The Irony of America's Search For a Unique Culture

From the very start, America has had the feeling of being something special. The idea got its first formulation from the Puritan Divines who wished to create a New Zion in the wilderness. To the Jeffersonian, some century or so later, the emphasis became less religious, more political. America was a land without the dead hand of the European past of feudal and clerical privilege.

Complementary to this sense of election was the notion that America had a special mission in the world, a sense of purpose that perhaps reached its apogee in Woodrow Wilson's campaign to make the world safe for democracy. When in fact the first World War instead made the world open to demagoguery, America seemed to lose its high idealism. What had been the source of great spiritual strength to our culture declined to the level of the after-dinner bromides of fatuous optimism.

The ideals of unique opportunity and responsibility, to be sure, are still ours, however fallow we may have let them lie. It is the purpose of a readable survey of this tradition, The American Idea of Mission: Concepts of National Purpose and Destiny (Rutgers University Press, 1957, $9.00) by Edward McNall Burns, to describe the special character of American nationalism and then test those ideals against present performance.

"Purged of its dross of conceit and illusion," the professor of history and political science writes, "the mission of America remains one of the noblest expressions of idealism that any nation has embraced. What it needs most of all is more wisdom and tolerance in carrying it out. Intelligently applied, its elements of liberty, equality, democracy, and peace are the prime essentials to give the substance of hope to a tortured humanity.

But we must mean what we say if our slogans are to have lasting value." This political dimension to American idealism must be understood as background for appreciating America's long search for a unique culture; for we needed Great Art as a kind of esthetic justification of our experiment in democracy. Dr. Benjamin T. Spencer, professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan, has recently published a definitive study of the literary phase of this search for arts commensurate with the ideals and aspirations of the new republic, The Quest for Nationality: The Long Struggle for American Literary Independence (Syracuse University Press, 1957, $5.00).

Although Oliver Wendell Holmes referred to Emerson's Harvard Phi Beta Kappa oration on "The American Scholar" as our declaration of cultural independence, Spencer shows the roots of that artistic independence go as far back as Cotton Mather's preference for a plain style in prose, "one comprehensible by the great body of readers." Much of what was actually done in pursuit of a unique democratic American art now seems mildly amusing, e.g., the noble epics in heroic couplets of the Hartford Wits in Revolutionary Days; or the embargo on the imported imagery of skylarks and yews, too often usurping the place of homegrown bobolinks and pine trees; or, to carry the theme to other art forms, the intention of Albert Bierstadt to catch the bigness of America by painting on bigger and bigger canvasses; and George Henry Bristow's choice of "Rip Van Winkle" as the theme of an opera in 1855.

(It was actually an Italian opera in English, with Rip's daughter falling in love with a British officer during the Revolution to justify soldiers' choruses and a martial song by the heroine.)

The real irony of the American search for a unique artistic expression is that we didn't know when we had actually achieved it in minor ways. For example, back in the nineteenth century, Anglophile critics were embarrassed by the vogue that popular humorists like Crockett, Downing, and Sam Slick had in England. And Seba Smith, Jack Downing's creator, denigrated his own humor in favor of more pretentious efforts, like a metrical romance on Powhatan.

The same holds for jazz, held by some to be the only really unique art form so far created in America. To most genteel people, this art was too coarse and vulgar to be taken seriously. But Europeans, not as self-conscious about art as we have been, took it up with instinctive zest; to this day, there seem to be more eager audiences for first-rate jazz in Europe than in America. This cultural myopia is silly, and a balanced program in the humanities must do its bit to redress the balance.

Themes and research papers on American music can help to make a better focus. Very useful for such investigations is the admirable and compact A Short History of Music in America (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1957, $5.00) by John Tasker Howard and George Kent Bellows. Although this survey has only a few pages on jazz, it does show the interest of some serious composers in the popular form. And its detailed table of contents is a very complete topical outline of the main themes in American music from Puritan psalm-singing to last night's TV musical.

There are also good bibliographies and discographies. On the subject of jazz itself, the recent CBS-TV "The Sound of Jazz" (Columbia LP CL 1098) is a perfect example of how the integrity and expertise of the musicians are all that is needed to communicate to a general audience. Read Eric Larrabee's fond review of the show in his "After Hours" column in Harper's (February 1958), also reprinted, as the jacket liner notes, for the Columbia album. Six of the stars on that show (Pee Wee Russell, Coleman Hawkins, "Count" Basie, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, and Roy Eldridge) are represented in a collection of twenty-one portraits, The Jazz Makers, edited by Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff (Rinehart, 1957).

(Hentoff, by the way, was one of the critics whose insight and affection made the CBS show a success; the other was Whitney Balliet, poetry editor for the New Yorker.) The biographies include analyses of each jazz artist's style, and his place in the development of jazz. The things that some of the Negro musicians have had to put up with are frightening in their inhumanity, and surely account for the moral waywardness of some jazz creators.

This is by no means a matter of Southern Jim Crow either; as a native of Detroit, I share the shame of the moral obtuseness described by Charles Edward Smith in his article on Billie Holiday: "At a Detroit theatre she was asked to apply dark grease paint, so that she wouldn't be mistaken for off-white. Conversely, when she played a Detroit theatre with the Artie Shaw orchestra there was some apprehension about her appearing on the stage (with a white band) because of her dark complexion."

All the more reason for teachers to hold up the ideals described by Professor Burns in The American Idea of Mission. One artist who, for me at least, rep- resents those ideals at their very highest in contemporary America is the painter Ben Shahn, whose Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard last year have just been published as The Shape of Content (Harvard University Press, 1957, $4.00). One of his lectures, "On Nonconformity," was printed in the Atlantic last July. The title comes from Shahn's attempts in the lectures to make sense out of a current controversy over meaning and communication in non-objective art.

The New York School of abstract expressionist painting has swept the art circles, and in my judgment is fostering a cliche in its theory that form, not content, is the only thing that matters in art. Shahn claims that form is simply the shape that a thought- ful and conscientious painter gives to his ideas or feelings (content). He doesn't prove his point "abstractly," but rather as he worked it out as the theme of "Allegory"--a painting about his horror at death by fire. Amidst the anti-intellectualism that stultifies a great deal of contemporary American painting, it is reassuring to see Shahn make a brief for the importance of a broad humanistic education to a painter.

The notion that a painter can't explain his esthetic purposes but can only ugh at his canvas is also scotched by Shahn's highly developed powers of verbal expression; and his illustrative drawings (wonderfully underlining points made already in print) are a treat in themselves. Shahn's career also points up the irony of the genteel expectations of art in America; for his art appeared in unexpected places--CIO posters, OWI posters, CBS tune-in ads and promotion pieces, as well as the cover and illustrations for Harper's (December 1957).

What is still vital about our tradition of searching for a unique culture is the feeling that democratic art must be put into the hands of the people. The classroom is still the place for that to happen. And we must also learn that art cannot be tamed or even--at times--completely housebroken.

Gentility is not art but nostalgia. Thus when and where we least expect it, our greatest and most confident artists find materials to express the human situation-in jazz, in political posters as well as private testaments on canvas, even, to close on a short-sighted note, in "The Marvelous (and myopic) Magoo," a stimulating photoessay on the UPA cartoon character, in Literary Cavalcade for February 1958.