America as an Underdeveloped Nation/part 2

Consider the Sydney Smith syndrome. Too much energy in American Studies is devoted either to explaining away cultural impoverishment or in arguing that our Jackson Pollack is as good as your Michelangelo. American Studies is excessively esthetic in emphasis. This is a defect in an anthropological sense. What we need is more “culture” and less anxiety about “Culture.” One result of our century-long inferiority complex, vis-à-vis Europe, is that we have turned out thousands of articles and monographs on trivial and irrelevant figures in preindustrial genres.

Meanwhile, our new institutions such as television drama, advertising graphics and photo journalism have achieved substantial bodies of significant material that has not been recorded, let alone analyzed and criticized. Mass communication, for all practical purposes and in spite of the pioneering work of men like Gilbert Seldes, is terra incognita. We keep shuffling a worn deck of minor nineteenth-century literary while Saul Bass and his peers have never even entered our minds, let alone our curricula. We busy ourselves with huge projects on the collected papers of every old president; yet our ignorance about the achivement of photojournalism remains abysmal.

A related area of darkest ignorance is mass production. Despite seminal work (Like John Kouwenhoven’s Made in America) the tradition of vernacular art remains something one must stumble upon. Our contention that humanists are helping students see life whole and see it steadily is a travesty. Contemporary industrial civilization is a life almost totally unexamined in our humanistic curricula, slighting the whole area of how automation and mechanization have transformed our environment.

These are not things that should be admitted grudgingly into the curriculum in one final lecture. They ought to be the very warp and woof of our intellectual concern. Sydney Smith’s sneer has had devastating effects; it has taken the limited resources we have had available and whipped up enthusiasm for appreciating or creating the elite arts of Europe, when we should have been concentrating on civilizing the new institutions of mass communication and mass production in industrial America. That remains our central task.

Why have so many obviously intelligent men so misallocated scarce energies? The only explanation I would have is what might be called the new Adam tradition. De Crevecoeur exulted in “this new man, the American” as he toured the post-revolutionary Atlantic seaboard of small but sturdy yeoman farmers. Later Frederick Jackson Turner closed the book on American character development, at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893. Four hundred years after Columbus discovered America, Turner discovered that America was no longer a “new land” and shuddered at the disintegrative possibilities. Thinking of the 1893 “Great White City” as a form of architectural escapism from the brutal realities of the Chciago stockyards, we may begin to comprehend why professional humanists and laymen Americans alike have not grasped the meaning of their own urbanization.

The hard fact is that America is no longer an Eden. It is an ancien regime. Not the ancien regime of eighteenth-century France, with its rigidities of class, established church, and royalty, but ancien regime nevertheless. It is long past time for us to look at how the very virtues of the democratic experiment have become its characteristic vices. Like the eighteenth-century ancien regime, ours too is one of complacent privilege, more widely diffused privilege admittedly; but also with medians of responsibility significantly lower than those of the best European aristocracies.

Equality, liberty, and fraternity parodied become rigidities of the mind, much more difficult to overcome than mere property ownership. Egalitarianism, for example, has led to the fear of the superlative, to rationales about giving the public anything it wants, anything it can be made to crave. Liberty has declined into contempt for order and discipline. Everyman’s flipping his expended beer can onto nature becomes a paradigm of democratic man following his own collective whims. The wantonness, multiplied throughout the entire range of daily activities, poisons the very atmosphere.

Fraternity has deteriorated into the packaging of amiability. Toothy clowns, like Jack Bailey, promise those who have not fulfilled their dreams that they can at least be “queen for a day.” This is a marginal consolation prize indeed when one looks at the ex parte rationalizations that big capital, big labor, big agriculture, and the big middle give for their various impediments to fulfilling the American dream of opportunity. For all, one gets an oppressive sense of the inertia of the middle class as an ancien regime. These fat cats of mass America, satisfied with the height they’ve been able to reach, are ill-prepared to fulfill the American dream of a qualitative revolution in which excellence will be the keynote.

What the American Studies Movement ought to be doing domestically is preparing the way for such an intellectual revolution instead of wishing ti were really as respectable as the literary scholars or as scientifically sophisticated as atomic physicists. A book like that edited by Daniel Lerner, The Human Meaning of the Social Sciences, is more humanistic, though written by social scientists, than most of what we write. Lerner and Lasswell have elsewhere established their definition of what they call the policy sciences; that is to say, objective knowledge that clarifies decision making in politics, economic, and social relations. The humanities ought to assume a somewhat analogous role with respect to establishing the quality of American life.

Most American Studies curricula have been patchwork affairs reflecting the prior commitment of their planners either to history or literature. American Studies seems like an easy way to pull our methodological chestnuts out of the fire. But the anthropologist’s culture concept can be no better than the materials it has been using to organize or the sensibilities of the organizers. We must look afresh at the American Studies curriculum. It ought to be more than just a way to put literature into context or give esthetic richness to history.