as support for exhibitions as good public relations. Robcrt Kingsley, J~,m01-rexecutive and founder as well as chairman of the Arts and Business CIou~scil, explained that Emt->n"r;%supg-rort of the arts serves as a social lubricant. Aircl i f business is to continue ixz big dties, it iirceds a lubricated enviraiment," h v i d RockefeFler put it even inore expficitly. )","room an ecot-romic scandpc~int,such ix-rvc~Xvementin the arts can meax-r direct: and tangible benefits. It car1 prrrvide a cornpally with extcnsivc: pubticity and advertising, a l~righterpubljc repuratiotl, and at1 iinprovetl corilorate image, It can huiltl better customer relations, a readier acceptaxe of companjr product" arzd a superior appraisal of their qualiv. Promodon of the arts can improve the morale of empfojrees and hdp atlract qualified per~ot-rnel."""~ By the mid-1980s the commercialjzatim of aggregate information, such as 1nemberf;hip lists of inuseurns atld profeessiotlal organizations, had become a dominailt feature of the United States economy-driven in so manjr ways by the need for gross quantities of informadoxz about poterirtial consumers. In E 985 the Cauiirell on Library Resources, a p i vate organi~xtion,issued an extraordinaly and higMy syrnptcrrnatic statement: Wayunust be found to assure continuing attention for tlrose aspects of cutture and learning that are important but, in a commerciaf ser~se,iirot necessarily in fidshion. . . . Uncritical adherence to the co~-rccptof informatiur-ras a commodisy will distort the agendas of instit-rtdons and disciplilles atikc, . . . f"rft9lic i~sterestin the principle of open access must appropriately inaucnce the structure of the i~sfc~rmatiorn sjTstem and its components. It: is certain that the inforxnaGoxz needs of sociesy canrzot be defined by the rnarkerpjace alone." Nevertheless, in an age af declinix-rg reso~zrces,universiti~strecame increasilsgly dependent on corporate Anerica for money; equipment, lakoratories, anti other researefi facilities. As the Chm~zicle$Higher-

E d ~ ~ w tput i o ~it in 1985: "the refation tremcen academe and business is more cordial than it has treen in de~ades.'"~ 1he same pattern applies to what are now called 'bsnegachurches," congregations that have grown exceedingly large because enterprising mirusters have carehlty observed techniques successhi in the world of entertaiment, smdied the tl-ansielzt tastes af middle-class America, and tearned from the secular jnstitutior-rs that appeat to it, Such entcrprising c l e r m ~ e nstlldy rhe writings of Peter E I)nlcker, the leaditlg theorist of corporate management and leadership, and hang posters by their pastoral doors that highlight provocat-ive questions raised in I3nxckcer"swritings: "What is our business"zho is our customer? \VIiat does the customer consider vatue"z7 "f'he phenome~zazz of mcgacburches, along with the immcr-rse mo1-retaf.rsucccss of tetcvangclists in recent years, demnstratcs the commerciati7,ittion of cttltllre in yet another realm of American life, religiun,'" h 1986 a federal judge refused m ""sell" rlre exclusive coverage of a major naturalizatioxz ceremoily to ABG-'Z'V For $10 milIioxz.""h~nples of such resistas~ceto co ercialization of a public process, a r of cdtvrt-al events that do not rey~ZIrea corpc~mteS P O I - ~ S Oin ~ ctrcijer to occur at all, are incrcasix-rgly rare, W'e have long k~-rowxrthat artifacts produced in the private sector can be bought and sold, including the books that authors write, the pictures that artists paint, and the music that composers create. But attemp& at the cornmodification af civic life stilt come as a shock-at least for some af us. It must ire ackrsowtecfged that a revisionist perccptiot-r of cunmrnerism has emerged sir-rcethe mid-1g8os. I find this view only partially persuasive and will returll to it when we coilsider contemporary mass culture in chapter 8, T h e reader should be forewanled, Irowever, that culmrat critics af a certain papulis~ersua"on insist that consumers are formative participants in the culture of consumption (rather than simply passive vietixns), setectix-rggoods that please them a d endowing them with a significance not necessari(y anticipated t9y those who sell them4' P .

T h e fcit desire by cjtizcns of the United Staates for identifiably hnerican mar-rikstatiot-rsand expressions ~ d t u r edates t9ack to the early decades of tlre nineteenth cenr-uq, For same people, the need sirnply

Consumerism, Amcricanis~~, and the Phasing of' Pqpglal- Czlltftr-e reflected an expression of rlatjot~atpride (ax-rd a modicum c~ftvltural insecuriv), For others, by midccr-rt-uryand tater, the desire also mcax-rt an oppoa~u"sivto pedcite hooks atld magazines, songs and theatrical entertailmeats that prociairned a distilsetitre national identity in a world that did not: believe that a detnocracjr was capable of '6ge~-ruine" culture and that the United tieates, in particulan; had a population too heterogenec~usto pn3duc.c a distir-rctveculture or jcie~-rtiyin any case, At rnidccnn1f")rWa' Xt W i t m a n feft that A1xericar-r.literature seemed too imiti~eveof:polite culture in Europe. It: lacked sufficient "hnericanness. "" Nutnerous writers have obsewed that from the 1830s ti~raughthe x 890s ~zotionsof popular culture (exemplified by theatrical ex-rtertainmen&, minstrel shc~ws,and ahrdable writing in booklets and magazines) wcrc strongly tir-rgedby natior-ratistichues. 'T"hatwas equally tme of tales of Davy Crockett and the Marno, dime novels abuur Buffalc;, Bill's explczits as a scout, and Edwin Bc>oth"serebral Shakespearean perfarma~zces,Each G p r e became Iege~zdary~ in fia-tct,precisely because he ernbodied the Arnel-icanness for which blvfhihnan had yearned.'3 "What complicated matters, hc~wever,as IQic Lott has obsenred, is that popular culture jxs r~ix-reteentl~-ccnturfr hxerica was contested and consequently unstable, ""R site oi" can8iccing interesrs, appropriations, impersonations, indeed bnationalities,>even in its allegedly nadornal forms." Competing ver~~aeulars existed in the Uriited States because of regional, raciaf, and dass differences, As Latt has writtell of the minstrel show, '20ne sees a ccrr-rstant struggle for control-ei~compassitlg black, white, immigrant Irish, and other crtlmres-within blackfacc forms thernsel~es."'~Yet another reason why I am unwilling to apply the label of ""mass culture" RI nineteentl-r-centu~Amel-lca, therefore, is because major differences of class and race remained so powertsul find combustible) througl-raut the cenmrq;: ;Vanjr factors were required to make mass ~ x i t u r egenuinely "mass,'%nd one ctf them was a warzirlg and resuitar-rtdiminution of ctass consciorzsx-ress,class distir-rcdox-rs,and class-related tastes, So long as those diisri~sctiionspersisted in palpable wa)rs-and they did until the second half drbe twentieth centrlq-we could not: have a tmly mass sociev, never mind a sinplnrty mass culture, Every so ahex-r durir-rg the later nineteenth cetltury some poet, preachet; ectitor, or politician aw.dd proclairn a sentirncnt seemingly indicative of cultural or social hr>mogeneiy on a vast scale-pejora-

tivefy 017 ~ c ~ ? i i ( ryet n , sometimes with apprrlval. "It is not a trifling matter," MTroteJames RussefX Lc~wetl,""eat thirty millions of men should be t h i ~ ~ k i ntlre g same thougl~tand feeling the same pang at a single moment of time, and that tlrese vast parallels of latitude should ltecorxle a neighborliod more inrixnate than many a countT \riilage.'94i "E'hat assertioxz might be vatid as an allusioxz to tietera~zsof the Grand Army of the Republic, pel-haps, blrt i ~ t to ~ tthe great m4fange of new immigrants, farmers migrating beyond the Mississip~3i,and young people leaving rural weas to seek their fortunes in the burgeonkg cities. Irvlfost h e r i c a n s did not yet respond to the same news at the same time and think the same ti~oughts"at a single ~noment."!is late as x y301Joy Elmer lkforgan a~zticipatedradio as the basis for establishing a trllly '%national cr;lituremand called fr~rgovernment reptation in order to achieve the "prrblic enlightenment" that radio 11ad the potential to foster, By then tl-re prospect did exist, though it had nor become a reality quite yet.4o By the 6rst decades of the twentieth cer-rturyan irarGc development had occurred, though virtualty no one perceived it as ironic at the ti~z~eThat recogniticrl-r wwrfd come sclme fifty years iatel; 'l'hrougi~outthe nineteenth ccl.rtlrr)i hmerieans had yearned for genuknely disrinctim forms of art, literature, and music in the United States, If they did nor always have lriglr culture specificalljrin mind, they cerminly ellvisiolled elevated forms of expressioxz. On the eve of VVorld NLar X, however, when I;urapea~zst~eganto take note of hnerican creativit-?;,it woufd be innc~~atiuns in popular ~vfture that caught their attex-rtion and prrnnpted their admimion, A tong editorial essay in Scribnerk offered this highly revealing observatirtn in 1913: "Every [hnerican] traveller to Europe in recent days has had the oploortranitry of observilsg the interest sllown in Axnerican tunes and dance r h ~ h m which, s as assodated in his mind with forms of amusement xirat ~zecessarilyof the 1-rigt-rest class, certainly do not strike 11irn as very ~ w r t h yof being thctugt rcpcxntativeiy American."" 'The author/cditor did not i~elievethat Americans took sufficient or particular pride in their "rag-time ardsts,'" yet achowledged tlrat musicians and audiences in Euroloe had a surprisingiy difkrer-rt perspecthe. ""'l'hey don't regard hnerican popular music as being any ~zablerin tone ti~anwe do ourselves; Gut they do find it tecl-rnicatly new; they do find that it is original, that it leads in a fresh direction," "'Then came the rcluceant ack~~owiedper-rt that jazz night even he a distinctive and vatrretl native cotlrritjution: "IVe may

Consumerism, Amcricanis~~, and the Phasing of' Pqpglal- Czlltftr-e have in these vulgar [musical] measures something more vatuatlle than we grasp; something which t~e1~~11gs pcaxliariy to rrs, and which may contain the germs of a greater developent-sometl~ing~ in short, to be called nae~nal."~' 'l'he writer went on to observe that recent krisitors to the United States were xnast eager to discover ""the ' p ~ ~ u f anote r ' of h e r i c a , " the tively and distinctive products of "fin X3an A!ley3 which was then productively pulsing wit11 new music, and theatrical enter~ainmerzts,'The editor;ial recognized tlre need to reconsider, in less snol-1bislr tvay;s, the hu~nhlersources oi" national cultural espressiotl. "Fcjlk-song% f d k tore, natior-ral dances, ~zatioxzalepics, the hjl-fiavored welling up from the soil of the love and joy of life-these, we were rernindeci, were tire britage of the oider, artistic pccrples, whslrw all gllcat national art had sprurl g, 1his was not tlre first time cultural critics in the United States bad been ohtiged to acknwledge that Etrropem perceptions of h e r i c a n popular mintre did not coincide with native sexxtirnents and seffawareness, But it may well 11ave brougirt a shoclc of recognidon: namely, that h e r i c a n ~ v t m r eas a natjot~alconcern might be valued more highly for its popular contr-ittrrtions than for its "set-i(jusn or highbrolv aspiradons. In 1908 that same column (magazine departmenl;), perlraps written by the very same editor, bad quoted an English critic who remariced that ""while there may be less emditioxz in h e r ica, there is cor-rspicuaus2y more cufhzre," Afore xneant poplar, fresh, a d diverse rather tl~anhigh; er~tertilinnlerltratl~crthan rhe advancemcrlt of bztj~;ledgc.'f'hat critichcbsetvation wcl-rttl raise a cnrr;tin for the cecsrrtuy to co~ne."' :tileanwhile, d~tf-1119the early decades of the menrietlr centrtT?con~zectionst~emeenhericaxzism and commercial cu1.t-r;r.t-eappeared in severat iircw waj~s.Klm coxnpaiiries promoted and even celebrated their of colItemporaf7r events and history. W'ithin nowcl rote as chro~~icters weeks of Wootfrow W7iIson"seath in r gzq., the first film tribute to hjxn was in production, "I'he film consisted of morion picture foowge taken during IVilsonQpresidency and retirement interspersed with title fra~nesextolling his krirt-ucs in efhsikre and pious terms, "X'he producers 11oped to presexxt the film ""reverently" each day somewhere, forever. In surn, they hcrpcd that the fitm .n;t_tuldprtrvc to he proti~ai~le as well as inspiratio~~al!" IDuring World War I, and especially in 1915-16, intensive puMic P .

discr;lssions af "hericar-rism" wtook place, with not;lzkle contrifk-cttions from attorney Lojuis D. Brandeis (not yet on the Supreme C:ourt), philosoplrer IIorace Katlen, critic Randofph Bourne, socialist Elizabeth Churley Flynn, and others, Ilissenters like F l p n and 13ourne called for cuft-ural plurafisx~and internationafism as the best (least cf-rauvinistic)definition af patriotism. But theirs was distinctly a Ininor19x6 ""Americanism" meant ity 13cs"ition and lacked broad appeal, 11% compliant assimi1atjot-r ancl Amencax-rizadon to most people: wha considered themselves to be of native stock, Once the United States became directly involved as a cclrnbatallt in 1917-18, George Creel's Caxnmittee on Pul~licInfarxnadox~rolled into high gear as a pro-Allies propagarirda bureau that effecti~rely~lrnariripulatedand even comznadifrcd public pcrccptions heid t9y hncricans. 'I" ifistributiot-r of treatises and posters had a pc~wcrkltgcohesive ixnpact upon public opinion. Creel's efforts were considerably enhailced by lessrms learned fri-rtmdevelopments in cclrnlnercial ad\rertising during the previous two decades, Failure ta support the war effort t~ecametantamount to treason.'" Back in 1897, wl-rex~the ~o~mmercXltXi7,atjm of c"u1ture in the Unitccf Spates was still immature (by comprisor-r with half a ces-rtrtirylater), the critic Brallder &fatthews lrad defined ""americanism" in social and civic terms. "I'he word meant patriotism and acceptance of the principles underpiming the U.S. governme~~t. "It trowxzs upan all appeals to the former allegiance of ~zaturalizedcitizens af this countsy; and i t thinks that it ought to he enough fbr airy man to be an American ~ r i t h t ~the ut aid of the l~~pl-rcn."" By the 1920s, lrawever, four decades of ilstensive immigration bad and tnarketing people to the process opened the eyes of man~~fiactttrers af Americanization as arir oppartui~ityfor expanGve consumerism, lkfasses af new hnericans IneaIlt E;Ir Inare than patriotism, which had been ,Ilatthews's emphasis mcnty-five years earlicr, Frances Alim Kciler, an advertising woman wkc~placed ads in the foreign-iarzwagc press, viewed advertising in the 1920s as a vital opportunity for social inngt-ation-and sales, Here is the pitch that she lnade to husinessmen, Inariry of them unaccustomed ta thinldng about newcomers as worthwhile targets for consu~~erism. Natiox-raX advertising is the great hncricanizer, American ideals and ilsstirurciions, law? order, and prospel-lty, have nor yet been

Consumerism, Amcricanis~~, and the Phasing of' Pqpglal- Czlltftr-e sold to all our imxnigrax-rts. Amedcar-r protfucts and star~dards of living have clot yet been bought by the hreigtl barn in hnerica, . . . If h ~ e r i c a n want s to combine business and patriotism, they slrould advertise products, industy and h e r i c a n instirutions in the hericaxz Foreign Lanpage press, That ~ f r a i nwould be reiterated by ma~lyothers ti-rrongkont the

For hnericans of ""alder stc;lck," that is, not recent iinmigrants, the interwar years witnessed a parallel but perhaps