The Art of Democracy

A Concise History of Popular Culture in the United States

Jim Cullen

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781583673782
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Démocratie

"Cullen's strength comes from his understanding of how the different strands of American society intertwine in imaginative, unpredictable ways... The shape and vitality of pop culture's next era will depend, at least in part, on commentators like Cullen."
— Washington Post Book World

"A thoroughly engaging look at American culture... Cullen's articulate prose is spiced with wicked wit and he loves a good story... Demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of complex cultural forces."
— Publishers Weekly

"Reflecting both the strengths and weaknesses of an unusually dynamic area of historical scholarship, The Art of Democracy is one of the best surveys of the history of American popular culture."
— Journal of American History

"An exceptionally well-written and engrossing introduction to the nonelitist art forms of American popular culture... Highly recommended."
— Library Journal, starred review

"Should be kept on hand to restore our faith in the things that matter to us."
— American Studies

Popular culture has been a powerful force in the United States, resonating within the society as a whole and at the same time connecting disparate and even hostile constituencies. The novels of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the theater and minstrel shows of the mid-19th century, movies and the introduction of television and computers in the 20th century are the building blocks that Jim Cullen uses to show how unique and vibrant cultural forms overcame initial resistance and enabled historically marginalized groups to gain access to the fruits of society and recognition from the mainstream.

This updated edition contains a new preface and final chapter which traces the history of contemporary computing from its World War II origins as a military tool to its widespread use in the late 20th century as a tool for the masses. Cullen shows how the computer is reshaping popular culture, and how that culture retains its capacity to surprise and disturb.

The highly acclaimed first edition of The Art of Democracy won the 1996 Ray and Pat Brown Award for "Best Book," presented by the Popular Culture Association.

CHAPTER ONE

NOVEL APPROACHES: THE RISE OF POPULAR CULTURE

Frontispiece, AMELIA: OR THE FAITHLESS BRITON. AN ORIGINAL AMERICAN NOVEL (1798). A typical novel of the period, Amelia depicts an innocent woman who, seduced and abandoned by a British soldier who fathers her child, is finally redeemed by her father’s forgiveness. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

PERHAPS THE SIMPLEST, though not the most precise, way to begin telling the story of popular culture in the United States is to state that it did not exist until the nineteenth century. That is because (as I will be defining it in the next few pages) popular culture depends on the existence of a modern working class to use it, as well as to play a pivotal role in creating it. The phenomena we think of as “modern”—urbanization, mass migration, technological innovation, and other elements of the Industrial Revolution—reached a kind of critical mass in the three decades after 1800. The cultural explosion that resulted will be explored in some detail in the next chapter.

But popular culture was not the result of spontaneous combustion. It had clear lines of origin, and in retrospect we can see the various elements converging, and even taking a recognizable form, well before 1800. These converging lines will be the focus of this introductory chapter.

The cultural landscape of any civilization at any time is lush with artistic forms. For all this diversity, however, it is possible—at least in the West before the eighteenth century—to divide these cultures into two categories: elite and folk. Elite culture is official culture. It is the art produced for (and often by) the rich and powerful. Elite culture usually draws on the most valuable material resources available at any given time, as well as on the talents of individuals deemed most successful at producing artifacts for the enjoyment of the privileged. Elite culture is also often designed to demonstrate the authority of those who support it, authority not only to determine what beauty is but also to project political power—as in monumental sculptures to a ruler. In earlier times this was the art of the palace, the court, and its administrative apparatus. Elite culture is still a part of contemporary societies, often supported by corporations and the national state.

Folk culture, by contrast, is the culture of ordinary working people. It is intensely local, and it relies on readily available materials and on techniques that, in theory at least, can be practiced by almost anyone. Folk art is not concerned with projecting the power of the state. In some cases, it seems to acquiesce to the authority of a ruling class; in others, it subtly subverts that authority. Occasionally, folk art even challenges authority directly. In any case, folk culture derives from a different set of social, economic, and political interests than elite culture, interests that often conflict with it.

This is not to say that there is no interaction between the two, or that any particular artistic form is inherently either elite or folk. Indeed, some art—Italian opera, for example—migrates over a period of time from one camp to the other as works or forms lose their cachet and diffuse to the masses, or as elites develop an interest in folk arts, like shaker furniture, and appropriate them for their own use. The blurring of such lines might well lead one to question the value of the distinction at all. I make it, however, to highlight the very real differences in the creation, use, and meaning of art that are the result of people living in different material circumstances.

Essentially, popular culture is a modern offshoot of folk culture. Like folk culture—which continues to exist to this day in rich traditions of handicrafts and communal rituals that range from ethnic cuisines to community parades—popular culture relies on plentiful materials and common techniques and values. The difference is that popular culture is refracted (and magnified) through the prism of mass production. One historian more elegantly defined popular culture as the “folklore of industrial society.”¹ “Industrial society” is used here as shorthand for a series of social changes that began appearing in Europe during the eighteenth century. Among other things, those changes include the processes I mentioned above: urbanization, mass migration, and the acceleration of technological change, no one of which is wholly extricable from any other, and all of which are central to the formation of popular culture (and make it different from folk culture). It is useful to artificially compartmentalize these processes for the sake of clarity.

Cities are a prerequisite for popular culture. This does not mean that popular culture is simply urban culture. In fact, popular culture represents a symbiosis between city and country; as rural people pour into cities, they bring their backgrounds with them, and as popular culture emerges from cities it diffuses into the countryside, where the whole process begins again. What cities have historically provided is a common ground where disparate groups of people can meet, and where there is sufficient population and capital for the creation of relatively complex organizations to produce and distribute popular cultural products. Such organizations can be found at least as far back the Middle Ages, when the growth of towns led to the formation of an urban artisan milieu. Most historians agree, however, that the Industrial Revolution represented a perceptible intensification of this process.

Immigration has also provided a seedbed for the creation of popular culture, especially in the United States. As world trade increased, some people began moving more freely across national borders, while slaves and impoverished rural folk were forced to move against their will. As with native-born populations moving from country to city, these people also brought their cultures with them. Yet close contact with other groups inevitably meant that their original cultures lost their “purity” (if they ever had it) as they combined with other cultures and created altogether new ones. In the United States, the general impact of these developments has been dramatic from the very beginning, and has played a decisive role in the history of U.S. popular culture.

Finally, there is the role of technological innovation. Until well into the nineteenth century, the innovation crucial for the development of popular culture was the refinement and proliferation of the printing press. The introduction of movable type, which allowed many copies of a single work to be reproduced mechanically, dates back to the fifteenth century, and one could plausibly date the birth of popular culture there. Yet the quantitative differences between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries in terms of the scale of the publishing industry, the relative freedom of the press from religious or state control, and the pace of modernization—which in the United States underwent a quantum leap over the space of a generation in the early nineteenth century—are so great as to be qualitative as well.²

But whatever its origins, popular culture emerged most clearly in England during the eighteenth century, triggering a “long revolution” whose effects are with us still.³ This revolution, which included developments ranging from the growth of a large reading public to the destruction of the medieval craft system in printing, was replicated elsewhere in the centuries that followed. The first traces of it began to appear in England’s American colonies toward the end of that century—that is to say, right around the time those colonies declared their political, if not quite cultural, independence.

GETTING THE WORD: THE ORIGINS OF A POPULAR AUDIENCE

In some respects, the constitutionally ratified United States of 1789 was not very different from the thirteen still-loyal colonies of 1776 or, for that matter, those of 1676 (the year a violent insurrection was crushed in Virginia). Compared to Europe in the intervening century, the colonies exhibited somewhat less class stratification, though tensions with Indians were sharp and immediate and the slave system of the south solidified. But compared to what came later, the colonies were overwhelmingly rural—and Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson hoped they would stay that way.

For most people on the Eastern seaboard between the settlement of Jamestown in 1607 and the ratification of the Constitution, cultural life was rooted in folkways. For sure, there was a cultural elite, personified by Jefferson himself. People like him experienced the official culture of Europe, and brought it here via imported books, paintings, and ideas. For the rest of the country, however, artistic production was vernacular and localized.

One good example of this is music. Both Anglo-Celtic and African arrivals brought their songs with them, singing and playing them as an accompaniment to work, leisure, and religious rituals. Virtually none of this music was written down; it was transmitted orally and in the process mutated gradually into something new. Only oral tradition, combined with careful sleuthing by scholars and the serendipitous discoveries of folklorists such as John Lomax, who occasionally encountered isolated rural folk still performing music in traditional ways, give us an idea of what this music sounded like. Fortunately, the far-sighted New England publisher Isaiah Thomas published a collection of broadside song sheets “to show what articles of this kind are in vogue with the vulgar at this time, 1814,” leaving us an invaluable historical record.⁴ Later, greater mobility, along with the advent of recording and broadcast technology, would lay the foundations for an American popular music.

The first step in the creation of popular culture on these shores, however, was the establishment of printing presses. The future growth of this industry was important not only for reading materials, but also for products like sheet music, lithography, and photography, which would allow the unprecedented diffusion of artistic production across geographic, racial, and class lines. In general, the dissemination of these materials did not become widespread until well into the nineteenth century. I mention them here so that they can be kept in mind as I discuss the literary dimensions of popular culture.

The first printing press in the colonies was established in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1638.⁵ Given the religious imperatives of radical Protestantism, where individual effort might at least signal future salvation, it is not surprising to learn that Cambridge-Boston was the publishing capital of the colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that New England’s literary output outstripped that of the mid-Atlantic states and the South. (Georgia was apparently the last state in the colonies to establish a press, in 1763, suggesting just how long it took for publishing to diffuse throughout the colonies.⁶)

Nor is it surprising to learn that one of the most popular works in the colonial era had a religious orientation. In 1640, the Cambridge press published a quarto, or sheets of paper cut four ways and bound into a booklet, of 148 pages. Originally called The Whole Book of Psalms—and later to be known as the Bay Psalm Book—the volume was a collection of translations from Hebrew to English with some commentary by Richard Mather (forefather of the famous New England family that included Increase and Cotton). The first printing of 1,700 copies sold out. Since there were only about 3,500 white families in northern New England at the time, many of whom disliked the pieties of the Puritans in Boston, it seems likely that many were sold abroad. Wherever they went, by the end of the eighteenth century there were fifty-one editions of the Bay Psalm Book available in New England and Great Britain. For these reasons, it seems plausible to call it the first American bestseller.⁷

Despite its creation in an urban setting, the role of immigration in dictating the need for it, and the use of modern technology for its production, however, there are two reasons why we might have reservations about calling early versions of the Bay Psalm Book popular culture. Both are class-related. First, books were very costly commodities in the colonies, widely available only to the wealthy. Second, they had little value to poor and working people who could not read, which included most non-white males (and maybe even the majority of white men as well) in the colonies before the Revolution.⁸

By 1750, the first of these issues had been partially overcome by journalism: almanacs, newspapers, and magazines. While religious life remained a powerful cultural force throughout the Western world in the seventeenth century—nowhere was this more true than in New England—an early demand for practical, secular knowledge was evident. In fact, the Cambridge press had published An Almanack for the Year 1639 before the Bay Psalm Book. Almanacs, which included data on the weather and other information of use to farmers, were peppered with jokes, sayings, and political opinions. The most famous of these was Poor Richard’s Almanack, published in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin from 1733 to 1757. By the time he died in 1790, Franklin had completed a transformation from a poor boy in Boston to one of the most cosmopolitan men in the world, and the last edition of the almanac, which reflects his more genteel side, was published to widespread acclaim in France in 1776; it has decisively shaped popular perceptions of his persona ever since. The earlier editions, spiced with pungently colloquialized versions of dated epigrams (in the 1736 Almanac the English proverb “God restoreth health and the physician hath the thanks” became “God heals and the doctor takes the fee”), have a more democratic, class-conscious edge. Cheaper than most imported or domestically published books, Poor Richard sold 10,000 copies a year—or one copy for every one hundred people in the colonies—making it the most popular reading material other than the Bible. As one of Franklin’s more recent biographers notes, “Poor Richard had special flavor and was the foundation of a popular American culture.”⁹

One might expect newspaper publishing in the colonies to have preceded either books or almanacs, but in fact newspapers did not appear until a half-century later, leaving news-hungry colonists to rely on the English press or widely circulated personal correspondence. Besides the absence of an obvious market, the primary reason was political: printers could not risk the loss of property, or worse, should they publish material that offended local or English officials. The fate of the first newspaper is highly revealing in this regard. Published on September 25, 1690, Boston’s presumably monthly Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick was suppressed four days later by the colonial government, which issued a statement saying the paper did not have permission to operate. It was not until 1704 that the more cautious Boston Gazette became the first paper to survive more than one issue. Its price was sufficiently high that the famed Judge Samuel Sewall would give copies as gifts to the women he visited. Although newspapers were almost certainly passed around and read by those who could not afford subscriptions, it was not until the next century that it became possible to speak of a mass press that catered to working-class interests.¹⁰

Then there were magazines. An even more difficult proposition than newspapers, magazines were not indigenously produced until 1741, when Franklin published American Magazine and his rival Andrew Bradford launched A Monthly View of the Political State of the British Plantations of America, both in Philadelphia. A steady magazine industry did not take off until after the Revolution, and not until the mid-nineteenth century was there a flourishing periodical culture. Yet like newspapers, magazines reached far beyond urban elites. One study of New-York Magazine, a moderately sized monthly that counted George Washington, John Adams, and John Jay as readers, found that a significant percentage of the 370 subscribers in 1790 were shopkeepers and artisans—members of professions that had begun (or would soon begin) to experience proletarianization as a result of industrialization. Cartmen, laborers, and mariners also subscribed—a subscription cost $2.25 a year, at a time when the average workingman’s daily wage was $.50. Perhaps the most compelling evidence of wide readership concerns women, for while there were only seven who subscribed in their own names, there were numerous articles about or even specifically directed at women (such as “On the Choice of a Husband”), which indicated a wider readership.¹¹

The most popular form of reading material for poor and working people was the chapbook. The term “chapbook” did not come into general use until the nineteenth century, and these small, inexpensive books—pamphlets, really—at first went by a variety of names: “small books,” “chapman’s books,” or “small histories.” They were usually between sixteen and thirty-two pages, and were illustrated with simple woodcuts. Most were imported from England, and since they didn’t go out of date, like almanacs, they were profitable for the publisher. Paper shortages made chapbooks difficult to manufacture in the colonies, although they were sometimes published on the backs of sheets recovered from pirated Spanish s...