America as an Underdeveloped Nation/part 3

My proposal would be to study the United States in both domestic and international aspects. Let me suggest a sequence of courses which would provide a four-year undergraduate experience.

First semester: The European Roots. (In this introduction America as the beneficiary of the excess intellectual and economic energies of Europe, which could develop free from the rigidities of the ancien regime, would be studied.)

Second Semester: The Two Americas—North and South. (This would explore “the road not taken” by South America. It would be a comparative study of how Europe’s memory represented by Spain and Portugal created the cultures south of our border, while the North American development was going in a new direction based on northern Europe’s dreams.)

Third Semester: America and Africa. (This would study the differential acculturation of African immigrants to the Caribbean and to southern United States and the adjustment of the African Negro to the plantation economy and later dispersal through urbanization. This would examine historically the most destructive dilemma now facing American civilization.)

Fourth Semester: America and Asia. (This would examine the first contacts between America and Asia, the Chinoiserie imports of eighteenth-century New England ship captains and the interaction with Asians of the nineteenth-century missionaries. It would concentrate on changing American images of Asia from the stereotypes of Charlie Chan movies to the managed images of today’s Red and Free Chinese.)

Fifth Semester: America and Russia. (This would explore the Cold War’s tensions at a high intellectual level, with particular emphasis on the uncommitted two-thirds of the world’s unwillingness to accept either Russian or American ideology as the only ways of orgnanizing human behavior.)

Sixth Semester: America Today. (This would be an analysis of the qualitative revolution now under way in America.)

Seventh and Eighth Semesters: These would be devoted to original research designs submitted by seniors in consultation with their advisers. I can already hear the charges of Utopianism reverberating dully throughout committee rooms. And it may very well be that some no longer have the will or the way to respond freshly to the challenge of events. This perhaps is the most discouraging part of America as an ancien regime: the really shocking timidity and time-serving that keeps American Studies and other humanistic enterprises from fulfilling their potential.

The internecine warfare that characterizes most college communities may not permit the creation of an idea American Studies curriculum; the college is not the best place to introduce innovations in curriculum today. The National Broadcasting Company, and later the Columbia Broadcasting System, have shown with “Continental Classroom,” “Sunrise Semester,” and other videotaped courses how to create a “national university.” This dream of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams may actually come into being through the newest and “most vulgar” medium in American mass communication. TV makes a national democratic university possible and practical.

If we were to have the boldness to create a really new American Studies, rather than a jerry-built accommodation to insecure disciplines, we might then go on to learn that our fear of eloquence in the newer media is the second most debilitating influence in our academic endeavor. What is needed is a wholesale redefinition of our concept of publication. Most of us know that much of what passes for scholarship is so dull and irrelevant that it is a blessing that it remains mercifully unknown in the vast wasteland of academic quarterlies.

I would say that we ought to publish more of our results in photojournalistic, filmic, and broadcasting forms to test the relevance of what we are researching. If what we are digging up cannot be made significant to the general audience, perhaps it shouldn’t be dug up. I look forward to the day when graduate schools will approve of a student’s presenting his thesis in an hour-long documentary. The research done behind television series such as “The Twentieth Century” and “Project XX” no longer makes it possible for academicians to dismiss the world of popular culture as beneath contempt. It would be liberating for us if we were to train ourselves in one or more of the newer media, not simply to be eloquent, although that is no mean ambition, but to meet the responsibility of putting what we learn into circulation.

By leaving North America I discovered that I did not really understand the unique characteristics of American civilization; its so-called bread and butter institutions, political stability and economic development, social intercourse. I was forced to explain them to Asians who come to American institutions with an entirely different set of expectations from ours. They forced me to see the excessively esthetic bias of the Aemrican Studies Movement. This bias can be understood historically, as I have tried to show in a brief summary of John Adams’s theory of American growth, the Sydney Smith’s sneer heard round the world, and the De Crevecoeur-Turner concept of the American as that new Adam.

Such an intellectual self-analysis indicates that America is an underdeveloped area, imaginatively and intellectually, oblivious of much of the significance of its past, and therefore unable to comprehend what is happening in the present, let alone establish a sound policy for the future. The only way to continue our revolution is to complement the already largely achieved quantitative one with a qualitative revolution: one concerned with the quality of American life. We would not only save ourselves much boredome and frustration, but would also have much greater intellectual and imaginative resources to aid those other countries who want to modernize—not necessarily in the way we have, nor at the same cost. The American Studies Movement is not too surprisingly a victim of some of the same assumptions that inhibit the maturing of the larger American society. Even if we expect “saving remnants” to be perfected, or at least perfectible, it should not astonish us that we are not perfect. Were we to commit the same energy to a criticism of our own discipline that we currently devote to criticizing the social sciences, we might be less confused than we now are.

That is why I have outlined, in bare detail, an archetypal American Studies curriculum that is more than a pragmatic attempt to resuscitate literary history or to enliven social and cultural hsitory. Beyond the admittedly difficult problem of studying mass production and mass communication, and publishing these new subjects in new ways through photojournalism, motion pictures, radio and television, I would say we must commit ourselves in a most energetic manner to the problems of public school reforms. There is a Chinese proverb: “You can’t carve rotten wood.” Our society will not achieve its needed qualitative revolution until our public schools, particularly the high schools, have humanities programs that are superlative in concept and execution. The simplest thing one can say about our stewardship is that for the most part the professoriate has completely neglected this responsibility. We now reap the results of that intellectual abandonment.

I think we need to be reminded, with respect to the “two cultures” controversy, that in America scientists have been much more humane and civilized than we with respect to their responsibilities in public schools and going on to mathematics, American scientific specialists have accepted the challenge of new knowledge and the possibilities of new forms of publication. They are making science ever more attractive, more sound and significant, to the high school student today. If for no other reason than self-protection (and surely there are better reasons than this), we must do for the high school curriculum what the scientists have already done for their sectors of that curriculum. The growing gap of disaffection between the humanities and the sciences will become even more ominous unless we concentrate on secondary schools. Here is a grass roots problem that no one can ignore.

For many years methodology has been held in contempt by some “intellectuals” and academic people. More and more people are coming to see that this whole matter is neither amusing nor irrelevant. With all their shortcomings and dilemmas, teachers in American Studies have been willing to talk of methodology, integration, and synthesis. Perhaps we are still an underdeveloped academic segment, paralyzed by just and unjust fears in the special world in which we must operate. But, since these are the times that try our souls, let us not be sunshine patriots. Our fight is well worth waging, and winning.