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Coming to Terms with Defining Terms

A decade ago, when I began to teach courses on the evolution of taste levels and cultural stratification in the United States—courses concerned with culture in a democratic society, the commodification of culture, the changing nature and uses of leisure, culture and national identity, those kinds of issues—a troublesome lack of definitional clarity and precision in the pertinent literature quickly became apparent. Since then this disarray has become a genuine challenge, not just to me personally, I believe, but to anyone seriously interested in understanding popular culture. Adding to my perplexity, this lack of clarity even appeared evident among the best and brightest—sociologists, historians, literary scholars, art historians, those working in cultural studies, American Studies, and journalism; the problem looked to be ubiquitous.

The most obvious puzzles, in my view, arose from the habit of using the phrases “popular culture” and “mass culture” interchangeably, as though there were and are no discernible differences. I shall offer only a few representative examples on the grounds that giving excessive evidence of bad habits may only encourage them. (A batting coach shows players what to do rather than what not to do.) In 1984, for instance, an innovative cultural historian wrote the following in an otherwise brilliant essay titled “Books and Culture”: “The 1930s joined the European voice to the American perception in a situation where the fear and distaste of modern mass or popular culture seemed justified by the twin totalitarian viciousness of fascism and communism [emphasis added].” ¹ We even have serious writers who casually refer to “mass popular culture”; and National Public Radio now has a Popular Culture commentator who mostly seems to report on mass culture phenomena, such as film. ²

It must be acknowledged that sometimes the conflation of mass and popular culture occurs in the context of (or with reference to) the Great Debate over the evils of mass culture that occurred primarily during the mid-and later 1950s. In these instances, it is frequently unclear whether the author is directly at fault or simply repeating the muddled usage of predecessors. Either way, however, the reader who needs definitional clarity gets fuzziness instead. ³

Yet another cause for confusion occurs when a writer chooses to discuss popular culture within the framework of something casually labeled “mass society” in which “mass communication” has begun to occur. Mass society is a demographic phenomenon (dramatic population growth) once commonly associated with vulnerability to charismatic demagogues capable of swaying the masses toward either socialism or fascism, particularly during the second quarter of the twentieth century. Mass communication involves a technological transformation once identified with universal access to newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, but now more frequently identified with satellites, computers, and the Internet. Mass society may very well serve as a host or context for mass culture; but historically the former antedated the latter in ordinary usage, whereas the latter seems to have outlived the former in common parlance. Mass communication certainly facilitates the dissemination of mass culture; and both are undeniably dependent upon the venturesomeness of innovative entrepreneurs. Yet to intermingle the two only confuses the vehicle with the voluminous load it is supposed to distribute. The one has wheels, wires, and wavelengths. The other has comic books, cartoons, sitcoms, and videocassettes. ⁴

A few writers have bothered to differentiate thoughtfully, but they have not done so systematically or in depth. Almost four decades ago Oscar Handlin remarked that mass culture—by which he meant culture disseminated through the mass media—had a “disturbing” effect upon both popular and refined cultures, each of which predates mass culture. He wisely noted a common misconception that the mass culture of 1960 was merely an extension of popular cultures of the past. ⁵

Richard Slotkin, whose discipline is American Studies and whose specialty has long been the role of dominant myths in the United States, acknowledges the need for discrimination. “The productions of the cultural industries are indeed varied and ubiquitous,” he writes,

Historian Jackson Lears adamantly refuses to mix the two, and does so for a reason sensibly separate from Slotkin’s yet altogether congruent with it: “one cannot after all maintain a coherent or sophisticated notion of class and still equate mass culture with ‘popular culture.’ ” ⁷

The disposition to confuse or conflate the two phenomena is due, at least in part, to disciplinary allegiances and ideological commitments. Because, for example, the phrase “mass culture” is commonly perceived as carrying pejorative connotations, many of those who really enjoy it and write positively about it prefer to use the term “popular culture,” almost as a synonym, when they actually do mean mass culture: record-breaking attendance for films and television shows, compact discs that sell in the millions, apparel like jeans and sneakers, fast-food chains, standardized products sold at Wal-Mart and Kmart, and so forth. ⁸ The use of euphemism in this context has increased in recent years, but it certainly is not new. More than a generation ago an astute young cultural critic, Robert Warshow, casually used “popular” and “mass” interchangeably, but also referred with almost clinical care to a transformation given explicit recognition following World War II. “The mass culture of the educated classes,” he observed, “the culture of the ‘middle-brow,’ as it has sometimes been called—had come into existence.” ⁹

A British cultural critic has called attention to a similar paradox in the realm of film reviews. It is not unusual for writers to praise intellectually unpretentious popular movies for reasons that are not merely unrelated to their apparent appeal but even seem inimical to it. According to C. W. E. Bigsby, “Popular culture, then, can apparently be transformed into ‘high’ art by a simple critical act of appropriation. Indeed so insecure are these categories that the popular culture of one generation can become the high culture of the next and vice versa—a fact which applies not only to individual artists but to genres (theatre, novel, film), subgenres (farce, science fiction, detective fiction) and styles (romanticism, realism).” ¹⁰

Needless to say, popular culture not only existed but thrived for centuries prior to the period from 1885 to 1935 that I shall highlight. I draw a marked distinction between what British scholars refer to as “traditional” popular culture (flourishing in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries) and the considerably more commercialized and technologically transformed popular culture that emerged at the close of the nineteenth century and then blossomed exuberantly early in the twentieth. Traditional popular culture has also been called pretechnological and preindustrial. A fine example from the United States is the dime museum, which flourished during the nineteenth century but disappeared after 1900 because of the emergence of nickelodeons, film, and mechanized amusement parks. ¹¹

When we turn to folk culture and contemplate its advocates over a historical span of, say, seventy years, notable changes and even more diversity become apparent. Back in the 1930s Constance Rourke made an ardent yet isolated case for folk culture as the very essence, not merely of popular culture, but of national identity in the United States. Despite the plaudits her work received, her particular emphasis did not gain many adherents for more than a generation. ¹² In recent years we have professional students of folk culture deeply concerned to maintain a clear distance between handwrought folk traditions that they cherish and a mass consumer culture that they dislike. ¹³ And we have historians of popular culture who perceive 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 entrepreneurs. ¹⁴

By now the nonspecialist reader may very well feel overwhelmed by a surfeit of citations and contradictory points of view. If such browsers are still bearing with me, they surely must sense that the study of popular culture is clearly thriving in institutions of higher learning. Scholars may not be all of one mind, but they certainly are single-minded if not downright feisty in their pursuit of popular culture. Paradoxically, however, that is not the impression that one gets from casual browsing, particularly in the press or even among the cognoscenti. In 1974 Herbert Gans declared that “popular culture is not studied much these days either by social scientists or humanists... .” Twenty years later the retiring Secretary (director) of the Smithsonian Institution threw his hands up in despair at rising interest in popular and mass culture displays at the National Museum of American History. “How the hell do you define pop culture anyway?” he demanded. ¹⁵

Much of this book will be devoted to answering that question from various angles of vision. Here at the start it seems prudent to begin with an even more basic question on which there is no consensus respecting inclusiveness: What is culture? If we look at two famous responses to that query (offered well after Walter Lippmann’s) which share a common point of departure, we will gain from the second one a definition of popular culture by negative reference: culture is ordinary rather than rarefied, a matter of quotidian meanings rather than the gleanings of formal education. Both definitions still have their devotees today, though the balance of opinion has surely shifted from T. S. Eliot’s elitist view to Raymond Williams’s more populist view. Let’s begin with Eliot in 1948:

Although Eliot acknowledges the existence of mine workers and field laborers, he assumes that in some mysterious way they will share the national cultural identity of those with more education and money and higher social status than themselves. How they choose to use their leisure and what distinctive pleasures they may enjoy are beyond his realm of concern. ^*

Twenty years later, in 1968, Raymond Williams did not repudiate Eliot so much as find his definition incomplete:

At the close of that extract, writing just when the study of popular culture began to require recognition if not outright legitimacy in academe, Williams anticipated the inclusiveness that would occur in progressive stages during the 1970s and ’80s. Meanwhile the historian E. P. Thompson, Williams’s contemporary, made a useful distinction (in writing about the eighteenth century) between the “polite culture” of more genteel folk and a “customary popular culture” of ordinary people so different that it would lie beyond the recognition of even pious or affluent members of the middle class who had no aspirations for learned culture yet longed for the gentility of “polite culture.” ¹⁸

Students of colonial and nineteenth-century America, however, examining a less traditional and less rigidly stratified society, have narrowed the distance between book learning and collective beliefs. David D. Hall has warned against the presumption that ordinary people possess a culture totally separate from that of an educated elite, and has argued that there were always intermediaries able and ready to interpret one segment of society to another. Bridging the nineteenth into the twentieth century, David Grimsted has discovered common ground for bookish and popular culture; but even more important, he has punctured the customary distinction that elite culture was untainted by pecuniary ambitions, unlike popular culture, which was not merely tarnished but downright mercenary. Grimsted has suggested that “a desire to create, and a need to live, and a yen for money or recognition are not warring but joined elements in human beings. Such a gross truism would hardly be worth making did it not relate to one of the most popular explanatory put-downs of popular culture. To decry popular culture because it’s involved with profit motives is to disparage all levels of culture, all similarly tinged with personal adulterated motives.” ¹⁹

Both Grimsted and Hall acknowledge the existence of diverse levels of cultural taste, while minimizing their distinctiveness or the distance that separates them. The process of change over time, however, has not been neatly linear but more nearly cyclical, with widely shared cultural tastes more noticeable early (seventeenth to mid-nineteenth centuries) and late (since the 1960s), whereas the segmentation of cultural tastes was more prominent in between. Inquiries have certainly demonstrated that sharp distinctions between high culture and low did not yet obtain during the first half of the nineteenth century, whether one looks at museums, carnivals, the audiences for painting or for Shakespeare. ²⁰

The situation in Victorian America is more complex, and there is considerably less consensus among students of the later nineteenth century. One’s preferences depend a great deal upon the modes of cultural experience one chooses to examine. Looking at museums, symphonic music, and opera, for example, Lawrence W. Levine finds cultural hierarchy becoming much more pronounced in this period. Genteel taste, exclusiveness contrary to museum and zoo charters that proclaimed an educational mission to the masses, an emphasis upon decorum within the hallowed precincts of temples devoted to art and music, admission fees that fended off the working classes, all contributed to a marked increase in segmentation and stratification. ²¹

Those who concentrate more on books and reading habits, however, are impressed by the broad appeal across taste-level lines of such writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Horace Bushnell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Henry Ward Beecher. Hence their belief that clear dichotomies between high and popular culture did not yet exist even in Victorian America. ²²

An intermediate position can be found if one examines the controls over magazine content exercised by Victorian editors who carefully monitored the propriety of public taste. Or the way American folk heroes, such as Kit Carson, displayed notable variations in their diction depending upon whether their venue was a dime novel or a play directed to the middle class, not to mention diverse regional audiences. After looking at a variety of cultural institutions in the United States during the later nineteenth century, Neil Harris reached a multifaceted conclusion: Functioning within those institutions he found “unstable mixtures of preservation and popularization, dogmatism and tolerance, opposition to and acquiescence in mass taste.” He saw a surprising blend of “high and popular culture in unlikely places... . Whether the popular was acknowledged out of respect for its integrity or from a desire to reshape it is not always clear.” Yet Harris concludes that these institutions “adopted a stance toward modernity that was both more skeptical and more probing than easy wisdom would suggest.” ²³

Harris and others have noted that popular as well as high culture programs and exhibitions occurred at the numerous world fairs that took place in the United States between 1876 and 1915. Entrepreneurs recognized the need for both and provided for them—but in carefully controlled ways, such as noncontiguous locations. At Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, for example, Frederick Jackson Turner addressed the American Historical Association about the frontier West within the pristine confines of the sparkling White City while Buffalo Bill and his philistine Wild West Show performed on the Midway Plaisance. Cultural segregation, plain and simple. ²⁴

As late as the 1870s, taste levels and stratification had not yet become rigid or inflexible; but they were perceptibly hardening. In 1871, for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Roscoe Thayer (a proper Bostonian who published extensively on Italian history and politics) made a transcontinental trip by railroad (riding in a private car) and enjoyed a look at Yosemite. In Salt Lake City the two preeminent intellectuals attended a melodrama, Marriage by Moonlight; or the Wildcat’s Revenge , and were not impressed. A month later they went to a “notorious theater” in San Francisco, one said to be a favorite of gold miners. It must have been a kind of burlesque-opera house. In any case, Emerson and Thayer found it “flat and dreary.” As American society became more heterogeneous, crossing cultural boundaries became increasingly problematic. ²⁵

One year later, yet another old-line New Englander puzzled over the big question, though this time quite publicly in Scribner’s. Presumably others shared his concern about the optimal connections between high culture and the working class. “What are the relations of culture to common life,” asked Charles Dudley Warner, “of the scholar to the day-laborer? What is the value of this vast accumulation of higher learning, what is its point of contact with the mass of humanity... .” Warner suggested that public intellectuals had civic responsibilities; but few among his contemporaries shared that concern, and his cri de coeur would hardly be heard again for almost a century. ²⁶

It is undeniably true that T. S. Eliot wanted a larger reading public for poetry, but mainly because he also hoped to have a bigger audience for his social and religious ideas. “I believe that the poet naturally prefers to write for as large and miscellaneous an audience as possible,” he once wrote, but then continued enigmatically: “it is the half-educated and ill-educated, rather than the uneducated, who stand in his way: I myself should like an audience which could neither read nor write.” Eliot later modified that oddly patronizing notion into a theory highly representative of the tripartite “brow level” doctrine that dominated American thinking during the middle third of the twentieth century. He explained that a writer really needed three concentric publics: “a small public of substantially the same education as himself, as well as the same tastes; a larger public with some common background with him; and finally he should have something in common with everyone who has intelligence and sensibility and can read his language.” ²⁷

Other cultural critics tended to follow a tripartite division while using different labels and varying grounds for differentiation. Leslie Fiedler, for example, with a more whimsical wisdom than Eliot’s, defined taste levels in terms of what people preferred to read. His correlations were clear-cut and made no allowance for overlap. Highbrows read the little reviews. The philistine middle class read “the slicks.” And the masses were consumers of the pulps. Whereas Fiedler’s masses simply took what was available, affordable, and comprehensible, Michael Denning has offered a very different vision of working-class cultural autonomy in which the writers of dime novels were sympathetic to working-class culture and readers from that culture interpreted dime novels in a highly particular way that coincided sensibly with the actual world they inhabited. “The cultural formation of the dime novel,” Denning writes, “derives its energy and crudity from the conjuncture of the birth of a culture industry with the emergence of an American working class. Its narrative formulas gain their resonance largely from their closeness to working class ideologies, from the mechanic accents of the producer culture to which its readers, writers, and earliest publishers belonged.” ²⁸

In 1984 the American historian Warren Susman wondered (and asked) whether popular culture operated according to formulas while high culture functioned in response to conventions. The question is important though difficult, but perhaps we can respond to it in terms of the varied patterns of repetition that may be observed at different taste levels. ²⁹ In high culture, repetition occurs because participants fully expect to see different stagings of the Ring Cycle or Hamlet and then compare them, always with certain conventions in mind though not feeling bound by them until, perhaps, Hamlet is set in Houston with redneck guards or Die Götterdämmerung features Hell’s Angels.

Most newspapers read by middlebrows presume that you have not followed a story faithfully, so repetition is built into each installment as background. In the realm of popular culture, a great many people never seem to tire of old favorites like Lawrence Welk, formulaic romance fiction, certain beverages, and cartoon characters. Familiarity and reliability are more desirable than novelty. ³⁰ With mass culture, by contrast, novelty is necessary in order to maximize sales, initiate fads, and excite audiences. Repetition is also inevitable, nonetheless, for two reasons. First, nothing is copied so quickly as a success, so that a hit program elicits a multimirrored hall of look-alikes. And second, the secret of effective advertising is repetition with minor variations. Hence we see certain ads so often that we come to learn them by rote.

Departing too radically from convention runs the risk of rejection and abject failure. Yet rigid adherence to convention also entails the risk of stagnation and alienation. Only the avant-garde, by definition, seek to flout convention. In fact, their most prominent convention is their unconventionality.

Having acknowledged the historical existence of “brow levels” used as a kind of shorthand for cultural stratification by taste levels, and also having indicated that I want to differentiate between mass and popular culture, perhaps I may appropriately recognize that what appears to be a current trend—the mixing and consequent blurring of taste levels—has historical roots that date back roughly four decades. The recent vogue is highly visible. In 1996 the cultural historian Ann Douglas published an essay titled “High Is Low” in which she announced that a wall dividing the art world had disintegrated. Some of her particulars, however, suggested that it had been heading toward collapse for much of the twentieth century. Early in 1997 Michiko Kakutani’s “Culture Zone” column for the New York Times called attention to a blurring of preferences in apparel across class and racial lines. As she provocatively put it, “why are homeboys and suburbanites wearing each other’s clothes?” A few months later an essay observed that “deconstruction” had entered the lexicon of daily life. Although it may often be used improperly, that word-concept has curiously entered the realm of popular writing. ³¹

Taken together, do those examples begin to suggest that some sort of cultural Mixmaster has been activated? Forsooth, perhaps even a paradigm shift? Let’s scroll back to 1955 and read John Berger, art critic at that time for the New Statesman in England and The Nation in the United States. He ridiculed the notion that an iron divider loomed large between highbrows and lowbrows. He insisted that “a great deal of highbrow and lowbrow culture derive from exactly the same attitude of life and differ only in their degree of self-consciousness.” Berger acknowledged the existence of “different standards of appreciation”: Some people with an “unusually developed visual sensibility” see works from the perspective of the artist; they appreciate how the artist has solved certain aesthetic and technical problems. A majority, meanwhile, identify not with the artist but with the content of the art. “They will applaud not the process of creation but the result. This difference, however, is not the same as that between highbrow and lowbrow. Both these attitudes of appreciation are necessary to one another.” ³² What Berger saw as an arbitrary and wrongheaded division between highbrow and lowbrow was, in his view, “based on a misreading of history.”

We may or may not agree with Berger; many of his contemporaries in 1955 did not. But eventually, during the decades that followed, his rejection of strict lines of demarcation would be reiterated by critics in diverse fields. His attack on cultural snobbery was only an opening salvo, and what we have read in recent years is mainly an insistent elaboration.

For myself, as Supreme Court justices say, I concur in part and dissent in part. I dissent from Berger because for most of a century, from the 1870s until the 1960s, a great many Americans did in fact believe that cultural stratification existed and they responded accordingly. In 1949 the editor of Harper’s magazine received the following handwritten letter from a man in Bard, New Mexico: “Just a line to let you know that I do not think your magazine is what it used to be. It seems to me evry [ sic ] thing you print is too much high brow, or it may be that I am just low brow.” Already in 1892, a literary reviewer was noting the irony that Walt Whitman celebrated the masses and yearned for their approval, yet was chiefly read by the “cultivated few.” ³³ Countless examples of taste-level awareness will appear in the chapters that follow.

But I also concur with Berger because many of those who read and invoke history in order to elucidate taste levels in the United States do so in such a variety of ways that “history” gets to be a grab bag, ransacked almost randomly in support of often contradictory conclusions. A few examples should suffice. Richard Ohmann, a historian of American literature, sought to answer the question: “Where did mass culture come from?” He found his answer in the transformation of American journalistic publishing (newspapers and magazines) at the end of the nineteenth and during the early years of the twentieth century. In the 1880s, he explained, “editors and publishers first succeeded in basing their business on low prices, large circulations, and advertising revenues. And the great editors of the 1890s, who turned this principle into even greater profits, understood it well.” Consequently, enterprising publishers blended two business practices that were already effective but had until then been independent of each other. They borrowed from the women’s magazines and the cheap weeklies the concept of making a large group of consumers more accessible to advertisers, and they took from the most prominent monthlies the idea of appealing to people who wanted to be part of a newly emerging national audience. By about 1905, according to Ohmann, monthly magazines had become “the major form of repeated cultural experience” for Americans. ³⁴

The difficulty here, symptomatic of problems posed by so much of the material treated in this book, is that the clientele for these magazines can be (and has been) viewed in highly variable ways. During the decades examined intensively by Ohmann, 1885 to 1905, the most influential national monthlies were Harper’s and The Century. Scarcely anyone regards these as progenitors of mass culture. A few students even place them in the highbrow category, but most consider them what subsequently came to be called middle-or upper-middlebrow. The same is true of Scribner’s , founded in 1887. The Atlantic Monthly underwent a revival after 1898, when Walter Hines Page took over as editor. It must be acknowledged, however, that sales of the Ladies Home Journal rose from 600,000 in 1891 to a million by 1903. And by 1900 Munsey’s Magazine had become the first general-interest illustrated magazine to achieve a genuinely high circulation. But, again, do any of these publications qualify as products of mass culture? Judging by their contents, and by other kinds of attractive reading material (like gazettes) that would have had their greatest appeal for working-class Americans, I would prefer to categorize them—except perhaps for Munsey’s —as manifestations of popular culture, aimed mainly at the protean and capacious middle class. ³⁵

Richard Ohmann even acknowledges that Munsey’s went mainly to middle-class people rather than to farmers and workers, and therefore that configuration is less inclusive than what we mean by mass culture. Yet Ohmann nevertheless claims that an “integrated mass culture” emerged in the 1890s, though the meaning of “integrated” remains unclear. ³⁶

The same kinds of difficulties arise when we turn to other criteria of cultural stratification in search of the genesis of mass culture. The historian Kathy Peiss looks at the diversions pursued by working women in New York at the turn of the century and finds what she calls the emergence of “mass leisure.” ³⁷ Because the paid vacation did not become a reality for working-class Americans until well after World War II, however, mass leisure surely did not mean in 1900 what it would come to mean by the 1960s. Moreover, can mass leisure of any kind imply the existence of full-scale mass culture in the absence of such mass media as radio and television?

Similarly, Lary May locates the birth of mass culture between 1911 and 1929, but especially during the 1920s because of the appearance then of large and gaudy movie palaces. He cites “an unprecedented mass audience centered in the growing cities.” But his operative meaning of mass culture remains elusive because he is really describing the uses of leisure in urban settings primarily for middle-and lower-middle-income Americans. These glitzy movie palaces cost more and were less physically accessible than the much smaller and unadorned neighborhood structures patronized by nearby working-class folk, especially the newer immigrants. ³⁸ Consequently, the film audience in the United States during the first three decades of the twentieth century remained more segmented by class and taste levels than some observers have been willing to recognize.

Writing about the emergence of the Book-of-the-Month Club in the later 1920s, Janice Radway explains that controversies generated by this entrepreneurial innovation occurred as part of the “American attempt to come to terms with the process of massification.” She frequently refers to a “huge mass audience” and to a “modern mass society.” Radway believes that Henry Seidel Canby, a professor of English at Yale who served as chairman of the club’s selection committee, included the masses in his assessment of cultural markets and their dynamics in the United States. Yet Radway and others acknowledge that the Book-of-the-Month Club is best described by a new category (or label) that made its first appearance during the 1920s: middlebrow. ³⁹ No one can plausibly claim the BOMC and its imitators as exemplars of mass culture. Popular, perhaps, and middlebrow surely, but not mass. Its subscribers were numerous though hardly vast—tens of thousands but not yet millions.

Two more illustrations should suffice. In noting the popularity of “auto-camping” by the end of the 1920s—automobile holidays accompanied by camping in the out-of-doors—historian Warren Belasco designates this protean activity (its modus operandi changed every few years) as a “mass institution.” Although it is true that Henry Ford had democratized access to the automobile by the end of the 1920s, ownership remained particularly an upper-and middle-income phenomenon. Neither the urban masses nor the rural poor went auto-camping. Meanwhile historians of feminism as an ideology, and of the changing role of women in American society, tend to place the emergence of mass culture in the 1940s. ⁴⁰

Clearly, then, there is no agreement among students of American culture in the twentieth century as to when mass culture either began or achieved full flower. One of the principal purposes of this book is to clarify that uncertainty. I am persuaded that the appearance of newspaper and then radio syndication (ca. 1908–38), along with many other developments, including those just mentioned, comprise an era that might properly be categorized as proto-mass culture; but I believe that the nature and uses of mass leisure prior to the 1960s, along with the technologies that served mass leisure, differed appreciably from mass culture as we have known it since the later 1950s.

Because the availability of leisure and widening access to it have undergone such a dramatic transformation during the past century, my concern with mass and popular culture in this book will focus particularly upon changing American attitudes toward leisure and their uses of it. The rise of recreation in its broadest possible sense and changing modes of entertainment will be at the heart of my story: how Americans have amused themselves and how they have felt about their amusements are central to our understanding of the so-called American Century. Indeed, the growing legitimacy of amusement itself in manifest ways is crucial.

For example, the law creating the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., enacted by Congress in 1888–89, rationalized its existence by emphasizing that it would be “for the advancement of science and the instruction and recreation of the people.” But realities and the recognition of change brought new priorities to the fore. In 1891 a staff member pleaded with the Secretary (director) of the Smithsonian Institution that exotic animals be added to North American wildlife at the zoo “for the amusement and instruction of the people.” By 1901, as the new century opened, the secretary acknowledged to his diary that the new National Zoo offered “an admirable place for health, recreation and entertainment. ” So an institution intended for the advancement of science had, within a decade, become vastly more important as a source of entertainment. ⁴¹ That transformation is highly symptomatic, and it provides an essential context for my focus throughout this book upon popular culture during the past century as entertainment, first and foremost. Hence my emphasis upon the changing nature and uses of leisure as matters of degree as well as kind in distinguishing between mass and popular culture.

Its most enthusiastic advocates have defined mass culture as “everything that members of an industrialized society share with all other members. Anything not universally shared may be less than ‘mass,’ an aspect of a ‘minority’ or ‘sub’-culture.” ⁴² Fine. Let us bear in mind that as late as the 1930s many Americans, especially in the South and West, did not yet live in a fully industrialized society; and up until midcentury there were a great many aspects of American culture that most certainly were not universally shared. Consequently, according to their own criteria, devotees ought to acknowledge that mass culture could not become truly pervasive until well after World War II. Mass culture, then, must be nonregional, highly standardized, and completely commercial. Handmade quilts, for example, do not qualify as mass culture, not because they lack commercial value (for they most certainly possess that), but because they vary so much by region or locale, sometimes by religious sect, and also in the reasons for their making.

For the sake of clarification, then, let me suggest some of the characteristics of mass culture as we have known it for about four decades so that readers can understand why I consider the significant developments just described, along with others, as being better perceived either as popular culture or as proto-mass culture.

We must begin with television, which went from being expensive and therefore exclusive to being perceived as an affordable necessity during the mid-to later 1950s. Afternoon soap operas did not become standard fare on all of the major networks until 1954, when NBC reluctantly capitulated because it could not compete with the huge success enjoyed by soap operas on CBS. By the early 1960s television executives systematically started to “dumb down” their programs for a mass, undifferentiated audience—far more than radio had ever done. For that reason, the presumed or potential homogenization of American viewers, TV would contribute considerably more to the shaping of mass culture than radio had. Keep in mind, also, the sheer number of local radio stations along with stations that targeted particular clienteles compared with the severely limited number of dominant, national television networks. ⁴³

Fast-food chains like McDonald’s got started in the mid-1950s but did not “take off” until the sixties or become ubiquitous until the seventies. They should not be considered a true component of mass culture until the early 1970s, because initially they targeted a large but specific clientele: suburban families rather than urban workers, the customary habitués of White Tower and White Castle hamburger houses. Unlike their predecessors, McDonald’s featured cleanliness. They were not “joints” and had neither jukeboxes nor vending machines. They aimed to please the baby boom middle class rather than the urban workingman and-woman. All of that changed during the 1970s and ’80s when McDonald’s rapidly began to add downtown locations for teenagers and busy single people who did not have time to cook and who ate on the run. ⁴⁴

When regional shopping centers started to emerge in the mid-and later 1950s, the community marketplace characterized by personal relationships shifted from the old “downtown” to the more anonymous suburban shopping center, anchored by major national chain stores with standardized products, such as Sears, Penneys, and Montgomery Ward. The preponderance of chain stores and national franchises brought shoppers all of the latest national trends, not only in products but in merchandising techniques as well. Standardization was also perceived as the key to success for national motel chains beginning in the 1960s. Franchising meant local ownership but predictable nationwide similarities. A national name conveyed reliability and security to potential patrons. ⁴⁵

On September 26, 1960, seventy million people watched the presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon—an unprecedented number of viewers who could exchange reactions the next day about what they had seen. And then there is Monday night football, a newly routinized mass phenomenon in which people in many thousands of cities and towns watch two teams from some other part of the country compete. All sorts of rituals developed in response to the magnetic attraction of Monday night football, such as places where women with no interest in football could gather and socialize. Not until 1967 was it possible to relay film by satellite from Tokyo to New York, and then at a very high cost. By 1970, however, we know that a majority of Americans received their news coverage from television, most notably news about the war in Vietnam. ⁴⁶

Finally, to round out a selective menu of mass culture’s distinguishing features in our own time, we have the inundation of bulk mail catalogues, special promotions for credit cards and life insurance, tele-advertising and direct sales, philanthropic and medical research solicitations—mostly made possible by the sale of computerized membership lists. It has to be mass culture when the process depends upon targeting zip codes and census data based upon household incomes, all from vast electronic data banks. We can call 1-800 numbers seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, and be answered by a recorded voice that presents us with a list of options we can only opt if we have a touch-tone telephone. ⁴⁷

All of that and more, compounded of pixels, adds up to mass culture of a character unknown and unimagined by most people prior to the later 1950s. (On April 2, 1965, Time magazine devoted its cover story to “The Computer in Society.” On January 3, 1983, Time chose to celebrate the “Machine of the Year” rather than a Man of the Year. Its cover story was entitled “The Computer Moves In” and the lead visual featured a man and a woman sitting at tables staring at computers.) Writing in 1965, when mass culture as we know it was relatively new, two notably influential British writers, Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel, produced a sophisticated text that predictably mingled mass and popular culture into a multi-ingredient omelet. They defined mass culture as art that is machine-produced according to a formula. They devoted a closing chapter to critics and defenders of mass culture, and like most of the aggressively defensive partisans of popular and mass culture at that time, they rejected any spurious distinction between the serious and the popular or between entertainment and high culture values. They took mass and popular culture quite seriously themselves and resented those critics and scholars who regarded their own chosen meat as poison. ⁴⁸

There is a striking contrast between their upbeat perception of mass culture and that of Clement Greenberg in 1939 and Dwight Macdonald’s two decades later (building upon Greenberg’s). Hall and Whannel highlighted technology and the formulaic element—mass production moving ahead in a manner independent of older models or art forms. To its advocates, mass culture was capable of innovation or even novelty. It could produce repetition but not uniqueness; yet the production of repetition was altogether appropriate if one subscribed to egalitarian values. ⁴⁹

An important reason why Greenberg and Macdonald so despised mass culture derived from their belief that it imitated and thereby degraded high culture—a pattern of reasoning that made less and less sense with the passage of time as polls demonstrated that ordinary Americans had little interest in high culture, never mind its send-ups. But as Greenberg wrote in one of his most celebrated essays: “The precondition for kitsch ... is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends.” Macdonald put it even more simply, albeit more perversely: “Masscult is a parody of High Culture.” ⁵⁰

I shall have much more to say about mass culture in chapter 8 —critical, albeit not for the reasons that prompted Greenberg and Macdonald to be. In closing this introductory chapter, however, I want to alert the reader to several other central themes of the book. First, I regard the half century from 1885 to 1935 as the heyday of commercialized popular culture in the United States, from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show to the demise of burlesque and vaudeville, with a great deal more ululating in between.

Second, I see a crucial and vital period of overlap involving what I have called proto-mass culture and the prime of popular culture, an overlap that I date from approximately 1930 to 1965. The word “overlap” (rather than “transition”) is deliberately chosen because there was, undeniably, a great deal of simultaneity. How does one categorize a Norman Rockwell illustration on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post when its circulation edged close to three million—popular culture or mass? The answer must be both, of course, because Rockwell’s illustrations are, in their own curious way, beyond category. ⁵¹

Why then do I reject the word “transition”? Because popular culture did not die and is not ready for interment. It remains very much with us, albeit more easily observed in smaller towns than in large cities, in rural America more than urban or suburban, yet ubiquitous nonetheless in revivals as well as in some new TV shows and radio programs, for example. Moreover, because of technological changes, popular culture always has been and remains more ephemeral and evanescent than mass culture. Although Mae West’s distinctive humor survives on film from the 1930s and ’40s, for example, her many years in vaudeville and nightclubs can never be recaptured or reproduced.

What then of the criteria that I use for differentiating between popular and mass culture? The somewhat less important criteria involve matters of scale—such as thousands of people at an amusement park as opposed to many tens of millions worldwide watching the Super Bowl in January, for example—and increasing dependence upon technologies of visual access, entertainment, and information rather than avenues of personal access, self-instruction or amusement, and knowledge for its own sake rather than practical utility. To make the abstract more concrete (albeit reductive), it’s the difference between games of skill at the state fair and video games, or between “scoping” the boardwalk at Coney Island or Atlantic City and surfing the Web at home. ⁵²

Which leads to the distinction that matters most. I regard popular culture— not always but more often than not —as participatory and interactive, whereas mass culture (until the 1980s, when computers caused significant changes that have yet to be fully charted), ⁵³ more often than not induced passivity and the privatization of culture. In writing about P. T. Barnum and his public in the nineteenth century, Neil Harris described a degree of responsiveness on the part of patrons who delighted in disentangling issues of validity and deception. Hence the participatory aspect of popular culture. In 1870 the famous landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted described two capacities or qualities latent in all people: the “exertive” and the “receptive.” I am persuaded that popular culture calls forth the exertive while mass culture can rely far more upon the receptive. ⁵⁴

Being “exertive” or participatory may occur either in the making or in the consuming of a product or a pleasure. (A quilting bee provides a good example.) How people used or responded to what was offered them matters a great deal. It once was common for kids to create their own toys, combining vivid imaginations with miscellaneous materials at hand. That pattern is much less true today; not absolutely, of course, but significantly so. Now, they are more likely to want particular manufactured items seen on TV or at the mall. Particularity means authenticity: just like Johnny’s or Judy’s.

The cultural historian Alan Trachtenberg has made a useful distinction between experience and information. Needless to say, they are not mutually exclusive—we act upon information, and new knowledge may prompt us to seek experience. ⁵⁵ Nonetheless, when popular culture was in its prime, Americans seemed to search for experience, whereas in recent decades they have had cause to privilege information above experience, a parallel in symmetry with the relative shift that I perceive from participatory to more passive. ⁵⁶

At the close of the 1870s, the major cultural tension that seemed to attract the attention of journalists, preachers, and social critics got subsumed under the polarized rubric “Vulgarity and Gentility,” which became the subject of a major editorial in the New York Times . Remarkably egalitarian in tone, the essay sought to minimize any inevitable connection between class and taste, between social status and brow levels—a sure sign that this very issue had become vexing in Victorian America.

A century later that widely noticed dualism had been supplanted by a very different one: “Narcissism and Altruism.” The social critic and historian Christopher Lasch caused quite a stir in 1978–79 with his provocative book The Culture of Narcissism , a work that prompted President Jimmy Carter to invite Lasch to the White House. Lasch derided wrongheaded critics of narcissism for their naïveté in failing

The problem of passivity and privatization in a new guise with new manifestations! Within the span of a century a dominant lifestyle among Americans had come full circle, but with a troublesome twist. People had shifted from a culture of domesticity centered on hearth and home to a culture of entertainment in public places, made possible in wondrous ways by urban electrification at the close of the nineteenth century. By 1910–20 “going out” meant more than the customary fare of popular culture: the circus and the carnival, the minstrel show and the Wild West show, Barnum and burlesque. It meant illuminated amusement parks and trolley parks, nickelodeons and movie houses, vaudeville and musical reviews, dance halls and cabarets. Stepping out made popular culture lively, and vice versa, during the first half of the twentieth century. ⁵⁹

Then came television and suburbia, almost simultaneously, and within a quarter of a century a remarkable shift back to privatized leisure occurred with astonishing speed. In 1951 a Gallup poll asked: “Which do you enjoy most—radio, television or the movies?” Radio got 50%, TV 24%, and movies 21%. Late in 1975 a Roper poll of 2,007 Americans pursued a more complex but intriguing issue:

Here are some of the responses to what people were doing more than they used to. (The answers total more than 100% owing to multiple responses.)

In terms of public places and private spaces, it almost seemed as though the clock had been turned back one hundred years. But not quite. We had achieved an interesting mix of mass and popular culture; but above all, a partial retreat from the public sector to the haven of home and even specific spaces within the home. The privatization of leisure. A retro process that, all in all, seems to have transcended customary patterns of categorization. ⁶¹

I certainly do not believe that television is exclusively a passive experience, nor do I deny that it can have participatory and interactive consequences. Television gave a genuine lift to the civil rights movement, 1963–65, and to opposition against the war in Vietnam, 1968–73. Some people still watch television together, and they may very well discuss what they watch. But if the program is really important (such as a nominating convention or a State of the Union address), the audience at home is most likely to watch other people discuss what they have just seen and heard.

It seems clear that we can invoke a historical orthodoxy that still persisted less than half a century ago, so long as we acknowledge that it never went entirely unchallenged. The template for that orthodoxy looked something like this: High culture is expected to connect humankind to its finest past achievements, whereas popular culture provides more ephemeral access to amusement and experience across class lines in the here and now. High culture is meant to create as well as preserve. Popular and mass culture function in more transitory ways within a contemporary time frame. Their principal objective is not enduring excellence but pleasure and commercial appeal.

How those orthodoxies underwent modifications and transformations will concern us in the chapters ahead.

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* For an unusual indication of Eliot’s enthusiasm for popular culture, see his essay “Marie Lloyd” in Selected Essays (New York, 1932). xJPqy7DQjRJSJ/3zmBTt9AdXXkKs5kiieUNdDQnPf6j+M6Fn22SfV/YNutQ19pZ+