Another organizational (and ideological) strategy is demographic. Although this is an elusive and imprecise matter, I tried to keep my attention on working-class people and the issues, artists, and documents that have mattered most to them. So, for example, I have done relatively little with magazines (a largely middle-class affair), except in the case of those (like dime novels) whose working-class orientation was clear.
A bottom-up approach to cultural history also has important racial ramifications. Despite their status as members of an oppressed minority, African Americans have invented, elaborated, or inspired more popular culture than any other racial or ethnic group in the nation’s history. Their achievements figure prominently in the stories that follow.
A question that often looms over assessments of cultural phenomena in a society is whether those phenomena reflect or shape historical forces. Was the emergence of rock & roll a spur to the nascent Civil Rights movement or a sign that a movement with roots in the 1940s (or earlier) was having a discernible effect? Empirically, the question is impossible to answer. I’m inclined to think, however, that ideas do have consequences, and that popular culture has at least potential power to change hearts, minds, and behavior. Here, then, is one more reason to explore it. Indeed, even if one concludes that ideas are not the engine of history, the study of popular culture can be usefully employed as a pulse-taking measure.
Four recurrent ideas provide the thematic glue for the book. The first is this: that new forms of popular culture are almost always resisted by elites. From the proliferation of novels read by white women in the late eighteenth century to the proliferation of rap songs listened to by black men in the late twentieth century, there have been consistent—and strikingly similar—criticisms of those who make and use such forms. The argument that popular culture expresses the brazen excesses of urban life, seduces and corrupts young people who need to be quarantined from it, and functions as an enervating substitute for more “serious” forms of culture is made again and again in a variety of contexts (most recently in presidential elections). The repetition is unwitting but suggests class, racial, gender, and other ideological interests that are often a smokescreen for the more frankly political interests in some way threatened by popular culture. Such concerns should not be dismissed out of hand; to say that popular culture cannot have potentially negative effects also denies its potentially positive effects and thus negates its power altogether. Of course, some popular culture is repellent and even dangerous, and I will note it as such as this history unfolds. At the same time, it seems to me that far too much energy has been expended on moralistic judgments at the expense of an attempt to understand why particular works and forms command the allegiances they do.
The second theme of the book is that new cultural forms often move up the cultural ladder over time. That novels went from being the most despised form of western culture to the most exalted in the space of a century—a transformation often overlooked by readers, writers, and critics alike—suggests a kind of collective amnesia that can be dispelled only by looking to history. In the twentieth century alone, immigrant-oriented “movies” became intensively studied “films”; jazz changed from a mass cultural phenomenon to a modernist avocation of aficionados; and the perception of television shifted from a wasteland to a fertile field of social meanings. Such developments can be explained as an elite co-optation of working-class forms, as a belated recognition of the artistic power of culture rooted in working-class concerns, or both. In any case, a historical perspective helps remind us that no form of culture is the sole province of any group of people, and that signs of migration from one constituency to another can provide valuable indications of other shifts taking place within U.S. society. These shifts also demonstrate that aesthetic values are rooted more in historical circumstances than in transcendent objective values, and that cultural hierarchies are never pure or invulnerable to change.
A third theme relates to a particularistic/universal dialectic in popular culture. As the succeeding chapters will suggest, different forms and texts originated in highly specific milieux: white working-class politics in the Jacksonian era, African- American communities in the aftermath of slavery, leisure practices in rural communities on the cusp of industrialization, and so on. These settings gave each new kind of popular culture a very distinctive flavor. At the same time, almost by definition, the most resonant popular culture becomes emblematic of the society as a whole, connecting disparate and even hostile constituencies. Perhaps the best example of this is the minstrel show, a hugely popular white cultural form that grew out of a peculiar fascination with pre-Civil War slave life. In the twentieth century, U.S. movies, which have been the product of a singular array of social, political, and economic conditions, are often nevertheless seen as having universal appeal—which in some narrow sense they probably do. But the passage of time (and the waning of U.S. imperial power) will also no doubt make increasingly clear how historically rooted—and limited—they have been.
The last and perhaps most important theme I wish to present to readers is what I call the “hardware/software” metaphor, a term that evokes the crucial role of technology in popular culture in general and the centrality of computers in contemporary U.S. society in particular. Repeatedly, I have found, new cultural forms are generated and changed by elites with access to capital and technical know-how, resources quickly funneled into commercial purposes. Printing presses, movie projectors, recording equipment, and other forms of “hardware” are usually introduced at the top of the U.S. economic structure and diffuse downward as part of an often mad scramble for private profit. But after an initial melee, it becomes increasingly apparent that the economic—and, especially, cultural—viability of these forms actually depends on content, or “software”: the particular books, movies, and records that win large audiences. This is important because ordinary working people are the key to those large audiences—they are what makes popular culture truly popular. Perhaps even more important is that unlike the labor market, residential patterns, local government, and other sites of everyday life, popular culture affords a unique degree of economic, social, and even political access for those otherwise marginalized in U.S. society. The success of “damned female scribblers” (as an envious Nathaniel Hawthorne called popular women novelists), African-American musicians, and ethnic stage and screen performers testifies to an unusual degree of diversity, mobility, and ferment in a divided populace.
This, ultimately, is why I decided to title the book “The Art of Democracy.” Certainly, there is plenty about U.S. culture that is less than altogether democratic (its ruthlessly exploitative commercial structure, its tendency to dominate cultural discourse abroad) and plenty that illustrates the worst aspects of democracy (mindless pandering, compromise to the point of diluting real change). For these reasons, a title like “The Art of Democracy” can be read as bitterly ironic, and such a reading is one whose partial legitimacy I cannot deny.
In the final analysis, however, I find myself focusing on how full the bottle is, not how empty. In terms of enriching everyday life, opening windows on alternative ways of life, and providing intellectual and emotional experiences that offer incalculable surplus value beyond a material plane, popular culture has enriched countless lives. It has also been an exceptionally effective means of describing what one scholar has called the “hurts of history.”2 Despite disenfranchisement, discrimination, and the most basic denials of the pursuit of happiness, popular culture has given a voice to the oppressed and generated dialogues that have been heard all around the world. This book seeks to preserve its best aspects and to furnish a truly usable past for the popular culture of the future.
CHAPTER ONE
NOVEL APPROACHES: THE