Introduction

This book is essentially an extended essay about changing views of leisure and American preferences concerning its growing array of uses. It also examines perceptions of popular and mass culture in the United States during the past century. “Popular” and “mass” have meant different things to different people at different times, however, so quite understandably the terms have commonly been interchanged and confused, often because they have not been viewed carefully in historical context. Such casual usage has been encouraged by our equally loose and occasionally frivolous invocations of highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow, those all-too-familiar yet elastic categories of cultural taste that have sometimes been applied with excessive (meaning undemonstrable) precision, but at other times with reckless (meaning unreliable) caprice. Just ask ten educated friends to differentiate between popular and mass culture. I predict that you will receive ten fairly divergent answers, and few of them will be historically informed. ¹

Although the author of this project is a practicing historian, we will not proceed decade by decade, or even generation by generation, which would be mechanical and perhaps lethal. Change over time matters immensely, and it must receive due attention. (Hence the Selective Chronology of landmarks in popular culture immediately following this Introduction.) But the organizational scheme that follows is fundamentally topical within a flexible chronological framework. Why? First, because this is an inquiry concerning the problem of popular culture and its contested meanings rather than a comprehensive history of popular culture. And second, because I can develop my assertions more clearly and economically through a thematic approach rather than a strictly sequential one. Although the book contains episodes, it is not a narrative. Rather, it is meant to be an explanation of numerous narratives or accounts that readers may already have encountered—many of them, because of their apparent implications, contradictory.

I do, however, take up my topics with this serial logic: they appear in the approximate order of their historical salience, that is, when they respectively began to influence or affect American understanding of taste levels and their role in twentieth-century leisure and desire. Chapter 2 , therefore, will be devoted to the hesitant, conflicted search for a compelling rationale for leisure pursuits appropriate in a democratic culture with a very strong work ethic, a rationale that could achieve widespread appeal without being tainted by charges of coarseness or degradation—a quest most visible during the early decades of the twentieth century, but especially in the 1920s. Chapter 3 concerns commercialization and cultural consumerism, an important phenomenon from the turn of the century that has intensified apace ever since. That chapter will also take note of the relationship between popular culture and national identity, a nexus that involved shifting attitudes toward Old World cultures as well as reconsiderations and appropriations from the American past, particularly during the years from around 1900 through World War II.

Chapter 4 seeks to locate and define post-traditional, commercialized popular culture during its most effervescent and prominent period, the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, with particular emphasis upon its interactive and participatory qualities and the culture of celebrity that emerged between the two world wars. Chapter 5 explores the gradual blurring of traditional boundaries between taste levels—the loss of meaning and the eventual irrelevance of strictly defined cultural strata correlated in people’s minds with class, education, and degrees of affluence—mainly after midcentury. Chapter 6 will look at two distinct barometers of ambivalence and contestation: the Great Debate about mass culture that dominated the 1950s, and public opinion polls from the 1940s through the 1970s concerning attitudes toward the uses of leisure and toward popular as well as mass culture. That chapter also emphasizes the decline of cultural authority, especially that held by critics, in the later twentieth century, and the increasing importance of cultural power, usually sustained by corporate capital rather than by valorized critical authority. We will witness the rise and decline of respected cultural expertise between the 1920s and the 1980s.

Chapter 7 looks at what I perceive as the emergence of “proto-mass culture” during the interwar years, followed by the first problematic phase of overlap and fuzziness in marks of difference between popular and mass culture, circa 1930–60. (Chronological distinctions made throughout the book are only meant to be suggestive in order to clarify the inevitable messiness of such overlaps. They are not intended to be a new gospel or precise gauge of historical measurement.) In chapter 8 I describe and define mass culture as we have known it in our own time, by which I mean since the 1960s and ’70s. The persistence of popular culture as a recognizable realm will not be ignored, however, and areas of intersection or convergence must be acknowledged.

Chapter 9 examines the curious and sometimes difficult relationship between historians and popular as well as mass culture, mainly since the 1980s, and does so using two case studies: Ken Burns’s television documentary The Civil War (1990) and the Museum of Modern Art’s extremely controversial exhibition High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture (1990–91). Finally, chapter 10 seeks to pull these various strands together by discussing the ongoing prevalence of cultural ambiguities and contestation in recent years; by making brief comparisons with trends overseas; and by assessing some rather apocalyptic claims quite recently asserted about the condition of American culture at the close of the century.

For several decades starting in the sixties, numerous scholars on the left sought to redefine the interactive relationship between high and popular culture, out of a desire to demonstrate the cultural autonomy and widening influence of taste preferences among working-class people. Depictions of the lifestyles of ordinary folk went from nearly nonexistent or else trivialized to “subaltern,” or at least quite separate in their origins and evolution. More dynamic and complex theories, influenced by studies of European culture, stressed that “so-called high culture has been and will continue to be renewed from below, just as popular or even mass culture derives much of its energies from above. The boundaries shift and dissolve, the categories harden and soften.” ²

I am in full agreement with that, although the former (impact from the bottom up) is more difficult to demonstrate than the latter. It can be done, however—the MoMA exhibition High & Low being a case in point. A large number of art critics found fault with it for myriad reasons, but the viewing public, by and large, liked it and learned a great deal from it. Kirk Varnedoe, the curator, anticipated controversy but held fast to his convictions and survived a firestorm. “The relationship of high art to mass culture,” he declared, “is one of the great subjects crucial to what made modern art modern.” The inspiration for the show had been an article by Adam Gopnik, a writer for The New Yorker , showing the influence of cartoons and caricature on Picasso’s portraits between 1905 and 1912. ³

The critics’ ultimate complaint, however, was that “the promised circuitry of exchange between art and popular culture is shown to go one way only: from low to high.” ⁴ Although this objection was exaggerated, perhaps Varnedoe and Gopnik had overcompensated because for so long it has been much easier (or at least far more common) to demonstrate patterns of “trickle down” rather than gravity-defying pulsations of “filter up.” The basic point, of course, is that the flow between cultural taste levels is not unidirectional. Rather, it is a process of interaction, and sometimes more like the continuous action of a circuit.

Be that as it may, I feel a certain envy for writers who describe and explain cultural phenomena at a particular taste level, whether it be highly cerebral, avant-garde, middlebrow, or mass culture. ⁵ Not that theirs is an easy task, by any means, but it is somewhat less complicated, perhaps, than presenting a story of permeability, where categories casually interpenetrate and conventional lines of stratification collapse into one another. The history of cultural taste levels in the twentieth century has increasingly been one of fluidity, blending, and the attendant blurring of boundaries. Because that is one of the central propositions of this book, it warrants some advance notice here, particularly as a preview for chapter 5 below.

At the turn of the century George Lyman Kittredge, a prestigious Shakespearean scholar and folklorist at Harvard, observed that educated Americans jumped back and forth from the “learned” to the “popular,” a sentiment echoed by H. L. Mencken a generation later. In 1937 poet and playwright Archibald MacLeish made a determined effort to use radio as a bridge between high and popular culture. His play The Fall of the City (1937) called upon serious writers to recognize the cultural reach and possibilities of radio. The art of Thomas Hart Benton effectively and indissolubly integrated folk, high, and popular traditions. Consequently, an Omnibus television program in 1953 explicitly presented Benton’s paintings as a fusion of cultural levels. And for more than a decade starting in 1964, Susan Sontag insisted that perceptions of a gulf existing between high and low art were illusory. The emergence of new media exemplified “not a conflict of cultures but the creation of a new kind of sensibility which is defiantly pluralistic and dedicated both to excruciating seriousness and to fun, wit, and nostalgia.” ⁶

This book seeks to explain how that kind of cultural pluralism came about and to describe some of its implications as a historical process. I will devote particular attention to the major sources of cultural authority, such as critics, and their increasingly conflicted relationship with major repositories of cultural power, such as corporate sponsors and media executives. The once delicate balance between these two forces has been markedly altered in the past three decades, thereby rendering many of the generalizations in the best of our analyses reductive and misleading. Here is an example from a pioneering study that belongs to the same genre of inquiry as the present work: “People pay much less attention to the media,” wrote the sociologist Herbert J. Gans in 1974, “and are much less swayed by its content than the critics, who are highly sensitive to verbal and other symbolic materials, believe. They [ordinary people] use the media for diversion and would not think of applying its content to their own lives.” ⁷ A wide range of national opinion studies made in the 1970s (examined in chapters 7 and 8 below), however, forcefully contradicts such assertions.

Ultimately, I hope that American Culture, American Tastes will convey to readers a sense of the swiftly expanded meanings and perceptions of “culture” in twentieth-century America. Back in 1914 the young Walter Lippmann, already a precocious pundit, offered a working definition that seemed remarkably inclusive for the time:

Much of the swift and moving drama of modern American cultural history can be found in the myriad ways in which that description has perforce become even more expansive in recent decades—and has generated a disparate body of writings from students in many disciplines and from beyond the walls of academe as well. I have drawn quite heavily upon that literature: borrowing and agreeing in some areas, skeptical and offering alternative explanations elsewhere. I have relied a great deal upon public opinion polls concerning aspects of American culture, not because the polls are so accurate—indeed, they manifest numerous contradictions—but because they supply such abundant of variable public perceptions of American culture and leisure, which is the core subject of this essay.

Almost a quarter of a century ago the British cultural critic Raymond Williams reminded us that the word-concept “culture” has undergone several major shifts in meaning over the past half a millennium. Its most common usage during the last century—as an abstract noun referring to music, literature, painting and sculpture, theater and film, and so forth—dates only from the later nineteenth century and emerged in the wake of discussions prompted by Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1867). Arnold associated culture with authority. Doing so seemed inescapable to him because he regarded culture as “a principle of authority, to counteract the tendency to anarchy.” Williams added, moreover, that the adjective “cultural” seems to date from the 1870s and only became common during the 1890s. As Williams observed, “the word is only available, in its modern sense, when the independent noun, in the artistic and intellectual or anthropological senses, has become familiar.” He added that hostility to the word “culture” appears to date from the controversy provoked by Arnold’s views. ⁹

In sum, American Culture, American Tastes is written in response to an enormous (and constantly growing) corpus of writing that has appeared in recent years about taste levels, cultural stratification, and a process of “informalization” in the United States. ¹⁰ The creators of that corpus, needless to say, are usually well informed and thoughtful. Some of their work is outdated, however, in part because it was ahistorical to begin with—oblivious to complex changes wrought by time. Aspects of their work suffer from being excessively present-minded. But in addition, swift and unexpected developments during the past decade or so have made their conclusions vulnerable for reasons they could not readily have anticipated. The passage of time will undoubtedly wreak havoc with my own interpretations, too, yet I indulge a conceit that the historical perspective informing American Culture, American Tastes may supply it with some staying power. Although it is polemical in places, it is not meant to be a tract for our times. Rather, it is intended to serve simultaneously as a wraparound window and as a rearview mirror, as well as an ancillary side mirror, to assist those who need to negotiate the confusing cultural traffic of our century.

Whenever an interviewer asked Duke Ellington to categorize a musical mode, or inquired about music and race, or about the skills of a musician the Duke greatly admired, he liked to quote “the words of the Maestro, Mr. Toscanini, who said concerning singers, ‘Either you’re a good musician or you’re not.’ In terms of musicianship [for example], Ella Fitzgerald is ‘Beyond Category.’ ” ¹¹ Ellington’s phrase is elegantly helpful in reminding us that pigeonholes are highly confining; but our scope will not be exclusively restricted to excellence. Americans 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 housing. ¹² How that level of expenditure gradually came about, and the diversity of preferences and attitudes that accompanies it , warrants our attention. ow5k+m418HnsMPSsH4vGmt7q61TWvWA+Vmy0i1ABd2POrtM77+/Q1HuIfDq/ECfR