Turning The Century: Essays In Media And Cultural Studies 0813368200, 9780813368207

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Turning the Century

Cultural Studies Series Paul Sm ith, Series Editor

Turning the Century: Essays in Media and Cultural Studies, edited by Carol A. Stabile Midfielders Moment: Politics, Literature, and Culture in Contemporary South Africa, Grant Farred The Audience and Its Landscape, edited by James Hay, Lawrence Grossberg, and Ellen Wartella Art and the Committed Eye: The Cultural Lunctions of Imagery, Richard Leppert Youth, Murder, Spectacle: The Cultural Politics of “Youth in Crisis,” Charles R. Acland Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream, Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis F OR T HC O MI N G

Postmodernism and the Politics of 'Culture', Adam Katz Look into the Dark: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia, Thomas Moylan Being Native in North America, Gail Valaskakis

Turning the Century Essays in Media and Cultural Studies

Edited by

Carol A. Stabile

Routledge Taylor & Francis Croup New York London

Cultural Studies Series

First published 2000 by Westview Press Published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN

,

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group an informa business

Copyright © 2000 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 13: 978-0-8133-6820-7 (pbk)

Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction, Carol A. Stabile 1 Sound Out of Time: Modernity’s Echo, Jonathan Sterne 2

vii viii 1 9

Maintaining the Order of Things: Class, the Gospel of Scientific Efficiency, and the Invention of Policy Expertise in America, 1865-1921, Amos Tevelow

33

3

Sensationalism, Objectivity, and Reform in Turn-of-the-Century America, Mark Harrison

55

4

“All Love Making Scenes Must Be Normal”: Pennsylvania Movie Censorship in the Progressive Era, Michael G. Aronson

75

5

Only Flossy, High-Society Dudes Would Smoke ’Em: Gender and Cigarette Advertising in the Nineteenth Century, Dawn Schmitz

100

6

Trotting Horses and Moving Pictures: A Sporting View of Early Cinema, Andrew C. Miller

122

1

“Girls Who Come to Pieces”: Women, Cosmetics, and Advertising in the Ladies' Home Journal, 1900-1920, Lisa Belicka Keranen

142

8 Race Betterment and Class Consciousness at the Turn of the Century, or Why It’s Okay to Marry Your Cousin, Kelly Happe

166

Contents

vi

9

Conspicuous Whiteness: The New Woman, the Old Negro, and the Vanishing Past of Early Brand Advertising, Carla Willard

187

10

Constructions of Violence: Labor, Capital, and Hegemonic Struggle in the Pullman Strike of 1894, Kevin Ayotte

217

Afterword, Richard Ohmann

235

About the Editor and Contributors Index

241 243

Figures “The Thimble Theatre” “Magic”

16 17

Official stamp of approval of the Pennsylvania State Board of Censors

86

“The Cigarette Maker” “Duke Cigarettes Are the Best” “Riding Side Saddle”

108 111 113

“Trotting, Occident” “The Science of the Horse’s Motion” “General View of Experimental Track”

124 129 133

“Tired Out” Ivory Soap advertisement “Don’t Sweep the Old Way!” “As Graceful as the New Woman” Rubifoam’s New Woman Redfern’s New Woman “Let the Men Wash” “Let the Gold Dust Twins Do Your Work”

189 191 194 195 197

202

203 205

Acknowledgments Many people helped make this volume possible. First and foremost, thanks are due to the participants in one of the liveliest and most interesting graduate sem­ inar groups I have ever led: Michael Aronson, Kevin Ayotte, Lisa Belicka Keranen, Andrew Haley, Kelly Happe, Mark Harrison, Andrew Miller, Dympna Reinheimer, Dawn Schmitz, Maxwell Schnurer, Julie Stoddard, Amos Tevelow, and Ron VonBurg. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Dawn and Kevin for donating their time and labor during the final stages of production. Their enthusiasm, hu­ mor, and ability to meet deadlines have kept this project alive. Jonathan Sterne kindly read through the introduction, gave me an editorial kick in the pants when I needed it most, and reminded me how important intellectual colleagues actually are. Lisa Frank, Csaba Toth, Matt Reichek, and Andrew Haley collabo­ rated on a series of reading groups that formed the impetus for the graduate course and stimulated much of my thinking about the period. Special thanks to Csaba, whose encyclopedic knowledge of literature on and about American cul­ ture continues to be both a marvel and a valued resource to me and others. Paul Smith showed interest in this volume from the moment I mentioned it; without his continuing support and unstinting friendship, it would never have seen the light of day. Thanks are also due to Richard Ohmann, both for his inspiring and lucid Selling Culture and for so kindly agreeing to pen an afterword. This volume is much improved because of Lisa Wigutoff and Rebecca Ritke’s patient and thor­ ough editing. Lastly, “grateful” doesn’t begin to capture what I owe to Mrak—for the pack and the doggerel and for allowing me to believe that I’m much bigger than I am. Carol A. Stabile

Introduction CAROL A. STABILE

As the twentieth century lurched toward its close, media consumers in the United States were treated to a variety of competing accounts of the meaning of this clo­ sure—some cheerlessly apocalyptic, others gaily optimistic. Although the crime wave that began in the 1980s was said to have abated by century’s end, the final decade bore witness to intensified international military aggression: The 1990s were framed by the Persian Gulf War on one hand and the bombings of Iraq and Serbia on the other. And although the crisis in family values that had pervaded public discourse in the late 1980s and early 1990s receded as the decade waned (and as the political goals that had motivated this discourse, such as welfare “re­ form,” were achieved), a series of so-called schoolyard shootings—from Pearl, Mississippi to Littleton, Colorado—provoked a new debate about middle-class angst and alienation and about the role of violence in the media. When the mass media reflected on the role of communications in these and other events, their commentaries were similarly millennial in tone. The promi­ nence of celebrity scandals in the news and the Monica Lewinsky case, the media proclaimed, had contributed to deepening political apathy; in the same breath, they observed that the World Wide Web was generating new and exciting oppor­ tunities for virtual communities and political organization. Internet access had its downside in cyberporn, virtual sexual predators, and other ££security”-related issues; but at the same time, the information superhighway promised to lead everyone—schoolchildren, workers, and retirees alike—into the beckoning oasis of the twenty-first century. Whether positive or negative, media commentaries were awash with renewed claims about the uniqueness of the present historical moment. In breathless an­ ticipation of the myriad breakthroughs that the new century and millennium would bring, politicians, scientists, experts, and media pundits spoke with almost fundamentalist fervor about the information superhighway and the array of new media technologies that were paving the way to that bright future. At these higher echelons of cultural production, the world had never been so small, and the op­ portunities for profit, never so vast. During the waning decades of the century, 1

2

Carol A. Stabile

critics of media and popular culture similarly emphasized what was new, distinct, and specific to contemporary culture. To a large degree, these claims of millennial transformation were possible only insofar as history could be forgotten or ig­ nored; at the end of the century, history appeared less and less relevant to the pre­ sent. Like Thomas Hardy’s darkling thrush at the close of the nineteenth century, I find “little cause for carolings” as this particular century turns, and much reason for skepticism in the face of millennial proclamations in the media, be they ec­ static or apocalyptic. For above all, the turn of the twenty-first century has rein­ vigorated the media’s longstanding narcissistic romance with rupture, with the unprecedented nature of the present, and with the “new.” The American mass media—from newspapers to radio to television and the Internet—have long un­ derstood themselves as the harbingers of modernity, as world-historic agents in the production of the present, and to a large extent, as both the alpha and the omega of massive social changes. Given widespread popular acceptance of the media’s self-representations, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the media and the modes of storytelling em­ ployed therein have histories, and that claims to novelty and modernity have long been deployed as strategies for increasing various forms of media consumption as well as for promoting new and old media alike. These strategies proceed through a logic of distinction, in which new media technologies and cultural practices are abstracted from social and historical contexts and presented as en­ tirely revolutionary. The logic of distinction requires that history and historical connections be downplayed; and the commercial basis of mass media operations demands that properly historicized narratives—particularly those that might give consumers a sense of deja vu—be repressed.1 We can see this process of distinction very clearly in the current marketing of the Internet, wherein new computer technologies are represented as changing the way we are educated, the way we do business, and the nature of our communi­ ties, our families, and our everyday lives. To lack access to the Internet and the World Wide Web is to be old-fashioned, outdated, and ultimately obsolete. The Internet, we are told, bears no resemblance to previous media technologies; and debates about Internet regulation and access seldom, if ever, refer back to earlier debates about print media, radio, or television. Similarly, we are treated to end­ less sermons about the effects of the Internet, video games, and other media tech­ nologies on “vulnerable” populations, as if these technologies alone were the causes of violence, apathy, and despair. Despite the apocalyptic timbre of these debates, we have had these conversa­ tions many times over the past hundred years and the language and direction of these debates remain virtually unchanged. The novel, it was said, had deleterious effects on the moral health of women and children, and the Penny Press had sim­ ilarly negative consequences among “the masses.” Early film exhibition was like­ wise charged with having a corrupting effect on workers, women, and children.

Introduction

3

Public outcries about film, violence, and crime reappeared in the 1930s, with the publication of Henry James Formans Our Movie Made Children (1933) and Her­ bert Blumer and Philip Hausers Movies, Delinquency; and Crime (1933). Lynn SpigePs (1992) account of ideology and the introduction of television vividly il­ lustrates how the debate proceeded along much the same lines as that about the Internet today: television as the great democratic hope for society versus televi­ sion as the bane of society. And William Boddy’s (1993), Susan Douglas’s (1989), and Robert McChesney’s (1994) analyses of policy and regulatory debates from the early days of television and radio illuminate the ways in which commercial interests have historically and strategically intervened in such debates to further narrow, economic concerns. This is not to suggest that different media technologies and cultural practices do not have specific conditions of production, distribution, and consumption. Obviously, no media critic would maintain that the uses of the Internet, and the debates about it, are identical to those related to radio. By the same token, points of continuity and difference are instructive. Why, for example, did a lively debate about democracy and access occur before the 1927 Federal Radio Act and no similar debate accompany the regulation of television in the early 1950s or of the Internet in the mid-1990s? Why have public discussions about media and vio­ lence taken such predictable forms over the past century, despite very real changes in media production, distribution, and reception, not to mention in American society’s physical capacity for violence? An understanding of such historical resonances may act as a prophylactic against technological determinism, in which the causes of social change are laid at the door of media alone, as well as against the political culs-de-sac that follow from this type of argument. By challenging claims to the “new” and “unique,” by remedying the historical amnesia promoted by the media, we gain valuable criti­ cal insights into the present. A case in point involves the political response to the schoolyard shootings in the late 1990s, when the debate about violence and the media once again came to dominate the headlines. In what was represented as a bold and unprecedented political move, in 1999, President Clinton charged the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice with carrying out a $ 1 million study to determine whether the entertainment industries were using vio­ lence to target young consumers. Not only was the research question in and of it­ self rhetorical (the entertainment industry will use any strategy to increase its profits), not one politician or pundit mentioned that voluminous research exists, dating back to the early days of broadcasting and devoted to studying precisely such media effects. No one, moreover, commented that such research has invari­ ably culminated in calls for the media to regulate themselves, or that the resultant regulations (from the film rating system and its revisions, to the V-Chip) have had no observable effect on the quality of media production. Were we to under­ stand Clinton’s move in a wider, historical context (as Michael Aronson’s contri­ bution to this volume asks us to do), we would be in a better position to ask our­

4

Carol A. Stabile

selves why we keep pursuing the same hypothesis—that the media cause vio­ lence—and throwing so much money at a research question that has historically yielded so little in the way of productive public discussion, not to mention results or solutions. In addition, we might also be better able to ask whether the media are in fact the determining variable in cases of mass killings or whether public re­ sources might be better devoted to pursuing other lines of research. Students and scholars are not immune to the amnesia promoted by the mass media. We depend on mass media for information about the world around us, and our understanding of cultural practices and current events is irrevocably shaped and structured by the very media we seek to critique. During the 1980s and 1990s, scholars in media and cultural studies tended to focus on the present in classrooms, conferences, and published work. Numerous studies of various fe­ male celebrities, for example, saw figures ranging from Madonna to Princess Di­ ana as embodying a new, pseudofeminist sensibility. The connections between these representations of female celebrity and the emergence and reemergence of various discourses about the “new woman” over the past century were seldom discussed. Similarly, cultural analyses of Reaganism and the New Right posited the emergence of a new and unique hegemonic bloc based on an authoritarian populism whose relationship to preexisting populist movements in the United States remained largely unexplored. In fact, the veracity of claims—widely trans­ mitted by the media—about Reagan s allegedly widespread popularity was never challenged but was instead rather blithely accepted as fact.2 One is tempted to characterize the broader trajectory of media and cultural studies in the last part of the century as antihistoricist and to some degree anti-intellectual. When not preoccupied with disciplinary border wars or onanistic internal debates, studies of contemporary media and culture often were marred by poor scholarship. Where were the footnotes that supported claims about Reagan’s popularity? What were, and are, the implications of using mass media’s claims about novelty or popularity to support arguments purportedly critical of the media? Their fo­ cus on the present unfortunately has prevented many scholars from doing much more than scratching the surface of popular culture. In some cases, media schol­ ars’ analyses did little more than reproduce and legitimize what mass media themselves had to say about these issues. This volume demonstrates that such pitfalls can be avoided. Each chapter is well grounded in research and engages primary materials as well as secondary sources of an analytical or theoretical nature. The contributing authors have con­ cerned themselves more with pursuing the necessarily contextual practice of cul­ tural studies than with establishing or critiquing theories and definitions of the field. They have sought above all to counter the ignorance upon which media claims to novelty are founded and to provide a historical foundation from which to analyze contemporary media debates. Since media either ignore or manipulate history in order to construct a unique and seductive present for their markets, the common goal of the contributors to this book has been to make visible those historical patterns and continuities that

Introduction

5

might help us better understand contemporary media and mass-mediated de­ bates. Our explorations of the development of mass media and mass culture in the United States therefore highlight the currently all-but-forgotten conditions and relations of production that continue to shape and inform contemporary culture. The chapters in this volume examine a wide range of media and media practices, departing from a single, common belief: that an analysis of what Stephanie Coontz (1992) has described as “the First Gilded Age” can give con­ temporary cultural theorists better insights into the structure and function of the Second Gilded Age inaugurated by Reaganism. Although the chapters do not of­ fer direct comparisons with contemporary mass media or culture, each offers suggestive insights into, and connections with, contemporary culture. Because centuries don’t turn in compact and easily periodized packages, each chapter examines media-related processes and practices dating back to the decades preceding and following 1900. This era, which encompasses both the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, marks a particularly important one in the development of the mass media in the United States. First of all, the processes of full-blown industrialization and technological development that had been dra­ matically altering the American landscape since the Civil War were concomi­ tantly transforming media industries. Innovations in print media, sound record­ ing, and cinema were accompanied by innovations in business and distribution practices. The maturation of the advertising industry—as Jackson Lears (1996), Richard Ohmann (1996), Michael Schudson (1978, 1995), Susan Strasser (1989), and other scholars have documented—was having significant effects on how the media understood their role in society, and in turn, on how those media were marketed to audiences increasingly likely to understand themselves as consumers rather than producers or citizens. However, as Dawn Schmitz points out in “Only Flossy, High-Society Dudes Would Smoke ’Em,” the relationship between technological and industrial inno­ vations and marketing is not as simple as is sometimes portrayed. Technology alone, Schmitz argues (specifically, the Bonsack cigarette machine), did not cause or determine a market for cigarettes. This market was produced just as much by changing public attitudes toward cigarettes—by persuading consumers that cig­ arettes were the symbol, par excellence, of modern masculinity—as by techno­ logical developments. Viewing trade card and magazine advertisements through the lens of late-nineteenth-century (1880s) cultural concerns about the oriental­ ist effeminacy of the cigarette (other tobacco products were not affected), Schmitz shows how a centuries-old association of tobacco with Woman was be­ ing used to market cigarettes to men. Several of the chapters in this volume remind us that industrialization and technological advances only partially explain the transformation of the media in­ dustry during a given period: Media revolutions and changes in consumption also are accompanied by ideological shifts that explicate and ease transitions from the old to the new. Like Schmitz, Lisa Belicka Keranen (in “£Girls Who Come to Pieces’”) charts the intersection of changes in the meaning and market­

6

Carol A. Stabile

ing of commodities with wider changes in ideology. Keranen’s essay maps the shift between makeup’s association with prostitution and the morally dubious realm of theater to its construction as an indispensable marker of the “new” woman by the 1920s. Through Ladies' Home Journal advertisements, articles, and editorials about beauty culture, Keranen provides a glimpse into the ways in which American women were persuaded that cosmetics were an integral and nec­ essary part of the respectable woman’s toilette and everyday life. Carla Willard’s “Conspicuous Whiteness” more directly addresses the ways in which social upheavals and challenges to the political and cultural status quo were incorporated by and into an expanding consumer culture. During the 1890s, mass media such as newspapers and magazines were confronted with an ideological challenge: Having recognized the value of female consumers, they could ill afford to ignore changes in the role of women in society and the politi­ cal challenges posed by women’s participation in myriad reformist movements (suffrage, temperance, and public health, to name but a few), as well as first-wave feminist agitation calling for political and economic enfranchisement. Willard explores the ways in which these tensions surfaced in the advertising practices of turn-of-the-century magazines. In particular, she examines the way in which gender and race combined to produce the representations of the “new” woman that proliferated during this period. Of course, the emergence of the “new” woman was accompanied by simulta­ neous shifts in the meanings attached to masculinity, during a period in which, according to historian Frederick Turner (1891), the “frontier”—that brutal play­ ground for the exercise of American masculinity—had reached its literal limit. Whereas film studies traditionally has considered spectatorship a largely femi­ nized practice, Andrew Miller (in Chapter 6) revisits Eadweard Muybridge’s mo­ tion studies in order to understand an overlooked link between a masculine tra­ dition of mass amusements— specifically, sporting culture—and early film production and cinematic codes. Miller plots an intersection between film and athletics that enhances the larger sweep of film history as well as theories of nar­ rative and of spectatorship. The industrialization of the media and the modernization of society were si­ multaneous processes occurring symbiotically among the various media, as well as between the media and the developing social institutions. A number of the chap­ ters in this volume reveal the complex relationships that emerged from these processes of modernization, as well as the ramifications of these processes for pub­ lic understanding and debate. In “All Love Making Scenes Must Be Normal,” Michael Aronson looks at a later manifestation of gender construction and the me­ dia. Specifically, he examines the relationships among Progressive-era reformism, women’s organizations, and the film industry in transforming film into an accept­ able middle-class medium, largely via local and national censorship practices. Amos Tevelow in “Maintaining the Order of Things” similarly takes as his ob­ ject of study institutions that originated a century ago: the precursors of what are now known as “think tanks,” or private, nonprofit policy research groups. Fol­

Introduction

7

lowing Ohmann, Tevelow sees the early think tanks as a strategy undertaken by the activist political wing of the professional managerial class, the net effect of which was to insulate decisionmaking from public access. Tevelow’s research has particular importance for understanding the purpose and function of contem­ porary think tanks. By tracing the origins of policymaking institutions and the forms of consensus produced within them, Tevelow provides fresh insight into current constraints on political debate, policymaking, and democracy. Mark Harrison examines another significant component of contemporary media controversies: the development and deployment of ideologies of objectiv­ ity and sensationalism. Harrison s understanding of the relationship between ob­ jectivity and sensationalism—and of the important and fundamental connection between the two seemingly contradictory concepts—gives readers a unique ap­ proach to understanding current charges of sensationalism in the mass media. Kelly Happe and Kevin Ayotte analyze rhetorical phenomena that also have di­ rect implications for contemporary discourse. In “Race Betterment and Class Con­ sciousness at the Turn of the Century, or Why It’s Okay to Marry Your Cousin,” Happe scrutinizes the emerging “scientific” rhetoric of eugenics in the early part of the century and the dissemination of racist and class-based ideologies of genetics in mass-circulation magazines. Happe’s chapter highlights the intersections of sci­ ence, politics, ideology, and mass culture, thereby offering a framework for under­ standing contemporary debates about genetic research and the implications of these debates. Kevin Ayotte examines newspaper coverage of the 1894 Pullman Strike as a way of understanding the rhetorical fabric of a historical tapestry that has allowed the American public to understand socialism, and later communism, strictly in terms of violence, whereas the violence of the State remains out of sight. Jonathan Sterne, in “Sound Out of Time: Modernity’s Echo,” weaves together two narratives about modernity and sound reproduction at the turn of the last century. The first concerns the new media for sound reproduction, and popular representations of these media as representing a “break” with a primitive, oral past. The second concerns the connections and contradictions between the pro­ ject of anthropological sound recording of Native American music and language and other arenas of U.S. policy toward Native Americans while the Dawes Act was in effect. Sterne’s essay offers a useful corrective to the ideology of visuality in which our culture is steeped, as well as to the logics of domination upon which such ideologies were established. Above all, the analyses in this volume attend to the complex relationships be­ tween texts and contexts against a wider backdrop of social, political, and cultural struggles. Rather than seeking the shallow root systems observable in the present (and consequently much easier to dislodge), the authors of these chapters have undertaken the excavation of root systems that are deeper and more difficult to follow. In the spirit of this digging, Turning the Century has avoided easy, super­ ficial comparisons with contemporary media products and debates. Instead, by offering glimpses of what previously was hidden from view, the authors hope to give readers a foundation from which to better understand the current moment.

8

Carol A. Stabile Notes

1. Obviously, this process of distinction, which more directly relates to media technolo­ gies and the media’s self-understanding of their role in society, functions differently from the marketing and advertising of “vintage,” “retro,” or “collectible” commodities. This re­ cycling of commodities, and the industry that has grown up around it, retains a highly specific sense of history that imbues the “old” with “new” value and meaning. A case in point is the marketing of the new Volkswagen Beetle, which utilizes a sentimentalized un­ derstanding of the 1960s as pure counterculture—the only understanding of the 1960s permissible within commodity culture. 2. As Michael Schudson points out, the news media claimed overwhelming support for Ronald Reagan, despite the fact that polling data showed that “his polls were lower for his first two years in office than those for any other newly elected first-term president since such numbers began to be tracked” (Schudson 1995, 125). In addition, the media celebrated a landslide victory for Reagan in 1984, even though only half of all registered voters cast bal­ lots, of which slightly more than a quarter voted for Reagan (Ericson et al. 1987, 36). References

Blumer, Herbert, and Philip Hauser. 1933/1970. Movies, Delinquency, and Crime. New York: Arno Press. Boddy, William. 1993. Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Coontz, Stephanie. 1992. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York: Basic Books. Douglas, Susan J. 1989. Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ericson, Richard V., Patricia Baranek, and Janet B. L. Chan. 1987. Visualizing Deviance: A Study of News Organizations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Forman, Henry James. 1933/1970. Our Movie Made Children. New York: Arno Press. Lears, Jackson. 1996. Fables of Abundance. New York: Pantheon. McChesney, Robert. 1994. Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935. New York: Oxford University Press. Ohmann, Richard. 1996. Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century. New York: Verso. Schudson, Michael. 1978. Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers. New York: Basic Books. . 1986. Advertising: The Uneasy Persuasion. New York: Basic Books. . 1995. The Power of News. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Spigel, Lynn. 1992. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Strasser, Susan. 1989. Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market. New York: Pantheon. Turner, Frederick J. 1891/1920. The Frontier in American History. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

1 Sound Out ofTime: Modernity's Echo JONATHAN STERNE

A phonograph industry periodical no doubt hoping to amuse its readers printed this report of racial difference in the spring of 1897: Long Island City has placed nickel in the slot machines at the train station. Lately one of these machines played the popular negro melody ‘All Coons Look Alike to Me’ to a genuine Alabama coon, and those who were in the station at the time will not soon forget this little concert, although none but the coon heard a note of the music. It was at a popular train hour and the station was thronged with people, when a typical Southern darkey sauntered into the building. A long blue frock coat, a pair of light trousers which went almost twice around him and were well fringed at the bot­ toms, a broad-brimmed, grease coated felt hat which had once been of a light color, and an odd pair of number 12 shoes, made up a costume which inspired a smile all ’round before he had a chance to say a word or do a thing. As the boys say charcoal would have made a white mark on his face and his ears were all that stopped his mouth from going clean around his head. Mr. Darkey jerked a huge brass watch out of one of his trouser pockets, pried the case open and compared it with the big regulator in the station. Satisfied that he had some time to while away, he began to look around and see the sights. After a couple of turns around the station, he brought up in front of one of the phonographs. He evidently mistook the thing for a corn sheller judging from the way in which he twisted the crank, but the more he twisted the more mystified he be­ came. At last his curiosity got the best of whatever timidity he may have had and he hailed one of the doormen, who was passing, and inquired as to the nature of the machine. 9

10

Jonathan Sterne The darkey’s big white eyes began to roll and his mouth flew open in amazement as the doorm an unfolded the working plan of the machine and he decided to invest a nickel. The coin was dropped into the slot and with the trumpets jammed against his ears the Alabamian braced himself for whatever might follow. ccW hir-r-r” went the machine after its usual preparatory fashion, and the darkey got a better brace. There was another whir-r-r and an idea struck him. He removed one of the trumpets from his ears and shouted into it ‘sing louder, I can’t hear.’ Then the machine began to sing and none of the crowd which was watching the darkey could be deceived as to the exact time it began. His eyes glistened and danced in their sockets. His mouth gradually spread itself all over his face. Big drops of perspiration trickled down from under his hat and way down on the floor the big shoes begin to show signs of life. Fi­ nally his whole body was in a wiggle and even the big yellow rose on his lapel seemed to have become animated also. But it was too good to last. The end came and the darkey nearly collapsed. “Say, boss, is dat all dar is to it fo’ a nickel?” he asked of the doorman. “Yes, but you can put in another and have it all over again,” answered the man in the brass buttons. “Golly! dat’s what I’se goin’ to do,” chirped the delighted darkey, and he fished an­ other coin out of the mysterious depths of those trousers’ pockets and fed it to the machine. There was a repetition of the whir-r-r, a repetition of the song and a repetition of the circus for the spectators. Trains came in and trains went out but the darkey stuck to that machine. Nickel after nickel was freely fed into the greedy slot and it is not improbable that when the old brass watch ran down he was still doing a shuffle to the tune ‘All Coons Look Alike to Me.’1

Moments like this might appear to be neatly contained in long trajectories of racist iconography in writing, imaging, and music. They also might appear to contemporary readers—perhaps as comfortable in their own “modern” sophisti­ cation as the unnamed observer in this tale—as something of a shock from the past, a kind of aberration to be gotten over. And although both reactions are to a certain degree valid—we should contextualize this description among other sim­ ilar descriptions, and we should want to move beyond a brutally racist past and present—I believe documents like this also offer another kind of historical in­ sight. One could easily find a hundred similar racial caricatures from this mo­ ment in American middle-class culture; but this racist representation of differ­ ence is centered on the writer’s fascination with the encounter between cultural other and a phonograph. The description is framed by the perspective of a con­ temporary and contemplative observer, sophisticated enough to be familiar with and unsurprised by the workings of a coin-in-the-slot phonograph, and self­ consciously cosmopolitan enough to notice someone else’s lack of such familiar­ ity. The text goes into great descriptive detail—essentially, parodying anthropo­ logical style—exploring the listener’s reactions, gestures, and postures. Though

Sound Out of Time: Modernity’s Echo

11

meant as light reading for people in the entertainment business, the article clearly bespeaks a fascination with others’ fascination with the apparatus of sound re­ production. The roots of that fascination lie in the twisted connections between the phonograph in the story and the understanding of racial difference on which the story is based, a set of connections that this chapter retraces. When read through the cultural history of sound reproduction, alongside the larger cultural history of racism, the phonograph in this and similar tales simul­ taneously referenced a certain sense of modernity for its relatively well-off, middle-class users at the turn of the twentieth century, through two related em­ bodiments of time: (1) a sense of present time as objectifiable, repeatable, and ex­ changeable; and (2) a sense of historical time as linear and all-encompassing. As a result, early users of the phonograph could experience sound recording as both bolstering an already present self-understanding as “modern” (since it could be located as the latest step in a long history of technological progress) and a way of marking and containing the difference between their own self-understanding as “modern” and their understandings of cultural others such as African Americans or Native Americans as “nonmodern.” The extract quoted above is but one ex­ ample of how the connection between the phonograph and this very particular sense of temporality in effect marked and delineated the difference between the “modern” and the “nonmodern” for their readers. Because the phonograph was so thoroughly embedded in particular cultural understandings of time by its early users, it could be experienced as moving sound out of time through a double temporal movement: first through isolating and objectifying a sound event and then through transposing it, so that the voices of the “modern”—people thought to be inhabiting an unavoidable future— could be brought to the “primitive,” and so that the voices of the “primitive,” ever receding into the past, could be preserved for the future listening experiences of the “modern.” “Modernity” here should be understood as a highly particularized construct. In this chapter, I defer the larger philosophical questions concerning “modernity” as an analytic or descriptive term (and leave open the question of whether you or I should or could describe something as “modern”) and turn instead to an analy­ sis of modernity as a form of self-understanding manifested—sometimes only implicitly—in early uses and depictions of sound reproduction technology. Early users were framed as quintessential^ modern and up-to-date through their use of these machines; the machines were proof of their owners’ modernity. Com­ mercial representations of sound reproduction technologies played to this sensi­ bility: AT&T Long Distance signs were advertised as “the sign board of civiliza­ tion”; the Orthophonic Victrola was a “really modern instrument”; radio receivers were “essential conveniences of modern life.”2 Yet it was not simply their status as commodities that bound up sound repro­ duction technologies’ conceptualization as modern; after all, the description of a product in early twentieth-century advertisements as “modern” was hardly

12

Jonathan Sterne

unique to sound reproduction technologies. Rather, their particular modernity was a result of the combination of bourgeois understandings of time and of the basic function of sound reproduction technologies at the turn of the twentieth century. Throughout this essay, I use the words modern and primitive to denote the understandings of “self” and “other” that were operative among middle-class users of the phonograph at the turn of the twentieth century, and not as objec­ tive descriptions of periods or people. The very concept of modernity is a social artifact susceptible to historical analysis—a project to which this chapter con­ tributes. The so-called modernity of sound reproduction technologies was framed through the machines’ perceived ability to move sound out of time, and in so do­ ing to cross over between modern and nonmodern time in the minds of those observers who considered themselves modern. Contrary to others who argue that the phonograph—as a machine that “amplified and extended sound across space and/or time”3—brought about a revolution in temporal sensibility in turn-ofthe-century American and west European culture, I argue that early users essen­ tially built the phonograph into the machine it was and experienced its mechan­ ical manipulation of vibrations the way they did because of an already highly developed sense of temporality. In other words, the phonograph did not trans­ form bourgeois senses of time. It was itself a tributary element in what Matei Calinescu (1987) calls bourgeois modernity—a culturally specific sense of time linked to middle-class self-understandings that predated sound recording and clearly informed even the most rudimentary understandings of the machine’s workings at the turn of the twentieth century. In order to develop this thesis, this chapter first offers a brief discussion of the concepts of “modern” and “primitive” in their historical contexts before turning to examine in turn (1) an enduring fascination with watching people who are understood as primitives listening to sound reproduction technologies and (2) the desire to preserve the voices of “primitive” cultures for future, “modern” lis­ teners, through the emergent practice of anthropological sound recording at the turn of the twentieth century. Bourgeois Modernity as a Form of Self-Consciousness

I have argued thus far that although contemporaries understood the new tech­ nologies of sound reproduction as evidence or agent of those individuals’ own (and possibly others’) modernization, we would do better to consider sound re­ production technologies as artifacts of particular moments in culture and soci­ ety. Following the work of Henri Lefebvre,4 who argues that any theory of the modern requires a critique of the ideology of the modern, in this chapter I cri­ tique the former conceptualization of sound reproduction—as agent or emblem of modernization—via the latter conceptualization, in the service of clearing the ground for a new theory of sound and modernity.5

Sound Out of Time: Modernity’s Echo

13

Modernity—even when used in specific reference to self-description or selfconsciousness—suggests several different, contradictory tendencies. It is a noto­ riously difficult term to define. For the purposes of this essay, Matei Calinescu’s phrase bourgeois modernity best captures the sense of modernity I describe.6 This sensibility is not so much a formalized set of concepts as a practical self-under­ standing— ££a logic of practice,” in the words of Pierre Bourdieu.7 Bourgeois modernity is defined by the rise of middle-class self-consciousness in industrial capitalism: The doctrine of progress, the confidence in the beneficial possibilities of science and technology, the concern with time (a measurable time, a time that can be bought and sold and therefore has, like any other commodity, a calculable equivalent in money), the cult of reason, and the ideal of freedom defined within the framework of an ab­ stract humanism, but also the orientation toward pragmatism and the cult of action and success— all have been associated in various degrees with the battle for the m od­ ern and were kept alive and promoted as key values in the trium phant civilization es­ tablished by the middle class.8

Bourgeois modernity hails the existence of a sense of the present that Jacques Attali calls “exchange time”: Time becomes something measurable, something that can be apprehended and felt, stockpiled, repeated, spent, saved, broken, frag­ mented, or mended.9 Yet this sense of the present immediately collides with linear-progressive “historical time, linear and irreversible, flowing irresistibly on­ wards.”10 Bourgeois modernity implies a temporalized understanding of cultural differ­ ence: It implies the historical superiority of “modern” civilization (which is gen­ erally urban, cosmopolitan, largely white, middle-class culture in the United States and western Europe) over other cultures by casting those different (yet ac­ tually contemporaneous) cultures as if they existed in the collective past of the m oderns.11 The military and economic domination of other cultures by the United States and western Europe—and the larger projects of racism and colo­ nialism—became explainable in the late nineteenth century as the product of a difference between what is modern and what is not (yet) modern. To borrow a phrase from Johannes Fabian (1983), relations of space become relations of time. Writing about anthropology’s conception of modernity, Fabian argues that cultures outside the anthropologist’s own became representative of some kind of collective past, thereby implying that the anthropologist’s home culture represented the future of so-called “native” cultures. But anthropologists were themselves creatures of their own cultures, and this sense of racial and spa­ tial difference as temporal—of the modern as the telos of the primitive—ex­ tended far beyond anthropological journals and university departments.12 The technology of sound reproduction fits oddly into this description of modernity as a form of at once hypertemporalized and detemporalized social

14

Jonathan Sterne

consciousness. If relations of space become relations of time—a time that is at once teleological when viewed historically and fragmented when viewed experientially—then the technology of sound reproduction could literally be perceived as moving sound out of time, as shifting the temporality of sound itself. Thus, the fascination with watching a man of African descent discover a phonograph in a train station grows out of a complementary perception of a temporal disjunc­ tion: the sound of the phonograph (emblematic of the present moment, of stock­ piled, repeatable exchange-time) being out of time with his hearing (represented as primitive, noncapitalist time). Of course, this is purely sleight of hand on the author’s part, since the man in question was “modern” enough to know about time and trains, coins and station attendants. But the racist caricature of African Americans as primitives relies on an agreement between writer and viewer that through the phonograph, reproduced sound moves out of its own time and into someone else’s. The link between these two moments, primitive and modern, is the belief that the machine treats sound-events as capitalism treats time: as fragmented, com­ modified, and mobile. Sound-time becomes a thing: Time can be owned, time marks differences, and differences mark time, and so the technology of sound re­ production becomes at once the mark of modernity and a means of juxtaposing it with the nonmodern precisely because it is a technology to manipulate sound. This is why applying the epithet “modern” to sound reproduction technology en­ tails more than simply fitting phonographs, telephones, and radios into the rhetoric of early twentieth-century advertising. It requires an understanding of the role of the technology in mediating cultural difference for its users. Watching Others Listen

This encounter between the modern and the nonmodern lies at the heart of mo­ ments of fascination with others’ listening to reproduced sound. Michael Taussig, in his provocative and captivating book Mimesis and Alterity, calls collective lis­ tening to recorded sound “an intercultural nexus, a new cultural zone of white and Indian social interaction for discovering strangeness and confirming same­ ness.”13 He writes that anthropologist R.O. Marsh found his Victrola most useful during his 1924 expedition to Central America in search of “the white Indian,” because recorded music both pacified and entertained otherwise mistrusting na­ tives. Mimesis and Alterity chronicles several moments of intercultural contact where the mimetic faculty is the hook on which natives and anthropologists to­ gether hang their differences.14 For Taussig, mimesis is primitivism at the heart of modernity—it is the ani­ mated nature at the heart of technology: “Modernity has ushered in a veritable rebirth, a recharging and retooling of the mimetic faculty.”15 Taussig claims that the phonograph is modern only because it is technological; its principle is more universal and more mysterious than that. But his sources would disagree. In al­

Sound Out of Time: Modernity’s Echo

15

most every case, the phonograph was perceived by its contemporaries as marking a radical break between present and past. Marsh, for instance, wrote that Time and again we were to encounter surly, unfriendly, and even menacing Indians. . . . We would bring out and start a record while proceeding with our regular task of camp-pitching or what-not. The attention of the Indians would soon be diverted from us to the “music-box.” Their hostility would cease and be replaced by curiosity. Gradually they would end up by crowding around it as closely as possible, touching and feeling it. From then on they would often keep us up playing it until midnight, and were no longer our enemies though perhaps not yet our friends. That victrola, our fireworks, outboard motors and dynamite were four essentials without which we could never have traversed interior Darien.16

Although Marsh does use the words “not yet our friends,” the encounter is clearly framed as a kind of first contact between anthropologist and native. The phonograph becomes a kind of bait for Indians who otherwise would have noth­ ing to do with Marsh. It becomes a way of impressing them while “finding amusement in their amusement.”17 The distance between modern sophisticate and naive native is clear: The party goes about their work while listening;18 the machine overwhelms and fascinates the natives so that they can do and think of nothing else. Implicit in Marsh’s account is the consciousness of a temporal disjuncture, with the natives on one side of a great sonorous divide and he and his colleagues on the other. Other ethnographers had similar experiences. John Lomax wrote that he and other turn-of-the-century anthropologists found phonographs useful in getting subjects to be friendlier and more interested in interaction.19 Yet many of Lo­ max’s subjects thought him ridiculous when he would turn around and ask them to sing into the machine for him. A particularly well-known case from this period regards the signing of the treaty of Sulu in 1898, during the Spanish-American war. One night, during the negotiations between the Sultan of Sulu and General John C. Bates that would lead to the treaty, Bates and his shipmates played phonograph music for the Moro tribespeople, who had not previously heard it. According to the story, the sultan’s mother was so impressed, that she would not consent to his signing the treaty until the Americans agreed to give her the phonograph. The treaty was signed in due course; and the negotiations, including the phonograph incident, were later memorialized in a 1902 musical comedy entitled The Sultan of Sulu.20 The phonograph was instrumental in scientific and theatrical imaginings and narrations of racial difference via the primitive/modern dichotomy. In each case, the key to understanding the difference is that the “modern” in the scenario has knowledge that the “primitive” does not. Perhaps the clearest ar­ ticulation of this story is a 1924 cartoon (see Figure 1.1)—a racist caricature of

16

Jonathan Sterne

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195

Women s bicycle saddles were caus­ ing quite a stir in medical journals and advice manuals, and some of the medical advice crept as one-liners into ads. Ads strove to downplay this de­ bate, which was particularly anxious given that many doctors considered saddles to be potential stimulators of sexual desire, especially now that women were straddling their wheelers instead of sitting sidesaddle. Extended attention was given to the mechanics of pedaling in conjunction with clitoral movement. One medical counsel warned that “scorching,” or speeding on bicycles, as women lowered their pelvises toward the front of the sad­ dle, could “cause the clothing to press against the clitoris, thereby eliciting arousing feelings hitherto unknown and unrealized by the young maiden.” Another pamphlet, more explicit in describing the “feeling,” noted that the pommeling movement of scorching “strongly suggested . . . the indulgence of masturbation.”12 These anxious debates about fe­ male bicycling were implicit in many brand-product ads, where they were distilled in and quelled by the sales pitch. For example, an ad for the Du­ plex Saddle, which was indented rather than humped in front, guaran­ teed with emphatic certainty— “You do not straddle the Duplex Saddle.” Like these campaigns, the Gage-Down ad gestured toward the bicycle contro­ versy in a word or two (“a-wheel”). In addition, the “Bicycle Waist” not only offered women “streamlining” sup­ port during strenuous exercise; it also fit a model whose “graceful” lines could be seen as she lifted her arms,

196

Carla Willard

accentuating the breasts and waist, thus placing the controversy within a more acceptable and conventional sexual frame: under ££a negligee .” To associate the bi­ cycle corset with a seductive bedroom dress and pose was to rein in—or in Gramscian terms, to incorporate—women s “hot” movement in a new version of the oldest sexual geography. In the 1890s, that geography also ran through the decades-long “corset contro­ versy,” whose significance resonated in the “perfect freedom of movement” promised Gage-Down consumers. For decades, medical and domestic reformers had discussed the appropriateness and morality of corset products and practices, and these discussions usually began and ended with the subject of “tight-lacing.” Tight-lacing was a method of tying in the midriff by drawing in the laced backs of corsets, compressing the waist to unnaturally (and often painfully) small di­ mensions. As early as the 1840s, tight-lacing was condemned, often by men, who lamented the practice as an arbiter of marital disaster. Many men’s books and pamphlets, such as Orson Fowler’s Tight-Lacing, or the Evils of Compressing the Organs of Animal Life, warned male audiences to have “Natural Waists or no Wives.”13 Fowler and other conservatives who were mounting anti-lacing cam­ paigns believed that corsets that molded the feminine figure into hourglass shapes threatened women’s traditional domestic and reproductive functions: In addition to the health risks they posed, such corsets offered women a measure of control over their own bodies and sexual potency, and consequently, over their own sexuality. Late in the nineteenth century, anti-lacing activists stressed the relationship between tight-lacing’s risks to women’s health and the subsequent threat to the reproduction of the future nation, reformulating arguments similar to those pro­ duced by the medical profession in regard to the bicycle saddle. When women compressed their middles in tight-lacing, the argument went, they strangled the blood supply to their reproductive organs and endangered their ability to replen­ ish the national population.14 New corsets were created with “expandable” waists that guaranteed women more “freedom of movement”; but in relation to the conservative arguments of the corset controversy, expandable corsets were not all that “free.” Even as it was less restrictive in the physical sense, the Bicycle Waist also took the laces of control over women’s figures out of women’s own hands. To modernize the corset without laces placed women’s “perfect freedom of move­ ment” within a fashion context where women managed less control over their own sexuality. The ad for the Bicycle Waist picked up on the “hot” issues of bicycling and tight-lacing to name a product whose story ended controversy by leading readers to the type and text of a normalized heterosexual female object—and there was nothing controversial or original about such a transformation. Along with the old corsets and their laced waists, Gage-Down glossed the controversy as a behind-the-ad story; the ad appropriated controversy in a name— “New Woman”—and in a leisure activity—“a-wheel.” Whether readers believed or dis-

Conspicuous Whiteness: Early Brand Advertising

197

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