It is one of the great clichés of U.S. historical writing to describe any period as a time of great change: what time in our history was not? And yet it seems hard to avoid a perception that the 1990s, especially the second half of the 1990s, witnessed a major quickening in the society at large. Certainly the perception of accelerated change was powerful and widespread. This will be something future historians should grapple with, even if there is later agreement that the nineties were a more innocent time compared to what followed (calling a period “innocent” is another historical cliché).
Histories themselves have histories, and this one may date more quickly than most. Were I writing this book today, I’m not sure I would write about popular culture with the same degree of sunny optimism I did a few short years ago. The intellectual bankruptcy of much popular culture is more apparent to me than it used to be, and the power of capitalism to channel it is as well. Moreover, having lived through the Internet boom, which was just getting underway as I finished the first edition, I’m concerned that the culture of the Information Age is substantially less democratic in its origins and current state than many earlier media.
Actually, I was aware that some of my ideas were dated even as I was recording them. A good example is the “hardware/software” metaphor I discuss in the introduction and elsewhere in the book. Even in the early nineties, informed observers knew that the line between hardware and software was blurring, and by the mid-nineties software like Java was capable of doing much of the work of a computer’s operating system hardware. Yet the distinction between hardware and software seemed too vivid for me to pass up; it seemed to have the power to explain the past in terms the present would understand. To be sure, this was anachronistic: no one called a printing press “hardware,” or Uncle Tom’s Cabin “software” in 1850. But then even the most careful attempts to respect the pastness of the past are always anachronistic to some degree, and I was nothing if not a historical pragmatist. If now another metaphor seems more appropriate—given ascendance of biotechnology in computing at the turn of this century, perhaps “host/carrier” would be more apropos than “hardware/software”—I’d like to think that The Art of Democracy has some value as a useful document of its time.
To sum up what you have here: the introduction and first four chapters of the book are substantially as they appeared in the first edition. Chapter Five, which deals with television, film, publishing, radio, and popular music, has been updated, and incorporates material from what used to be the final chapter of the book. That final chapter is now entirely new, and traces the history of contemporary computing from its origins in the on the eve of the Second World War to the rise of the Internet—a story that I have a strong sense of ending midstream as we await its ongoing evolution. The bibliographies and notes are intact from the first edition, though I do include a short list of some important works that have been published in the last few years.
My gratitude to the people I list in the acknowledgments of the first edition remains intact. For the opportunity to revisit my work here, I would add to that list Martin Paddio and Andrew Nash of the Monthly Review Press. My dear friend Gordon Sterling of Analog Devices, and my brother-in-law, Tod Sizer, of Lucent Technologies, lent me their considerable expertise in the area of computing. And my immediate family, which has grown considerably since this book was first published, has been an ongoing source of wonder.
JIM CULLEN
May 2002
INTRODUCTION
“Will Shade with His Tub Bass, Memphis, 1960,” one of jazz photographer William Claxton’s photographs of the jazz scene in the 1950s and 1960s.
THE ART OF DEMOCRACY was written as an introductory history of the U.S. experience with popular culture, an experience that shares important parallels with other societies, but one that has had a unique trajectory and global influence. There has long been a need for this kind of book for the scholar, student, and general reader.
One reason for this need is that popular culture has only recently been considered a subject for serious scholarly inquiry. For most of the twentieth century, it has been denigrated by intellectuals of all ideological stripes as either meaningless escapism or a dangerous narcotic.1 While such views are not altogether lacking in validity—one need not defend popular culture by arguing for its universal excellence—they seriously underestimate the complexity and relevance of those arts most passionately embraced by ordinary working people and their families. The escapist argument, for example, begs questions of where people escape from, where they escape to, the varied choices they make in their means of escape, and what those choices reveal about them and the world in which they live. The narcotic argument, by contrast, overlooks the often desperate uncertainty that marks the products peddled by corporate culture lords to a presumably gullible public, as reports of any recent box-office flop will attest. But if the study of popular culture is surrounded by a great deal of uncertainty, even mystery, it also affords valuable clues—about collective fears, hopes, and debates.
Indeed, even if one assumes the worst about popular culture, the attention and affection it receives merit explanation, which is why labor historians were among the first to explore the popular arts in any detail. So were more theoretically minded writers keenly attuned to the gaps in the visions of preceding generations of intellectuals. At its best, such work testified to the democratic spirit that has animated U.S. scholarship since the 1960s.
This book grew out my own first-hand experiences with popular culture and my frustration with the burgeoning literature I read to enhance my understanding of it (if the problem had once been scarcity, it now seems to be one of dizzying abundance). My irritation was not so much that this literature was boring or lacked insight; often the opposite was true. But much of it was fragmented into discrete media or time periods, riddled with obscure jargon, or governed by theoretical concerns that overshadowed the materials being analyzed. Again, much of this literature was—and remains—valuable, and this is especially true of professional scholarship since the 1980s. My goal here has been to synthesize that scholarship and put a simple analytical frame around it.
The book was written to proceed in a loosely chronological fashion, although it need not be read that way. Actually, my hope is that in addition to providing a coherent narrative, it will serve as a reference that can be consulted after (or instead of) being read from cover to cover. To facilitate additional study, I have included brief bibliographic essays for each chapter. Some of these sources, of course, were used in more than one chapter, and when appropriate are cited in each. More specific sources are cited in the notes, which I have tried to streamline for the sake of brevity and readability.
The focus of the book will be on mass-produced texts (a term that encompasses novels and periodicals, as well as plays, films, television shows, and other media) intended for large audiences to enjoy in their spare time. This textual approach allows me to narrow an otherwise unmanageably large field of study. At the same time, I know—as should any reader—that popular culture can be defined more broadly to include festivals, rituals, handicrafts, and other cultural practices. (I consider these to fall within the realm of folk culture, which will be discussed in Chapter 1.) Perhaps the most obvious omission from the book is sports, a highly visible aspect of everyday life notable for its ability to cross class and racial lines. But sports is a world unto itself, divided by particular games and amateur, professional, and scholastic sectors that would be too unwieldy to survey. And so while I may not cover all areas of popular culture, I invite the reader to draw parallels between what I do discuss here and what I do not. Indeed, the patterns I describe and their implications may ultimately be more important than any specific material covered.
Even those media discussed here are treated in an abbreviated way. To deal with them comprehensively would lead to progressively larger and more unwieldy chapters as new forms are introduced