American Perspectives: The National Self-Image in the Twentieth Century [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674367456, 9780674367449

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AMERICAN

PERSPECTIVES

The National Self-image in the Twentieth Century

Library of Congress Series in American Civilization Edited by Ralph Henry Gabriel

AMERICAN* PERSPECTIVES THE N A T I O N A L

SELF-IMAGE

I N THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Edited for The American Studies Association by ROBERT E. SPILLER and ERIC

LARRABEE

Associate Editors: RALPH H E N R Y HENRY N A S H

GABRIEL SMITH

EDWARD N. WATERS

H A R V A R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S · C A M B R I D G E · 1961

©

Copyright 1961 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved

Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, London

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 61-8841

Printed in the United States of America

PREFACE

W HEN, in 1954, plans for the Library of Congress series in twentieth-century American culture were nearing completion, it was suggested that the project needed a volume of synthesis to bring together the diverse aspects of that culture which had been treated individually. The various other volumes were to deal with literatme, religion, politics, education, and other facets of the culture objectively and severally. What did American culture add up to? What did it look like to others, or — more importantly — to itself? Two concluding volumes were planned, both to be prepared collaboratively: one to attempt an answer to the question, "What do others think of us?" and the other, "What do we think of ourselves?" The first volume has not yet materialized; the second is in your hands. The American Studies Association was asked to undertake the preparation of this volume. A title, THE IMAGE OF AMERICA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, was tentatively selected, and a board of editors and contributors was chosen. Ten specialists in history, literature, philosophy, politics, economics, sociology, art, music, the popular arts, and the mass media were invited to address themselves to a common question: What image of the American national character is reflected in the aspect of culture with which you are trained to deal, and what changes in that image can be noted during the period 1900-1950? Collaboration began immediately with a weekend conference of editors and contributors; it was continued by exchange of preliminary drafts and criticism of completed manuscripts.

vi

PREFACE

Carefully planned and thoroughly discussed though they were, the chapters, when written, revealed as many different approaches to the problem as there were authors. The hoped-for unity of the book did not materialize; in its place we discovered that we had a group of stimulating but miscellaneous essays on aspects of American culture in this half century. This diversity seems to have been the result of the large number of unknowns and variables in the equation which the editors had set. In order to discover a self-image, one must define the viewer, the mirror in which the object is to be seen, and the object to be viewed. In discussion, the contributors seemed to be in harmony, and the editors, feeling that the volume was by its very nature experimental, did not wish to insist on rigid specifications in advance. For the same reason, the suggestion that an introduction, summary, or conclusion be provided was rejected as an attempt to impose on the essays a degree of unity which they had not in themselves developed. Even though in their conclusions, as in their premises and methods, the contributors thus found themselves in no firm agreement, the composite picture which they have drawn may nevertheless provide some suggestive insights of another kind. Most of them report an emerging pattern, an evolutionary curve to which they can relate the changes taking place during these years. They seem generally to agree that the first decade and a half was a period of mounting dissatisfaction with previous norms and standards, and that the period between wars was one in which new cultural energies were consequently released. Finally, they seem to note a process of simultaneous consolidation and diffusion in recent years, an attempt to hold on to some cohesive image of America at the same time that the American imagination was beginning to expand far beyond its national boundaries. In this disequilibrium most of our contributors find cause for both curiosity and alarm. Perhaps if there were more unity in modern man's total view of himself and his world today, a symposium such as this might produce a more explicit and consistent image of any one part of that world.

PREFACE

vii

Rather than a scientific study of culture and imagination, therefore, this book must be considered a conversation among students of the American image, in all its variety, who sincerely wish to understand each other's problems and methods. It reflects the excitement and satisfaction which the writers of the essays experienced in planning and writing them. The editors hope, by presenting a general impression of the emotional and intellectual trends which America experienced while living through the vast ideological and technological changes of this half century, that it may open the way to more scientific and limited studies in that most difficult of all subjects — the nature of contemporary culture. R.E.S. E.L.

CONTENTS I II

HISTORY A N D THE A M E R I C A N PAST Ralph H. Gabriel

P R A G M A T I S M A N D THE S C O P E OF S C I E N C E Morton White

III

LITERATURE A N D THE CRITICS Robert E. Spider

IV

MUSIC A N D MUSICIANS Edward N. Waters

V

VI VII

VIII

1

35

59

P A I N T I N G A N D SCULPTURE Lloyd Goodrich THE S O C I A L S C I E N T I S T S Thomas C. Cochran

17

77

94

THE PUBLIC I M A G E OF A M E R I C A N E C O N O M I C I N S T I T U T I O N S 117 Kenneth E. Boulding THE PUBLIC I M A G E : POLITICS John M. Blum

134

IX

THE D I S C O V E R Y OF THE POPULAR CULTURE Reuel Denney

X

THE D O C T R I N E OF M A S S P R O D U C T I O N Eric Larrabee Notes

197

Contributors Index

211

209

178

154

AMERICAN

PERSPECTIVES

The National Self-image in the Twentieth Century

I HISTORY

AND THE AMERICAN

PAST

Ralph H. Gabriel

T H E historian is perhaps the first to attempt a definition of the images which a people in any given time and place forms of its own culture. Significant writing about American history began in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Because the work of these pioneers makes it possible to see the interpretations of their twentieth-century successors in perspective, this account begins with the most important of the early American historians. A growing sentiment of nationalism stirred George Bancroft as he began his historical labors in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The War of 1812 had ended and President James Monroe had warned Europe against further adventures in the Western Hemisphere. Westward-moving pioneers had crossed the Mississippi. A democratic movement that reached its climax in the administration of Andrew Jackson inaugurated in the United States the Era of the Common Man. Yet, increasingly, as the quarter-century unfolded, the sentiment of a larger nationalism contended with local loyalties that grew stronger in the South as the men of that section moved to strengthen their defenses against Northern criticism of their peculiar institution. In such an age Bancroft chose, as his principal life work, to lay before his generation what was to him the inspiring story of his country's origins. Believing freedom to be God's plan for men, he saw the Divine Hand in the course of American history. In volumes widely read by Americans in the middle of the nineteenth century, he traced the idea of liberty and its corollary

2

AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

democracy, through the story of the English colonies until liberty had been realized in the Revolution and had been confirmed in the Constitution. The image that Bancroft presented to his contemporaries took the form of an epic tale — the story of how men, determined to be free, shook off the vestiges of feudalism, abolished monarchy, and built a nation supported and directed by commoners. It provided both perspective and inspiration for a generation largely preoccupied with the materialism of mere money-getting and increasingly concerned by the persistence in the Republic of that evil, chattel slavery. The publication of Bancroft's ten volumes was well along when, in 1849, young Francis Parkman brought out his famous book of travels, The California and Oregon Trail. He himself had taken the trail into the Great Plains that he might see Indians still living in a stone-age civilization because he planned to write about red men who in earlier centuries built their wigwams in the eastern forest. The theme for his drama was to be the imperial struggle between Britain and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the continent of North America. His principal characters were Europeans — La Salle, the explorer; Father Jogues, the missionary; Frontenac, the governor; Montcalm and Wolfe, the generals — but his narrative ended with Pontiac, greatest among the Indian chieftains who had been caught in the long contention. Recounting the rise and fall of New France, Parkman dealt with the expansion of Europe in an age in which Europeans were achieving preëminence in the world. He focused on the events which determined that the British rather than the French version of Western civilization should prevail in that part of North America which lay north of the Spanish empire. This was one of those turning points in history that condition subsequent events. He brought out his principal volumes between 1865 a"nd 1892 for an American generation that had fought a Civil War and had saved the nation from division. In an age when Americans were preoccupied with events within their own country, he spread before them a

HISTORY AND THE AMERICAN PAST

3

panorama relating the origins of their nation to that dynamic Europe from which it had sprung. Henry Adams, Parkman's younger contemporary, also related the United States to Europe. He had observed the Civil War from London, where as a young man he had been secretary to his minister father. Knowing Europe well, he saw his country against a European background. He wrote his History of the United States in the postwar decades when his countrymen were chiefly concerned with effecting an industrial revolution within the nation. Since 1815, the end of their second war with Britain, they had lived in comparative isolation from Europe, but Adams chose for his narrative a period when the United States was entangled in European affairs. He told his story with careful documentation of diplomatic maneuvers and with full-dress portraits of the principal actors in politics and war. "In 1815," he concluded, "for the first time Americans ceased to doubt the path they were to follow. Not only was the unity of their nation established, but its probable divergence from older societies was also well defined." 1 Four years after the last volume of the History appeared, Henry Adams' brother and close associate, Brooks, brought out a book which reminded an isolationist generation that the national experience of involvement in the affairs of Europe, as Henry had described it, might be repeated. In The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895), Brooks Adams advanced the thesis that the course of economic power ( and hence of real power) was proceeding, at the close of the nineteenth century, westward across the Atlantic from Britain to the United States. Adams reminded a generation whose outlook was still for the most part limited by the shop, the factory, and the investment house that America was destined for the dangers and responsibilities of leadership. Though Brooks argued cogently and Henry wrote with grace and effectiveness, the works of neither made a popular impact comparable to that of the history of a contemporary, James Ford Rhodes, whose narrative dealt with events that still, at the close

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AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

of the century, had strong emotional implications. Rhodes published in 1893 the first volume of History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850. He brought out the final volume of the original series in 1906. His drama, which dealt with the nation in time of crisis and catastrophe, was a story of politics and campaigns, of statesmen and generals, of the organization of the Confederacy and of the Lost Cause. Through most of the volumes moved the figure of Lincoln; from the pages of Rhodes rose the image of the Union endangered by sectional strife, broken for a time, but in the end invincible because the political chieftain and the hundreds of thousands of fighting men who answered his call willed it to be so. Rhodes saw the liberation of the slave and the saving of the nation as part of a single great effort. His narrative, restrained and founded on laborious research, amplified and developed Walt Whitman's understanding of the war: . . how the brunt of its labor of death was volunteered. The People of their own choice, fighting, dying for their own idea." 2 In the Rhodes vision of America, the ideas of freedom and nationalism were one, as they had been in the mind of Jefferson when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. In 1893, the year in which Rhodes began the publication of his epic, Frederick Jackson Turner of Wisconsin reminded his generation of the importance of the West and at the same time carried nationalism into the realm of culture.3 He created a fully developed picture of the frontier — the first scattered clearings in the forest, the simple arrangements of the society of hunterpioneers, the well-fenced farms of the later settlers, the crossroads churches they attended, and the one-room schools to which they sent their children; and, after more years, the commercial establishments, the bank, and the courthouse of the county town. Turner declared that, in this frontier cycle which began afresh whenever adventurers pushed into a new segment of the wilderness, may be found the genesis of American democracy. In it, Americans learned the practice and the meaning of responsible liberty. Turner, who declared that American democ-

HISTORY AND THE AMERICAN PAST

5

racy came out of the American forest, agreed, in effect, with the New Englander Ralph Waldo Emerson that Americans had "listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe." 4 His interpretation set a great company of historians to exploring particular aspects of the westward movement in order to trace the origin and development of free institutions in their chosen areas of the American West. In 1906, the year in which Rhodes completed his narrative of division, war, and reconstruction, Turner in The Rise of the New West added to his frontier hypothesis a theory of sections. As he developed this theory in later writings, he saw the United States, geographically as large as Europe, marked off into semiautonomous economic and cultural units — incipient nations, that might under different circumstances have given to North America a political pattern similar to that of Europe. But the forces making for union of the states prevailed over the drives furthering diversity, even though sections shorn of their old potentialities remained into the twentieth century. In his image of sections and of the triumph of Americans over their divisiveness, Turner subtly compared the United States with Europe, to the latter's disadvantage. The nationalistic images of Turner and of Rhodes complemented one another. Together they reflected and reinforced a mounting popular nationalism stimulated by the victory over Spain in 1898 and by the sudden acquisition of a new empire that extended from San Juan to Manila, half a world away. This new spirit had already been reflected in the work of a naval captain, Alfred Thayer Mahan, who in 1890 brought out his lectures at the Naval War College under the title, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. Although he developed his theme further in later volumes of history and essays, he etched clearly the outline of his picture of America in this first work, and particularly in the analytical essay on the elements of sea power with which it opened. The fortress provided Mahan with the metaphor with which to describe the United States and all

6

AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

other important members of the society of nations. Though he dealt primarily with naval operations, he saw naval power as merely an aspeot of national power, and analyzed the components of that power. In his later writings, after the triumph over Spain had given to the United States new stature in the society of nations, Mahan dealt with the opportunities created by power and the responsibilities that its possession entailed. Brooks Adams fell in step with him and the naval officer's analysis also became basic to the thought of President Theodore Roosevelt when he consciously and purposefully put the United States on the road to the power position it was to achieve in the middle of the twentieth century. Mahan saw America as a member of a society of nation-states, each maneuvering for advantage or survival and all involved in one unending power struggle. His vision completed the nationalistic images of Turner and Rhodes. All three helped to create the mood of an age in which Elihu Root brought a managerial revolution to the Army of the United States, President Roosevelt sent the fleet around the world, and Americans began to train the Filipinos in selfgovernment. Although the work of Adams, Turner, Rhodes, and Mahan helped to create the greater intellectual sophistication that characterized American thought in the early twentieth century, historical writing was but one among many influences that brought about the new intellectual climate. Around the turn of the century the full-fledged universities that had come into being provided channels through which European thought could reach American culture and in which creative American scholarship could make its contributions to learning. The rise of the universities caused history to be professionalized so that the historian could take his place as scholar and teacher on the campus as a member of a varied community of men and women who cultivated the humanities and the social and natural sciences. In the universities of the first third of the twentieth century

HISTORY A N D THE A M E R I C A N PAST

7

there appeared a group of historians who found Turner's frontier hypothesis inadequate. The concept of evolution bulked large in the thought of the time, and, for historians, origins became increasingly important because origins condition all subsequent development. Charles M. Andrews emerged as the most important member of what came to be called the Imperial school. In his research and in his seminars and lectures, Andrews pushed his quest for the origins of American institutions and attitudes back past the first seventeenth-century settlements of Englishmen in the forest beside the western shore of the Atlantic. He saw the colonies on the mainland of North America and in the West Indies against the background of an evolving British Empire. His was a vision of Englishmen, motivated by commercial or religious considerations, pushing out from the shores of the island kingdom, carrying with them inherited ideas, customs, and institutions. Supplementing the image of Parkman, he drew a picture of European civilization in transit to the New World. Transcending Turner's image of American democracy rising from the American forest, Andrews saw America arising from Europe, following a different and divergent course, but, in spite of variations and novelties, always revealing the marks of its origin. After he had retired from a long career of teaching, he summed up his conclusions and expressed his cosmopolitan outlook in his four volumes, The Colonial Period of American History (1934^1938). The United States grew swiftly after 1900 in population, wealth, and power. An evolving industrialism created giant metropolitan centers. The motor car and the airplane brought about revolutions in transportation and made every corner of the nation available to its citizens. World War I marked the end of a century of balanced stability in Europe and of the freedom of the United States from European involvements. In 1917, the American people moved into an age of violence and war; industrialism and urbanism at home, and major shifts of power in the society of nations abroad magnified the complexities of life. In

8

AMERICAN

PERSPECTIVES

response to the need for understanding, the social sciences grew to maturity. In the spirit of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, they marshaled the resources of reason to cope with the problems of the new day. The perspective provided by a complex age set historians to exploring the past for hitherto unnoticed or neglected complexities, and the specialities of economic, diplomatic, social, and intellectual history appeared. The positivism that powered the investigations of the social sciences led some historians to look upon their discipline as a science and, with the determinism of the nineteenth century as a guide, to search for the laws that had determined the course of history. Henry Adams, abandoning narrative history, formulated his pessimistic theory of the consequences for society of the harnessing at an accelerating rate, by natural science and technology, of the energies of nature. Adams' A Letter to American Teachers of History (1910), however, did not persuade the guild. To a considerable number of historians in the first quarter of the twentieth century, economic forces seemed to provide more useful explanations for phenomena than did the broad generalizations of Adams concerning the phases in the progressive release of natural energy. For a time and to some, "scientific" history seemed to offer possibilities in exactness and in the possibility of prediction that would make history a science of man; but more cautious scholars, while seeking to be as exact and as objective as possible, still looked upon their discipline as one of the humanities and upon historical writing as an aspect of literature. Charles A. Beard, like Turner before him, fed the harvest of the social sciences into his mill. Influenced in particular by the thought of James Madison, he saw American history in terms of conflict between economic classes. In a book which created a storm in the Progressive Era, he pictured the Constitutional Convention of 1787 as dominated by holders of government securities; in a later work, he traced the importance of the same group in the political decisions of the new nation; and in still

HISTORY AND THE AMERICAN PAST

9

another book, he described the Civil War as the "Second American Revolution" in which the growing power of industrialists brought an end to a long epoch characterized by an agriculturalcommercial civilization. Yet Beard rejected the determinism of "scientific" history. He swung to the opposite extreme and insisted that the historian must admit that "objective" history is an illusion and consciously create his own image of the past to serve what he considers to be the needs of the present. In the four volumes of The Rise of American Civilization (1927-1942), Charles A. and Mary R. Beard presented a challenging interpretation of the national story which Charles Beard alone completed in later volumes. A nationalism surpassing that of Turner gave his picture its highlights. His image was of a vigorous eighteenthcentury people winning their freedom from the political, and, finally, from the economic, control of Britain; then, escaping from European entanglements, exploiting (not always intelligently) a rich environment, developing industry, building cities, cultivating learning and the arts, and moving forward (not without intermittent retrogressions) under the stimulus of a humanistic faith toward a great destiny — but throwing away in the twentieth century the immense moral and material advantage of "the open door at home," by adventuring into imperialism and moving again into the arena of European politics and wars. Beard, who brought philosophy as well as the social sciences into his study, became the chief among the prophets of isolationism. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, the number of professional historians grew enormously as did also the body of writings on American history. Much of the serious writing was informative but dull, its limited aim that of the monograph to explore a particular event or to follow an out-of-the-way trail. From time to time, however, works of insight contributed to what we shall call the historians' composite image of America and its history: the work of many scholars working in many areas. When the later historians began carefully to survey three cen-

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AMERICAN P E R S P E C T I V E S

turies of social change, the city emerged as the center in which Americans effected, most rapidly and significantly, alterations in customs, ideas, and institutions.6 They noted, however, that never in America did one city dominate in the manner of London or Paris. In the eighteenth century, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston led in innovation. In the nineteenth, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and San Francisco were only three among many urban centers that expressed, each in its peculiar history, the evolving life of the nation. An urban hypothesis of American history took its place beside Turner's frontier hypothesis. The historians who saw in the city the key to change, emphasized such institutions as the library, the publishing house, the daily newspaper, the theater, the art museum, the symphony orchestra, not to mention the hospital, the factory, and the investment bank. Beside the urban interpretation, Turner's frontier theory seemed a romantic oversimplification coming pridefully out of the agricultural civilization of the upper Mississippi Valley. Yet, the frontier theory would not be refuted. As a portrayal of the social origins that condition all subsequent developments, it seemed to have a validity that persisted in spite of the obvious importance of the later city. The frontier seemed to stamp American character with that individual independence, that unconscious belief in progress, that forward-looking optimism, which the historian found in every period of American history — even, it should be added, after the frontier had passed. These two theories, frontier and urban, came to a testing when the historian began to take account of the immigrant.® From the 1840's to World War I, millions of strangers crossed the Atlantic from Europe to remain as citizens of the Republic. The flood magnified vastly an older ethnic diversity of the American people. It multiplied the number of homelands in which American families, tracing their ancestors, could find their origins. Some of the immigrants became farmers, but the great majority settled in cities. In both country and city various nationalities coalesced into ethnic groups that kept alive familiar traditions and gave to

HISTORY AND THE AMERICAN PAST

11

the newcomers a sense of belonging; but the second and third generations absorbed the American pattern and outlook. The immigrant, beyond an ethnic diversity that diminished in importance with the progression of the generations, brought about only one important cultural change — the establishment of the Catholic Church as an important factor in American life. This church became primarily an urban church, and the great majority of the immigrants and their children learned their Americanism in the cities. At this point in the inquiry, a problem arose. The frontier experience of Turner's emphasis set off Americans from Europeans; the urban experience, analyzed by the social historians, did not. The American city might be the locale for cultural change, but so was the city in England or any other nation where turban concentrations appeared. Only a minority of the immigrants ever knew the frontier. It was in the cities of the United States that the newcomers discarded, save for the Catholic Church and some smaller immigrant churches, the cultural baggage they had brought with them from their homelands. But the urban theory offered no adequate explanation as to why the outlook and ways of the New World differed from those to be found in the cities east of the Atlantic. The findings of the economic historians, whose views became important after World War I, seemed to offer a clue. Gradually, and after some revisions, their interpretation of the American economy took form and found its place in the more inclusive picture the historians drew of the American scene. By the 1920's, historians were describing that amazing age of steam and steel, which had begun in the middle of the nineteenth century, and in which, before World War I, the productive capacity of the United States had come to surpass that of any other nation. In the 1930's, when the depression had impaired the prestige of the businessman and had brought the New Deal into being, the historians pointed out that the last third of the nineteenth century had been a time of unregulated capitalism in which strong and ruthless men — "robber barons" — had exploited the vast

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AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

resources of the country to build great economic empires. The image changed after World War II, partly as a result of a new perspective and partly as a consequence of more penetrating research. The later historians7 told a story of entrepreneurs who marshaled men, machines, and capital to create enterprises whose productive capacity not only brought Americans a high standard of living, but provided the economic strength which enabled the United States to win two world wars and to emerge from the second strong enough to provide essential aid for the rehabilitation of sadly damaged economies in Western Europe. At the same time, these historians noted the passing of the older form of free enterprise and the appearance of a mixed economy in which the national government had an important role along with private entrepreneurs. What bearing had this interpretation of American life on the problem of the distinctiveness of the American character? The social historians, surveying three centuries, noted one persistent factor — the fact of plenty.8 Plenty — few men and much land — had conditioned the thought and outlook of the pioneers on each successive frontier. When the last frontier had disappeared, the mounting productivity of industry and of scientific agriculture had continued the fact of plenty. It conditioned life both in the country and in the city. These historians thought that the characteristics of individual independence, of optimism, and of futuremindedness must be set against the continuing background of plenty. This factor of plenty seemed to distinguish, at least in degree, America from Europe. If social history had corrected the original Turner theory of the dynamics of the American way of life, it had not completed the analysis. Nor did its developed image portray the full reality. Those historians who dealt with ideas® tried to fill in the picture. They chose as their point of departure the central theme of the school in which Andrews was preëminent. As the intellectual historians looked at such specific items in American culture as

HISTORY A N D THE A M E R I C A N PAST

13

capitalism, representative government, and Christianity, they noted that all of them came to America from Europe, mostly by way of England. Although the migration across the Atlantic of ideas and institutions of such basic importance made American civilization a derivative of that of Europe, the concept of derivation did not adequately express the relation that ultimately developed between the New World and the Old. The historians of ideas thought rather in terms of a Western civilization which stemmed from ancient Greece and Rome and from the Middle East of the Old and New Testaments. As in Europe the Italians, the Spaniards, the French, and the English had each created a peculiar variant of Western civilization, so in their turn had the Americans. This outlook took account of the factors of both continuity and diversity. It suggested the explanation of the midtwentieth-century phenomenon in which the United States accepted naturally the task of rallying the war-shattered peoples of the West to the defense of a great civilization. What were the unique elements in this American variant? Some historians of ideas noted, as had Charles M. Andrews, that feudalism as fully developed in Europe did not cross the Atlantic to the seventeenth-century English colonies. The rare efforts to reproduce the complete pattern in the American wilderness had quickly failed, and the feudal characteristics of colonial society remained of minor importance. The institution of monarchy, to be sure, was firmly established in America; but monarchy was not supported in the English-speaking New World by a hereditary aristocracy. The historians of ideas saw the primary peculiarity of the American variant of Western civilization to be the evolution in the English colonies of a functioning open-class system. In this system, the individual acquires status in accordance with his personal qualities and achievements. As it developed, the open-class system represented a new solution of the old problem of the relation of the individual to society. The men who proclaimed the Declaration of Independence spelled out in that manifesto the ideals and values inherent in the sys-

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AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

tem. The historians of ideas agreed with Turner that the frontier offered to Peter Jefferson, Thomas' father, opportunity to rise in status, but noted that the city, Philadelphia, gave Benjamin Franklin his chance to achieve the same end. The lives of both were conditioned by the promise of plenty which was inherent in the American environment of the eighteenth century. The historians of ideas, noting the transfer from England to America of representative government, emphasized the New World conditions — particularly the open-class system — that turned John Locke's theories of individualism and of government by consent of the governed into the ruling American political philosophy. Monarchy, unsupported by an hereditary aristocracy, disappeared in the upsurge of a new kind of nationalism in the Revolution, a nationalism that substituted loyalty to the whole people for loyalty to the king. After the Revolution, the nationalist urge led to the creation of those two novelties, a federal republic and a presidential form of government. The historians of ideas saw in these institutions the completion of the inventory of the important characteristics that gave the American variant of Western civilization its distinctive quality. To the composite image of America presented by scholars of the middle twentieth century, the political historians made several contributions.10 They traced the continuing struggle of the common man against entrenched economic privilege, in particular in the times of Jackson, of Wilson, and of F. D. Roosevelt. Taking up the work of Rhodes, they sought answers as to why the Union had fallen apart in 1861 and, rejecting the theory of "irrepressible conflict," they presented the tragedy as due to the failure of men who had the freedom to make fateful choices. Investigating the approach to Civil conflict, the political historians discovered and pointed out the importance of the American type of political party as a force for holding together the union of the states. Dealing with the factor of potential and actual plenty, these scholars pictured the emergence and growth of governmental

HISTORY AND THE AMERICAN PAST

15

regulation of the economy, the rise of the service state, and the redistribution of the national income through taxation and social security arrangements. They pointed to the development of "big government" to deal with the exigencies of the twentieth-century world. Turner had insisted that sectionalism continued after the Civil War; the political historians noted that the forces making for standardization in American civilization had not caused the South to cease to be a peculiar region with political and social arrangements differing from the rest of the nation. Big government had not abolished federalism (states' rights remained a militant doctrine); yet the political historians saw Americans moving in such a direction as to confirm the Rhodes thesis that liberty and union are inseparable. The scholars who, following Mahan, investigated the history of power in the society of nations also made their special contributions to the composite historians' interpretation of twentiethcentury United States. 11 They wrote from the perspective offered by a century of violence and revolution, a century in which old empires dissolved and the former world preëminence of Europe disappeared, and finally, a century in which a giant despotism, creating a new empire by stealth and by force, challenged the Free World and the values and ideals of Western civilization. These historians of diplomacy and of war developed in full detail the achievement by the United States of a power position of vast and world-wide implications. Interpreting its involvement in World Wars I and II, the historians of diplomacy, after first conclusions, revisions, and re-revisions, presented the course of the United States in the ever-shifting international scene not as a mere cynical participation in a game of power, but as a pursuit of the highest national interest through support of the values of the Free World. These scholars described the nostalgia of that great company of Americans who between the wars clung to the traditional formula of isolation and who hoped to return to the state of aloofness from Europe that had characterized the century between 1815 and 1917. Finally, the historians of war

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AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

and diplomacy, after describing the impact of American arms on every continent in World War II and after describing the scientific and technological revolution that brought in the atomic age, pictured a people forced by events into a position of world leadership which they had not sought and did not want. This image gave in the middle of the twentieth century a new poignancy to Parkmans classic picture of the struggle in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries between France and England for the interior of North America. It raised an unanswerable question: What would have been the course of modern history had Montcalm won the battle fought on that September day on the Plains of Abraham? Historians deal with past decisions and past developments which ineluctably condition the present. Their guild has now rejected Charles A. Beard's doctrine of relativity. Recognizing that complete objectivity represents a perfection impossible of attainment, they insist, however, that their awareness of the problem, plus their critical methods, make possible a practicable objectivity out of which can come dependable conclusions concerning the past. In dealing with the past, they have traced the evil along with the good. Their labor and its reception by the public throw light on the people whose history they unravel and interpret. To write the story of the unsavory along with the inspiring, and to have readers accept such writing as in the public interest, is the sign of a free, courageous, and sophisticated people. This attitude suggests the quality of mid-twentieth-century American civilization.

II P R A G M A T I S M A N D THE S C O P E OF S C I E N C E Morton White

T H E afterglow of the sputniks has provided all Americans with a glaring light in which to view our ambiguous and often inconsistent attitude toward science, scientific method, and scientific education. We have sometimes thought of America as the land of the free and the home of the scientist, but we can now see through telescopes, not horoscopes, and by the light of missiles bursting in air, that there may be genuine doubt about our scientific capacity to keep ourselves free. Throughout the twentieth century, we have been caricatured as a crowd of heartless and insensitive scientists concerned only with refrigeration and automation; and, although we have said that this was a distorted picture, we now know that it is, and even some of our critics and enemies have come to believe us. The student of the history of American philosophy should not be surprised at this national ambivalence toward science, for he knows that we have been a nation of Emersons and Thoreaus and Jameses as well as a nation of Jeffersons and Franklins and Deweys. Indeed, the story of American philosophy may be told as a tale of radically opposed attitudes toward science — a tale of conflicting conceptions of its scope and nature. The path from the Enlightenment to transcendentalism to evolutionism in the nineteenth century may be viewed as a zigzagging curve of the fortunes of science in American thought. And, not only has American philosophy as a whole produced no single image of science, but even if one turns to pragmatism, our most distinctive philosophy, one finds disagreement and serious difference on this

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question. This last fact is both ironical and illuminating. It is ironical because pragmatism has been the main target of those critics who accuse all pragmatiste of worshiping at the altar of "scientism," of believing that one scientific method rules as a god over all branches of human thinking. It is illuminating because the internecine wars of the pragmatiste on the scope of science reveals a conflict in the most abstract reaches of our culture which has its concomitants, causes, and effects on almost every level of our national life. Therefore, no image of America in the twentieth century can be wide enough and revealing enough if it does not include an examination of this paradoxical feature of our "national philosophy." Some pragmatiste believe that one and the same scientific method is applicable in all spheres of intellectual activity, while others do not. And, since this cleavage has persisted throughout the career of so influential a movement, its story may illuminate the past fifty years of American philosophy, and possibly help us foretell the shape of the subject in the fifty years ahead. Because some pragmatiste are methodological monists, some are explicitly pluralistic, and some think they are being monistic when they really are not, the historian of technical pragmatism must acknowledge his inability to formulate a clear definition of this doctrine. He can point to philosophers who have called themselves pragmatiste and who therefore share some underlying attitudes toward practice and experience which are of great importance to studente of our national life. But, there ie no such thing as a pragmatic catechism which defines a creed, particularly a creed concerning the scope and limits of scientific method. The pragmatism of Charles S. Peirce, who is usually acknowledged as the originator of the doctrine, was basically a theory of the meaning of scientific beliefe. Confronted with aeeertione containing laboratory worde like "hard," "heavy," and "lithium," to mention Peirce'e own examplee, a pragmatic logician muet translate them into statemente of practice. Peirce recognized, of

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course, that a scientific statement about the hardness or weight of an object is logically equivalent to a "myriad" of other statements, but he held that one type of equivalent is of special significance to the scientist, namely that which specifies certain experiences that an experimenter would have if he were to perform certain operations on the experimental object. Peirce held that if a statement could not be translated in this way, it lacked scientific or pragmatic meaning; and that two statements, no matter how different they might appear, meant the same thing if their pragmatic translations were identical or equivalent. One purpose of establishing such a test of translatability was to eliminate what he jeeringly referred to as "ontological metaphysics," in some of his writings, but oddly enough his own pragmatic maxim led him to conclusions which were themselves metaphysical. For, if every laboratory statement about a particular object is equivalent to a statement which asserts what would happen if one were to perform certain operations on it, then every such statement covertly attributes a disposition to the experimental object. To say that Shylock would bleed if he were pricked is to attribute a disposition to Shylock; hence, Peirce said, to imply the existence of an entity which is a universal in traditional terminology. It was precisely this metaphysical implication that led him to claim that medieval realism was the consequence of pragmatism, that pragmatism implied the existence of universale. In saying this, however, Peirce created a puzzle for himself, for how could a maxim dedicated to the elimination of "ontological metaphysics," lead to such a conclusion without violating itself?1 On the one hand, we are urged to present the pragmatic meaning of a laboratory statement in order to distinguish laboratory statements from pragmatically meaningless metaphysical statements; on the other hand, our very translation supposedly implies the metaphysical conclusion that universale exist. But, can we translate the statement that universale exist into pragmatic terms? And, if not, should we not conclude that it is seien-

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tifically or pragmatically meaningless? We are led to wonder whether two standards of meaningfulness and hence two criteria of truth are not implicit in Peirce's philosophy. Apparently Peirce never faced up to this question; but a variant of it has recently reëmerged in the literature of pragmatism, and serious efforts have been made to deal with the difficulty. One amounts to a denial that the existence of universals is implied by pragmatic translation. Another amounts to an explicit acknowledgment of a double standard, which would allow us to say that the statement, "universals exist," is meaningful in a sense different from that in which the statement, "this diamond is hard," is meaningful; and, therefore, that the grounds on which we justify the former are different in kind from the grounds on which we justify the latter. Peirce is forced into the tacit acceptance of two standards, but he leaves one, the standard for metaphysical meaningfulness, very obscure indeed. Peirce's predicament, therefore, is not very different from one in which William James found himself when he came to discuss the method of theology. Ralph Barton Perry has said: "The modern movement known as pragmatism is largely the result of James's misunderstanding of Peirce." 2 The statement shows that even James's most devoted admirers are doubtful about his most important effort in technical philosophy. Few of the distinguished thinkers who grew up under his tutelage or shadow, not even John Dewey, fail to acknowledge James's indifference to formal logic, his impatience with forensic dialectic, his tendency to let passion triumph over intellect. Therefore, a movement which was first besieged by formidable arguers like Bradley and Royce, and then by analysts like Russell and Moore, had to disown the more extravagant though exciting moves of its acknowledged leader. James may have been an inspiration to the tough young men who were learning logic while it was evolving in the early twentieth century, but he was not used as a model in their philosophizing. This tradition of

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treating James not as a defensible philosopher but rather as an inspired man, a saint, an adorable genius, as Whitehead called him, continues to the present. Therefore, as soon as a philosopher elects to call himself a pragmatist, he usually adds rather earnestly, "but not a Jamesian!" In spite of his technical lapses, or perhaps because of them, James dominated the pragmatic movement at the beginning of the century insofar as the world was concerned. After his great Principles of Psychology appeared in 1890, he devoted himself more and more to philosophical questions of interest to the ordinary man. His sense of style led him to avoid the jargon of the schools, his racing intelligence made him impatient of logical minutiae, and his feelings inevitably brought him to religion. But James, like so many of his generation, was caught in the cross fire of science and theology, his sense of conflict exacerbated by his devotion to Darwin's biology. His Psychology was an application of Darwinism to the mind, and the mind was of enormous strategic importance to those who sought to shore up something immaterial against the flood that followed Darwin's bombardment of conventional theology. Although he shared their Darwinism, James could not line up with the Cliffords and the Huxleys on theological matters. He was too religious in temperament, too much the son of his Swedenborgian father, too quick to resent a short way with dissenters from agnosticism. In 1877, W. K. Clifford said sternly: "It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence; and where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, there it is worse than presumption to believe."3 In the very same year Peirce spoke scornfully of the man who might say, "Oh, I could not believe so-and-so, because I should be wretched if I did." 4 Yet James, the Darwinist, the empiricist, the follower of Peirce, spoke up in defense of what he called "the religious hypothesis." His first famous attempt in its behalf was his essay "The Will to Believe," which appeared in 1896; the second was his Pragmatism of 1907. "The Will to Believe," as James pointed out, dealt with a

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problem which was very different from that which occupied him in Pragmatism, but both works have a great deal in common. The former was essentially an answer to Clifford's agnosticism, an argument in justification of religious faith as a policy. According to James, we do have a right to believe a statement even though "our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced," 5 though neither the statement nor its contradictory have been scientifically verified. But, when one examines some of James's examples of religious statements, one is struck by the fact that he does not bother to see whether they can be translated in accordance with Peirce's pragmatic maxim. According to religion, James says, "The best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word." β Yet this is not — or at any rate James does not bother to persuade us that it is — a statement which can be easily translated into one of Peirce's pragmatic conditionals. It does not predict certain experiences after the performance of certain operations on an experimental object. For this reason, an application of Peirce's severe pragmatic test of meaningfulness to James's "religious hypothesis" might well yield the conclusion that it was meaningïess. And this is why James's predicament is similar to that in which Peirce found himself when he defended medieval realism. Just as Peirce consciously or unconsciously exempted the statement that universale exist from the need to satisfy the pragmatic criterion of meaning, so James seemed to exempt statements like "God exists." Once again a double standard of meaning and truth seems required — one for science and one for theology. By the time that James's Pragmatism appeared, therefore, it was not at all clear how unified a philosophy of belief or affirmation pragmatism would ever develop. Even if the statements of laboratory scientists were translated pragmatically by Peirce, the statements of metaphysics and theology still had to be dealt with clearly and consistently. Such a situation could not surprise

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or dismay idealists or rationalists. They might even use it as ammunition against pragmatism, as evidence of the fact that pragmatism was a philosophy of limited significance, at best capable of formulating the method of natural sciences but powerless to extend its sway over the really vital subjects of God, freedom, and immortality. For this reason James's Pragmatism must be regarded as a more ingenious effort to meet his philosophical opponents, for it did not content itself, as did "The Will to Believe," with saying that the logic of theology and the logic of science were fundamentally different. On the contrary, Pragmatism was an effort to present a unified theory of truth which would apply to both theological and scientific statements. It might be said that, because in Pragmatism James applied Peirce's theory of pragmatic meaning to the word "true," he was trying to do something quite different from what he had attempted in "The Will to Believe." The doctrine of truth advanced in Pragmatism treated cases in which "our merely logical intellect" had been coerced, and, therefore, cases in which the word "true" might be applied as a Peirceian scientist might apply it. But, nevertheless the implications of James's theory of truth in Pragmatism are very similar to the implications of his doctrine in "The Will to Believe" — at least in the eyes of a rigorous follower of Peirce's pragmatic maxim. One way of looking at James's theory of truth in Pragmatism is to regard it as an effort to do for the word "true" what Peirce tried to do for laboratory words like "hard" and "heavy." To say that an object is heavy is, for Peirce, to say that if one were to let it go, one would have certain visual experiences; to say that a statement is true is, for James, to say that if one were to believe it, one would have certain satisfactory experiences. Both translations are statements of the "if-then" form; both prescribe certain operations — in one case letting things go and in the other believing; both predict certain experiences upon the performance of certain operations. But a serious problem arises when one asks while reading the

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Pragmatism, as one asks while reading "The Will to Believe," whether James always applied the Peirceian criterion of meaning to the statements he called true on pragmatic grounds. The point is that, before the Peirceian scientist asks whether he should accept a certain statement, whether he should say that it is true, he must ask whether it is meaningful. And, before he can say that it is meaningful, he must see whether it can be translated into something analogous to the statement, "If I let this body go, it will fall." If it cannot be so translated, then there is no point in saying that the statement is true. One may pronounce with satisfying results the words, "I believe that the best things are the more eternal things" or the words, "It is true that the best things are the more eternal things," but if the statement that the best things are the more eternal things is itself not capable of Peirceian translation, then one is not really believing anything, one is not seriously attributing truth to anything, even though one thinks or says one is. The conclusion that must be drawn from reading Peirce and James is that neither of them was fully consistent or thoroughgoing in his application of Peirce's pragmatic maxim. Peirce failed to apply it to his own realistic metaphysics; James managed to keep it out of action at crucial points. The result is the confusion in which they left the subjects of metaphysical and theological method. One clung to universale, and the other to God; but neither of them provides a rationale for their beliefs which is clearly consistent with the pragmatic theory of meaning set forth in Peirce's famous essay, "How to Make Our Ideas Clear." 7 Therefore, if one were to be a little fairer to James than his biographer is, one might say that the philosophical movement of pragmatism in the first part of the twentieth century was largely the result of James's and Peirce s misunderstanding of Peirce. It is generally said that pragmatism espouses a naturalistic ethics; that is to say, the view that every moral statement may

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be verified by the fact-finding methods of empirical science. This view is conspicuously held by John Dewey, by intent the most thoroughgoing exponent of scientism and methodological monism in the whole school of pragmatic moralists. His aim, he tells us, is to avoid "the pallid remoteness of the rationalistic theory" as well as what he calls the "empirical theory of values." One of them appeals to intuition, the other maintains that "to be enjoyed and to be a value are two names for one and the same fact" 8 — and neither view is defensible, according to Dewey. Therefore, he rejects the theory of G. E. Moore9 that goodness is a simple, non-natural attribute to be intuited rather than observed; and he also rejects the opposite view that the value of an item is constituted by the fact that one desires it now or finds immediate satisfaction in it. On the subject of value, Dewey's view is close to that of C. I. Lewis, who says: "As a first approximation, we might say that attributing value to an existent, O, means that under circumstances C, O will or would, lead to satisfaction in the experience of somebody, S; or it intends the joint assertion of many such affirmations."10 Here both Dewey and Lewis follow Peirce's pragmatic maxim, applying its central idea to statements of value; indeed, Lewis points out explicidy that value is a disposition, and that therefore attributing value to a diamond is like attributing a specific gravity to it. In both cases, we say what experiences would occur under certain circumstances. This, however, is not all. For Lewis makes a distinction which upsets this picture of pragmatic uniformity on the fundamentals of ethics. In his own words, "Valuation is always a matter of empirical knowledge. But what is right and just, can never be determined by empirical facts alone." 11 But Dewey, if I understand him correctly, is not prepared to grant that there is a class of moral statements or beliefs which are established by means that are fundamentally different from those used in science. For this reason, the historian of twentieth-century pragmatism must record its failure to present any uniform position on ethics. It

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is true that Lewis acknowledges a double standard, whereas Peirce and James seem to slip unconsciously into holding that metaphysics and theology have methods of their own which are distinct from that of empirical science. But, like Peirce and James, Lewis fails to make clear just how we do justify judgments of right and wrong. His difficulty is related to his position on the nature of a priori knowledge, which is itself a subject on which pragmatiste are in considerable disagreement. Perhaps one of the most distinctive features of Lewis' work in epistemology is his theory of a priori knowledge, knowledge that we allegedly justify without reference to experience. The most distinctive characteristic of such knowledge is its necessity: statements expressing such knowledge cannot be denied without contradicting oneself. By contrast, a posteriori knowledge is said to be contingent: statements expressing it may be false. If a posteriori statements are true, that is not because they must be true but because the world happens to be as they say it is. The classic examples of a priori statements have usually come from pure mathematics; whereas the most obvious examples of a posteriori knowledge come from everyday life and the empirical sciences. The problem of a priori knowledge has usually been conceived as the problem of saying how there could be such a thing, and a number of answers have been offered in the history of philosophy. The answer given by Lewis is one of the most widely accepted in the twentieth century and is in broad outline similar to that given by logical positiviste. He holds that all and only a priori statements are analytic, that is to say, seen to be true merely by inspecting the meanings of their component terms. Therefore, he rejects Kant's doctrine of the synthetic a priori. The truth of the statement that every horse is an animal, is vouchsafed by the fact that the meaning of the word "horse" contains the meaning of the word "animal," and this is why we can discover its truth without engaging in experiment on or observation of horses. Therefore, analytic statements are sharply

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distinguished from synthetic statements, whose truth we cannot determine merely by studying meanings. Moreover, according to Lewis, all logical and mathematical truths are fundamentally like the statement that every horse is an animal in being analytic. The upshot of his theory is an exhaustive and exclusive division of knowledge into two kinds: logico-mathematical knowledge which requires no observation of the world for its justification, and empirical knowledge which does. One can understand why Lewis is involved in a serious problem over the status of statements about what is right and just. He contrasts them with value statements because he claims that value statements are empirical. Yet, he cannot hold that aU statements about the Tightness or wrongness of actions are analytic, seen to be true merely by an inspection of the meanings of their component terms. Moreover, he vehemently rejects the positivistic view that ethical statements express no knowledge at all. Therefore, he has entered a quandary from which he has not yet successfully emerged. Statements about the Tightness of action are to Lewis what ontological statements are to Peirce and theological statements to James. On Lewis' view their method of justification is not empirically scientific.12 This brief discussion of a priori knowledge leads to the question of pragmatism's position on the nature of mathematical and logical truth; and, once again, there is no agreement. One of the most discerning expositors of Peirce's philosophy writes: "Peirce's Pragmatism is, primarily, the logic of hypothesis; its aim is to prescribe and articulate the one essential condition to which every genuine hypothesis must conform; and broadly this condition is that a hypothesis must be verifiable experimentally. This being the case, it would be natural to assume that Pragmatism has a bearing solely on questions of matters of fact, questions about the world which is disclosed to us, ultimately through our sensations. It should therefore have no bearing whatsoever on our purely formal a priori knowledge, that is, our knowledge of

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logical truths and of pure mathematics. But, although Peirce's writings on this issue are distressingly scrappy, there can be no doubt that he did not wish the scope of his Pragmatism to be restricted to thoughts, statements, or hypotheses concerning questions of empirical fact. "Pragmatism,' he maintains, has an important relevance to those parts of our knowledge which are commonly described as purely formal, or apodeictic." 13 But, while Peirce's writing on this subject may be "scrappy" and even "confused," as Gallie also says, the fact that he did try to extend his pragmatism to the statements of logic and mathematics itself prefigures later, pragmatically inspired efforts to question a sharp line between the analytic and the synthetic. Moreover, there is evidence that James too had serious doubts about the distinction between analytic and synthetic, especially in the last chapter of Psychology, a chapter that had great influence on John Dewey. The chapter is entitled "Necessary Truths and the Effects of Experience," and, in one of its notes, James says; "Some readers may expect me to plunge into the old debate as to whether the a prion truths are 'analytic' or 'synthetic.' It seems to me that the distinction is one of Kant's most unhappy legacies, for the reason that it is impossible to make it sharp." 14 These views of Peirce and James are cited merely because they anticipate in a historically interesting way what has become a serious difference between Lewis and W. V. Quine on the subject of logico-mathematical truth. Lewis espouses just such a sharp distinction as James disowns, holding a position on it which is in many respects like that of Carnap. Quine, on the other hand, writes: "Carnap, Lewis, and others take a pragmatic stand on the question of choosing between language forms, scientific frameworks; but their pragmatism leaves off at the imagined boundary between the analytic and the synthetic. In repudiating such a boundary I espouse a more thorough pragmatism."15 The recent attack on the distinction between analytic and synthetic has been prompted by a number of technical considerations. They are mainly inspired by the conviction, shared by

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Quine, by myself,16 and by Nelson Goodman,17 that the "meanings" appealed to by Lewis and Carnap are shadowy, obscure entities, and furthermore that the word "synonymous" as applied to linguistic expresssions is often lacking in the clarity we expect of philosophical terms. This is one part of the argument against a sharp distinction between analytic and synthetic, one which conceivably could be met by a clarification of the term "synonymous" that has not yet been presented by those who are wedded to the sharp distinction between the analytic and the synthetic. More positive considerations seem to lead to the conclusion that much of reflective thinking consists in the acceptance of a system or body of statements, some of which are logical and some scientific, and that we must surrender the notion that for each kind of statement there is a separate and distinct method of validation. Such a position has been advanced by Quine in opposition not only to a sharp methodological distinction between logico-mathematical truth and truth in the natural sciences, but also to the contrast between ontology and science which seems implicit in Peirce's acceptance of scholastic realism. Turning to the debate over the status of metaphysics which has also dominated recent pragmatic literature, it can again be seen that pragmatically minded philosophers do not agree about the scope of empirical science. When some philosophers assert the existence of universals, for example the property of individual men called "manhood," it is sometimes felt that they make a very different kind of existential statement from those made in science or in ordinary life. Some philosophers see a difference between the statement that there are universals and the statement that there are tigers in India. The latter can be settled, they think, by straightforward empirical investigation, while the former has been the subject of interminable controversy. Logical positiviste once tended to say that ontological assertions were meaningless by contrast to statements like "There are tigers in India," precisely because the former are

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not subject to the translatability that Peirce required or to the kind that positiviste formulated in their "verifiability theory of meaning." Rudolf Carnap, under pressure from certain arguments of Quine, has in one respect altered the positivistic attitude toward ontology.18 He holds that, so long as we treat ontological statements on a par with ordinary existential statements, we are forced to call them meaningless, simply because we cannot confirm or disconfirm them as we can confirm or disconfirm statements as to the existence of are tigers in India. But, the alternative is to transform all so-called ontological questions into — or to replace them by — questions about the practical advisability of speaking in a certain way, of using a certain kind of linguistic or conceptual framework. On this view, the question as to whether universale exist or whether numbers exist is not only distinguished from the question whether there are tigers in India and from the question whether there are molecules and electrons, but also from the question whether there are prime numbers between 8 and 80. Physicists report the existence of electrons, hunters the existence of tigers in India, mathematicians the existence of prime numbers between 8 and 80, but the acceptance of numbers and universale is not so much a question of discovering what is true in natural science or mathematics as it is the reflection of a decision to set up a language in which we discuss numbers and universals. This decision, Carnap says, is to be justified on pragmatic grounds. Because Carnap's aim is in a sense to distinguish questions of existence of the kind debated by philosophers from those debated by scientists, he is in one important respect in the tradition of James's essay, "The Will to Believe." Carnap explicitly distinguishes the grounds on which we defend scientific beliefs from the grounds on which we adopt ontologies, just as James makes a distinction between the grounds on which we accept scientific statements and the grounds on which we adopt theologies. We must not minimize the fact that James appeals to a pragmatic faith when he defends his nonscientific religious beliefs, whereas

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Carnap appeals to something else. But both men are in the tradition of methodological dualism, and explicitly so. By contrast, from a methodological point of view, Peirce is a crypto-dualist. His pragmatic theory of meaning will not accommodate his metaphysics, but he does not seem to recognize this; hence, he does not feel the need to provide some rationale for his realistic ontology. One is inclined to say that Carnap has come to his rescue, but this is risky for a reason that may seem obvious to any student of the history of pragmatism. Peirce's pragmatic theory of meaning was applied to scientific statements. In his view, to justify a statement like "This diamond is hard" pragmatically is to perform an experiment on the diamond, to see whether one has certain experiences after doing certain things to the diamond. But Carnap's pragmatic criterion for testing the expediency of using a certain linguistic framework is worlds removed from Peirce's pragmatic maxim for just this reason. Carnap's pragmatism goes to work on questions of ontology precisely when scientific, Peirceian, pragmatic testing of ontological statements is impossible. One may say that Carnap ceases to think of an ontological doctrine as something that can be called true in the sense in which an ordinary existential statement can be called true, and therefore for him ontological doctrines are not subject to Peirceian pragmatic translation. On the contrary, Carnap's important move consists in urging us to stop thinking of ontological statements as true or false, and to begin thinking of useful linguistic frameworks instead. That is why there is an analogy between Carnap and James, for James, especially in "The Will to Believe," tried to persuade his audience that religious beliefs were to be evaluated on the basis of their usefulness to the believer. Carnap's test of usefulness is more public, more logically articulated, but in spirit it reminds one of James rather than of Peirce. Carnap's views have been reported at some length in this essay on pragmatism, even though he is not usually regarded as a pragmatist, because his position on certain questions is reminiscent of the views of some pragmatiste. Also, he has had very

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great influence on American thinkers of a more explicitly pragmatic bent. He represents an extreme variety of methodological pluralism. He distinguishes the method used in answering ontological questions from that used in answering factual questions. He distinguishes the method used in answering factual questions from that used in answering logico-mathematical questions. Quines reconstruction of the ontological problem has led Carnap to hold that, if we are going to debate the issue of realism versus nominalism, we should think of it as a debate of a nonscientific, pragmatic kind. Under pressure from Quine, who has tried to give the ontological question a respectability that it has never had in positivist literature, Carnap emerges as a philosopher who tells us that to support one's realism or nominalism is to do one sort of thing; to defend relativity physics is to do another; to show that there are prime numbers between 8 and 80 is to do another; to defend the statement that lying is wrong is to do still another kind of thing. Leaving ethics aside, for it has not played a great role in Carnap's more concerted thinking, we may turn to Quine's disagreement with Carnap, for Quine not only questions the sharp contrast between analytic and synthetic statements, but also the Carnapian dichotomy between ontology and science. The debate between them is related to the traditional ambiguity of pragmatism on the scope and limits of science. Following in the tradition of Russell and Frege, Quine not only has participated in the effort to reduce mathematics to logic, but has also been more concerned with the philosophical foundations of logic than most contemporary logicians. It was his preoccupation with the so-called ontological question that prompted Carnap to take the stand just examined. Quine's conclusions, however, are diametrically opposed to Carnap's on the relation between ontology and science.19 The statement, "There are prime numbers between 8 and 80," logically implies the statement, There are numbers," and so Quine holds that anyone who asserts the former is "committed" to the latter. And, what one is

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logically committed to, one ought at least to acknowledge and try to justify. Moreover, he makes no radical methodological distinction, as Carnap does, between the method of justifying one's commitment to the existence of numbers and one's commitment to the existence of prime numbers between 8 and 80. The mere fact that the more "philosophical" of the two seems to be more difficult to evaluate when considered outside a system is no reason for supposing that it is to be evaluated differently once it and the more mathematical commitment to prime numbers between 8 and 80 are both ensconced in a formal system. Once both are incorporated into the system, the whole system must be evaluated, and differences in the ways of justifying the two commitments seem to vanish. Quine calls himself a pragmatist not because he thinks that every statement of science can be translated by means of a criterion like Peirce's, but because he thinks of the whole conceptual scheme of science as a tool "for predicting future experience in the light of past experience." Ontological questions, therefore, "are on a par with questions of natural science," as are mathematico-logical questions. What we test are entire frameworks which cannot be chopped up into separate parts having different methods of justification. In this essay, which is primarily historical, I have tried to show that the pragmatic movement does not present a unified position on the scope and limits of scientific method, on its significance for theology, metaphysics, morals, and logic.20 Dewey21 and Quine are probably the most explicitly monistic in their outlook; Lewis and Carnap (insofar as Carnap may be counted a pragmatist on the ontological question) are the most explicitly pluralistic; Peirce and James have implicitly shown their inclination to think that the method of science is not universal in scope. Because individual pragmatiste have not always been clear on this issue, and because the movement as a whole has been divided, pragmatism has never been able to present a single face to the world

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on one of the most central problems of modern philosophy. This, I suggest, is part of a wider cultural problem in American life: our failure to come to a clear agreement on the nature, the scope, or the social role of science. The ambiguities of pragmatism reflect the ambiguities of our society as a whole.

Ili

L I T E R A T U R E A N D THE Robert E. Spiller

CRITICS

'AHE image of America that was reflected in the literature of the first half of the present century — poems, plays, fiction — and in its literary criticism and history was not very different from those revealed by the telescope of the historian and the microscope of the philosopher. An awakening at the close of the nineteenth century to the inescapable role of major world power in a world but recently transformed by the latest revolution in science created by 1920 a self-conscious, self-critical, confused and violent, but finally triumphant literary renaissance, American in characteristics, universal in meaning and value. Like romantic movements in other times and places, this upsurge of literary power was both nationalistic and naturalistic: it drew its materials from its immediate culture, but it shared with other literatures of Western civilization the new view of man's relation to nature which modern scientific inquiry was unfolding. Its rise to full expression by about 1935 and its gradual definition and control by an analytical and critical reaction form the subject of this chapter. In 1900 American literature was still a minor voice among the literatures of the world, with no more than a dozen or so masters to point to and a general level of mediocrity and derivative ideas and modes in most of the current writers; by 1950 it had produced its own soul-searching and uncompromising interpretation of modern experience, and its current writers were read and studied in all literate quarters of the rapidly shrinking globe. The American people, by developing within its borders for the first time a vigorous creative and critical movement of national scope,

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had succeeded finally in destroying its complacent self-image as a colonial culture, and had substituted an image which was national only because it was a fully realized self-portrait of universal man. The story of how this transformation came about is too complex to be told here in full detail, but its main themes and stages of development can be traced in the work of those writers who were sufficiently conscious of their own aims and methods to express as well as to practice the literary theories of their times. It must be told therefore as a history of the literary criticism of an era, a people's view of its own expression of present and past experience through the writings of its most skilled and articulate interpreters. The first phase of a major literary movement is likely to be romantic almost to the point of anarchism. Between 1910 and 1915, there was a stir on all our literary fronts. The reappearance of Dreiser's flagrantly naturalistic novel, Sister Carrie, virtually suppressed for a decade, was merely a symptom of a new freedom and vitality in fiction; the founding of specialized magazines like Poetry (Chicago) gave voice to an unexpected chorus; and an experimental theater, widespread and amateur, came to Broadway to challenge the vested interests of the major producers. Scholars in the universities and colleges, and journalists in the market place, began to take note of developments in their own twentieth-century world and to tear at the barriers between past and present, "highbrow" and "lowbrow," national and international, tradition and originality. New magazines were founded and old ones reformed, poets once more became bards and took to the lecture platform to offer readings, original plays were offered to responsive audiences, and a new generation of critics and scholars began to examine seriously for the first time their own literature and culture. Perhaps because of his very lack of connection with existing institutions and interests, Van Wyck Brooks was able in 1915 to announce the movement which everyone was beginning to feel

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but no one had yet quite defined. His little book, America's Coming-of-Age, created no great stir when it first appeared and has only recently been reprinted, but a search among contemporary documents reveals no better formulation of the critical issues of the day. It was, for the literary movement here under review, much what Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads was to the British and Emerson's American Scholar address was to the American romantic movements. In any case, it will here serve the historian's purpose of locating a point from which to study the interplay and movement of forces in the mind and affairs of men. It can b e used to mark the summing up and restatement of the issue between literary idealism and realism of the late nineteenth century and as the announcement of the main action and reaction in the literary movement of the twentieth. As in all such statements, the central plea of this book is that literature must periodically refresh itself by coming to terms with life in its own time and place. Specifically Brooks argues that a tradition which he calls Puritan has consistently separated America's finest literary minds from the materials of life about them. The pattern of this division between ideals and facts, he believes, was set in Colonial days, and it persisted throughout the nineteenth century. "Transcendent theory," on the one hand, and "catchpenny reality," on the other, have divided American life between them ever since Jonathan Edwards took for his exclusive concern "the immanent eternal issues," and left to Benjamin Franklin the opportunism that originated in "the practical shifts of Puritan life" and which thereafter motivated American conduct in all practical affairs, particularly in business. This schism between the ideals of the intellectuals and the practices of the people accounts for America's failure to produce major literary figures, from Poe to Lowell and beyond, and especially for what Brooks feels to b e the lack of vitality in the New England renaissance. Herein lies the difference between an Emerson who "never dreamed of moulding society" and a Carlyle

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who "had the faculty of devising and making intensely real and contagious a social ideal the rudiments of which actually existed in the people he was addressing." The inference is that "the more deeply and urgently and organically you feel the pressure of society the more deeply and consciously and fruitfully you feel and you become yourself." The moral for twentieth-century American literature is that our writers must concern themselves with social ideals and social issues that "catch at the bottom of things, like a dredging-machine"1 before their writings can become vital and authentic. The issue seemed to be one of social ethics rather than of individual aesthetics. The road was at the fork: in one direction lay social participation and responsibility arrived at through realistic study and criticism and reform; in the other lay alienation and aesthetic detachment. There is some hope of healing the breach in American society, concludes Brooks, because "It is true that under the glassy, brassy surface of American jocosity and business there is a pulp and a quick, and this pulpy quick, this nervous and acutely self-critical vitality, is in our day in a strange ferment." 2 But the American writer has a further and more personal choice to make. He must decide whether to turn his art outside himself, identifying it with the issues and reforms of his day, or to ton it inward on the personal and subjective issues of his own mind and feelings. Brooks, as the first major critic among the Literary Radicals, cut the issue sharply for both the artist and his society. He made it clear that the American artist in 1915 must help his society come to terms with itself before he could come to terms with his own art and use it for the expression of eternal verities and values. This was a more basic kind of "realism" than that which the earlier and milder radicals in literature like William Dean Howells had launched against the entrenched "idealism" of the acknowledged masters of the eighties and nineties. There had been at least two quite contrary portraits of America presented by the literature of the previous generation, that of the genteel Eastern

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writers whose principal spokesmen had been James Russell Lowell and Henry James, and that of the rebellious, continentally conscious group whose principal spokesmen had been Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. The plea for ideality as opposed to nationality was firmly presented by Lowell as early as 1849. "Literature survives," he wrote in a review of Longfellow's novel Kavanagh, "not because of its nationality, but in spite of it. . . . The only element of permanence which belongs to myth, legend, or history, is exactly so much of each as refuses to be circumscribed by provincial boundaries.3 To this position Whitman answered in the Preface to the 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass: "The American poets are to enclose old and new for America is the race of races. . . . As soon as histories are properly told there is no more need of romances. . . . The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." 4 At the close of the century this conflict between the genteel and the organic response of literature to American life had not been resolved. In spite of the efforts of W. D. Howells and the early realists to effect a reconciliation, the gap was growing wider. "Realism," he wrote, "is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material," but he saw the truth of American democracy as quite different from that of the corrupt aristocracies of Europe, and he committed the logical fallacy of transferring this difference to the literature itself. In the United States, he argued, realism and idealism could survive together because "we have been now some hundred years building up a state on the affirmation of the essential equality of men. . . . these conditions invite the artist to the study and appreciation of the common, and to the portrayal in every art of those finer and higher aspects which unite rather than sever humanity. . . . The arts must become democratic, and then we shall have the expression of America in art." 5 Such an effort to reconcile the opposing views of the genteel idealist with the "barbaric yawp" of the true realist failed because it attempted to impose propriety on

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literature as well as on life, and the eruptive civilization of his times ignored his admonitions. The first critical spokesman for the new literary movement had, long before 1900, sold out to the entrenched opposition, and the nineteenth century ended with the genteel writers in full control. Together with Dreiser's Sister Carrie, the year 1900 saw Edmund Clarence Stedman's An American Anthology, a garnering of the poetic achievement of the past. "Our afterglow is not discouraging," said the critic in his introduction, after pointing out that the last of the literary masters of the older generation was now dead. "We have a twilight interval, with minor voices and their tentative modes and tones; still, the dusk is not silent, and rest and shadow with music between the dawns are a part of the liturgy of life, no less than passion and achievement." 6 A similar note of apology for the post-romantic generation was sounded in 1903 by Professor William P. Trent of Columbia in A History of American Literature, 1607-1865: "It is not surprising that their performance is disappointing, especially when it is compared with that of the writers who had been permitted to grow up in the comparatively homogeneous and unvulgarized New England of the first half of the century. But in spite of all their disadvantages the newer writers . . . upheld high ideals in a crass period, they profited from the lessons in literary art given by such British writers as Tennyson and Thackeray," and "they helped greatly to educate and refine their fellow-citizens." 7 And Professor Barrett Wendell of Harvard emphasized the same Anglicist and Brahmin prejudices, the same belief that the primary purpose of literature is to refine the public morals, in A Literary History of America, published in 1900. . . our main purpose . . . we should constantly remember, is chiefly to discern what, if anything, America has so far contributed to the literature of our ancestral English language." "The literary history of America is the story, under new conditions, of those ideals which a common language has compelled America, almost unawares, to share with England. . . . The ideals which for three

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hundred years America and England have cherished, alike yet apart, are ideals of morality and of government, — of right and of rights. . . . In the simple, hopeful literature of inexperienced, renascent New England, . . . for a while, the warring ideals of democracy and of excellence were once reconciled, dwelling confidently together in some earthly semblance of peace." 8 The first wave of the realist movement ended, therefore, in inadequacy so far as literary criticism was concerned, and during the first decade of the twentieth century the new forces went, as it were, underground. In evidence were, on the one hand, the "muck-raking" journalists and novelists like Lincoln Steffens and Upton Sinclair, whose work was subliterary at best, and, on the other, the editors and writers of the upper-class literary monthlies like Atlantic, Harpers, and Century, which still dominated the literary market place. Mark Twain's humor soured into the caustic misanthropy of his later years, while Howells and James developed their art of sustained chronicles of "polite" behavior both at home and abroad. The stronger voices among the new writers, if heard at all, were as yet unrecognized as shapers of an awakening vitality in American letters. The critics who led the revolt of 1910-1915 had in common only their impatience with the general state of stagnation that seemed to have settled on the American literary scene. Beyond this initial sharing of a common impulse, they broke up into a variety of schools and of species and subspecies. There was no one positive remedy upon which more than a handful could agree, although many saw "socialism" as a glorious sun on the horizon; nor did many of them think their problems through to a defined and stable position. The most that can be said of the situation is that it divided itself more or less along the lines of the classical emphases on Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, or according to the belief that the new order for American literature should seek its first foundations in an effort to understand and express the basic nature of things in its own time and place, in a re-evaluation of

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its own experience according to revitalized ethical criteria, or in a fresh appreciation and analysis of literary expression for its own sake. Convenient labels for these overlapping groups are: the Literary Radicals, the Neo-Humanists, and the Aesthetic of Analytical Critics. The Literary Radicals formed by far the largest group. Most of them followed the line that Van Wyck Brooks was to define, and proposed a more basic kind of "realism" than the descriptive and superficial method of Howells. This realism sought to understand the nature of man and his universe in the light of the new science, thus falling in with the naturalistic movement in European literature, and, at the same time, to examine and evaluate the principles and conditions of twentieth-century American society as they actually were and not as a vague and sentimental idealism would like them to be, thus identifying itself with the social criticism by which the European movement was so strongly motivated. In this group, literary criticism was hardly distinguishable from metaphysical and social criticism. One may divide its members into those whose social and political views inclined them to the Left or to the Right, but most of them were content to espouse vague causes like "democracy," "socialism," — even "anarchism" — rather than to conform, as their European counterparts so soon did at their cost, to organized systems of dogma and to political dictatorships. They were united only by their primary belief that literature is never vital except when it deals directly and critically with life. The term "Literary Radical" was taken by Brooks from the title of an unpublished novel about the then younger generation by his friend Randolph Bourne, and it was to that physically handicapped but intellectually dynamic young disciple of the philosopher John Dewey that the group first looked for leadership. "He saw," wrote Brooks later, "that we needed, first, a psychological interpretation of these younger malcontents, secondly, a realistic study of our institutional life, and finally, a general opening of the American mind to the currents of contemporary

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desire and effort and experiment abroad." 9 Bourne's own writings are scattered but incisive fragments on literature and society, but when brought together they provide a program of revolt for youth at a time when the normal protest of a rising generation against its fathers was about to be magnified into a World War that cut civilization's future from its past. Mixing sociological with literary study, reading Dreiser and Dostoevski as well as Dickens, writing with equal insight on the cultural nationalism of the European countries and the raw cosmopolitanism of the American Midwest, Bourne saw in his world only uninhibited invitations to the mind of adventurous youth. Even though his naïveté was soon dashed by the issues of war, his early death left a challenge that more vigorous if perhaps more callous warriors like H. L. Mencken were to take up and carry forward. With Mencken, the attack on the British-American genteel tradition became more virulent if not more profound. Perhaps because his grandfather had emigrated from Germany, perhaps because of an early study of Nietzsche, his thoughts and feelings were instinctively middle-European and his political philosophy pointed more toward Hitler than toward Lenin. In his series of Prejudices, starting in 1919, he centered his ire on Puritanism — defined much as Brooks had defined it — and on the "professors," any of those teachers of conformity, in school or out, who he thought substituted hypocrisy for honesty. He attacked the literary great and discovered and defended the literary underdog. Because his irony so far outdistanced his judgment, his importance as a critic is not so great as was his service as an irritant, but he did call attention to Dreiser, Huneker, Conrad, and many other new voices in literature, in most cases supporting his views vigorously and for the right reasons. But, the over-all image of America which emerges from his collected writings is a caricature rather than a description, anti-British, anti-democratic, antirespectable. Every stroke of his pen tended to bring the "lowbrow" up and the "highbrow" down, to force modern American man to view himself and his society honestly as products of hu-

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man desires and weaknesses rather than as reflections of lofty and inflexible ideals. He summed up the situation thus: "Romance, in American fiction, still means only a somewhat childish amorousness and sentimentality — the love affairs of Paul and Virginia, or the pale adulteries of their elders. And on the side of realism there is an almost equal vacuity. . . . They never penetrate beneath the flow of social .concealments and urbanities to the passions that actually move men and women."10 That this is so inaccurate a description of the literary situation some thirty years later is a circumstance for which H. L. Mencken is in no small degree responsible. The ideas of the Literary Radicals produced a whole shelf of books of réévaluation and criticism of American life during the period between the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and the stock market crash in 1929. One popular form of the movement was the "debunking" biographies like H. S. Gorman's A Victorian American — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or Lloyd Morris' The Rebellious Puritan-Portrait of Mr. Hawthorne in which an acknowledged master is reëxamined "realistically," especially with respect to his private life and personal frustrations, and is thus reduced in stature. Another was the broad réévaluation of contemporary American society and the arts, like Waldo Frank's Our America or Harold Stearns's symposium Civilization in the United States, usually with a plea for reform of ideas and institutions as well as criticism of existing conditions. A third, and perhaps the most useful in the long run, was the attempt to discover America's "usable past" by a rejection of the assumed American tradition and a review of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury culture, again with a "realistic" point of view. Lewis Mumford's study of architecture, Sticks and Stones, and of literature, The Golden Day, were perhaps as successful as any of the earlier attempts at historical reassessment. With the founding of the American Literature Group of the Modern Language Association in the early twenties, of the Saturday Review of Literature in 1924, and of the scholarly journal American Literature

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in 1929, the forum and the academy began to unite in a common effort. Carl Van Doren stepped down from his desk at Columbia to be literary editor of the Nation (1919-1922); Henry Canby came from New Haven to edit the Saturday Review for twelve years; and a previously unknown Vernon L. Parrington came out of the West with Main Currents in American Thought (19271930) to give a final academic sanction to the reexamination of America's literary past as expression of her main political and social tradition, which Professor Parrington defines as the democratic-agrarian philosophy of Thomas Jefferson in all its variations and contraries. Between 1927 and 1933, the radical literary movement seems to have run its course, at least in its first phase of shock and réévaluation. Many of its leaders either died like Bourne and Parrington; became temporarily silent — like Brooks, Mumford, and Mencken — before undertaking major works of synthesis; or identified their radicalism with one or another of the dogmatic ideologies — Freudianism, Marxism, Fascism — which were then being imported from Europe to absorb and channel American critical thinking. Its main drives of critical nationalism and philosophical naturalism were by this time incorporated into the new fiction, poetry, and drama which by 1925 were already showing the full inspiration of the radical challenge in their free choice of materials from life, their uninhibited courage in dealing with previously forbidden themes, and their devastating critical candor. Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Eugene O'Neill, Carl Sandburg, and Robert Frost were among those who most directly profited from the interference run by the Literary Radicals. Although sharing with this group an impatience with the conventionality of literary forms and modes at the turn of the century, the other two groups of critics that began to claim attention around 1910 were reactionary rather than experimental in their emphases. Both the Neo-Humanists and the AestheticAnalytical critics called for reëxamination of standards and forms

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rather than for greater freedom in life and literature, the one for new and firmer ethical bases for art, and the other for more attention to art and the experience of art for its own sake. When George Santayana wrote The Genteel Tradition at Bay in 1931, he was attacking the Neo-Humanists rather than the older defenders of ideality: "The humanists of the Renaissance were . . . pleasantly learned men, free from any kind of austerity, who, without quarrelling with Christian dogma, treated it humanly, and partly by tolerance and partly by ridicule hoped to neutralize all its metaphysical and moral rigour." The new American humanists, on the other hand, seemed to be returning to the sources of the movement in the theocratic doctrines of Calvin. "Culture won't do, they must say, unless it be the one right culture: learning won't do, unless it fills out the one true philosophy."11 The new movement was signalized by the appearance in 1904 of the first volumes of Paul Elmer More's Shelburne Essays, which continued through 1909, when More became editor of the Nation, and then on for many years. These essays were followed by Irving Babbitt's Literature and the American College in 1908 and The New Laokoön in 1910, and by William Crary Brownell's American Prose Masters in 1909. By 1910 these philosophercritics were apparently aware that they, and some younger men with them, were fellow workers in a cause. Their primary purpose was to attack what they thought to be the extreme pretensions of the new science, whether it appeared as philology in the college literature departments or as a sponsor of unethical conduct on the part of Theodore Dreiser's heroines. By offering a mechanistic natural law as the ultimate law of the universe, rather than the law of God or the will of man, science, they charged, was attacking human integrity at its roots and destroying literature along with life. Hoping to avoid the dogmatism of religion as well as that of science, these critics sought an answer to their problem in the middle ground of traditional human culture. They urged a return to introspection as a means

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of achieving knowledge and right conduct, substituting the "inner check" for the inner light, and human equilibrium for the extremes of theocracy and natural anarchy. The sweet reasonableness of this position was not always reflected in the personal character and conduct of its proponents. Babbitt in particular was by temperament a warrior in the lists, fighting for his view of literature against Kittredge and the philologists as well as against Mencken and the Literary Radicals. More and Brownell, on the other hand, revealed some rather extreme romantic ideas in their essays on such American writers as Thoreau and Cooper. In the long run, it was not so much the rigid dogmatism without dogma for which they argued as their emphasis on the study of literature for the sake of its ideas that gave them a major role in American literary history. By 1930, when their leading disciple, Norman Foerster, garnered the best fruit of their thinking in Humanism in America, the movement itself had run its course. Like the Literary Radicals, the Neo-Humanists had served mainly to give literature a reason for feeling alive and important in a materialistic society. The aesthetic movement in criticism was not at the start analytical or in any way associated with Neo-Humanism. James G. Huneker urged enjoyment as the aim of all the arts, and "John Charteris" of Willoughby Hall, the alter ego of that Southern gentleman, James Branch Cabell, suggested that all the auctorial virtues were "distinction and clarity, and beauty and symmetry, and tenderness and truth and urbanity." "So I in point of fact desire of literature, just as you guessed, precisely those things of which I most poignantly and most constantly feel the lack in my own life." 12 His plea that Romance, merely because it can exist only beyond life, contains a truth that is higher than that of Realism is a sensuous substitute for the ideality of Brooks's highbrows. An American version of Walter Pater, Cabell, with a few others, tried to lead the revolt down the primrose path of imaginative escape from reality. It remained for J. E. Spingarn to offer a code and a discipline

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to all such vague searchings for the exclusive pleasures of art, and to cast the literary revolt into definitive terms as an aesthetic activity alone. American criticism "has neither inherited nor created a tradition of esthetic thought," he wrote in "The American Critic." For nearly all our critics, "a disconnected body of literary theories takes the place of a real philosophy of art." "Art has something else to give use; and to seek moral or economic theories in it is to seek moral or economic theories, but not art." Challenging at once the social concern of a Van Wyck Brooks, the moral anxiety of an Irving Babbitt, and the sensuous impressionism of a Cabell, Spingarn sums up the need of the American critic: "Only the drenching discipline that comes from mastery of the problems of esthetic thought can train us for the duty of interpreting the American literature of the future." 13 That future was becoming a present as Spingarn wrote, because the balance of forces of action and reaction in the decade 1925-1935 made it possible for the American writer of fiction, poetry, and drama to confront the materialism of his society and ask of it the ultimate questions about the worth and the destiny of man. American literature had really come of age. The generation of Hemingway and Faulkner was far more sophisticated aesthetically than was that of Dreiser and Sandburg. The task of opening up the new material for shaping by new art forms had been completed by 1920. The even greater task of sharpening and refining the tools of a new art made its urgent demands. Simply because the situation required it, this generation developed the aesthetic detachment that art demands and that Spingarn had called for. In doing so, it took the first steps from revolt into reaction, from romantic exuberance into classical control. The peak of the movement was reached at that moment when the artist found himself both wholly within and wholly outside his material. This a dozen or more American writers succeeded in doing — among them O'Neill in Mourning

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Becomes Electra, Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom!, and T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets — but the moment passed. By 1940 there was more than a war to declare the approaching end of a literary era. A new separation of the artist from his society was taking place at the very moment when they seemed in the best working rapport. It had been hinted in O'Neill's Hairy Ape who could not find the group to which he rightfully "belonged," in Hemingway's Jake Barnes who suffered a symbolic as well as a physical injury to separate him from his fellows, and in Wolfe's forever wandering and lost alter ego, Eugene Gant. In all these writers, the issue of alienation of the sensitive spirit from his society was a theme within the material itself. When the artist finally achieved — first in poetry and criticism, much later in fiction and drama — the actual aesthetic detachment that O'Neill and Hemingway, and especially Wolfe, never quite sustained, he began a fatal separation from the material that gave life to his work. The reaction was in progress. The theme of the alienation of the sensitive human spirit from the harsh realities of his world is, of course, common to the great literature of other times and places, including the American nineteenth-century renaissance, but it seemed, in the context of the modern machine and of American industrial supremacy, to force a rather special kind of escape in the twentieth-century group. Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound had fled to Europe and settled there permanently well before World War I, and T. S. Eliot was soon to follow. Others, like Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and Archibald MacLeish, joined a widespread expatriate movement between the war and the depression, but returned to the United States by about 1930 to make their peace with its civilization. Malcolm Cowley has described this migration in Exile's Return (1934) as motivated by three kinds of escape: into art, into the primitive, and into another land — presumably the continent of Europe. This explanation will do for those artists who took the third of these choices, but for the causes and meanings of the

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other two, one would better turn to Edmund Wilson's AxeTs Castle, perhaps the best contemporary study of this problem of the alienated artist, a book which does for the literary reaction much of what Van Wyck Brooks's early books did for the literary revolt: it provides a summit from which the landscape may be surveyed before and after. Taking as his text the long poem Axel, published by Villiers de l'lsle-Adam in 1890, Wilson presents a study of the Symbolist movement in contemporary European and American literature. This movement, he assumes, was based on the "renunciation of the experience of the outside world for the experience of the imagination alone." Poets, he finds, were particularly susceptible to this tendency because they seemed to have no place in "the utilitarian society which had been produced by the industrial revolution and the rise of the middle class." They might choose either the way of Axel ( a retreat to the tower of their own sensibilities) or the way of Rimbaud (a retreat to distant and primitive lands). For both, the Symbol, including the entire art of language, becomes an instrument for concealing rather than revealing the outer reality, a screen around the inner world of the imagination, and a set of mechanical devices that can be used at will by the poet to satisfy his own needs. The symbols of the Symbolists are not, like those of Christianity, for example, representative of large and commonly held concepts; rather they are "usually chosen arbitrarily by the poet to stand for special ideas of his own — they are a sort of disguise for these ideas." 14 Of the six writers discussed by Wilson, two are French, two Irish, and two American — both of the latter having retreated to Europe, T. S. Eliot to London and Gerturde Stein to Paris. The movement, as he sees it, was international in character but had its roots in France. Why then is it important to American literary history or to the shaping of the American self-image? The image of the alienated artist was already established long before 1930 as a characteristic American image, traceable to Poe, James, and innumerable minor writers of the nineteenth century.

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The Symbolist movement fell into this tradition and, once established on American soil by the expatriate or repatriated artist of the twenties and thirties, became the principal counter-image to that of the socially participating artist of the early years of the century. Much of this development can be traced to the influence of two literary women, Amy Lowell and Gertrude Stein, who had a far deeper and wider critical influence than the intrinsic merits of their own writing might warrant. The influence of Amy Lowell was felt mainly through her sponsorship of the Imagist movement in the American poetry of the early twenties. At the time when Frost, Sandburg, Lindsay, and Masters were producing the bardic poetry of an aroused people, Amy Lowell set up the standard of a counter-movement. Stigmatized as the high priestess of a new poetic license known as free verse, she took pains in her own survey of the movement, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917) to stress the control and discipline that Imagism demanded. These poets, she felt, represented the third stage of the revolt, a stage in which poetry could "inherit in plenitude and calm" that for which the early and more stormy poets had fought. The rules that were to govern their performance emphasized the exact use of common language, the discovery of new rhythms, absolute freedom in choice of subject, and the use of images that could "render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities." Poetry, finally, must be "hard and clear, never blurred or indefinite"; it must be the product of concentration. Freedom of subject matter had been achieved and was to be maintained, but freedom of form was to be severely disciplined through control of language, image, and rhythm. These first signs of reaction were simultaneous with the stormiest stages of the romantic movement, but again American literature was reflecting a European trend. American Imagism was but an echo of a recent movement in French poetry, and it was to France that America's other high priestess of the new •order had retreated as early as 1902. Gertrude Stein had been

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thoroughly trained in scientific method at Radcliffe and at the Johns Hopkins medical school, and she knew and understood the new movements in painting. Approaching the problem of literary expression from the angle of the psychology of language, she was able to crack the rigid forms of normative grammar, syntax, and rhetoric, as Cézanne and Picasso were fracturing the conventional forms of painting. Words and images suddenly became mere colors on a palette to be applied as the aesthetic sense of the artist dictated. With this new fluidity of medium, she then turned to experiments of verbal expression. Never quite achieving the aesthetic control for which she pleaded, she was able nevertheless to communicate her principles to those who were finer artists than she — among them Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and, at one remove, T. S. Eliot and William Faulkner. Surely the place of this lifelong expatriate in American literary history has been underestimated. Her Three Lives (1909), apparently anarchic in concept and discursive in style, is the focal book of the new order in American prose and poetic arts. It released the scientific principles of order in form as Dreiser's Sister Carrie had released the new material. It was an elementary textbook for the American Symbolists. After a brief flirtation with the Imagists, in 1908 America's most technically gifted and experimental poet, Ezra Pound, took up what he hoped would be a permanent residence in Europe. Between 1920 and 1924 he was in Paris in close association with the expatriate group of all countries at the modest salon of Gertrude and Leo Stein. Soon thereafter he moved to Rapallo, Italy, and associated himself with the rising Fascism which he found congenial to a theory of "usury" he had even by then developed to the point of fanaticism. Apparently a follower of fads, Pound in perspective appears not only as a naturally gifted poet, but as a consistent advocate and student of the basic requirements of his craft. "Great literature," he wrote in 1931, "is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree."15 His experiments in poetry, from the simple early verse to the

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complicated Cantos of recent years, are all exercises in the use of language as form. Whatever posterity may think of his political and economic views, it cannot escape the facts of his inherent poetic gifts and his major contribution to an understanding of the principles and possibilities of language when released and controlled by modern science. Pound became for subsequent American writers the model of the alienated artist who achieved success by devotion to the requirements of his art, and who found his relation to society by rejecting it. His critical detachment from American life was so complete as to make his social thinking absurd, his position supreme as lord of the tower of Edmund Wilson's Axel. In acknowledging Pound as his master, T. S. Eliot was marking the beginning rather than the end of his poetic career. In him the alienated artist perfected his role. Eliot's is a deeper and broader mind than those of his contemporaries and followers. Profiting from Pound's experiments in language and the uses of the past, he knew what to take and what to leave. His earliest published poems reveal a long technical and philosophical apprenticeship. An isolated artist in that he has held firmly to the necessary alienation of the artist role, he has never allowed himself to lose touch with the society of his day and with its underlying ethical structure. There has never been any question in Eliot's mind about the reactionary character of his own thought. Admitting in one place that he began as a disciple of Irving Babbitt and in another that he is a Royalist, an Anglo-Catholic, and a Classicist, he insists time and again that literature must be judged by moral, religious, and even political as well as aesthetic standards. The reading of "great" literature is only one of many ways that an individual may use in cultivating his own intellectual and spiritual growth, and there is for him a right and a wrong in his measurement of what is great. But to recognize the close interrelationship of the parts of experience is not to confuse the various functions of the human intelligence. He differs finally

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from Babbitt in that the latter speaks of "humanism and religion"; whereas Eliot recognizes an alternative of religion or humanism. When he says, "The 'greatness' of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards," he adds, "though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards." 16 Eliot's literary conservatism is therefore parallel with his general conservatism as an individual, but it is none the less distinct. For him art is a special kind of experience and should not be confused with other kinds. It is complete in itself. What one believes as a man does not make poetry; it merely supplies the material for the maker. "The poet makes poetry, the metaphysician makes metaphysics, the bee makes honey, the spider secretes a filament; you can hardly say that any of these agents believes: he merely does." Eliot himself as a poet and critic is careful to make and to judge poetry as poetry, and not to inject into it his own emotions. Not until it becomes a total "objective correlative" of life is it good art, as Hamlet is not a good play because Shakespeare is obviously feeling more in this case than his medium will allow him to express.17 Eliot is unhappy about most literature since the seventeenth century because he finds that somehow there occurred at that time a "dissociation of sensibility," a break between the capacity to experience and the adequacy of the medium to contain the expression. "While the language became more refined, the feelings became more crude." He himself went back to John Donne and the English Metaphysicals to learn his art, as Emerson and Emily Dickinson had before him, and he has in effect dismissed the whole romantic movement and all that it stands for. As one trained in philosophy, he is able to separate the aesthetic from other functions of his mind without involving the other functions immediately, a feat that even Pound has never quite been able to accomplish satisfactorily. Without becoming an analytical critic, Eliot provided the platform on which the analysis of meaning could become a specialization in itself; and without alienating the

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artist in himself from the rest of his personality, he distinguished the artist-role so clearly and completely from other roles that he prepared the way for a total alienation. His importance to American literary history lies both in his general conservatism and in the autonomy he provides for the aesthetic function of the artist and critic alike. Some critics like Kenneth Burke and Yvor Winters have likewise attempted to distinguish the special role of the artist without destroying the interdependence of art and ethics, but others have been willing to take the next step and complete the separation. By 1939, with the founding of the Kenyon Review by John Crowe Ransom, the analytical reaction was ready to take command of the literary situation in the United States, and the main dynamic phase of the twentieth-century literary movement was over. Meanwhile, naturalism had shown signs of exhaustion even before the outbreak of World War II. Chief symptoms of the decline of this romantic and organic impulse lay in the search for authority, the willingness to subordinate free inquiry to dogma in literature as well as in politics, religion, and other aspects of human thought. Eliot's turn to the Anglican Church and Pound's identification with the cause of Italian Fascism were only extreme examples of a general movement in the thirties toward conservatism and conformity among American writers. Those who did not become expatriated or did not remain so were attracted by the extremist movements of Communism and Fascism at home. Acceptance of the doctrine of Marx in its most dogmatic form became the badge of the "radical" critic of 19301940. V. F. Calverton's The Liberation of American Literature (1932) and Granville Hicks's The Great Tradition (1933) demonstrated what can happen to a socio-literary approach like Parrington's when the Marxian dialectic is substituted for Jeffersonian liberalism. James T. Farrell's A Note on Literary Criticism (1936) and Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station (1940)

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attempted to discover the relation of American life to the new ideology while avoiding the excessive dogmatism and political commitment of the extremists. Magazines were taken over by control groups of both the political Left and Right, and writers of fiction, poetry, and drama, as well as of criticism, became critics of the democratic tradition and the capitalistic order rather than, like the earlier Literary Radicals, advocates at most of reform. Anti-Americanism and ideological conformity were characteristics of many of the naturalistic writers and critics by 1940. The symbolism of the Spanish Civil War as an uprising of the so-called "Democratic front" against the threat of Fascism brought the new alignment to a head; the signing of the RussoGerman Pact broke the spell. By 1940, the advocates of literature as the expression of the forces at work in American society were a scattered and self-defeated army. The purists, on the other hand, who had long been advocating a new separation of literature and society, began at the same time to find refuge in the aesthetic-linguistic-psychological emphases of Stein, Pound, Eliot, and a revived Henry James. The metaphysical or Symbolist movement in American poetry and the analytical or "New" movement in American criticism began to take root in American soil in the thirties, and by 1945 it had become the dominant school. Only then did it begin to show any marked influence on the American drama and novel, as Freudian analysis offered fiction an apparently systematic symbolism. Those writers and critics who felt the need for orthodoxy and authority — and who among the American writers in the postwar period did not? — found in a kind of aesthetic existentialism an escape from the dilemma of social and political conformity. The "New" critics took over, and the dominant literary image of America began to be drawn by a highly intellectual and aesthetically sensitive coterie. The result was a major contribution by America to world literature in the form of a literary reaction, as the American literary revolt had contributed its major writers to the naturalis-

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tic movement in world literature in the early years of the century. The existence of several schools of criticism like the Southern Agrarians or Fugitives (Ransom, Tate, Cleanth Brooks, R. P. Warren, etc.), and the Chicago School, as well as of individualists like Burke, Winters, and Blackmur, does not prevent these critics from accepting a strong common core of orthodoxy. Instead of a central principle of organic process, they substitute a central principle of organic form, which throws the critical emphasis away from problems of social context and of historical or biographical causation and wholly onto problems of structure, texture, and meaning in the work of art itself. Language and symbol are embraced in the single concept of metaphor, and literature becomes a substitute for rather than an involvement in life. The central doctrine of the movement is expressed by W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Cleanth Brooks in their Literary Criticism, A Short History, published in 1957. " 'Form' in fact embraces and penetrates message' in a way that constitutes a deeper and more substantial meaning than either abstract message or separable ornament." 18 Escaping from the conflicts and complexities of modern life, the new analytical criticism supplies a "job of work" to be done and the tools, mainly of rhetoric, with which to do it. It is too soon, perhaps, to sum up the achievements of these analytical critics, but some of their contributions are already apparent. They have developed in the cultivated reader a much sharper sense of the values in the work of art with which he is dealing; they have singled out and set in a permanent gallery some of the really great and nearly forgotten or misinterpreted works of the American literary imagination; and they have stimulated and guided a whole generation of new writers. Many of their judgments of their contemporaries — particularly of writers like Wolfe, O'Neill, and Dos Passos, who are remarkable for their vitality rather than for their refinement of sensibilities — have probably been too much hampered by dogmatism to stand the test of time, but any lack in this respect is more than

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compensated for by their aid in the réévaluation of earlier authors like Hawthorne, Melville, Stephen Crane, and Henry James, and by their insights into such highly tempered contemporaries as Hart Crane, Faulkner, and Eliot. It is not too soon, however, to recognize in this reactionary movement a return to the status of separation of literature and American life which aroused the concern of the Literary Radicals of the early years of the century. The gigantic swing of the great mass of the American people away from drama, fiction, and poetry to other media such as movies, television, and radio would indicate an increasing need for mass expression that written literature is failing to supply. The trend of historians and social scientists away from studies of economic and political causation to studies of human behavior itself as the best index to culture would suggest a way of approaching the larger problems of literary meaning that the techniques of the analytical critics are entirely inadequate to cope with. Minority groups such as Jews, Catholics, Negroes, and recent cultural migrants from Western Europe and the Orient are producing a large proportion — and perhaps the most vital part — of a literature that was once Protestant, Anglo-Saxon, and middle-class. The literary image of the America of the second half of the twentieth century is already beginning to take recognizable form as something quite different from the images of either rebellion or conformity discussed in the preceding pages, but it is too soon to attempt to describe it, much less to evaluate its worth or indicate its direction.

IV MUSIC AND MUSICIANS Edward Ν. Waters

Δ Ι PEOPLE understands its music when its composers understand their people. This understanding need not be immediate or contemporaneous. The popular and simple arts, folk and composed, are usually appreciated without delay. Serious, carefully disciplined, and esoteric creations may wait longer before the people for whom they are intended accept them, relish them, and admit them as part of a cultural heritage. In music as in other arts there are exceptions that escape the time lag so frustrating to composers, but of its existence there can be no doubt. It seems to be a concomitant of artistic modernity, as evident in American society as in European. The processes of time, however, make the unpalatable flavorful, the hostile friendly, the strange familiar — and the best of a nation's culture sooner or later becomes the pride of a nation's citizens. Listeners who repudiated a symphony ten or fifteen years earlier may eventually welcome the same work, feeling a glow of satisfaction because it came from a fellow-countryman who has (or had) something to say to all the people. As this happens with increasing frequency, the time lag may shrink to lesser intervals; composers and audience draw closer together, their cultural bonds are more tightly knit.

Intelligent proponents of American music must be lovers of music first and lovers of American music second. It is irrational and antimusical to promote and pursue an art solely in terms of nationality; in the frame of Western civilization it may even be impossible. Our music differs far too little, if at all, from the forms and idioms of Europe to justify setting it apart and calling

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it a unique phenomenon. If it is developing individual qualities, as seems likely, these, too, are traceable derivations or mutations springing chiefly from expressions having origins in Europe and Africa. To seek or to expect a one-hundred-percent American music is to labor under a delusion that should be swept away; but if one looks in our music for an American spirit, American characteristics, American vigor (even if these elude adequate definition), the search is defensible and will probably be rewarded. Our present degree of sophistication, perhaps taken too much for granted, has been hard won. A hundred years ago we boasted of music, but it was music purchased and imported from abroad. As long as it satisfied our needs, there was no reason to worry about a lack of native music makers. "Musical progress in the United States since 1850," wrote J. W. Moore in 1854, "has been very extraordinary, and has more than kept pace with the other arts and sciences. . . . The great European vocalists and artists who have followed each other to this country in quick succession have produced a remarkable effect in raising the standard of musical taste and spreading the science and practice of music over the land. Critics talk of the want of a national music in America. . . . It is impossible that American music can do more than reproduce the music of other ages and cultures. We are too open to the world, too receptive of all influences from abroad, too much a nation made up of others to possess a music of our own." 1 And yet, Moore had high (and contradictory) hopes. In spite of his discouraging opinion, he also wrote: "But we must confess that we have no national music. . . . The great performers on instruments, and the great singers who have visited us from Europe, have done little or nothing for the formation of a popular taste. . . . It is said that we are naturally an unmusical people. This we do not believe. . . . We are convinced that beneath the noisy, dusty, rattling shell of Yankee life, with all

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its hurry and all its money getting, there is a sense of art, which will one day be displayed with a keenness and insatiable desire, that will rival the energies of the gifted nations in the south of Europe."2 Moore himself lived to see a development in the direction he wanted America to follow. In his truly remarkable encyclopedia of 1854 he listed only 7 native-born Americans (outside of the New England psalmodists and hymnodists), and one of these was Benjamin Franklin. In 1875 he issued an Appendix to Encyclopaedia of Music wherein appeared 25 native-born American musicians. In 1876 he published A Dictionary of Musical Information in which no fewer than 404 American names were entered. There is some reason to suspect, however, that by this time his zeal was exceeding his judgment or that his criteria for selection were less elevated than his desires. Obviously, Moore saw an emerging image that reflected our musical growth, but even before his time there were composers who showed pride in being native-born artists or who bewailed the quality and quantity of American music. Francis Hopkinson may be pardoned his boasting when, in 1788, in dedicating his Seven Songs for the Harpsichord to George Washington, he declared: "However small the Reputation may be that I shall derive from this Work I cannot, I believe, be refused the Credit of being the first Native of the United States who has produced a Musical Composition." And in 1803, Oliver Holden advanced this sad thought in the preface of the eighth edition of The Worcester Collection of Sacred Harmony : "It is to be lamented that among so many American authors so little can be found well written or well adapted to sacred purposes, but it is disingenuous and impolitic to throw that little away while our country is in a state of progressive improvement." 3 The progressive improvement in music, for better or worse, followed the well-worn paths of European leaders who felt they were doing us a kindness by bringing their art to American shores. As a matter of fact, they were, and present-day critics who

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belittle their contributions are on weak ground in castigating the European influence. The summits of European music are still summits, and in the middle of the nineteenth century an American drive toward musical individuality (if it existed at all) was too weak to be felt. The example of Lowell Mason, great educator and leader, may have suggested the futility of developing a musical Americanism, but he guided our aspirations toward a worthy end. As long as we spoke a language which itself came from Europe, as long as we shared heritages from half a dozen European lands, how could it have been otherwise? The goal was still far off. The brightest light of American art music before the Civil War was perhaps Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Though trained in Europe and indoctrinated with the technique of Chopin and Liszt, he was remarkably successful in exploiting the temperament and phenomena of his background — New Orleans and the West Indies. While his music could sink to pathetic depths — which did not hinder its popularity — some of his pieces, particularly those for piano, were charmingly fanciful and spontaneous. He caught the flavor and insouciance of his exotic, yet American, haunts in a way that would be impossible to one lacking his background. His best music strives after no great examples; it wins its admirers by naturalness and ease. Stephen Collins Foster, an American immortal whose strains remain omnipresent, is difficult to classify. There is no denying his importance and popularity, but his sentimental songs and ballads were not distinguished by national individuality. Some trace of this quality is perceptible in his lively minstrel airs, which reflected a major ingredient of contemporaneous theatrical entertainment. He has become an object of veneration because of the unforced simplicity of his lyrical airs and the infectious lilt of his foot-light tunes. Several respectable, though not great, musicians, who plied their trade in this era, succeeded in turning out Civil War songs that are still rousing and stimulating. George Frederick Root and

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Henry Clay Work are representative; the former's The Battle Cry of Freedom and the latter's Marching through Georgia have lasting qualities as American patriotic songs. But, of this type of music one song outranks all others — Dixie, by Daniel Decatur Emmett. Direct and uncomplicated, similar to many popular airs, it remains uniquely invigorating, "probably the most genuinely 'American' song that we possess." 4 Yet, if one asks "why," all the powers of criticism might fail to provide an answer. It was a fluke, albeit a happy one, but Americans can claim it with pride and joy. If Dixie was phenomenal as a song, John Philip Sousa was phenomenal as a composer, at least in one small form — the march. Though he ventured into many types of composition with only fair success, he became justly famous as "The March King," exhibiting in these band pieces a verve, a spirit, an appropriate turn of melody that no one else has even approximated. Who can deny that he wrote supreme marches? And what American — when he hears or thinks of The Stars and Stripes Forever, The Washington Post, The High School Cadets, or The Liberty Bell — can resist the reflection: this is my music, this is what we are like, this is part of my background? The fine art of music, however, and its numerous composers (for there were plenty) were having a more difficult time. They benefited from no flukes; they served the art as they had learned it in Europe; they were becoming jealous of their own reputations as American composers. Not one was artistically disloyal to his country, but no two were agreed on how a distinctive national expression was to be achieved. In the 1890's Dvorák, coming from Bohemia to teach in New York, recommended the use of Negro melodies, but only his personal disciples followed his precepts — and with little success. Others were violently opposed, and no less a person than MacDowell declared: "Masquerading in the so-called nationalism of Negro clothes cut in Bohemia will not help us. What .we must arrive at is the youthful optimistic vitality and the undaunted tenacity of spirit that char-

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acterizes the American man. That is what I hope to see echoed in American music." 6 Unfortunately, MacDowell, perhaps still the most gifted of American composers, was not the artist to establish the school he was calling for. At the turn of the century, Arthur Farwell, intensely nationalistic in sentiment and caring not whether our composers found their inspiration in Negro, Indian, or Anglo-Saxon folk sources, gave deliberate encouragement to a modest nationalist movement by founding, in 1901, the Wa-Wan Press. For approximately a decade this altruistic venture issued smaller works (chiefly songs and piano pieces) of thirty-seven composers who shared, more or less, Farwell's own enthusiasm. The lasting effect of this limited but important library of American music is not easily determined, but it gave needed stimulus to several of our best known composers, among them H. F. B. Gilbert, Ε. B. Hill, E. S. Kelley, and Arthur Shepherd.® Composers were naturally dissatisfied with the number of performances their works received, or failed to receive, and occasionally members of the public voiced similar displeasure. In Pittsburgh, in 1900, Victor Herbert and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra were criticized sharply for not presenting more American music. As a matter of fact, in his six years as leader of this ensemble, Herbert conducted no less than twelve American scores by the following composers: Hadley, A. Whiting, Foote, Chadwick, Huss, MacDowell, A. F. Nevin, H. W. Parker, and Van der Stucken. For the time and place this was no mean record. A champion of the modern American composer, like Koussevitsky, was still twenty-five years in the future, and so, it may be said, was the American composer himself, at least as far as true novelty of expression was concerned.7 Under no circumstances must it be thought that, before World War I, American composers were scarce or negligible. There were many, and they developed a high degree of competence. Some were overzealous in trying to write on a nationalistic or

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patriotic basis; some felt that compositions consciously erected on a folk tune would ensure American success; some wrote naturally, faithful to the European technics cultivated under foreign teachers. Few, however, developed an artistic personality strong enough to make them great composers or composers with whom listeners in this country could feel any close affinity. Two examples suffice to illustrate this. Several years ago there was a broadcast of Arthur Foote's Suite for Strings. A distinguished musician, listening carefully, remarked that he preferred his Tchaikovsky unadulterated. Within the past year I heard a recording of a completely unfamiliar work. In attempting to guess the composer's identity, I said that it sounded like Richard Strauss, to which an informed colleague replied: "You're close — it's Henry Hadley!" A list of American composers active between 1890 and 1925 would be astonishingly long. The following names are only a few of a large group that served their art and their country worthily as we struggled for a status of equality with foreign creators (for, paradoxically enough, this desired status seemed attainable only through becoming internationally minded and not merely internationally trained): John Alden Carpenter, George W. Chadwick, Frederick S. Converse, Arthur Farwell, Arthur W. Foote, Henry F. B. Gilbert, Charles T. Griffes, Henry K. Hadley, Edgar Stillman Kelley, Edward A. MacDowell, Daniel Gregory Mason, and Horatio W. Parker. Composers of this period were overlapped or succeeded by younger men who, with their successors, have carried the fine art of music down to the present. The later artists were unquestionably affected by the First World War and the changes it effected. Americans by the score had studied in Europe before the conflict, but they had followed the precepts of an older generation. The postwar Americans, however, shaken by world events, were ready to absorb the foreign modernism and to twist it any way their fancy dictated. Perhaps the most obvious element of their work was effort, the exertion of which resulted in a host of pieces

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characterized by dissonance, sharpness, seriousness, and determination. Their music was not warmly welcomed by the American public, but neither were many other phenomena that constituted the war's aftermath. Yet their pieces were positive and personal; the composers were no longer clinging to the idioms of an older day. A leading figure in the new dispensation, and still in the distinguished vanguard of artists, declared that the 1920's and 1930s saw the emergence of "an indigenous school of composers," even though "there are still few, if any, trends typical of our own music alone." He knew that something vital and important was occurring, that our composers were "getting many more performances than ever before," and that they were suddenly more newsworthy. He did not expect American music to show a single profile for a long time to come, for the country was too large, too many-sided, too heterogeneous to develop easily in this direction.8 Indeed, it may never do so, in view of the racial and cultural mixtures which are our boast and a source of our spiritual wealth. The American composer was also aided during the twenties and thirties by happenings that gave him encouragement and sometimes tangible assistance. There was an unprecedented flowering of new symphony orchestras, a number of which attained major rank. New and important schools, equal to the best in Europe, were established — Eastman, Juilliard, and Curtis, for example. European masters came to the United States, and serious music took firm root in American universities. New sources of musical support became available: the Coolidge Foundation in the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim Foundation, both in 1925; the Koussevitzky Foundation in 1942 and the second Koussevitzky Foundation in the Library of Congress in 1949; more recently, in 1952, the Fromm Foundation in Chicago. In short, the American composer found an increasingly favorable climate to which he has responded magnificently. It must be said; too, that American composers today, having reached an enviable degree

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of maturity, are not only better equipped to make their mark, they are also more flexible than their forerunners in the variety of the work they do and the many styles they employ. We may have produced no supreme contemporary genius like Bartók, Schoenberg, or Stravinsky, but our composers (or some of them ) seem practically the equal of any. Slonimsky noted that the center of creative music has passed from Europe to the United States, and he quoted a grudging admission from Le Guide du Concert of January 30, 1948: "L'Amérique n'est plus une nation a-musicale: elle compte une cinquantaine de compositeurs de talent."® Here are half of a cinquantaine: Samuel Barber, William Bergsma, Leonard Bernstein, Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, Norman Dello Joio, David Diamond, Ross Lee Finney, George Gershwin, Howard Hanson, Roy Harris, Charles E. Ives, Leon Kirchner, Peter Mennin, Douglas Moore, Robert Palmer, Walter Piston, Quincy Porter, Wallingford Riegger, William Schuman, Roger Sessions, Leo Sowerby, William Grant Still, Robert Ward. This group of composers is a versatile lot. Their music includes works in all forms, for all combinations of instruments. It embraces opera (with very few successes), symphonies, chamber music, vocal music, and solo pieces. Much of it is deadly serious, some is delightfully piquant, and some is (too) consciously based on folkish sources. There is no prevailing pattern or single profile in what they have produced, and in the absence of particular style or idiom, perhaps, lies their essential Americanism. To what extent do fellow Americans hear and understand them? This is a question that can be answered only fractionally, for statistics are few, incomplete, and inconclusive. Figures compiled over the past twenty years by the National Music Council, as shown in the accompanying table, afford a glimpse of the orchestral picture of the country. They are based on the programs of the major orchestras of the United States. Limited though they are, these figures are not too encouraging. Our orchestras, in 1958-59, played more works by Americans

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PERSPECTIVES

TOTAL NUMBER OF WORKS PLAYED BY MAJOR ORCHESTRAS OF THE UNITED STATES, 1 9 3 9 - 1 9 5 9 , ARRANGED ACCORDING TO COMPOSERS.

Season 1939/40 1940/41 1941/42 1942/43 1943/44 1944/45 1945/46 1946/47 1947/48 1948/49 1949/50 1950/51 1951/52 1952/53 1953/54 1954/55 1955/56 1956/57 1957/58 1958/59

Approx.

ave. over 20 yrs.

Total played

Foreign-born number percent

Naturalized number percent

American-born number percent

1391 1413 1356 1235 1430 1577 1913 1968 1904 1798 1864 1813 1834 1928 1995 2380 1840 1978 1955 2061

1257 1207 1124 978 1148 1292 1586 1676 1601 1533 1604 1540 1588 1644 1715 2067 1607 1666 1662 1759

90.3 85.5 82.9 79.2 80.3 81.9 82.9 85.2 84.1 85.2 86.1 84.9 86.6 85.3 86 86.9 87.4 84.3 85 85.3

23 114 112 116 135 143 152 140 137 118 120 142 108 134 141 122 102 141 133 111

1.7 8 8.3 9.4 9.4 9.1 7.9 7.1 7.2 6.6 6.4 7.8 5.9 6.9 7 5.1 5.5 7.1 6.8 5.4

111 92 120 141 147 142 175 152 166 147 140 131 131 150 139 191 131 171 160 191

1781

1512

85

122

7

146

8 6.5 8.8 11.4 10.3 9 9.2 7.7 8.7 8.2 7.5 7.3 7.3 7.8 7 8 7.1 8.6 8.2 9.3 8

Source: National Music Council, Bulletin (Fall 1959).

than they did twenty years earlier, but the percentage rise was discouraging. The highest percentage was in the crucial war years of 1942 and 1943, and even then it was not outstanding. It is fair to assume, however, that far more American music was played from 1940 to 1959 than in any corresponding earlier period, and during the recent past it can be maintained, at least, that American composers are holding their own. Popular music forms a different, yet oddly related, world. By the broadest definition it includes folk music, dance music, rag-

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time, jazz, Tin Pan Alley songs, operetta, musical comedy, and even barbershop quartets — any and all music enjoyed and apprehended by the people without the burden of analysis, contemplation, or rationalization of aesthetic principles and influences. It is proper and often necessary to subject all phases of popular music to scholarly scrutiny; otherwise we remain unconscious of its developments and stylistic variations as well as of its effects and characteristics. But there is no need to compile statistics to prove its value or to guess its meaning for the nation. We know what it is because we feel what it is. If it expresses tawdry sentiments, as it often does, it also expresses emotions that "art" music completely fails to express, and it has carried facets of American personality around the world. If America has found native grand opera lacking in vitality and inherent interest (except for very rare exceptions, like Gershwin's Porgy and Bess), it has warmly welcomed operetta and musical comedy. A European tradition, of course, long dominated our lighter stage composers, but this fact has caused little criticism. They were writing for entertainment, not edification, and no one cared whether the art was imported or home-grown. Victor Herbert, who was not native-born, was the master of the American musical stage for a generation and was called America's greatest composer for the theater. The honor was justly bestowed, but his best scores were a mixture of Austrian charm and Teutonic sentimentality. Yet it was Herbert, feeling acclimated as an American, who clamored for Americanism in this branch of music as well as in others. In 1911, when he composed his bewitching operetta, The Enchantress, he proclaimed: "We need an American School of Music in order to give our young composers a chance to develop and drive out quacks. Our young composers are too prone to get their ideas from the old world, and their work naturally will fall into the style of foreign composition. They do not get into their music that freshness and vitality so characteristic of this country.

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. . . I determined, when I started . . . [the] composition [of The Enchantress], to disregard absolutely every foreign impulse and to write in a frank, free American style." 10 The fact that this operetta was European to the core does not lessen its musical value or minimize the importance of Herbert's words. Besides offering good advice they showed that masters of the musical theater were likewise aware of the need of national expression. Three years after Herbert's utterance, in 1914, Irving Berlin's Watch Your Step appeared. This occupies a most important position in our musical stage history, for it was allegedly the first operetta or musical comedy with elements of ragtime, foxtrots, and onesteps.11 It was definitely American in flavor, and it ushered in a new era. Musical comedies follow each other in endless succession. It will suffice to name only a few outstanding composers to realize how indigenous the best of them seem to be, which is tantamount to saying how much they mean to the populace and how much poorer we should be without their products. It is extremely important also to note the steady improvement in musical comedy books. From a conventional pattern of moronic nonsense, they have developed into libretti which, when allowance is made for unreasonable musical interference, have moments of real social significance, tragic import, and sparkling satire. This phenomenon has aided both the American composer and the American audience. A few of the composers who have made the American operetta (and musical comedy) what it is are: Irving Berlin, Vincent Youmans, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and Frank Loesser. Without the formation of a school or coterie they have brought to the stage, in greater or less degree, the essential ingredient that Herbert called for, but could not supply. Nor should it be forgotten that Gershwin's Of Thee I Sing (book by George S. Kaufman and Morris Ryskind), created in 1931, was the first musical play to win a Pulitzer prize. The

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award went to the authors, but without the music the judges might never have heard of it. In the July 1956 issue of Harper's Magazine, Professor John A. Kouwenhoven selected and described twelve items as "distinctively American." One of these is our Constitution, one is jazz, one is chewing gum. No doubt we may be grateful for each of them, also the other nine, but it is hazardous to relate dissimilar objects, even when the description of each is persuasive and eloquent. And it seems somewhat unfair to our "art" music and composers to single out jazz as our only musical virtue. On the other hand jazz is indisputably a mighty American characteristic which conquers every country it invades. Jazz is a positive and an elusive art. Easy to listen to, it is extraordinarily difficult to describe — and to play. Its expert practitioners are entirely free within a rigorously disciplined style, and its experienced listeners know seemingly by instinct exactly how competent each artist is. No other art is so immediately and so thoroughly apprehended. Jazz as we know it today is perhaps less than two generations old, but it has both recent and remote antecedents, such as primitive chants and rhythms, blues, ragtime, spirituals, and gospel songs. It is not too difficult to trace the seeds of jazz back to the Civil War South, particularly the area around New Orleans, where French, Spanish, and Afro-American elements fused with and interacted on each other. The fusion of these elements and the metamorphoses that occurred from one city to another, constitute a unique phenomenon of artistic, emotional, and anthropological significance. And, as it became known outside of its cradle areas, its impact upon the whole world of music was enormous. Gershwin's belief has been sustained and his prophecy partially fulfilled: "Jazz I regard as an American folk-music; not the only one, but a very powerful one which is probably in the blood and feeling of the American people more than any other

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style of folk-music. I believe that it can be made the basis of serious symphonic works of lasting value." 12 When the Original Dixieland Jazz (called "Jass") Band, formed in New Orleans in 1912, went to Chicago in 1914, and to New York two years later, jazz as such began to attract national, then international, attention. Victor issued records by the band in 1917, and Columbia followed in 1918. In November of the same year a jazz band was first heard in Paris, and Milhaud confessed to being shocked and awakened by the new sonorities and rhythms.13 Attempts were made to mitigate certain jazz effects, with peculiar results: they won the denunciations of jazz purists while making new converts to our musical vernacular. In this context the date — February 12, 1924 — of Paul Whiteman's famous concert in New York, called "An Experiment in Modern Music," remains memorable. Besides virtuosic playing and incredible tonal combinations, it presented the first performance of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, and music has not been the same since.14 Some experts have suggested that jazz is accepted in every country except Americal The fragment of truth in this opinion probably resides in the fact that the best of anything is rarely accepted by the majority. The best of jazz is complex, dissonant, polyrhythmic, and governed by musical techniques that the layman is unaware of; many find it easier to appreciate a diluted or inferior jazz, or formalized popular songs. Nevertheless, the vitality of jazz is undeniable, and recognized as deeply American. Surely "more people in the United States listen to and enjoy jazz or near-jazz than any other music. . . . Because of its all pervasiveness it has a great influence on most of us. Jazz has played a part, for better or worse, in forming the American character." 15 But our character has also formed jazz. Can as much be said for chewing gum? A half ór even a quarter century ago American folk music was ridiculed or its existence denied. Elson claimed that, except for

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Indian chants, our only possible folk music stemmed from plantation life, and that before this could flourish, the rubbish of ragtime had to be cleared away.16 Rosenfeld repudiated our folk music because it was Negroid or Elizabethan, its presence in the Western hemisphere being sheerly accidental — "purely American they most certainly are not." 17 Today we have vastly different concepts and a truer appreciation. We know that our folk music is not purely American; we know that it reflects many amalgams of cultural strains; we know that these very mixtures are American; and we know that our folk music can be duplicated in no other nation. Indeed, we find our folk music so natural, so welcome, that the market is flooded with puerile imitations, a commercial flattery that is not an unmixed blessing. Scholarly research, the development of sound recording, and incessant collecting and collating are responsible for the present situation. Their benefits are found in all branches of musical application — religion, education, labor, entertainment, social intercourse, and so on. The unusual hymnal, We Sing of Life, has this correct statement in the introduction: "A unique feature of this book is its tunes from the magnificent but little-known treasure of American folk hymnody. The newer understanding of folk music in our time is here embodied in arrangements which display almost forgotten modes in all their eloquence."18 Folksong has alwaysflourishedin its own milieu, but only sympathetic observers can spread it abroad. Thomas Jefferson noted that Negro singers seemed more musically gifted than white,19 but he recognized no implications. The premier folksong publication of the country in many ways was the Allen-Ware-Garrison Slave Songs of the United States (1867), and it is honored far more today than it was ninety years ago. It took the imagination and zeal of men like R. W. Gordon, John Lomax, and Carl Sandburg, the quickened interest of institutions (particularly the Library of Congress), and the availability of music on records to make this country conscious of its musical folk heritage. The best introduction to American folksong and the "newer

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understanding" is probably gained through the recordings issued by the Library of Congress. The versions are unadulterated and the singers untainted by commercial or urban influence. Two outstanding printed collections are Sandburg's The American Songbag and Lomax's Folk Song U.S.A., which serve the listener, performer, or inquirer. But, in the latter, which catches the spirit of folksong without being pristinely pure, Alan Lomax warns: these songs are "to be crooned and lilted, moaned and shouted through, not contemplated." In them, he says, will be found the basis of democratic art, the life and emotions of a people who sing with deep sincerity of love, death, poverty, humor, sadness, achievement, and adventure. Speaking of his own and his father's enthusiasm he asserts: "It is this enthusiasm that laid the basis of the Archive of American Folk Song in the Library of Congress, where we added the voice of the common man to the written record of America." 20 But his claim that the folklorist is the "advocate of the common man" should not go unchallenged. The folklorist is the documentalist or amanuensis of the common man who, as his folksongs testify, needs no advocate. Sing and play through the Lomax collection, with its excellent piano settings by the Seegers, and absorb the spirit of The Grey Goose, the pensiveness of Careless Love, the gaiety of Skip to My Lou and Buffalo Gals, the spaciousness of The Old Chisholm Trail, the loneliness of Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie and Old Paint, the fervor of Amazing Grace and When-a My Blood Runs Chilly an' Col', the awe of Never Said a Mumblin Word, and the exuberance of Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho. The musicality of the airs and the poetry of the words make incomprehensible to us now the attitude of fifty years ago. These pieces and countless others like them are full of meaning in the 1950's; they illustrate the vicissitudes of the American common man whose experience we all share. Notes on paper are silent and lifeless. Music must be heard to be appreciated. Without submitting to aural stimuli, man can

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know nothing of his music, regardless of its period, category, or importance. The encounter of performer and auditor depends upon the agreement and convenience of both. With the advent and development of the recording machines, a revolutionary change was effected which exerts a permanent influence on musical perception and understanding. Its significance cannot be exaggerated. One performance may now serve a million people a million times — and music created today can be preserved forever. Aaron Copland has suggested that the invention permitting the mechanical reproduction of music is the equivalent of the invention of printing in the literary world.21 Not only does it give us a henceforth permanent record of musical and interpretative values of the greatest composers and artists, it also offers to Everyman any music that he wants when he wants it. It means, wrote Copland, that democracy thus enters the realm of serious music, a thrilling fact not yet fully comprehended. The same holds true, of course, for any other type of music. The phonograph is also a scientific aid of immeasurable worth. The late Frances Densmore wrote in the American Anthropologist: "A new phase of the study of Indian music will open when further examination of existing recordings is possible and new recordings are made by improved methods. Musical notation does not convey the sound of Indian singing, neither does our alphabet show the exact sounds of a foreign language. . . . the actual performance contains many peculiarities and mannerisms that cannot be shown in any graphic form. Indian music must be heard in order to be appreciated, and those who have not heard it on the reservations may study it on the recordings."22 Substitute for "Indian" any other desired adjective ( Negro, Cowboy, Eskimo, Mexican, Californian, Appalachian) and the same stricture prevails. Any single rendition of any song may be accurately and permanently captured by the phonograph for either enjoyment or analysis, a twentieth-century phenomenon born in the

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nineteenth. Its importance as an instrument of collecting has already been mentioned. Edison's invention was made in 1877. Subsequent history of the machine shows ups and downs, rivalries, bankruptcies, triumphs, and the present achievement of relative perfection. 23 Composers and musicians of all types profit artistically and financially from this parade of mechanical progress; it seems inconceivable that its influence will ever lessen. Americans who have complained of the inaccessibility of American music can probably find much that they want (for the time being) on records. In June 1957 (though the preface is dated 1956) the American Music Center in New York issued American Music on Records, "a catalogue of recorded American music currently available, prepared in cooperation with the Committee on Recordings of American Music of the National Music Council." Listed in its pages are nearly 200 serious composers, from our early derivative days to the sharply individual present. Recordings of folk music, popular music, and jazz are, of course, legion. Thanks to the phonograph, no person and no school can any longer plead ignorance of the musical segment of our national culture. It provides an image of what we were and what we have become.

ν P A I N T I N G A N D SCULPTURE Lloyd Goodrich

I N examining the evolving images of America embodied in our painting and sculpture of the present century, I shall consider not so much the Americanness of our art as what it has to say about America. By "America" I mean not only the physical face of our country and the actualities of our life, but also the concepts of the American mind, spirit and character expressed in our art. It is not the main purpose of art, any more than of literature or music, to paint a portrait of its place and time, or even to set forth any ideas at all. Art is a visual language expressing thoughts and emotions that can be entirely personal — or universal — without reference to national or contemporary factors. The artist's function is not that of the historian, philosopher, or social scientist; it is not his primary concern to comment on the social order. But his personal utterances can contribute to our selfawareness. This essay will not try to cover all leading schools and figures, but to focus on those which have something to say about the United States, consciously or unconsciously. At the beginning of the century, American art was in one of its most backward and provincial phases. The vital forces that had produced the leaders of the late nineteenth century — I n ness, Homer, La Farge, Ealdns, Ryder, Saint-Gaudens — had spent themselves, and had lapsed into academicism. The art world was governed by a devitalized idealism that had little relation to the realities of contemporary America. It was an art expressing the outlook of the upper and upper middle classes,

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genteel and polite, ignoring the common life and its crudities. In it was no hint of industrialism, the worlds of farm, factory and office, the teeming cities, the swelling tide of immigration. And it was an art of the Eastern seaboard, turning its back on the broader America of the West and South — which as a matter of fact had found little place in our art since the genre painters of the middle nineteenth century. It contained no trace of social comment or satire, indeed little humor of any kind. As a critic said of Eastman Johnson's pictures of rural workers, "they preached no ugly doctrine of discontent." That disorderly phenomenon, the American city, was pictured only in occasional glimpses of the fashionable world of Fifth Avenue. In figure painting, the American woman played the central role — young, good-looking, ladylike, conspicuously leisured, and more or less bodiless. With all its cult of womanhood, this art was singularly sexless; its emphasis was on woman's fragility and purity, her virginal qualities. The masculine flesh-and-blood realism of Eakins was a voice from the past. This academic art was a pictorial embodiment of the American idealization of womanhood that was a legacy of Puritanism. The prevailing impressionist concentration on outdoor light and color coincided with the predilections of a leisured class which was enjoying a new freedom in outdoor activities and sports, in vacations and the pleasures of summer resorts. This sunlit optimism was shared by the landscapists, who devoted themselves to nature's smiling moods, and to the idyllic aspects of our countryside, shunning the evidences of urbanism and industry that were transforming the face of America. The neat old white villages of New England were allowable, but not factories. Looking back on this school, one feels a certain nostalgia for this seemingly secure world of before the wars, and the art that mirrored it. At its best it achieved the fresh authentic charm of William M. Chase's seaside and domestic scenes, the wholesome vigor and largeness of Abbott Thayer's virgins, and Thomas Dewing's delicate, rarified sonnets to femininity. Such pictures

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bring back the innocent happiness of a world soon to be shattered. In public art — mural painting and monumental sculpture — the political and social ideals of the period received their most ambitious expression. Expanding national wealth, increasing stature as a world power, growing cultural aspirations, and the new scale and ostentation of American life, demanded a public art expressive of a more imperial United States. Inevitably, the patterns were Roman and Renaissance. The gleaming white buildings of the World's Fair of 1893, and its decorations and statuary, ushered in a golden age of academic mural painting and sculpture. An extensive public building program spread Beaux-Arts classicism the length and breadth of the land. Derivative neoclassic buildings were appropriately embellished with derivative neoclassic art. Again, the viewpoint was saccharine idealism. Blameless civic ideals were incorporated in stereotyped symbols. Justice and Charity were nice American girls whose Greco-Anglo-Saxon profiles created a new ideal physical type, half Greek, half Gibson Girl. This feminized re-doing of traditional allegories revealed a poverty of ideas or genuine convictions, a failure to connect with the vital currents of American thought and history. Consider, for example, John White Alexander's portrayal of the Spirit of Pittsburgh as a knight in shining armor serenaded by angel trumpeters, and contrast this with a more recent version of the same theme, Thomas H. Benton's forceful murals of actual steelmaking. In monumental sculpture the same academic idealism was expressed with more energy and technical proficiency, but no closer relation to actuality. Officialdom, governmental and artistic, was not yet mature enough to produce a vital public art worthy of our history, traditions, and living present. Into this peaceful academic domain, about 1905, broke a small band of iconoclasts, the young realist painters centering around Robert Henri — George Luks, William J. Glackens, John Sloan

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and Everett Shinn. All ex-newspapermen (except Henri), they were devotees of the contemporary scene, and particularly of city life. Their world was New York — its people, streets, theaters, dance halls and prize fights, the glamour of its night life, its infinite variety of character and incident — all of which they painted with love for common humanity, and a humor that had been sadly lacking in our art for many years. Although some of them, Sloan in particular, were socialists, their political beliefs found no direct expression in their paintings but were reserved for their illustrations, notably in The Masses, our first effective radical illustrated magazine, which revolutionized the style of American illustration. Their humor was genial; although of Dreiser's generation, they did not share his fatalistic pessimism, any more than Toulouse-Lautrec's mordant exposure of human degradation. While they did not idealize the city, they saw it with a love that overlooked its more unsavory aspects. In artistic concepts and style they were not advanced; it was their acceptance of contemporary life that seemed revolutionary to the official world, which dubbed them "Apostles of Ugliness." In time, and in alliance with the early modernists, they broke the dominion of the academy, and introduced a franker, more robust viewpoint. They inaugurated that interest in the contemporary American scene which has been a leading strain in our art ever since. Hard on the heels of this realist revolt came the first wave of a much broader, more fundamental revolution — the modern movements from Europe. Their influence will be more fully discussed later. What concerns us here is their impact on the older American culture, to which they were diametrically opposed in almost every respect. Modernism was not only a basic innovation in the language of art; it was the visual expression of a new spirit, at war with the devitalized Puritanism which still governed the official culture. It involved a wholehearted acceptance of the modern world, of the city and the machine, of the dynamism of contemporary life. It was a rediscovery of the physical and sen-

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sual bases of being, and an affirmation of free emotional expression. It brought a franker attitude toward sex, a new realization of its role in all human affairs, and as one of the motivating forces of all vital art. Thus the liberating influence of European modernism added its weight to that vast rejection of Puritanism that was taking place in all fields of American life. When we contrast the sexlessness of the older American art with the mature attitude toward sex of liberal and modernist artists of the past two generations, we see how profound a revolution has been accomplished. Throughout the history of art in America can be traced two basic forces: native creativity, dealing with the raw material of American life; and the influence of world art. Let us follow the first for a while. Not until the 1920's did the awakened interest in the American scene spread beyond the Eastern cities to include the larger United States, still an unexplored continent for most artists. It was the regionalists Thomas H. Benton, Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, all born in the Middle West, who rediscovered this broader America. After varying experiences in the East and in Europe, they returned to their native grounds and became articulate champions of regionalism, the belief that there is a peculiar virtue in a man's feeling for his own section that is lost in cosmopolitanism. To them the Mississippi Valley was the heartland of America, and its people, landscape and folkways had a character and flavor that were precious and worth preserving. So they recorded the America of hillbillies, revival meetings, folk singers, cotton plantations, windmills, and limitless horizons of wheat. They were in love with the raciness and toughness of this rural America, with its old-time virtues and old-time sins. They were aware of its aspects of grotesqueness, and their pictures had more than a hint of satire — not hostile satire, but a relish for native idiosyncrasies, a mingling of affection and ridicule parallel to that of Sinclair Lewis. All this was compounded with nostalgia; these artists were essentially romantics, creating images of a provincial America which was

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already beginning to pass away. (Who can say that in picturing it they did not assist its passage, as Lewis did in exposing Main Street?) The negative aspects of their viewpoint were their cultural isolationism, which saw as enemies not only Europe but the Eastern seaboard; their self-consciousness, which in Wood developed into cuteness; and their externality, concerned more with picturesqueness than with human fundamentals; they failed to achieve the depth and universality of Faulkner's regional genius. But with all these limitations, they did record certain things about their region in works which should have permanent value, unfashionable as they now are. For the first time since the nineteenth-century genre school, the world of mid-America was depicted with vitality and humor. With Edward Hopper and Charles Burchfield, other aspects of our country have been seen with a deeper, more penetrating vision. Hopper has pictured the face of the Eastern United States with all those man-made features that give it character but that the earlier idyllic landscapists had ignored — highways and gas stations, the stark simplicity of New England farmhouses, the ruthless steel horizontals of railroad tracks — a portrait of a land, uncompromising in its honesty, alive with a sense of the strong sunlight, crystalline air and high remote skies of America, and filled with the poignant poetry of solitude and stillness. His city paintings, concentrating on the character and moods of the city itself, its architectural masses, the impersonal features overlooked by the Henri group in their concern with the human actors, are haunted by the inhuman vastness, monotony and loneliness of the modern city. Hopper is a poet of places more than of humanity, but no artist has painted a more exact and intense portrait of our land and what man has made of it. Burchfield has made a definitive record of what might be called the Eastern Middle West — grim towns with their architectural monstrosities of the post-Civil-War era, streets of false fronts, rows of identical workers' houses, decaying farms — a record which exposed the grotesqueries and dreariness of a sec-

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tion typical of much of the United States, and did so with a realism, a tragic sense and a satirical power that made the regionalists seem like boosters. But in all this there was much more than satire; there was a deep emotional attachment which saw a melancholy beauty in wintry cities and smoke-begrimed streets, in the grim monuments of industry, in the pathetic pretentions of native architecture; and underlying these actualities, a lyrical awareness of the changing moods of nature, who holds her sway in streets as much as in fields. Here was an ambivalence of love and hate inevitable for a sensitive artist who had the courage to remain in his native habitat, to see its ugliness and its beauty, and out of it to create his art. At the same time the younger New York painters such as Reginald Marsh and Raphael Soyer were painting the city with a realism much more drastic and edged than the good-humored gusto of the Henri group, revealing the tawdriness of its glamor, the feverish public pursuit of pleasure, the luridness of sex as publicly presented, and by contrast, the city's aspects of human misery, the submerged life of the Bowery bum. With unsparing detail they pictured the unparalleled crowdedness of the city, the unending procession of humanity, the multitudinous activity, the babel of signs and advertisements, the overwhelming omnipresence of things. But while their work contained a new note of pessimism, its motivation was affirmative — fascination and love for the huge phenomenal complex that is the modern city. The viewpoint remained objective; there was no more conscious social comment than with the Henri group. In no other country had artists shown such interest in their contemporary environment as in the United States from 1905 to 1940. Conditions were different from those in other nations: a vast land, still raw and unfinished, unexplored by men of visual sensibility, unassimilated into art — to the artist a new world, at once familiar and fantastic, grand and squalid, loved and hated. The painters of the American scene opened our eyes to all those things from which the older genteel generation had averted their

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gaze. To them we owe a visual discovery of America equivalent to the literary discoveries of Dreiser, Anderson, Lewis, Faulkner and Wolfe. The old sugar-coated vision of an America of idyllic pleasures, sheltered virtue and happy innocence, had been dispelled, and we were shown a series of images, successively more revealing, of our country and our people. The American artist, by looking at reality and picturing the truth as he saw it, made his contribution to our growing self-knowledge. W e have been concerned so far with more or less objective versions of the American scene. The depression of the 1930's brought a swing to the Left in art as in other fields. In the history of modern art since the French Revolution, the more vital artists have seldom been champions of the ruling forces of society; but with the depression came our first widespread outspoken movement of pictorial social criticism. It included many viewpoints, from liberalism leftward, but its hard core was Marxist, holding the rigid doctrine that art was valid only if it possessed social content, and that the mere objective portrayal or sensuous celebrating of life were meaningless. Social and economic democracy, the workers' cause, and the international Popular Front were championed; capitalism, fascism, and militarism were attacked; the regionalist and American scene schools were branded as chauvinist. Stylistically, however, the chief foreign influence was not the academic naturalism of official Soviet art, but the more vital revolutionary art of Mexico, transmitted through Rivera's and Orozco's murals executed in this country. In our own social art the United States was portrayed as a land of bread lines, strikes, police brutality, lynchings and dust bowls. It was a picture colored by the prevailing desperation and revolt, heavily weighted toward negation, and distorted by Russian and Mexican concepts, but it did present certain social factors never before touched by our artists, except cartoonists. There was a new realization of America not as a visual spectacle but as a social organism, a land not only of solid Midwest farmers and pictur-

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esque hillbillies, but of class conflicts, social inequalities, denials of civil rights, and spectacular contrasts of wealth and poverty. In no other nation did artists speak their minds so freely about the social order and what was wrong with it. In the depths of the depression, the Federal government for the first time showed an awareness of the social value of art by establishing the federal art projects — a drop in the overflowing bucket of relief expenditures, but nevertheless the most extensive art program ever undertaken by a modern democracy. The stated theme was "The American Scene," but in actual practice there was wide latitude in subjects and viewpoints, with a minimum of either censorship or official propaganda — something unique in modern government-sponsored art. Mural painting and public sculpture were enormously expanded and democratized; the mold of conservative idealism was broken, and a more lively realistic attitude toward American history and contemporary life was introduced. With the end of the projects in the early 1940s the academic monopoly of public art was reinstated — a commentary on the backwardness of governmental policy in the arts. But in their eight years of existence the projects had proved one of the most stimulating influences in the history of our art. With the disillusionment of the Nazi-Soviet treaty, and the coming of World War II, the social school's concepts became obsolete. But it left a permanent influence. Social content is still an important element in American art. More than the average citizen the artist is sensitive to the climate of his time, and responds to it in his individual way. The world-wide issues of today, the tensions and anxieties of our world, the lingering horror of the two greatest wars in history, the fears for the survival of civilization — all these find expression in much of our art, though often in forms disguised consciously or unconsciously. They are stated fairly directly in George Grosz's horror-laden memories of war, in Jack Levine's biting satire on our rulers, in Robert Gwathmey's commentaries on the South and the Negro; and less directly, with more symbolism and ambiguity, in Ben Shahn's

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imaginative parables of the modern world, in Philip Evergood's fantastic visions, in Peter Blume's elaborate allegories. Such artists reveal elements of imagination, irony, and philosophic content on a higher level than the simple social protest of twentyfive years ago. They evidence a growing maturity in the American artist's attitude toward our society and toward today's troubled world. Although orthodox surrealism has never had many exponents in the United States, the discoveries of psychology have had a deep effect on our art. In the early years of the century, academic art had been governed either by literal naturalism or hackneyed pseudo-classic symbology. The exploration of the subconscious mind has released art from bondage to external actualities, and set it free to draw on the inner images of the mind's eye. Fantasy has been restored to the role it played in the great art of the past. No longer the lifeless allegory of the academicians, fantasy has been revitalized by its relation to the living reality of the subconscious mind. The result has been a richness and inventiveness of imagery lacking in our art of the early century. So far we have been considering our theme within the range of representational art. But American art has shared fully in the innovations of the international modern movements. In the first decade of the century, certain Americans had played a part in the beginnings of these movements abroad, and had come home to spread the gospel. The United States to which they returned was building its first skyscrapers, but its technology was far ahead of its artistic awareiiess. The dynamism of modern America, the towering new buildings, the functional forms of factories, the sweep of great bridges, the kaleidoscope of Broadway at night, had so far found little expression in our art; paradoxically, their spirit had been most nearly expressed by French cubism, Italian futurism, and German expressionism. So, it was Max Weber in his early cubistic interpretations of New York, Joseph Stella in his futuristic visions of the skyline, Brooklyn Bridge and

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Coney Island, and John Marin and Abraham Walkowitz in their expressionist watercolors of lower Manhattan, who first embodied in nonrepresentational forms the essential energies of twentieth-century America. "I see great forces at work, great movements," Marin wrote to Stieglitz. "I can hear the sound of their strife, and there is great music being played." 1 But the trend toward abstraction was not to prevail in the United States for at least two decades. After their youthful wild oats many modernists turned to more representational styles, but having been strongly affected by the new concepts. Cubism had a decisive influence on artists such as Charles Sheeler, Preston Dickinson, Charles Demuth and Georgia O'Keeffe, who accepted completely the technological phenomena of modern America, and transformed them into designs whose clarity and precision expressed the functional beauty of the machine age. The image of America presented by these painters was of an advanced mechanized culture whose products and monuments had an unintended aesthetic value. It was an image in which humanity played little part, with its problems and struggles and general disorderliness — hence the title of "The Immaculates" given to these artists. It was not in the direction of formal perfection, however, that the main current of American modernism was to move, but in that of emotional expression. The most widespread tendency in modernist schools of the 1920s and 1930's was expressionism — a word which embraces the many varieties of art whose chief aim is to express subjective emotion in imagery based on the real world but freely interpreted, neither realistically on the one hand nor abstractly on the other. The causes of this American bent toward expressionism may be found in our long native tradition of romanticism, our mistrust of classicism, our slowness to adopt the radical innovations of abstraction, and our preference for art related to personal experience; and on a broader level, in the growing representation in our population of certain national and racial strains, especially German, Russian and Jewish, more

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sympathetic to free emotional expression than the older American stock. These new ingredients in the melting-pot of American art led the conservative critic Royal Cortissoz to brand modernism as "Ellis Island art." "The United States is invaded by aliens," he warned in 1923, "thousands of whom constitute so many acute perils to the health of the body politic. Modernism is of precisely the same heterogeneous alien origin and is imperilling the republic of art in the same way." 2 Fortunately, this viewpoint now survives only in the extreme right wing of the academic art world. Primarily the expression of emotions aroused by the real world, expressionism did not present objective images of America like the regionalist and American scene schools, nor creeds and criticisms like the social school. Nevertheless it did embody concepts of America that were vital and significant. These concepts were as varied as the individuals who expressed them. To cite only a few: Marin's lyrical interpretation of the electric vitality of New York, or the tonic air and sea of Maine (Winslow Homer's America seen with a different sensibility); Marsden Hartley's return from cosmopolitanism to the elemental simplicities of his native New England, its mountains and rugged coast and fisherfolk (again, with links to both Homer and Ryder); Max Weber's intense expression of the Jewish contribution to the American mind — the ancient faith, the immemorial poetry, the spiritual exaltation; Karl Knath's semi-abstract record of the salty life of Cape Cod, a portrait as authentic in its own way as Thoreau's; Everett Spruce's stark monumental visions of the soil and air of Texas. Such artists were less concerned with the externals of the American scene than with aspects that were at once more personal and more universal — man in his relation to nature, the elemental in human life as opposed to the particular. No longer interested in portraiture, commentary, or satire, these artists were saying things about their world that were affirmative and poetic. Compared to both the academic and nonacademic repre-

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sentational schools, they revealed a new emotional freedom, warmer and more sensual, in love with the color and rhythms of the world; and less literal-minded, not afraid to take liberties with external reality, to re-create it for expressive purposes. The change was typified by the difference between Charles Burchfield's realistic, satirical work of the twenties and thirties, and his recent expressionistic work, in which the same native environment is seen with lyrical pantheism. For the past two decades the main current of nonacademic art has veered from expressionism toward abstraction. The first wave of abstract art in America, following the Armory Show of 1913, had been short-lived. But in the middle 1930s began a second wave, still in full flood. Abstract art now occupies the dominant position that the American scene and social schools did a quarter-century ago. The fundamental concepts of the nature of art have been revolutionized — from the representation of reality to creation in form, color and design, a language as directly sensuous and emotive as music. In no other art form has there been a transformation so basic. Of the many causal factors, a few may be suggested. There is the historic logic of abstract art: as the camera has taken over more and more of the artist's representational functions, he has lost his role as pictorial recorder for society, and at the same time has been freed for the creation of a new visual language. There is the relative newness of abstract art in the long perspectives of art history — a novelty that appeals especially to youth. There is the growing internationalism of our period: abstract art is an international language, with a minimal connection with specific place. It is surely no coincidence that the decline of the regionalist and American scene schools, and their replacement by the second wave of abstraction, came at the same time as the decline of our political isolationism. (Indeed, many advanced artists are not only instinctively opposed to nativism, but are consciously internationalist in their personal viewpoints.) And

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there are the problems and tensions of our troubled age, causing many artists to abjure social content, and to devote themselves to building aesthetic creations independent of the outer world, creations which will embody in plastic form the principles of freedom, order and harmony so tragically rare in human affairs today. The general trend of abstraction, of course, has been away from art's image-making functions. Imagery has tended to disappear or to be so transformed as to be hardly recognizable. But what has been broadly (and sometimes inaccurately) called abstract art is now highly diversified, with individuals of widely varied personal attitudes and styles. Many of them retain a relationship, more or less direct, to visual reality; some use recognizable imagery; and some have definite things to say about the world they live in. Stuart Davis, who emphatically rejects the abstract label, has written: "I have enjoyed the dynamic American scene for many years past, and all of my pictures . . . are referential to it. . . . Some of the things which have made me want to paint, outside of other paintings, are: American wood and iron work of the past; Civil War and skyscraper architecture; the brilliant colors on gasoline stations, chain-store fronts, and taxicabs; . . . 5 & 10 cent store kitchen utensils; movies and radio; Earl Hines' hot piano and Negro jazz music in general, etc. In one way or another the quality of these things plays a role in determining the character of my painting. Not in the sense of describing them in graphic images, but by predetermining an analogous dynamics in the design, which becomes a new part of the American environment. Paris School, Abstraction, Escapism? Nope, just Color-Space Compositions celebrating the resolution in art of stresses set up by some aspects of the American scene." 3 In our most advanced school, imagery has been reduced to a minimum or done away with altogether, and the painting or sculpture speaks through its purely physical properties of pig-

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ment, texture, line, color and form. It would be pointless to look in such art for specific images of America. But since every work of art is the creation of a human being living in a particular environment, it is inevitable that even our most advanced art should present some concepts of national character, mind and spirit — concepts implicit rather than expressed, unconscious more than conscious. Here the distinction between content and image, between the American qualities in art and the concepts of America embodied in art, becomes very fine indeed — sometimes too fine to be drawn. Let us at least attempt to identify the characteristics of present-day abstract art which are most expressive of the American spirit, and which may reveal underlying concepts of America. One outstanding characteristic of our advanced art is its strongly expressionist bent. Formalism or purism are as unusual in abstract as in representational art — a sign of our traditional neglect of the classic qualities of form. Much more typical is free-form abstraction, or what has been called abstract expressionism, which is related to expressionism by its emphasis on emotion, its subjectivity, its freedom and fluidity of style, and the leading role that color and pigment play in it. In general it has dispensed not only with recognizable imagery, but with the traditional concept of design as centralized composition of threedimensional forms endowed with properties of solidity and weight. Design has become open, aiming at space and movement more than substance. Forms no longer rest on foundations, but exist in space. Such floating forms appear not only in painting but in suspended and balanced sculpture such as that of Alexander Calder, Naum Gabò and Richard Lippold. Sometimes there are no central forms: Mark Tobey's paintings can be space activated by vibrating lines; Rothko's can be space pervaded by light and color. This open concept of design and this emphasis on space are clearly related to our air age, and express the spirit of our air-minded country. Often a picture's patterns recall the

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patterns of our prairies and deserts as seen from above. Arshile Gorky, apropos of his pioneering murals for an airport, wrote that he was trying to capture "the unbounded space of the skyworld of aviation. . . . I considered the new vision that flight has given to the eyes of man. The isle of Manhattan with all its skyscrapers from the view of an aeroplane five miles up becomes but a geographical map, a two-dimensional surface plane. This new perception simplifies the forms and shapes of earth objects. The thickness of objects is lost and only the space occupied by the objects remains." 4 In this new use of space, artists are also expressing, sometimes consciously, their sense of the spaciousness of America; and also in the frequent large scale of their paintings — which in another aspect can be considered as a protest against the man-made restrictions of our civilization, a public gesture of defiance against our living conditions. Our advanced art concentrates on the primary physical sensation, on the visual and tactile sensations aroused by color, texture, pigment. Conscious designing has been replaced by intuitive methods, in which the physical materials and their manipulation have much to do with determining the final forms. This emphasis on creation as action is the origin of the term "action painting" sometimes applied to the school. Conventional brushwork has been replaced by all kinds of novel techniques, often highly ingenious and effective, such as Jackson Pollock's method of pouring the pigment with wide-swinging rhythmic armstrokes. All of this represents the revolt against academic naturalism carried to its furthest extreme — a search for new means of expression growing directly out of the physical materials of the work of art. Such artists are trying to rebuild art from the ground up, from its bases in the senses. Their concentration on physical sensation has parallels in many other fields of American life, as does the sense of speed, impact, and sometimes violence that their works often contain. There are analogies to jazz in the free rein they give to improvisation, in their emphasis on rhythm, in their repeated patterns, and in their "open-ended" type of

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composition, which one feels could go on and on, or be cut off at any point without injury. In sculpture, changes fully as revolutionary have taken place. The traditional conception of sculpture as representation of natural forms, usually the human figure, in monumental style, and in solid materials such as stone, bronze, and wood, has been completely altered. Not only has there been the same swing to abstraction as in painting, but the fundamental concepts of sculptural form have been revolutionized. The central mass has opened out, expanded and become fluid, in much the same way as in pictorial composition. No longer monumentality, but forms in space, are aimed at. Instead of resting solidly on a pedestal, a contemporary piece of sculpture is just as likely to hang from the ceiling. New materials allow radically new types of construction, such as metal structures welded with a blowtorch, or the use of prefabricated machine elements. Alexander Calder's mobiles have introduced actual motion into an art hitherto static. Gabò and Lippold have taken a further step in their elaborate abstract structures, sometimes mobile, composed of metal or plastic wires which catch the light — an art as purely one of light and motion as the moving picture. All these innovations are manifestations of proverbial American ingenuity, inventiveness, and love of machine technology, and beyond that, of an imaginative adaptation of art to modern concepts of space, motion and light. These are some of the characteristics of our advanced school which, while presenting no conscious images of America, seem to me to embody certain essentials of the American spirit in our time. These artists are no longer painting the portrait of their country, nor glorifying it, satirizing it, or criticizing it. Out of the material of modern America and the modern world, they are trying to build an art which will have absolute values independent of its relation to a particular place or time. They are creating, and thereby helping to create "America."

VI THE S O C I A L S C I E N T I S T S Thomas C. Cochran

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O SCHOLARS of today, harassed by awareness of the elusive

character of physical reality, by the limitations of old-fashioned discursive logic, by the known pitfalls of subconscious bias, and by the confusions between deductive and empirically based theory, the early years of the century appear as an age of innocence. Scholars were then enjoying the afterglow of a century when man seemed to be coming ever closer to solving the riddles of the universe, when society was apparently learning how to deal with its problems, and when the future promised a perfection of the kind of life enjoyed by Victorian gentlemen. 1 While something of the same sense of achievement and progress affected Europe in those days when Marx was regarded as impractical and Freud and Einstein were known to only a handAlthough an explicit image of the whole society may not be necessary for their work, even narrowly specialized social scientists have to make assumptions regarding existing social relationships, about the culture in which their theories are set. In most monographs, such assumptions are implied rather than elaborated, but some scholars in each generation hazard statements regarding general characteristics of American culture. In this chapter, two kinds of generalizations regarding American society during the last sixty years have been selected from the writings of leading social scientists. One type consists of observations regarding the structure and progress of the society, mainly concerned with politics or economics. The other type is made up of statements regarding characteristics of Americans and the major themes of their culture. The opinions are merely those of leading scholars, not selected on any systematic basis. The justification for tentatively viewing them as representative is that within each period they show consistency. The emphasis here is on the kind of features of the society or culture that the social scientist regarded as important, and in the uniformities of their interest rather than in the accuracy of their observations.

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ful of specialists, America was particularly optimistic and confident. As progressivism triumphed, and new ideas for the improvement of society received the backing of law, even continual campaigners against evil such as sociologist Edward A. Ross could write: "Let the half-stifled muck-raker, the faltering soldier of the common good, the down-hearted reformer leave his trench for a moment and climb to the hilltop that looks out on all the peoples and on all the forces of the age. He will see that the lips of the morning are reddening." 2 Doctrines such as pragmatism and institutionalism gave Americans a heady feeling of release from the inevitabilities of the natural laws of classic economics. The new doctrines suggested that the evolutionary process could be steered by man. Experiment and measurement could determine social evils, and proper education and legislation could bring them under control. Many social scientists, observing its social structure and trends, saw the United States as a great laboratory in which a society, free from the aristocratic, feudal impediments of European nations, might be brought to new levels of perfection. Students of government were particularly inspired by the unfolding possibilities of a powerful, well-educated democracy. "In the early 1900's saying democracy was semantic magic." 3 A young political scientist, Woodrow Wilson, wrote in 1897: "In a new age men must acquire a new capacity, must be men upon a new scale with added qualities." Four years later he wrote: "No other modern nation has been schooled as we have been in big undertakings and mastery of novel difficulties . . . determining its own destiny unguided and unbidden, moving as it pleases within wide boundaries, using institutions, not dominated by them." 4 This optimistic view of social trends was shared by men of varying shades of social belief. "We are insisting upon higher standards of conduct both in politics and in business," wrote the famous critic of our political mythology, J. Allen Smith, "Our ideas of right and wrong in their manifold applications to social life have

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been profoundly changed. . . . We are trying to realize a new conception of justice." 5 Leading sociologists expressed similar views. Ross, while condemning immediate evils, thought that "with modern facilities for mind influencing mind, democracy, at its best, substitutes the direction of the recognized moral and intellectual elite for the rule of the strong, the rich, or the privileged." He enumerated the forces that would help the people to win, to achieve, true democracy. More education had changed the common people from masses or mobs to groups of individuals. Soap and water were befriending democracy, narrowing the difference in habits between rich and poor. Birth control would also enhance the value of each human being. Leisure for all elements in society would give them "time to read, to think, to consult together, to organize." The newspaper cartoon was a major force for democracy. "Some day," said Ross, "the inventor of it will rank with Gutenberg. . . . Give it much of the credit for the growing failure of the bosses to hoodwink the voters." 6 Franklin H. Giddings, one of the pillars of the profession, wrote in 1900: "I remain convinced that the democratic tendencies of the nineteenth century are not likely to be checked or thwarted in our own or in future generations." 7 Economists of the day were more given to expansive generalizations than were those of later generations. Simon N. Patten did not hesitate to theorize about social development. In a course of lectures on "The New Basis of Civilization" delivered in New York City in 1905, he put forward the idea of an economy of plenty: "A higher civilization is a present possibility that may be realized by people living in this century. It is now ready to appear. . . . Disease, oppression, irregular work, premature old age, and race hatreds characterized the vanishing age of deficit; plenty of food, shelter, capital, security, and mobility of men and goods define the age of surplus in which we act." 8 This theme of American thought was to have a strong continuing influence, one accentuated by the paradoxical hardships of the Great

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Depression. Richard Ely, generally regarded as a severe critic of the American economic system, wrote just before World War I: "In our own day society is awakening to a consciousness which is something new in its history . . . in its growth and development is to be found one of the prime causes of those movements of our own time which aim at bettering economic conditions." 9 These liberal social scientists saw the chief danger to democracy, and therefore to the future of America, in corporate monopolies. To Ely, trusts were "another step in the evolution of industry which tends to minimize the individual still further." 10 Economist William Z. Ripley believed that "the great controversy" was one between "large-scale industry which seeks the advantages of monopoly, and the individual producer and the public who demand the benefits of competition."11 Ripley's colleague at Harvard, Charles J. Bullock, thought that "the moral and legal responsibility of our captains of industry must be made commensurate with the enormous power they wield." 12 There were social scientists, particularly among the economists, who saw the growth of trusts as an inevitable stage in evolution and an advantage from the standpoint of efficiency. Like historian Theodore Roosevelt, economist Jeremiah W. Jenks thought that efficient trusts could lower prices and raise wages, but he believed that, to insure their good conduct, they should be regulated. Whether the writers thought them good or bad, progressive or reactionary, trusts formed an important and dynamic element in the social scientist's image of America in the early twentieth century. A few scholars deviated from the faith in gradual progress. William Graham Sumner foresaw the twentieth century as one of war, imperialism, and dictatorship; Brooks and Henry Adams speculated about immanent decay and inertia; and Thor stein Veblen predicted an inevitable conflict between the instinct for workmanship and the practice by businessmen of coercive acquisition. Marxists like A. M. Simon or Daniel de Leon deviated, of course, from the progressive, meliorist faith, yet, in a sense, their

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confidence in the imminence of the socialist society allowed them to share optimism per se with the majority. The type of writing about American personality and culture that later social scientists were to call analysis of national values or character was foreshadowed in the work of Franklin Giddings. The American, he claimed, "keenly realizes the opportunities of the concrete present." Americans were seen as more practical than Frenchmen, but more sentimental than Englishmen. They were less concerned about material conditions than about "the subjective attitude of each man toward his neighbor." In such relations personal worth was valued more than status.13 Professor Giddings had no special method for arriving at his conclusions, and they were colored by the prevailing climate of optimistic nationalism, but they have much in common with the more systematic findings of the forties and fifties. Nothing before World War I shook the faith of the main body of social scientists in this bright picture of America and the Americans. Most of them would no doubt have agreed that America had a great and relatively secure future, that the people were becoming better educated, more democratic both socially and politically, and more understanding of the legislative needs of an industrial society. There would also have been, it appears, reasonable agreement on the dominant values or characteristics of Americans. Few would have quarreled with Giddings' emphasis on practicality, friendliness, concrete rationalism, equality, and personal worth or achievement as important American values. Furthermore, these qualities were well suited to the discovery of new social "truths" and the ready discarding of old « *i errors. But this bright image quickly faded. The America that was presumably so well on the road to emancipation from ancient error became involved in one of the bloodiest and costliest wars in history and emerged with a social order that pleased chiefly the conservative economist and the prosperous businessman.

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Obviously, something had gone wrong in the America visualized by the prewar social scientists. As J. Allen Smith saw it, "The real trouble with us reformers is that we made reform a crusade against standards. Well, we smashed them all and now neither we nor anybody else have anything left." 14 Undoubtedly, the breakdown of the age of innocence and the disillusionment of the 1920s, the change in the intellectuals' image of America from one of shining promise to one of doubt and confusion, depended on many factors beyond the demolition of standards by a band of reformers. The war itself was a peculiarly depressing one, without glorious action or the fruits of victory — only mud, slaughter, and bargaining for small shifts in the ancient balance of power. Wilson's brief day of idealistic enthusiasm for a new world settlement seemed over almost as it began. By bringing revolution and dictatorship in Russia, the war produced an unprecedented menace to American political ideals. In spite of superficial prosperity, the economic system was not expanding as rapidly as in earlier decades, many farmers were worrying about their mortgages, and employment was highly unstable. Prohibition quickly added to political corruption, and to increased drunkenness among the social elite. Leadership in national politics fell to those who offered the least challenge to the status quo. In addition, two sets of ideas, not connected with reform, probably not even known to most prewar social scientists, demolished the rational optimisms of the age of innocence. One of these, the physical-science demonstration — that our sense mechanisms and brains were incapable of perceiving and visualizing the nature of reality — had a long history. Philosophers had, of course, always considered this possibility, but only in the late nineteenth century did it acquire the vast prestige of scientific truth. Recognition of the fact that verbal logic was inadequate and that mathematical, or symbolic, logic was necessary to an understanding of reality, spread slowly. Einstein's field equations for relativity in 1905, and Rutherford, Planck, and Bohr's

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calculations regarding the relations within the atom, in the first decade of the century, were to serve as the decisive illustrations, but such work was not popularized in other disciplines until the twenties. Meanwhile, a quite dissociated attack upon the rational use of the results of direct perception had been originated by Sigmund Freud in Vienna. While the American reformers had moved toward Freud in putting more emphasis on surreptitious economic motives and less emphasis on disinterested reason, they had still perceived man as guided by rational choices. Freud's conclusions that apparently rational conduct was generally governed by unconscious drives, usually coming from frustrated sex impulses, took from the reformers their basic reliance: that the citizen if broadly educated would do what was socially good. Freud, who was not one to belittle his achievement, put the discovery of the unconscious mind on a par with the Copernican revolution and Darwinism. The ideas of the Vienna group were soon taken up by G. Stanley Hall at Clark University; Freud lectured there in 1910, but general recognition of the social and philosophical meaning of Freudianism did not come until after World War I.15 Both the cure of certain war psychoses by Freudian therapy and the recognition of the role of the unconscious in response to propaganda led to a flood of postwar writing on the new psychology. Freudian ideas entered openly or surreptitiously into all the social sciences. Walter Lippmann demonstrated in his Public Opinion (1922) that people thought in emotionally conditioned stereotypes, and at the end of the decade Harold Lasswell published Psychopathology and Politics. The sociology of W. I. Thomas, and the work on primitive culture of anthropologists such as Franz Boas, Robert Lowie, and Ruth Benedict were remodeled by Freudian considerations. In psychology, John B. Watson carried the influence of the unconscious to the extreme limit of denying the existence of conscious thought. According

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to his behaviorist school, all apparent thoughts and actions were the results of conditioned reflexes. For those who wished to cling to religion, the destruction of the homely world of perception and reason opened the way, as the Englishman John Langdon-Davies wrote, to a "New Age of Faith." Sir James Jeans, the great popularizer of the meaning of mathematical physics, held that God was a master mathematician. But the new age of faith did not immediately develop. Rather, the effect was to weaken dogmatic theology, to bring all scholars to a reassessment of their theories, and to cast doubt on the broader generalizations of the social sciences. Because of these basic uncertainties, the atmosphere of the twenties was not conducive to the construction of over-all social science images of generalizations about American society. Confusion as to absolutes reënforced the relativism inherent in pragmatic approaches, and led in philosophy to the even more starkly empirical conceptions of the logical positivists. In sociology, the major scholars of the decade avoided assumptions about the character of society as a whole, and concentrated on empirical observation of special areas such as the city, population, crime, or the family. For example, in 1929, in the special issue of the American Journal of Sociology, which was, in the late twenties, annually given over to a discussion of social change, all articles were on specific limited topics. The editor, William F. Ogburn, in a one-page introduction to the volume, remarked: "The great body of these articles are, of course, factual and the conclusions and analyses are those that flow from the data." Anthropologists also illustrated the retreat from the confident generalities of the earlier decades. Writing in 1928 on Anthropology and Modern Life, Franz Boas eschewed general laws or principles. "All we can do," he concluded, "is to watch and judge day by day what we are doing by what we have learned and to shape our steps accordingly."16 Reinforcing the trend toward limited generalization among scholarly social scientists was a strong fear of racist doctrines.

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The chauvinistic ideas of Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic superiority loosely stated by politicians, ministers, journalists, and many scholars before the war had been caricatured in anti-German propaganda, and were now disreputable. American social scientists wanted to avoid being identified with assumptions regarding American characteristics, even if such ideas were based on environment rather than race. While the younger economists also denied themselves the sweeping judgments of Commons or Ely, Patten or Veblen, the prosperity of the times supported some of the optimistic attitudes of the earlier period, and made the Freudian attack on economic man seem less important to this group than to most other intellectuals. Social theorizing marked time while institutionalists, now organized in the National Bureau of Economic Research, recorded the gratifying statistics of progress. In the introduction to two volumes on Recent Economic Changes, prepared by the National Bureau of Economic Research for a government-sponsored committee which was headed by then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, Edwin F. Gay, an economist schooled in history, surveyed the economic image of America. After reading the reports of foreign businessmen, who saw the United States more simply than could native social scientists, he concluded: Our visitors are impressed everywhere and every day by the evidence of an ebullient prosperity and a confidence in the future." 17 Heinrich Ludwig of Germany praised American industrial psychology. "Its chief characteristics," he asserted, "are optimism tempered by statistics and experiment; its aim is stabilization; the secret of American success is its study of the market." Other foreign observers emphasized American individualism and cooperation, seen as products of the struggles with the wilderness, mobility, ambition, uniformity of tastes, and a passion for standardization. "The American businessman, according to a French point of view "has standardized the individual in order to better be able to standardize manu-

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facture.' " Commenting further on these foreign views, Professor Gay suggested that corporate development might be creating "a new type of social organization."18 While William Z. Ripley complained that the Federal Trade Commission, charged with enforcing the antitrust laws, had been trying to commit hara-kiri,19 and Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means were collecting material to show that 200 corporations dominated the industrial economy, most economists were far less alarmed than those of the previous generation by the increasing size of big business. It had become clear that, although some firms tended to grow bigger, the movement that seemed revolutionary between 1897 and 1903, threatening to create an America with all business controlled by trusts, was a very gradual one, subject to many limitations. The depression neither solved the philosophical problems of relativism and rationalism nor inspired any new insight on how to represent rapidly changing reality in essentially static social theory, but for the moment it pushed such matters aside. For nearly a decade, thought centered around the causes and cures of depression, the problem of unemployment, and the proper role of the welfare state. There developed an image of America as a productive giant partly paralyzed by a disease of the nervous system. Commenting on R. H. Tawney's earlier work, The Acquisitive Society, sociologist Elton Mayo wrote in 1933: "Actually the problem is not that of the sickness of an acquisitive society; it is that of the acquisitiveness of a sick society. The acquisitiveness . . . is itself no more than a symptom of the failing integration which invariably accompanies too rapid social change." 20 The concluding page of Robert Lowie's textbook on anthropology in 1934 is illustrative of the interest of all social scientists in the problem of the sick giant: "The interests of the producer are not those of the consumer, the capitalist's may clash with the laborer's, the

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working man's are not identical with the fanner's. These economic conflicts . . . are a sinister social reality." 2 1 Late in 1929, President Hoover appointed a small Research Committee on Social Trends, which in turn commissioned some forty prominent social scientists to survey various aspects of American life. Its report in 1933, based on these monographic studies, was a comprehensive statement of social science views of the early depression period.22 There was a general emphasis on "The progressive confusion created in men's minds by the bewildering sweep of events." 23 A prevailing attitude of the depression is illustrated in Edwin F. Gay's guess that "the declining birth rate and reduced immigration may, with the resumption of normal business conditions, involve a slower rate of industrial growth than we have had in the past." He reaffirmed the current uncertainties: "On the whole question of business organization and social control, the general attitude of the American public is now in a state of confusion." 2 4 In the section of the report on "Changing Social Attitudes and Interests," sociologist Hornell Hart, after a survey of the magazine articles listed in the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, stated the obvious fact that "a new and unprecedented wave of discussion of unemployment and business conditions has developed during the present depression." 2 5 C. E. Merriam, a political scientist, contributed the final chapter to the report. He saw such changes as the closing of the frontier, the restriction of immigration, the decline in the rate of growth of population, the decline in agriculture, increasing industrial production, the new position of women, and the growth of education as creating a new political environment. He subscribed strongly to the common hypothesis of social disorganization. ". . . the confusion in government cannot be understood," he wrote, "without taking into account the parallel confusion in the economic life and mores of the community. . . . If business is closer to technical mechanical efficiency, it is

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further from the sense of social responsibility equally important to mankind. Industry as well as government suffers from disorganization and lack of direction, from conspicuous waste and profitable fraud." 26 The recovery period from 1933 to 1937 did not solve the unemployment problem or dispel scholarly pessimism regarding the immediate future of the society. In 1938, Harold E. Stearns edited a second symposium on the United States under the title America Now, in which the articles again stand in contrast to the writing of the first decade.27 Elsie C. Parsons saw social security and increasing emphasis on prolonged education as making upsetting changes in America. "Diminishing parental control or satisfaction," she wrote, "means a diminishing birthrate in any economic class." She saw a breakdown in the immediate values of church and family but hoped that "in time our civilization might conceive of new values, head away from suicide and begin to bloom." 28 Walton H. Hamilton, lawyer and economist, wrote eloquently of the contradictions of America in 1938: "The old has lingered as the new has appeared . . . the industrial landscape is all broken up with fault-lines. . . . It is inevitably a period of confusion. . . . The man of business . . . has signally failed to make the material means of life serve the common good." 29 Only the Marxian social scientists saw a clear path out of the current confusion. Since there was always some danger of discrimination in high places against avowed Marxists, it is hard to estimate how widely this image of the American problem was accepted. Anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists could adopt some Marxian beliefs without greatly modifying their previous theories, and many did so. Economists, historians, and political scientists had larger vested interests in non-Marxian, nondialectical concepts of social development and were probably more resistant to Marxism. But all scholars became so familiar with the Marxian picture of historical materialism that it seems

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needless to quote its details. In spite of a general nonacceptance by academic social scientists, many Marxian concepts found their way into the body of orthodox thought. The new intellectual event of the thirties in the field of economic thought, one that was to revise the over-all image of how capitalism worked, was the publication in 1936 of British economist J. M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Prior to Keynes, economic explanations of why American capitalism was not working properly had centered around prices and costs. According to Arthur H. Burns, Keynes's reasoning, which shifted the emphasis to income, "met the needs of the despondent and anxious thirties for a theory that was at once simple and reassuring, clothed with the symbols of science, and yet equipped with a political handle for economic reform." 30 Simple as it seemed to Dr. Burns, Keynesian theory is too complex to outline here, but in the total image of the society it made the distribution of income a vital element. If the share of income that went to the poorer recipients was increased, there would be a larger demand for goods, this would lead to investment in new productive facilities that would in turn provide still more income. If such a happy train of events did not happen naturally, it should be brought about by government's power to spend, invest, and regulate interest rates. These ideas of Keynes were new only in their lucid theoretical relationships. Government here and abroad had been increasing the income of the poor by relief payments and employment on public works, but both Republicans and Democrats regarded such measures as somewhat immoral and justified only by necessity. The classic concept of the self-regulating economy was still "sound" doctrine. Some American economists, however, had been moving toward Keynesian ideas without stating the essential propositions as a complete system. Economist Harold G. Moulton, for example, wrote a year before the appearance of The General Theory that income in the twenties had gone in dis-

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proportionate and increasing measure to a small percentage of the population and that the nation could not have the economies of mass production save in an economy of mass consumption.81 While it was not Keynesian logic, but the violent tax and income readjustments of World War II, that led to general acceptance of the importance of income distribution, the publication of the theory may be used to symbolize the wane of the economic image of a self-regulating economy. Self-regulation held its place in the minds of some academicians and many business leaders as an ideal, but it ceased to represent in anyone's mind the way things were operating in reality, or the way they would be allowed to work in the capitalism of the future. The Keynesian emphasis on national income also added a new interest in measuring the performance of the economy as a whole, and led scholars to much clearer pictures of what went on beneath the confusing surface of economic operations. Inspired partly by the spread of logical positivism in philosophy, and somewhat by a desire to avoid controversial practical issues, many social scientists in the thirties turned their attention to the requirements of scientific method. Those scholars committed to inductive procedures had necessarily repudiated the broad, partly intuitive generalizations so popular early in the century, and insisted that progress in understanding must come by seeking answers to limited questions. By the forties the split between the champions of broad generalizations such as those of Marx, Weber, or Toynbee, and proponents of limited statement based on measurement, between the descriptive integration of humanists and an insistence on physical-science types of procedure, ran through all social science. While the quantitatively oriented group did not hesitate to study large measurable aggregates such as national income, saving, fertility, or migration, they did not attempt to fuse their findings into an image of the culture as a whole. But this over-all task was soon undertaken

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by the cultural anthropologists with a professional commitment that had been lacking in the offhand generalizations of men like Giddings, Patten, or Ross. The thinking of anthropologists such as Franz Boas, A. L. Kroeber, and Robert Lowie had turned in the thirties to the possibilities of analyzing and generalizing about complex cultures, and in 1935 sociologists Robert S. and Helen M. Lynd had attempted a summary of the cultural attitudes of Middletown. In this city, Muncie, Indiana, they found the following culture elements were especially valued: conformity, particularly when in doubt; progress, equated with increasing size; moderation; success by fair means; individual responsibility for success or failure; loyalty to family and community; competition and free enterprise; and the solution of problems by sincerity and good will.32 Meanwhile the younger generation of anthropologists gave a new turn to the analysis of complex national cultures by including psychoanalytic theory in their methods. Their studies were greatly stimulated by World War II. Government agencies wanted answers to many questions regarding the probable responses of our own people, our allies, and our enemies to various types of propaganda pressure. Cultural anthropologists who had been developing their ideas separately were now brought together in teams to work for the government. "Within these teams," wrote anthropologist Margaret Mead, "the national character' approach was one of several methods used. Content analysis, polling, historical analyses, etc. were also used." 33 National-character study, which uniformly eschewed assumptions of physiological racial differences, was conducted differently by different anthropologists, but Dr. Mead distinguished three general approaches. They illustrate the new emphasis on childhood conditioning and the learning process which was little emphasized at the turn of the century. The first method was comparison of the configurations of the culture being studied with those of cultures that had undergone nearly similar

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historical experience. The second was analysis of the basic learning of the child in relation to other aspects of the culture. The third was study of patterns of interpersonal relationships such as parent to child or peer to peer. Dr. Mead thought that "studies of national character . . . normally should follow, not precede studies of a national culture." 3 4 Thus, "national character," as used by these anthropologists of the forties, emphasized certain basic personality factors acquired in childhood, or, in other words, the ways in which the individual had learned the culture. Earlier scholars had tended to take these processes for granted and to generalize rather unsystematically about the behavior and ideas of the adult group. Insofar as causal explanations were attempted by a Giddings, Ross, Ely, or Patten, they were likely to be in terms of environment and economic pressures rather than learning process and personality. The newer analysis led to generalized images of America or Americans that emphasized the evolving socio-economic structure less and inner qualities of the population more. The same shift in emphasis was noticeable in other fields. In economic history, for example, a new center was founded at Harvard to study the origins, conditioning, and behavior of entrepreneurs, who had been largely taken for granted by earlier generations. In political science there developed a new concern with voting behavior, and in sociology a strong interest in the behavior of small groups. The specialized studies done by anthropologists for the government inspired Dr. Mead's And Keep Your Powder Dry (with G. Bateson, 1942) and Geoffrey Gorer's The American People (1948), both broad-stroked pictures of national character, as well as Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) on the national character of Japan. Necessarily generalizing without the exhaustive research that would have been required to justify their conclusions scientifically, the nationalcharacter group encountered severe criticism from specialists in various fields. On the other hand, both the Mead and Benedict

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books sold widely. Well-educated Americans appeared anxious to have a clearer image of themselves and their culture, no matter how tentative it might be. Regardless of differences in specific terminology and methods, anthropologists and sociologists of the middle twentieth century who have interested themselves in such study are in surprisingly close agreement on certain characteristics of American culture that appear to have changed only slightly during the last century or more. For example, Casper D. Naegele, in a project at Harvard, examined statements regarding major American values made by visiting social scientists, from Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835 to Gunnar Myrdal in 1944. From this writing he derived some "main pillars" of an enduring American value system: democracy, coupled with an insistence on conformity; individualism, implying free enterprise and the achievement of prosperity; equality with an emphasis on the dignity of work; and optimism, seen in the views that the future counts more than the past and that time is valuable and is equated with money. To these Naegele adds a list of implicit values that are less strongly and consciously held than those just enumerated. These implicit or "fringe" values include: the priority of the deed — actions are more important than words; conformity to the neighbor, with deviation only tolerated within conventional limits; and the desire to reduce complexity to simple discrete components, which Naegele calls the idiom of measurement.35 Sociologist Robin M. Williams, Jr., on the basis of studies made at Cornell, affirms the American values of: active mastery as opposed to passive acceptance; an interest in the external world of things; change as such; rationality as distinct from emotion or fantasy; orderliness; equality rather than superordinate-subordinate relationships; and the importance of individual personality.88 In 1950 a group at Harvard composed of sociologists and economists completed an investigation of the American business creed based on current and earlier written statements by busi-

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ness leaders or their spokesmen. The general method was a type of content analysis — looking for the frequency of occurrence of certain concepts or ideas. The list of characteristics accorded well with those derived from more generalized materials. The Harvard group, of course, found individualism and its corollaries, moral responsibility and freedom, a primary cluster of values. "A note of individualism," they wrote, "sounds through the business creed like the pitch of a Byzantine choir." Materialism and productivity came next in the business creed and were closely tied to individualism. "The material emphasis on thrift, saving, and capital accumulation are a necessary condition of personal autonomy." Practical realism defined as "serious moral responsibility to face the material facts of life and to provide for physical needs" appeared to follow as a corollary. The authors asserted "a strong institutional commitment to rationalism," stronger than in other nations.37 The continuing goal of progress and its pursuit in a spirit of optimistic adventurousness were held to be other values of the classic business creed. In pursuing their adventures, "the wisdom and experience of the businessman or the common sense of any American are a more reliable guide to understanding the economy" than learning or abstract theories. The authors maintained that "the broad values . . . encountered in the business ideology and in the American cultural heritage have not been the values of one partisan group but values to which all must at least make a show of obeisance. The symbols of democracy — political and religious freedom, equality of opportunity, and progress — have been accepted by all the major American ideologies." 88 Anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, who was a director of the Naegele project, wrote extensively on American values and characteristics. In 1953 he supplied "Some Aspects of National Character" to a study made for the government-financed Operations Research Office at Johns Hopkins. He saw his findings as tentative, but affirmed that the investigation "of the manner in which Americans sustain relationships to parents or children, or equals

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or superiors, or of the way in which some specific characteristics develop early and change or persist is very useful and important indeed." The characteristics that he noted, such as a commitment "to success and to winning"; an ability for technology, organization, and other physical arrangements; and a desire for simple answers, added detail to what he and other social scientists had previously written but offered no basic revisions. He cautioned that all the characteristics may vary "from class to class or region to region." 39 This increasing interest in highly generalized American characteristics has been reflected in the work of many humanists and social scientists outside the ranks of anthropology and sociology. Faculty seminars in American Civilization and History at the University of Pennsylvania, for example, have attempted to check some of the findings of the anthropologists. Since the values or themes stated by Kluckhohn, Naegele, or Williams refer to abstractions that may be indicated by a term but could only be closely defined by extensive research, it is inevitable that each brief statement of these abstractions will employ slightly different words. The general characteristics indicated for American society by the different studies, however, appear to be much the same and to be substantiated by various types of records ranging from advertising copy to scholarly addresses. Each list could be derived from any other by substitution of synonyms or redefinition of the same traits from a different point of view. To a degree this mirrors the universality of such highlevel generalities, but differences in formulation cannot obscure the fact that the values give an image of a society differing in significant ways from that of other Western industrial nations.40 Another approach to an image of American society and character stems from research on voting behavior by the lawyer and social scientist David Riesman. As elaborated in collaboration with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney in The Lonely Crowd, this approach holds that the tendency toward a coercive conformity

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is growing with urban industrialism. The upper middle class of the larger cities, becoming increasingly dependent upon the approval of their peer groups — are said to be "other-directed." Conformity in habits of consumption is regarded as particularly important and enters strongly into child training.41 Following somewhat similar lines of reasoning, sociologist C. Wright Mills sees the "fixer," and psychiatrist Erich Fromm sees the "marketer," as emergent types. Since the chief divergence between these characteristics and those discussed above is emphasis on the increasing importance of conformity, it is possible to say that by the 1950's those anthropologists and sociologists who had, far more than any previous group, turned their attention to the total culture were in agreement on certain major characteristics of American society. Turning to the image of America as seen by economists, one can find the same shift toward a more pragmatic interest in behavior. There has also been a further decline in the fear that big enterprise is about to become dominant. Reviewing two books on the monopoly problem in the winter of 1953, Solomon Fabricant, Research Director of the National Bureau of Economic Research, concluded that both books supported the same conclusion: "There is no basis for believing that the economy of the United States was largely monopolistic before the Second World War or at the opening of the century; there is no basis for believing that competition has declined seriously." 42 Dr. A. D. H. Kaplan, Director of Research at The Brookings Institution, wrote in 1954: "There is no evidence that the relative positions of the smaller and larger firms have changed significantly between the immediate prewar and postwar periods." 43 A new trend in economic thought was shown in the rise of a field called "operations research" that examined actual behavior under defined conditions, and therefore should lead to conclusions bearing on national character.

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In addition to examining behavior by social psychological techniques, political scientists also emphasized study of the relations of government to the individual. Writing in 1948, Merle Fainsod and Lincoln Gordon saw the majority of Americans "committed to an intermediate position which sought to preserve civil and political liberties and the advantages of private enterprise and which at the same time looked to government to provide basic securities and to guide entrepreneurial dynamics."44 More important to the individual than the trend toward more comprehensive government, according to J. M. Burns and J. W. Peltason, was the trend toward bigness. "Ours is becoming increasingly a civilization of big cities, big machines, big business, big bombs and big government. . . . Little man, big world — this is the nub of the problem." To make living with the problem more bearable, people were said to seek security, hide behind conformity, and strive to associate themselves in communities.45 Probably in all of the social sciences the scholars of the 1950's who attributed characteristics to the United States as a whole, on any level above that of the textbook, were in a small minority. The majority of each discipline continued to specialize in limited problems or single aspects of society and tried to develop more precise methods. The greater use of mathematics opened new possibilities for manipulating data, but did not lead to new conclusions on the level of national culture. As in the case of operations research in economics, however, quite specialized work occasionally provided clues to important general conclusions. In demography, for example, migration studies by Simon Kuznets, Dorothy Thomas, and Everett Lee led to some important speculations about migration as a factor in American culture. Democracy, tolerance, emphasis on success, conformity, and the discarding of the extended family can be seen as characteristics developed by migration. That Americans have been a migratory people from start to finish may be the

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most important single factor differentiating their culture from that of the more demographically stable countries of the world. What is important is not the validity of these various characteristics of America and Americans, but the new social scientific interest shown in self-understanding on a national level. Even without Freudian and post-Freudian ideas, American scholars of earlier generations could have gone far along these lines; but the environment did not greatly stimulate such reflections or research. Perhaps self-confidence was stronger in the earlier years, and certainly our need for explaining ourselves to other people was less. While the degree of interest in over-all analysis has grown, while language and methods have become more sophisticated, while social scientists now probe deeper into personality and no longer make such confident forecasts, their views of American society and character over sixty years show striking continuities. The chief characteristics posited by Kluckhohn, Riesman, Williams, and others were also recognized by the social analysts of the turn of the century. A gain in the value placed on security, a more conscious quest for pleasure, a partial substitution of social for Christian moral ethics, and less confidence in the civilizing mission of the Anglo-Saxon "race," appear to be the chief alterations. The same types of social problems that troubled social scientists in 1900 attract their attention at mid-century. While monopolistic capitalism is no longer feared as a near inevitability, constant pressure to curb the power of big business is still regarded as necessary by both social scientists and government officials. Income after taxes is regarded as better distributed than in any previous period, but some writers see a "new proletariat" made up of tenant fanners, migratory and other low-paid workers, and some members of the fixed-income group.46 In general, these and other, similar problems are those of the developing

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industrial state, and they change only in degree from one generation to the next. A more basic type of change in scholarly analyses has come from the substitution of social for Christian morality, and from the loss of confidence in racial superiority. For the first time social scientists and other Americans have been forced to see their culture as competitive on equal terms with other powerful and quite different cultures, and they lack the reassurance of many of their predecessors that the Christian God and the Anglo-Saxon race have unique powers. In tune with the loss of confidence in divine mission is the scholar's recognition that the character and dynamics of the society as a whole are imperfectly understood, and that he has little basis for predicting the future.

VII THE PUBLIC I M A G E OF A M E R I C A N ECONOMIC INSTITUTIONS Kenneth E. Boulding

I N ECONOMIC and political life it is not the images of the philosopher or the specialist that decide the course of history — important as these may be in the long run. It is, rather, the images of businessmen, factory workers, union men, farmers, housewives, and so on that make up the workaday world and guide its immediate destinies. Although often widely divergent, these images have something in common. It would be surprising if they did not, since all presumably originate in the general experience of the society and in the same external reality. They are also very complex, and their complexity is not diminished by their frequent lack of definition. We are dealing here not with the clearly expressed ideas of scholars, but with the half-formed, vaguely delimited, and often unexpressed perceptions, attitudes, prejudices, and views of the world of people in the ordinary business of life. This chapter deals mainly with a single predominant aspect of these images — the perceptions and evaluations, by various groups in the society, of business and the businessman. This aspect will be dealt with first as it expresses itself in a polarity of attitude, "pro-business" or "anti-business," a great oversimplification of a complex and many-dimensioned image. Yet, as a first approximation it is useful to look at the history of the general image of business in the first half of this century as a process of gradual resolution and synthesis of these two opposing states of mind. Discussion of "pro" or "anti" views implies either that there

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are opposing ethical systems — differences in valuations of the same set of perceived "facts" — or that there are differences in the perceptions of the facts themselves. These are not unrelated, since differences in valuations usually lead to differences in perception of fact. If, for instance, by reason of something in our basic valuation system we look unfavorably on the institution of business, we will be more likely to perceive the bad consequences of the institution than the good. It is important, therefore, to look into our value systems — especially polarities of value — in order to trace the sources of different images even of the facts of the business institution, and still more of its evaluation. A polarity of value is a quality (or quantity) that can be ranged on a linear scale, such as "honesty-dishonesty." Frequently opposite descriptive terms apply to each end of the scale, so that the polarity can be described as a movement from more to less of the one, or less to more of the other. Thus, a movement from more to less honesty is the same as a movement from less to more dishonesty. Behind both the "anti" and the "pro" business image there are a number of these polarities of value, and the over-all position of the image on the "anti-pro" scale will depend largely on the weight given to these various polarities or qualities. There is the quality of publicness versus privateness. Both Christian and Nationalist ethical systems preach the virtues of the public interest as over and against the private interest; the public interest is noble and self-sacrificing, the private interest is mean and self-seeking. Insofar as the business institution gets identified with the private as over and against the public interest, this polarity leads to a distrust of the business institution and a corresponding prejudice in favor of governmental institutions which seem to symbolize the public interest. Closely related to this polarity is the further quality of "profit" as opposed to "service." Here again the Christian and Nationalist ethic lays much stress on the ideal of "service," again, it relegates profit-seeking to the less praiseworthy level of human motivation.

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Insofar as business becomes identified with profit as opposed to service, again we are apt to move toward the "anti-business" end of the scale. Another related polarity is the "competitive-cooperative." Here the church and the school stress the cooperative aspects of life; "uncooperative" has become a strong term of abuse in American childhood. Business, therefore, gets another black eye for being "competitive" — which comes to have the sense of "uncooperative." These three polarities are all perhaps derived from a more fundamental scale which might be called "familistic-mechanistic." In religious teaching and in formal education much stress is laid on the virtue of familistic behavior and institutions. The family is held up as the ideal type of human relationship, where informality, love, service, and cooperation reign. By contrast, the market institutions are formal, cold, selfish, and competitive. A further polarity emerges which likewise grows out of the high value given to small groups and informal relationships. This is the "big guy-little guy" quality. I think it was Christopher Morley who coined the delightful jawbreaker "infracaninophilism" to describe the love of the underdog! This is a powerful value symbol; it leads us to value "small business" at the expense of "big business"; it moves us toward sympathy with the worker rather than with the boss. This is the identification with Oliver Twist, with Peter Pan, with Cinderella. It reinforces the unfavorable image of business. These value systems based on identification of business with private, selfish, nonfamilistic modes of behavior have been much more important in creating an unfavorable image of business in the United States than has Marxist ideology. Marxism has never attracted more than a splinter group of convinced adherents, plus a few hangers-on among the intellectuals. Among those whom it has influenced, of course, Marxism contributes to an attitude hostile to the whole concept of a business civilization. This hostility may have some emotional roots in familistic attitudes, but its intellectual foundations lie in the Marxist concept

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of history as a succession of dominant classes. The United States has failed so dismally to conform to the Marxist predictions that it has required unusually self-contained minds to maintain the Marxist interpretations in the face of so much obvious evidence to the contrary. The Great Depression seemed at the time to be evidence for some of the Marxist claims, but, as it has become clear that this was an episode rather than a fundamental collapse, it has become harder and harder to maintain the Marxist interpretation in all its purity. Balancing the anti-business image, there have been strong value systems making for a pro-business image. The polarity "businesslike-unbusinesslike" has an important value connotation in American society. We admire the businesslike: the efficient, the well-planned, the uncluttered desk and the uncluttered mind. We do not like the unbusinesslike: the inefficient, the careless, the cluttered. Government has a certain reputation for being unbusinesslike: wasteful, bureaucratic, lackadaisical. Hence the success of Coolidge's slogan: "More business in Government, and less Government in business." To be businesslike is to be progressive, to welcome new methods, to be willing to scrap the old. In this polarity the world of business is a world of shiny machines, of constantly growing output, of ever improved technology. A sourpuss like Veblen may try to persuade people that it is the engineers who are responsible for all this lovely technology, and that the businessmen are sinister figures trying to sabotage the noble efficiency of the engineers in the interest of monopoly profits and stock market jiggery-pokery.1 But the word for efficiency is still "businesslike" and not "engineerlike." The engineer is perhaps too much linked in the public imagination with the oily rag, and only the businessman has the clean, efficient desk and the clean, efficient mind that goes with it. Another polarity making for a favorable image of business is that of independence and democracy on the one hand, compared with subservience to government and arbitrary power on the other. This is the great "Jeffersonian" image of America as a

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land where "they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid." 2 The businessman is the independent man, because he is not dependent on the favors of a few, nor on the whims of a superior, but on his own ability to satisfy the desires of many customers, none of whom has individually any authority over him. In its modern form this is the theory of what may be called the "polylithic" society, as opposed to the monolithic society of the totalitarian, communist, one-form state. A business society is a society of "many stones" — many different organizations, many niches, many bosses — and hence may hope to avoid the tyranny that comes from the concentration of power. The rise of the great bureaucratic corporations and of the "organization man" has somewhat blurred this image, for the Jeffersonian image is that of a nation of small businessmen and proprietors, not of great corporations. It tends therefore to unite with the familistic dislike of "bigness" in favoring small rather than large business. The competitive-cooperative polarity, which lent itself to unfavorable appraisal of business as "cutthroat competition," appears now in a different form as the competitive-monopolistic polarity, in which it is favorable to business. Competition is here associated with rivalry for the consumer's dollar — that is, rivalry in service, at least according to the standard of consumer preferences. Competitive business is here seen as serviceable, as opposed to monopolistic business, and even more to monopolistic government which is under no obligation to be serviceable in order to survive. Just as the rise of big business somewhat dims the Jeffersonian image, so the rise of advertising and public relations somewhat dims the competitive ideal, as business is now visualized as wheedling or bamboozling the customer out of his dollar rather than as being rivals in service. Still the ideal of competition in service remains strong and does much to counteract the contrary image of business as the selfish profit-seeker which we noticed earlien If profits are the measure of service performed, much of the sting of the "profit motive" is removed.

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It is from this image of business as purified by competition that the ideology of the antitrust acts is derived. The image of government is now that of a watchdog, seeing that business behaves itself in such a way that profits are made by service and not by deception, chicanery, or conspiring against the public. Finally there may be an increasing sense of business as the noncoercive element in society as over against the coercive power of the state. Two of the best unintentional advocates of business in the twentieth century were Hitler and Stalin. Compared with these heads of states, the president even of the most selfish, sinister, and powerful corporation seems like an angel of light, or at worst only a feeble little devil. The assumption — which was perhaps not so implausible in 1900 — that public institutions had a certain moral superiority over private institutions is more open to doubt today. The peccadilloes of business even at its worst in the days of goon squads and Joe Hill, seem insignificant when compared with Dachau, the liquidation of the Kulaks, and Hiroshima. In the long run a business can survive only by being serviceable, by being of more use to more people than alternative organizational coagulations. In the very long run this may be true of states as well, but in at least a fairly long run, states can survive merely by being cruel, simply because of their virtual monopoly of the means of cruelty. The view that all problems can be solved by turning them over to the state therefore received a considerable setback as the ambiguous moral nature of the state became clearer. Business is by no means the only institution of economic life, and a word should be said about the image of other economic institutions. The image of the labor union exhibits many of the same complex polarities that are involved in the image of business. Anti-union images are derived from the perception of unions as monopolistic, as greedy, as seeking gains for their members at the expense of the rest of society, and sometimes as corrupt, exploiting their own members or conniving with corrupt employers.

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More sophisticated anti-union images perceive unions as agents of inflation, pushing up money wages and thereby forcing a monetary expansion, or as the creators of unemployment in deflation by holding money wages up. Pro-union images are derived from the perception of unions as the defenders of the rights and status of the worker against the arbitrary power of the boss or the straw boss and so, as the instruments of democratic industrial government, or as the defenders of the poor, the "little guy" against the rich (infracaninophilism again?). Once more, there is a sophisticated pro-union image of the union as an agent of integration of the working class into the general fabric of society, and therefore a conservative rather than a disruptive force, helping to prevent the alienation of the masses and rectifying what would otherwise be serious sociological defects of capitalism. The image of government as an economic agent is an important element in the total image of economic life. This is a peculiarly complex image, as it is an image of functions rather than of the institution as such. That is to say, the question is not what government is but what it does, not whether it should exist, but whether it should do certain things. Thus there is a libertariansocialist polarity of attitude. Toward the libertarian end the economic functions of government are conceived in very meager terms as little more than the protection of the rights of person and property, with the market and the right of contract being left to take care of all economic problems. Toward the socialist end government is seen as an appropriate agency for the organization of major industries and areas of economic life and for the control of the system of prices and the distribution of income. There are no sharp breaks however along this continuum. Few libertarians would advocate turning the post office or the state universities over to private enterprise, and few socialists want to socialize everything or to abolish the market entirely. The image of government as a referee in the conflict of special interests is a curious and complex one, especially when it reveals government as an ally of the weaker interest. Much of the justifi-

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cation of government support of labor unions, government assistance to agriculture, and government programs of social security is ixx terms of this doctrine. There is also a somewhat less reputable image of government as a pork barrel, as a booty to be divided among the constituents by the process of logrolling. The government role in the process of economic competition is also a peculiarly complex image. On the one hand we have the image of government as the promoter and defender of competition; on the other, we have an image of government as the protector of special interests against foreign competition. An industry threatened by competition of imports feels free to call on government to protect its inefficiency in a way that it does not when threatened by technological improvements in the domestic economy. Then the image of government as the defender of competition falls foul of the image of government as the ally of the weaker interest. We find ourselves torn between the defense of the weak and the encouragement of the efficient. Images are kaleidoscopic patterns, made up of many polarities and pieces of values and perceptions. The course of events constantly changes them, both by the introduction of new pieces and by rearranging the old ones. Insofar as value images especially contain many inconsistent polarities, these may change rapidly as the perception of events brings one or another of these polarities to the fore. Since 1900, events have been large, loud, and insistent. It would be surprising indeed if images were not affected by them. We can trace this effect through what may be called the "great cycles" of war and peace, depression and prosperity, and also through the "great trends" of rising income, rising population, rising organization, rising and increasingly progressive taxation, and the rise in education, religion, and militarism, and what might be called the decline of the proletariat. Consider first the impact on the economic image of the "great cycles." The century to date divides conveniently into three periods. From 1900 to 1919 we have an inflationary period,

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broken by a brief depression in 1907 and culminating in World War I and the wartime and postwar inflation. From 1919 to 1932, we have a period of deflation — a sharp deflation and depression in 1920, a plateau of moderate stability from 1921 to 1928, then the Great Depression of 1929-1932. From 1932 to at least 1958, we have a long inflationary period — a slow recovery from 1932 to 1940, broken by a sharp depression in 1937-38, then wartime and postwar inflations to 1951, with moderate stability to 1957, and a moderate depression in 1958. On these long swings of inflation and deflation a great deal of economic, social, and political history is hung; it is a most useful clothesline on which to hang out the rags of particular events. These long cycles likewise produce great changes in the image. Thus, the image of business tends to become less favorable in periods of deflation and depression, more favorable in periods of full employment, and perhaps less favorable again in periods of sharp price inflation when the image of the "profiteer" comes to the forefront. By contrast, a period of depression produces a more favorable image of labor unions and a more favorable image of active government intervention in economic affairs. A period of recovery and rising employment is favorable to the growth of labor unions and of reform movements in government, as the discontent that gathered in the previous depression is now expressed in the easier climate of a rising market. The depression creates the steam; the recovery provides the engine. A long period of prosperity, on the other hand, especially following the stresses and strains of a war or reforming period, produces a conservative reaction, or what might better be called a period of consolidation — for example, the eras of Coolidge and Eisenhower. The rise and fall in the warmth or coolness of public attitudes toward various economic institutions follow the great cycles fairly closely. In the period 1900-1919 there is a rather sharp division of opinion between radical and conservative views. The probusiness view, however, is clearly dominant, in spite of certain

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anti-business overtones of Wilsonian reform. Public attitude toward labor is at best neutral or mildly hostile. Government economic programs hardly exist. These attitudes carry over somewhat into the next period, though some change is perceptible even in the twenties. The Great Depression, however, produces a major shakeup. The depression is visualized as a serious breakdown of the business system and of the market mechanism. Public attitude toward business becomes increasingly hostile, even though business is on the whole the worst sufferer from the depression, and profits is the share of income that takes the worst beating. Conversely, attitudes toward labor become warmer, as reflected in the Wagner Act of 1935. The New Deal represents a major shift in attitude toward the economic functions of government, even though most of the New Deal activities were illplanned and very small in scope. ( The share of national product going to government actually fell from 1932 to 19381 ) The attitudes, however, were more important than the policies, and such experiments as the N.R.A. and A.A.A., the T.V.A., and other alphabetical agencies, would have been inconceivable a decade earlier. Since World War II, we have again seen a shift in the image, which grew more favorable to business, less favorable to labor (as reflected in the Taft-Hartley Act and in the state right-to-work laws) and slightly less favorable to government enterprise and intervention in the market. In the long view, however, the trends may affect the image more than the cycles; 1958 is not 1928, and still less is it 1908. The effects of the cycles are obvious and often spectacular. The trends are like the movements of the ice cap, imperceptible over short periods but enormously powerful. There is, for instance, the trend in growth of population, checked by the immigration laws after 1920 and by the low birth rates of the depression years, but now resumed in full and somewhat alarming flood. There is the trend in increased wealth and in real per-capita income, again interrupted by the depression, but, if anything, stimulated

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by the two world wars. There is the continuing "organizational revolution," the rise in the scale of organizations of all kinds: businesses, labor unions, professional associations, farmers' associations, trade associations. There is a continuing rise in the educational enterprise, and in the proportion of people who enjoy higher levels of education. There has been a fairly continuous rise in the size, and perhaps also in the power, of the churches. The proportion of the population included in church membership has risen fairly steadily through the century till it is now about 60 per cent. Especially since the outbreak of World War II, there has been a great rise in the size, power, and influence of the armed forces. Expenditures on national security were about 1.5 per cent of the Gross National Product even in 1939; in 1960 they were about 10 per cent. The structural changes within the over-all totals of these trends have been just as striking since 1900 as have the changes in the totals themselves. The proportion of the population in agriculture has declined sharply as a result of a great revolution in agricultural techniques — the mechanization and "biologizing" of agriculture — which enables one man to grow much more food than he could in 1900. People living on farms formed almost 50 per cent of the population in 1900, 25 per cent in 1929, and 13 per cent in 1957! In 1900 one might still say that the "average" American lived on a farm; in 1929 his parents had lived on a farm, and in 1958 his grandparents! Manufactures have about maintained their proportion of the population; the great increase has been in the professions and the service trades. With the coming of automation this trend should continue. Another trend of great importance is the rise of consumer capital and the shift in the center of gravity of the stock of wealth away from the factory and the business toward the home. This is the age of the home-owning, the car-owning, and the washerand-dryer, household-equipment-owning family. Even entertainment has moved into the home with the coming of TV. The "average American" is increasingly a surburban family man with a

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working wife and three or four children. This improvement in the efficiency of the home as an economic unit is releasing increasing numbers of women to the labor force. Even from 1942 to 1956 the percentage of women (20-64 years old) in the total labor force rose from 22 per cent to 27 per cent. What all these trends add up to is a great movement of economic success, punctuated with one serious interruption in the Great Depression of the 1930's. It is not surprising under these circumstances that economic radicalism has declined, that socialism is no longer even the very mild threat that it may have seemed in 1900, at least as far as internal affairs are concerned. On the whole we seem to have entered an era of economic good feeling where something of a synthesis of the conflicting images has been achieved. This "mid-century synthesis" can be seen at three levels — the level of the academic and the intellectual, the level of the "informed" businessman, and the level of political action. At the academic level, economic dissent in this country took the form of "institutionalism" rather than of Marxism. The Institutionalists were a group of professional economists, most of them professors, among whom the names of John R. Commons, Thorstein Veblen, and Wesley Mitchell stand out. Their most productive period was about 1900 to 1920. Their protest against the "orthodox" economics of the universities took three main forms. They objected to the static nature of the prevailing Marshallian and Austrian price theory, and its neglect of dynamic and evolutionary processes. They objected to the narrowness of the economist's abstraction, and wanted to bring sociological and psychological considerations into the treatment of economic problems. Then they objected to the divorcement of economics from the facts of life — and, Commons and Mitchell, at any rate, pioneered in empirical economic research. All the protests of the Institutionalists had an important degree of justice in them. Their positive contributions were less fruitful, and with the exception of a

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handful of faithful disciples, the Institutionalists left no direct descendants and made little direct impact on the course of American academic life. Their indirect influence, however, has been very great. As with many reformers, their reforms were carried out by other (more conservative) men, and in ways which they would never have envisaged. Within the last twenty-five years or so, the revolution in economic thought, justly called the Keynesian Revolution, has had as profound an effect on American thinking as it has on other parts of the non-Communist world. The revolution walks on two legs. One is the theoretical reformulations of Keynes which gave economists a new box of tools, crude but effective, to deal with the problems of mass unemployment, depression, and inflation — that is, with the "great cycle." The other leg is the development of national income statistics, pioneered by the National Bureau of Economic Research in the 1920s, and beginning on an official scale with the Department of Commerce in 1929. The situation is not unlike that of the Copernican revolution in astronomy which was a new theoretical viewpoint combined with a new source of information, the telescope. Before the development of national income statistics, economists moved in a world of occasional lights and flashes; afterward, however shadowy, the outlines of the whole economic landscape became visible. The Keynesian Revolution undermined the most serious and far-reaching criticism of capitalism — that it was inherently incapable of solving within the broad framework of its own institutions the problem of recurrent depressions, and was therefore necessarily doomed to be succeeded by a centralized planned economy. The Keynesian conclusion is that the vices of an uncontrolled capitalism are not inseparable from its virtues, and that its major defects can be remedied within the framework of its basic institutions of private property, free enterprise, and the market mechanism. The remedy, however, involves the acceptance of a certain basic responsibility by government for "steersmanship." We might describe this system, using the term

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of Norbert Wiener, as "Cybernetic Capitalism." Its image is, appropriately enough, not the socialist streetcar, following the rigid rails of a predetermined, bureaucratic plan, but the automobile, family-owned and privately driven and free to go where fancy calls, but provided with a steering wheel and brakes and guided by stop lights. The remedy for the high-powered but steerless car of uncontrolled capitalism is not to jam everybody into the socialist trolley but the much simpler solution of fitting the car with a steering wheel. In less fanciful language this means that government must be prepared to act in the opposite sense to the way in which the private economy is going — to be deflationary when the private economy is inflationary and inflationary when it is deflationary — and to see that aggregate demand is maintained at a level which yields high employment and reasonably full-capacity operation of the system. The ideas involved in this "revolution" are very simple yet they imply a shift of viewpoint from which many objects of the economic landscape are regarded. Thus, we now look upon the tax system not merely as a device to raise money for government to spend, but as primarily an instrument to control aggregate demand. The national debt likewise is looked on as an instrument for providing the economy with an adequate amount of government securities and for satisfying the demand for savings in the absence of investment, rather than as the shameful offspring of financial incontinence. We may sum up the conclusion of the Keynesian Revolution by saying that the main economic task of government is to be a governor, not an engine. It is a little too early to say that this revolution has been accomplished in practice as it has in thought; one will be a little happier about the permanence of this "new era" if we get through, say, another five years without anything more than minor depressions, and with continued steady growth in percapita income. The memories of the "New Era" of the 1920's, when the Federal Reserve System was supposed to have done away with depressions for good and all, still rankles a little. The

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wise economist knows that there are "ifs" and "buts" even in the new theoretical and informational system, and that the problem of steersmanship — with a slack steering wheel, or maybe with two steering wheels — is not as easy as it sounds in the textbooks. There are still more "ifs" and "buts" in the political system; it remains an open question whether the government would be able to act fast enough, or even in the right places, if we were faced with another situation like those of 1930 or 1931. There is a further gnawing long-run uncertainty as to whether the price of a full-employment policy is not continued creeping inflation, and if so, whether we can adjust to this situation. There is even an unpleasant doubt as to whether economic progress is not to some extent stimulated by depressions, so that steady progress might be a little slower than the kind of unsteady progress which we have experienced. In spite of these hesitations, however, there is room for cautious optimism. On the side of government there is the commitment involved in the Employment Act of 1946. The commitment is not spelled out in any detail, but the act had at least the virtue of setting up a fire alarm in the shape of the Council of Economic Advisers and a small fire department in Congress in the form of the Joint Committee on the Economic Report. The Joint Committee has acted through the years as a seminar in economics inside Congress, and has developed as a result a small group of congressmen in both houses who have an above-average level of understanding of economic problems. It is to be hoped that in the event of a serious economic emergency, this core of more expert congressmen might give leadership which their less experienced colleagues would accept. The Council of Economic Advisers performs a rather similar function within the executive branch. On the side of business, an influential group of business leaders in the Committee for Economic Development accepted the new ideas, and have been influential in getting them broadly accepted within the business community. The C.E.D. did much

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to break down the wall between the business and the academic communities, at least in its earlier years. We must not overdo the idyllic picture; there are still large numbers of the unreconstructed on both sides. Still, a certain change in atmosphere is perceptible; even the National Association of Manufacturers and the United States Chamber of Commerce have come around to a rather grudging acceptance of some of the new ideas, and the essential continuity in economic policy between the Truman and Eisenhower administrations is evidence of the permanence of the change. In industrial relations also we see a certain "mid-century synthesis," as symbolized perhaps in the five-year contract of General Motors and United Automobile Workers. The change here is again not unrelated to the intrusion of academic ideas into what used to be a preserve of practical men. A new academic discipline of industrial relations, drawing on all the social sciences for its theory and methods, and embodied in institutes of industrial relations in many of the major universities, emerged in the 1920's and 1930's. The impact of this development on the practice of labor relations has been important, though credit must also be given to the practical wisdom learned from the often bitter experience of industrial warfare. Thus, in many industries there has been a transition from industrial warfare, with the employer and the union fighting each other tooth and nail, through a period of "cold war" in which the union is accorded a grudging coexistence, to a genuine industrial peace in which the union is fully accepted as a necessary part of the industrial picture and in which the worker achieves a dignity and status within the enterprise which is something more than that of a mere hired hand. Here again one must not paint too idyllic a picture. The 1958 depression shook the Great Detroit Truce. The great steel strike of 1960 evoked dim reminiscences of 1919. Much of the South is still in the stage of industrial warfare, and there are great underlying tensions there. The very growth of the labor movement has brought with it serious problems of corruption, of internal

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democracy and control of irresponsible leadership. On the whole, however, a mood of cautious optimism is still in order; looking; back on 1900, one is conscious of a real change in attitude. There has been an integration of the working class into the over-all structure of the society in a way that perhaps has never before been achieved in history, and which certainly has not been achieved in the communist countries for which this is theoretically a major objective! There has been a similar movement in agriculture — the farmer is much more like his city cousin than he was in 1900. The integration of the Negro has been slower, but it has been steady. If the twentieth century does not go down in nuclear disaster, then, it may stand out in history as the great age of integration, in which for the first time a classless society was created by everybody becoming middle class.

Vili

THE P U B L I C I M A G E : John M. Blum

POLITICS

I n the United States since 1900, the American people have used politics continually as one medium for their difficult adjustment to advancing industrialism just as, since colonial times, they have continually expressed their national ideals and character in political terms. There was need at the turn of the century for a very high order of conciliation, indeed, to modulate the antitheses of American life. In arresting array stood the contrasts of the few and the many, the rich and the poor, the city and the farm. Control of the state was an actual protection for those who had what they wanted, a potential corrective for those who felt themselves in need. Men of money had manipulated politics adroitly to obtain and hold large privileges. Some of these were local — liberal franchises for the development of urban services; easy standards for incorporation and investment; inexpensive and indulgent government. Some of these were national — a protective tariff; a monetary system susceptible to private domination; a system of taxation that left corporate and individual incomes and fortunes unscathed. These privileges perhaps counted less than did important immunities. The first managerial revolution had already occurred. Partly for the efficiencies of industrial integration, more particularly for the safety of restricting debilitating competition, the great managers of the 1880's and 1890's had constructed huge corporate organizations that dominated the basic economy. Neither local governments nor the national government held the

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masters of these organizations to meaningful account for their business procedures, for their operations in the money market, for the quality of their products, for the safety of their employees, or for their treatment of their laboring force. The consolidators were not ordinarily vicious, but they were also not apologetic about their wealth or power. Identifying their own status with the welfare of society, they believed themselves Christian men to whom "God in His Infinite Wisdom has given control of the property interests of the country." 1 As Christian men, they recognized some responsibility for magnanimity. Their stewardship, often generous and sometimes wise, relieved the most obvious burdens of those they considered the worthy poor, and subsidized the cultural activities which they considered the most obviously proper. Each Christmas, orphaned newsboys knew their charity. Their daily disbursements, however, had a broader exemplary influence, for Newport mansions and Bradley-Martin balls probably cost more and certainly registered a clearer impression in the consciousness of most Americans than did a Bowery mission. The call to alms doubtless gratified the givers, but their largess could not satisfy a people with a strong egalitarian tradition, with the suspicion — at least — that any man might own a mansion. The promises of stewardship were simply less compelling for the American "on the make" than were the promises of Horatio Alger. And, even those who believed rather less in leveling the wealthy down than in leveling themselves up saw the practical advantages in controlling the state. Consolidators, moreover, in meeting what they took to be the realities of corporate life, excited in the early years of the century a growing resistance from other interest groups. Farmers, for one, suspicious in any case of industrialism and urbanism, had special grievances and objectives. They had long urged government control or even ownership of the railroads, maintaining that the policies of private management placed an inequita-

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ble burden on agricultural commodities. They advocated also public ownership or control of grain elevators and other crop warehouses. This, the argument went, would reduce the cost of marketing crops and permit the farmer to hold produce for high prices, to reap speculative gains for himself. The basically capitalistic predilection inherent in these demands revealed itself also in the farmers' attitude toward money. By the use of one device or another, they wanted an increase in the supply of money and a decrease in the cost of credit; an inflation in the prices their products commanded, a deflation in the prices of goods and services they used. So, too, in thinking about the tariff or taxation, the farmer fought not against privilege or discrimination but against privileges for those who were not farmers. Perhaps the central emphasis of agrarian politics as the century began was on creating public instrumentalities to monitor the growth and the practices of the great consolidators. If most farmers stopped short of rural socialism, they also perpetuated the agrarian antimonopoly tradition. They would divide industrial power by enforcing aggressively the languishing antitrust law. They would bring industrial units down to their size. They would legislate their view of America, the image they held of a bucolic society of independent husbandmen. It was for them a pretty picture, verdant, egalitarian, nostalgic. It was also socially regressive, impossible of application in an industrial world. The laboring force, as troubled as was the agricultural community about the institutions of industrialism, was divided about how it wanted to engage the state. Crafts-union leadership, representing skilled workers, and by no means the majority of them, recognized the advantages to labor in the stability which restrictions of competition had achieved. The American Federation of Labor had no argument with the process of industrial consolidation, but it resented the application of antitrust laws to unions and their activities, and it demanded that the state protect the consolidations of workers that paralleled the consolidations of management. So protected, labor expected to obtain concessions

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in wages, hours, and working conditions that would permit the working man to live a decent life. For the same purpose, the crafts unions advocated local and national legislation to set minimum standards of safety and sanitation and to insure an equitable system of workmen's compensation. The skilled laborer intended the state to protect his view of himself as a peer of the bourgeois. The unskilled and unorganized, especially the recent immigrants, neither identified fully with white-collar values nor stood to profit from the collective bargaining of the crafts, which made no real effort to win their loyalty. Indeed, articulate craft-union spokesmen, believing that massive immigration in the early century threatened labor standards, were amenable to and sometimes even eager for the restriction of immigration. But the unskilled had aspirations of their own. The vast majority of the laboring force harbored strong prejudices against radicalism. Rather, they responded to the calculated compassion of urban politicians who made the city machines rough prototypes of social service agencies. Providing a bucket of coal, a turkey, a chowder party, a wedding, or a burial, the aspirant ward politician gave those he served a sense of belonging, and at once won his constituency and whetted its taste for American comforts. Out of community associations of urban ethnic groups organized to afford a minimal, mutual protection against the disasters of disease, death, and unemployment, out of political organizations trading sporadic benevolence for constant partisanship, there was emerging a corps of second-generation Americans who rooted their political careers in tenacious advocacy of factory and tenement legislation, public health measures, and various forms of social insurance. For the laboring force, immigrant and native-born, they helped to create expectations of a society wherein the state underwrote minimum standards of life consonant, though not identical, with those that beguiled the trade unionist. For such an urban and mutualistic society, farmers ordinarily

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felt no sensitivity; toward such an actionist and costly state, industrialists ordinarily felt only fear. Among laborer, farmer, and industrialist, between any two of them, there was no sufficiently common identity of interest, no sufficiently common interpretation of America to compel a lasting collaboration. But politics depended upon coalition, and the most effective one when the century began was the cooperation of business with urban political leadership. The city machines could rely upon local industrialists to contribute some direct financial support for election campaigns and for social activities, and to provide employment for needy constituents. On this basis, men of wealth had long been able to count upon the institutional politics of industrial cities to provide enough votes to preserve safe government. But the extravagant behavior of the alliance thus created, and the conditions of filth and misery which it permitted to flourish, threatened the gentle ideals of many middle-class Americans. Descendants of families that ruled the country in earlier years resented the manners and the mores of the parvenus and resented, too, the recruitment of a political elite from among the newly rich or the recently naturalized. Many of them also, however much they may unconsciously have felt their own status threatened, took genuine offense at dishonesty, at corruption blatantly paraded. The shame of the cities made itself felt first in the hearts of ladies and gentlemen of good will of whom large numbers became self-conscious reformers. Some of the sturdiest and most conscientious dedicated themselves to social work, hoping thereby systematically to provide the services which urban politics rendered at best incompletely and unmethodically. As the social worker became familiar with his territory, however, he gradually recognized the need for political participation, for only by mobilizing the state could he hope to achieve precisely the ends for which the politically active second-generation Americans were also striving. From the

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ranks of the social workers there came a small but knowledgeable leadership for political reform and a trained and growing staff available to the state at any time it embarked upon remedial programs. More immediately the reformer found himself in politics because of his attachment to good government. During the last decades of the nineteenth century scores of middle-class Americans devoted militant enthusiasm to civil service reform. As the century turned, these men were selecting newer objectives designed to delimit the power of the alliance of business with machine politics. They had discovered, moreover, that they could make their mark only by organizing, by consolidating their political activities just as the major political parties consolidated theirs. Ordinarily, reform organization had been nonpartisan, frequently in Good Government clubs or the like, which either proposed a slate of their own or threw their support to a political party which was willing to run candidates they could endorse. Because such organizations had been ineffective, at best the vehicles for infrequent and inconclusive victories, the middleclass idealist moved more and more into the mainstream of politics itself. Accepting the terms of the institutionalized two-party system, he tended by 1900 to enroll and work within one of the parties, suffering his defeats when they occurred without bolting, learning the necessity of gradualism and compromise. Those who elected this last avenue could pursue not only their ideals but also the satisfactions of the status of high public office. They might, in effect, restore to their own kind the direction of government which they felt slipping away. What was more, they were able by judicious political regularity to enlist the allegiance of other groups, and they were forced, whatever preconceptions they brought to their role, to educate themselves in the needs and the methods of the rich, of the poor, and of the rural. The politically active middle-class reformer became a kind of self-appointed court to judge the processes and the possibilities of American politics. As he selected among the available options,

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he tended, like representatives of other groups, to identify with those with which he could most readily sympathize on the basis of his own experience and needs. The eminent practicality of the middle-class political response revealed itself variously. Almost as much as the farmers, the managers of small business concerns suffered from the latitude that large industry enjoyed. More and more they urged the use of the Antitrust Act to restore equitable competition, the construction of public regulatory agencies to discipline industrial power, and the increase of available funds for business loans at moderate rates. The spokesman of the urban middle class could go along with his rural brother so long as the farmer did not insist on socialism or upon federal adventures for which the city man had to pay. Like the farmers and some union leaders, the middle-class reformer was repulsed by the unfamiliar way of life of the urban masses. Through an easy rupture in logic he frequently blamed the immigrant for the slums and sought remedy not only in factory and tenement legislation, but also in the restriction of immigration. The industrial or residential slum, furthermore, threatened property values which the owners of better urban real estate were prepared to protect even at the risk of some public expense. The social reformer, his self-interest reinforcing his humanitarian zeal, asserted the desirability of raising the necessary public moneys by increasing taxes on corporations and corporate properties. Such taxation could also support and improve public education, so long an issue of urgency for men who cherished high ambitions for their children. And, for men of old family, graduated inheritance taxes were an attractive device for reducing the fortunes of the newly rich. Even the progressive income tax constituted a substantially larger threat to the owners of the great consolidations than to those who staffed their bureaucracies or managed their smaller competitors. Prepared on their own account to question the status quo, middle-class social workers and political reformers took positions

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on public policy only marginally at variance with those of the moderates among farm and labor leaders. They took these positions, moreover, with a soothing conviction, in some cases justifiable and in all cases plausible, that they acted unselfishly for impeccable humanitarian goals. The middle-class man, alienated by extremes of wealth and poverty, frightened by the prospect of conflict between managers and laborers or urbanités and farmers that might disrupt the comfortable order of his society, sought out instinctively the gentle conciliation that best suited the needs of a viable politics. He was admirably placed to be the effective broker of conflicting interests, to be the reasonable catalyst for political change. Out of his self-interest and his altruism he could fashion a political purpose to which men from every sector of society might subscribe. His conciliatory objective conformed exactly with the needs of the two major parties. In order to win a national election, to control not only the Presidency but also the houses of Congress, the major parties had to draw support from a complex of interest groups. Party success hinged on the ability of party leaders to control a shifting alignment of forces. To this end they could rely upon partisan loyalties to help cement coalitions, but these loyalties needed continually to be refreshed by techniques of reward and exhortation. The mobilization of political conviction depended in large part upon the availability of a national leader whose posture encompassed a wide range of acceptable agreement, whose personality evoked sufficient attachment to convince those who suffered some disappointment in the process of compromise to follow where the party led. Through their leaders and through their platforms, the national parties had to project an evocative program designed to obscure the concessions made by each element in any coalition large enough to govern, a program convincingly communicative of some promise for everyone. The perfect source for such conciliation lay in the happy coincidence of middle-class values and political needs. A series of intraparty coalitions, each composed of different alignments of

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interest groups, successively dominated American politics during the first half of the twentieth century. Each depended upon middle-class support and middle-class leadership. Middle-class attitudes and coalition politics alike provoked a continual turning of the energies of the state toward reducing the extremes of American life. In this process, both the accomplishments and the rhetoric of the successful coalitions revealed the essentially constant, preponderantly middle-class aspirations which Americans expected their politics to effectuate. Theodore Roosevelt, inheriting the Presidency in 1901, set out to capture the allegiance of "the farmers, small businessmen and upper-class mechanics" whom he considered his "natural allies." Primarily an Eastern, urban man, an American patrician, Roosevelt had a genius for reaching the average voters, for endowing his deliberately homely and commonplace statements of middle-class virtues with the drama of his own exuberance. For all the superficial differences between himself and his electorate, he contended, down at bottom they had the same ideals. Roosevelt presided over a centrist coalition. Though it included moderates from agriculture and labor, it rested upon the sure foundation of the Republican precincts, strongest in the East and Middle West, and it attracted, as the party so long had, a substantial proportion of men of wealth who in any case had no ready political alternative. Roosevelt assiduously cultivated his organization, rewarding regularity without condoning corruption, binding the professionals and their constituents to his person. He consulted continually those "best minds" — the captains of industry, law, and finance — in whose allegiance the Republicans took such persistent pride, and he appointed an immediate staff of skilled specialists who were to give him a fund of safe, thoughtful, and unbiased advice about the problems of the nation. The political and administrative structure of Roosevelt's government mirrored his private, reflective temperament which he so often dressed in an adventurous vocabulary.

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Roosevelt's Square Deal gave a circumspect, urban, even elitist direction to change. His most winning gestures toward the fanner were those that had an equal appeal to small business. The first President to employ the Sherman Antitrust Law aggressively, he established the usefulness of that act for dissolving industrial combinations. But he placed his larger faith in regulation. Antitrust he considered important as a kind of sheep dog, perpetually barking at the flock to keep it in order but rarely allowed to snap except at a recalcitrant stray. Industrialism, he believed, inevitably involved consolidation. For society to live with consolidation, however, government had to have the power to monitor the behavior of big business, and government had also to encourage farm and labor organizations which, once constructed, would tend to balance the power of industry. His emphasis on balance rather than destruction protected — even endorsed — the economic structure of American industrialism without endorsing — indeed while limiting — the license of industrial power. Roosevelt's policies thus underwrote all the pleasing conditions of modern industrial civilization — the conveniences, the productivity, the national strength — which only the nostalgically bucolic wished to remove from American life. He nourished the national dream of plenty. Yet his policies might well have disturbed the less privileged had not his rhetoric tempered the acceptance of bigness with a more generally winning invocation of moral individuality and absolute justice. Condemning only the criminal and foolish among the rich, the violent and sullen among the poor, the corrupt and timid without regard to status, Roosevelt welcomed all others as his partners in a program of common sense, courage, and common honesty. They believed him, by and large, as they should have, for he was himself the heroic image of his ponderously unheroic constituency. On two accounts the centrist coalition fell apart after Roosevelt left office. His successor, William Howard Taft, a genial man without nerve for politics, let himself be identified with, if not

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captured by, the right wing of his party. Roosevelt had struck many poses — cowboy, soldier, explorer, policeman — familiar and endearing to the American people. But, as he observed in 1908, Taft risked popular disfavor by having his photograph so often taken while he played golf, then still a rich mans game. So, also, though Taft judged public policy much as Roosevelt would have, he seemed ordinarily to lack vigor, imagination, and especially the common touch. Almost before he was at home in the White House, the spokesmen of agricultural discontent and middle-class reform began to drift away from the Republicans. Taft's maladroitness was not alone to blame. Intransigent business interests had decided they preferred control of the party to government of the country. As the fringes of the coalition raveled, the party came to represent primarily the more privileged Americans. This gave the Democrats a splendid opportunity to form a broad coalition of their own. What evolved in the years between 1910 and 1916 was a new reformist coalition rather more rural than its predecessor. It contained, of course, the Solid South, largely agricultural, and the dependable Northern Democratic machines, but it grew beyond that bifurcated base to take in many of those whom Taft's associates had alienated. Building on the foundations Roosevelt's Republicans had laid, modifying but not abandoning their picture of society, Wilson's Democracy made large alterations in the pattern of American life. By his own account a spokesman of the aspirant small businessman, of the "man on the make," by temperament and training suspicious of organized power, Wilson put his first emphasis on measures designed "to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore." The initial statutory achievements of his New Freedom tended to splinter industrial power. They also gave the country for the first time a central banking system susceptible to considerable public control. These innovations satisfied Wilson's modest reformist proclivities, but in order to enlarge his coalition he espoused a number of measures he had previously resisted, includ-

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ing legislation establishing the eight-hour day on railroads, creating special federally supported banks to extend inexpensive credit to farmers, and prohibiting child labor. After the coming of war, he accepted without complaint the heavy and deliberately redistributive taxes imposed by Congress. Yet Wilson's management of his party gave small satisfaction to unorganized workers, the majority of the laboring force. Only with unfeigned reluctance did the President cooperate with the leaders of the democracy of the cities to whom he gave no feeling of belonging. In some areas of the country he withheld the favors to which machine Democrats had long been accustomed. And he had no clearly communicable argument with antiforeign biases or with Prohibition, twin anathemas of city wards. Not surprisingly, especially in the East, the Democratic urban vote showed some tendency to waver when it came to electing national officials. Wilson always appealed more to the America of the small town and polite suburb than to the America of blast furnaces and asphalt pavements. His prim middle-classness, dressed in an antiseptic rectitude, had political force just so long as he bent to agrarian demands and engaged himself in completing his generation's program of middle-class reform, of what seemed, at least, to be the insulation of politics from the rule of the machines and of industrial power from the domination of wealth. Thereafter the middle-class man began to feel he had conceded enough to the less privileged, and Wilson s interpretation of the mission of America as an exemplary, moral force suited his constituency only while the strains of war invigorated his plea for mutual sacrifice. Even then there were grumblings from industrialists yearning for freedom from federal control, from farmers chafing at ceilings on the price of wheat, from ethnic groups unpersuaded by the President's implicit Anglo-Saxonism, and, perhaps most significantly, from erstwhile reformers saturated with change and tired of high taxes. Whatever its merit, the apocalyptical image Wilson offered to them neither satisfied their particular

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interests nor provided the political beguilement of Roosevelt's sometimes banal but always vigorous practicality. The disruption of the Democratic coalition coincided with the loss of its consensus. Satisfied with what government had accomplished, the middle-class man reidentified with wealth or the exciting prospect of wealth and reënlisted in 1920 with the Republicans. The great urban machines gladly reëstablished their immunity from genteel intrusions and toughly reasserted their antipathy to agrarian culture, Republican or Democratic. Throughout the 1920's the most obvious characteristic of the Democratic Party was its incoherence. Lacking a purpose that could obscure the incompatibility of the rural South and the urban North, lacking a middle-class leadership that could fuse the two, the party twice had almost insuperable difficulty in nominating a Presidential candidate. Once its urban candidate failed to carry much of the rural South. The Democracy could find no conciliatory formula for itself, much less a program for the nation. Men of wealth and their standpat representatives who had chosen to control the Republican Party even at the risk of its defeat reaped their reward after 1918. Content to let the Democratic factions neutralize each other, they systematically nullified the effect of most of the reform legislation of the previous two decades by turning the state over to do-nothing administrators, by reducing the incidence of the income tax, by enthroning industry and its preferred privileges. This regression to conditions as they had been was possible only because of the changes that had already occurred. Though the bastions of reform had become paper fortresses, the tired progressive was content with the semblance of success. He had no stomach either for subsidizing agriculture or for effecting a really broad redistribution of income and property. He was happily seduced by the prosperity of the Golden Twenties. The cornucopia of advancing industrialism overflowed to the unprecedented benefit not of its masters

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alone but also of their bureaucratic, legal, medical, and aesthetic servants. Industry took care, too, to allot much of the increase in productivity to labor. Fighting unionism tooth and nail, business contrived a new paternalism that for the time made the doctrines of a magnanimous stewardship amply satisfying. The organized labor movement receded, losing membership it had accumulated in the previous decade, losing spirit to the point where the president of the American Federation of Labor broadcast stock tips every week. For all this there was, as there had been in earlier times, an appropriate leadership. Calvin Coolidge's laconic complacency mirrored the spirit of the time. Measured in terms of his capacity to represent a total constituency, Coolidge was a superlative President. He stood as plausibly as Wilson had for middle-class rectitude and much more obviously than his immediate predecessors for petty bourgeois caution. A more skillful politician than Wilson, indeed in his operations within the party as self-aggrandizing as Roosevelt, Coolidge also had a sure instinct for speaking the transient mind of his people. His was the appropriate symbolism of his decade, for it believed with him that the man who built a factory, built a temple; and the man who worked there, worshipped there. While this spirit reigned, only the fact of prosperity remained to level further the remaining extremes of American life. Both the political strength of the administration and the persuasion of its message depended upon prosperity. It was prosperity that perpetuated the cleavages among non-elite groups. It was prosperity that made believable the platitudes that condoned the inactivity of the state. But prosperity was transitory. Indeed, the failure of government even to attempt to rectify the gap between the rich and the poor safeguarded a maldistribution of income which contributed substantially to the economic collapse of 1929. In the years immediately thereafter the vicissitudes of depression reëmphasized the latent polarity in American life.

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Much of the middle class, its savings and security threatened, lost confidence in Republican stewardship. The paternalism of industry disappeared with the decline of profits; and, with an awful aloneness, laborers, organized and unorganized, met the misery of unemployment which neither the tired clichés of union leadership nor the overtaxed resources of urban politicians could effectively mitigate. The farmer, the victim of an agricultural depression that anteceded the crash itself, harassed by falling income and heavy debts, faced the harrowing loss of independence and even self-respect. Among the captains of industry and finance, too, especially among those whose profits had disappeared and whose businesses seemed about to, there was a growing sentiment for mobilizing the state in self-protection. The folklore of Coolidge could not meet the needs of any group. The "best minds," including Herbert Hoover's, counseled only patience and prudence, qualities vastly unconvincing in the absence of prosperity. By 1932 the Democratic Party could scarcely have failed to achieve power even in default. Under the astute leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt, it also achieved triumph. Roosevelt's New Deal rested in uneasy equilibrium, as he so often put it, somewhere slightly left of center, but the coalition over which he presided delivered something to the disenchanted in every sector of society, and in the viable tradition of middle-class leadership, he made himself a symbol of national purpose. Recapturing the spirit and refurbishing the rhetoric of reform, Roosevelt in the period 1932 through 1938 conceded less and less to the business community and more and more to agriculture and labor. Yet these concessions were continuously modified by the basic commitment of the New Deal to existing American traditions and middle-class values. Like his namesake in office, Franklin Roosevelt accepted the condition of size in industry as a fact of life. In spite of delayed and unconvincing adventures in antitrust, the New Deal en-

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deavored to contain the power of industry rather than to pulverize it. It increased the number and the authority of federal regulative agencies. It transferred the determining voice in monetary and banking policy to the government. It put government into the business of regional development, a business which private capital could not and would not sustain. It made government big, and yet it left business as big as ever and potentially much bigger. Size, to which few Americans really objected, was newly dignified, for, besides big government, the New Deal sponsored big labor and big agriculture, thereby achieving that counterbalance of social forces which the Square Deal had anticipated. There was a kind of leveling up of the consolidations of American life that the rhetoric of the day accurately equated with a leveling down of privilege. The balances thereby established left the small entrepreneur, the professional man, the pensioner, without the strength to resist the organized interests which were capable of making agreements between themselves that might threaten the status of those who lived outside of their orbits. But for the persisting commitment of the society to bourgeois and individualistic values, the New Deal wrote special insurance. As it did to industry, it supplied to farmers and home owners generous and cheap credit to protect mortgaged properties which might otherwise have been foreclosed and to assist in the acquisition of new and better farms and homes. The state in effect wrote for itself a money license to guard small and large capitalists, householders, selfemployed farmers and those who desired to become self-employed, from the perils of the business cycle. In using this license, moreover, the government strengthened private lending institutions by employing public credit indirectly, insofar as possible by reinsuring private individuals against the risks of lending. While underwriting the security of private property, the New Deal did as much for the income of fanners, North and South. Early agricultural legislation guaranteed many of them a decent subsistence, and later, when the level of parity was redefined

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during the Second World War, an outright prosperity. So also with labor. The government set minimum standards for wages and hours and adopted national programs for unemployment and old-age insurance. It also replaced dozens of slums with attractive public housing projects. All in all, the New Deal built a floor below the status of farmers, laborers, and property owners alike. New Deal labor and fiscal policies tended to level the status of the separate groups in the United States toward a mean which seemed golden to all but the wealthy. The increasing success of federally supported collective bargaining brought within the unions a majority of the laboring force, and the bargaining process itself helped them to extract from industry a growing share of the proceeds of production. Federal spending for relief and work relief not only saved a fifth of the nation from starvation, but also established the obligation of the state to defend the right to work, and to work at something above mere subsistence pay. Perhaps more significantly, the New Dealers, building on earlier precedents, used personal and corporate income taxes and personal inheritance and gift taxes as powerful leveling instruments. The acquisition and transmission of great fortunes became excessively difficult except in a few fields of activity which specialinterest groups contrived to protect. Against the tax laws more than any other New Deal venture, men of means protested. Roosevelt delighted in announcing that he planned it that way, delighted in putting men of wealth on a pinion by ridiculing what "they say" in mellifluous and colloquial addresses to the total people, "my friends." As he said, they were his friends. That Rooseveltian smile, that broad Rooseveltian "hello" which Winston Churchill somewhere called the most wonderful word in the English language, those white shirtsleeves waving from an open Ford, those hot dogs that the President made the special fare of royalty — all these and more made Roosevelt the good neighbor of every man next door in town, and of every man who learned from Roosevelt to believe that he could and should and

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would soon move next door. There was in the New Deal a joy and a promise that mitigated the impact of continuing hard times. There was, too, in the New Deal an element of the midway on Saturday night, an element of the cocky and the gaudy, a kind of bravado, that dispelled the moralism and the elitism of earlier episodes in humanitarian striving. A vulgarizing of middle-class reform as well as a broadening of its mission gave it a larger and more dedicated constituency who not only profited from its works but also reveled in its showmanship. New Deal efforts at reform proved vastly more successful than New Deal efforts at recovery. The intensification of depression in 1937 and 1938 drove marginal voters from the Democratic coalition. So, too, did the leveling up that occasioned a growing resentment of those relatively comfortable middle-class men who preferred their status to carry an element of exclusiveness. Enlisting with the more elite, they formed a sufficiently strong veto group, partly within and partly without the Democratic Party, to block the attempts of agricultural and laboring interests further to help themselves. But after prosperity returned during and following World War II, the devices for leveling and for counterbalancing which the New Deal had created won the permanent allegiance of all but an insignificant fraction of the American people. In a time of plenty the instruments for insuring an equitable, almost an egalitarian, distribution of the products of the economy operated so dramatically that the mass of Americans found themselves willy-nilly members of the middle class. In the decade since the war, wages-and-hour legislation and changes in federal social insurance have scarcely kept pace with the rising wages of the American laboring force; the returns from federal taxation have increased relatively less than has disposable consum'er income. Few of the terrors of early-century agricultural distress remain. The farmer, if he has suffered at all, has suffered only by comparison with the servants of industrialism. The great consolidations, moreover, stand stronger and better respected

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than ever before. Though their power over labor is checked by the power of the union, though their power over their competitors is subject to the continual but usually bland sniping of antitrust and federal regulation, they are essentially uninhibited in their pursuit of markets and of profits. Most importantly, the upward march of the agricultural and laboring force, while swelling the middle class, has left those who have not advanced in social status in a less differentiated position. The average small businessman, professional man, or bureaucrat, finding on one side a neighbor from the farm and on another a neighbor from a lathe, has become concerned most of all with protecting himself rather than with assisting others. The vanishing underprivileged leave the reformer without a platform, without humanitarian fervor or positive political mission. Because the antitheses of the early century have by and large vanished, there is small demand for further evolution in the direction of the energies of the state. The various interest groups are committed not to change but to the preservation of what they have gained, therefore to the defense of the status quo. Under these conditions the conciliatory processes of politics hang pretty much at dead center. This is the source and the meaning of "moderation" — the state of mind which has for the last decade elected a federal government that cannot rule, a government in which neither party has command of a working alliance, a government without a mandate. For this condition and for this state of mind there is, as there has been under different conditions, an appropriate political symbol. It has displayed itself most blatantly in the personality of General Eisenhower, a middle-class man whose entire life has been given to expert service in the government, a kindly but a rather tired man. By his own desire he has found himself to a degree unprecedented in the history of American politics the symbol not of one party but of both, a two-dimensional enlargement, in color to be sure, of the contact print of moderation. Over fifty years the conciliatory processes of politics, catalyzed

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by the middle class, working to make concrete the aspirations of that class, have so successfully removed the antitheses of 1900 that the basic group conflicts which it fell to politics to resolve are now stabilized. Yet the investment in political institutions, especially in the two major parties, and the habits of a century and a half perpetuate partisanship. This partisanship, moreover, has before it still at least two sets of unresolved problems, those of racial discrimination and those of foreign policy. Here group interests are less identifiable, the patterns of conciliation less sure. Just when imaginative catalyzing is in order, the middle class, its identity generalized, has lost its missionary spirit, leaving the routinized functions of party bereft of the guidance politics demands. An awful doubt therefore obtrudes. The familiar processes of politics may prove unequal to the mammoth tasks of providing a foreign policy suitable to a divided world in a time of fusion, may prove unequal to subduing the emotional obstinacy that impedes the liquidation of racial discrimination. There is also a happier possibility. The propensity for conciliation in two-party politics survived the dramatic social upheaval of industrialism and functioned as efficiently in an industrial and urban society as it had previously in an agricultural and rural society. Perhaps, just as the middle, so to speak, reformed itself during the first two decades of this century and thereby set the precedents by which a searching reform could be accomplished, so now a conscienceful moderation may produce at least the preliminary bases for neighborliness between black and white and for unselfish participation in world affairs. These vital ends need for their fulfillment only a total projection, inside the United States and out, of the middle-class image of America — an image to which Americans from most walks of life have long subscribed, an image which the continual accommodations of middle-class politics have now almost realized, an image of a bountiful society in which each man has the assurance of comfort and of dignity.

IX THE D I S C O V E R Y OF POPULAR CULTURE Reuel Denney

THE

Ν OT until almost the second quarter of the twentieth century was there an adequate critical response to an American popular culture which depends as much on aural and visual media as upon the printed page. The preparation for that response, nonetheless, had been made in previous decades. In the period 1880-1950 the response of critics and interpreters of popular culture to increasing mass-duplication and mass-distribution of symbols returned again and again to certain major questions. At least six of these questions had been more or less implicit throughout the nineteenth century, and became explicit between 1880 and World War I. A question about democratic man: Was he losing his way by standardizing so much of his imaginative life at the low level suggested, for example, by yellow journalism? A question about democratic-industrial culture: Was the United States leading the Western world in a leveling process that threatened to go too far — as in the banality and vulgarity of some of its schoolbooks? A question about social structure: Could society survive such a rapid transfer of power from the rich and the better-educated to those who were as yet both poor and uneducated? What should the relation be between mass and elite? A question about the American communications system: What effects on language, tradition, and character would be caused by massive immigration from countries that not only spoke a foreign language, but lived by a different ethos?

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A question about the New World and the Old: How did American popular culture affect the terms of America's relation to its European past? A question about the relation between city and farm: Was the decline of agrarian occupations changing the nature of American society? To these questions, already standardized in one form or another before World War I, the period since 1920 has added others. Many of them were in the air as early as Van Wyck Brooks's pivotal publication of America's Coming of Age1 in 1915; not until after 1920 did they become more widely recognized as "topics." Here are three of the most salient. A question about industrialism and mass-marketing in relation to social character: To what degree is the American economy of surplus compelled by its own nature to expand consumer motives as fast as possible? A question about the relation between new communications trades, the elites that practice them, and the products they produce: Would all symbols degenerate as the result of their manufacture not by creative individuals but by industrial teams, not necessarily by personalities pledged to their work, but by anonymous craftsmen? Would the producers degenerate also? A question about the place of our popular and industrial culture in a sequence between the older industrial cultures ( Britain, for example) and the newer industrial cultures (Japan, for example): What could we actually transmit from old to new? What were the merits and demerits of our role as an agent of transmission? In order to understand how the more "practical" public critics of the popular culture in the twentieth century came to formulate such major questions and how they gradually learned to deal with them, one must recall the work of the critics who preceded them. A thoughtful concern with the new form of mass industrial

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society and its popular culture had appeared in some strength after the Civil War. In the late 1870's Jonathan Baxter Harrison had written unsigned magazine articles for the Atlantic ("Certain Dangerous Tendencies in American Life") 2 in which he raised fundamental questions. What was to be expected, for example, from the social alienation of the middle class from the workers of the New England mill towns? Besides touching what was to be a major nerve-end of social politics in New England for the next eighty years, he implied that he was dealing with two different class cultures, two different ways of using the communications institutions of American society. It has been suggested that his concern with having the elite take an interest in the demos and its ways, with some implied scorn for the seclusiveness of the elite, flows naturally out of Emerson's praise for the simple refinements of the common man s culture. Yet, intellectual influences more complex than Emerson's partly selfdelusive hopes for a democratic culture of plain living and high thinking are to be found in later nineteenth-century reflections on the state of American society. That such reflections commented on the popular communications forms mainly for the sake of topical illustration is no reason for passing them by. Henry James was no specialist in the daily press and he limited his commentary to problems of reviewing and to such apothegms as: journalism is criticism of the moment at the moment. Although he wrote seriously on the drama, he limited his commentary on the popular United States market for theater to such ponderously amusing vignettes as the one dealing with changes in the Bowery theater district, between 1870 and 1900, in The American Scene (1907). 3 It is not so much what he had to say about particular communications forms, as his sense of their context in his image of a society in communication with itself, that is of interest. The same can be said for the others who influenced the popular culture critics of the twentieth century. It seems fair to say of Henry James that he always took some

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interest in American "levels of aspiration," was always depressed by the effect on American lives of the failure to make enough demands on the world and on the self. It is in this sense that he established a claim on the theme of the "poverty of wishes," the poverty of aspirations, which has become one of the principal themes in the criticism of modern personality and popular culture. "Modern politics," wrote Henry Adams, "is at bottom a struggle not of men but of forces. The men becpme every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central power-houses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces." 4 Adams might have been referring not only to electrical powerhouses but to rapidly turning rotary presses, dynamos engaging America in powerful magnetic fields of publicity force. In his response to mass culture, Adams was an ancestor of those who are concerned about the maintenance of a responsible elite, in the face of flanking movements by popular culture, and what he would have called its cult of the undifferentiated man. Yet, more than anyone else, William James led the late nineteenth· and twentieth-century intellectual's expedition across the railroad tracks to the popular-culture side of town. The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) is an attempt, among other things, to come to terms with popular Protestant sources of despair and optimism in American life. A study of primary communication forms such as the sermon or religious introspection, it implies a Durkheimian concern (different as his conclusions are from Dürkheims) with the problem of "collective representations."5 As evidence of his lively insight into the social facts, one has only to observe how much he served as a pioneer for such later studies of the "inspirational literature" of America's popular prints as the recent Popular Religion, by Schneider and Dornvusch.

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Not that his own tentative conclusions were convincing to others of his philosophical and psychological craft. What has proved to be one of the most influential evaluations of the problem of the Protestant ethos in the face of the newer popular culture was put forward by George Santayana in a comment on James: "He seems to have felt sure that certain thoughts and hopes — those familiar to a liberal Protestantism — were every true man's friend in life. This assumption would have been hard to defend if he or those he habitually addressed had ever questioned it." 6 In other parts of Character and Opinion in the United States (1920), Santayana presses home his perception that men such as the Adamses, the Jameses, and Royce, are the late products of a religious and literary culture once "popular" but no longer so. He was saying, in effect, that a lot of things had happened to America and its popular culture since the Bay Psalm Book. He was observing a late stage of the decline of that complex of American critical thought which, as William Charvat describes it, was crystallized in the period 1810 to 1835. This earlier critical thought was the work of a "practically homogeneous upper class which felt itself competent to legislate, culturally, for other classes."7 Already, to be sure, there was a voice that broke sharply with the tradition that Santayana gently satirized. Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) scornfully dismissed the hope of explaining American society in terms of any harmonizing and controlling ethos. He boldly divided the society and its popular cultural communications forms into two social worlds, the two Marxist classes. The psychology of instincts and occupations, however, rather than the sociology of the ownership of the means of production, was the crucial source of social duality for Veblen. The popular cultural forms, such as the movie, were dream factories intended to maintain the industrial reserve army of the masses as hypnotized "hosts" for the parasitism of the powerful. Like many a farm boy, he saw the industrial

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and city culture more clearly and more harshly than some who had been born to it. Veblen's understanding of the increasing urbanization of American society was reflected in the more general critical response to the new forms of American popular culture after the turn of the century. We know a good deal about how the city and the popular culture interacted during the period 1870-1950 — the media growing up in, and strengthening the hand of the city; the city concentrating more and more on the population within its borders, and acculturating people to a constant pressure of media experiences. The growth of the big daily press from an 1870 circulation of about three million to a 1909 circulation of about 24 million, and to a scale, today, in which the circulation of one daily ( The New York Times) exceeds the total daily newspaper circulation of 1870, is correctly referred to as a sensitive index of urbanization.8 Less has been said about newer forms of the popular culture that developed along with the cities. One gauge of the growth of the urban culture — a gauge which permits us to dramatize briefly the contrast between the technically mechanized popular culture of the press or movie and the previously existing popular culture — is the American response to changes in the world of sport. America was getting near to the time when spectator sports were to become hugely popular, when Veblen could say: "The relation of football to physical culture is much the same as the bull-fight to agriculture." 9 American sports have developed through three social stages. The first, or agrarian, stage emphasized field sport, the amateur approach, and high personal participation. The second, beginning after the Civil War, emphasized team games, the professional approach — and above all, yearly increases in paid attendance by fans from areas of high population density. The third, or suburban, stage found some of these earlier spectator

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forms, such as baseball, under economic pressure after World War II; participation in sports returned as a suburban fashion, under the leadership of that twentieth-century American character, the tutoring "pro." From everyone involved in these stages there was a marked response especially in the sports pages, compounded of both hope and anxiety. In the early nineteenth century, games for adults were rather looked down upon, as Foster Rhea Dulles tells us, because they threatened the Protestant ethos.10 Actively indifferent to this reproach were only such horsemen, dog-fanciers, fishermen, and hunters as those who followed the great New York sporting paper before the Civil War, The Spirit of the Times.11 In country-squire fashion, they fought a quiet battle for the bourbon-and-hunting-lodge standard against that of bluenoses, women, and city palefaces. The social world of this paper was superseded by the society that followed the Civil War, the society that soon found it could apply its passion for "organization" to the world of sports as well as war. By 1893, Frank Harris' Fortnightly Review could report in hard statistical terms that the athlete was being organized. Noting that the only American sport of international prominence before the Civil War was yachting, Caspar W. Whitney reported in the Fortnightly Review that by 1893 there were scores of rowing, cycle, football, and track clubs; and that paid admissions to baseball and football had become a part of popular culture.12 Changes in the sporting world and attitudes toward it are cited largely because they indicate the way in which cities altered the shape of popular culture. At the same time, the popular culture was attempting to keep pace with the changing image of the city itself. Self-conscious assessments of the city in the daily press were sparked after 1900 by studies in urban sociology and reform investigations. But the popular culture did not really "see" the city until it had been seen by the high-brows. Visual realization of the city waited for the period between 1900 and 1910, when it became the concern of the realist paint-

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ers, Robert Henri, George Luks, John Sloan, and Everett Shinn — the "Ashcan School."13 Not until they had discovered the visual city, and transferred it to the magazine page did the popular media deign to observe the city as a culture in itself. And not until this happened was the general public able to respond to the popular-cultural image of the city as a defined object of attention. For our purpose it is logical to leave the topic of urbanization to others, in order to examine some of the reactions to metropolitan processes of industrial organization in the entertainment and communication arts. Today, anyone who wants to know what is happening in these industries reads Variety. It is crucial to see how certain responses to the theater, soon to be dominated financially by the film, were reported and structured in the early Variety, whose first issue roughly corresponds with the beginning of the period under discussion. Variety was built up on the remnants of the old New York Mercury by the remarkable "Sime" Silverman. The first issue came out on December 16, 1905, and something of the attitude that was to be taken by the paper was suggested in one of the earliest issues by the remarks, over the pen name — "Chicot" — of Silverman's short-time collaborator, Epes W. Sargent. On the one hand, Sargent chides the profanity of the variety acts at Miner's Bowery Theater; on the other, he defends Sunday performances against Blue Law threats. "One reason for the Sunday Concert," he writes, "is the hall bedroom and the flat parlor. A young man who wants to see a girl finds greater privacy in a crowded theater than in the open-faced flat or boarding house parlor . . . to close the Sunday Concerts would not only work great injury to the artists, but would fill the back rooms of saloons."14 It is not difficult to hear in this discussion of premovie popular culture an echo of that transition from country ways to city ways that Mark Sullivan speaks of as a major happening at the turn of the century.15 While the emphasis in the early Variety was on the variety

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circuit — and on such economic, professional, and ethical problems of the theatrical performer as actor-organization and contract terms — these matters did not continue to be its sole stock in trade. Variety became the major recorder of the decline of vaudeville (after a brief career of a little more than a generation) in the face of rising movie power. As actors, through one bitter struggle after another, added their chapter to the history of labor organization in the United States, Variety acquired the status of reporter and commentator for all of the various roles and interests in the entertainment industry. The historian of mores, however, might consider Variety's early campaign for a lively urban Sunday as one of the most important steps in the formation of its character, and as one of the more constructive, if professionally interested, responses to conflict between the new urban popular culture and old-fogeyism. At a distance of fifty years one can see a significant convergence of interest on the part of publicist Silverman and institutional economist Veblen. Both appeared on the scene at a time when luxury consumption and entertainment were about to expand enormously in financial scale, public influence, and social prestige; and both seemed to sense this. Veblen was the first intellectual in the United States to identify the emerging American problems as conditioned by economic surplus. Moreover, he was the first to offer a systematic theory which pointed to the psychology of production, saving, and consumption as a key to problems of economic development in an economy of abundance such as ours. Silverman, on the other hand, was the most important editor of the periodicals dealing with entertainment industries in the period between 1900 and 1950. No other man gave so much to hardheaded analysis of the trades that waxed fat on the new income levels, new surpluses, new leisure. Silverman's contribution was to analyze in weekly detail the way in which the economic surplus was reflected in the relation between the modern entertainment industry and its audience. The role of that surplus and the nature of its emergence from modern industrial

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conditions were Veblen's contributions. The facts that Silverman reported fit the theory that Veblen offered. As Silverman's paper slowly came to acquire some of the dignity of the other industrial and trade papers, and as Veblen's theory slowly came to acquire some of the prestige once attached to the economics of Adam Smith and the sociology of Herbert Spencer, the conditions surrounding criticism of the popular culture changed. How slowly this came about is apparent in the historical record. The urban and cosmopolitan milieu that stimulated Silverman and Veblen — a milieu that was itself rooted in the new journalism, the new advertising, the new art of the movie — was a minority culture in the United States through the first quarter of the twentieth century. Moreover, until at least World War I, the American urban culture was itself still provincial when compared with that of London or Paris. To return to the "hot" years of America's discovery of popular culture in the 1920's, therefore, is to write a footnote to the general self-discovery experienced in all areas of American life during the same period. With urbanization came a broadening of the critical perspective on popular culture as the waves of "new" immigration after 1885 brought greater racial variety to the American public and its critics. Long before 1885, however, the immigrant Germans, one of the first large non-English speaking groups to come over, had made the forum and the press bilingual. And if the Irish had not made it bilingual, they had made it at least bicultural; they used the English language, as they used the political institutions of the country, in ways that were shockingly new. As the post-1885 immigration from central and southern Europe made itself felt, the impacts were even more noticeable. In 1895 about half of the total population of cities such as New York and Chicago spoke broken English, if much English at all. The rise of the foreign language press has been studied by Robert Park16 and others, but it is not easy to find systematic interpreta-

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tions of the way in which immigrants influenced the press when the American English-language journals began to incorporate immigrants as readers, and began to be influenced by that readership. This was only the first step in a gradual process of deverbalization of the forum. Some of the first steps in that direction were changes in the use of language itself. Joseph Pulitzer demanded that his reporters produce "color." And, during the seventies, eighties, and nineties, according to Richard Hofstadter, there was "an increasing disposition on the part of editors to use the human-interest story, the crusade, the interview, and the stunt or promotional device." 17 While these strengthened the resources of journalism and publicity, they generally did so at the price of spoon-feeding the public a diet of sensations expressed in stereotyped language aimed at low levels of education. In the end such editorial policies led to the substitution of a word for a sentence and a picture for a word wherever a gain in attention could be anticipated. Lloyd Morris believed that the journalistic war between Pulitzer and Hearst (in the largely "foreign" city of New York) in 1895 was the seedbed of such journalistic innovations as the supplement, the magazine section, the big Sunday edition, and the comic strip.18 It is not an exaggeration to say that the deverbalization of the forum began as a result of the presence of the immigrants in the cities, in the growth of journalistic forms which could be followed, as children still follow them, either by word or by picture — as, for example, the cartoon strip or the picture-emphasizing advertisement. The invasion of the forum by nonverbal modes of communication reached a climax between 1900 and 1920 when the movies lit up the cafes and little stores where they were first shown. Later, television was to command a larger audience — but this audience was already familiar with the audio-visual medium for which TV provided a new channel of transmission. Probably no future revolution in mass-communications techniques will ever

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occur under conditions so strongly favoring the appeal of a story that can be followed through its picture content alone as the movie revolution. For it was only around 1920, at the end of the period, that foreign languages began to decrease as the household tongue of millions of city dwellers. Perhaps an even more important result of the influx of this new immigration was a change in American social structure which tended to decrease the influence of the elite and to increase that of the mass. One result was that the nature of the relation between American culture and its parental culture in Europe began to change in ways that led to new self-definitions on both sides of the Atlantic. Before World War I, we sent to Europe as tourists those who stood at the top of our society. At the same time, at least until the reaction to immigration that appeared with the legislation of 1917-1924, we took from Europe those who were at the bottom of Europe's social structure. World War I, however, introduced a massive contact between Americans of all origins and Europeans of all origins. Europeans who would earlier have pointed out to Americans the derivative status of the American culture were now more likely to point, by contrast, to some of the few ways in which America had achieved a degree of cultural autonomy. Many Europeans praised not American architectural styles imported from the Old World, but bridges on the East River; not American symphony orchestras, but jazz; not plays modeled on Mayfair, but musical reviews manufactured in Manhattan. The English, French, and German observers more than playfully argued that the only music the United States could claim was Negro-born jazz; and that the heights of originality in American entertainment were the result of the release, in the American society, of lower-class talents from the ghettos of Poland, the Irish rack-rents, and the hill towns of southern Italy. The interest shown in popular culture by European intellectuals such as Élie Faure,19 St. John Ervine,20 and James Agate,21 helped Americans to see something new in their own popular arts.

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Serious American response to the movie, for example, begins not much earlier than the 1909 remark of the drama critic, Walter Prichard Eaton: "When they [the movies] are well planned and well played, it is quite possible that they can always fulfill a useful function in leading the lower strata of society up toward an appreciation of the true dramatic art." 22 Before this date, response to the movies was casual and fugitive, except in such technically oriented works as the historical survey published in 1905 by Edison's collaborator, W. K. L. Dickson.23 At about the end of the first decade of the century, both fan magazines and serious commentary put in an appearance. One of the first influential fan magazines, Motion Picture Story Magazine, began publication in 1911; already, in 1910, Horace M. Kallen had been among the first to attempt to articulate an esthetic of film in an article in the Harvard Monthly.2* The fascination with film to be found soon among literary people was augmented by poet Vachel Lindsay's book, The Art of the Motion Picture (1915); and one of the very first extended treatises on the psychology of film, by Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, appeared in 1915.25 With the possible exception of Lindsay's book, none of this literature took sides for or against the film as art and rhetoric. Movie historians are inclined to say that passionate attack and defense came only after a sharp stimulus, widely discussed, from the film itself: the appearance in 1915 of D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation." General recognition of Chaplin, to be sure, occurred in some quarters before 1915; and in the years immediately following this date we find the film's new-found prestige among the highbrows reflected in the appearance of French art historian Élíe Faure's The Art of Cineplastics in 1923.26 Similarly, pre-jazz Negro song and dance were reported in American and foreign prints in the eighteenth century by such observers as British traveler Charles Lyell,27 and in the middle nineteenth century by British-born actress Frances Kemble.28 Later observations appeared in books of travel and in American

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magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly and the Continental Monthly. It was for the Century that American novelist, George W. Cable, wrote "The Dance in Place Congo" (New Orleans).29 However, according to Marshall Stearns, in the bibliography to his The Story of Jazz (1956), the first book devoted entirely to jazz was Jazz and Shimmy by the German, Franz Koebner, in 1921 — followed by the Americans, Alfred Frankenstein (1925), Henry Osgood (1926), and Isaac Goldberg (1927). Except for the two important, indeed revolutionary, books by the American, Wilder Hobson, and the Frenchman, Hugues Panassié, the thirties added few new titles; the great rush came in the 1940's and 1950s. The first biography of an important jazz musician was Louis Armstrong's in 1936. In fiction, although Langston Hughes and Gilmore Millen had made fictional heroes of jazz men, in the 1920"s, the genre did not become popular until Dorothy Baker's Young Man with a Horn in 1938.30 So it was that a few Americans began to observe that a cultural inheritance of a primary and unique sort had been acquired unconsciously and they began trying to describe and evaluate it. Further evaluation was undertaken by the generation whose questionings were focused in Van Wyck Brooks's America's Coming of Age (1915) and, again after the war, in America and the Young Intellectual ( 1921 ), by Harold Stearns. The work that climaxed this generation's interest in the popular culture was Gilbert Seldes' The Seven Lively Arts (1924), then and now the classic in its field. Edmund Wilson, reviewing The Seven Lively Arts at the time of its publication, spoke of it as contributing to a line "inaugurated in 1915 by Brooks's America's Coming of Age and two years later more violently promoted by Mencken's A Book of Prefaces." 31 Chiding the breathlessness of some of Seldes' prose, Wilson qualified the comment by making some shrewd remarks about the difficulty of approaching such topics at all. "The French have a culture which diffuses itself more or less through

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all their social classes and their various fields of activity. . . . But in America we have no such homogeneous culture penetrating our whole society. Today a whole race of Americans goes to school and arrives at maturity without more than the sketchiest acquaintance with the classic Anglo-American culture that has been so far our only heritage." 32 This theme — the desire for a culture which is universal throughout the society but divided into levels of quality that are generally and openly differentiated from each other — appears as a recurrent refrain in this period. It is picked up and developed in a variety of ways by the advanced periodicals of the 1920's: The American Mercury, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker. All were devoted to peering intensively at what the popular taste admired from day to day, and all attempted to "place" the products of popular culture in some hierarchy of rank. In all this higher journalism, the most important influence is usually assigned to H. L. Mencken. Though he was less interested in the new visual and auditory forms than in the word, he merits attention. Mencken yearned for an elite as passionately as Henry Adams; he was as much fascinated by the emotional springs of popular religion as William James, he was as contemptuous of status expenditure as Veblen, and as suspicious of Puritanism in American life as Santayana. He became the great publicist of these critical responses to the mass culture. In doing so, he shared with the Liberals such as Walter Lippmann, Herbert Croly, and Randolph Bourne a passionate concern for what kind of caps were being tossed in the forum every day; at the same time, he shared with Variety editor Sime Silverman, and columnist Heywood Broun, an understanding of the popular arts as symbolic expressions of social and political values. In many ways, moreover, he was akin to those artists who criticized the popular cultural forms as they practiced them: Will Rogers, Groucho Marx, Fred Allen. In his orientation toward the word (oratory, journalese, sermonizing), this last of the "print-shop" intellectuals

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seems to climax and conclude a certain style of response to popular culture — the response of the last generation to be brought up under the primacy of print.33 The intense concern with the contemporary state of American popular culture which characterized these new urban critics did not prevent them from feeling the need for a sense of the past. Henry Ford spoke of history as "mostly bunk." It does not stretch the interpretation of this remark too much to say that Ford and his generation felt a sense of discontinuity with the past. For, at almost the same time that he made the comment, Ford began to collect the antiques of Greenfield Village. All the contemporary publicity about Greenfield Village suggests overwhelmingly that this museum of the agrarian age was intended to emphasize the break with history, not the continuity with it. Exhibits appear to have been arranged to dramatize contrast between the present and a crystallized past, not to illustrate chronological and genetic sequences between, say, the older technologies and the new. This feeling of discontinuity probably had its principal origins in World War I. The relative peace, the limited war of the post-Napoleonic age, had come to an end. In the United States, however, there were additional forces at work. In a secondary and derivative culture such as that of the United States, there are bound to be periods when the claim for innovation and autonomy is made prematurely. Thus, in the later nineteenth century, the wish was father to the thought that we were making a complete break with the past. By the turn of the century, in the midst of technical and social novelties that were genuinely new and disturbing, we had ready-made an ideology that overemphasized immediate influences and understated their gradual emergence from a preparing past. The public critics of popular culture were destined, however, to play an important part in transforming this attitude. In short, they were to make some of their most interesting comments

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when they were being most historical. It was not merely a matter of connecting jazz, for example, with its European, African, and local roots in Negro musical life; it was abo a matter of seeing that the audio-visual arts were restoring the "oral" techniques that had been prominent in the days before print and mass literacy. While discussion of such themes was on a more or less casual and even careless basis among the practical critics of the 1920's, they contributed to the emergence of such questions. Two related elements from the intellectual background now came to the fore. One was the interest in genetic explanations inspired by Darwinism, an interest deeply infused in American thinkers as different from one another as Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey. Another was the rising interest in the primitive cultures, an interest that seems to have begun to develop intensely in the colony-building nations long before World War I. The former way of looking at social life contained the suggestion that things were never as new as they appeared to be; the latter way contained the strong suggestion that, just as the "least" of cultures might deserve attention along with the "greatest," so the most conventionally disparaged aspects of a given culture might also deserve attention. It was in the latter sense that an Italian observer could speak of the movie palace as the cathedral of America, and that Veblen could speak of the entertainments of Vanderbilts as the potlatches of plutocracy. The beginnings of a convergence in cross-cultural and historical views can be given a specific date: 1931. In that year Stuart Chase and Marian Tyler published a book called Mexico. Its purpose was to establish a sharp contrast between the industrialurban culture of the United States and the folk culture of traditionalistic Mexico. It was very widely read and helped to spread the fashion of the "simple primitive" and the folkish in the thought of the 1930's. "Culture" was no longer what Matthew Arnold meant — knowing the best that has been thought and said — but what anthropologist Ruth Benedict and her predecessors meant — the whole customary organization of a society.

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Along with a tendency to romanticize the folkish, the rise of such concepts was a part of the general revolt against formalistic criticism which nerved the popular culture critics to take their stand. Seldes' appreciative nod toward the "lesser" arts was congruent with an anthropological relativism that saw dignity in all items of a culture, including the lowliest. Movie critic James Agee's emphasis on the recurring archetypes of one-reel movie comedy was congruent with the searchings of anthropology into social role and ritual.34 John Kouwenhoven s study of what he called "vernacular" design in American gadgets was congruent with studies of culture contact and culture diffusion that had previously emphasized the shape of axheads rather than the shape of locomotives.35 Wilder Hobson's work on the musical forms of jazz clarified the relations between New Orleans and Northern styles, and thus added a chapter to our knowledge of the way in which a subculture contributes an artistic form to a majority culture.36 Thus, among critics of the popular culture, cross-cultural interests did not conflict with historical interests — no matter how much these interests might conflict among the professional scholars. Dealing with such forms as movies, jazz, and the advertising symbol, their search for origins was compelled in both directions. Along one line, as in jazz, for example, they were interested in the specific step-by-step process within the American society by which jazz had come from the bottom to the top. Along another line, as in jazz, they were compelled to be interested in the fact that certain aspects of jazz (such as vocalization and beat) were still present, preserved more or less unchanged since the time of slave-hunting, among primitives in Africa. As for movies, to take another example, it was no more important to see the relation between an early Chaplin film and a music-hall act than it was to see that the silent film itself had revived principles of pantomimic art having great historical antiquity and profound cultural interest. After the publication of the Chase and Tyler's Mexico observ-

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ers began more and more to see popular culture audiences and their tastes as an aspect of anthropologist Robert Redfield's "folkurban continuum," began to see the entertainment world and the forum as an era of struggle between the older Protestant ethos of the United States and a new ethos of a less ascetic sort. Above all, the products of the modern mass media began to be studied as part of a general communications theory which included historical change in modes of transmission as part of its perspective. The particular version of this approach most popular in the 1930's among many critics of movies and popular literature was influenced by Marxism which appeared in two ways. In the formation of critical attitudes it taught reviewers to look for political ideology in every art, and to employ it themselves as a basis of judgment. In the trades of the popular arts, Marxism was one of the forces behind the struggle for labor organization in the industries of popular culture. This influence began to recede after the Berlin-Moscow Pact of 1939 broke up the politics of the Popular Front. Critical responses to the popular culture after World War II were dominated by the spread of television, which regenerated on a new level many of the issues that had appeared when movies and radio were first making their power felt. The terms of the investigation of the new media, however, had shifted. A trend that began with such studies as that of the movies by the Payne Fund Studies, under the direction of sociologists, had developed in force.37 Building on the work of the 1930's, a variety of investigators began to tackle highly specific problems, problems in which the effort was to see how the uses and the effects of the mass media might be related to some theory of social structure. Leo Lowenthal studied changes in the idealtypes of the successful man in American magazine biographies, noting a shift from the producer-hero to the consumer-hero.38 Robert Merton studied the myth-making talents of the wartime bond saleswoman and radio singer Kate Smith.39 W. Lloyd

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Warner and William Henry investigated the appeal made by the fantasy of soap opera to women in different social classes.40 Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites carried the psychoanalytic analysis of film to a new level of interest.41 Studies of the popular culture by the social sciences were shaped by the interests of particular disciplines. The more behavioristic psychologists were interested in the learning processes generated by the modern mass media; psychologists of a more Freudian bent were concerned with processes of identification with film and TV heroes and heroines. Sociologists showed a continued interest in the way in which the popular culture played a part in reinforcing the "collective representations" of class and mobility patterns of American life. Anthropologists were interested in the processes by which the popular culture embodied or reflected cultural norms and values. Social psychologists continued to occupy a central place in popular culture studies because of their concern with such problems as the effect of communications on the formation, organization, and cohesion of social groups. In all these researches, the inventive formulations suggested by scholars from Germany such as Paul Lazarsfeld and T. W. Adorno42 were fruitful and influential. In some degree, the postwar discussion of the popular culture had also been stimulated by articles on popular mythology and propaganda in Dwight Macdonald's periodical, politics, in the early 1940s. In this publication, the values of popular culture were attacked in terms inherited from the broad criticism of popular culture by Marxists in the 1930's. The terms of the debate thus engendered are best summarized in the 1954 exchange between Dwight Macdonald and British historian Denis W. Brogan.43 Macdonald continued his attack on the popular culture as the product of a sick society; Brogan retorted with the observation that it was no different in the eighteenth century— the problem was not a typically modern problem at all, but has always been with us. The attitudes and interests of those who wrote in more essayis-

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tic terms about the popular culture in the 1940's and early 1950's must be considered as a unit; they seem to arrange themselves between these two poles of opinion. Their interests, at the same time, were highly individualized. Leslie Fiedler, observing the concern of certain middle-class people about the popular culture, wondered why they feel this way. Could it be because they wish to make popular culture so excellent that there will be no need to admit the existence of a "high culture"? Apparently these people dream of a "one-class" society.44 Milton Klonsky renewed the attack on the products of popular culture on the ground that they are not the product of an "organic" imagination, being fabricated by industrial teams.45 Louis Kronenberger attacked many aspects of the popular and middle-brow culture not so much because of its own particular traits as because it is employed by a middle-class (which should know better) to protect itself from reflection and self-knowledge.46 Marshall McLuhan approached the whole topic by way of an historical and humanistic interest in the forms of popular art and rhetoric. He argued that, before making judgments of particular products, such as the TV commercial, one had to define its place in a new universe of perception generated along non-print "non-linear" principles by the new media.47 During the 1940's and the early 1950's, the discussion was carried along within an international framework that encompassed some of the Europeans who wrote on the popular culture. André Malraux, for example, argued that the main fault of the vulgar popular culture was that it got in the way of attempts on the part of the elite of the Western world to get on with the job of reforming and transvaluating their own ethos.48 George Orwell also approached the problem with an eye on the processes by which eûtes are dissolved and reconstituted.49 He was especially interested in the effects that the popular arts and their myths had upon the historical tradition, and the transmission of the tradition to new generations and new social classes. One of his main objections to the popular arts and fiction of the

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period 1920 to 1950, roughly, was that they seemed to him to pass on to rising orders of society the vices (sadism, for example) but not the virtues (magnanimity, for example) of a declining aristocratic order.60 In 1950, the interest in historical continuity and in the crosscultural method were made to work together in a new analysis of the mass culture and its communications habits by David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd, a work he wrote in collaboration with Nathan Glazer and me. The work drew heavily on suggestions by Freud as to the process of personality formation and the suggestions of Max Weber 51 as to the dominance of the Protestant ethos in Western industrialism. The profusion of the popular culture of movies, advertisements, and song was seen as one part of a general economic development: the shift from emphasis on production to emphasis on consumption, occasioned by unforeseen abundance. All other things being equal, unfavorable responses to the popular culture might be a reflex of the older production-oriented types of social character. All other things being equal, favorable responses might be a reflex of the newer consumption-oriented types of social character. Beginning in the late 1940's, I began to explore the importance of the various genres of art and rhetoric employed by the mass media. My conclusion was that the mass media are a dumping ground for the artistic theories elaborated in the productionminded, late nineteenth century under the labels of realism and naturalism. By employing actuality techniques, the mass media marketed fantasy packaged in the form of "documentation." This tendency reinforced, and is reinforced by, the industrial organization of the studios and networks and their associated guilds and crafts. "Literalism" becomes the order of the day in the mass media, and all standards of critical and popular evaluation are compromised by failure to take into account the differences in the appeals and effects of fictional and nonfictional forms.52 All such discussions in the period after World War II were dominated by the rise of TV — and by basic internal and external

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changes in the ambit of American popular culture. Abroad, American films and comics had immensely widened their previous influence, and Americans had become concerned with the effects upon America's relations with foreign peoples of these cultural exports. There was not, as a matter of fact, a great deal of evidence to go on as to whether effects were good or bad. Within the United States, the late 1940's saw several processes occurring at the same time in the field of popular culture. Television began to increase its audience by millions every year; the move to the suburbs was becoming massive; and the migration from the South and other backward agrarian regions into the cities continued at its wartime pace. At times, the increasing incidence of hillbilly and Western themes on radio, TV, and in song made it appear that the "internal immigrants" from the farm were about to swamp the airwaves with their favorite entertainment. At times, by 1950, the airwaves sounded like the beginning of a Confederate and Anglo-Saxon revival. One of the effects of the spread of television was to reactivate criticism of the mass media and to channel the energy of certain groups toward educational radio and TV broadcasting. The growth of such "cultural" transmitters, especially in the FM field, did not prove gratifying until after 1950. By then they were beginning to make a dent on the structure of the mass communications audience in the United States. As they were to grow they were to promote rather than to allay general criticism of what could be seen and heard over the commerical channels. This was the first faint evidence, barely seen in 1950, of a trend toward differentiated responses to the popular culture, as small audiences began to take root in the mass audience's media. As for the intellectual discovery of the popular culture, even as late as 1950 the continuity between the new media and the older media was open to further exploration. To many a critic and scholar, the world of the new media seemed as trivial and grotesque as prose fiction had seemed to his ancestors before the novel became respectable. In general, in the United States, with

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the conservatism of its insecurity, literary and art scholarship tacitly ignored the factor of the audience in the triad — Artist, Art-Work, Audience — and thus deprived itself of a necessary mode of understanding the connection between the older forms and the new. Just as disconcerting was the fact that, during the postwar years up to 1950, there seemed little inclination on the part of the American people to face up to the contemporary problems of political, economic, and cultural policy posed by the growth of the mass media. In the name of free competition and the free press, the people and their representatives stood by uncertainly while a limited number of television channels were passed out to patent-medicine salesmen. At the end of the first half of the twentieth century, private enterprise and the free market in leisure goods and services had created — with the help of various government encouragements and subsidies — a vast new industrial complex of entertainment and information. It remained to be seen whether vital new ideas about the purposes, the forms, and the management of these instruments, both in the private and the public sectors of American life, would serve to make them worthy of their power.

χ T H E D O C T R I N E OF M A S S Eric Larrabee

PRODUCTION

Ν EAB the mid-point of the twentieth century there appeared a number of books, avowedly popular in appeal and tone, which undertook in various ways to locate the American genius. The Big Change, by Frederick Lewis Allen; The New Society, by Peter F. Drucker; and U.S.A., The Permanent Revolution, by the Editors of Fortune were among the most conspicuous. These works had much in common. In the strict sense of the word, they were "apologies" for the United States. Their authors, moreover, had available a rough consensus as to what they were trying to defend. To friends and detractors alike, "America" had recognizable form, an agreed shape which made responsive argument possible. That image, in gross outline, is one of a mass culture — one in which an abundance of material goods, including the output of the popular arts, has been made available to a large majority of the population. It holds America to be the most extreme expression of those tendencies toward mechanization and egalitarianism which are observable elsewhere in the world. It accords with Gertrude Stein's observation that the United States is in fact the oldest nation, since we came into the twentieth century first and have been here the longest. It defines the mass media and the mass market for consumer goods, along with related phenomena like advertising, as our most characteristic institutions. Its dominant figure is Henry Ford, O u r Ford," as Aldous Huxley satirically had him deified in Brave New World (1932). Its symbol, as Chaplin showed in his "Modern Times"

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(1936), is the assembly line. Its most familiar name is Mass Production. "The technology of mass production," John A. Kouwenhoven writes, "is as indigenous to the United States as the husking bee," having appeared well before Eli Whitney's armory in the grain mill built near Baltimore by Oliver Evans in 1785. And there is more to mass production than technology; it is a system of social organization based on an alliance, archetypically American, between machinery and democracy. "It was our democratic and social institutions that gave our industrial system its special characteristics," he continues, "while at the same time it was our technological achievements that strengthened and extended our political and social democracy. Neither could have existed without the other in anything like its present form." 1 Among the themes that fall under the heading of mass production are therefore many which long preceded it, among them the attitudes of Americans like Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville toward what Leo Marx has called the "sudden appearance of the Machine in the Garden," the coming of industrialism to "an age already sensitive to the conflict between civilization and nature." 2 They also include aspirations made fully evident by the time the twentieth century opened. President Eliot of Harvard, listing "Five American Contributions to Civilization" in 1896, had quite naturally included among them the diffusion of material well-being among the population. "It is," he said, "in the invention of machinery for producing and distributing power, and at once economizing and elevating human labor, that American ingenuity has been most conspicuously manifested. . . . It is for such work that multitudinous democracies are fit." 3 But mass production as a social force did not take full form until the twentieth century was in its second decade. The year, if a single date were needed, would be 1914 — with the introduction of the first true assembly line and the adoption of the five-dollar-a-day minimum wage by Henry Ford. These two

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events were of course closely related. Ford's achievement derived its "dynamic logic," as Frederick Lewis Allen called it, from their combination. "This is the principle that the more goods you produce, the less it costs to produce them; and that the more people are well off, the more they can buy, thus making this lavish and economical production possible. . . . The continuing discovery and demonstration of this principle has been one of the most powerful forces in the making of twentieth-century America. For it has had its corollaries: that a nation of men and women secure against exploitation and acute poverty is a nation of delighted buyers of goods, to everybody's profit; that it pays better to produce the same sort of food, clothing, and equipment for people of all income levels, than to produce luxury goods for a few; and that therefore one can make money by lowering class barriers." 4 And the elucidation of that principle, the development of mass production as a doctrine, is even more recent. Naturally, approval for it has varied in almost direct proportion to its success, its ability to provide Americans with prosperity. Mass production achieved its most complete and extravagant expression in the semi-inspirational business literature of the late 1920's, while during the thirties there was an understandable hiatus, and only after World War II did the mood of self-congratulation return. Even today, the criticism is made that doctrine has lagged behind the event. Jacques Maritain, expressing his approval of "very enlightening" books like Allen's and Peter F. Druckers, complains that they are too empirical and after-thefact. "You are advancing in the night," Maritain told a seminar at the University of Chicago in 1956, "bearing torches toward which mankind would be glad to turn; but you leave them enveloped in the fog of a merely experiential approach and mere practical conceptualization, with no universal ideas to communicate. For lack of adequate ideology, your lights cannot be seen. I think it is too much modesty." 5

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On the other hand, the claims made by proponents of the doctrine are anything but modest; Drucker himself, for example, argues that "Nothing ever before recorded in the history of man equals in speed, universality, and impact the transformation this principle [mass production] has wrought in the foundations of society in the forty years since Henry Ford turned out his first 'Model Τ.' " β It forms the factual base for the idea of "productivity," that curiously intangible and self-contained ideal in which Americans have recently been instructing, not only the "underdeveloped" nations, but also the presumably mature industrial societies of Western Europe. There, as an offshoot of the Marshall Plan, have been formed such organizations as The Anglo-American Council on Productivity, the Association française pour Taccroisement de la productivité, and their equivalents in other countries. The former alone between 1948 and 1952 sent sixty-six teams of expert observers to the United States and published their reports; and these are near-unanimous in agreeing that American "productivity" has less to do with mechanical techniques than with the attitudes underlying them. "There is one refrain throughout the A.A.C.P. Teams' reports. It is that Americans — trade unionists and management, consumers and producers, politicians and professional men, men and women, old and young — are more productivity-minded than Europeans. They seem on the whole to be more aware than their British or European counterparts of the need to raise efficiency, to raise the effectiveness of machines and men, to turn out more goods, and to turn them out at lower prices. This is not necessarily a conscious economic perception." 7 In short, by the middle of the century there existed a virtual mystique of mass production, and its articles of belief bulked large in the image of America entertained both at home and abroad. In 1900, obviously, no such picture was presented. What happened in the five intervening decades can perhaps be best described as the increasingly effective application of alreadyexisting American principles, followed by their increasingly

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coherent and organized expression in lowbrow, nonintellectual form. Residual attitudes toward the Machine inherited from an earlier period, however, effectively delayed the appearance of mass-production principles at the higher, more sophisticated level where M. Maritain might have encountered them — or been less surprised at their existence. The legitimate descent of American technology from the Western "idea of progress" still seemed widely unappreciated to Charles A. Beard in 1931, when he wrote his introduction to J. B. Bury's book and addressed himself to those "who imagine that the idea of progress was lately discovered by the promoters of business enterprise and those who suppose that it is a superficial concept adopted by a superficial age." Beard argued that "of all the ideas pertinent to the concept of progress, to the interpretation of what has gone on during the past two hundred years and is going on in the world, none is more relevant than technology"; and he went on to bind progress and technology together at the core of the national ethic. "Whatever may be the merits of the controversy over its philosophic soundness, the idea of progress, even when vaguely understood, has exerted a powerful influence in the United States. . . . It remains, and will remain, a fundamental tenet of American society, and while vigor is left in the race it will operate with all the force of a dynamic idea rooted in purpose, will, and opportunity." 8 During the first few years of this century a British physician named Arthur Shadwell made a detailed study of industrial communities in England, Germany, and the United States. Shadwell was a moralizer, with a shrewd eye for the relevant detail, and he seldom hesitated to isolate and label "national characteristics." Yet there is a pointed contrast between his views on American technology and those typically held now, fifty years later. Admitting the difficulty of comparing the United States with any European country, he took note of our ethnic and geographic diversity, of the stimulating climate, of a general spirit of expan-

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sionist endeavor and carelessness encouraged by unused resources. But he said nothing to suggest that American industry essentially differed from its European counterpart, that it had an essentially different character or played an essentially different role. His comparisons were in fact made possible by assuming that in Blackburn, Sheffield, Solingen, Chemnitz, Lowell, or Pittsburg alike he was observing the impact of a universal phenomenon called "industrialism." 9 The same, with rare exceptions, can be said of contemporaneous American commentators on American technology. They did not impute to it any uniqueness; it was like other technology only more so. Here, at the dawn of the twentieth century, even those who experienced an ecstatic vision of the American future were still likely to place the source of our power and potentiality elsewhere. For Brooks Adams it lay in applied science, "a control over nature which has enabled the United States to construct a new industrial mechanism, with processes surpassingly perfect." 10 And for his brother Henry, whose "historical neck" had been broken in the Gallery of Machines at the Paris Exposition of 1900, the sight of the dynamo — that "symbol of infinity" — stood for essentially physical power. An accelerating historical trend from unity toward multiplicity rather than the logic of industrialism would make necessary a "new social mind" in the coming generation.11 For Henry Adams' generation the geometric increase of industrial capability, soon to transform the American "social mind" beyond recognition, would have been unimaginable. The economic polity was still visualized as the Darwinian division of a more-or-less fixed quantity of spoils. A class could prosper only at the expense of another class; a nation, of another nation. Characteristically, the reformers who were about to appear would concentrate their fire on the means, especially political, by which slices of the given pie were apportioned — as, for example, David Graham Phillips blamed the Senate for the fact that people "remain poor, or deprived of their fair share of the products,

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though they have produced an incredible prosperity."12 And Thorstein Veblen, who needed no encouragement to praise technology, thought it unlikely to serve or secure any over-all upward aspiration. If mankind were to define its needs realistically, he was willing to allow that "the aggregate economic wants of a community might conceivably be satisfied at some point in the advance of industrial efficiency." But, since wants are actually defined in terms of emulation rather than of necessity, "a satiation of the average or general desire for wealth is out of the question." 13 To be sure, there were already anticipations — such as President Eliot's — of the ideas on which mass production depends. Arthur Shadwell himself, though mainly treating industry as a norm, saw that American manufacturers felt the same drives which were later to propel Henry Ford into his epoch-making endeavor; they were continually experimenting with new devices "to increase output and diminish cost." Furthermore, Shadwell was as much aware as his successors, a half-century later, of a pervasive national attitude toward industry far different from that which he encountered in Europe. "I have suggested," he wrote, "that the restless driving character of the Americans has been set in motion by the desire for wealth and the potentialities of millionairedom, and undoubtedly that is a prime factor. But there is more than that; it would be unjust to ascribe their enterprise and activity merely to the pursuit of money. They are a highly emulative people, and anxious to beat not only their own competitors but themselves. . . . The buoyant self-confidence of Americans may be a little overdone, but it is a great source of strength." 14 Yet, the tendency of American social observers, seeking the American "genius," was still to look for it elsewhere than in industry— as Stuart Sherman, trying to solve the problem in his book, The Genius of America ( 1923 ), was to find it in Anglo-Saxon "puritan" morality. A believer in traditional "democratic" ideals like E. A. Ross could admit the necessity of extending them into

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the economic sphere: "Unless democracy mends the distribution of wealth, the mal-distribution of wealth will end democracy." But, he put no hope in "commercialism" and lamented the absence of a restraining upper class: "Among Americans business ideals are not held in check by the influence of a landed aristocracy." 15 Writers percipient enough to see what was coming saw it, so to speak, only out of the corner of their eyes. For example, Herbert Croly, who clearly recognized the "dynamic logic" of satisfying consumer needs, gave it only a paragraph in a bookful of suggestions for improving American society: "So long as the great majority of the poor in any country are inert and are laboring without any hope of substantial rewards in this world, the whole associated life of that community rests on an equivocal foundation. . . . Their wants must be satisfied, and must be sharpened and increased with the habit of satisfaction. . . . That the American political and economic system has accomplished so much on behalf of the ordinary man does constitute the fairest hope that men have been justified in entertaining of a better worldly order; and any higher social achievement, which America may hereafter reach, must depend upon an improved perpetuation of this process. The mass of mankind must be aroused to still greater activity by a still more abundant satisfaction of their needs, and by a consequent increase of their aggressive discontent."1β Discontent, as it turned out, was indeed the mainspring of revolution in the automobile industry, where mass production made its first full-dress appearance. "It was not accidental," as Christy Borth of the Automobile Manufacturers Association has put it, "that most of the pioneers in this field of endeavor were from the farms and the small towns of the land. They knew, by bitter experience, the grinding drudgery and the appalling loneliness which were all too much the most characteristic attributes of rural life in America."17 This was Henry Ford's background, and the world he set out so successfully to destroy — by making

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the automobile universal and cheap, by continually increasing its numbers and lowering its price.18 Ford, as Seymour Harris has suggested, was a Keynesian before Keynes.19 He had arrived — by a process of intuitive, disorganized, and often illogical reasoning — at conclusions quite sharply in conflict with those prevailing in his time. And in 1916 there took place a dramatic confrontation between Henry Ford's logic and the logic that "business" was then assumed to obey. In his efforts to raise production by reinvesting his company's income in its plant, Ford had alienated a number of his minority stockholders — conspicuously the brothers Dodge, two dour Scotsmen who had manufactured engines for the original Ford car and in the process acquired a hundred shares. On this investment ($3,000 in cash and $7,000 in credit for engines) they had enjoyed a return of $5,500,000, but now they were making their own car, expanding their own plant; and they were angered at Ford's proposal to cut dividends to a tenth of the previous size. He was then in the early stages of conceiving River Rouge — the enormous, fully integrated factory which is itself a symbol of Ford's triumph — and he told the Dodges, when they asked him, that he planned to double the plant, double the output of cars, "and sell them at half price." 2 0 The Dodge brothers thereupon brought suit, to compel him to distribute earnings and enjoin him against expansion. Ford had made a fool of himself not long before in a courtroom, but on this occasion he was more than a match for the Dodge brothers' lawyer, Elliott G. Stevenson, a skillful crossexaminer who professed sarcastic disbelief in Ford's straightforward, sometimes naive answers. Stevenson spoke for the world of corporate finance, Ford for a world that did not yet exist. He had earlier told a newspaper reporter that he didn't believe in making "such an awful profit on our cars," and Stevenson pounded away at this incredible statement. STEVENSON: Now, I will ask you again, do you still think that those profits were "awful profits"?

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Well, I guess I do, yes.

STEVENSON: And for that reason you were not satisfied to continue to make such awful profits? FOBD: We don't seem to be able to keep the profits down. STEVENSON: . . . Are you trying to keep them down? What is the Ford Motor Company organized for except profits, will you tell me, Mr. Ford? FORD: Organized to do as much good as we can, for everybody concerned." 2 1

Ford was enough of a showman to know the publicity value of his words, but in them — especially his ironic evasion: "We don't seem to be able to keep the profits down" — is an authentic echo of the new era. He was puzzled, too. Ford was a volatile, catalytic man overwhelmingly possessed by a simple idea — a cheap car for the masses. Credit for any single feature of his achievement can easily be taken away from him; there is even some question whether he "understood" the first assembly line.22 Yet his was the driving and unifying force, his was the "wild wheel" that set the "second industrial revolution" going. Ford, in addition, was opposed to one aspect of his revolution which soon threatened to take it over — and convert it into something quite different from his intention. Both by temperament and principle, he wanted his car to last; he wanted his customers never to have to buy another; he wanted the Flivver to stay the same. But once the "wild wheel" was started it could not be stopped; once Croly's "aggressive discontent" had been set in motion, it had to be kept in motion. The outcome was the utterly un-Fordian conception of planned obsolescence. During the early twenties other companies (notably General Motors) had enthusiastically attempted to satisfy the demands Ford had resisted — for added comfort, style, safety, and power — and, as Ford struggled to keep ahead of them, there took place inside his company during 1926-7 the argument over abandoning Model

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Τ, and adopting the new car later known as Model A, that signaled the dissolution of his dream. Ford lost not only the argument, and his commanding lead over the competition, but also the point of principle involved. The idea of the annual model change, as a means of insuring permanent dissatisfaction, replaced the idea of the permanent car. His defeat, in the prosperous mood of the times, was interpreted as another step forward into the millennium imminently due to arrive. "Wear alone made replacement too slow for the needs of American industry," wrote Paul M. Mazur. "And so the high priests of American business elected a new god to take its place along with — or even before — the other household gods. Obsolescence was made supreme. . . . Model T, of which Mr. Ford built over 15,000,000, was built and sold upon the basis of economy. General Motors made economy subservient to style change — to obsolescence. . . . Both great companies — Ford and General Motors — used mass production methods. But in the case of the one the starting point of industrial policy was mass production. In the case of the other, on the contrary, mass production was the result of sales policy, not the cause. . . . Today American prosperity exists through intensive selling."23 Many of the other popular expositions of business doctrine in this period have similar qualities — the same man-to-man, folksy tone that strains for reasonableness — and some go much further than Mr. Mazur's in the extravagance of their claims. "That eternal job of administering this planet must be turned over to the despised businessman. The work that religion, government, and war have failed in must be done by business." Thus, Ε. E. Calkins in Business the Civilizer, a work that examines the institution of advertising and finds it surpassingly good.24 Not all, however, were so clumsy in their rhetoric or so unlucky in their prophecies. One in particular deserves credit for anticipating to a remarkable degree the formulation of a mass-production ideology which was to be attempted two decades later — namely, Edward A. Filene's Successful Living in this Machine Age.

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Filene, a successful and enlightened Boston merchant, was writing (or having his writing done for him by Charles W. Wood) in mid-depression, which would account for any lack of attention paid him. For he holds to the true faith. He believes that mass production harnesses human self-interest to the interest of all, making inevitable a higher living standard, increased leisure, a revolutionary leveling of social classes, and a wider reliance on scientific method (which he calls "fact-finding"). He anticipates that mass production will not standardize life, but rather will liberate the masses of humanity "from the struggle for mere existence . . . enabling them, for the first time in history, to give their attention to more distinctly human problems. . . . It is poverty which standardizes, and mass production cannot endure mass poverty." He even anticipates the possibility of a surfeit: "There is a limit, doubtless, to the number of material things that human beings care to accumulate. . . . When people everywhere can have all the clothes that they want, it is not to be expected that they shall care to spend a large part of their precious time in changing their clothes. . . . Likewise, when they can have as good houses as they want, they may discover that they do not want perfectly meaningless mansions and palaces. . . . It may seem that the profit motive is no longer operating in human affairs. But we do not have to worry about that. It will not mean a change in human nature. . . . It will mean a change only in the kind of profits human nature wants." 25 There are dismaying simplicities in Filene. He was no intellectual, nor was he writing for intellectuals. Yet, it is astonishing the extent to which he presaged concerns which have since received more formal attention, and embodied the sort of coherent ideology which M. Maritain reproaches us for not having developed. His book compares favorably with those of the time that took an opposite view — with, let us say, James Truslow Adams' Our Business Civilization. Adams, while better educated and a far better writer, is comparably disabled by his nostalgic reverence for European high culture and his identification of all "busi-

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ness" with an old-fashioned, Darwinian business ethic, which causes him, for example, to read Henry Ford's tragedy backwards.26 Many of Adams' criticisms are still valid, but in the large he failed to foresee the potentialities which a mass society possessed, even for those traditional cultural activities that were closest to his heart. The critique of mass-production culture in the thirties and forties, as suggested, was of a much higher quality than the literature of less thoughtful praise which preceded it. Industrialism now had to be regarded in the light of its catastrophic failure to stay prosperous, and the image of the assembly line (and of Henry Ford) had to be redefined. Novelists like dos Passos gave it a new form: "At Ford's production was improving all time; less waste, more spotters, strawbosses, stoolpigeons (fifteen minutes for lunch, three minutes to go to the toilet, the Taylorized speedup everywhere, reach under, adjust washer, screw down bolt, shove in cotterpin, reachunder, adjustwasher, screwdownbolt, reachunderadjustscrewdownreachunderadjust until every ounce of life was sucked off into production and at night the workmen went home grey shaking husks). . . . But when the country on cracked shoes, in frayed trousers, belts tightened over hollow bellies, idle hands cracked and chapped with the cold of that coldest March day of 1932, started marching from Detroit to Dearborn, asking for work and the American Plan, all they could think of at Ford's was machineguns. The country was sound, but they mowed the marchers down. They shot four of them dead." 27 At the same time, the best of the new criticism was far more balanced and sympathetic than the old. A marked tendency of the earlier attacks had been to polarize alternatives, like Henry Adams' Virgin and Dynamo, in such a way as to exaggerate the dehumanizing quality of the Machine. This was most true of such foreign observers as André Siegfried, whose statement of the

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choice seems to have left an imprint on generations of his European readers and successors. "The chief contrast between Europe and America," he said, was "between two epochs in the history of mankind . . . the contrast between industrial mass production which absorbs the individual . . . as against the individual considered not merely as a means of production and progress but as an independent ego. From this unusual aspect we perceive certain traits that are common to the psychology of both Europe and the Orient. So the discussion broadens until it becomes a dialogue, as it were, between Ford and Gandhi." 28 But the increasingly numerous students of the history of mechanization were bound to discover how severely that history had to be distorted in order to sustain this view. Americans have only made with machinery an explosive, unstable combination of what Europeans had long been making. Lewis Mumford, whose Technics and Civilization was one of the first major treatments of the subject and remains one of the most relevant, began it with the putative invention of the mechanical clock in a tenth-century monastery and drew even-handedly on both European and American examples as he proceeded. Siegfried Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command (1948) is similarly illustrated from the Western world at large, and Roger Burlingame's Backgrounds of Power: The Human Story of Mass Production traces that "American" invention, the assembly line, back as far as the Arsenal of medieval Venice.29 Ford, at his worst, was of the West to his bone and marrow. The American experience with mass production, to readers of Mumford and Giedion, can be more clearly seen in both its unique and its universal aspects. Perhaps what is unique does not emerge quite so clearly as what is universal, especially with Giedion, since there is one filament which still binds him to the traditional view of technology as inherently "dehumanizing." This is his conviction, shared by many others, that it is a neutral agent — 'like water, fire, light . . . blind and without direction of its own." 30 Much confusion comes of this notion. It lies behind the

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German phrase for America as a Civilization ohne Kultur and behind the reiterated desire of many underdeveloped areas to import American technology selectively. Miss Santha Rama Rau, speaking for India, expressed it at the Corning Conference in May 1951: ". . . this is the first chance that my people have had to choose what it is they are buying in the way of industrialization. . . . I rather hope that we can manage to keep what is in our civilization without losing the advantage of yours." A book which contains the necessary answer to Miss Rama Rau was published in 1948, the same year as Giedion's: Pearl Franklin Clark's Challenge of the American Know-how. Mrs. Clark, the wife of an international management consultant, accompanied her husband Wallace during the 1920's on his professional trips to offices and factories throughout Europe. Thinking his methods inhuman, she at first reproached him for his intense concentration on the physical conditions of work that he found, on the way it was organized, the often trivial barriers that held it up. Only later did she come to realize the implications of his first principle: "Nothing must interfere with the free flow of work," the same conception of productivity as a process, as a natural force that needs only to be liberated from restraint, that underlies mass production. Only later did she appreciate his repeated insistence that most of the obstacles were in men's minds — in their fear of competition, their deference to distinctions of class, their reliance on unbreakable customs. The "American methods" that Wallace Clark taught were "revolutionary" in impact because they contained a built-in ethic. "It was not only new methods against the old. It was something inside them — inside the thinking and feeling that had gone into them." 31 The worst of the crimes and horrors of the industrial process were boiled out of it by the Depression and New Deal; other inequities were eased and new vistas of egalitarian plenty were opened by the outburst of expansionist energy which accompanied and followed World War II. But the problem remaining,

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one that men as different from one another as Mazur, Filene, Mumford, and David Riesman all touch upon, is that of equating abundance with desire. Granted that we all now know — as after the shelfful of books appearing in the 1950's we certainly should — that mechanical productivity is bound up with the satisfaction of mass wants, and with the social and political system which makes this possible. What then? Forced obsolescence is a shabby ideal, and already shows signs of losing its allure. Without it, will the "dynamic logic" lose its dynamism? Filene thought not, but Mumford is not so sure that the needs necessary to drive large industries will be permanent. "In the very act of enlarging its domain over human thought and practice," he writes, "the machine has proved to a great degree self-eliminating: its perfection involves in some degree its disappearance." 32 Many Americans remain balanced, on this knife-edge, over an abyss between the competing ethics of austerity and waste. Mumford is one of those who would have us "normalize consumption" and return to a limited, "vital" standard of wants ("vital wants are all necessarily limited"). The "doctrine of increasing wants must be thrown overboard," not because all of them have been satisfied but quite the opposite, because the doctrine has failed to produce, even for the rich, a "vital norm" — "an adequate diet, proper facilities for hygiene, decent dwellings, sufficient means and opportunities for education and recreation." Mumford is with Henry Ford in deploring "changes in form and style" as "symptoms of immaturity"; he urges that "the devices of competitive waste, of shoddy workmanship, and of fashion" be abandoned. "Wasteful consumption and shoddy craftsmanship go hand in hand: so that if we value soundness and integrity and efficiency within the machine system, we must create a corresponding stability in consumption." 33 Mumford's "vital norms" belong to what John Kenneth Galbraith calls the "public" sector of the economy, an area in which he too finds that the spur of private demand has failed to produce the kind or amount of production that we need. In The Affluent

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Society (1958) Galbraith argues that we have been so obsessed with solving the problem of productivity, and with the "conventional wisdom" developed in the process, that we failed to notice it when the problem changed — and became the more subtle one of deploying our vast powers intelligently. If the consumer's whim cannot be wholly relied upon to keep us stocked with motor cars, how much less can it be trusted to supply us with adequate education, an admirable culture, or an agreeable environment? The question is not one of reducing needs, as Mumford would, so much as defining them — as would David Riesman, who regards the "searching of aims and motives" as an immediately pressing national task. "We are coasting psychologically on the remaining — and of course enormous — gaps and deficiencies in the ever-rising standard package, but beyond its generic acquisition we have very few goals, either individually or socially. . . . For most reasonably well-off Americans are not basically materialistic, as envious non-Americans so often interpret us as being: we seldom want things for their own sake, let alone money or land for its sake; rather, we want not to be deprived of the things we are supposed to have. Thus, the basic stockpile on which our society's dynamism rests — the stockpile of new and significant wants — is badly depleted. We can scarcely — even the planners among us — depict in the imagination, quite apart from political feasibility, a society which could put to good use the gross national product likely to descend upon us." 3 4 It is a dilemma to which the evolving doctrine of mass production has brought us, but from which it does not presently provide an exit.

NOTES CONTRIBUTORS INDEX

NOTES I. History and the American Past Ralph H. Gabriel 1. Henry Adams, History of the United States of America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1889-91), IX, 220. 2. F. Stoval, ed., Walt Whitman, Representative Selections (New York: American Book Co., 1939), p. 393. Selection from "Democratic Vistas." 3. "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," a paper read at the meeting of the American Historical Association held in Chicago in 1893. It is available in many places, including F. J. Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1950). Turner's theory, at first almost universally accepted, stimulated in the twentieth century an extensive literature of controversy as to the validity of its affirmations. For a listing of the titles of this literature, see O. Handlin et al., Harvard Guide to American History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), p. 21. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950) gives a twentieth-century point of view that puts the Turner hypothesis in perspective. R. A. Billington, Westward Expansion: History of the American Frontier (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1949) summarizes for teachers of history the interpretation of the middle twentieth century. 4. R. W. Emerson, "The American Scholar," Complete Works (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1903-04), I, 114. 5. The discussion began with A. M. Schlesinger, "The City in American Civilization," reprinted in his Paths to the Present (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1949). Carl Bridenbaugh emphasized the approach in Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America, 16251742 (2nd ed.; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955) and Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743-1766 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955). Histories of individual cities have burgeoned into an extensive and significant literature. See also William Diamond, "On the Dangers of the Urban Interpretation of History," in Historiography and Urbanization (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1941). 6. For immigration as a factor contributing to the historian's image of America, see especially Carl Wittke, We Who Ruilt America: The Saga of the Immigrant (Cleveland: Western Reserve University Press, 1939); M. L. Hansen, The Immigrant in American History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1941); and O. Handlin, The Uprooted (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1951 ). 7. Interpretations of evolving American industrialism have varied as the march of events has deepened the perspective on the industrial revolution in the United States. The following titles, chosen from an extensive literature, present particular and significant points of view: L. M. Hacker, Triumph of American Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940); T. C. Cochran and William Miller, The Age of Enterprise (New

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York: The Macmillan Co., 1942); Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1935); T. C. Cochran, "Legend of the Robber Barons," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, LXXIV (1950); A. A. Berle, The Twentieth Century Capitalist Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1954); J. K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1958). 8. D. M. Potter, People of Plenty, Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954). 9. The historians of ideas began their interpretations with V. L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought ( 3 vols.; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1927-30). Other interpretations are R. H. Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic Thought (rev. ed.; New York: Ronald Press Co., 1956); M. E. Curti, The Growth of American Thought (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943); Morton G. White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism (New York: The Viking Press, 1949); H. S. Commager, The American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950); W. F. Craven, Legend of the Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 1956); E. S. Morgan, The Birth of the Republic, 1763-89 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956); Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1953); Stow Persons, American Minds (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1958). 10. In the twentieth century, political historians enriched their narratives and deepened their analyses by making use of the insights and contributions of economic, social, and intellectual historians. Theirs is the most fully developed image of America. The following works illustrate a few of the twentieth-century insights that have contributed to the historians' image of America: R. F. Nichols, The Disruption of American Democracy (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1948); Avery Craven, The Growth of Southern Nationalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1953); Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1947); Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955); E. F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952); A. M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order and The Coming of the New Deal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1959); C. B. Swisher, American Constitutional Development (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1943). 11. For interpretations of American foreign policy and the image of the United States as a member of the society of nations, see S. F. Bemis, A Diplomatic History of the United States (4th ed.; New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1955 ) ; T. A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People (6th ed.; New York: Appleton-Century-Croft, Inc., 1958); Dexter Perkins, A History of the Monroe Doctrine (rev. ed.; Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1955). II. Pragmatism and the Scope of Science Morton White 1. For an illuminating discussion of this point see Arthur W. Burks's essay introducing his selections from Peirce's writings in M. H. Fisch, ed., Classic American Philosophers (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951).

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2. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1935), II, 409. 3. W. K. Clifford, "The Ethics of Belief," Lectures and Essays, eds. Leslie Stephen and Frederick Pollock (2nd ed.; London: The Macmillan Co., 1886), p. 363. 4. Charles S. Peirce, "The Fixation of Belief," Popular Science Monthly, XII (1877), 1-15; reprinted in The Collected Tapers of Charles Sanders Peirce, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931-35), V, 223-247. 5. William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longmans, 1898), pp. 1-2. 6. Ibid., p. 25. 7. Popular Science Monthly, XII (1878), 286-302; reprinted in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, V, 248-271. 8. John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (New York: Minton Balch, 1929), p. 258. 9. G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903). 10. C. I. Lewis, An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (La Salle, 111.: Open Court, 1946), p. 512. 11. Ibid., p. 554. 12. See my article, "Value and Obligation in Dewey and Lewis," Philosophical Review, LVIII (1949), 321-329; also Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism (New York: Viking Press, 1949; reprinted with a new preface and epilogue, Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), ch. XIII. 13. W. B. Gallie, Peirce and Pragmatism (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1952), p. 161. 14. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1890), II, 661, second note. 15. W. V. Quine, "Two Dogmi ' " ' "' " " ' ' ' ~ ' L X (1951); reprinted in From recently Quine has developed his point of view in Word and Object ( Cambridge, Mass.: Technology Press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1960). 16. "The Analytic and the Synthetic: An Untenable Dualism," John Dewey: Philosopher of Science and Freedom, ed. Sidney Hook (New York: Dial Press, 1950), pp. 316-330; reprinted in L. Linsky, Semantics and the Philosophy of Language (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952); also see Morton White, Toward Reunion in Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956). 17. Nelson Goodman, 'On Likeness of Meaning," Analysis, X ( 1949 ) ; reprinted in Linsky, Semantics. 18. Rudolf Carnap, "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology," Revue internationale de philosophie, IV (1950), 20-40; reprinted in Linsky, Semantics. 19. See especially Quine's "On What There Is," Review of Metaphysics, II (1948); reprinted in From A Logical Point of View. 20. My own views on most of the philosophical issues mentioned in this essay are developed at length in White, Toward Reunion in Philosophy; see especially ch. XVI, "Beyond Positivism and Pragmatism."

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21. For a discussion of some of Dewey's apparent departures from methodological monism, see my essay "Experiment and Necessity in Dewey's Philosophy," Antioch Review (Fall 1959), pp. 329-344. III. Literature and the Critics Robert E. Spiller 1. Van Wyck Brooks, Americas Coining of Age (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1915), pp. 81-82, 92, 170. 2. Ibid., p. 161. 3. James Russell Lowell, Review of Longfellow's novel, Kavanagh, North American Review, LXIX (July 1849), 202, 206-207. 4. Walt Whitman, Preface to 1855 edition Leaves of Grass (Garden City: Doubleday, Doran, 1931), pp. 488-507. 5. W. D. Howells, Criticism and Fiction (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1891), pp. 73, 139-140. 6. E. C. Stedman, An American Anthology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1900), p. xxviii. 7. William P. Trent, A History of American Literature, 1607-1865 (New York: D. Appleton, 1903), pp. 462-463. 8. Barrett Wendell, A Literary History of America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1900), pp. 10, 521-530. 9. Randolph Bourne, History of a Literary Radical, and Other Essays, ed. Van Wyck Brooks (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1920), p. 24. 10. H. L. Mencken, A Book of Prefaces (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1917), pp. 275-276. 11. George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition at Bay (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931), pp. 4—5, 23. 12. James Branch Cabell, Beyond Life (New York: Robert M. McBride, 1919), pp. 342, 355. 13. J. E. Spingarn, "The American Critic," Creative Criticism and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1931), pp. 123-147, 93. 14. Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931), pp. 257-258, 268, 20. 15. Ezra Pound, How to Read (LeBeausset [Var] France, 1932), p. 17. 16. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1932), p. 343. 17. Ibid., pp. 118, 124-125. 18. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism, A Short History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), p. 748.

IV. Music and Musicians Edward N. Waters 1. John W. Moore, Complete Encyclopaedia of Music (Boston: John P. Jewett and Co., 1854), p. 5.

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2. Ibid., pp. 643-644. 3. Gilbert Chase, Americas Music, from the Pilgrims to the Present (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), pp. 95, 136. 4. Ibid., p. 277. 5. Ibid., p. 355. 6. Ε. N. Waters, The Wa-Wan Press (in A Birthday Offering to [C. £.]; New York: G. Schirmer, Inc., 1943). 7. Ε. N. Waters, Victor Herbert: A Life in Music (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1955), pp. 179-180. 8. Aaron Copland, Our New Music (New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill, 1941), pp. 147, 129, 176. 9. Nicholas Slonimsky, Music Since 1900 (New York: Coleman-Ross Co., 1949), p. xi. 10. Waters, Victor Herbert, p. 406. 11. Cecil Smith, Musical Comedy in America (New York: Theatre Arts Books, Robert M. MacGregor, 1950), p. 209. 12. Chase, America's Music, p. 488. 13. Slonimsky, Music Since 1900, pp. 170-171, 192. 14. Waters, Victor Herbert, pp. 541-542. 15. Marshall W. Stearns, The Story of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. xi. 16. Louis C. Elson, The History of American Music (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1904), pp. 133-134. 17. Paul Rosenfeld, An Hour with American Music (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1929), pp. 28 ff. 18. Vincent Silliman and Irving Lowens, We Sing of Life (Boston: Star King Press, distributed by the Beacon Press, 1955. 19. Chase, America's Music, p. 66. 20. John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, Folk Song U.S.Α., Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford Seeger, eds. (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1947), pp. vii, ix. 21. Copland, Our New Music, p. 236. 22. Frances Densmore, "The Importance of Recordings of Indian Songs," American Anthropologist, 47 (October-December 1945), 637-639. 23. Roland Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1955).

V. Painting and Sculpture Lloyd Goodrich 1. Dorothy Norman, ed., The Selected Writings of John Marin (New York: Pellegrini and Cudahy, 1949), pp. 4-5. 2. Royal Cortissoz, American Artists (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932), p. 17. 3. Stuart Davis, "The Cube Root," Art News (February 1, 1943). 4. Ethel Schwabacher, Arshile Gorky (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1957), p. 70.

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N O T E S T O C H A P T E R VI VI. The Social Scientists Thomas C. Cochran

1. Since preparing this manuscript, David W. Noble's The Paradox of Progressive Thought has appeared (University of Minnesota Press, 1958). It further elucidates the ideas presented here, and emphasizes the Christian religious element in the optimistic thought of the period. 2. Edward A. Ross, Changing America (New York: The Century Co., 1912), p. 19. 3. Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), p. 132. 4. Quoted in Merle E. Curti, "Woodrow Wilson's Concept of Human Nature," Midwest Journal of Political Science, I (May 1957), 11-13. 5. J. Allen Smith, The Spirit of American Government (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1907), p. 362. 6. Ross, Changing America, pp. 5, 9-11, 15. 7. Franklin H. Giddings, Democracy and Empire (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1900), p. v. 8. Simon N. Patten, The New Basis of Civilization (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1907 and 1921), p. 186. 9. Richard T. Ely, Property and Contract in Their Relations to the Distribution of Wealth (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1914), I, 10. 10. Richard T. Ely, An Introduction to Political Economy (Hunt and Eaton, 1889), p. 58. 11. William Z. Ripley, Trusts, Pools and Corporations (New York: Ginn & Company, 1905), p. x. 12. Ibid., p. 473. 13. Giddings, Democracy and Empire, pp. 338-339. 14. Quoted in Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, p. 310. 15. G. Stanley Hall, Life and Confessions of a Psychologist (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1923), pp. 406-414. 16. Franz Boas, Anthropology and Modern Life (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1928), p. 236. 17. Conference on Unemployment, Washington, D.C., 1921. Committee on Recent Economic Changes, Recent Economic Changes (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1929), p. 1. 18. Ibid., pp. 2, 3, 5, 11-12. 19. William Z. Ripley, Main Street and Wall Street (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1927), p. 115. 20. Elton Mayo, The Human Problem of an Industrial Civilization ( New York: The Macmillan Co., 1933), p. 153. 21. Robert Lowie, An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (2nd ed.; New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1940), p. 540. 22. President's Research Committee on Social Trends, Recent Social Trends in the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933). 23. Committee Findings, Recent Social Trends, p. lxxv. 24. "Economic Organization," Recent Social Trends, pp. 221, 250. 25. Recent Social Trends, p. 442.

AMERICAN ECONOMIC I N S T I T U T I O N S

203

26. "Government and Society," Recent Social Trends, pp. 1490, 15371538. 27. Harold E. Stearns, ed., America Now (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1938). 28. Elsie C. Parsons, "Family," America Noto, pp. 407-408. 29. Walton H. Hamilton, "Economics," America Now, pp. 155-156. 30. Arthur F. Burns, The Instability of Consumer Spending (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1952), p. 6. 31. Harold G. Moulton, The Formation of Capital (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1935 ), pp. 155 fi. 32. Robert S. and Helen M. Lynd, Middletown in Transition (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1937), pp. 402-486. 33. Margaret Mead, "The Study of National Character," Policy Sciences, ed. Daniel Lemer and Harold D. Lasswell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1951), p. 75. 34. Margaret Mead, "National Character," Anthropology Today, ed. A. L. Kroeber (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1952), p. 651. 35. Casper D. Neagele, ed., From de Tocqueville to Myrdal, Comparative Study of Values, Working Paper # 1 , October 1949, Laboratory of Social Relations, Harvard University. 36. Robin D. Williams, Jr., American Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), pp. 441-442. 37. Francis X. Sutton, Seymour E. Harris, Carl Kaysen, James Tobin, The American Business Creed (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 251, 256, 379. 38. Ibid., p. 285. 39. Clyde Kluckhohn, "Some Aspects of American National Character," Human Factors in Military Operations, ed. Richard Hays Wilhams (Chevy Chase, Md.: Operations Research Office, The Johns Hopkins University, 1954), pp. 118-120. 40. See: Thomas C. Cochran, The Puerto Rican Businessman (Philadelphia; University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959), pp. 117-132. 41. David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955), pp. 34-35. 42. The Journal of Economic History, XIII (1953), p. 92. 43. A. D. H. Kaplan, ed., Big Enterprise in a Competitive System (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1954), p. 70. 44. Merle Fainsod and Lincoln Gordon, Government and the American Economy (rev. ed.; New York: W. W. Norton, 1948), p. 891. 45. J. M. Burns and J. W. Peltason, Government by the People (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1954), pp. 14, 15-16. 46. Ibid., p. 7. VII. The Public Image of American Economic Institutions Kenneth E. Boulding 1. Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1921). 2. Micah 4:4.

204

N O T E S TO CHAPTER Vili Vili. The Public Image: Politics John M. Blum

1. George F. Beer, quoted in Harry F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt, A Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1931), p. 265. IX. The Discovery of the Popular Culture Reuel Denney 1. Van Wyck Brooks, Americas Coming of Age (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1915). 2. Jonathan Baxter Harrison, Certain Dangerous Tendencies in American Life (Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Co., 1880). 3. Henry James, The American Scene (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907); see chapter, "The Bowery and Thereabouts." 4. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), pp. 421-422. 5. Emile Durkheim, Les Formes Elémentaires de la Vie Religieuse, le systeme totemique en australie (Paris: F. Alcari, 1912). 6. George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States ( New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), p. 52. 7. William Charvat, The Origins of American Critical Thought (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1936), pp. 1-26. 8. Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism; a History of Newspapers in the United States Through 250 Years, 1690 to 1940 (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1942). 9. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class ( New York: The Macmillan Co., 1899) and (New York: Mentor Book, 1953, p. 175). 10. Foster Rhea Dulles, America Learns to Flay (New York: Appleton Century Co., 1940). 11. Spirit of the Times; a Chronicle of the Turf, Agriculture, Field Sports, Literature and the Stage (New York: vols. 1-31, no. 20, December 10, 1831 —June 21, 1861). See also Eugene Current Garcia, " 'York's Tall Son' and His Southern Correspondents, ' American Quarterly, III, no. 4 (Winter 1955), 371. 12. Caspar W. Whitney, "The Development of Athletics in the United States," Fortnightly Review, LIV, new series, no. 221 (Sept. 1, 1893), 412-424. 13. Joseph W. Kwiat has made this point most clearly in various articles in the American Quarterly, 1950-1959. 14. "Chicot," Variety, I, no. 3 (December 30, 1905). 15. Mark Sullivan, Our Times (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1926-35). 16. Robert Park, The Immigrant Press and Its Control (New York: Harper and Bros., 1922). 17. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), p. 187. 18. Lloyd Morris, Postscript to Yesterday (New York: Random House, 1947), p. 217.

THE D I S C O V E R Y O F THE P O P U L A R CULTURE

205

19. Êlie Faure, The Art of Cineplastics, translated by Walter Pack (Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1923). 20. In a conversation with me, Gilbert Seldes named St. John Ervine as a critic who took an interest in the movies and other popular arts in London at about the time of World War I. 21. James Agate, Alarums and Excursions (New York: G. H. Doran Co., 1922); Around Cinemas (London: Home and Van Thai, 1946). 22. Walter Prichard Eaton, "The Canned Drama," American Magazine, LXVIII (September 1909), 493-500. 23. W. K. L. Dickson, The Life and Inventions of Thomas Alva Edison (New York: T. Y. Crowell & Co., 1892); and Antonia Dickson and W. K. L. Dickson, Edison's Invention of the Kinek-phonograph (Los Angeles: Pueblo Press, 1939; a reprint of an article in Century Magazine, 1894). 24. Horace M. Kallen, "The Dramatic Picture Versus the Pictorial Drama," Harvard Monthly, L (March 1910), 22-31. 25. Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay, a Psychological Study (New York: Appleton, 1916). 26. Faure, Art of Cineplastics. 27. Charles Lyell, A Second Visit to the United States of North America (London, 1849), I, 327-328. 28. Frances A. Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation (1838-1839) (New York: Harper & Bros., 1864), p. 218. 29. George W. Cable, "The Dance in Place Congo," Century Magazine (February 1886). 30. Complete citations on all of the foregoing authors and titles will be found in Marshall Stearns, The Story of Jazz (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1956), which contains a fine bibliography on which this section heavily depends. 31. Edmund Wilson, A Literary Chronicle 1920-1950 (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958), p. 53. 32. Ibid. 33. See, besides Mencken's varied writings, William Manchester, Disturber of the Peace: The Life of H. L. Mencken (New York: Harper & Bros., 1951). 34. James Agee, Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1958). 35. John Kouwenhoven, Made in America (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1948). 36. Wilder Hobson, American Jazz Music (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1939). 37. Herbert Bloomer, Movies and Conduct (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1933; The Payne Fund Studies). 38. Leo Lowenthal, "Biographies in Popular Magazines," Reader in Public Opinion and Communication (Glencoe, 111.: The Free Press, 1950). 39. Robert Merton, Marjorie Fiske, and Alberta Curtis, Mass Persuasion (New York: Harper & Bros., 1946). 40. W. Lloyd Warner and William Henry, "The Daytime Radio Serial: A Symbolic Analysis," in Reader in Public Opinion and Communication (Glencoe, 111.: The Free Press, 1950).

206

NOTES TO CHAPTER IX

41. Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites, Movies: A Psychological Study (Gleneoe, 111.: The Free Press, 1950). 42. Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton, "Mass Communication and Organized Social Action," The Communication of Ideas, ed. Lyman Bryson (New York: Harper & Bros., 1948); T. W. Adomo, "A Social Critique of Radio Music," Reader in Public Opinion and Communication (Glencoe, 111.: The Free Press, 1950). 43. Denis W. Brogan, "The Problem of High Culture and Mass Culture," Diogenes, no. 5 (Winter 1954), 1-15; and Dwight Macdonald, "A Theory of Mass Culture," Diogenes, no. 3 (Summer 1953), 1-17. 44. Leslie A. Fiedler, "The Middle Against Both Ends," Encounter, V, no. 2 (August 1955), 16-23. 45. Milton Klonsky, "Along the Midway of Mass Culture," The New Partisan Review Reader, 1945-53 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1953), pp. 344-360. 46. Louis Kronenberger, Company Manners: a Cultural Inquiry into American Life (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1954). 47. Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951). 48. André Malraux, "Art, Popular Art, and the Illusion of the Folk," The New Partisan Review Reader, 1945-53 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1953), pp. 438-146. 49. George Orwell, A Collection of Essays (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954). 50. The analysis of the attitudes of Fiedler, Klonsky, Kronenberger, McLuhan, Malraux, and Orwell owes much to a perceptive analysis of these authors' writings on popular culture by Peter W. Hanan: "The Case Against Popular Culture" (mineographed copy of Honors Paper in the College of the University of Chicago, Spring 1956; the Dean's Office College, the University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois). 51. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitolism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Allen and Unwin, 1930). 52. Reuel Denney, The Astonished Muse (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1957). X. The Doctrine of Mass Production Eric Larrabee 1. John A. Kouwenhoven, Made in America (Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1948), pp. 50, 225. 2. Leo Marx, "The Machine in the Garden," New England Quarterly, XXIX, 1 (March 1956), 33. 3. Quoted in Halvdan Koht, The American Spirit in Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949), p. 79. 4. Frederick Lewis Allen, The Big Change (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952), pp. 112-114. 5. Jacques Maritain, Reflections on America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), p. 118.

THE DOCTRINE OF MASS PRODUCTION

207

6. Peter F. Drucker, The New Society (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950), p. 1. 7. Graham Hutton, We Too Can Prosper (London: Allen and Unwin, 1953), p. 182. See also William E. Rappard, A quoi tient la supériorité économique des Etats-Unis? (Paris: Génin, 1954), The Secret of American Prosperity (New York: Greenberg, 1955); and Final Report of the Council (London: Anglo-American Council on Productivity, 1952), pp. 9-10. 8. J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1932), Introduction by Charles A. Beard, pp. vii, xxi, xxxi, xxxvii. Since the above was written, my attention has been called to the work of Marvin Fisher, of Arizona State University, who argues very persuasively that the essential pattern of modem mass production was evident in the United States as early as 1850, and that numerous observations of it may be found in the diaries, journals, and reports of European observers during the latter half of the century. See Marvin Fisher, "The Uniqueness of American Industrialization, as Reported by European Observers, 1830-1860," paper delivered to the American Historical Association, December 1958. 9. Arthur Shadwell, Industrial Efficiency (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1909), passim. 10. Brooks Adams, The New Empire (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1902), p. 1. 11. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1918), pp. 380, 382, 498. 12. David Graham Phillips, "The Treason of the Senate," Cosmopolitan Magazine, XL, 5 (March 1906), 6. 13. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: The Viking Press, 1945), p. 32. 14. Shadwell, Industrial Efficiency, pp. 651, 23-24. 15. Edward Alsworth Ross, Changing America (New York: Century, 1912), pp. 18-19, 88. 16. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1912), pp. 14-15. (Italics mine.) 17. Address to Centennial of Engineering (Chicago, September 8, 1952). 18. "I have followed many a weary mile behind a plow and I know all the drudgery of it." Henry Ford, My Life and Work (Garden City: Doubleday Doran and Co., 1923), p. 200. 19. Seymour E. Harris, "The Man Behind the Model T," New York Times Book Review (September 15, 1957), p. 3. 20. Quoted in Allan Nevins, Ford: Expansion and Challenge (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1957), p. 90. 21. Ibid., p. 99. See also Garet Garrett, The Wild Wheel (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952), pp. 115-118; and William C. Richards, The Last Billionaire: Henry Ford (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948), pp. 54-59. 22. Charles E. Sorensen, My Forty Years with Ford (New York: W. W. Norton Co., 1956), pp. 128-131. 23. Paul M. Mazur, American Prosperity: Its Causes and Consequences (New York: The Viking Press, 1928), pp. 92-93, 127-128, 130, 263.

208

NOTES TO CHAPTER Χ

24. Ernest Elmo Calkins, Business the Civilizer (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1928), pp. 294-295. 25. Edward A. Filene, Successful Living in this Machine Age (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1932), pp. 1, 15, 201-202. 26. "America's most successful business man, Mr. Ford, while rolling up millions by the hundreds in profits, was content to tum out what was, perhaps, the ugliest car on the market. It was only when his profits were threatened that he turned to the consideration of beauty, and he would not have done so had it not promised profit." James Truslow Adams, Our Business Civilization (New York: A. and C. Boni, 1929), p. 20. 27. John dos Passos, The Big Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1936), pp. 55-56. 28. André Siegfried, America Comes of Age (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1927), p. 353. 29. Roger Burlingame, Backgrounds of Power: The Human Story of Mass Production (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1939), pp. 57-58. 30. Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 714. Cf. "All technology is in itself morally neutral." Aldous Huxley, television interview with Mike Wallace, American Broadcasting Company, May 18, 1958. 31. Pearl F. Clark, Challenge of the American Know-how (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948), pp. 94, xi. 32. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1934), p. 428. 33. Ibid., pp. 390-400. 34. David Riesman, "Abundance for What?" (Chicago: Center for Leisure, 1957), MS. pp. 5, 10.

CONTRIBUTORS

JOHN M . B L U M , Professor of History at Yale University, is associate editor of Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, and author of Joe Tumulty and the Wilson Era, The Republican Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and the Politics of Morality, and From the Morganthau Diaries.

Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan, was born in England and educated at Oxford University. He was the recipient of the John B. Clark Medal of the American Economic Association and has been a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is author of Economic Analysis, The Economics of Peace, The Organizational Revolution, The Image, and The Principles of Economic Policy. KENNETH E . BOULDING,

c. COCHRAN, Professor of the History of the People of the United States at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of The Age of Enterprise (with William Miller), Railroad Leaders 1845-1890: The Business Mind in Action, The American Business System, The Puerto Rican Businessman, and A Basic History of American Business. In addition, he has written and contributed to a number of works in general American History, and has served as editor of The Journal of Economic History and as a member of successive committees on historiography of the Social Science Research Council. THOMAS

Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, has been associate editor of Fortune and contributing editor of Time. He has been a Fellow of the Wesleyan University Center for Advanced Studies, Director of the Humanities Section of the Harvard International Seminar and of the seminar for Artists and Architects of the Graham Foundation of Chicago. He is author of The Astonished Muse, and (with David Riesman and Nathan Clazer) The Lonely Crowd. He has contributed articles and poetry to magazines, and has won the Yale Poetry Prize and the Eunice Tietjens Poetry Prize of Poetry magazine. REUEL DENNEY,

Professor of History at Yale University for many years, since his retirement has held the Chair of American Civilization at the School of International Service, American University, Washington, D.C. Author and editor of innumerable works on American History — among them The Course of American Democratic Thought — he is the general editor of the Library of Congress Series in American Civilization, to which this volume is a contribution, and a member of the United States National Commission for UNESCO. RALPH H. GABRIEL,

210

CONTRIBUTORS

Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, was chairman of the editorial board of the Magazine of Art and is a member of the boards of Art Bulletin and Art in America. He has written biographies of Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins and monographs on Albert P. Ryder, Yasuo Kuniyoski, Max Weber, John Sloan, and Edward Hopper. He is director of the American Art Research Council, and a trustee and vice-president of the American Federation of Arts.

LLOYD GOODRICH,

L A B B A B E E , Managing Editor of American Heritage, has also been associate editor of Harper's Magazine and editor of Mass Leisure and American Panorama. He is a regular contributor to Harper's and other magazines and a frequent guest and moderator of the radio program "Invitation to Learning." He is the author of The Self-Conscious Society and coauthor of Creating an Industrial Civilization. EMC

Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, has been chairman of the Department of American Civilization, president of the American Studies Association, first vice-president of the Modern Language Association, and an editor of Publications of the Modern Language Association, American Literature, and American Quarterly. Coeditor of Literary History of the United States and The Roots of National Culture, he is the author of The Cycle of American Literature, Fenimore Cooper: Critic of His Times, and The American in England. R O B E R T E . SPELLER,

Ν. W A T E R S , Assistant Chief of the Music Division, Library of Congress, and author of Victor Herbert: A Life in Music, has been program editor for the National Symphony Orchestra, president of the Music Library Association, and chairman of the Council of the National Library Associations. He is also a contributor to music periodicals. EDWARD

M O R T O N W H I T E , Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, is the author of Social Thought in America, Toward Reunion in Philosophy, and Religion, Politics and the Higher Learning. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is editor of a critical volume on twentieth-century philosophy, The Age of Analysis.

INDEX

Adams, Brooks, 3, 6, 97, 183 Adams, Henry, 3, 8, 97, 157, 168, 183, 190 Adams, James Truslow, 189-190 Adorno, T. W., 173 Agate, James, 165 Agee, James, 171 Alexander, John White, 79 Allen, Fred, 168 Allen, Frederick Lewis, 178, 180 Anderson, Sherwood, 49, 52, 84 Andrews, Charles M., 7, 12, 13 Armstrong, Louis, 167 Arnold, Matthew, 170 Babbitt, Irving, 46, 47, 48, 53-54 Baker, Dorothy, 167 Bancroft, George, 1-2 Barber, Samuel, 67 Bartók, Béla, 67 Bateson, G., 109 Beard, Charles Α., 8, 9, 16, 182 Beard, Mary R., 9 Benedict, Ruth, 100, 109-110, 170 Benton, Thomas H., 79, 81-82 Bergsma, William, 67 Berle, Adolf, 103 Berlin, Irving, 70 Bernstein, Leonard, 67 Blackmur, R. P., 57 Blume, Peter, 86 Boas, Franz, 100, 101, 108 Bohr, Niels, 99-100 Borth, Christy, 185 Bourne, Randolph, 42-43, 45, 168 Bradley, F. H., 20 Brogan, Denis W., 173 Brooks, Cleanth, 57 Brooks, Van Wyck, 36-38, 42-43, 45, 47, 48, 50,155, 167 Broun, Heywood, 168

Brownell, William Crary, 46, 47 Bullock, Charles J., 97 Burchfield, Charles, 82-83, 89 Burke, Kenneth, 55, 57 Burlingame, Roger, 191 Burns, Arthur H., 106 Burns, J. M., 114 Bury, J. B., 182 Cabell, James Branch, 47, 48 Cable, George W., 167 Calder, Alexander, 91, 93 Calkins, E. E., 188 Calverton, V. F., 55 Calvin, John, 46 Canby, Henry, 45 Carlyle, Thomas, 37-38 Carnap, Rudolf, 28, 30-32, 33 Carpenter, John Alden, 65 Carter, Elliott, 67 Cézanne, Paul, 52 Chadwick, George W., 64, 65 Chaplin, Charles Spencer, 166, 171, 178-179 "Charteris, John. See Cabell Charvat, William, 158 Chase, Stuart, 170, 171 Chase, William M„ 78 "Chicot." See Sargent Chopin, Frédéric François, 62 Churchill, Winston, 150 Clark, Pearl Franklin, 192 Clark, Wallace, 192 Clifford, W. K., 21, 22 Commons, John R., 102, 128 Conrad, Joseph, 43 Converse, Frederick S., 65 Coolidge, Calvin, 120, 125, 147-148 Cooper, James Fenimore, 47 Copland, Aaron, 66, 67, 75 Cortissoz, Royal, 88

212 Cowell, Henry, 67 Cowley, Malcolm, 49 Crane, Hart, 58 Crane, Stephen, 58 Croly, Herbert, 168, 185, 187 Curry, John Steuart, 81-82 Darwin, Charles Robert, 21 Davis, Stuart, 90 Dello Joio, Norman, 67 Demuth, Charles, 87 Denney, Reuel, 112 Densmore, Frances, 75 Dewey, John, 20, 25-26, 28, 30, 33; mentioned, 17, 42, 169 Dewing, Thomas, 78 Diamond, David, 67 Dickens, Charles, 43 Dickinson, Emily, 54 Dickinson, Preston, 87 Dickson, W. K. L., 166 Dodge brothers, 186 Donne, John, 54 Dornvusch, Sanford M., 157 Dos Passos, John, 45, 57, 190 Dostoevski, Fëdor Mikhailovich, 43 Dreiser, Theodore, 36, 40, 43, 45; mentioned, 46, 48, 52, 80, 84 Drucker Peter F., 178, 180, 181 Dulles, Foster Rhea, 160 Durkheim, Emile, 157 Dvorák, Anton, 63 Eakins, Thomas, 77, 78 Eaton, Walter Prichard, 166 Edison, Thomas Alva, 76, 166 Edwards, Jonathan, 37 Einstein, Albert, 94, 99 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 125, 132, 152 Eliot, Charles William, 179, 184 Eliot, T. S., 49, 50, 52, 53-55, 56, 58 Elson, Louis C., 72-73 Ely, Richard, 97, 102, 109 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 5, 17, 37, 54, 156 Emmett, Daniel Decatur, 63 Ervine, St. John, 165 Evans, Oliver, 179 Evergood, Philip, 86

INDEX Fabricant, Solomon, 113 Fainsod, Merle, 114 Farrell, James T., 55 Farwell, Arthur, 64, 65 Faulkner, William, 49, 52, 58, 82; mentioned, 48, 84 Faure, Élie, 165, 166 Fiedler, Leslie, 174 Filene, Edward Α., 188-189, 193 Finney, Ross Lee, 67 Foerster, Norman, 47 Foote, Arthur W., 64, 65 Ford, Henry, 169, 178, 179-180, 181, 184, 185-188, 190, 191, 193 Foster, Stephen Collins, 62 Frank, Waldo, 44 Frankenstein, Alfred, 167 Franklin, Benjamin, 14, 17, 37, 61 Frege, Gottlob, 32 Freud, Sigmund, 94, 100, 175 Fromm, Erich, 113 Frontenac, Comte de, 2 Frost, Robert, 45, 51 Gabò, Naum, 91, 93 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 193-194 Gallie, W. B„ 27-28 Gandhi, Mahatma, 191 Gay, Edwin F., 102, 103, 104 Gershwin, George, 67, 69, 70-71, 71-72 Giddings, Franklin H., 96, 98, 108, 109 Giedion, Siegfried, 191, 192 Gilbert, Henry F. B., 64, 65 Glackens, William J., 79-80 Glazer, Nathan, 112, 175 Goldberg, Isaac, 167 Goodman, Nelson, 29 Gordon, Lincoln, 114 Gordon, R. W., 73 Gorer, Geoffrey, 109 Gorky, Arshile, 92 Gorman, H. S., 44 Gottschalk, Louis Moreau, 62 Griffes, Charles T., 65 Griffith, D. W., 166 Grosz, George, 85 Gutenberg, Johann, 96 Gwathmey, Robert, 85

INDEX Hadley, Henry Κ., 64, 65 Hall, G. Stanley, 100 Hamilton, Walton H., 105 Hanson, Howard, 67 Harris, Frank, 160 Harris, Roy, 67 Harris, Seymour, 110-111, 186 Harrison, Jonathan Baxter, 156 Hart, Hornell, 104 Hartley, Marsden, 88 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 44, 58, 179 Hearst, William Randolph, 164 Hemingway, Ernest, 48, 49, 52 Henri, Robert, 79-80, 161 Henry, William, 173 Herbert, Victor, 64, 69-70 Hicks, Granville, 55 Hill, E. B., 64 Hines, Earl, 90 Hitler, Adolph, 43, 122 Hobson, Wilder, 167, 171 Hofstadter, Richard, 164 Holden, Oliver, 61 Homer, Winslow, 77, 88 Hoover, Herbert, 102, 104, 148 Hopkinson, Francis, 61 Hopper, Edward, 82 Howells, William Dean, 38, 39, 41, 42 Hughes, Langston, 167 Huneker, James G., 43, 47 Huss, Henry Holden, 64 Huxley, Aldous, 21, 178 Inness, George, 77 Ives, Charles E., 67 Jackson, Andrew, 1, 14 James, Henry, 39, 41, 49, 50, 56, 58, 156-157 James, William, 20-24, 26, 27, 28, 30-31, 33, 157, 158; mentioned, 17, 168 Jeans, Sir James, 101 Jefferson, Peter, 14 Jefferson, Thomas, 4, 14, 73; mentioned, 17, 45 Jenks, Jeremiah W., 97 Jogues, Father, 2 Johnson, Eastman, 78

213 Kallen, Horace M., 166 Kant, Immanuel, 26, 28 Kaplan, A. D. H„ 113 Kaufman, George S., 70 Kaysen, Carl, 110-111 Kelley, Edgar Stillman, 64, 65 Kemble, Frances, 166 Kern, Jerome, 70 Keynes, J. M., 106, 129-130, 186 Kirchner, Leon, 67 Kittredge, George Lyman, 47 Klonsky, Milton, 174 Kluckhohn, Clyde, 111-112, 115 Knath, Karl, 88 Koebner, Franz, 167 Koussevitsky, Serge, 64 Kouwenhoven, John Α., 71, 171, 179 Kroeber, A. L., 108 Kronenberger, Louis, 174 La Farge, John, 77 Langdon-Davies, John, 101 La Salle, Sieur de, 2 Lasswell, Harold, 100 Lazarsfeld, Paul, 173 Lee, Everett, 114 Leites, Nathan, 173 Lenin, Nikolai, 43 Leon, Daniel de, 97-98 Levine, Jack, 85 Lewis, C. I., 25-27, 28, 33 Lewis, Sinclair, 45, 81, 82, 84 Lincoln, Abraham, 4 Lindsay, Vachel, 51, 166 Lippmann, Walter, 100, 168 Lippold, Richard, 91, 93 Liszt, Franz, 62 Locke, John, 14 Loesser, Frank, 70 Lomax, Alan, 74 Lomax, John, 73, 74 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 39, 44 Lowell, Amy, 51 Lowell, James Russell, 37, 39 Lowenthal, Leo, 172 Lowie, Robert, 100, 103-104, 108 Ludwig, Heinrich, 102 Luks, George, 79-80, 161 Lyell, Charles, 166

214 Lynd, Helen M., 108 Lynd, Robert S., 108 Macdonald, Dwight, 173 MacDowell, Edward Α., 63-64, 65 McLaughlin, Philip C., 67 MacLeish, Archibald, 49 McLuhan, Marshall, 174 Madison, James, 8 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 5-6, 15 Malraux, André, 174 Marin, John, 87, 88 Maritain, Jacques, 180, 182, 189 Marsh, Reginald, 83 Marx, Groucho, 168 Marx, Karl, 55, 94, 107 Marx, Leo, 179 Mason, Daniel Gregory, 65 Mason, Lowell, 62 Masters, Edgar Lee, 51 Mayo, Elton, 103 Mazur, Paul M., 188, 193 Mead, Margaret, 108-110 Means, Gardiner, 103 Melville, Herman, 58, 179 Mencken, H. L., 43-44, 45, 47, 167, 168 Mennin, Peter, 67 Merriam, C. E., 104-105 Merton, Robert, 172 Milhaud, Darius, 72 Mills, C. Wright, 113 Mitchell, Wesley, 128 Monroe, James, 1 Montcalm, General, 2, 16 Moore, Douglas, 67 Moore, G. E., 20, 25 Moore, J. W., 60-61 More, Paul Elmer, 46, 47 Morley, Christopher, 119 Morris, Lloyd, 44, 164 Moulton, Harold G., 106-107 Mumford, Lewis, 44, 45, 191, 193, 194 Münsterberg, Hugo, 166 Myrdal, Gunnar, 110 Naegele, Casper D., 110, 112 Nevin, A. F., 64 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 43

INDEX Ogburn, William F., 101 O'Keeffe, Georgia, 87 O'Neill, Eugene, 45, 48-49, 57 Orozco, José Clemente, 84 Orwell, George, 174 Osgood, Henry, 167 Palmer, Robert, 67 Panassié, Hugues, 167 Park, Robert, 163 Parker, Horatio W., 64, 65 Parkman, Francis, 2-3, 7, 16 Parrington, Vemon L., 45, 55 Parsons, Elsie C., 105 Pater, Walter, 47 Patten, Simon N., 96, 102, 108, 109 Peirce, Charles S., 18-20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27-28, 29, 31, 33 Peltason, J. W., 114 Perry, Ralph Rarton, 20 Phillips, David Graham, 183-184 Picasso, Pablo, 52 Piston, Walter, 67 Planck, M. K. E. L., 99-100 Poe, Edgar Allan, 37, 50 Pollock, Jackson, 92 Pontiac (Ottawa Indian chief), 2 Porter, Cole, 70 Porter, Quincy, 67 Pound, Ezra, 49, 51-53, 54, 55, 56 Pulitzer, Joseph, 164 Quine, W. V., 28-29, 30, 32-33 Rama Rau, Santha, 192 Ransom, John Crowe, 55, 57 Redfield, Robert, 172 Rhodes, James Ford, 3-á, 5, 6, 14, 15 Riegger, Wallingford, 67 Riesman, David, 112-113, 115, 175, 193, 194 Rimbaud, Arthur, 50 Ripley, William Z., 97, 103 Rivera, Diego, 84 Rodgers, Richard, 70 Rogers, Will, 168 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 14, 148-151 Roosevelt, Theodore, 6, 97, 142-143, 144, 146 Root, Elihu, 6

INDEX

215

Root, George Frederick, 62-63 Rosenfeld, Paul, 73 Ross, Edward Α., 95, 96, 108, 109, 184-185 Rothko, Mark, 91 Royce, Josiah, 20, 158 Russell, Bertrand, 20, 32 Rutherford, Ernest, 99-100 Ryder, Albert Pinkham, 77, 88 Ryskind, Morris, 70

Stein, Leo, 52 Stella, Joseph, 86-87 Stevenson, Elliott G., 186-187 Stieglitz, Alfred, 87 Still, William Grant, 67 Strauss, Richard, 65 Stravinsky, Igor, 67 Sullivan, Mark, 161 Sumner, William Graham, 97 Sutton, Francis X., 110-111

Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, 77 Sandburg, Carl, 45, 48, 51, 73, 74 Santayana, George, 46, 158 Sargent, Epes W., 161 Schneider, Louis, 157 Schoenberg, Arnold, 67 Schuman, William, 67 Seldes, Gilbert, 167, 171 Sessions, Roger, 67 Shadwell, Arthur, 182-183, 184 Shahn, Ben, 85-86 Shakespeare, William, 54 Sheeler, Charles, 87 Shepherd, Arthur, 64 Sherman, Stuart, 184 Shinn, Everett, 80, 161 Siegfried, André, 190-191 Silverman, "Sime," 161, 162-163, 168 Simon, A. M., 97-98 Sinclair, Upton, 41 Sloan, John, 79-80, 161 Slonimsky, Nicholas, 67 Smith, Adam, 163 Smith, J. Allen, 95-96, 99 Smith, Kate, 172 Sousa, John Philip, 63 Sowerby, Leo, 67 Soyer, Raphael, 83 Spencer, Herbert, 163 Spingarn, J. E., 47^48 Spruce, Everett, 88 Stalin, Joseph, 122 Stearns, Harold E., 44, 105, 167 Steams, Marshall, 167 Stedman, E. C., 40 Steffens, Lincoln, 41 Stein, Gertrude, 49, 50, 51-52, 56, 178

Taft, William Howard, 143-144 Tate, Allen, 57 Tawney, R. H., 103 Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilich, 65 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 40 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 40 Thayer, Abbott, 78 Thomas, Dorothy, 114 Thomas, W. I., 100 Thoreau, Henry David, 47, 179; mentioned, l7, 88 Tobey, Mark, 91 Tobin, James, 110-111 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 110 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri, 80 Toynbee, Arnold, 107 Trent, William P., 40 Truman, Harry S., 132 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 4-5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15 Twain, Mark, 39, 41 Tyler, Marian, 170, 171 Van der Stucken, Frank, 64 Van Doren, Carl, 45 Vehlen, Thorstein, 97, 102, 120, 128, 158-159, 162-163, 184; mentioned, 168, 169 Walkowitz, Abraham, 87 Ward, Robert, 67 Warner, W. Lloyd, 172-173 Warren, R. P., 57 Washington, George, 61 Watson, John B., 100-101 Weber, Max, 86, 88, 107, 175 Wendell, Barrett, 40-41 Whitehead, Alfred North, 21 Whiteman, Paul, 72

INDEX

216 Whiting, Α., 64 Whitman, Walt, 4, 39 Whitney, Caspar W., 160 Whitney, Eli, 179 Wiener, Norbert, 130 Williams, Robin M., Jr., 110, 112, 115 Wilson, Edmund, 50, 53, 55-56, 167-168 Wilson, Woodrow, 95, 144-146, 147; mentioned, 14, 99

Wimsatt, W. K„ Jr., 57 Winters, Yvor, 55, 57 Wolfe, James, 2 Wolfe, Thomas, 49, 57, 84 Wolfenstein, Martha, 173 Wood, Charles W., 189 Wood, Grant, 81-82 Wordsworth, William, 37 Work, Henry Clay, 63 Youmans, Vincent, 70