Dwight Macdonald on Culture the Happy Warrior of the Mind, Reconsidered

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3 Katowice Interdisciplinary and Comparative Studies Dwight Macdonald was the most prominent excoriator of mass culture Literature, Anthropology and Culture in the 1950s and ’60s. Since that time his reputation has not fared well. Derided as elitist and passé, his tracts now represent everything wrong- Edited by Tadeusz Sławek headed about mid-century cultural criticism. Nonetheless, Macdonald remains relevant and deserves reconsideration. His detractors, though un- Volume 3 covering many of Macdonald’s failings, have in part misunderstood him, while the field of cultural studies has misclassified his essays in the radical rather than conservative tradition of criticism. Dwight Macdonald on Cul- ture seeks to amend previous misconceptions, offering new perspectives on a figure who grappled with issues of culture that remain ever-pertinent. Tadeusz Lewandowski Dwight Macdonald on Culture The Happy Warrior of the Mind, Reconsidered

Tadeusz Lewandowski, Ph.D., teaches at Opole University (Poland). A graduate of the University of Rochester and Opole University, he has taught at the State University of New York, and published a book on Polish/English interlingual errors along with many articles in American and European journals. Tadeusz Lewandowski · Dwight Culture on Macdonald Tadeusz

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KIC 03_262690_Lewandowski_AM_A5HCk PLE.indd 1 22.03.13 11:29 Dwight Macdonald on Culture Katowice Interdisciplinary and Comparative Studies Literature, Anthropology and Culture Edited by Tadeusz Sławek

Volume 3 Tadeusz Lewandowski

Dwight Macdonald on Culture The Happy Warrior of the Mind, Reconsidered Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Cover and Photo Design: © Olaf Glöckler, Atelier Platen, Friedberg

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lewandowski, Tadeusz, 1973- Dwight Macdonald on culture : the happy warrior of the mind, reconsidered / Tadeusz Lewandowski. pages cm. — (Katowice Interdisciplinary and Comparative Studies. Literature, Anthropology and Culture ; Volume 3) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-3-631-62690-0 1. Macdonald, Dwight. 2. Popular culture—United States— History—20th century. 3. United States—Civilization—20th century. 4. Intellectuals—United States—Biography. I. Title. E748.M147L48 2013 973.91092—dc23 [B] 2013005172

ISSN 2191-3277 ISBN 978-3-631-62690-0

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Acknowledgements

Firstly I would like to thank Professor dr hab. Tadeusz Sławek for including this book in his Peter Lang series. Thanks must also go to Professor UO dr hab. Ryszard Wolny for reading this book’s original draft as a dissertation and improving it markedly. I could not have asked for a better supervisor. I, too, thank Professor UO dr hab. Andrzej Ciuk and Professor UAM dr. hab. Jacek Fabiszak for thoroughly reviewing the manuscript and making highly constructive sug- gestions. A big thanks as well to Professor UO dr hab. Jacek Gutorow for lend- ing me several books, commenting on the manuscript, and especially for con- tacting Professor Sławek. Thanks also to Łukasz Galecki, Peter Lang’s representative in Poland, who was always very helpful in pushing through this project. Finally, thank you to Ben Kostival for help with proofreading, and Jane Vavala of Hinkle Library at SUNY Alfred for finding me every source I needed. Without her help it would have been impossible to write the following pages.

Table of Contents Acknowledgements ...... 5 Introduction ...... 9

Chapter 1 Early Critiques and Aesthetic Statements ...... 23

Chapter 2 Macdonald at Partisan Review ...... 35

Chapter 3 Politics and Culture ...... 59

Chapter 4 A Theory of Mass Culture ...... 87

Chapter 5 Masscult and Midcult ...... 115

Conclusion ...... 133

Selected Bibliography ...... 143 Primary Sources ...... 143 Secondary Sources ...... 145

Introduction

In October of 2011 the New York Review of Books reissued a collection of Dwight Macdonald’s writings on culture under the title Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain.1 The volume’s appearance was in some ways surprising given the derision heaped on Macdonald’s cultural theories in previous decades by academics determined to expose his supposedly undemocratic leanings and rigid notion of hierarchy, and not least because the essays had not appeared in print since 1983. Nonetheless, the reissue testified to Mac- donald’s loyal if slim base of admirers, indicating the enduring respect he has earned for his colorful and frequently contentious life in American letters and politics. Without question it is within the latter of those realms that Macdonald is best remembered and regarded among historians, in particular for the probing essays on the horrors of the Second World War featured in his short-lived but intellectually significant magazine Politics. Concern over matters of culture, however, ran parallel to and at times overrode Macdonald’s political obsessions. Macdonald was indisputably the most visible critic of mass culture during the early 1950s to mid-1960s. Soon after, the foundations of his theories were questioned by an ever-growing litany of voices that eventually dubbed him a passé neo-Marxist who spewed little but misguided, elitist critical venom.2 Yet at the same time, Macdonald arguably has some claim to relevance, and in view of his place in the pantheon of American intellectuals, certainly deserves reconsideration. His critics, though admittedly uncovering many failings, have ignored Macdonald’s prophetic statements, while the field of cultural studies has generally miscategorized the ultimate strain of his thought in the radical left-wing rather than conservative tradition of criticism. Dwight Macdonald on Culture: The Happy Warrior of the Mind, Reconsidered seeks to amend such misconceptions, offering new perspectives on a figure who grappled with issues of culture that remain ever-pertinent. Macdonald was born in New York City into comfortable upper-middle-class surroundings on March 24, 1906. His father practiced law while his mother, who hailed from a prominent family, busied herself with climbing Manhattan’s many-runged social ladder. Educated at fine private boarding schools in his youth, Macdonald attended Phillips Exeter Academy and later Yale University. An unusually precocious child, he showed a deep interest in literature from an

1 Dwight Garner, ‘Dwight Macdonald’s War on Mediocrity,’ New York Times Sunday Book Review (October 21, 2011), accessed November 27, 2011, online. 2 See Paul Gorman, Left Intellectual and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 217.

10 Introduction early age, sending his parents lists of books he expected to discuss with them during his school vacations.3 At Exeter Macdonald was elected class poet, but despite this potential indicator of popularity, as a boy he felt alienated from his peers. In a 1979 interview he explained, “they were just ordinary guys and I was quite a bright fellow. I just had the biggest contempt for them.”4 Such modesty aside, at Exeter young Macdonald graciously deigned to socialize with two other students, forming an exclusive society called ‘The Hedonist Club,’ which distinguished itself with debonair monocles, canes and ties, after the effete example of Oscar Wilde. Adopting the droll slogan ‘Cynicism, Estheticism, Criticism, Pes- simism,’ the club self-published two issues of Masquerade, in which the four- teen-year-olds snidely poked fun at school traditions.5 Macdonald showed a similar desire to rebel against God and man at Yale immediately after his arrival in the mid-1920s. In an impolitic letter to the university president he questioned the wisdom of compulsory chapel – “To be forced to listen to such puerile, stupid twaddle is an insult to any intelligent person” – and unwisely risked expulsion with a brash attack on a famed English professor in what could be considered Macdonald’s first critical venture into issues of culture.6 William Lyon Phelps had taught at Yale for three decades before Macdonald appeared in one of his courses. In addition to being a respected academic, Phelps authored a regular newspaper column devoted to scholarly subjects and hosted a well-known radio show that popularized classic works of literature for the American public. These suspicious activities, along with Phelps’ reputation for keeping Yale’s athletes eligible for play despite their baleful ignorance, incurred Macdonald’s sardonic censure. In a foolishly brazen editorial for Yale Literary Magazine he counseled Phelps to forgo teaching a new course on Shakespeare, condescendingly inquiring “if he honestly thought he was competent to give it.”7 The assault was the perilous culmination of a series of criticisms Macdonald had leveled at the Yale administration, encompassing everything from the quality of teaching at the university to an attempt to inspire an underclassmen revolt against the exclusive right of Yale seniors to go hatless on campus. The Phelps

3 Michael Wreszin, ed. Interviews with Dwight Macdonald (Jackson: University of Mis- sissippi Press, 2003), p. xii. 4 Diana Trilling, ‘An Interview with Dwight Macdonald,’ Interviews with Dwight Macdonald, p. 123. 5 Joseph Epstein, ‘Dwight Macdonald: Sunburned by Ideas,’ New Criterion 20 (Novem- ber 2001), accessed July 7, 2007, online. 6 Quoted in Michael Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald (New York: Basic Books, 1994), p. 13. 7 Dwight Macdonald, ‘Politics Past,’ Memoirs of a Revolutionist: Essays in Political Cri- ticism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957), p. 7.

Introduction 11 episode earned Macdonald the threat of dismissal straight from the Yale president’s lips, which he regarded as a badge of honor for the rest of his life.8 What is striking about the incident from today’s perspective is how it gives a taste of Macdonald’s future writings on the American cultural scene. Most significant is his conviction that high culture is inviolable, reflected in his attack on Phelps’ attempts to make the arts accessible to the otherwise benighted. Such odium for the dilution of high culture would become a primary theme in later theories. Macdonald’s career after Yale was no less notorious. After graduating in 1928, he planned to make a great deal of money in business and establish a Brook Farm-type community where he and other like-minded friends could lead sheltered lives immersed in literary criticism. However, a failed attempt at retail sales in Macy’s Department Store quickly impressed upon Macdonald the fact that, as he put it later, “even a modest degree of success was possible only if one took merchandizing far more seriously than I was able to.”9 Though disenchanted with the business world, in 1929, the year of the Great Depression, Macdon- ald took a job as a staff writer for media mogul Henry Luce’s Fortune.10 The magazine, slavishly devoted to promoting free-market capitalism in the midst of a collapse that laid bare the obsolescence of its philosophical underpinnings, was a bad fit.11 The experience contributed greatly to Macdonald’s political radicalization, and following a dramatic resignation he fell in with a group now known as the ‘New York intellectuals,’ who in the 1930s and ‘40s coalesced around the radical left-wing literary journal, Partisan Review. As one of the editors of PR, Macdonald found himself among company that stimulated his interests in both politics and culture. The group included Philip Rahv, William Phillips, and Clement Greenberg, whose critiques of popular entertainments and capitalist society were echoed by the German émigrés who made up the Frankfurt School, namely Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Leo Lowenthal. By and large, the above critics shared a perspective on social and economic issues inspired by Marxism, bound with a reverence for modernist art, which to them embodied a powerful protest against modern society. In the work of the avant-garde movement’s most illustrious figures – Joyce, Picasso, Cézanne, Kandinsky, and Stra- vinsky – they found socially critical and radical qualities, along with the inherent difficulty believed to be an indispensable hallmark of high art. Such lofty

8 Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald, p. 15. 9 Macdonald, ‘Politics Past,’ pp. 7-8. 10 Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald, pp. 21-22. 11 James L. Baughman, Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American News Media (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), pp. 34-70.

12 Introduction cultural principles mixed with socialist idealism resulted in an evaluation of mass culture as an instrument of domination over the intrinsically healthy but insensate masses.12 Macdonald shared such aesthetic sympathies and unease with American popular amusements, though not the entirety of the above intellectuals’ frameworks. Fearful that both high culture, artistic standards, and humanity at large were under threat, over the course of thirty years he struggled to locate solutions to the perceived onslaught of mass culture on American society. The journey would bring him considerable fame and veneration during his lifetime, but equal scorn after his death. Before discussing any of the issues of culture that so troubled Macdonald, one must invoke the potent specter of the English poet and social critic Matthew Arnold. Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criti- cism (1869) began the study of popular culture in the modern era and established the ‘culture and civilization’ tradition of cultural criticism.13 The definition of culture put forth by Arnold hinges on several central aspects vital to the amelio- ration of Christendom. Firstly, culture is designated as the “pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically.”14 As well, culture “moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good.” Seek- ing such study and betterment enables men to live within “sweetness and light,” allowing God to prevail through an ideal of perfection that encourages the “harmonious expansion of all powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature” [emphasis in original].15 In Arnold’s paradigm ‘culture’ finds its diamet- ric opposite in ‘anarchy,’ which functions as a synonym for popular culture, or in other words a description of rough working-class existence. This dichotomy reflects Arnold’s belief that the political participation of plebian males in 1860s England constitutes a danger to cultivated civilization – artistic standards being his main concern.16 This preoccupation was a common one in the mid- nineteenth century, when social thinkers wondered how the rise of democracy

12 Gorman, Left Intellectual and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America, pp. 141-45. 13 John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction (Harlow: Prentice Hall, 2001), p. 18. 14 Matthew Arnold, ‘Preface to Culture and Anarchy,’ Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) p. 190. 15 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism, in Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, pp. 59, 66-67, 62. 16 Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, p. 19.

Introduction 13 could sustain the cultural and aesthetic values that had depended on the landed gentry for existence.17 As Arnold writes in one of his many treatises: “The difficulty for democracy is, how to keep ideals high.”18 That said, Arnold was not entirely enamored of the upper classes that ruled in his day. In Culture and An- archy he divides English society into three unsavory groups – the ‘Barbarians’ of the aristocracy, the ‘Philistines’ of the middle classes, and the lowly ‘Popu- lace’ – each of which maintains a flawed relationship with culture. Barbarians, who have the greatest opportunity for enrichment, are instead “lured off from following the light by those mighty and eternal seducers of our race which weave for this class their most irresistible charms, – by worldly splendour, security, power, and pleasure.” Philistines, on the other hand, remain “perverse in the resistance to the light,” preferring the “machinery of business, chapels, [and] tea-meetings” that make up their “dismal and illiberal life.” The Populace, lastly, embodies all that is ignorant and brutal in society: “bawling, hustling, and smashing,” and of course, “beer.” To Arnold, the growth of Populace-generated anarchy stands as the great menace of proletarian intrusion into the political scene, while culture represents the only potential barricade. Culture is an active force, a policing, civilizing agent among the “raw and half-developed” commoners. Notwithstanding the degraded condition of the vast, miserable mob, Arnold suggests that regardless of social class mankind shares “a common basis of human nature” that can be exploited for good.19 Arnold’s recommendation, therefore, is a strong state, whose proposed role is that of culture disseminator, guiding the masses upward towards civilization, and bestowing the franchise of education on those below in order to prepare them for inclusion in a new bourgeois, capitalist order. Despite this neat solution presented in Culture and Anarchy, Arnold eventually came to the further, less optimistic conclusion that: “Knowledge and truth in the full sense of the words, are not attainable by the great mass of the human race at all.”20 But fortunately, hope for culture still survived. He writes that in all social classes (Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace, alike) there are so-called “aliens” – “persons who are led…by a general humane spirit, by the love of human perfection,” and who potentially offer protection from culture’s foes [emphasis in original]. These numbers must be encouraged, insists Arnold, by “authoritative centers,” or academies operated by a self-perpetuating cultural elite who act as the guardians of mankind’s finer legacies. Within this scheme the lower classes,

17 Sefan Collini, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, p. xiii. 18 Matthew Arnold, ‘Democracy,’ Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, p. 14. 19 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism, pp. 105-09. 20 Quoted in Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, p. 22.

14 Introduction by virtue of the salve of education, assume a position of deference even while remaining attached to their decidedly common customs.21 This conception of the division of cultures would draw the battle lines in cultural debates and influence thinking on popular culture well into the mid-twentieth century. Arnold’s culture and civilization discourse, for example, appears eight decades later in T. S. Eli- ot’s Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1949), when terms like ‘popular culture’ and ‘mass culture’ had come to replace Arnoldian ‘anarchy,’ and the concept of ‘mass society’ had given new theoretical structure to the fear of the overgrown and bothersome Populace. Also, Arnoldian discourse informs the work of Macdonald in many ways previously unrecognized. Just as any discussion relating to culture must make reference to Matthew Arnold, so too must it include a word of qualification regarding the terms ‘mass culture’ and ‘mass society.’ Mass culture, for all that has been written about it, still lacks a universally accepted working definition. Much of the problem has to do with the terminology itself, namely the difference in meaning between the words ‘popular’ and ‘mass.’ The former is clearly less judgmental and the latter more pejorative, while the economically connotative ‘commercial culture’ and ‘commercial entertainments’ are also sometimes employed as synonyms for ‘amusements’ produced on a mass scale for mass consumption. To make things more problematic, during the cultural debates that occurred in 1950s America, those on all sides used the same labels to identify differing cultural trends and phenomena.22 Since then, scholars have tried to make distinctions both between mass and popular culture, and those who consume it. Lawrence Levine, for instance, points out that not all mass-produced culture achieves widespread popularity, and maintains that this is where the division of ‘mass’ and ‘popular’ should be made.23 Raymond Williams takes this observation a step further. Ar- guing against the notion that popular or mass culture products should be equated with those who consume them, he draws a line between ‘working-class’ and popular culture. Whatever their intrinsic significance, these semantic and categorical debates are of little concern to this book, as is establishing any timeline for the development of such nomenclature. As a result, in an effort to counter lexical redundancy terms such as ‘mass culture,’ ‘popular culture,’ ‘commercial culture,’ ‘popular amusements’ and ‘popular entertainments’ are utilized to designate essentially the same phenomenon depicted by Macdonald and other critics who shared what is referred to as the left-wing ‘mass culture perspective.’

21 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism, pp. 110-11. 22 Michael Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century (New York: Basic Books, 1999), pp. 162-64. 23 Lawrence Levine, The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 296.

Introduction 15

The definition of mass culture within the mass culture perspective is a formulaic, largely uniform, commercial product disseminated and consumed on a large scale for the sake of profit, whose aim is to entertain without the burden of artistic or ideological originality or difficult creative content. Macdonald saw much of what the ‘culture industry’ (to borrow a phrase from Horkheimer and Adorno) produced in this light, including most of television, radio, and Holly- wood’s output, in addition to miscellany like comic books, rock ‘n roll, Norman Rockwell paintings, and popular periodicals such as the Saturday Evening Post, Life, and Reader’s Digest. This assessment of mass culture is often marked by nostalgia for a lost golden age when an authentic folk culture reigned among organic communities, only to be destroyed by the advance of industrialization and the resulting commercialization of entertainment. Lastly, the critique posits that mass culture bludgeons the minds of the masses, working as a depoliticizing opiate imposed from above that encourages acceptance of the capitalist system, rather than its overthrow.24 It must be noted, however, that while Macdonald’s critique at times featured some of these ideas – accounting for his erroneous inclusion in the radical tradition of culture criticism – they ultimately yielded in priority to more conservative concerns over high culture’s defense. The concept of mass society, of which Macdonald was also a persistent critic, came into prominence in the early twentieth century when its critics, most notably the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, used it to designate the demographic expansion and growth of socialist thought in Europe. Gasset was particularly horrified by the Bolshevik Revolution – much like Arnold had been by universal male suffrage in 1860s England. In La Rebelión de las Masas (The Revolt of the Masses) (1930) Gasset warned that the early twentieth century’s simultaneous rise of literacy and propaganda could bring populations under the rule of dictatorial demagogues. As a result, a leveling effect would occur, wip- ing out men of thought and culture with a tidal wave of hyper-democracy, and replacing them with technocratic, uncultured, and easily indoctrinated ‘mass men.’ Though Gasset was a self-declared elitist, his concept of mass society was taken up by European and American Marxists, whose critique emerged in the second quarter of the 1900s in response to fascism and Stalinism. In the 1950s, mass society also became a popular theory among American intellectuals, who used it to designate the rise of impersonal postwar bureaucratic institutions, gigantic economic and military organizations, and the impact of industrialization and standardization on the individual’s personal identity. These mass society discourses are found in sociological and political tracts such as David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism

24 Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, pp. 48, 8-9.

16 Introduction

(1951).25 The concept of mass society in many ways worked in tandem with that of mass culture, entrancing postwar intellectuals such as Macdonald, who were intent on explaining the seeming prevalence of conformity in the United States and the nature of militaristic dictatorships in Europe prior to and during the Se- cond World War. Macdonald’s account of mass culture as described in his four main essays – ‘A Theory of Popular Culture’ (1944), ‘Field Notes’ (1945), ‘A Theory of Mass Culture’ (1953) and ‘Masscult and Midcult’ (1960) – reveals several main concerns. They include: preserving the integrity of high culture, the degrading influence of capitalism on artistic production, and the deleterious effects of mass culture on its audience. He dedicated considerable energy to explicating and promoting his views, denouncing the cultural mortification and societal stupifi- cation encouraged by popular entertainments. Macdonald insisted that mass culture was a large contributor to America’s ills, and argued that in its pandering to the lowest common denominator it functioned as a threat to humanity and art alike, deadening social awareness and personal sensitivity. His concerns, then, were aesthetic and humanistic. So great was his fixation on the mass culture issue that, despite the great notoriety of his political writings, he labeled it his “one big idea” in an interview given near the end of his life.26 Macdonald, however, was more than a culture critic. In his long and varied career he worked as editor for numerous periodicals, some as large as the New Yorker, and as small as Miscellany, a short-lived arts journal started by some university friends. (The phrase ‘the happy warrior of the mind’ is taken from one of his first efforts for that journal.) After his resignation from Partisan Review in 1943, Macdonald also founded Politics, which boasted a circulation of approximately 5,000. Poli- tics is regarded as an important if isolated voice among historians, and it is Macdonald’s survey of the political battlefield during these years that has cemented his place in American intellectual history.27 His considerable public fame, though, came not from these writings, but from his role as a film critic on

25 Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century, pp. 165-66. 26 Trilling, ‘An Interview with Dwight Macdonald,’ p. 147. 27 See Robert Westbrook, ‘The Responsibility of the Peoples: Dwight Macdonald and the Holocaust,’ Holocaust Studies Annual: America and the Holocaust, eds. Sanford Pins- ker and Jack Fischel (Greenwood: The Penkevill Publishing Company, 1983), Paul Bo- yer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985), Robert Cummings, ‘Resistance and Victi- mization: Dwight Macdonald in the 1940s,’ New Politics 1 (Summer 1981), and Grego- ry D. Sumner, Dwight Macdonald and the Politics Circle: The Challenge to Cosmopoli- tan Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).

Introduction 17 the television show Today, and movie reviews for Esquire magazine in the 1960s. These activities helped sales of his 1962 compilation, Against the Ameri- can Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture, which fleetingly secured his status as America’s premier cultural guru. Macdonald was nonetheless an odd candidate for mainstream popularity. Holding political beliefs that ranged from the socialist to, eventually, the anarcho-pacifist, he simultaneously advocated both aristocratic and avant-garde cultural standards, and despite his radical- democratic politics often espoused a dim view of the common man’s ability to appreciate art. These were indeed positions much against the American grain, in any decade or century, making Macdonald a figure of interest no matter what one’s political or cultural persuasion. Macdonald’s life was cataloged soon after his death in 1982. Stephen Whit- field’s A Critical American: The Politics of Dwight Macdonald appeared in 1984, and has since gone out of print. It is a straightforward albeit succinct biography for the first three quarters, after which Whitfield argues that Macdonald was “the progenitor of the ‘60s radicals.”28 Virtually no space is devoted to Macdonald’s writings on culture, as Whitfield focuses on his subject’s political obsessions – as the book’s subtitle obviously suggests. Aside from Gregory D. Sumner’s Dwight Macdonald and the Politics Circle: The Challenge to Cosmo- politan Democracy (1996), Macdonald’s historical significance as a social and cultural commentator has received greater notice in more recent years mainly due to one man: Michael Wreszin. His impressive, far-reaching study, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald (1994), was the first full portrait of the man. Wreszin has also edited a volume of Macdon- ald’s letters, A Moral Temper: The Letters of Dwight Macdonald (2001), and a book devoted to interviews, titled Interviews with Dwight Macdonald (2003). As in Whitfield’s biography, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition gives its greatest attention to Macdonald’s most significant political works, and though a respectable amount of space is devoted to the writings on culture there is still a great deal more to say. Two other relevant works that deal with Macdonald’s writings on mass culture are Paul R. Gorman’s Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth- Century America (1996), and the unpublished doctoral dissertation, ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal: Mass Culture and Politics in the Works of Dwight Macdonald’ (1989), by Thomas S. Edwards. Gorman’s book can hardly be considered an ex- haustive study of Macdonald’s thought on culture, nor does it claim to be. Mac- donald receives one chapter in a work mainly intended to examine criticism of American popular culture from the early twentieth century. And though it treats

28 Barry Gewen, ‘Dwight Macdonald’s Legacy,’ The New Leader (February 1985), p. 14.

18 Introduction many of the writings and issues included in this study (the logic of both Gor- man’s and Edwards’ selections and chronological presentation, incidentally, is inescapable), it does so in necessarily little detail and leaves out essays of significance. Also, it sports a highly critical slant that this monograph eschews. Ed- wards’ focus, meanwhile, tends towards Macdonald’s political writings. Specifi- cally, he seeks to demonstrate that “one can look for instruction” in Macdon- ald’s political writings, deeming them germane to contemporary America.29 With regard to culture, Edwards also omits important essays from Macdonald’s early days as a critic, as well as some from the 1940s, and devotes the greatest part of his energy to searching for similarities between Macdonald’s later theories and Horkheimer and Adorno’s 1944 mass culture tome Dialectic of Enlight- enment, which was not translated into English until the 1970s. Most importantly, both works regard ‘A Theory of Mass Culture’ and ‘Masscult and Midcult’ as the same formulation of ideas, without taking into account perceptible retreats from previous positions, newly integrated ideas, and clarifications. Gorman is particularly guilty in this regard, as he quickly passes over what is certainly Macdonald’s most interesting and important statement on the culture issue. In addition, Gorman casts ‘Masscult and Midcult’ as the “culmination” of the left- wing mass culture critique that circulated in mid-twentieth-century America and a “surrender” to the concept of mass theory, while the essay’s categorization and conclusions are far from that simple.30 Dwight Macdonald on Culture differs from the studies above in its attempt at a comprehensive presentation and analysis of Macdonald’s essays on cultural matters from 1929 to 1960. It argues for Macdonald’s removal from the left- wing tradition of cultural criticism, and his placement within the culture and civilization discourse as the twentieth-century heir to the mantle of Matthew Ar- nold. The book traces and encapsulates the development of his all-inclusive theory of mass culture and defense of high culture while directly explicating historical and intellectual influences. It is often averred that Macdonald was not an original thinker on the subject of mass culture, and his significance lies in his synthesizing the thoughts of other like-minded intellectuals into one organic whole.31 Indeed, Gore Vidal once told him: “You have nothing to say, only to add.”32 Whether Macdonald would have agreed with this assessment with regard

29 Thomas S. Edwards, ‘The Pursuit of the Ideal: Mass Culture and Politics in the Works of Dwight Macdonald,’ unpublished dissertation, Bowling Green University (August 1989), p. 193. 30 Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth Century America, p. 181-83. 31 Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald, p. 351. 32 Garner, ‘Dwight Macdonald’s War on Mediocrity,’ online.

Introduction 19 to culture would have likely depended on his mood. At times he thought himself to be quite pioneering, once going so far as to assert that he had been “the origi- nator” of the phrase mass culture.33 The truth rests somewhere in between. On the one hand, many of Macdonald’s concerns, ideas, and tastes predated his exposure to the writings of his fellow critics and remained constant, yet on the other, Macdonald ruthlessly appropriated insights that offered new directions in which to guide his old arguments. This second fact does not, however, signal any lack of ability in Macdonald to form conclusions for himself, many of which he came to quite early. In fact, intellectual redundance on matters of culture (going back to the Phelps incident) perhaps best characterizes his output, in which Macdonald often cites new examples to make the same points at different times. Dwight Macdonald on Culture is also the first attempt to illustrate the degree to which Macdonald shielded himself against and factored in the criticisms leveled at him by his contemporaries, namely Gilbert Seldes, Daniel Bell, and Edward Shils, providing the first complete expository account of his theory’s defense and final mutation. Likewise, any analysis of Macdonald’s theories on culture cannot be made without some reference to his political writings – as the two are deeply interconnected. This book therefore incorporates several seminal Macdonald essays, written mostly during the World War II years. These are: ‘The Future of Democratic Values’ (1943), ‘The Responsibility of the Peoples’ (1945), ‘The Bomb’ (1945), and ‘A New Theory of Totalitarianism’ (1951). Taken together, the pieces indicate the important formative influence of the Se- cond World War on Macdonald’s perceptions of mass culture and society, particularly with regard to the pessimism that eventually subsumed his writings on both. The essays also do much to explain why Macdonald found accounts of mass society so persuasive. Deprived of this context, one simply cannot understand the underlying motives of Macdonald’s cultural writings. That aside, though historians have commented admiringly on Macdonald’s political output, his mass culture criticism is now discredited, a casualty of political correctness and new intellectual currents in writing on popular culture. To be sure, Macdon- ald’s body of thought is now considered representative of what went awry in twentieth-century cultural criticism. He stands, one could say, as the Great Vil- lain of contemporary cultural studies.34 Criticisms of Macdonald naturally began in his own time with Bell, Shils, and Seldes, but such condemnations multiplied as time passed. By the late 1960s

33 Trilling, ‘An Interview with Dwight Macdonald,’ p. 147. Macdonald’s contention is quite odd considering the phrase had been used by Irving Howe in print five years earlier than his supposed invention of it in 1953 – in an article for Politics. See Howe, ‘Notes on Mass Culture,’ Politics 5 (Spring, 1948). 34 Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Twentieth-Century America, p. 191.

20 Introduction it was increasingly felt that, as John Cawelti writes, “the mass culture model of communication between an irresistible elite and helpless incoherent mass audience is totally inadequate as a description of the real social complexity of rela- tionships between the media and their various publics.” He further declares that, “the fear that a rampant mass culture will drive out the good arts is not justified by events.”35 Critics of the 1970s thus largely ignored Macdonald, while the 1980s brought a wave of disapproval by academics and cultural historians who identified him as one of the primary perpetrators of an injudicious mass culture critique that symbolized both abhorrent elitism and theoretical myopia. Even those sympathetic to Macdonald’s views, such as Christopher Lasch, could not help but disparage his perspective for containing “many serious flaws,” among them a reliance on the mass society model, the belief in the manipulative power of the media, and the argument that resistance among the masses and variety in commercial entertainment had been eliminated.36 To demonstrate how far Mac- donald’s star had fallen, in 1957 his essay ‘A Theory of Mass Culture’ had been given pride of place in Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White’s ground- breaking anthology, Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America – attesting to his perceived knowledge on the subject. By 1987, however, Macdonald was no longer seen as an expert of any sort, but described in the anthology American Media and Mass Culture by Donald Lazere as one of the old guard who promoted a defective approach to the study of popular culture.37 As such attacks continued they became divorced from historical context, almost as to suggest that Macdonald’s mass culture criticisms had either occurred within a vacuum or under the same conditions of his later detractors, rather than being a logical extension of his own unique historical experience. This brings us to another of this monograph’s central aims. It is argued that Macdonald has, unfairly, borne the brunt of criticism from historians for the haughtiness and theoretical untenability of the collective left-wing, twentieth- century mass culture critique forged by the neo-Marxist critics of Partisan Re- view and the Frankfurt School, mainly due to his status as the most famous excoriator of mass culture during the period. Disregarding for the moment that he was an animal of another tradition of cultural discourse, Macdonald has been made a whipping boy of sorts by those eager to establish their democratic cre- dentials. This is especially true of Levine, who since the late 1980s has been viewed as one of the leading voices for a positive reevaluation of popular cul-

35 John Calweti, ‘Untitled Review,’ American Quarterly 20 (1968), p. 255. 36 Christopher Lasch, ‘Mass Culture Reconsidered,’ Democracy 1 (1981), p. 10. 37 Donald Lazare, ‘Introduction: Entertainment as Social Control,’ American Media and Mass Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 2.

Introduction 21 ture. His 1988 book, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierar- chy in America, began a new wave of interest in cultural studies, promoting the highly anti-Macdonaldian proposition that categories of high and low culture are inherently unstable to the point of permeability.38 Levine also writes of Macdon- ald’s “subjective…aesthetic priorities and judgments,” depicting him as an in- competent, boorish elitist obsessed only with condemning whatever he capri- ciously chose to deem inferior.39 Gorman (incidentally, Levine’s protégé) largely seconds this view, suggesting that Macdonald operated on “a criterion that was nothing more than his own taste.” He as well cites Macdonald’s lack of “ob- jectivity,” arguing that he wallowed in “preconceptions about the public’s passivity” and refused to “confront [his] own social prejudices.” Such criticisms may have some weight, but they selectively ignore the scope of Macdonald’s critique, and are insensitive to his historical framework – in which many of his fears appear if not entirely justifiable, at least understandable in the light of his political essays. While Gorman glances over some of these writings, he fails to acknowledge the magnitude of the events behind them as they appeared to those who witnessed them, and in particular how Macdonald’s account of American society and mass culture explicitly intertwined. There were, of course, compel- ling reasons for why Macdonald thought as he did, as many of his essays reflect the conventional wisdom among intellectuals of the period. As well, Gorman and Levine hardly address the entirety of Macdonald’s critique and unjustly peg him a mere culture snob, as opposed to a deeply concerned commentator. Most crucially, they incorrectly characterize Macdonald as a social elitist, which wrongly suggests his criticism of common people’s tastes arose from a high- class, rather than high-cult, origin. Macdonald’s disparagement of the common man’s artistic sensibilities, also characterized as an annihilating contradiction of his proclaimed democratic-socialist sympathies by Gorman, is better seen as a compartmentalization, as argued in this book’s conclusion. Finally, both scholars wrongly disregard any possibility that elements of his critique remain forceful. From a wider perspective, the larger field of cultural studies generally disre- gards Macdonald’s categorical rejection of Marxism in the mid-1940s. Despite this fact, his analyses are classified with other left-wing critiques.40 Macdonald’s writings clearly do bear some left-wing elements, specifically a disdain for capi-

38 Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century, pp. 223-24. 39 Levine Lawrence, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in Ame- rica (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 7. 40 Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America, ‘Ac- knowledgments,’ pp. 171, 10-11, 184.

22 Introduction talism’s influence on art. However, Macdonald’s view of high culture’s function, his desire to preserve it in an era of apparently hyper-democratic massification, and his lionization of the cultural divisions of the aristocratic past – all primary themes Arnoldian in nature – conclusively put his thought within the culture and civilization discourse. Considering, then, the controversies described above, as well as the reissue of Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the Amer- ican Grain, the time is incontestably ripe for a comprehensive reexamination of Macdonald. Though this monograph is not an explicit defense of his theories, it bears a corrective impulse as an effort at a more humane and historically grounded presentation of his writings, and a response to Levine and Gorman. It is hard to refute some of the criticisms concerning the defects contained in Mac- donald’s rather monolithic mass culture paradigms, but it cannot be denied that his writings raise issues worth exploring and, regardless of their faults, reveal a highly sensitive intellect of great erudition, consumed by questions regarding the role of the arts in human society, and dedicated to preserving standards and individual artistic vision in the face of culture’s commodification. Several statements of Macdonald’s also stand as prophetic. As no full history of Macdonald’s culture war has yet been written, Dwight Macdonald on Culture fills a gap in the studies done on him thus far, offering a new evaluation of his thoughts on Amer- ica’s often intractable cultural conundrums.

Chapter 1 Early Critiques and Aesthetic Statements

An examination of Macdonald’s early writings on culture begins during his fret- ful tenure at Fortune. Though much of his time was devoured by continuous as- signments to write glowing profiles of business leaders, the years at the magazine were not a complete waste in terms of Macdonald’s evolution as an intellectual and culture critic. Fortunately, he was able to keep his interests in the arts and literary criticism alive by writing articles for the small journal Miscellany (1929-1931), a bimonthly he and two university friends started as a moonlight- ing venture.41 Here, Macdonald expressed his independence and honed his critical faculties away from the omnipresent gaze of Luce’s chief editors in four essays on T. S. Eliot, Robinson Jeffers, and American and Soviet cinema. A fifth on Hollywood directors, written for the arts journal Symposium, caps off Mac- donald’s early period. Taken jointly, the articles provide a window into the emergence of themes that would reverberate through Macdonald’s writings on culture in the succeeding decades. Macdonald’s initial contribution to Miscellany, ‘For Lancelot Andrewes’ (1929), reviewed the volume of Eliot’s writings of the same name – in a less than flattering light. For Lancelot Andrewes appeared following Eliot’s conver- sion to Anglicanism and acceptance of British citizenship. The titular essay praised the principles of the Anglican Church throughout European history. At the urging of his friends to open up regarding his beliefs,42 Eliot defined himself in the work’s preface as “a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.”43 By this point, Eliot had already spearheaded a critique of the West’s increasing secular decadence, which in his view had demol- ished the previous Christian aristocratic order and left alienated men aimlessly drifting across a disjointed industrial landscape. Only through a return to the past and a simultaneous conscious rejection of modern society, he argued, could civilization mend itself.44 Literary works, meanwhile, remained as “icons of human value deployed against twentieth-century barbarism,” offering a means of escape through the divorcing of politics and emotion from poetics in the name of

41 Epstein, ‘Dwight Macdonald: Sunburned by Ideas,’ online. 42 Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), pp. 159-74. 43 Quoted in Craig Raine, T. S. Eliot (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 46. 44 Vincent B. Leitch, American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to Eighties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 20-28.

24 Chapter 1 aesthetic and objective textural purity.45 Such principles invited harsh criticism from Macdonald, who disparaged Eliot’s flight into the hermetic world of literary allusion. ‘For Lancelot Andrewes’ opens with the acknowledgment that Eliot enjoys “a remarkable ascendancy over no inconsiderable portion of the younger generation of writers and intellectuals.” This assemblage of followers, Macdonald charges, is “too impressive intellectually,” in particular because “their mental attitude is so aloof and superior as to verge on the esoteric” [emphasis in original]. Though Macdonald, ever supercilious, admires such resistance to making dubious “concessions to the mob,” he points to the dangers of losing the essential vitality offered by the “bustling vulgarity of the marketplace.” In the rarified world of letters there is a crucial point where “independence becomes eccentrici- ty,” and devolves into inscrutability. Importantly, it is not Eliot’s message that is impenetrable, but his language. Concerning The Waste Land: “The average mind is baffled, not by the thought or imagination of the poem, but by the very way in which it is expressed. This technical obscurity, in which Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings, and fantastic mediocrities like to indulge, is the paltriest sort of mystification.” The “intellectual aloofness” of both Eliot and his poem is compounded by the learned bard’s “immaturity” and “shallowness,” demonstrated by Eliot’s description of himself as a “classicist,” “royalist,” and “anglo- catholic.” To this Macdonald counters: “With all respect, bosh!” – questioning both the very meaning and relevance of the terms, and sarcastically accusing Eliot of “mystification” by means of “nimbly juggling the pea about under the walnut shells while aesthetes and graduate students gape in provincial amaze- ment.” Such disgust results from Macdonald’s own conception of the artist’s vital role in ameliorating society through direct engagement. Eliot confounds this notion, seeking “external marks of distinction” in royalism and classicism, rather than blazing his own trails. Taking cues from such “phantoms” of the past, Macdonald opines, is “deplorable.” The stance constitutes a decisive repu- diation of Eliot’s aesthetic philosophy, suggesting a more populist, forward- looking approach to conferring literary value. Amongst the strong objections there is praise. ‘For Lancelot Andrewes’ concedes that Eliot writes with “distinction” and “care,” choosing “words to express his meaning simply and gracefully.” The article also notes that Eliot’s pro- digious gifts as a writer give the small volume “more meat” than “several vol- umes by most critics.” Significantly, Macdonald claims to wholly understand Eliot’s thorny intellectual predicament. Faced with the “chaos of modern val-

45 Raman Selden, et al., A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (London: Prentice Hall, 1997), p. 14.

Early Critiques and Aesthetic Statements 25 ues” – certainly a reference to the decline of Victorian ideals during the fast and materialist 1920s – one naturally looks for something to grasp, something to anchor oneself within the swirling currents of the splintered world. Yet in the end it is “lamentable that Mr. Eliot must pervert his intelligence by confining its workings within such a narrow and rigid philosophy.” “A healthy mind seeks to throw off such shackles,” Macdonald scolds, “not put them on.” In doing so, El- iot has pusillanimously retreated to the long-spent past rather than face the challenge of fashioning new principles of intellectual leadership for the broader swath of modern humanity. This pitiful refuge in an “ivory tower” of “isms” cowardly employs “the dogmas of the past as shields to defend…against modern evils.” In contrast, “the happy warrior of the mind attacks the errors of his time with spears of his own making.” The purpose of cultural expression is to provide leadership and direct the unenlightened through the chaos – rather than exacer- bate modernity with willful obtuseness and tradition-mongering. Eliot of course marinates in a concoction of these egregious sins, and unwittingly promotes a rejection of the intellectual’s necessary commitment to constructive societal change.46 At the heart of this condemnation of Eliot lies a sharp disagreement over where direction and intent should reside in art and literature. As such, ‘For Lancelot Andrewes’ reflects several constants that emerge in Macdonald’s later writings on mass culture: a borderline bellicosity, a probing interest into the proper role of the arts in contemporary society, and an insistence on progressive sympathies and engagement with outer reality, however gritty. Macdonald refuses to accept artistic escape as a viable solution to the world’s troubles, while his apparent yearning for positive progress prefigures his future awakening to revolutionary socialism. For the moment, though, this fledgling ‘happy warrior of the mind’ had other poetic strongholds to bombard, starting with Robinson Jeffers, who embodied similar failings to those exemplified by Eliot. Macdonald’s criticisms of Jeffers appeared when the poet still provided attractive copy for journalists seeking to reveal more about the misanthropic semi-recluse who lived in a self-made tower overlooking the Pacific. Influenced primarily by the harsh California landscape in which he dwelt and the blood-soaked calamity of the First World War, Jeffers claimed to write for a time a thousand years in the future, focusing on the sober-

46 Dwight Macdonald, ‘For Lancelot Andrewes,’ Miscellany 1 (December 1929), pp. 38- 39. It should be noted that Macdonald was hardly the only critic to denounce Eliot for the volume. The Times Literary Supplement characterized For Lancelot Andrewes as “treasonous,” while even Eliot’s friend, Conrad Aiken, described the book as filled “with the presence of a spirit which is inimical to everything new or bold or generous.” See Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot: A Life, p.174.

26 Chapter 1 ing but everlasting themes of the incontrovertible physical world and the censure of mankind.47 It was the value of his somber poetry that caused most controversy. As noted in The Critical Reputation of Robinson Jeffers: “Few poets have generated more disagreement on the merits of their work.”48 When Macdonald’s article appeared Jeffers’ status was about to fall dramatically, reaching a nadir of outright denunciation in the 1930s when the critic Yvor Winters debated over labeling him a “great failure”49 and suggested that if he was so dissatisfied with life he should consider suicide.50 Macdonald gladly joined the critical voices dis- inclined to Jeffers’ artistic route. The beginning of ‘Robinson Jeffers’ (1930) undiplomatically states: “In spite of his long contact with culture in American and European universities, in spite of a deep understanding of history and philosophy, in spite of his vast powers of expression, and, finally, in spite of an intellect of the first order, Jef- fers remains a barbarian.” A barbarian, because of his negative and hateful attitude towards society, and tendencies towards isolated indifference to pressing matters at hand. Macdonald dubs Jeffers (together with Joyce) among the “portents of dissolution,” proposing that his work signals an unraveling of both literature and society. In his self-defeating mindset, Jeffers must not care at all whether his poetry is read or not, as he curiously writes for “no public.” With his “most splendid gestures of disdain and proud loneliness,” Jeffers also leaves Macdonald wondering why he bothers publishing at all. Here arises the paradox: “Jeffers, against his will, remains a man, with a quite human desire to impress, perhaps influence, his fellows with such talents as he has.” But to do so, the scornful poet must mingle with the “noisy crowd” in disregard of his “Romantic scorn for society.” Macdonald consequently chides: “If Jeffers were ‘sincere,’ whatever that may mean to a poet, in his detestation of humanity, he would not write down his sentiments in a book and offer them to humanity to read.” Though Jeffers is bludgeoned for his elegiac flights of despair, in citing his poetry as evidence of societal and artistic decay Macdonald is forced to admit that he understands, just as he did with Eliot’s creative predicament, why a true artist would want to work “primarily to please and satisfy himself.” One can only express chagrin at the contemporary state of the public, and the facts that “the mob has burst into letters” and “no publishing house but panders to the vulgarity

47 James Karman, ‘Introduction,’ Critical Essays on Robinson Jeffers (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1990), pp. 7-8. 48 Alex A. Vardamis, The Critical Reception of Robinson Jeffers: A Bibliographical Study (Hamden: Archon Books, 1972), p. 7. 49 Yvor Winters, ‘Robinson Jeffers,’ Critical Essays on Robinson Jeffers, ed. James Karman (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1990), p. 286. 50 Vardamis, The Critical Reception of Robinson Jeffers: A Bibliographical Study, p. 7.

Early Critiques and Aesthetic Statements 27 of mass taste.” Yet, as in ‘For Lancelot Andrewes,’ Macdonald remains adamant that literature, like the other arts, exists as “a means of communication” intended to connect with mankind at large, even if awfully degraded. He chastises Jeffers for abandoning the public, maintaining that “in the face of steady degradation of literary taste” positive involvement is vital.51 Certainly the public is corrupted and undiscriminating, but this truth should compel the artist to offer something of high quality, not merely serve as an excuse for obscurity, obfuscation, and retreat into self-absorption with one’s own private artistic vision. In mirroring his complaints about Eliot, Macdonald evinces a desire for a public art that en- gages the masses aesthetically, raising the general level of taste and culture, and disseminating beauty and drama into the lives of ordinary folk. Culture should be transformative in nature, not only for the solitary individual but for broader society, so needful of fundamental improvement. His following articles for Mis- cellany optimistically posit that such a medium exists within the promising darkness of the nation’s proliferating movie theaters. At the end of the 1920s the only art form Macdonald saw as promoting cultural advancement and mass enlightenment were moving pictures, which he firmly praised as the greatest art form of the twentieth century. ‘Our Elizabethan Movies’ (1929) speaks of the exhilarating new possibilities the cutting-edge artistic vehicle opens up: “This century, so indifferent to the poet and the painter, so warped and feeble in creative power, has strangely given birth to a new form of art that has already produced its masterpieces.” Comparing their “emotional power” and “beauty of form” with the works of Da Vinci and Shakespeare, Macdonald propitiously declares that onto the film director “has fallen the mantle of those great magicians of the Renaissance who called into being the thousand and one shapes of human passion and destiny.” The masterpieces already include films such as Stroheim’s Greed, Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, and Pudovkin’s The End of St. Petersburg – and the best is certain still to come. “It is to be expected,” Macdonald excitedly forecasts, “that the movies should give us our highest type of aesthetic expression.” It is, in his view, the novelty of film that holds greatness and ever-growing potential, being that cinematic techniques are yet to be fully discovered and exploited. In contrast to other mediums, whose artists tardily arrived “on the scene a century or two after the major battles in art had been fought,” the film director has a “wealth of untouched and unexploited means of expression” limited only by “his ingenuity and imagination.” Perhaps surprisingly, to highbrow Macdonald the most important aspect of film’s status is that it has not come to be regarded as art among America’s critics, much like the plays of the Elizabethan era had not garnered critical sanction, but disap-

51 Dwight Macdonald, ‘Robinson Jeffers,’ Miscellany 1 (July 1930), pp. 1-3.

28 Chapter 1 proval. Like them, films are “created for the enjoyment of the people, not the delectation of the connoisseur or the dilettante.” There is, of course, also criticism for the burgeoning medium. Hollywood and Elizabethan theater are similar in the sense that each produced works not considered of permanent value, churn- ing out hundreds of productions a year that resulted in a “complete chaos of good, bad, and mediocre.” Still, that “nine out of ten movies are cheap, banal, and drearily shallow means nothing except that, as everyone knows, nine out of ten attempts at artistic creation are failures.” If ten percent of Hollywood’s output can be counted artistically valuable, the other ninety percent can be tolerated as a necessary byproduct. The beauty of cinema as well lies in the indiscriminate programming of movie houses. An audience attending a double bill is exposed to a diversity of genres, from a ‘Tom Mix Western’ – “one of the most vapid and infantile forms of art ever conceived even by the brain of a Hollywood movie producer” – to The Lash of the Czar – “a Russian film of the greatest subtlety and sophistication.” Macdonald explains that cinema’s “soil is deep enough to nourish the highest trunks, the most abundantly spreading branches.” Such conspicuous in- congruity, nevertheless, does not irk the spectators, who see a movie as a movie. This cinema-going public is unsystematic concerning aesthetic values, but in its innocently ignorant quest for distraction at least receives exposure to works of genius. Though the “people do not understand, or even perceive, many of [cinema’s] finest effects,” their mere presence allows the film director to “draw strength from contact with his fellow men as Antaeus was refreshed by touching his mother earth.” An intimate relationship between director and audience is hence possible, capable of overcoming any artificial barriers erected by bothersome critics as to what is “good” and what is “popular.” Among all the arts on offer to the public, only the moving picture speaks to a heterogeneous audience, as “the movie director communicates his creations to a public [both] broad and inclusive.” Just as religion once served as “the ancient immemorial meeting place of the great and small, the powerful and weak,” cinema provides “the common ground for the artist and the layman.” In film Macdonald distinguishes a means that can create consensus in the wide miscellany of American society, and improve the taste of the masses in ways contemporary writers such as Eliot and Jeffers cannot. But the question remains as to what needs to be communicated. To Macdonald the answer is decidedly pure in nature, and curiously quite removed from his earlier allusions to productive engagement in bettering society. Cultural and artistic development in the transmission of “drama” and “beauty” to the public is all that is needed. Drama, “because [movies] are concerned with the most basic and moving aspects of life: with ambition, with love, with heroism, with sin, with passion, with

Early Critiques and Aesthetic Statements 29 failure, with birth and death.” Beauty, because what comes to one’s eye as “a wholly aesthetic pleasure in following the interplay of form on the screen,” is found within the multitude of complex and ever-evolving techniques that stand on their own, irrespective of plot or content. It is such perceived openness to aesthetic innovation that draws Macdonald to Soviet cinema, which, as he makes clear in his next installment for Miscellany, embodies the ultimate ideal of public culture, forming the basis of a common understanding that religion provided in the past, revamped as communistic proletarian ideology.52 ‘Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Others’ (1930) is Macdonald’s first dissertation on the starkly differing values of Soviet vs. American cinema (others would follow later in the decade). The article makes the counterintuitive argument that the political restrictions Soviet filmmakers endure regarding content actually liberate them stylistically: “The Russian director has his orders plainly enough about the political tone of his pictures, but he is free to express this just as he pleases. He can be as bold and subtle and experimental as he wants as far as his technique is concerned; and this is the kind of freedom an artist must have.” Mac- donald admits that potential anxieties exist regarding the propagandistic aspect of Soviet films, and though he feels that the overweening emphasis on propa- gandizing the social purposes of communism may have led to some distortion in Russian cinema, he quickly adds that much the same trend has been at work throughout history. Christianity, he claims, inspired Milton to write Paradise Lost, enabling him to translate experiences to others. Communism has subsequently filled this role in the Soviet Union. America, in comparison, offers a differing artistic environment. The diverse United States shares no common philosophical or political foundation. Commercial success, or “the intolerable bond- age under which Hollywood groans,” determines all artistic formula. It is the Russian artist, therefore, who benefits from freedom of expression, while the American cinematic establishment inevitably bows to the mass audience’s injurious influence over form and content. “The Hollywood director,” Macdonald ruefully records, “must not bewilder his audience by telling his story in a subtle or original way. Every picture must be capable of being grasped by the 120,000,000 Lords and Masters of America, which means every picture must come as close to mediocrity as humanly possible.” Continuing, Macdonald argues that unchained from the public’s despoiled demands, the conditions of artistic production in the Soviet Union allow politically-limited Russian directors to make far greater advances in film technique than Americans, as content gives way to fruitful experiments in form. And yet another paradox emerges: despite the superiority of Soviet cinema, Russian au-

52 Dwight Macdonald, ‘Our Elizabethan Movies,’ Miscellany 1 (December 1929), pp. 27-32.

30 Chapter 1 diences are “undoubtedly even less intelligent than the average American audience” [emphasis in original]. It is propaganda that makes the Russians take “a national interest in brilliantly (that is to say, boldly, subtly, and to the average person, incomprehensibly) directed pictures.” Whether one wants it or not, when going to the cinema in the Soviet Union contact with great art is inevitable: “Since the Russian proletariat cannot get its political glorification without at the same time swallowing a certain amount of good art, it takes heart and gulps down both at once.” The sugar coating of propaganda, in other words, helps the medicine go down. Macdonald lambastes those (unidentified) American aesthetes who oppose this stress on propaganda, writing that they overlook the fact that such works of art are “a manifestation of a great social renewal” that has stimulated the enthusiasm of the people and directors alike for bold, experimental techniques and modern treatments. Intoxicated by new social theories, the Soviets have taken delight in cinema as part of an artistic renaissance. Prop- agandizing can at times produce exaggeration, but as the greatest source of strength, rather than weakness, of Soviet cinema, it provides a “seriousness of purpose” that is sorely lacking in Hollywood and among the American public. In order to further contrast the cinematic output of each country, Macdonald quotes Eisenstein (at face value) explaining his country’s rejection of conventional storytelling in favor of political messages:

Romantic entertainment does not enter our films. …We always have a message to bring out that will help build up our country under its new regime. …For a subject we always go to the heart of the masses, find out what they need, then build a sce- nario around it.

The Soviet director, then, has a message to transmit, one that Russian people are eager to receive, but importantly, he dictates his own terms in areas of artistic expression. No danger of spectator alienation exists, because the very nature of cinema as a medium for the masses makes the Soviet director a master over the audience. This advantageous dynamic is not possible in the commercialized movie houses of the United States, where the director, reduced to “the servant of his public,” has only allowance to entertain his master, the mob, who “prefers the easily shallow, the safely dead.” Soviet directors can simply ignore public demand, brushing aside their viewers’ tastes and desires, and going “straight to the heart of the matter: not what pleases audiences, but what affects them, what moves them whether they know it or not and whether they like it or not” [emphasis in original]. Soviet and American cinema, consequently, are polar oppo- sites. Artistic considerations are paramount to Soviet directors, while Hollywood caters to the public: “a hopeless effort, for popular taste is notoriously unstable

Early Critiques and Aesthetic Statements 31

[and] always bad.” These facts now established, the need for a deeper analysis of the Hollywood system called out to the increasingly pessimistic critic.53 Macdonald’s first article establishing what could be termed a mass culture critique is found two years later in the periodical Symposium. ‘Notes on Holly- wood Directors’ (1933) gives his appraisal of US cinema, focusing more on the intrinsic drawbacks of American film production than merely the egregious stupidity of Hollywood’s thrill-ravenous audiences. Predictably, Macdonald paints a grim portrait of the studio system, entirely abandoning the optimism found in ‘Our Elizabethan Movies,’ and detailing the American system’s faults minus the felicitous prospect of fortunate artistic flukes. As had quickly become his habit, Macdonald again deems the output of Hollywood inferior to that of Soviet cinema, represented primarily by Eisenstein. The ideas and criteria presented define future concerns about the American mass culture machine, as the article exhibits a loss of faith in cinema’s ability to enlighten its consumers due to the heinous strictures placed on directors by the marketplace. The main criticism leveled at American cinema is that “the Hollywood director has nothing to say.” As a result, Hollywood produces only “one movie a year that is not artistically stillborn.” The reason is that art worthy of recognition requires that its creator “believe in something,” and “have standards of some sort and feel a certain pride in maintaining them.” Such essentials are virtually nonexistent in Hollywood, as its directors generally exude a “lack of personal conviction.” Instead of being artists who place their personal stamp on the films they make, they are mere “craftsmen, specialists, technicians, who turn out…whatever the industry requires of them.” In short, each is a “good little boy” who does as he is told. These timid directors are not fully to blame. The Hollywood studios have fomented this mindset with their division of labor, wip- ing out the possibility of uniquely personal expression and transforming the medium of film into a pure commodity: “Chairs can be made this way, but not works of art” Macdonald states, comparing movie-making to a “multipersonal engineering product similar to the automobile.” The system, rather than the individual, has become paramount. The article goes on to review contemporary directors and identify a decidedly unhealthy strain in linking serious artists with the commercial aspect of the industry. The sad but inevitable effect is that “even the most gifted directors make an appalling number of second-rate films,” deriving from compromises between studios and directors – always to the disadvantage of the film’s artistic substance. Economic imperatives and the demands of the mass audience, of

53 Dwight Macdonald, ‘Eisenstien, Pudovkin, and Others,’ Miscellany 1 (March 1931), pp. 19-21.

32 Chapter 1 course, also interfere with individual vision, liquidating the qualities that differentiate artistic statements from consumer products. Macdonald singles out Stro- heim for retaining a sense of personal integrity in the face of both market pressure and the depersonalizing effects of working at studios reluctant to support artistic undertakings. Yet, his admirable stubbornness has meant that he has made fewer films, and has had to go into acting to support himself. Stroheim’s career thus represents an “intensified form” of the dilemma the serious artist en- counters in Hollywood, where devotion to artistic standards ultimately has no place. Macdonald concludes with this assessment, which repeats his opening criticism:

[T]he type of director now in the saddle in Hollywood is technically competent, clever, even intelligent, but somehow lacking in individuality. …There is a certain individual quality to the work in the best of the older generation – Griffith, Lubitsch, Sternberg, Stroheim. Their movies may be very poor indeed, but they are unmistak- ably theirs [emphasis in original]. No such personal note exists in the work of the younger generation. They have, it seems, nothing to say.54

Together, the four articles from Miscellany and one from Symposium reveal several foundations of Macdonald’s later theories, while indicating a transition in his approach to culture. In ‘For Lancelot Andrewes’ and ‘Robinson Jeffers’ Macdonald writes that art must engage directly with its consumers, rejecting obscurity, criticizing, one assumes, what is wrong with modern life, and looking forward to offer a constructive vision of the future. In this vein artists also have a duty to fulfill in providing leadership to those in need of direction and purpose – pointing to Macdonald’s Arnoldian notion of cultural and spiritual uplift. In the first two essays Macdonald harshly criticizes Eliot and Jeffers for their solitary elitism, though he cannot help but allow that it is partially justified given the sullied status of the common man. Still, this actuality is all the more reason not to abandon, but enlighten the public. In ‘Our Elizabethan Movies’ Macdon- ald feels he has found the key to the assimilation of high and low in America’s cinema houses. A mere eight months later in ‘Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Others,’ he has already lost faith in this potentiality, suggesting that the public’s taste prohibits the Hollywood machine from producing anything of aesthetic, moral, or philosophical value, and praising the Soviet system for deliberately ignoring the tastes of its intended audience. The tone of the essays (particularly the first two) is also significant, offering pungent and sharp rebukes and a combativeness that became a Macdonald trademark. Early on, he had found his voice as a writ-

54 Dwight Macdonald, ‘Notes on Hollywood Directors,’ Symposium 4 (1933), pp. 76-103.

Early Critiques and Aesthetic Statements 33 er. The disdain for the market and its interference with artistic vision found in ‘Notes on Hollywood Directors’ would also make up a major part of Macdon- ald’s theories, signaling later concerns about the danger of bureaucratic systems to individuality, the Soviet film system excepted. Indeed, the state of the arts as described by Macdonald in these early essays presents a pernicious pickle, from which escape is impossible. Individual expression is prized, but it must engage the people. Yet the only medium capable of doing so is corrupted, ironically, by the people themselves. The only path out of this vicious circle, for the moment, leads to in the Soviet Union. Macdonald’s Soviet fascination and growing contempt for capitalist mechanisms indicate his increasing political radicalization during the 1930s. The political shift was largely brought on by his experience at Fortune. While the Miscel- lany articles had shown a general but undelineated interest in social matters and progress, Macdonald’s subsequent activities took this preoccupation to another level. He began reading Marx and socializing with members of the American Communist Party, becoming a “mild fellow traveler.” But when invited to a party meeting and asked to join, his superiority complex got the better of him. He later recalled, “when I left I said to myself, my God, these people, there’re just simply wobbits, they don’t have any brains and they’re scared to death of each other and they have no sense of humor, no life! How could anyone live in this airless atmosphere?”55 The atmosphere was even worse at Fortune, where Mac- donald was in close contact with the United States business elite, “idiots” whom he described with phrases such as “coarse and stupid” and “narrow, uncultivated and commonplace.” These dealings instilled a sense that there was a dangerous vapidity in American business culture, for which Luce’s publishing machine was partly responsible. Macdonald wrote to a friend in the mid-1930s: “I’m growing more and more intolerant of those who stand – or rather squat – in the way of radical progress, the more I learn about the conservative businesses that run this country the more I see the injustices done to people under this horrible capitalist system.”56 Much of what precipitated this new awareness was an as- signment to write an article on the US Steel Corporation, which held a firm monopoly on the nation’s steel industry. During his research in West Virginia, Macdonald saw first-hand the harsh conditions under which the company’s mill workers suffered. Though management tried in vain to wine and dine him, he snuck away to meet with union organizers in ramshackle company towns, whose dilapidated state shocked him. It was his first real, up-close view of ordinary life during the Great Depression, and it made a lasting impression. By the end of the

55 Trilling, ‘An Interview with Dwight Macdonald,’ pp. 118-20. 56 Epstein, ‘Dwight Macdonald: Sunburned by Ideas,’ online.

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1930s Macdonald identified himself as a Trotskyite, and voted for the Com- munist candidate in the 1936 presidential election.57 Thus despite his solid origins in the upper-classes and even his marriage to New York debutante Nancy Rodman in 1934, Macdonald’s interest in socialism and hatred of capitalism only grew. Inevitably, this new political and social perspective was reflected in his US Steel article for Fortune. Macdonald’s tenure at the magazine abruptly ended in 1936, when his critical series on the notorious monopoly reached the editor’s desk prefaced with a quote from Lenin’s Imperi- alism. Fortune’s editors immediately attempted to revise the unbecoming portrait of US Steel, sparking a feud. Macdonald, in turn, submitted his resignation with the stated purpose of writing an exposé on working conditions in the steel industry.58 The decision to quit was an easy one for Macdonald. Working for Fortune had become an incommodious moral dilemma, and with his accumulated savings and stock, along with his wife’s trust fund, the couple lived in considerable comfort despite his being unemployed. After writing a tell-all article on the Luce Corporation for the Nation, in which he accused them of fascist sympathies, Macdonald was invited to join the left-wing journal Partisan Re- view as one of its editors.59 The position would place him in the center of a potent combination of radical Marxist politics and arts criticism, providing influences, like-minded peers, and a forum in which to express, develop, and refine his views on the role of art and culture within a new lexis populated by ‘masses’ and ‘class rulers.’ At PR Macdonald’s worry over the economic plight of the nation’s workers would continue to stand in contrast to his condemnation of their taste in culture. Yet this apparent apparent inconsistency is better seen as an evolving compartmentalization of concerns that defined Macdonald’s thought until the very end, as explored in the following pages.

57 Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald, pp. 47-49, 55-64. 58 The work, incidentally, was left unfinished. John Rodden and John Rossi, ‘Rebel with a Cause: Dwight Macdonald Remembered,’ Commonweal 113 (2006), accessed Novem- ber 27, 2011, online. 59 Macdonald, ‘Politics Past,’ pp. 9-12.

Chapter 2 Macdonald at Partisan Review

Originally conceived as the representative publication for the New York John Reed Society, Partisan Review’s stated modus operandi was the promotion of literary voices of proletarian dissent. Shaken by the scandal of the Moscow Tri- als and the American Communist Party’s (ACP) support for the United Front Against Fascism (or Popular Front), inaugurated in 1935, PR languished until 1937, when it was revived with Macdonald’s crucial financial help. When Mac- donald joined PR he had not written anything significant on culture or literature in four years. At the magazine he would ride a wave of reproach against popular entertainment that emerged as advances in technology made commercial culture more visible. PR’s editors, William Phillips and Philip Rhav, treated popular amusements as a threat to social progress. This focus produced a wealth of cultural criticism ranging mainly from literature to film, which rejuvenated Mac- donald’s interest in the subject.60 Like Macdonald, Phillips and Rahv were drawn to Marxism in the 1930s as they saw the capitalist world crumble around them. Phillips grew up in a petite bourgeoisie family, earning a Master’s degree in Literature at New York Uni- versity before his personal economic circumstances worsened to the degree that he joined the ACP, and eventually PR.61 Rahv meanwhile endured an impoverished childhood, ending his education prematurely at the age of sixteen when he found himself alone and unemployed in New York City during the height of the Great Depression. Between sleeping on park benches and standing in breadlines, Rahv took advantage of the warmth and stored knowledge of New York’s public libraries to indulge his keen interest in literature. He had become completely radicalized by the mid-‘30s, declaring in one of his early articles: “We must sev- er all ties with this lunatic civilization known as capitalism,” and dubbing himself “an intellectual assistant of the proletariat”62 Both men used a protective pseudonym due to their Jewish roots and connections with radical movements.63 At Partisan Review Phillips and Rahv strengthened their gravitation towards Marxism as a salve for their deep alienation from American society, pulling

60 Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America, pp. 137-39. 61 Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York: Oxford, 1986), pp. 30-35. 62 Quoted in Terry Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), p. 41. 63 Phillips’ family name was Livinsky, while Rahv was named Ivan Greenbaum. See Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World, p. 26.

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Macdonald along with them. Given the ACP’s growing influence during the early Depression and the Soviet Union’s still-intact but diminishing status as a nation that had achieved social and economic progress under a socialist system, Marxism provided a convenient defense within an analysis of the American experience. It also carried the thrill of a crusade to raise up all of mankind, which Phillips and Rahv tenuously connected with the excitement surrounding the emergence of cultural modernism. As Terry Cooney writes in The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and its Circle, the two intellectuals “placed themselves on the side of the new and vital – in the tradition of those writers and martyrs who had battled with the dullness and constriction of political and cultural repression.”64 Because the Communist Party was in the vanguard of those urging the importance of cultural achievement to society, the two became quixotically entranced with the idea that a socialist revolution could yield a cultural renaissance characterized by a “cosmopolitan culture, rooted in the dynamics of the interplay between society and the avant-garde.”65 According to Rahv, this “intellectual art” stood in opposition to the banality of “commercial” arts, with their “shallow optimism,” “open cash-valuation of life,” and “ut- ter lack of integrity.” Only art that articulated desolation, exposed philistinism and hypocrisy, and put forth biting social criticism was worth examining, as in times of class conflict and economic despair it could induce men to greater consciousness and action. Modernist literature, then, would find relevance in times when “economic conditions compel the masses to revolt against, not to accept, things as they are.”66 This cultural stance relied greatly on the lionization of modernist intellectual culture (placing heavy emphasis on the sensibility expounded by Picasso, Cézanne, and Kandinsky in the realm of visual arts, and James, Joyce, Eliot, and Pound in the world of letters) and the condemnation of popular entertainment and its acceptance and support of capitalism.67 By the mid-1930s the Partisan Review intellectuals had established modernist literature as the standard for aesthetic expression in America, and had desig-

64 Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle, pp. 44-45. 65 Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World, p. 116. 66 The above quotes come from Philip Rahv, ‘How the Waste Land Became a Flower Garden,’ Partisan Review 1 (September-October 1934), pp. 40-42. Though the article dealt primarily with literature, its principles can be applied to popular culture. See Gor- man, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America, pp. 144-45. 67 Despite his royalist sympathies, Eliot was inducted into this group because Rahv felt his writings cogently criticized contemporary life, so as to transcend these archaic political views. See Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the An- ti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: The University of North Caro- lina Press, 1987), p. 76.

Macdonald at Partisan Review 37 nated the critical intellectual as a central figure supporting the progress and integrity of culture.68 Perhaps needless to mention, this demand for social analysis and intricate density in art was an off-putting model for a shared, universal culture whose purpose was to tend to the concerns of average people. Regardless, PR’s cosmopolitan intellectual critique denounced all forms of artistic expression that did not take into account the complexity of modern existence, and instead offered one-dimensional, mechanical answers to life’s dilemmas. In op- posing such notions of culture and celebrating the glories of cultural upheaval against conventional value systems, the critique represented an aesthetic few artists dealt in and few consumers of culture embraced.69 Nonetheless, the loosely-connected avant-garde movement seemed to offer “the hope that the disrup- tion caused by modern progress in the arts and sciences [would] result in the end not only in the control of nature to humanity’s benefit, but…also promote universal justice, moral progress, and happiness.”70 Such interest in the avant-garde extended to Russian cinema after the October Revolution (particularly for Mac- donald), and its radical use of collage and montage techniques, which broke the banal grip of common perspective and realistic representation. From any standpoint, such radical notions and full acceptance of difficult art had absolutely no chance of widespread acceptance. But the overarching mindset had an influence on Macdonald, who was quick to lend his voice to PR’s developing line of criticism by targeting those who skirted a disturbing and multifaceted worldview in favor of the inordinately frivolous. Macdonald launched his first attack in this rigid vein on the New Yorker in a piece entitled ‘Laugh and Lie Down’ (1937). The New Yorker was founded in 1925 by Harold Ross, who envisioned it as an urbane periodical dedicated to reportage, humor, and short fiction.71 Blessed from its beginnings with an excellent staff that included E. B. White, the magazine quickly met with success among America’s middle and upper-middle classes due to White’s ‘Notes and Comments’ essays, which developed a distinctive voice known as “the New Yorker style.” Also characteristic was its diverse content. A typical edition of the eclectic magazine included subjects as disparate as profiles on Mohawk Indians in the steel industry to exposés on celebrity high-

68 See Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America for a more detailed explication of how this attitude evolved, pp. 137-57. 69 Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World, p. 26. 70 Ann Gibson, ‘Avante-Garde,’ in Critical Terms for Art History, eds. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 158. 71 James L. Baughman, Henry Luce and the Rise of the American News Media (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), p. 29.

38 Chapter 2 life, peppered throughout with droll cartoons of an apolitical nature.72 Having taken umbrage at these contents, Macdonald fires several salvos in ‘Laugh and Lie Down’s’ opening paragraph:

More persistently than any other magazine the New Yorker has exploited a distinctive attitude towards modern life. The typical New Yorker writer has given up the struggle to make sense out of a world which daily grows more complicated. His stock of data is strictly limited to the inconsequential. His Weltanschauung… – a term that would greatly irritate him – is the crudest sort of philistine “common sense.”

The resulting “intellectual amputations” and esoteric subjects consciously hide the harsh realities of the world from the New Yorker’s readers. The tone of the magazine is one of “a cocktail party at which the guests are intelligent but well bred. No subjects are taboo, so long as they are ‘amusing.’” Accordingly, the magazine exploits those desiring to adopt upper-class ways, who use it as a window into the wit and high-end sophistication of the big city. Its genius lies in not shocking anyone, and taking a monotonously unjudgmental stance on everything from the stock market crash of 1929 to class conflict and labor struggles. No serious cultural or social criticism appears, merely deferential paeans to captains of industry and “deodorized” descriptions that, for example, generically characterize the 1917 October Revolution as “a violent phase of Russian experience.” Hence the only integrity the New Yorker exhibits is “an accurate expression of a decaying social order.” To Macdonald, what betrays the New Yorker’s true sympathy for the upper- class elite is its cultivated aloofness from the problems of everyday life, and sheer avoidance of confronting such evils – a stance tantamount to moral suicide in view of the unbearable hardships of the economic depression: “In times like these, there is something monstrously inhuman in the deliberate cultivation of the trivial.” Moreover, the magazine’s detestable purpose consists in giving “our ruling class the even more satisfactory sensation of establishing a tradition in a landscape notably barren of such ornaments.” The greatest evidence of this function is the New Yorker’s copious advertising of Parisian gowns, high-priced wines, movie cameras, luxurious jewelry, airplanes, custom-made shoes, and window treatments. Macdonald gleans from this a portrait of its wealthier readers as well-traveled, concerned with quality clothes and restaurants, and interested in fashionable sports such as polo and tennis. He also snidely reports that any

72 Norman Sims, ‘Joseph Mitchell and the New Yorker Non-fiction Writer,’ Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century, ed. Norman Sims (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 82-103.

Macdonald at Partisan Review 39 problems they do have can be fixed by products like “magical ear stoppers,” which protect delicate ears from being awakened by the bothersome din of the city or countryside, and the “windshield wiper” powder compact, which auto- matically wipes the mirror clean when opened. In closing, Macdonald posits that: “It would be rash to assume that most of the 120,444 people who read the New Yorker every week are plutocratic enough to buy $50 shoes and $120 cur- tains.” On the contrary, it is more likely that most readers, “like most movie- goers, are comparatively humble folk who are willing to pay a small admission fee for a peep into the haute monde.” Consequently, any potential class- consciousness is complicated by the American tendency to “keep up with the Joneses.”73 ‘Laugh and Lie Down’ stands as part of Partisan Review’s larger call for culture critics to bring the problems of modern American life into the public arena for discussion. The New Yorker and its literary ilk countered these serious intentions. Also standing in the way was another odious obstacle: the masses themselves. This unfortunate fact is made clear in Macdonald’s subsequent series of PR articles on 1930s Soviet cinema, whose final installment seeks to il- luminate the mentality of the common Soviet citizen, and by implication the man on the street in general. The dissertations on Soviet cinema appeared within the context of PR’s ever-growing anti-Stalinism, which labeled the regime as a danger to modernist forms. The pieces helped Macdonald establish himself in intellectual circles as an uncompromising critic dedicated to the denunciation of escapist forms of culture. First came a two-part article, inauspiciously titled ‘The Soviet Cinema 1930-1938’ and ‘The Soviet Cinema 1930-38 Part II’ (1938), followed by ‘So- viet Society and its Cinema’ (1939). The series begins with the proclamation that “the Soviet cinema has been in a state of crisis, varied with periods of collapse, ever since 1930.” Mainly, Macdonald wishes to demonstrate how formerly celebrated directors and their artistic creations have been devastated by Sta- lin’s cultural policies. Stalin is not the only target. Macdonald makes numerous comparisons between Soviet cinema and Hollywood to establish a pattern of broad cultural atrophy during the decade. What embitters Macdonald most about the sorry state of Soviet cinema are his glorious memories of viewing Soviet films in small New York theaters during the late-1920s. Those who made the pilgrimage did so “as one might visit a celebrated cathedral or museum – reverently, expectantly.” Films such as Eisenstein’s Ten Days that Shook the World and The Battleship Potemkin, and Pudovkin’s The

73 Dwight Macdonald, ‘Laugh and Lie Down,’ Partisan Review 4 (December 1937), pp. 41-53.

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End of St. Petersburg and Storm Over Asia, left Macdonald with the impression that he, along with the other “avant-garde illuminati” present, had been treated to the “exhilarating consciousness of experiencing a new art form…the great modern art” [emphasis in original]. “In the darkened auditorium of the theater,” Mac- donald continues with nostalgia, “one came into a deep and dynamic contact with twentieth century life.” Yet as quickly as this exhilarating new cinematic movement appeared, it vanished. In the space of a few years its directors were discredited as “bourgeois” and “formalist” by Stalin’s regime, and forced to publicly re- cant their artistic indiscretions. “The clue to the decline of Soviet cinema,” Mac- donald charges, “is found in politics and not in esthetics [sic].” Macdonald details how between 1925 and 1929, dubbed “the Golden Age of the Russian cinema,” film producers and directors pioneered a variety of new film techniques, such as expressionism, montage, and newsreel documentary. Their collective achievement was nothing less than “a series of movies which not only surpassed anything either before or since, but were entirely different in technique.” These vast cinematic riches came closest to fulfilling a new ideal of modern aesthetic expression. Sadly, this vaunted experiment was swiftly suppressed by a “Third Period,” under which filmmaking was reorganized within the Five Year Plan. Stalin, having taken control of the state apparatus in 1928, complemented the forced collectivization of agriculture with “forcible proletari- anism in the arts.” For two years the effects were not felt in cinema, as the great silent film directors were in the middle of projects, and had gained such international prestige that the Soviet bureaucracy dared not encroach so boldly. But beginning in 1930 Stalin made a systematic attempt to exert control. Experimenta- tion was quashed by apparatchiks, and directors were assigned to propaganda projects designed to convince the Soviet people of the benefits of collectivization and industrialization in the simplest terms possible. Macdonald notes that the great themes of the previous period were class struggle and revolution – excellent material to dramatize. Collectivization, he argues, bears less legitimacy as an epic subject matter. Stalin’s policy, therefore, “laid waste the once- flourishing cinema industry as effectively as it laid waste the fertile Ukrainian farmlands.” By 1938, “[e]very single one of the radical innovations which Ei- senstein and his peers introduced” had been officially discouraged. Montage became a mere “memory,” and experimental techniques were replaced by a camera that “stays timidly inside the studio walls.” Members of the “Stalin School” now dominated – second-rate talents all too willing to fulfill “the political require- ments of the regime” by putting out a wash of propaganda and diversions designed to numb the audience, different from Hollywood’s “only in being techni-

Macdonald at Partisan Review 41 cally less competent.” This precipitous decline, Macdonald is eager to emphasize, does not end in the realm of cinema.74 Continuing the attack, ‘The Soviet Cinema 1930-38 Part II’ alleges that Sta- lin and his regime have wrought equally corrosive effects on the remaining artistic forms in the USSR, fostering the bland aesthetic of Soviet realism. Gestated in the name of direct communication with the people, the movement can only be described as vile:

Socialist realism is nothing more complicated than Stalinist politics applied to art. In architecture, it means classical colonnades; in literature, the banal historical novels of an Alexis Tolstoy; in music, the “tuneful” marching songs of Dzerzhinsky; in painting, the realistic French school of the last century, whose influence, outside the USSR, is today traceable chiefly in barroom art. In cinema it means, in one word, Hollywood.

Such works are obviously beyond any serious analysis, because they hold no inherent value. Much of their purpose is “nakedly political,” symbolized by Sta- lin’s wholly ignorant command that Shostakovich “abandon his discordant modern technique in favor of melodies the toiling masses could whistle on their way to work.” Just as exasperating is Pravda’s simultaneous attack on the great composer, whom they labeled “un-Soviet, unwholesome, cheap, eccentric, [and] tuneless,” and crudely admonished to write more like Glinka. Macdonald also expresses outrage at Pravda’s description of Joyce’s Ulysses as “the delirious babblings of a mad philosopher who has mixed all the known languages into one monstrous mess.” Considering these denunciations, Macdonald conjectures that the promotion of socialist realism appears no more than “the doctrine of a reactionary ruling class which must at all costs keep its artists and their mass audience safely under control.” In order to expose the increasingly clichéd fruits of Stalin’s impoverished and cynical cultural policies, Macdonald briefly catalogs contemporary Soviet cinema. Most of the recent output has come from the “workshop,” and cannot be “classified on any esthetic [sic] basis,” but by subject matter. First are films concerning the civil war period and revolution, which are superior due to the cinematic adaptability of the themes and the fact “they are living off the crumbs of the great silent film tradition.” Second are films made to order by the Kremlin, aimed at some short-term political goal and characterized by a dull, propagandistic feel. The final and most significant category has mainly proliferated during the past few years: “films modeled directly on Hollywood and quite deliber-

74 Dwight Macdonald, ‘The Soviet Cinema 1930-1938,’ Partisan Review 5 (July 1938), pp. 37-42.

42 Chapter 2 ately innocent of political content.” Macdonald puts down the rise of this Hol- lywood-style cinema to an increasing divergence between the interests of the relatively privileged bureaucracy and the common folk, which necessitates So- viet cinema’s transformation from a revolutionary stimulant to an opiate that lulls the masses into a state of dreary complacency. The regime recognizes that the proletariat needs its vicarious pleasures, making “the cinema of escape” a regular feature of Russian life, just as in America. The trend signals nothing less than a “dead end,” best represented by the appointment of a former NKVD of- ficer to head the new Committee on Cinema. Macdonald concludes: “With the arrival of the NKVD on the scene, the degradation of the cinema under the present regime may be said to have reached its logical and inevitable conclusion.” That is, art under full control and in direct service of the state.75 The final installment, ‘Soviet Society and its Cinema,’ turns attention to the question of the Soviet masses and their taste in culture. Macdonald asks whether or not the Soviet public once preferred, or rather could have preferred, the modernist creations of Eisenstein and Shostakovich. The inquiry strikes at the heart of the mass culture matter both in the USSR and USA: Could the masses appreciate what Macdonald and his fellow Partisan Review writers deemed avant- garde? Regardless of the forced nature of Stalin’s culturally destructive policies, Macdonald concedes that they have only succeeded because easily-digested art had so easily pleased the public:

In these articles I have emphasized, perhaps too much, the part played by the conscious policies of the Stalin regime in the decline of cinema. The responsibility of the Kremlin is indeed heavy. But let us not deceive ourselves. The Stalinist Thermi- dor has succeeded only because it found a response in the Russian masses.

This dynamic is termed the “Problem of Mass Taste,” accounted for by limited access to education during the Czarist era and the “grim and pernicious life” average Russians have for so long endured – rather than any inherent failings of intellect or national character. Although Macdonald admits the lack of satisfactory evidence regarding the Soviet masses’ response to cinema, it is no matter. The inarticulate nature of the Russian peasantry and the web of propaganda they live in, he feels, precludes accurate appraisal. Cited, however, are eyewitness accounts of audiences reacting to heroes with shouts of encouragement, villains with groans, and love scenes with imitation kisses, all of which leads to the conclusion that Russians are hardly averse to “good old-fashioned theatricalism.”

75 Dwight Macdonald, ‘The Soviet Cinema 1930-38 Part II,’ Partisan Review 5 (August- September 1938), pp. 36-60.

Macdonald at Partisan Review 43

Macdonald further confesses that even at the height of Soviet cinema’s great period, citizens favored Hollywood productions. In 1925 Moscow’s big block- buster was not Battleship Potemkin, but the American-made action epic The Thief of Baghdad, starring Douglas Fairbanks. Influenced by such box-office successes, Macdonald reports that the Soviet filmworks began to blatantly copy American products. Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton soon had their own Rus- sian counterparts, chased around Red Square by mock-Keystone cops to the great amusement of audiences across the USSR. The inclination towards light entertainment and easily interpreted Hollywood-style films also resulted in The End of St. Petersburg (a movie about the 1917 revolution that had a clear hero and plot) achieving greater popularity than the more difficult, aesthetically chal- lenging October. This seemingly universal penchant for simplistic enjoyment is not confined to the cinema houses. Macdonald’s analysis continues with a survey of the Soviet public’s response to the art of painting. In Moscow, he writes, the Museum of Western Art displays mainly contemporary works, exhibiting the moderns from Picasso to Cézanne. The Tretyakov Gallery, on the other hand, features works by nineteenth-century Russian academicians, such as Ilya Repin’s pretty winter sunsets. The public’s taste is determined by a look at the two competing institutions: “The Museum of Western Art is always empty, the Tretyakov always crowded.” At the latter, a Repin show attracted 8,000 viewers on its opening day, a Rem- brandt exhibition attracted 3,600 some time after. As for the Museum of West- ern Art, Macdonald quotes one attendee’s (a housewife named “Nikolskaya”) opinion of its formalist paintings: “They are stupidities, which it would be better not to show.” The Moscow newspaper interviewing her seconds the judgment: “She was right, and they have long since been replaced by others of a more artistic value.” Macdonald explains that the housewife’s reaction begs the following questions: “(1) to what degree is this expression of popular taste spontaneous and to what degree is it stimulated by official policy?, and (2) could this policy conceivably have guided mass taste into other channels?” The answers, to his mind, are thus: It is obvious that the works of art in the Tretykov are venerated; the museum has a bigger budget and is sanctioned by the state. The Museum of Western Art, in contrast, is treated with less respect, receives less funding, and often sees its most important works sold abroad for hard currency. Additionally, Macdonald refuses to accept that the Soviet audience has come to its own conclusions on the validity of modern painting, and instead blames Stalin’s regime, which has cleverly manipulated public taste. Macdonald inquires, somewhat tactlessly:

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Why, after all, should ignorant peasants prefer Repin to Picasso, whose abstract technique is at least relevant to their own primitive folk art as is the former’s realistic style? No, if the masses crowd into the Tretykov, it is largely because they have been conditioned to shun “formalism” and to admire “socialist realism.” The regime has conducted this conditioning with its usual thoroughness, and for its own political ends.

As a result, the works in the Museum of Western Art are taken to symbolize the shocking decadence of the West, while the Tretykov stands for the wonderful wholesomeness of the Russian Motherland. It is a matter of course, a product of the cultural education the masses receive under the Soviets. Had the regime chosen a different artistic period to extol, it would have been likewise widely accepted. Displaying a striking degree of optimism, Macdonald contends that, “the fact that it has been easy to popularize the conventional Hollywood type film does not mean that it is impossible to interest the masses in something more advanced.” To demonstrate, he points to how the Soviet cinema of the Golden Age had idealized the masses in a way most palatable to them. Similarly, he offers that the formalist style had been much more conducive to expressing mass heroism than the more conventional style that eventually prevailed. Now the masses were all but excluded from the silver screen, replaced by “gigantic images of Great Leaders.” Had Soviet cinema been left to develop without Stalin’s loath- some interference, who is to say that Russian taste would not have adjusted itself to an avant-garde aesthetic? In view of the mass popularity of cinema in Russia the conditions for improving the level of mass taste were firmly in place, but this possibility was brutally stunted by Stalin’s vicious determination to “corrupt and paralyze all culture.” Finally, then, “the Soviet ship of state [now] lies rotting at anchor in the same stagnant harbor…to which it has confined its artists.”76 Macdonald’s handling of the question of mass taste is most curious. He suggests that the masses have instincts that compel them toward cultural products of greatest simplicity, and simultaneously portrays them as having something within (also at the instinctual level) that might lead to admiration of the avant-garde, if, of course, encouraged by propaganda that extols the common man by means of formalist film techniques. Also, in the comparison of the Tretykov and the Museum of Western Art, Macdonald indicates that the lower orders are so mal- leable as to like what they are encouraged to like. This paradoxical troika, in which the sluggish minded are inherently capable of appreciating culture but inevitably duped away from it by greater forces, would later become a point of exploration.

76 Dwight Macdonald, ‘The Soviet Society and Its Cinema,’ Partisan Review 6 (Winter 1939), pp. 85-94.

Macdonald at Partisan Review 45

The Soviet cinema series brought to the fore a new and influential voice in the critical debates of the late 1930s and early 1940s – Clement Greenberg. Greenberg, after reading Macdonald’s final installment, composed a letter to PR in order to challenge several assumptions that he found misguided, particulary regarding the question of mass taste. The missive read:

It must be pointed out that in the West, if not everywhere else as well, the ruling class has always to some extent imposed a crude version of its own cultural bias upon those it ruled, if only in the matter of choosing diversions. Chromeotypes, popular music and magazines reflect and take their sustenance from the academicized simulacra of the genuine art of the past. There is a constant seepage from top to bottom, and kitsch (a wonderful German word that covers all this crap) is the common sewer.77

Impressed by these insights, Macdonald arranged a lunch with Greenberg, and offered him the opportunity to put down his thoughts for a feature article.78 The outcome was ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch,’ one of the century’s most illustrious statements on popular culture.79 ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ opens: “One and the same civilization produces simultaneously two such different things as a poem by T. S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, or a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover. All four are on the order of culture, and ostensibly, parts of the same culture and products of the same society.”80 The riddle is whether such diversity is part of “the natural order of things,” or something entirely new, “particular to our age.” Greenberg proposes that the answer is found in the concurrent development of modernist art critical of civilization and its conventions, and the emergence of the popular entertainment industry. He extols avant-garde art and its “superior consciousness

77 Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America, p 153. 78 Macdonald would later claim he “invented” Greenberg. Even forty years later he still insisted it was “the best thing [Greenberg] ever did.” See Trilling, ‘An Interview with Dwight Macdonald,’ pp. 126-27. 79 Greenberg would subsequently become a regular contributor to Partisan Review (he was made one of its editors just a year later in 1940) and go on to contribute regularly to the Nation (which he also edited from 1942-1949), the New York Times, and Commen- tary. He remains one of the most distinguished art critics of the twentieth century. See John O’Brian, ed. Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 1, Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. xviii. 80 The Post was a politically and culturally conservative periodical popular at the time, noted for its cover scenes of nostalgic Americana painted by Norman Rockwell. The magazine was a favorite target of the New York Intellectuals, Macdonald included.

46 Chapter 2 of history” for constituting “a new kind of criticism of society,” writing that its uniqueness rests in the revolutionary potential to educate people of the fact that the bourgeois order is merely one transition of many in the history of societal organization:

This criticism has not confronted our present society with timeless utopias, but has soberly examined in the terms of history and of cause and effect the antecedents, justifications and functions of the forms that lie at the heart of every society. Thus our present bourgeois social order was shown to be, not an eternal, “natural” condition of life, but simply the latest term in a succession of social orders.

Following this line of argument, Greenberg claims that the bohemian artists of the mid-nineteenth century had, “unconsciously for the most part,” finally attained perspective and thereby resisted the dominant society and its capitalist nature. Their “true and most important function” became “not to ‘experiment,’ but to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence” [emphasis in original]. Such artists, who retired from public life altogether in a quest to maintain the high level of their art, tried “in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on his own terms in the way nature itself is valid.” Put differently, they (listed as Picas- so, Mondrian, Miro, Kandinsky, Brancusi, Klee, Matisse, and Cézanne) derived inspiration from the medium in which they worked. Nothing, in Greenberg’s opinion, could have been nobler. What is, too, laudable about the avant-garde is its “specialization of itself, the fact that its best artists are artists’ artists, its best poets, poets’ poets.” But in this strength is found the avant-garde’s weakness, as its essential difficulty “has es- tranged a great many of those who were formerly capable of enjoying and appreciating ambitious art and literature, but who are now unwilling or unable to acquire an initiation into their craft secrets.” Herein appears a great hazard. Warns Greenberg: “No culture can develop without a social basis.” In a world in which the masses remain indifferent to art and the aristocratic elite is rapidly shrinking, this means only one thing, that “the survival in the near future of culture in general is thus threatened.” This fact persists despite deceptive indicators of success. Though Picasso exhibitions draw throngs, Eliot is part of the university curricu- lum, and modernist art still sells, Greenberg sees the emergence of a serious peril to cultural advancement – “Where there is an avant-garde, generally we also find a rear guard.” The rear guard Greenberg so harrowingly invokes is the “gigantic apparition” of “popular, commercial art and literature with their chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc., etc.” In other words, Arnold’s ‘anar-

Macdonald at Partisan Review 47 chy’ commodified, or ‘kitsch.’ Artists of a different sort produce such debased fodder, and are worthy only of the most withering contempt. In Greenberg’s view, the emergence and continuing rise of kitsch is connected to industrialization, urbanization and the widespread literacy that mirrored the avant-garde’s ascension. Agrarian workers who were swept up in this evolving system were excluded from its higher realms of artistic expression due to their economic situation. “[P]easants who settled in cities as proletariat and petty bourgeois learned to read and write for the sake of efficiency,” he explains, “but they did not win the leisure and comfort necessary for the enjoyment of the city’s traditional culture.” Lacking the folk culture that sustained them in the countryside, an “ersatz” culture developed to please those “insensible to the values of genuine culture.” Naturally, the value of this ersatz culture is nil:

Kitsch, using for raw materials the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates…insensibility. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experiences and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money – not even their time.

Kitsch also draws on the “life blood” of established cultures, continues Green- berg, which it cruelly co-opts in the corrupt borrowing of “devices, tricks, strat- agems, rules of thumb, [and] themes.” These conventions are converted into a mechanized system that depends on profit, which snares even those potentially interested in high culture by ignominiously thrusting upon them a “faked article.” Such wicked deceptions, in a nod to Macdonald, come in the form of the New Yorker, which Greenberg deems “fundamentally high-class kitsch for the luxury trade.” Thus for those poor but ambitious souls burning to improve their cultural lot:

Traps are laid even in those areas, so to speak, that are the preserves of genuine culture. It is not enough today, in a country like ours, to have an inclination towards the latter; one must have a true passion for it that will give him the power to resist that faked article that surrounds and presses in on him from the moment he is old enough to look at the funny papers. Kitsch is deceptive. It has many different levels, and some of them are high enough to be dangerous to the naïve seeker of the true light.

What is worse, kitsch has broken out of its original city confines into the countryside, destroying folk culture and superseding geographical, national, and cultural boundaries. With a ring of prophecy, Greenberg describes kitsch’s eventual

48 Chapter 2 triumph as a “universal culture,” diluting native cultures as it finds acceptance from South America to China – by anyone’s measure, a prescient comment on globalization. Though Macdonald’s and Greenberg’s thoughts on mass-produced culture have much in common, Greenberg’s analysis differs from Macdonald’s in one crucial aspect: the reasons for the popularity of kitsch. While Macdonald, in his Soviet cinema series, portrays the public as half-willing but ultimately conditioned by the Soviet regime to accept only the realistic and easily interpreted, Greenberg blames simple human nature for kitsch’s success. To illustrate his contention, Greenberg refers to Macdonald’s example of the “ignorant Russian peasant” beholding Picasso on the one hand and the Russian landscape artist Repin on the other. When asked to choose his favorite, Greenberg is certain that the peasant will inevitably point to the Repin, not due to conditioning, but his nature. In the Russian painting:

[T]he peasant recognizes and sees things in the way in which he recognizes and sees things outside of pictures – there is no discontinuity between art and life…that Re- pin can paint so realistically that identifications are self-evident immediately and without any effort on the part of the spectator – that is miraculous. The peasant is also pleased by the wealth of self-evident meanings which he finds in the picture: “it tells a story.”

Picasso, conversely, demands a “cultivated spectator” who derives pleasure from “reflection upon the immediate impression left by the plastic values.” Without putting forth this additional effort, the public is rendered incapable of appreciating anything higher. In their passivity, they instead gravitate towards the “short cut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art.” Greenberg further emphasizes that this tendency is even more highly developed in the United States, reminding the reader that: “It is lucky, however, for Repin that the peasant is protected from the products of American capitalism, for he would not stand a chance next to a Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell.” ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’ ultimately identifies popular culture as a means to dominate the masses, presenting ominous explications of the cultural policies of Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Soviet Russia. Greenberg describes the “encouragement of kitsch” as an “inexpensive way in which totalitarian regimes seek to ingratiate themselves with their subjects.” The masses are flattered because culture is brought down to their level, while kitsch keeps the autocrats in “close contact to the ‘soul’ of the people.” The avant-garde is a danger in these nations, as it can potentially alienate the very masses that provide a support base

Macdonald at Partisan Review 49 for the crude dictatorships. Therefore it remains outlawed. In only slightly less pernicious form the situation is much the same in the United States, where mighty demagogues speak of art for the masses, and what is left of quality art faces ineluctable extinction at the rough and ready hands of capitalism’s cultural masters. The masses naturally sit helpless, unable to resist the stultifying pull of commercialism. Importantly, Greenberg explores a trend Macdonald would pick up on and consistently explore in his later analyses of mass culture. Greenberg fears that the lure of Hollywood and the like will absorb otherwise legitimate artists into the shady realm of art for profit, citing the “puzzling borderline case” of the popular novelist John Steinbeck as one such forerunner. Writing that the pressure of kitsch and the lure of the market could make such artists succumb and modify their work, Greenberg presages that the consequences will be devastat- ing to “true culture.” The emergence of sophisticated kitsch will cut into the consumer base for the high arts, and blur the crucial distinction between the two, creating a repellent cultural mire. The culture enjoyed by those of intelligence, therefore, is a separate and sacred entity that needs to be cordoned off from the brutish ignoramuses at the bottom. Under this belief, both avant-garde artists and the few serious critics who appreciate them constitute the only valid hope for a culture spinning into the murky abyss of commercialization. Without the two groups, only exploitation will remain. Paramount, then, is the ferocious defense of advanced art from both the masses and the machine of popular entertainment. In evincing such concern for “the naïve seeker of the true light” (certainly invoking – intentionally or not – culture in the Arnoldian sense), Green- berg expresses alarm that the higher arts will also experience a gradual siphon- ing off of their potential audience.81 This was an issue that would continue to obsess Macdonald throughout his career, which he would dub the problem of ‘Midcult.’ Greenberg’s heavily critical view of the unwashed masses and the rising protest against capitalist corruption of culture would also go on to define thought on mass culture for the next two decades, with Macdonald becoming the leading figure in a self-imposed struggle for the maintenance of critical and artistic standards against the swelling tide of mass culture. For the time being, however, Macdonald found a more immediate foe in the Popular Front and its exponents, who presented the main challenge to the aesthetic preached by him and his PR peers. In 1935 the American Communist Party vigorously condemned the New Deal as a co-opting of otherwise attractive socialist ideas. The situation shifted dramatically when Stalin, fearful of Hitler’s Germany, called for an international

81 Clement Greenberg, ‘Avante-Garde and Kitsch,’ Partisan Review 6 (1939), pp. 34-47.

50 Chapter 2 alliance to stop the expansion of fascism.82 US communist leaders rallied to the cause, recruiting leftist writers and intellectuals to promote the anti-fascist alliance under the slogan: “Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism.” In- spired anew by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, American writers, intellectuals, and artists raced to express their support for the Loyalists and their dedication to democracy in the United States. This renewal of political engagement stimulated by the Popular Front, along with the social and economic advances made during the New Deal, created a significant change in cultural tenor. While the writings of the early ‘30s reflected America’s entrenched disillusionment, pessimism, and cynicism, the second half of the decade gave way to a more positive vision of the future. The New Deal assisted by furnishing grants and wages to artists through the Works Progress Administration, prompting a celebration of America. This expression of cultural nationalism was best represented by Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1938), with its imperturbable, hard- scrabble family, the Joads, and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938), which detailed the precious daily routines of hearty New England stock at the turn of the century. Composers, too, looked to typically American themes for inspiration. Aaron Copland drew on western myths and folk melodies for Billy the Kid (1938), and George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess (1935) dealt with the lives of sympathetic African Americans in Charleston, Virginia. As the decade ended, a fascination with America’s past set in. Historical recreations of colonial village life became regular outing-places, and historical novels such as Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1938) became best sellers. The celebration of America in the arts continued to thrive even as the Popular Front disintegrated in the wake of the infamous Nazi/Soviet non-aggression pact that divided Poland, and reached a climax with the United States’ entry into World War II in 1941 after the attack on Pearl Harbor.83 Macdonald and PR viewed the Popular Front’s devotion to American ex- pressive forms as an artistic and political dead end that ignored the transformative superiority of the avant-garde in favor of a complacent and dumb patriot- ism. Rahv, for one, summed up his criticisms of this mentality in contemptuous terms: “I see that mindset not only as unrevolutionary but as profoundly bourgeois in its political amorphousness, evasion of historical choice, and search for formulas of empty reassurance.”84 Macdonald added that the Popular Front

82 Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World, pp. 113-15. 83 Paul Boyer, et al., The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People, from 1865 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), pp. 747-49. 84 Quoted in Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World, p. 115.

Macdonald at Partisan Review 51 sought to “tame the rank and file.”85 Anyone who supported such grossly pathetic cultural ideals invited rebuke. One leading exponent of the celebration of American ways was Van Wyck Brooks, who would incur raging scorn from Macdonald. Brooks had been a pessimistic critic of American culture during the First World War, and in his work for the periodical the Freeman had constantly referred to the “thinness” and “sterility” of the country’s literary output, noting the need for American writers capable of “calling to life the innumerable impulses that make a society rich and significant, of opening up new paths and directing floods of energy that refuse to flow in the old channels.” His perspective altered radically in the following years due to personal struggles. In 1926 Brooks suffered a nervous breakdown brought on by his inability to finish a biography of Emerson. He entered a succession of hospitals and sanitariums, finally emerging to write a series of books in praise of American literature. In the most famous, The Opinions of Oliver Allston (1941), he collected his numerous writings under a quasi-autobiographical persona (the titular Oliver Allston) who commented on the current literary scene.86 Controversy was subsequently inflamed by a 1941 speech Brooks delivered at the Second Annual Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion at Co- lumbia University, in which he proposed that writers be put into two categories: ‘primary’ and ‘secondary.’ A primary writer was one “who bespeaks the collective will of the people, of his group, of his nation; and of mankind,” and displays an optimistic, positive attitude to his characters and audience. Thus, “through him humanity breathes and thinks and sings.” Such writers attracted wide fol- lowings, and expressed pleasure at the accomplishments, values, and beliefs of their people and nation, as well as civilization in general. Secondary writers, meanwhile, were negative doubters who disdained society’s fundamental values. Making matters worse, their abstruse writing styles daunted would-be readers, accounting for the minuscule audiences they drew. In Brooks’ judgment, the supposedly brilliant form secondary writers presented lacked concrete content. This literary demarcation aimed at bringing disrepute on “sick” writers such as Eliot, James, Pound, and Joyce by questioning their ability to express the prevailing temper of their era. Instead, Brooks suggested that writers the likes of Whitman and Whittier serve to establish a genuine, inclusive, and unique Amer- ican culture.87

85 Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald, p. 73. 86 Quoted in Raymond Nelson, Van Wyck Brooks: A Writer’s Life (New York: E. P. Dut- ton, 1981), pp. 158-59, 180-244. 87 Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World, p. 118.

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The implications of Brooks’ ruminations brought forth a torrent of abuse from fellow literary men convinced that he harbored nationalistic and even fascist sympathies. Eliot drolly deemed his opinions “depressingly reminiscent of a certain political version of biology.”88 Brooks’ divisive contentions, however, garnered vital support from the poet Archibald MacLeish, whom President Roosevelt had recently appointed Librarian of Congress in recognition of his complimentary writings on the New Deal.89 In this hallowed capacity, MacLeish wasted no time in agitating for the administration’s war aims. In two public lectures, ‘The Irresponsibles’ and ‘Post-War Writers and Post-War Readers,’ (both later printed in the Nation) he sternly admonished his fellow writers to abandon criticism of America, singling out Hemmingway and Dos Passos for having “irresponsibly” questioned the cultural values and political beliefs that justified US intervention in World War I. Similar displays of imprudent disapproval, MacLeish insisted, could deprive the nation of the self-assurance and vigor required to face down the fascist threat represented by World War II.90 Like many, Macdonald took exception to the arguments of Brooks and MacLeish, and fired away in ‘Kulturbolschewismus Is Here’ (the title referring to the Nazi’s policy of ridding Germany of ‘degenerate’ modern art through support for more nationalistic forms). The essay appeared along side numerous attacks against MacLeish, who had been branded an “unconscious fascist” by the Ameri- can Left for his remarks.91 Macdonald begins ‘Kulturbolschewismus Is Here’ by likening the “Brooks- MacLeish thesis” to Stalin’s cultural policies, which are indicative of “the period of reaction we are living through.” In the absence of any domestic revolutionary movement, progressive intellectuals are now embracing bourgeois values, and even advocating “a totalitarian solution” to artistic dissent. With considerable rancor, Macdonald charges:

Van Wyck Brooks’ speech was a Dadaist gesture in reverse. Dadaist in the furious invective, the wild statements, the general air of provocative hyperbole; only the madly ringing alarm clocks to interrupt the speaker and the stench of bombs to drive out the audience were lacking. In reverse because the apparatus was turned in defense of bourgeois-Philistine values [emphasis in original]. The comparison is unfair to the Dadaist, whose antics were both logical and deliberate. Brooks was apparently serious in his clowning.

88 Quoted in Nelson, Van Wyck Brooks: A Writer’s Life, p. 245. 89 Baughman, Henry Luce and the Rise of the American Mass Media, p. 70. 90 Scott Donaldson, Archibald MacLeish: An American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), pp. 333-35. 91 David Barber, ‘Archibald MacLeish’s Life and Career,’ American National Biography, eds. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 2.

Macdonald at Partisan Review 53

Elaborating on Brooks’ thoughts, Macdonald details the antithesis between those primary writers who celebrate the constructive, positive, collective life of the people, and the great themes of courage, honor, and love – and those who celebrate the death-drive while scorning, doubting, and rejecting. At Brooks’ listing of primary (Homer, Erasmus, Milton, Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, Whitman, Emerson, Whittier) and secondary (Joyce, Pound, Nietzsche, Eliot) writers, Macdonald scoffs: “This is childishness, ignorance [and] nonsense.” He notes that every primary writer on Brooks’ list is of the past, while contemporary writers make up those designated as “secondary.” Conceding that it might be logically possible that today’s writers have not lived up to the aesthetic merits of those who came before, Macdonald nonetheless points to the fact that Brooks is not making an aesthetic judgment, but a historical one: that “Eliot, Joyce and the rest are bad writers” because they do not “believe in progress and the ‘march of humanity,’” and therefore do not “truly render ‘the sense of the age.’” To Brooks’ confused mind, these writers have somehow highjacked the modern literary establishment and imposed upon it their frustrated value system. It was no matter if in actuality their perspective reproduced the fragmentary and traumatic nature of modern times. In the simplest terms, Macdonald accuses Brooks of ignoring the plain logic that primary writers exuded primary characteristics in primary historical periods. More myopically, Brooks adds generalization to misconception in assuming Homer, Erasmus, Milton, and Dostoyevsky all wore “the spiritual costume of Victorian humanitarianism.” Quoting Brooks’ speech directly, Macdonald ridicules the notion that “health, will, courage [and] faith in human nature is the dominant mood in the history of literature.” Instead, we live in “a world where such beliefs are in violent conflict with reality.” Unable to change this simple fact, Brooks, in his reverence for tradition, has been forced to “denounce as somehow responsible for this reality those writers whose work most truthfully reflects it.” This Macdonald cannot not abide, dubbing the “reactionary” Brooks “our leading mouthpiece for totalitarian cultural values,” and reproving him for killing “the living tradition” of the avant-garde “for the sake of a sapless re- spectability.” Macdonald asks: “He scolds the coterie writers for the ‘negati- vism’ and ‘death-drive’ but what could be more nihilistic than his own rejection of the whole body of significant writing of our time?” Further arguing the ill- conceived nature of Brooks’ position, Macdonald points out that he does not name even one “primary” writer living and working in 1941, because “to do so would have given the whole show away.” He does, however, admit that there are writers on the literary scene who,

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put into practice what Brooks preaches…they accept modern society, they are positive, constructive, optimistic, popular, and they are firm believers in progress. …Their work, however, turns out to be worthless as literature and also profoundly anti-human. It is printed in, among other periodicals, the Saturday Evening Post.

Having dispatched Brooks, Macdonald brings Archibald McLeish into the fray, deriding his attack on literary “irresponsibles” who fail to uphold patriotic values. Such censure of those who take political stands and are critical of Amer- ican society is a call for an “official approach to culture” reminiscent of Stalin- ism, under which the state plays an intrusive role in censoring, regulating, and legitimating the arts. Expanding the comparison, Macdonald additionally suggests that Goebbels, in his quest to destroy “degenerate” art, would most certainly approve of McLeish’s sentiments. Declaring that such practices are equally iniquitous under the Soviets, Nazis, or the United States government, Macdon- ald explains:

“Kulturbolschewismus,” “formalism,” “coterie writing,” “irresponsibles,” – the terms differ for strategic reasons, but the content – and the Enemy – is the same. The official approach to art has for its aim the protection of a historically reactionary form of society against the free inquiry and criticism of the intelligentsia. It is an attempt to impose on the writer from outside certain socio-political values, and to provide a rationalization for damning his work aesthetically if he fails to conform to these social values [emphasis in original].

Macdonald concludes with the following warning: “The recent growth of this tendency over here is an ominous sign of the drift towards totalitarianism. It is a matter of cultural life and death to resist this tendency. …The old battles must be fought again, the old lessons learned once more.”92 ‘Kulturbolschewismus is Here’ is perhaps the most passionate defense of the aesthetic ideals cherished by Macdonald and his PR colleagues. It also provides a measure of his deep concern over literary and cultural matters in early-1940s America, and the degree to which that concern was in many ways political. The independence of the artist to criticize society and his imperative to do so reigned supreme, while the conflation of MacLeish with Goebbels demonstrates both the dangers Macdonald perceived to artistic freedom in the United States, and his steely determination to counter any such leanings. But political censorship concerns aside, the ‘Brooks-MacLeish thesis’ also represented a formula for a commoditized popular culture of empty, patriotic messages, artlessly washing

92 Dwight Macdonald, ‘Kulturbolschewismus Is Here,’ Partisan Review 8 (November- December 1941), pp. 442-51

Macdonald at Partisan Review 55 over an ever more self-satisfied public. The triumph of this sort of commercialization was unthinkable, and embodied everything Macdonald was fighting, rhe- torically, so ferociously against. In the early 1940s Macdonald also began to battle his fellow Partisan Re- view editors over the direction the magazine was taking. The main point of contention was his written protests against the United States entering World War II, coupled with a series of essays arguing against siding with the Allies in any capacity. These sentiments peppered Partisan Review in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, causing much editorial consternation, and eventually creating a rift that could not be bridged. Macdonald later complained: “I kept writing these antiwar things and they didn’t write anything. They wanted to avoid the whole issue of the war.”93 While Phillips and Rahv supported their country and government, Macdonald went his own route. In PR he agitated for a “third camp” that would provide an alternative to the equally imperialist Axis and Allies. As a movement committed to socialism, Macdonald thought the third camp could provide some opportunity for revolutionary action in the eventual wake of the war, when he hoped both capitalism and Soviet communism would emerge as fully discredited.94 This unrealistic vision was stated most fully in what was to be one of his last articles for PR in 1943, entitled ‘The Future of Democratic Values,’ which expressed Macdonald’s concerns about the rise of mass society and its relation to mass culture, and his growing disenchantment with Marxism. ‘The Future of Democratic Values’ deals mainly with the failure of Marxist theory in the absence of worldwide revolution. What disheartens Macdonald greatly is the waning of the idealism that predominated during the first years of the war, when it was (fraudulently) cast as a struggle for world democracy by the United States government and Allied leaders. As military victory comes nearer, one sees the measured discharge of optimistic slogans about the future, lest they prove embarrassing during postwar settlements. What worries more is that “the antagonism between actual policies and formal principles has become too acute to be bridged by even the most powerful propaganda.” Macdonald cites the US government’s attempts to weaken labor unions, the persistence of Jim Crow in military and civilian life, a new and regressive tax regime, and the reassertion of corporate imperatives in government policy. His postwar disillusionment had come during the war, and larger problems still loomed.

93 Quoted in Shirley Broughton, ‘Interview with Dwight Macdonald,’ Interviews with Dwight Macdonald, ed. Michael Wreszin (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2003), p. 171. 94 Cummings, ‘Resistance and Victimization: Dwight Macdonald in the 1940s,’ p. 221.

56 Chapter 2

More and more there is a defeatist mentality spreading worldwide regarding the potential betterment of human existence. In somber tones Macdonald laments:

Most political thinking has not only abandoned the old optimism of progress, but also the very notion of any consistent attempt to direct the evolution of society in a desirable direction. Submission to the brute force of events, choice between evils rather than positive programs, a skepticism about basic values and ultimate ends, a refusal to look too far ahead – this is the mood.

With this decline in hope has come a new threat to the “free development of the individual,” and ultimately, the system of values established by the French and American Revolutions. Belief in the pursuit of happiness, the goodness of human nature, democratic institutions, and progress have come into conflict with the development of capitalism, which uses technologically-advanced production methods to enslave mankind instead of liberate it – often under the aegis of mass culture. Technology has, in fact, brought about a multitude of horrors with not only cultural, but moral, societal, and political dimensions:

Man has learned to master nature so well that we use the most advanced technology to blast to bits the fabric of culture. Art museums, hospitals, vast industrial works, ancient churches and modernistic housing projects, whole cities like Warsaw, Cov- entry, Cologne, and Nuremburg – all are being destroyed with the most admirable efficiency week after week, month after month. Everyone can read and write, popular education is a reality – and so the American masses read pulp fiction and listen to soap operas on that triumph of technology, the radio, and the German and Russian masses are the more easily indoctrinated with a lying and debased official culture.

In the final analysis, advanced mass society appears to mean the unfettered development of “vast power-States, military-socialist in form, which are devastat- ing the globe with their internecine struggles.” Not even the seeming decline of capitalism can cheer Macdonald’s spirits. To him, the advance of collective economic systems and state intervention in the economy does not mean a victory for the working class, but rather the establishment of “bureaucratic collectivism.” This new societal model does not eliminate the possibility of socialist revolution, but leads directly to fascism. Faced with this appalling reality, one has a choice between the “new totalitarian values” and the “old democratic values,” whose hope of perpetuation lies solely in “revolutionary socialism.” Macdonald concludes with a call for revolution, laud- ing the mass actions of Russians of the October Revolution’s early years, the Spanish people during the first years of their civil war, and America’s auto- workers, who prevailed against General Motors in the sit-down strikes of 1937.

Macdonald at Partisan Review 57

Despite the rosy send off, the gloomy spirit of the article clearly reveals Mac- donald’s legitimate apprehension concerning the future of the United States, and of the global situation in general.95 Nonetheless Macdonald, still striving to be the ‘happy warrior of the mind,’ remained committed to social criticism and revolution – though doused with no mean quantity of pessimism. This disposition did not prevail among his colleagues. Feeling that PR should no longer be a vehicle for radical politics, Phil- lips and Rahv sought to expel their troublesome associate over what they termed his goals of “politicizing” the periodical – quite a risky maneuver considering Macdonald’s apartment served as PR’s headquarters. Frustrated, Macdonald declared that the publication had become no more than an anthology of culture – “not the kind of magazine I would like to give a large amount of time to right now.”96 In his 1957 essay ‘Politics Past,’ which prefaces his anthology Memoirs of a Revolutionist: Essays in Political Criticism, Macdonald later recorded that after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Phillips Rahv began “to feel that it was their war and their country,” while he held fast to his ideals, opposed as ever.97 Macdonald parted with Partisan Review in July of 1943, sealed with an open letter of resignation in which he ridiculed Phillips and Rahv for abandoning their former political radicalism and social concern. With his departure, he predicted PR would mutate into an ineffectual academic journal of literary criticism (and he was largely correct). The tenure at Partisan Review, though bitter its end, provided Macdonald with significant influences for his own critique of mass culture and stoked his desire to safeguard the perpetuation of high culture from the demands of the marketplace. The time at PR also impressed upon Macdonald the political nature of the culture problem, expressed in later essays. As a final measure of the PR circle’s influence on Macdonald, he also changed his harsh opinion of Eliot, henceforth including him in the pantheon of modernist deities. Likewise, Mac- donald more fully embraced the modernist canon – in marked contrast to his earlier declaration in ‘Robinson Jeffers’ that Joyce, who would later serve as his literary exemplar, listed among the ‘portents’ of literature’s demise. Still, it must be noted that Macdonald’s fascination with the avant-garde did not, as some of his comments in ‘Kulturbolschewismus is Here’ might suggest, represent a rejection of all other strains of culture. During this period he firmly supported the imperative “to fight for the preservation of the best of bourgeois civilization as

95 Dwight Macdonald, ‘The Future of Democratic Values,’ Partisan Review 10 (July- August 1943), pp. 324-33. 96 Quoted in Epstein, ‘Dwight Macdonald: Sunburned by Ideas,’ online. 97 Macdonald, ‘Politics Past,’ p. 25.

58 Chapter 2 well as for the raising of that civilization to a higher level” – demonstrating his independence from PR’s insistence on the cultural vanguard’s almost sole claim to legitimacy, as well as from the totality of their left-wing critique.98 These cultural stances would be crucial to future statements, particularly in light of Mac- donald’s next project. His letter of resignation from PR trumpeted his intention to start a new project that would feature intellectuals still concerned with societal and political questions, and that would deal with culture as an expression of such concerns. That magazine would be Politics.

98 Wreszin, A Rebel In Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald, pp. 124, 82.

Chapter 3 Politics and Culture

Just as the break from Fortune allowed Macdonald to make a name for himself in New York’s intellectual circles, leaving Partisan Review freed him to concentrate on the issues and topics he found most intriguing without risk of interference. Along with his wife’s inheritance and a trust fund that garnered $4,000 a year, Macdonald started Politics, which like PR was run out of his own home. The journal, which lasted a mere five years (1944-1949), attracted contributions from a large number of leading thinkers, including C. Wright Mills, Daniel Bell, George Orwell, Irving Howe, and Marshal McLuhan, and was known for printing the more controversial and provocative opinions of the immediate postwar era.99 Today, the magazine is regarded as a unique voice in 1940s political discourse, which featured the uncensored opinions of “radical intellectuals who were increasingly critical of both Marxism and progressive liberalism.”100 Poli- tics’ subscribers were approximately 5,000 strong, a fact that often left Macdon- ald feeling like an isolated voice among a cacophony of periodicals with much greater circulation. Yet the voice was his. In ‘Politics Past,’ Macdonald writes of his “role of editor, publisher, owner, proofreader, layout man, and chief contributor,” and the deeply personal quality Politics exhibited.101 His views dominated the magazine’s content, much of which dealt with two apparently incongruous main issues: the implications of World War II and American popular amusements.102 As for the latter, ‘A Theory of Popular Culture’ appeared in the maid- en edition as Macdonald’s first attempt at a full analysis of the commercialization of entertainment. ‘A Theory of Popular Culture’ explores the dichotomy between elite and mass art, presenting a model for their mutual evolution indebted to Greenberg’s ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch.’ It commences: “For about a century, Western culture has really been two different cultures: the traditional kind – let us call it ‘High Culture’ – that is chronicled in the textbooks, and a ‘Popular Culture’ manufactured wholesale for the mass market.” This delineation amounts to a historically

99 Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald, pp.130-37. 100 Cummings, ‘Resistance and Victimization: Dwight Macdonald in the 1940s,’ p. 213. 101 Macdonald, ‘Politics Past,’ p. 27. 102 Though Macdonald only wrote two significant essays on popular culture during Poli- tics’ run, he consistently featured other writers with concerns similar to his on the topic. See Gorman Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America, pp. 174-76.

60 Chapter 3 understood truth, but a dangerous one. As democratic, capitalist political structures developed in the West along with widespread literacy, the “old upper-class monopoly of culture” was impiously usurped by the lowly orders of “the newly awakened masses.” Acknowledging their demand for diversion, enthusiastic en- trepreneurs took advantage of innovative technology that enabled the cheap and easy production of books, periodicals, and music, thereby slaking mass thirst. In the concluding stages of this paradigm, in other words the present, technology has produced forms of entertainment custom-made and “specially adapted” for mass audiences and mass dissemination, such as cinema and radio. These amusements now constitute something new, a “popular culture” that echoes the new organization of society, making it “peculiar to modern times.” Setting down a cornerstone of his perspective, Macdonald casts popular culture as “a continuation of the old Folk art” – though with one crucial and detri- mental difference. In times past, there were many unique cultures generated by common people, grown “from below.” Distinguished by their origins, these folk arts were based in real people’s experiences and heritage, forming “a spontaneous, autochthonous expression, shaped by the people themselves, pretty much without the benefit of High Culture, to satisfy their own needs.” In contrast, modern popular culture is imposed from above, “manufactured by technicians hired by the ruling class and working within the framework of High Culture.” This power shift means but one thing: exploitation of consumers by producers. Popular culture, Macdonald insists, “manipulates the cultural needs of the masses in order to make profit for their rulers” – adding: “It is very different to satisfy popular tastes [than] to exploit them, as Hollywood does” [emphasis in original]. In a slight adaptation of Greenberg, Macdonald explains that before, the people’s folk art was politically independent of the ruler’s culture. But the spread of popular culture, called “an instrument of social domination,” has integrated the masses into a debased form of upper-class culture that has little to offer other than a generalized propaganda value. “If one had no other data to go on,” Mac- donald jibes, “a study of Popular Culture would reveal capitalism to be an exploitive class society and not the harmonious commonwealth its apologists say it is.” And there is still another serious peril popular culture represents. Perhaps the most menacing aspect of the growth of mass entertainment is the corrupting influence it potentially represents to high culture. In the past folk art and high culture existed “in fairly watertight compartments” that corresponded with “the sharp line between the common people and the aristocracy.” But, the “irruption of the masses onto the political stage in the last two decades has broken down this compartmentalization, with disastrous results.” During the era of folk art and high culture the lower classes were free of cultural exploitation. Likewise, the producers of aristocratic arts were sequestered from the demands

Politics and Culture 61 of the marketplace and “the crude tastes of the masses.” These masses, however, have the occasional power to surprise. Oddly enough, Macdonald designates “exceptional areas” of modern popular culture that not only show the people are capable of appreciating art, but restore the old “high/folk art” compartmentalization. In the realm of folk art these include: Krazy Kat, jazz, and early Disney cartoons, while the pre-1930 cinema of Griffiths, Stroheim, Chaplin, and “the Russians” make up an avant-gardist high culture that has flourished, as all have been popular with the public. Despite these occasional happy occurrences, Mac- donald avers that the overall effect by the 1940s is the cheapening of cultural production as a form of domination. In addition, this detestable dynamic has be- gun to mutate, profoundly affecting the high culture of the dominators and producing a world where good art competes with kitsch, and serious ideas compete with commercialized formulas for the affections of the undiscriminating many. In an environment where higher art forms are forced to battle for audience with commercial products, Macdonald is certain of the former’s eventual demise at the hands of “Gresham’s Law,” which dictates that “bad stuff drives out the good, and the worst drives out the bad [because] the bad is more easily enjoyed than the good.” Reader’s Digest, the most successful magazine of the 1920s,103 serves as an illustration:

[H]ere is a magazine which in a few years has attracted enormous circulation simply by reducing to even lower terms the already superficial formula of commercial periodicals. Where Harper’s treats in six pages a theme requiring twelve, Reader’s Di- gest cuts the six pages to two, making it three times as “readable” and three times as superficial.

Referring to this downward drift as an “infection [that] cannot be localized,” Macdonald warns that: “Folk Art perished speedily at the hands of Popular Cul- ture; the death struggles of High Culture are more protracted, but they are taking place.” By ‘High Culture’ Macdonald means primarily the avant-garde movement that appeared between 1890 and 1930, though his earlier references to the aristocratic past betray an equally Arnoldian conception. As he describes it, in previous centuries elite forms of expression were appropriated and consumed by the aristocracy and reflected their interests, religious views, and tastes. In the present phase, “the genuine High Culture of this period is pretty much identical

103 Reader’s Digest, still popular today, reprints pieces originating from other sources, but in highly abbreviated form. Marked by a highly conservative bent, each piece is not to take more than ten to fifteen minutes to read. See Baughman, Henry Luce and the Rise of the American News Media, pp. 30-31.

62 Chapter 3 with Avant-gardism,” wherein creative geniuses such as Joyce, Picasso, and Stravinsky had “made a desperate attempt to fence off some area where the serious artist could still function.” Or put another way, as Greenberg explained in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch,’ they “refused to compete” with the market. In these elevated realms a new type artistic of success was born, creating “a compartmentalization of culture, on the basis of aristocracy of talent rather than social power.” Macdonald sees the avant-garde as a positive development that worked in tandem with the radical political movements of the same age, though he admits there was little common ground between them aesthetically or politically. And though such artistic advances had been possible for a time, Macdonald is convinced that the American cultural and political climate has degenerated into a “deeply reactionary period” due to the rise of fascism and the exposure of the Soviet Union as a murderous totalitarian nightmare. The prevailing temper, in his sober estimation, induces men and artists to “cling to the evils they know rather than risk possibly greater ones by pressing forward.” Macdonald observes that market forces are steadily converging to produce a pseudo-sophisticated mish-mash of high and low culture (a movement that he would identify as ‘Midcult’ sixteen years later). The growing popularity of trash literature such as Reader’s Digest, coupled with the disappearance of the avant- garde, has placed restrictions on artists in terms of available outlets to express themselves. What is one to do as an artist or writer, but undertake commercial endeavors? Within the emergent cultural paradigm the loss of the truly original to convention prevails, as those desirous of making careers in the arts have no choice but to sell out. Several contemporary examples offer evidence of this trend: the distinguished literary critic Edmund Wilson’s move to the New York- er, the appearance of Kay Boyle’s serialized writings in the Saturday Evening Post (she had formerly been considered avant-garde), and several (unnamed) avant-garde writers contributing to the New York Times Book Review. For Mac- donald, these facts are more than enough to demonstrate how money-making interests endanger high culture. In a personal footnote he wryly adds: “The problem this tendency – which applies to political writing, too – raises for the future of a magazine like Politics is obvious.” But it is not merely the personal consequences of crude commercialization that trouble Macdonald. What America has, he feels, is a “l’avantgarde pompier,” or phony avant-garde that includes one of his favorite targets, Archibald MacLeish, who has made ample use of radio to disseminate his work. Such artists, Macdonald scolds, do not raise the level of popular culture, but rather corrupt high culture: “There is nothing more vulgar, in fact, than sophisticated kitsch.” Further stressing the deathly collusion of high and low, Macdonald contrasts the relationship between Broadway and Hollywood in the 1920s and 1940s. In the

Politics and Culture 63 former decade the two were “sharply differentiated [with] movies being produced for the masses of the hinterland, and theatre for the upper-class New York City audience.” On Broadway, there existed high culture of the “academic variety,” with occasional avant-garde experiments. The movies, meanwhile, were solely popular culture, mostly degraded, with intermittent bursts of avant-gardism in the form of Griffith, Stroheim and Chaplin to liven up the scene. With the invention of talkies came a drawing of the two together. Theater agents produced plays to sell movie rights, and often received direct financing from Hollywood studios. As a result, standardization ensued. Broadway became less experimental, and though movies vaguely improved in acting, staging, direction, and taste, they, too, lost any hope of again providing “the fresh charm of Folk Art or the intensity and violence of Avantgardism.” In an exaggerated conclusion Macdonald writes off the medium of film entirely, stating that the advent of sound has “degraded the camera to a record- ing instrument for an alien art form, the spoken play.” Silent films had at least “the theoretical possibility of being aesthetically significant,” but the “sound film, as exploited within the limits of Broadway taste and sophistication, has removed this possibility” [emphasis in original]. Macdonald views such developments as a legitimate concern for Ameri- can intellectuals, and a severe hazard to the health of society in general: “The deadening and warping effect of long exposure to movies, pulp magazines and radio can hardly be overestimated.” It is a shame, then, that “little attention” has been devoted to popular amusements by the intellectual establishment despite the fact that the United States, more than any other country, is at risk from the competition between high and popular culture due to “the blurring of class lines…, the absence of a stable cultural tradition, and the greater facilities for manufacturing and marketing Popular Culture.” The cultural pattern and its deep penetration into the modern consciousness require political radicals to peer into the nation’s popular culture soup, and draw lessons as to how the masses can potentially react to socialist ideas. In an analysis of “synthetic folk-heroes,” Macdonald takes the public’s political pulse through a survey of the popular. He asserts that many products of commercial entertainment embody values in opposition to the dominant culture of the industrial capitalist era, yet simultaneously, function as an opiate. The list includes: the Western do-gooder the Lone Ranger, as well as Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, and Superman. Macdonald argues that radicals can derive hope from the exploits of these imperturbable characters: “The- se are folk-heroes because they are not individuals, each with a unique life story, but rather incarnations of certain abstract qualities.” Such “men of great powers,” much as older heroes like Robin Hood, “give us an important clue to the deepest, and least satisfied, cravings of our age.” Sherlock Holmes and Super- man show that science can be used for good in “a world of saturation bombing,”

64 Chapter 3 and Tarzan and the Lone Ranger thrive and conquer outside of the “mechanized rut of modern life.” Therefore, “in an age of gross violations of conventional Christian morality all these heroes unite power with morals in a most attractive way. This is what we would like to have happen, these are the leaders we should like to have.” Within his model of cultural exploitation, Macdonald sees these wishes fulfilled on screen and in popular literature as helping to temper the desire for justice and morality in real life. Instead of provoking resistance, ideological or otherwise, such fare merely co-opts and eventually quashes it. Even though the audience gets what it wants, in the end it amounts to a cheap, manipulative trick, and nothing more. The close of ‘A Theory of Popular Culture’ adds a new dimension to culture’s predicament in offering a solution to the whole capitalist mess of commercialized entertainment. “The whole problem of popular culture,” Macdonald writes, “involves one’s conception of the role of the common people in modern history. It is, basically, a political question.” Briefly examining others’ possible remedies, he reproaches Ortega y Gasset as a “reactionary prophet” for his theory that the “revolt of the masses” should be counteracted by the firm reestab- lishment of class distinctions, and the bringing of the “masses once more under aristocratic control.”104 The criticism is in reference to Gasset’s 1930 work La Rebelión de las Masas, first translated into English in 1932. The wide-ranging tome deals with the rise of the working classes into European political spheres, arguing against the deleterious effects of mass participation in public life, in particular Bolshevism, which Gasset designates the chief danger of his times.105 As Macdonald, Gasset was deeply concerned with issues of culture and its relationship to both sophisticated humans and the common man. His ideas require a brief recounting at this juncture because the depiction of the mass man in The Revolt of the Masses, while less than flattering, was adopted by Macdonald despite intermittent protestations. Gasset’s evaluation of the lower orders reduc- es its individuals to a single, recurring archetype:

The mass is the average man. In this way what is mere quantity – the multitude – is converted to qualitative determination: it becomes the common social equality, man as undifferentiated from other men, but as repeating in himself a generic type…the mass is all that which sets no value on itself – good or ill – based on specific grounds, but which feels itself “just like everybody,” and nevertheless is uncon- cerned about it…

104 Dwight Macdonald, ‘A Theory of Popular Culture,’ Politics 1 (February 1944), pp. 20-22. 105 Karl J. Weintraub, Visions of Culture: Voltaire, Guizot, Burckhardt, Lamprecht, Huizinga, Ortega Y Gasset (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 249-69.

Politics and Culture 65

The dim portrait above stands in sharp relief to Gasset’s conception of the aristocracy, defined as “select men” who demand much from themselves, yet do not smugly revel in their own superiority. Unlike the mass man who contentedly demands nothing of himself, select men strive to become something better: “It is, of course, plain that in these ‘upper’ classes, when and as long as they really are so, there is much more likelihood of finding men who adopt the ‘great vehicle,’ whereas the ‘lower’ classes normally comprise individuals of minus quality…a characteristic of our times is the predominance of, even in groups tradi- tionally selective, of the mass and the vulgar.” The incursion of this sum ‘minus quality’ into society has stark implications for “certain pleasures of an artistic and refined character.” According to Gasset, in the past when masses sought to encroach into the domain of culture, they recognized the imperative to drop their status as masses and acquire those special qualities abundant in aristocratic minorities. Today, however, they supplant the elite, bringing about “the political domination of the masses.” Gasset, it bears mentioning, rejects the concept of hereditary aristocracy in favor of “select minorities” charged with upholding the values of civilization, culture and rule of law. Their task is to limit the self- destructive tendencies of the mass man, who of inborn root ignorance crushes “everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified, and select.” 106 It is not difficult to understand why a self-styled socialist like Macdonald finds Gasset’s shameless elitism grating – despite his similar fears for the survival of high culture. Gasset’s acidic estimation of the common man makes Macdonald’s earlier comments look admiring, and Gasset challenges the developing foundation of Macdonald’s mid-‘40s model, which holds that the masses, while theoretically capable of larger consciousness, languishes under the fat thumb of popular culture, and by extension the elite who rule them whether in the USA or USSR. The Spaniard’s criticism of revolutionary movements is, as well, unpalatable to Macdonald’s transitory quasi-Marxist sympathies. Indeed, in Macdonald’s interpretation popular culture functions as Gasset’s mass man, embodying the enemy that destroys all that is lofty and worthy. In shifting this responsibility for society’s demise onto the commercial structures of the capitalist culture machine, he exonerates to a degree Gasset’s ill-bred populace. Summing up his judgment, Macdonald labels Gasset’s solution undemocratic and ultimately reminiscent of the “reactionary politics of the cultural Avant- garde, which also tried to solve the problem by excluding the masses.” Going further, he places blame for the present state of cultural affairs on “the peculiar

106 Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1932), pp. 14-19.

66 Chapter 3 historical situation created by the persistence of intense class exploitation throughout a century of mass education and expanding political democracy.” It can only be surmised that: “Either the exploitation or the democracy must be removed if culture is to recover its health.” As a man of purportedly democratic convictions, Macdonald refuses to even entertain the second notion’s demise as beneficial, speculating instead that the revolt of the masses has not progressed enough, and popular culture has “not been popular enough.” His solution is presented in decidedly hortatory form: “The standard by which to measure Popular Culture is not the old aristocratic High Culture but rather a potential new human culture, in Trotsky’s phrase, which for the first time in history has a chance of superseding the class cultures of present and past” [emphasis in original].107 Yet despite Macdonald’s dismissal of Gasset’s arguments, aspects of them – in particular the concept of the mass man and the walling off of aristocratic or high culture from those below – would appear in his later writings, saturated with far less rancor. It is appropriate at this point to momentarily compare ‘A Theory of Popular Culture’ with Macdonald’s writings for Miscellany, as juxtaposed they present an alteration in intellectual outlook worth highlighting. Fifteen years earlier in ‘Our Elizabethan Movies’ Macdonald praised film as a potential common locus for cross-class integration and a vehicle for the improvement of popular taste: “a meeting place of the great and small, the powerful and weak [and] the common ground for the artist and the layman.”108 He trusted in the hope that cinema would open up new realms of artistic expression, prove capable of overcoming artificial barriers of ‘good’ and ‘popular,’ and eventually work to the advantage of its consumers. By 1944 this prophecy had not materialized, and what had been great about the medium had vanished with the advent of sound, transforming movies into a problem rather than solution. In more general terms, popular culture had become an exploitative threat to society. In another contrast, in ‘Ei- senstein, Pudovkin, and Others,’ Macdonald posited that the American audience had a harmful hand in determining content in Hollywood, where the director en- gaged in “a hopeless effort” to please the bad taste of the nation’s “120,000,000 Lords and Masters.”109 Now public tastes were in large part imposed from above by ‘class rulers,’ reflecting Macdonald’s adoption of left-wing politics. But most importantly, high culture was under threat by capitalism and its degrading influ-

107 Macdonald, ‘A Theory of Popular Culture,’ pp. 22-23. The quote about the ‘reactionary’ avant-garde is the only criticism of the movement Macdonald made in print post 1930, indicating the degree to which he felt (at this time) that the masses could somehow be integrated into high culture. 108 Macdonald, ‘Our Elizabethan Movies,’ pp. 28-29. 109 Macdonald, ‘Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Others,’ pp. 19-21.

Politics and Culture 67 ence, which could potentially pervade all forms of artistic expression and render the high-minded permanently corrupt. This aesthetic aspect of the problem would outlast Macdonald’s brief Marxist fascination, while his growing pessimism would exceed that of Greenberg’s regarding the culturally ill-equipped masses who ravenously patronize mass-produced kitsch. For the time being, however, Macdonald was reluctant to blame the mass man for these developments, agitating instead for his integration into a reborn ‘human’ culture somehow rooted in the avant-garde. Curiously, this was despite his clear and enduring aversion to the average man’s taste, as expressed in numerous previous essays. But in his new radical perspective, Macdonald saw the masses as victims (nonetheless willing) in an emergent mass society whose poisonous qualities had to be exposed by pioneering intellectuals like him. In a stroke of fortune, he soon found intellectual support in a group of German émigrés sequestered within New York’s Columbia University. The Institut für Sozialforschung, or ‘Institute for Social Research’ (later dubbed the Frankfurt School), was founded in 1923 in Frankfurt, Germany. Un- der the stewardship of its first director, Carl Grünberg, Marxism acted as the group’s muse and the Institute sought to fuse historical study with theoretical analysis by publishing articles on the development of capitalist economies and workers’ movements as a means of explaining social phenomena. A major ad- justment occurred in the 1930s during the directorship of Max Horkheimer, who shifted focus from aesthetic and psychoanalytical approaches to explorations of “the interconnection between the economic life of society, the psychic development of the individual and transformations in the realm of culture.” Fleeing Nazi persecution, the Institute’s assemblage of writers, including Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, and Herta Herzog, escaped Germany in 1933, traveling to the United States in 1934, where they reconstitut- ed at Columbia. There they continued their work and developed a system of analysis called Critical Theory. Critical Theory holds that all aspects of society, be they cultural, philosophical, psychological or social, are interrelated. Any study of human actions, therefore, must take into account the totality of the society in which they occur, while any social analysis has to consider the individual mind’s ability to comprehend and interpret the world. Central to Critical Theory is the tension between objective reality and its perception. Truth, the Frankfurt School argues, is found by assessing “the breach between ideas and reality.” The bourgeois order, for example, with its principles of “justice, equality and freedom,” claims to be a system of free and just market exchange that is fair and efficient, satisfying the wants and needs of the people. Yet in practice this system negates these principles by instituting a form of wage slavery that breeds suffering – hence display-

68 Chapter 3 ing inherent negativity. In spite of the innovative nature of such insights, the Frankfurt School’s work went largely unnoticed by American academics and intellectuals, as it was published mainly in German. Only one journal appeared in English in 1941, and the majority of the Institute’s theoretical work remained untranslated until the end of that decade. Consequently, the only aspect of the Institute’s work that garnered admirers in mid-1940s and 1950s America was its work on commercial entertainment. As in Macdonald’s writings, the question of the masses features heavily in the Frankfurt School’s analyses. In their general opinion, the industrialized world’s downtrodden plebs are caught up in a system of highly concentrated capital, and increasingly interlocked within the economy’s iron cage of bureaucracy. It is a verwaltete Welt, or “world caught up in administration.” As an effect, the market penetrates people’s lives more and more as the system expands and develops, and ideas and beliefs become increasingly transmitted through mass culture, undermining the private realm by a socialization of the mind, and instating the virtual administration and control of leisure hours. The individual’s consciousness (and unconscious) is molded by “the culture industry” (a term coined by Adorno and Horkheimer in their 1944 German-language monograph Dialectic of Enlightenment), which includes mass media such as television, film, radio, and even professional sports. Because of this imminent menace, the Frankfurt theorists urged the creation of a sociology of mass culture, which would inquire into its formation and reception. The imperative was vital in the late 1930s and early ‘40s due to the further consolidation and growth of Ameri- ca’s entertainment industry, and the manipulation of culture and entertainment by the Nazis and Soviets.110 In the Frankfurt paradigm, though all culture emerges from society’s organi- zational foundation as a collection of norms, mores, ideas, and modes of artistic expression, two main categories present themselves: the dominant culture and the oppositional culture of art.111 In Horkheimer’s view, the role of the dominant culture is to legitimate societal beliefs in the service of political authority. Alter- natively, true culture, as put by Adorno in terms quite similar to Greenberg, the New York intellectuals, and even Arnold in Culture and Anarchy, “did not simply accommodate itself to human beings; but…always simultaneously raised a protest against petrified relations under which they lived.” This artistic culture comprises the “perennial protest” of the “particular against the universal.”112 By

110 David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (Berkeley: Uni- versity of California Press, 1980), pp. 23-33, 175-80, 77-78. 111 Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Urizen Books, 1978), p. 188. 112 Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas, pp. 80-81.

Politics and Culture 69 contrast, the dominant medium of mass culture is defined by the “pseudo- individualism” of standardization, to use a phrase from Adorno’s seminal essay ‘On Popular Music’ (1941). Under this process successful and undemanding musical models are repeatedly promoted by producers to ensure popular success, leaving unsuspecting consumers to assume differentiation and a “halo of choice” where in fact none exists. So omnipresent is standardization that it permeates all features of popular music, setting out strictly adhered to rules such as “the chorus consists of thirty-two bars [while] the range is limited to one octave and one note,” and “harmonic cornerstones” that invariably “beat out the standard scheme” from the beginning to end of each section. Such music is so predictable that the composition actually “hears for the listener,” divesting him of spontanei- ty and promoting conditioned reflexes. Macdonald was a fan of ‘On Popular Music,’ which encompasses several other of the Frankfurt School’s main themes regarding the nature of popular entertainments and their effects. Adorno presents an analysis of standardized culture that keeps its hold on the masses by simultaneously reinforcing “distraction and inattention,” understood in the context of “the rationalized and mechanized process of labor to which, directly or indirectly, masses are subject.” The capitalist mode of production begets worry over unemployment, lack of income and war, creating the need for work’s “non-productive correlate” – that is: entertainment without the effort of concentration. Commercial amusements thus spare the masses the burden of participation, lulling them into familiar patterns that include just enough stimulation to escape, intermittently, the grinding tedium of industrial labor. Im- portantly, Adorno mentions that the promoters of mass culture exonerate themselves by maintaining that they give the masses what they want. While conceding that this claim makes infinite sense to an industry based on profit, Adorno argues that the masses are essentially forced to accept such products, as inevitably, the distribution of such pseudo-individualized commodities as popular music destroys resistance to the monotonous by cordoning off avenues of escape during leisure time. This is not giving the masses what they want, but manipulation on the production end:

The customers of musical entertainment are themselves objects or, indeed, products of the same mechanisms which determine the production of popular music. Their spare time only serves to reproduce their working capacity. It is a means instead of an end. The power of the process of production extends over the time intervals which on the surface seem to be “free.” They want standardized goods and pseudo- individualization, because their leisure time is an escape from work and at the same time molded after those psychological attitudes to which their workday world exclusively habituates them.

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Within the state-capitalist monopoly, the danger is that large sectors of artistic culture are becoming more and more commoditized, meaning more of the above in store. In this “circle which makes escape impossible,” societal harmony is achieved with the “social cement” of popular culture.113 Using this model, the Frankfurt School asserts that those in power with the wish to centralize ownership and control all political and economic aspects of society use cultural means to prop up and legitimate the status quo. Because mass culture breeds a passivity that makes the masses unlikely to wish for change on any level, modes of artistic expression are co-opted as tools of ideological domination over individual consciousnesses.114 As culture is an industry, the profit motive turns artistic production into a “species of commodity…marketable and interchangeable like an industrial product.”115 The manipulation inherent in the production and consumption of mass culture is not necessarily in every case the result of a fascist conspiracy of those in power, but perhaps more disturbingly, merely the logical outcome of the unconscious determining force of capitalist society as a whole.116 In the past, artists sold their work to make a living, but this trade did not interfere with individual artistic vision or the inbuilt logic of each work. Now, cultural entities are commodities and commodities only, making the producers of culture slaves to the profit motive and the market’s demands, and reinforcing the implementation and standardization of techniques of promotion and distribution that amount to an “iron system” ensuring that “all mass culture is identical.”117 Though at this time Macdonald’s views converged with the Frankfurt School’s in the basic belief that commercial entertainment largely functioned as a distraction machine designed to subdue and inculcate the masses, he had yet to adopt the horrifically negative critique of mass society offered by the German intellectuals, best represented by Horkheimer’s ‘Art and Mass Culture’ (1941). The essay demonstrates that while Macdonald and the Frankfurt School shared disgust with mass culture and its function, each had differing concerns that war- rant differentiation in categorization.

113 Theodor Adorno, ‘On Popular Music,’ On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, eds. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), pp. 302-11. 114 Arato and Gebhardt, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, p. 216. 115 Quoted in Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas, p. 90. 116 Phil Slater, Origin and Significance of the Frankfurt School: A Marxist Perspective (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 124. 117 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972), pp. 120-21.

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‘Art and Mass Culture’ states that since the time of Calvin and the establishment of work as man’s primary calling, life has been divided into a public sphere defined by work, and a private sphere defined by leisure. Before this modern period, art was associated with daily life and everyday objects, both secular and religious. But as history progressed, the arts became disassociated from the common world, and aesthetic sensibilities gained independence as a representative of the “pure.” As art became an autonomous expression of the individual, menaces appeared that undermined the private, family sphere. Free time became burdened “with a mortgage” – or an obligation to spend it reinvig- orating the body and spirit for the next round of labor. Man’s leisure therefore now functions as “a mere appendage” without independent value, perceived as merely wasteful. According to Horkheimer, only one path is open to genuine shelter from the public world: family relations. Yet this hallowed refuge is, too, under attack by the twentieth century’s “large trusts and bureaucracies,” which threaten to take over the role of the family in transmitting values. In the face of a dissolving barrier separating the two worlds, family, which had been “a kind of second womb, in whose warmth the individual gathered strength to stand alone outside it,” sadly bows to economic demands. Most unfortunately, these harsh realities are being thrust upon children, who, especially among the lower classes, are becoming “prematurely hardened.” The ensuing “stunted mental growth” and “pent-up rage” are a major contributor to juvenile delinquency. “Evil does not stem from nature,” Horkheimer writes, “but from the violence committed by society against human nature striving to develop.” As children are all too familiar with the brutal realities of economic life, they discard idealism in favor of toughness and shrewdness, both necessary in a world of tight financial and social strictures. Any familial “experiences and images which gave inner direction to the life of every individual” or once aided in one’s resistance to the overwhelming pressures of economic imperative, have lost their potency. Over- whelmed by this encroachment of the public realm into the private, society is undergoing “the disappearance of the inner life.” Drawing on his experiences in America and Germany, Horkheimer believes that the last stages of industrial society are marked by two trends: preparation of the individual for the “manipulated pleasures” of mass culture, and the individual’s indoctrination by totalitarian governments into “his role as a member of the masses.” Against such pressures the only hope of saving one’s inner existence is not social or economic revolution, but art, which has to serve a different function than in the past. Prior to mass culture rearing its ugly head, the artistic realm of man’s existence provided one main purpose: escape. In this period, Hork- heimer explains: “Men had fled into a private conceptual world and rearranged their thoughts when the time was ripe for rearranging reality. The inner life and

72 Chapter 3 the ideal had become conservative factors.” The state of society in the twentieth century, though, leaves little room for such cerebral fastnesses because “man has lost his power to conceive a world different than that in which he lives.” The only area where some freedom remains culled out for the imagination is in “inhospitable works of art,” such as the novels of Joyce or the paintings of Picasso – those “works which uncompromisingly express the gulf between the monadic individual and his barbarous surrounding.” This “barbarous surrounding” is replete with elites and masses, who together “obey a mechanism that leaves them only one single reaction in any given situation.” Seemingly optimistic and enthusiastic on the surface, they in fact lead “a miserable, prehistoric existence” akin to a slavery of mind and body. Modernist art reflects this reality, cutting through superficiality, abandoning the false idea that community still exists, and standing as monuments to the solitary and despairing modern life by rebuking the modern world for all its copious evils. Horkheimer’s pessimism arises from his confidence in the demagogue’s ability to win the warped souls of men within the desolate industrial world: “What comes to the fore when men most candidly reveal their inner selves, is precisely the predatory, evil, cunning beings whom the demagogue knows how to handle.” Here a bleak contrast emerges to his earlier account of human nature. Nonetheless, Horkheimer informs the reader that the inner life of man, being destroyed, finds harmony with the haranguer’s simplistic, promise-laden message, while difficult art “makes the masses draw back in horror” because it gives “downtrodden humans a shocking awareness of their own despair.” Mass culture, meanwhile, assists the demagogue’s rise. Horkheimer, deploring the reaction of the masses to its stimuli, further clarifies:

The generation that allowed Hitler to become great takes its adequate pleasure in the convulsions which the animated cartoon imposes upon its helpless characters, not in Picasso, who offers no recreation and cannot be “enjoyed” anyhow. Misanthropic, spiteful creatures, who secretly know themselves as such, like to be taken for the pure, childish souls who applaud with innocent approval when Donald Duck gets a cuffing. There are times when faith in the future of mankind can be kept alive only through absolute resistance to the prevailing responses of men. Such a time is the present.

Cartoon waterfowl aside, Horkheimer proclaims that independent thought has ceased to function under the onslaught of slogans and classifications, leaving each human under the heading of bourgeois, capitalist, fascist, Jew, etc. The masses and even the sages have become chained to these patterns, preparing the way for totalitarian mass society.

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The Frankfurt School’s unabashed praise of the avant-garde as a protest against convention, imbued with higher sensibilities and pure vision, is crucial. Though art could not necessarily transcend the social constraints of twentieth- century capitalist society, it could, in the uncomfortable reactions it provokes, demonstrate resistance. Criticism exists to interrogate and eventually determine what is “genuine” about a given work of art, and certify its oppositional elements. Mass culture, on the other hand, is merely the product of “economic circumstances.” As Horkheimer elucidates regarding the film industry:

The economic necessity for a rapid return of the considerable capital invested in each picture forbids the pursuit of the inherent logic of each work of art – of its own autonomous necessity. What is today called popular entertainment is actually demands evoked, manipulated and by implication deteriorated by the cultural indus- tries. It has little to do with art, least of all where it pretends to be such.

Within this system, mass culture is precluded from consideration as serious art, due to its genesis in the profit motive, and the sheer number of people it takes to produce it. A Hollywood studio employs so many people that it nullifies the possibility of individual artistic expression, rendering obsolete the traditional “opposition of individual and society,” and the division between “private and social existence” that had originally given rise to the serious pastime of art. The severing of private from social existence, Horkheimer warns, has produced new modes of social life in which the individual will be either severely mutated or completely destroyed. The potential death of the individual is a trend linked to mass culture’s primary danger: it has “taken over the heritage of art,” meaning that it has liquidated the last refuge of individual expression and in- sightful societal criticism. ‘Art and Culture’ ends with two important comments on the implications of the widespread popularity of mass culture, and the need for individual integrity in artistic production:

Popularity no longer has anything to do with the specific content or the truth of artistic productions. In democratic countries, the final decision no longer rests with the educated but with the amusement industry. Popularity consists of the unrestricted accommodation of the people to what the amusement industry thinks they like.

Taste is hence dictated from above, and is subject to any given falsehoods that inform commercial art’s creation. The true role of the artist, by definition, is irrelevant in this scheme. Having made his point, Horkheimer reflects on the limits of human potential. Fearing that “the imaginary future audience has become questionable” because “man within humanity is as solitary and abandoned as

74 Chapter 3 humanity within the infinite universe,” he expresses only a faintly lingering hope that eventually “we may learn that in the depths of their hearts, the masses, even in fascist countries, secretly knew the truth and disbelieved the lie, like cat- atonic patients who make known only at the end of the trance that nothing has escaped them.”118 Macdonald, conversely, would eventually abandon such hopes in his final statement on mass culture, ‘Masscult and Midcult.’ In Macdonald’s essays following ‘A Theory of Popular Culture,’ references to the Frankfurt School are in evidence, and over the following decade and a half Macdonald would employ but a few selected aspects of Horkheimer et al. to buttress his own wide-ranging critique. But demonstrated more clearly in later analyses of ‘A Theory of Mass Culture’ and especially ‘Masscult and Midcult,’ Macdonald’s concerns differed significantly concerning art’s function, the importance of high culture’s historical legacy, and ultimately the solution to the culture problem. The political function of ‘inhospitable’ works of art, for example, in making the masses recoil in horror and gain greater consciousness, was not a factor for Macdonald, who appreciated the avant-garde for its individual, aesthetic qualities first and foremost. Also, unlike the Frankfurt School, Mac- donald, despite his flirtation with Marxist rhetoric in the 1940s, remained primarily focused on protecting high art, as opposed to political agitation on the rhetorical level. Macdonald would also soon abandon terms such as ‘class rulers’ to dwell on the aesthetic dangers and shoddiness of mass culture. Therefore while Macdonald was happy to cite the Frankfurt School in order to emphasize certain points, he hardly adopted their ideas, account of industrial mass society, or much less Critical Theory. His reliance on them has been exaggerated, particularly with respect to Macdonald’s own growing perception of mass society, which was unquestionably the result of World War II.119 Nowhere in Macdon- ald’s writings, for instance, does one find a totalizing critique of industrial society led by the determining forces of history inspired by the Frankfurt writers. One

118 Horkheimer, ‘Art And Mass Culture,’ Studies in Philosophy & Social Science 1 (1941), pp. 292-303. 119 See Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America, p 179. Here he makes the claim that the Frankfurt School was in large part responsible for Macdonald’s growing pessimism about mass culture and society. This contention is extremely doubtful considering the very real effect world events had on Macdonald during the 1940s. Wreszin also agrees that the Frankfurt School, though it gave Macdonald some support for his criticism of mass culture, was hardly a defining influence. System- ized genocide and Atomic bombs, after all, are incontestably more persuasive than essays, and Macdonald had already come to his own conclusions about popular culture before his exposure to the Frankfurt writers. Also see A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald, p. 326.

Politics and Culture 75 can only observe that while they evidently gave him impetus to continue his critique, their theories brought about no real change in attitude. Even ideas such as the squelching of individual artistic vision within the culture industry’s division of labor, or ‘standardization,’ which would appear to come from Horkheimer and Adorno, were already present in Macdonald’s critiques (for instance the chair and automobile analogies in ‘Notes on Hollywood Directors’) from the early 1930s, though devoid of any overarching political mechanisms. It is nonetheless understandable why the identification of Macdonald with the Frankfurt School is often made. Macdonald obviously read the group’s Stud- ies in Philosophy & Social Science along with several other of their articles on commercial media, and in 1945 he penned ‘Field Notes,’ which articulates new concerns about mass culture and shows the presence of the Frankfurt writers. Impressed by their cutting-edge research, Macdonald found welcome support for his own obsession with the dangers of popular culture, quoting Horkheimer, Lowenthal and Herzog, and commending the Institute for publishing “a great deal of interesting material on popular culture.” ‘Field Notes,’ coming at a time of world catastrophe when Macdonald was in the depths of heroic despair, testi- fies to the importance he placed on the culture subject. Though not a coherent expression of any theory, the article adds new criticisms to Macdonald’s evolving assessment of popular culture, specifically how it distorts the line between reality and fiction in the public mind, deadens humanity’s desire for knowledge, depicts sex, and portrays science. As well, it relates war and mass society issues to those of culture, and includes passages of considerable humor. The opening of ‘Field Notes’ discusses how mass entertainment blurs age lines. Macdonald complains that adults seem as interested in comic books as children, citing a study that found nearly forty percent of people eighteen and older read them regularly. The study also showed a correlation between income and comic book reading: “only 7% of the high-income adults read comics, as against 31% of the middle and 53% of the low-income group.” This is, “as one might expect.” The same can be said of Westerns and radio programs such as ‘The Lone Ranger’ and ‘Captain Midnight,’ which are also enjoyed by adults. This fare, Macdonald explains, is so simplistic that it places “extremely modest demands on the audience’s cultural equipment.” Adult shows are similarly enjoyed by children, resulting in a merging of the child and adult audience, and by extension “infantile regression” among grown-ups, and “growing up too fast” among children – both developments further stupefying the mass man. The paragraph concludes with a reference to Horkhiemer’s ‘Art and Culture’ concerning how “development has ceased to exist” among the masses due to commercial entertainment’s overweening influence.

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So strong is the force of popular culture, Macdonald continues, that the public fails to distinguish between reality and fiction. He disdainfully quotes an incident where the actor Lewis Stone, who played Judge Hardy in the Hardy Boys movies, was accosted while imbibing a high-ball in a restaurant. A woman ap- proached him, scolding indignantly: “Aren’t you ashamed, Judge Hardy, drinking in public! What an example!” Such idiotic confusion leads the public to fit- ful obsessions with fictional goings-on. When the popular radio characters Amos and Andy went on trial for murder on their weekly show, Time magazine reported that their sponsors insisted the story line be terminated as quickly as possible. The suspense greatly strained children’s normal lives, and “thousands of parent and teacher groups” protested its nerve-wracking effects on the nation’s youth. Macdonald carries on with this theme of over-identification in his first-ever attack on the ‘mass woman.’120 He explores a Herta Herzog study entitled ‘On Borrowed Experience,’ which deals with how 1930s housewives viewed soap operas. Her research, based on interviews with one hundred habitu- al listeners, aimed to “determine the effect of these programs” on housewives through questions “about what these programs mean to them, why they listen, and what they do with what they hear.” Herzog shows that during the Depres- sion soap operas consoled unhappy women by presenting other women’s debili- tating problems, creating a community of sufferers. A community, that is, of real and fantasy life. Herzog, like Macdonald above, stresses that the women “were unable to differentiate between the actor as a character and the actor as a person.”121 After his sketch of her work, Macdonald posits that the recent decline in the popularity of soap operas has much to do with America’s popular involvement in World War II, as such expressions of melancholy “are no longer in tune with the wartime mood.” There is a disturbing but likely accurate answer to why this is so: “This would seem to be one more indication of what the war so far has meant to the American masses: not tragedy (which would call for more conciliatory kitsch than ever) but full employment and economic security.” ‘Field Notes’ also denounces the country’s waning emphasis on self- education, charmingly conjuring up a time at the turn of the century when “book agents roamed the country ringing doorbells and selling sets of the ‘standard authors’ (Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot), encyclopedias and multi-volume works.” Yet now, they have become quaint anachronisms. The book agent has disappeared, and people now read for pleasure rather than instruction. This suggests the death of the Victorian concepts of self-improvement and progress,

120 Dwight Macdonald, ‘Field Notes,’ Politics 2 (April 1945), pp. 112-13. 121 Herta Herzog, ‘On Borrowed Experience: An Analysis of Listening to Daytime Sketch- es,’ Studies in Philosophy & Social Science 1 (1941), pp. 65-85.

Politics and Culture 77 along with a ditching of the model of the self-made man: “Is the modern world at once so irrational and so totally organized that the mass-man simply gives up, no longer hoping to understand or ‘improve’ his situation?”122 Along these same lines has come a transfer in emphasis from “idols of production” to “idols of consumption.” Here Macdonald cites Lowenthal, whose study ‘Biographies in Popular Magazines’ (1944) originally designated the phenomenon. Lowenthal compared the content of articles in the periodicals the Saturday Evening Post and Colliers from 1901 and 1940-1, and found that in this forty- year time span the proportion of pieces on business and political leaders had declined precipitously, while those on popular entertainers had risen fifty percent. In 1901, those few entertainers who had been given features were all serious artists, such as opera singers, classical musicians, and sculptors. Those featured in 1941, by contrast, were mostly movie stars, or idols of consumption, who did little more than garner success, riches, and the adulation of the public. In the meantime, those in politics and business (idols of production) ceased to be depicted as socially significant figures. While their biographies previously featured “life stories…really intended to be educational models…for someone who the next day may try to emulate,” those on idols of consumption differed significantly. Of idols of consumption Lowenthal writes: “They seem to live in a dream world of the masses who are no longer capable or willing to conceive of biographies primarily as a means of orientation and education… Instead, the leisure time period seems to be the new social riddle on which extensive reading and studying has to be done.” Lowenthal continues this examination of the average American, explaining that this corn-fed variety of the mass man,

appears no longer at the center of outwardly directed energies and actions…on whose work and efficiency might depend…mankind’s progress. Instead of the “giv- ers” we are faced with the “takers”…they seem to stand for…an attitude which asks no more than to be served with the things needed for reproduction and recreation [without] primary interest in how to invent, shape or apply the tools leading to such purposes of mass satisfaction.123

Macdonald claims that the above quotes accurately describe the current state of the American public – slovenly masses at the same stage as the Roman proletariat. So ensnared are they by the temptations of “bread and circuses” that they offer “little resistance to the Permanent War Economy.”

122 Macdonald, ‘Field Notes,’ p. 113. 123 Leo Lowenthal, ‘Biographies in Popular Magazines,’ Radio Research 1942-1943, eds. Paul Lazarsfeld and Frank Stanton (New York: Arno Press, 1979), pp. 513-27.

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The regressive comparison made, Macdonald again picks up the themes of self-education and improvement, writing that the modern Saturday Evening Post movie star heroes are without exception presented as successful not due to hard work and devotion to their trade, but because they “got the breaks.” This shift has done away with the Victorian concepts of success through hard work and sacrifice. By design, “competitive struggle is presented as a lottery in which a few winners, no more talented or energetic than anyone else, drew the lucky tickets. The effect on the mass reader is at once consoling (it might have been me) and deadening to effort, [and] ambition (there are no rules, so why struggle?).” The evolution of popular culture has also mirrored the nation’s economic development, resulting in rampant consumerism. Much to Macdonald’s approval, Lowenthal notes in his study that the American mass man turned to these “idols of consumption” after the Great Depression, which (understandably) precipitated the abandonment of articles on the business world’s idols of production. Mass circulation magazines dropped biographies as an educational tool, capable of showing how work and efficiency could lead to mankind’s progress, and focused indirectly on the new problem of how to consume what had been overproduced in the 1920s. In a prophetic remark, Macdonald notes that the consumer, not the producer, is the “economic man” that now occupies center stage – a comment that continues to ring true in the United States today. ‘Field Notes’ proceeds with a diatribe against Hay’s Office censorship of sex in movies. Declaring that Hollywood films have not been sexy since the old days, before the move to self-censorship, Macdonald attempts to pin down the potential reasons for the change. Possible explanations are suggested, such as Catholic pressure groups, the accessibility of movies to children, and the prospect that adults themselves, mentally imprisoned in the Victorian era, are simply not adequately prepared for such erotic pleasures. The end consequence is clear. What is curiously deemed “a sexually promiscuous people” view “only the most asexual movies,” ultimately meaning that “the social historian would go far astray if he took the movies as an accurate reflection of American social mores.” Nude content even has political and social implications. One sees plenty of bare skin in a Broadway musical, making it a “luxury” for those few who can afford it. Nudity, after all, “would be too distracting for the masses who must do the work of the world.” Burlesque, on the other hand, offers plenty of naked tit- illation, but caters to those below the movie audience in economic terms. Mac- donald concludes:

[T]he lumpenproletariat who patronize burlesque shows are as inconsequential, from the viewpoint of the social organism, as the top hats who go to musicals. The non- functional extremes can be permitted a license which the working class and middle

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class millions must be denied. For these millions carry on their patient shoulders the real burden of society: the production and distribution of goods, the rearing of children.

As Macdonald lauds the “patient” mass men and women for their vital social function, one almost forgets they are the same culprits who, foolishly content with their bread and circuses, brought death to the traveling book seller and self- education, and mistake the frivolous and flaccid fictions of mass culture for reality. That disregarded, the purity of Hollywood contrasts remarkably with the way sex is depicted in European films. In Europe, sex is treated as a natural part of human existence: “sometimes tragic, sometimes poignant, sometimes funny.” And in an insight arguably more true today than ever, American films offer none of this maturity, instead displaying an “adolescent approach, veering between the extremes of romanticism and sensuality, almost never humanizing the theme” [emphasis in original]. At the same time, female stars in America depend more heavily on their physical appearance than their European counterparts, being “younger, prettier, and more voluptuous.” Here, Macdonald draws the subjective but illustrative comparison of Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner, and Betty Grable with Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman, and Greer Garson. Such criticisms of how sex is depicted do not end in Hollywood, but fall across the popular culture spectrum. ‘Field Notes’ contains some humorous swipes at Life magazine, specifically the feature ‘GI’s Dream Party,’ which pictures “one Pvt. John Farnsworth, just back from three years in the Pacific,” pho- tographed at various stages of a party given in his honor by screen star Ginger Rogers, who has invited several other starlets along to join in the innocent fun.124 Macdonald deprecatingly describes the goings on:

124 A word or two about Life is necessary here. First published in 1936, the glossy periodical (now defunct) was part of the Luce publishing empire, and therefore attractive fodder for Macdonald’s derision. Originally conceived as a picture magazine designed to appeal to everyone from the truck driver to the bank president, Life quickly reached a circulation of one million just four months after its sold-out initial release. Within two years the magazine boasted a seventeen-million-strong readership, still far from Luce’s target audience of “half of mankind.” One of Life’s stated purposes was to “elucidate high culture to readers” through pictures. Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungs was thus explained in a photo spread, while reproductions and expositive criticism of great paintings were heavily featured. It is generally conceded that Life editors shamelessly juxtaposed Picassos with cushioning features on starlets, Miami Beach models, and informa- tive pictorial depictions on ‘How to Undress for Your Husband.’ The magazine’s editorial staff, as well as Luce, was against publishing an overly serious periodical. Even when Europe teetered on the brink of World War II, Life’s chief editor wrote in an in- ternal memo: “We need some sex. Yesterday Sermalino brought two semi-naked mod-

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They swim, play blind man’s bluff, have ice cream sodas in Ginger’s soda bar, etc. The last shot shows him lying on a couch surrounded (at safe distance) by the love- lies. Caption: “Relaxing on a Big, Big Sofa, He Heard the Girls Singing Softly.”

Farnsworth “cuts a silly, pathetic figure” in the shots, surrounded by “Holly- wood’s leggy, bosomy symbols of sex.” The poor boy enjoys no physical contact with the girls and “their alluring feminine flesh,” save one photo where he is dancing with one of them. Thus he regretfully gets “the simulacrum of sex – but no more.” The subtitle of the feature reads: “Beautiful Girls Made It Come True,” but Macdonald observes that “as far as the unfortunate private is concerned, it doesn’t come true and he might as well still be dreaming in a Pacific foxhole about Ginger and her friends for all the good it does him” [emphasis in original]. The pictorial therefore represents a bizarre form of hypocrisy. “There is sex here,” Macdonald concedes, “and a dream does come true” [emphasis in original]. However, it is not for the dopey GI, but the readers of Life, who get a wonderful gander at some erotic eye-candy: “The episode could have only taken place in America, a country in which even sex is faked commercially, where Hollywood has created amorous symbols so perfect that they have become inac- cessible to the very males who created them for their pleasure.” Sex aside, there is one final thing about Hollywood that exasperates: its depiction of science in horror films. This aspect of ‘Field Notes’ deserves most attention. Macdonald writes that unlike the educated middle classes, who see science as a force for progress and discovery, the masses are “humble and awed” in their attitude towards science. The kitsch the masses seek out therefore inevitably presents science as a mystery, something not understood and not fully mastered, and for that reason as terrifying as Frankenstein himself. It has gotten to the point where “if one sees a laboratory in a Hollywood film, one shudders, and the white coat of the scientist is as blood-chilling a sight as Dracula’s black cape.” Due to such irrational fears, horror films have taken on an indestructible popularity that is pathetically childish. Then, in an unexpected concession to the masses, Macdonald inquires: “If the scientist’s laboratory has acquired in Popu- lar Culture a ghastly atmosphere, is this not perhaps one of those deep intuitions of the masses? From Frankenstein’s laboratory to Maidanek [a Nazi Concentra- tion Camp located in Poland] is not a long journey.”125

els into my office…I decided to use them both for exercise photos showing how to reduce [the] waist. …In the excitement over the approaching war, I must not forget other stuff to give the magazine balance and variety.” See Baughman, Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American News Media, pp. 88-100. 125 Macdonald, ‘Field Notes,’ pp. 113-15.

Politics and Culture 81

The analysis Macdonald espoused concerning contemporary popular culture and mass society in the 1940s was therefore defined by world developments. Macdonald connected the woes of war and mass society to those of mass culture, though the global conflict was the dominant theme in his one-man magazine. Macdonald’s stated goal for Politics was “to give some sense of the human horror of the war period,” which he arguably did better than any other editor of the age. He saw the global clash as an overwhelming institutional change in modern civilization, which had taken on an “unconscious character.”126 This interpretation of World War II, the Holocaust, and national politics and economic policy led him to a belief in the decline, if not extinction, of human agency, and temporarily deprived him of all expectation of further human progress. In ‘The Responsibility of the Peoples’ (1945) and ‘The Bomb’ (1945) Macdonald described a new massified, unthinking culture of murder and destruction in Ger- many and the United States that rendered their people unaware of the evil that surrounded them at every political turn. In this new system of human relations, individual action or influence, higher consciousness, and simple communication were increasingly unfeasible. It was this social and cultural environment that enabled the Holocaust and the dropping of Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Such dedication to making some sense of the war and the Nazi genocide made Macdonald one of two intellectuals who, as Robert Westbrook puts it, dared “directly confront the implications of the unique terrors of that conflict” – the other being Hannah Arendt.127 Indeed, the response to the Holocaust among Partisan Review’s Jewish editorial board was notable silence. As Michael Wreszin comments, there existed a “widespread hesitancy on the part of many members of the New York intellectual community to either confront or comprehend the unimaginable dimensions of the state-ordered human destruction.”128 As a result, Macdonald became the only PR culture critic who explicitly made connections among the genocide, the mass society that produced it, and the problem of mass culture. In the notably controversial ‘The Responsibility of Peoples,’ which West- brook calls “the single attempt” of the New York intellectuals to understand the Holocaust, Macdonald strongly argues that the German public should be exon- erated of all guilt for wartime Nazi carnage, claiming they are victims of the

126 Cummings, ‘Resistance and Victimization: Dwight Macdonald in the 1940s,’ pp. 215-16. 127 Westbrook, ‘The Responsibility of the Peoples: Dwight Macdonald and the Holocaust,’ p. 37. 128 Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald, p. 146.

82 Chapter 3 modern problem of social organization.129 He begins with the query: “Something has happened to the Germans – to some of them, at least; something has happened to Europe – some of it, at least. What is it? Who or what is responsible?” The article goes on to describe reports of Nazi death camps, torture, vivisec- tions, experiments, methods of extermination, and the exacting Teutonic efficiency with which it was all expertly accomplished. In Macdonald’s view, many of those who perpetrated these horrors were literally insane, while the rest were metaphorically swallowed up by the far-reaching institutions of the Nazis, who had “learned much from mass production [and] modern business organization.” The regime, due to the state of war, rendered average Germans helpless in dic- tating their own actions. “Modern society,” Macdonald asserts, “has become so tightly organized, so rationalized and routinized that it has the character of a mechanism which grinds on without human consciousness or control.” Central to Macdonald’s argument is the fact, though hardly consoling, that it was not average Germans who perpetrated the Holocaust’s actual killing. Those in the SS were specially trained in torture and murder, each member handpicked and gradually accustomed to the taking of human life. A military machine had formed them. Some who refused to participate were shot, others had nervous breakdowns and were sent to asylums, and even the most hardened killers sometimes broke. In this new world, the “individual, be he ‘leader’ or mass man, is reduced to powerlessness vis-à-vis the mechanism. More and more, things happen TO people” [caps in original]. Macdonald is quick to add that the same “is going on in our own society,” recounting a statement by an US Air Force lieu- tenant who completed thirty bombing missions over Europe:

Whatever I tell you…boils down to this: I’m a cog in one hell of a big machine. The more I think about it, and I’ve thought about it a lot lately, the more it looks as if I’d been a cog in one thing after another since the day I was born. Whenever I get set to do what I want to do, something a whole lot bigger than me comes along and shoves me back into place. It’s not especially pleasant, but there it is.

Considering the above, if the German people are accountable for the actions of their government, those in the Allied camp bear some responsibility as well; principally for imposing harsh conditions on postwar Germany in the 1920s, allowing Hitler to rearm in the hope of turning him against Russia, abandoning the Spanish in their civil war, and also for the numerous atrocities committed against civilians by the Allies, such as the saturation bombing of German cities,

129 Westbrook, ‘The Responsibility of the Peoples: Dwight Macdonald and the Holocaust,’ p. 37.

Politics and Culture 83 the refusal to admit Jewish refugees into the United States, the betrayal of the Polish underground, the imprisonment of Americans of Japanese ancestry, and the support of a civil war in Greece to restore a widely unpopular monarch who had colluded with the enemy fascists. But Macdonald insists, “We, the people, didn’t do these things,” they were done by an elite cabal of political leaders counting on the ignorance of their populations. “In any case,” Macdonald further protests, “I can accept no responsibility for such horrors,” adding that no one he knows approves of them either [emphasis in original]. What the problem of blame hinges on is such: “Only those who are willing to resist authority themselves when it conflicts too intolerably with their personal moral code, only they have the right to condemn the death camp paymaster.”130 There were those who resisted and were executed, and there existed divisions and discontent among Germans, especially towards the end of the war. But the simple truth is that the common people of the world are coming to have less and less control over the policies of their governments, and this lack of influence makes identification with one’s nation or state increasingly tenuous. Seeing mankind as a mass of increasingly powerless cogs in an uncontrolla- bly spinning genocidal wheel is an austere assessment of the human condition, and Macdonald’s outlook would only grow darker. His cynicism greatly deep- ened six months later following the dropping of the Atomic bombs on Hiroshi- ma and Nagasaki. In the shocking aftermath he would lead an almost one-man ethical and moral crusade to connect the events with Hitler’s Holocaust and address the consequent potentiality for humanity’s complete annihilation. Shortly following the US government’s supreme act of violence Macdonald expressed his unequivocal revulsion: “This atrocious action places ‘us,’ the defenders of civilization, on a moral level with ‘them,’ the beasts of Maidanek.”131 A month later in ‘The Bomb’ he ruminated at length on the frightening significance and repulsiveness of the cataclysmic events in Japan. ‘The Bomb’s’ disturbing insight is the fact that those “who produced and employed this monstrosity” understood the effects the radioactive poisons would have. Yet this knowledge did not stop them from openly exhibiting “irresponsi- bility and moral callousness” in carrying out a scientific experiment “with cities as the laboratories and people as the guinea pigs.” Of the post-Hiroshima, US government discourse regarding the need to ensure the future peaceful use of atomic energy, Macdonald is doubtful: “Atomic fission is something in which

130 Dwight Macdonald, ‘The Responsibility of the Peoples,’ Politics 2 (March 1945), pp. 82-90. 131 Quoted in Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age, pp. 225-26.

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Good and Evil are so closely intertwined that it is hard to see how the Good can be extracted and the Evil thrown away.” Probing more, he wonders if the US government would not use the bomb again in a third imperialist world war, and maintains that misguided faith in science, progress, and the eventual benefits of atomic fission “blunts our reaction to the present horror by reducing it to an episode in an historical schema which will ‘come out all right’ in the end.” This stance “ignores the fact that such atrocities as The Bomb and the Nazi death camps are right now brutalizing, warping, deadening the human beings who are expected to change the world for the better.” In the interim, the numerous justifications for the bombing that American military and political leaders have offered, such as shortening the war, saving American and even Japanese lives, the brutal treatment of American war prisoners by the Japanese, and especially Jap- anese blame for the conflict, are flimsy excuses that could validate “any atrocious action, absolutely any one” [emphasis in original]. What deepens Macdonald’s trepidation, if that were possible, is that the Atomic bomb was realized not under coercion, but as the result of a well- organized bureaucratic machine staffed by normal, average citizens. The US government from President Truman down has stressed that: “The Bomb has been produced in the orderly course of scientific experiment, that it is thus simply the latest step in man’s long struggle to control the forces of nature, in a word that it is progress.” Macdonald draws different conclusions. Instead, the Manhat- tan Project was undertaken by myopic scientists bludgeoned by their own objec- tivity, supported by a modern technocratic state that could organize humans around massive endeavors with hideously lethal results. Over a hundred thousand people labored assiduously on the project, ignorant of what they were helping to create. Macdonald remarks: “There is something askew about a society in which vast numbers of citizens can be organized to create a horror like The Bomb without even knowing they are doing it…What real content, in such a case, can be assigned to notions like ‘democracy’ and ‘government of, by and for the people’?” That the original leader of the American war effort, Roosevelt, has been replaced by the “colorless” mediocrity of Truman highlights how interchangeable the human mechanisms of mass organizations are: “The more commonplace the personalities and senseless the institutions, the more grandiose the destruction.” In essence, the bombings and their moral repercussions amount to “Götterdämmerung without the gods.” At the close of ‘The Bomb,’ just as he declared the German people were not responsible for the Holocaust, Macdonald absolves the American people – entirely unaware of what was being done in their name – of responsibility for the bombings in Japan. Accountability lies instead with the scientists who accepted the work and failed to function as complete men in their limited capacity as spe-

Politics and Culture 85 cialists and technicians. Macdonald lauds those few who refused to work on the project, referring back to ‘Field Notes’ to express his suspicions of the scientific community:

Last April, I noted that in our movies “the white coat of the scientist is as blood chilling a sight as Dracula’s black cape…If the scientist’s laboratory has acquired in Popular Culture a ghastly atmosphere, is this not perhaps one of those deep intuitions of the masses? From Frankenstein’s laboratory to Maidanek (or, now, to Han- ford and Oak Ridge) is not a long journey. Was there a popular suspicion, perhaps only half conscious, that the 19th century trust in science was mistaken…?”

Though faint qualms may have existed, madness prevailed. And finally, in light of the outright hubris of the Manhattan Project, questions about the progressive nature of science “seem more and more relevant.” Such reflections indicate the degree to which the specter of mass society haunted Macdonald and pervasively influenced his writings on mass culture. To him, mass society had turned human beings into mere cogs and the social order had completely lost its humanity, transforming into “an impersonal mechanism.”132 The dread and bitterness expressed in ‘The Responsibility of the Peoples’ and ‘The Bomb’ would continue to perturb Macdonald throughout the subsequent decades, casting a pall over his writings on mass culture. Their initial consequence, however, was an obstinate depression that would eventually bring an end to Politics and affect a fifteen- year withdrawal from political writing. In late 1947 Macdonald sent a letter to Politics subscribers warning that the next issue might never appear: “There is only one reason for it: Politics has been a one-man magazine, and the man (myself) has been of late been feeling stale, tired, disheartened, and – if you like – demoralized.”133 Macdonald as well wrote of his disillusionment with world affairs, the unlikelihood that things would improve, and the difficult psychological strains of running the magazine single- handedly. Politics had been operating at a deficit during its entire run, only kept afloat by Macdonald’s wife’s inheritance, and for some time had appeared at intervals as long as six months.134 Nonetheless, the response to Macdonald’s letter was enormous. Great numbers of subscribers wrote in to protest the journal’s dissolution, begging Macdonald to find some way to continue. One reader re- plied: “Sorry you feel bad. We do, too. But we feel better when we read Politics

132 Dwight Macdonald, ‘The Bomb,’ Politics 2 (September 1945), p. 258-60. 133 Cummings, ‘Resistance and Victimization: Dwight Macdonald in the 1940s,’ p. 229. 134 Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald, pp. 207-08.

86 Chapter 3 and find out that everybody else feels bad.” 135 So many letters reached Macdon- ald, every one expressing a similar consternation at the current political situation, that he was buoyed by the encouragement and pledged to persist. He had made a mark (however small) on the publishing landscape, and work resumed with renewed spirits throughout the immediate postwar years with attacks on mainstream politics and essays on the growing Cold War. But by 1949 Macdon- ald’s resolve had given way to exhaustion. He had reached a full state of depression, feeling that it had become pointless to comment on a world that had become too complex, uncontrollable and hopeless. As for his personal life, Mac- donald’s relationship with his wife was on the verge of collapse due to two affairs he had indiscriminately undertaken with his friends’ wives. Longing for freedom from his marriages to both wife and Politics, he simply left both. The last edition of Politics appeared in 1949. Needing money badly, Macdonald began writing for the New York Times, Commentary, the Nation, and even the New Yorker. Luckily for Macdonald, Politics ended just as a period of intense mass culture criticism commenced. Since he had become so frustrated with world politics, cultural issues offered a fitting retreat, and he took pleasure in reviving this old interest. In a surprising twist, ‘A Theory of Popular Culture’ belatedly put Macdonald on the cultural map the same year Politics ended. T. S. Eliot gener- ously acknowledged the article in his 1949 book, Notes towards the Definition of Culture. The complementary mention thrilled Macdonald personally, bestowing on him new and unexpected prestige as a commentator on contemporary cultural matters.136 In this milieu Macdonald’s preoccupation with mass society and worship of high culture found relevant expression in a decade when intellectuals’ concerns about the character of modern American life and mass entertainment reached a climax. The 1950s would be good to Macdonald. The ‘happy warrior of the mind’ would become the undisputed leading voice against mass culture when its triumph seemed near complete, and a public intellectual and celebrity of considerable proportions.

135 Cummings, ‘Resistance and Victimization: Dwight Macdonald in the 1940s,’ p. 229. 136 Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald, pp. 235-46, 212.

Chapter 4 A Theory of Mass Culture

Looking over the panorama of 1950s America, it is easy to understand the dismay many intellectuals such as Macdonald felt with the temper of the decade. The ‘50s were, even at the time, described as a nation of “mass housing, mass markets, massive corporations, massive government, mass media, and massive boredom.”137 While this characterization ignores some nuances, surface attributes easily supported a developing stereotype of mass society. As Charles Ponce de Leon writes of the era, “most Americans were acutely conscious of living amid new circumstances, in a society that was the quintessence of the modern.”138 And within this modern nation existed a broadly shared belief that a distinct epoch had commenced, and a pattern of living had been consented to and irrevocably set. An explosion of commercial amusements, widely termed ‘mass culture,’ dominated the fabric of America, so much so that the population spent one seventh of yearly GNP on entertainment.139 In addition, television arrived, gracing ninety percent of American homes by the end of the decade, and quickly making TV Guide the nation’s most popular periodical. Its only rival was Reader’s Digest, famous in the ‘50s for its condensed versions of literary classics.140 As the airwaves filled with a steady output of soap operas, unsophisticated comedy shows and sitcoms set in white suburbia, Holly- wood pumped out lavish musicals, violent westerns, and spectacular costume dra- mas that reflected a waning of interest in political issues. Films that dealt with modern life generally portrayed Americans as living in a vast, harmonious consumer paradise, peopled by happy, white, middle-class families devoid of serious problems.141 Such fare was avidly consumed by an increasingly suburban populace, who inhabited identical pre-fabricated houses decried by architectural critics as “degraded in conception and impoverished in form.”142

137 Boyer, et al, The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People from 1865, p. 828. 138 Charles Ponce de Leon, Self-Exposure: Human Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890-1940 (Charleston: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 1. 139 Boyer, et al., The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People from 1865, p. 830. 140 Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century, pp. 182-83. 141 Boyer, et al., The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People from 1865, pp. 830-31. 142 Frederick, F. Binder and David M. Reimers, eds, The Way We Lived: Essays and Doc- uments in American Social History, 1865-Present, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Compa- ny, 2000), p. 220.

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None of the developments described above escaped trenchant criticism in American intellectual circles. Macdonald’s own disgust regarding the “disease of mass culture in America” was bluntly expressed in a letter to a friend in 1950.143 In it, he insisted that mass culture was so great a danger to America that it could bring on defeat in the Cold War:

If the US doesn’t or cannot change its mass culture (movies, radio, sports cult, comics, television, slick magazines) it will lose the war against the USSR. Americans have been made into permanent adolescents by advertising, mass culture – uncritical, herd minded, pleasure-loving, concerned about trivia of materialistic living, scared of death, sex, old age – friendship is sending Xmas cards, sex is the wet dream of those chromium-plated Hollywood glamour girls, death – is not… The happy ending is de rigueur in Hollywood, but there is no such thing in real life – everybody’s life has an UNhappy ending, namely death… Anyway we have become relaxed, immersed in a warm bath, perverted to attach high value to trivial things like baseball or football (kid’s games really), and we just don’t function when we get out into the big cold world where poverty, the mere struggle for existence, is important, and where some of the people are grown ups.144

As in the 1940s, Macdonald was not alone in designating commercial entertainment a threat to American society. Issues revolving around the country’s rampant consumerism and its effects on the citizenry had attracted the attention of other like-minded thinkers, igniting an explosion of new mass culture criticism. In 1952 Partisan Review dedicated three straight issues to a symposium entitled ‘Our Country and Our Culture,’ in which most contributors expressed fears concerning the seemingly unstoppable mass culture juggernaut. The scope of their discussion pitted detractors of mass culture and society against those who saw some hope for America’s cultural future. No one involved in the debate, however, had much positive to say about contemporary mass culture itself.145 The editorial statement by Phillips and Rahv prefacing ‘Our Country and Our Culture’ spoke of how: “the enormous and ever-increasing growth of mass culture confronts the artist and intellectual with a new phenomenon and creates a new obstacle: the artist and the intellectual who wants to be a part of American life is faced by mass culture which makes him feel that he is still outside looking in.” And even worse:

143 Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald, p. 254. 144 Michael Wreszin, ed., A Moral Temper: The Letters of Dwight Macdonald, p. 203. 145 Michael Kammen, The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 330.

A Theory of Mass Culture 89

[M]ass culture not only weakens the position of the artist and the intellectual profoundly by separating him from his natural audience, but it also removes the mass of people from the kind of art which might express their human and aesthetic needs. Its tendency is to exclude everything which does not conform to popular norms; it creates and satisfies artificial appetites in the entire populace; it has grown into a major industry which converts culture into a commodity.146

The bulk of the participants in the symposium, who included Lionel Trilling, Del- more Schwartz, Norman Mailer, Irving Howe, David Riesman, C. Wright Mills and both Phillips and Rahv, fully accepted the above assumptions, whatever their opinion of America’s future cultural prospects. Macdonald’s contribution to the debate came in the form of ‘A Theory of Mass Culture,’ published in the journal Diogenes in 1953. The essay became one of the most widely read diatribes on the subject, and secured Macdonald’s reputation as a public intellectual. ‘A Theory of Mass Culture’ is a more lengthy effort at exploring the evils of commercial amusements than its predecessor, ‘A Theory of Popular Culture.’ It begins with the fresh inclusion of new entertainment media into Macdonald’s familiar exploitation paradigm. In 1944 he mentioned radio and cinema as two technologies especially well suited to the mass audience, but 1953 brought more frivolities to the fore. Comic books, detective stories, science fiction, and above all, television, are identified as being specifically and exclusively created by the mass culture industry, designated by Macdonald as an area where “the serious artist rarely ventures.” Indeed, such developments even called for a change of epithets from ‘popular’ to ‘mass’ – a more derogatory category marked by products that are “solely an article for mass consumption, like chewing gum.” High- lighting the distinction, Macdonald writes that in the past high art at times became popular and attracted a wide audience of consumers, though today, “this is increasingly rare.” Charles Dickens serves as a prime example. Dickens was both a purveyor of high culture and yet broadly admired, a fact rendering the ‘popular culture’ heading unreliable as a tool of categorization. After all, one cannot be critical of all that is popular. ‘Mass’ is therefore a more appropriate term for the swill enthusiastically ingested by modern audiences. In emphasizing this point, Macdonald cites the novelist G. A. Henty, a contemporary of Dickens who also achieved a wide following. Yet the difference between the two was vast. Dickens “was an artist, communicating his individual vision to other individuals, while Henty was an impersonal manufacturer of an impersonal commodity for the masses.” The Dickens example again proves that the masses can appreciate quality, just as the popularity of Chaplin, Disney, Griffith, and jazz

146 William Phillips and Philip Rahv, ‘Our Country and Our Culture,’ Partisan Review 19 (May-June, 1952), p. 284.

90 Chapter 4 had shown in ‘A Theory of Popular Culture.’ Nonetheless, it is ‘mass’ and not ‘popular’ culture that Macdonald sees taking over America in the 1950s, steam- rolling its way across all that is artistically holy. Macdonald reiterates many of his previous arguments in ‘A Theory of Mass Culture,’ explicating the rise of mass culture from the 1800s as political democracy and popular education broke the monopoly on culture held by the aristocracy. The simultaneous rise of a profitable culture market born of the public’s demands for cheap literature, periodicals, pictures, and music, has culminated in the advent of cinema, radio, and television – creating a situation radically different from the old folk-art/high-culture dichotomy described in 1944. Quoting Greenberg’s ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch,’ Macdonald details the parasitic nature of mass culture on high culture in its aping of traditions, discoveries, and common consciousness: “The precondition of kitsch is the availability close at hand of a fully-matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and per- fected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of to its own ends.” As a result, mass culture integrates “the masses into a debased form of High Culture” that becomes “an instrument of political domination.” As in ‘A Theory of Popu- lar Culture,’ Macdonald describes a much different past, long before such horrid conditions prevailed. Prior to the intrusion of the masses onto the political and cultural scene, a separation between folk art and high culture into “fairly watertight compartments” existed. This division corresponded with the “sharp line once drawn between the common people and the aristocracy.” While folk art had its own special quality that reflected the genuine concerns and tastes of its creators, mass culture is merely vulgarized high culture, competing with the real thing for the admiration of all classes, high and low. Macdonald explains: “Like nineteenth-century capitalism, Mass Culture is a dynamic, revolutionary force, breaking down the old barriers of class, tradition, taste, and dissolving all cultural distinctions.” And what is more insidious, neither folk art nor high art are safe from attack. Folk art died as a matter of course when mass culture became the accepted entertainment for the lower orders, relieving them of the burden of self-production. Mass culture meanwhile imperils high culture “by its sheer per- vasiveness, its brutal, overwhelming quality.” It is, in a sense, Arnoldian ‘anarchy’ manufactured from above. Thus an ironic situation has evolved in which the upper classes, specifically the “Lords of Kitsch,” use mass culture “to make money from the crude tastes of the masses and to dominate them politically,” but end up “finding their own culture attacked and even threatened with destruction by the instrument they have thoughtlessly employed.” According to Macdonald, the great success of mass culture across the board has much to do with the fact that it “mixes and scrambles everything together, producing what might be called a homogenized culture.” This grotesque cultural

A Theory of Mass Culture 91 blend might be avoided if “there were a clearly defined elite in the United States, then the masses could have their kitsch and the elite could have its high culture, with everybody happy.” However, “the boundary line is blurred,” and the only thing capable of preserving aesthetic value is cultural criticism. Without it, the homogenization process will eventually suck in the wealth of western civilization’s accumulated ideas in the form of raw material, and put out nothing more than finely ground banality. Only one movement has sought to counter cultural massification: the avant-garde, which refused to compete in the marketplace of popular, commercialized entertainment, and made “a desperate attempt to fence off some area where the serious artist could still function.” By avant- garde Macdonald again makes clear he is referring to the period of 1890 to 1930, listing Joyce, Picasso, and Stravinsky as its main exponents. He praises their work for its criticism of bourgeois society, claiming that it produced a new compartmentalization of high culture – that of the intellect rather than of the social and economic elite. The radical, pioneering movement, to which “we owe almost everything that is living in the art of the last fifty or so years,” set a new high culture standard before its disintegration at the hands of Nazism and Stalin- ism. In the following years bold experimentation has ceased, as now “men cling to the evils they know rather than risk possibly greater ones by pressing forward.” The chronic state of the Cold War has only reinforced such sentiments, and what has filled the artistic vacuum is to Macdonald’s beleaguered mind, egregious: “There is slowly emerging,” he warns, “a tepid, flaccid Middlebrow culture that threatens to engulf everything in its spreading ooze.” And with this merging of high and mass culture, high culture is being usurped: Bauhaus modernism has been incorporated (“in debased form”) into the nation’s furni- ture, theaters, office buildings, and electric toasters, psychoanalysis is expounded (“superficially”) in popular periodicals, and T. S. Eliot’s plays (the “inferior” ones) have been produced on the Broadway stage. At first, Macdonald admits these developments might look like a raising of the level of mass culture, but instead they are nothing more than the corruption of the high and an effort at standardization reinforced by the capitalist culture industry’s division of labor. In the large studios of Hollywood, directors are not allowed to cut their own films and composers find their creations hackneyed. Con- sequently, “art workers are as alienated from their brain-work as the industrial worker is from his hand-work.” This culture machine produces staggering quantity rather than quality. Macdonald notes that Hollywood’s greatest directors, Grif- fith and Stroheim, flourished in the early days as tremendous egoists who oversaw every detail of their own films. Yet by 1925 both had been forced out as the industry became more highly organized, because “[t]he manufacture of commodities so costly to make and so profitable to sell, was too serious a matter to be en-

92 Chapter 4 trusted to artists.” The homogenized entertainment that has arisen in the absence of the auteur has wrought adverse effects on its audience, blurring age lines and making adults both more childish and childlike. As in ‘Field Notes,’ Macdonald deplores the fact that millions of American adults read the comics. Children’s programming on television also attracts an inordinate number of adult viewers. In turn, children easily consume adult programming due to the “extremely modest demands they make on the audience’s cultural equipment.” The observation that mass entertainments diminish their audience’s potential intellect warrants several new thoughts, contained in the section “The Problem of the Masses.” Here, Macdonald portrays the American public as hapless dolts entirely out of step with any political reality and almost beyond cultural enlightenment. Nonetheless, he again asserts the wrongness of Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses and its conclusion that the walls of aristocracy should be rebuilt. Macdonald also draws Eliot into the tussle, taking aim at his Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1949) and its conservative proposals for cultural re- trenchment in the post avant-garde era.147 Since the 1920s, Eliot had shifted from literary to social criticism, promoting a rather reactionary politics inclined towards a retreat to prewar aristocratic values.148 Characterized as “uneven” and “sometimes contradictory,” Notes towards the Definition of Culture, with its cautious title, was his only sustained work of prose to appear in the 1940s.149 However, the book can be seen as a co- hesive protest against postwar social philosophy, namely the potential communal, familial, and cultural fragmentation caused by democratic mass society based on the concept of meritocracy.150 Like Macdonald, Eliot feared that mass values would replace traditional notions of culture, threatening the world’s collective artistic heritage with extinction. In the opening pages of Notes he deline- ates his disenchanted outlook on twentieth-century culture:

We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline; that standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago; and that the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human activity. I see no reason why the decay of culture should not proceed much further, and why we may not even anticipate a period, of some duration, of which it is possible to say that it will have no culture [emphasis in original].

147 Dwight Macdonald, ‘A Theory of Mass Culture,’ Diogenes 3 (Summer 1953), pp. 1-10. 148 Leitch, American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties, pp. 21-25. 149 Bernard Bergonzi, T. S. Eliot (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972), pp. 156-62. 150 Roger Kojecky, T. S. Eliot’s Social Criticism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), p. 207.

A Theory of Mass Culture 93

The culprit is in many ways similar to Gasset’s: the collapse of social stratifica- tion. In his chapter ‘The Class and the Elite’ Eliot expands on the separate purpose of classes, and how the class structure is vital to the entirety of any given society:

[Each class]…possesses a function, that of maintaining that part of the total culture of that society which pertains to that class… [I]n a healthy society this maintenance of a particular level of culture is to the benefit, not merely of the class which maintains it, but of the society as a whole. Awareness of this fact will prevent us from supposing that the culture of the “higher” class is something superfluous to society as a whole, or to the majority, and from supposing that it is something which ought to be shared equally by all other classes. It should also remind the “higher” class, in so far as any exists, that the survival of the culture in which it is particularly interested is dependent upon the health of the culture of the people.

This intricate web of cultural interdependence, though, has been torn by the modern trend toward the abolition of classes. This offensive state of affairs en- dures because contemporary wisdom deems that a society consisting of different levels “is not the highest type to which we may aspire; but that it is indeed in the nature of things for a progressive society eventually to overcome these divisions, and that it is also within our conscious direction, and therefore a duty incumbent on us, to bring about a classless society.” Yet a classless society, in Eliot’s estimation, inevitably destroys the fruitful and harmonious cultural dichotomy of high aristocratic and quaint folk culture that happily existed for so long. Unlike mass society, the old model of the idyllic past Eliot praises (as does Macdonald) left none excluded in partaking of culture, while shielding the lofty arts from injurious intrusions from below. Because the whole of the population should “take an active part in cultural activities, [though] not all in the same activities or on the same level,” Eliot feels, as Gasset did, that “in a vigorous society there will be both class and elite.” Only under these proper conditions can “the ablest artists and architects rise to the top, influence taste, and execute important public commissions,” thus perpetuating a system that hands down its cultural wealth from generation to generation. In a qualifier reminiscent of Gas- set, Eliot insists that he has not advanced a “defense of aristocracy,” but rather “a plea on behalf of a form of society in which an aristocracy should have a peculiar and essential function, as peculiar and essential as the function of any other part of society.” Whereas it is important that the societal structure feature “a continuous gradation of cultural levels” from top to bottom, it is not that the higher level should possess more culture than the lower levels, but that it represent “a more conscious culture and a greater specialization of culture.” In Eliot’s

94 Chapter 4 vision, “each individual would inherit greater or less responsibility towards the commonwealth, according to the position in society which he inherited.” Conse- quently, “each class would have somewhat different responsibilities.” Without these crucial divisions a mass society of “equal responsibility in everything” results, becoming “oppressive for the conscientious and licentious for the rest.” These conclusions are axiomatic, Eliot circuitously states, if “we agree that the primary vehicle for the transmission of culture is the family, and if we agree that in a more highly civilized society there must be different levels of culture, then it follows that to ensure the transmission of the culture of these different levels there must be groups of families persisting, from generation to generation, each in the same way of life.” Notes closes with a plea to humankind to preserve and extend its cultural achievements. Barring a successful restoration of classes to their proper functions, Eliot is left to hope that “we can at least try to save something of those goods of which we are the common trustees: the legacy of Greece, Rome and Israel, and the legacy of Europe throughout the last 2,000 years.” “In a world which has seen such material devastation as ours,” he concludes, “these spiritual possessions are also in imminent peril.” Unsurprisingly, Eliot’s politically backward-looking proposals made little headway with Macdonald. This despite Eliot’s display of considerable generosi- ty in the preface to Notes, which reads: “I have also profited by reading an article by Mr. Dwight Macdonald in Politics (New York) for February 1944, entitled ‘A Theory of Popular Culture’; and an anonymous critique of this article in the issue of the same periodical for November 1946. Mr. Macdonald’s theory strikes me as the best alternative to my own that I have seen” [emphasis in original].151 Eliot was also a great fan of Politics, but this fact did not save his thoughts on culture from brusque dismissal. Returning to ‘A Theory of Mass Culture,’ Macdonald excoriates Eliot and Gasset for the misguided assumption that mass culture is “an expression of people,” rather than “an expression of masses” – a decidedly different entity [emphasis in original].152 Thus commences a lengthy explanation of Macdonald’s conception of mass society and the mass man, which draws heavily on the work of two contemporaries: David Riesman and Hannah Arendt. Riesman’s major work, The Lonely Crowd (1950), appeared three years before ‘A Theory of Mass Culture.’ The massive study examines America’s problem of conformity through a critique of the suburban middle-class lifestyle, focusing on questions raised by the affluent postwar environment, such as the effects of

151 T. S. Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949), pp. 17-34, 37, 43-44, 47-48, 128, 8. 152 Macdonald, ‘A Theory of Mass Culture,’ p. 13.

A Theory of Mass Culture 95 mass production, consumption and leisure on social values, and the implications of corporate organization and materialism for American behavior and character- formation. Riesman operates under the assumption that this homogenized middle- class culture will soon be all-pervasive, populating America’s postwar tapestry with ‘other-directed’ men, who similar to Macdonald’s masses, are influenced by forces they little understand. In bemoaning an increasingly prevalent “submission to the group,” The Lonely Crowd buttressed one of Macdonald’s earlier core arguments regarding popular taste – that mass culture operates by Gresham’s Law, inevitably catering to the lowest common denominator.153 The book also gave force to the concept of mass society that so entranced Macdonald and other intellectuals during the decade. Riesman and Macdonald, however, differed on their views of mass culture. While Riesman readily admitted that “conformity” and “the standardization of the [cultural] commodities themselves” was a serious problem, he was convinced that overarching condemnations of mass culture were premature. Riesman therefore urged further inquiry into the matter, particularly in the area of audience interpretation, and held out some hope that America could eventually turn the corner, so to speak, culturally.154 Instead, it was with Arendt that Macdonald found true kinship. Her Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, made a lasting and profound impression on him. Arendt’s work offers an examination of the origins of dictatorial state control, and deals with questions that had plagued the author (and of course Macdonald) since the Holocaust. Arendt’s primary concern is asking what happened, how it happened, and how it was possible. She delves into the ramifica- tions of mass society’s psychology, concentrated power, and the use of violence and state terror to coerce the citizenry.155 Arendt posits that these are the central, burning issues of modern life, as Marxist ideas of social class and economic re- lationships have lost any significance. Essential to her theory is the contention that totalitarianism is a unique force in Western history, rooted in the failure of nation states to cope with imperialism and self-aggrandizement. Arendt writes that totalitarian regimes grew out of the destruction of World War I, and promised a restitution of stability to Europe’s traumatized and disgruntled populations. Where it appeared, “totalitarian government always transformed classes into masses, supplanted the party system, not by one-party dictatorships, but by a mass movement.” These developments constituted a direct break from the

153 David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), p. 84. 154 David Riesman, ‘Our Country and Our Culture,’ Partisan Review 19 (May-June, 1952), p. 311. 155 Sylvie Courtine-Denamy, Three Women in Dark Times: Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 219.

96 Chapter 4 past, which would have been impossible were it not for the masses themselves, defined as such:

The term masses applies only where we deal with people who are either because of sheer numbers, or indifference, or a combination of both, cannot be integrated into any organization based on common interest, into political parties or municipal governments or professional organizations or trade unions. Potentially, they exist in any country and form the majority of those large numbers of neutral, politically indifferent people who never join a party and hardly ever go to the polls.

On the backs of the masses pan-German and pan-Slavic movements transformed into the Nazi and Bolshevik parties, which portrayed themselves to the mob as parties outside of traditional politics, able to unite populations through revolution. Once in charge they transmitted ideologies through propaganda to generate “mass popularity,” conditioning citizens to accept government policy and even routine and arbitrarily inflicted state violence. The purpose was not to merely terrorize the population, but eliminate personal dignity, free-thinking, and foster a society in which human beings could be treated like the interchangeable parts of a vast machine run by the Great Leader. Arendt’s vision of political organization, replete with brain-washed masses vulnerable to despotic systems, allows for “total domination” over human behavior. This is only achievable “if each and every person can be reduced to a never-changing identity of reactions, so that each of these bundles of reactions can be exchanged at random with any other,” turning plurality into homogeny.156 Crucially, Arendt equates Stalinism and Nazism as expressions of the same totalitarian impulse that American Cold War anti-communism foments. This impulse constitutes the primary danger in all modern mass societies. Therefore if Americans and Europeans do not appreciate their governments as institutions that secure the legal rights of all, totalitarianism might emerge victorious.157

156 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1963), pp. 460, 11, 484, 483. 157 Richard Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), pp. 90-95. Macdonald met Ar- endt soon after the publication of his review, and the two became frequent houseguests and lifelong friends – even “best friends” as described by Macdonald many years later. See Trilling, ‘An Interview with Dwight Macdonald,’ p. 140. He also was one of the most passionate defenders of her work, in particular Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Ba- nality of Evil (1963), which drew fire from critics for painting an innocuous portrait of the titular war criminal. Macdonald wrote a response, praising the book at length an article entitled ‘Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Establishment’ (Partisan Review Spring 1964), while dissecting its critical voices. See Macdonald, Discriminations: Essays &

A Theory of Mass Culture 97

Macdonald entirely bought Arendt’s theories, and extolled them in ‘A New Theory of Totalitarianism,’ written for the New Leader in May of 1951. The article labels Arendt the “most original and profound” political thinker of her time. Macdonald also proposes that the beginnings of totalitarianism have already taken firm hold in the United States. His stark assessment, much in concert with Arendt’s admonitions, declares that: “our society is rotting and that, if the Nazi- Soviet totalitarians are the extreme expression of this rot, their liberal- progressive opponents are also infected, and…a fundamentally new way of thinking (and, above all, feeling) is necessary if we are to escape destruction.” Though Macdonald concedes the “absolute evil, absolute lunacy” of totalitarianism goes right to the heart of America’s dire postwar predicament, he is less convinced that Arendt’s book can proffer much hope of changing the nation’s course. The deterrent, as perhaps one could expect, lies in Macdonald’s pet monstrosity: mass culture. The Origins cannot possibly influence “The Man in the Street,” or the “Common Man,” because “our American mass culture has efficiently perverted and suppressed his capacity to think about politics or indeed anything else.”158 According to Michael Wreszin, what Macdonald found most intriguing about Arendt’s work was its idea that the totalitarian, or mass man, was nothing more than the harmless family man next door. This view of the average neighbor working as an instrument of destruction mirrored Macdonald’s earlier writings on the creation of the Atomic bomb, in which he described a bureaucratic system staffed with unthinking workers who felt no responsibility for their individual or collective actions. At this time, it appears he genuinely feared the process of massification would bring about terrors equal to Stalinism and Nazism on American soil.159 Also important, Arendt’s analysis included references to the dangers of mass culture and its propagandistic nature in the subchapter ‘Totali- tarian Propaganda,’ which explained the need to win over the masses with such fare. Specifically, she wrote of mass culture’s ability to manipulate human emotions for political ends.160 American mass culture might not have been on the

Afterthoughts (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1974), pp. 308-17. Even towards the end of his life, Macdonald was still singing Arendt’s praises and citing her as “a great influence on me, especially the Origins.” See Book World, ‘Portrait of a Man Reading,’ in Interviews with Dwight Macdonald, ed. Michael Wreszin, p. 43. 158 Dwight Macdonald, ‘A New Theory of Totalitarianism,’ New Leader 34 (May 1951), pp. 17-19. 159 Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald, pp. 254-55. 160 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 341.

98 Chapter 4 same par as that of the Soviet and Nazi dictatorships, but for Macdonald it was a mounting problem destructive of civilized society.161 Both Arendt’s and Riesman’s seminal studies therefore stoked the fears Macdonald had been nurturing since the 1940s about the rise of a society so over-bureaucratized and industrialized that it squelched the healthy and progressive development of humanity and culture. His exposition of the mass man in ‘A Theory of Mass Culture’ seems to draw on Arendt on the macro-level and Riesman on the micro-level. The masses are,

in historical time what a crowd is in space: a large quantity of people unable to express themselves as human beings because they are related to one another neither as individuals nor as members of communities – indeed, they are not related to each other at all, but only to something distant, abstract, nonhuman: a football game or bargain sale in the case of a crowd, a system of industrial production, a party or State, in the case of the masses.

Macdonald continues on to say that the “mass man is a solitary atom, uniform with and undifferentiated from thousands and millions of other atoms who go to make up ‘the lonely crowd,’ as David Riesman well calls American society.” The outcome is a battered civilization with “just too many people,” in which morality “sinks to that of its most brutal and primitive members, its taste to that of the least sensitive and most ignorant” [emphasis in original]. Mass society is in opposition to a folk, or people, who lived in an integrated community linked by common interests, traditions, value systems, and work. Such groups functioned as a family, on a small enough scale to ensure that each human being could make a difference in his own daily life, “his creativity nourished by a rich combination of individualism and communalism.” And though Macdonald insists that the “great culture bearing elites of the past have been communities of this kind,” it is not an excuse to resurrect the old aristocratic patterns supported by Eliot. And it is not only Eliot and his fellow conservatives who err [emphasis in original]. ‘A Theory of Mass Culture’ scolds “Marxian radicals and liberals” for their proposals to ameliorate America’s mass-culture morass through enlightenment. These misguided observers “see the masses as intrinsically healthy but dupes and victims of cultural exploitation by the Lords of Kitsch – in the style of Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’ idea.” Macdonald rejects outright the belief that: “If only the masses were offered good stuff instead of kitsch, how they would eat it

161 Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald, pp. 254-55.

A Theory of Mass Culture 99 up! How the level of Mass Culture would rise!”162 The comments are a riposte to Gilbert Seldes, whose book The Great Audience (1950) dared lightly criticize ‘A Theory of Popular Culture’ for its stance that capitalism inevitably ensured poor entertainments. This disagreement caused a somewhat unpleasant controversy between Seldes and Macdonald that lasted throughout the 1950s. Curious- ly enough, each man’s criticisms of mass culture and its audience have so much in common it is difficult to understand their mutual ire. Though largely forgotten today, Seldes first made a national name for himself with the publication of The Seven Lively Arts in 1924, which discussed the connections between elements of popular culture such as jazz, slapstick, movies, and vaudeville, with the more traditional art forms of staged drama, ballet, classical music, and opera. Like Macdonald’s, Seldes’ career coincided with many innovations in popular culture, such as the transition from silent to sound movies, and the wide proliferation of middlebrow periodicals in the 1940s and ‘50s. Unlike Macdonald, Seldes believed that the mass audience’s proclivities were not beyond redemption and that the level of its taste could be raised. Seldes saw himself as both a mentor for the public and advocate of popular taste, who supported “the artistic rights of the average man.”163 The Great Audience explores several aspects of American mass entertainments, such as how the popular arts function to harm or benefit the public interest, whether they are as good as they can be, to what degree they work under the framework of capitalism, and finally, if they contribute to the moral and intellectual enlightenment of America. From the outset, Seldes makes it evident he is in favor of the ‘popular arts,’ but finds them in need of reform. And if things continue down the current path: “the end product which they are now creating is the mass man.” Seldes cherishes the dream, however, that there is still time to “make the popular arts serve free men trying to secure a free society.” When it comes to criticizing aspects of mass culture, Seldes is frequently as acerbic as Macdonald. He writes that the entertainment industry gives the artist scant opportunity to express his creative voice freely. In the Hollywood studio system, for example, creativity is quashed by “non-men” who interfere with the work of the salaried writer, who has little choice but to conform to the dictates of static conventions. The same artistic constraints affect television, whose producers are guided by the dictum “whatever succeeds now will set the standards

162 Macdonald, ‘A Theory of Mass Culture,’ pp. 13-16. 163 Kammen, The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States, pp. 326-28, 3-8, 316. This was, at least, his public stance. In a private letter written in 1952 he sarcastically referred to “The Great (though Torpified) Audience.” See Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century, p. 331.

100 Chapter 4 for the next ten years,” the result of which is bland programming. Sounding like Macdonald, Seldes warns that if television’s content does not improve its audience “will be lower in the scale of human values.” In a passage reminiscent of the Frankfurt School, he also asserts that part of television’s insidiousness is that it purports to offer a wide spectrum of programs to the viewing public, while in fact “a closer look at the actual product shows that the variety is superficial,” as “ninety per cent of our movies are made according to formula.” Interestingly, Seldes writes that the concept of intellect takes a beating at the hands of the culture industry. The section ‘The Common Oaf’ addresses the ur- gent need to overcome the estrangement between artists and intellectuals on one side, and the public on the other. Cautioning that it might be too late for this type of radical change, Seldes lays the blame at the feet of manufacturers of commercial entertainment, who have conditioned the audience “to suspect or despise the thinking man.” As a potential remedy, he appeals vigorously to the “average intelligent man” who has escaped “the contagion of mass thinking” enough to resist the “persistent, unremitting” attacks of popular entertainments and wake up to the need for a cultural revolution. Clearly, an “anti-intellectualism” appears in mass culture, in which sympathetic characters are almost without exception stupid, and characters who display learning and intellect act as mere “foils for the triumphant ape.” Seldes argues that this stereotype was born when educated men were rare, and condemns its continuance as a flattering of “the victims of our educational system.” Of central importance to Macdonald’s conception of the mass man is Sel- des’ discussion of “the public.” In comparison, Seldes’ masses are more nu- anced and sensitive than Macdonald’s:

The average man lives at many emotional levels in the course of his day. He can discuss baseball statistics and abstract justice in half an hour’s conversation; he is curious about a great many things. He has an appetite for fact, and unless his mental processes have been dulled, he looks for entertainment of many kinds. This is true of those people who make up the mass to which radio and movie executives refer.

Seldes therefore appears to disavow Macdonald’s notions of the masses. He declares that “Americans are not one huge lump. We are, as we always have been, a pluralistic society.” Yet at the same time this belief in diversity and autonomy of thought mixes with indications that the specter of the mass man might achieve reification at any moment. On the very same page Seldes writes: “nothing in our history suggests that we are done for, unless we lose our independence of character and the spontaneous capacity for action – unless we have al-

A Theory of Mass Culture 101 ready been robotized into mass men.” Despite Seldes and Macdonald sharing this similar apprehension, some basis for disagreement appears. In the chapter ‘The People and the Arts’ Seldes summarizes and criticizes ‘A Theory of Popular Culture,’ noting that the distinction between him and Macdonald is largely “one of approach.” Specifically, he thinks Macdonald’s conviction that “mass entertainment under capitalism is condemned to operate on a quick turnover of the cheapest and shoddiest goods” does not allow suffi- cient room for the potential mutability of the industry. Instead, “the manipula- tors of public taste will change their methods” under some type of undefined public pressure, and “give us new kinds of pictures and programs if that is the only way to make a profit.” This way, the industry’s profit motive can be used against it for the benefit of all. The public will spontaneously demand better products and reject inferior ones, and producers will immediately respond. Sel- des also differentiates himself from Macdonald’s pessimism concerning “the ills of the superior artist.” Rather than capitalism acting as a wedge between the artist and the people – forcing the artist to retreat into work geared for a small, specialized audience – something altogether different has occurred. The artist, Sel- des claims, rejects “the woes and passions of the average man,” and then unjus- tifiably complains that he is not appreciated by the masses. The misfortune of this hostility between common man and artist has persisted into the age of mass culture, as intellectuals, for reasons of snobbism, have shied away from the new mediums that need their talents most. For instance, in Hollywood many great novels have been adapted for the screen, but few serious writers have tried to specialize in film writing. Seldes also points out that only one American poet, Archibald MacLeish, has deigned to write verse expressly for radio broadcast. Macdonald was likely revolted by this example. Nonetheless, Seldes continues to see hope where Macdonald sees degradation, in spite of his own ruminations. He points to some forms of popular literature, namely Life magazine, that indicate there is still some imagination and in- quisitiveness left in the average American mind. Life is “a demonstration that a genuine intellectual curiosity exists even among the moderately educated,” constituting proof that the common people’s “appetites are not completely dulled.” As well, even if nine-tenths of Life’s readers glance at an essay on medieval philosophy, at least they have been beneficially exposed to such forbidding yet sub- stantive subjects. This fact makes such popular magazines “the last fortress of those who believe that we cannot survive unless we preserve our capacity to think.” What Macdonald deems rank exploitation, Seldes labels evidence that “the wants of the average man are not entirely satisfied by those exploiters who think of him as part of a mass.” As a result, “the reduction of man to mass is not an irreversible process.” The closing pages of The Great Audience, as is the hab-

102 Chapter 4 it in such works of cultural criticism, implore readers to take a stand against the lowly status and substandard level of the arts:

At stake is simply the future of this country as a creative and democratic society. If a nation cannot survive half slave and half free, a democracy cannot endure if the forces making for free minds are apathetic and the forces of invincible ignorance are aggressive and brilliantly managed and irresponsible. If it is already inconvenient to attack them, it will be dangerous in five years, and it will be impossible in ten. They multiply, and their critics have been sterile too long. If the breakdown of the independent spirit of the individual citizen is to be averted, it must be done promptly.

For Seldes, the “unspoken fundamental promise” of American life is the opportunity to grow into maturity, a promise that is in danger of being broken. If indifference to America’s cultural woes triumphs, there will be no immunity to the inevitable cultural, moral, and intellectual degradation in the USA’s “highly integrated” society. “Our strength,” Seldes counsels, “cannot survive the weakness of others. We have lived through too much to be frightened, and we hope for too much to let ourselves be defeated.” Somehow the workings of the capitalist entertainment industry have to be refocused, through collective effort, to the public’s benefit.164 The critical reception of Seldes’ proposals was generally positive, but re- viewers could not ignore the contradictions between his rosy outlook on the American public and scorn of highbrow critics like Macdonald on the one hand, and his harsh criticisms of popular entertainments on the other. Seldes’ prescrip- tion that the people responsible for the content of the public arts should rescue them on their own initiative in order to make them serve society seemed a bit askew, if not quixotic.165 Predictably, The Great Audience generated a storm with Macdonald due to its depiction ‘A Theory of Popular Culture.’ In ‘A Theo- ry of Mass Culture’ Macdonald struck back, labeling Seldes’ book “superficial,” and dubbing his views the flawed “liberal-democratic proposal.” Macdonald dismisses the claim that the present state of American culture is due to three factors: the producers who underestimate the public’s intelligence, arrogant intellectuals too snobbish to raise the level of the mass media and try to include the public, and the passive public itself, who refuse to demand better entertainments. These arguments are based on the subjective factors of “stupidity, perversity, and failure of will.” Such blame placing is an incorrect approach considering that it is the mass culture system, not necessarily its tiny human components,

164 Gilbert Seldes, The Great Audience (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1970), pp. 4, 160, 167, 226-27, 265-66, 225, 231, 263-64, 295-99. 165 Kammen, The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States, p. 324.

A Theory of Mass Culture 103 that manufacture the cultural catastrophe: “Human beings have been caught up in the inexorable workings of a mechanism [much like, Macdonald suggested, with Nazism or Communism] that forces them, with a pressure only heroes can resist (and one cannot demand that anybody be a hero, though one can hope for it), into its own pattern” [emphasis in original]. Additionally, Seldes’ perspective is not only juvenile but outright impossible, because people in modern mass society are incapable of partaking in legitimate cultural enterprise. Macdonald maintains: “I take it as axiomatic that culture can only be produced by and for human beings. But so far as people are organized (more strictly, disorganized) as masses, they lose their human identity and quality.” The conclusion of ‘A Theory of Mass Culture’ designates the “collective monstrosity” of the public as the primary target audience of the “technicians of our Mass Culture,” leaving no possibility of elevated cultural production. Those in the culture industry assume that the public wants trash, which they cynically give them. Thus the futures of both high culture and mass culture are “dark” and “darker,” respectively. Politically, Macdonald writes, the world is dominated by two mass nations: the USA and the USSR, each becoming ever more industrialized and massified by the minute. Though in the high culture realm a new avant- garde could arise as a successful counter-movement to mass culture, there exists no clear likelihood that this will occur. This is particularly true in America, where class lines are indistinct, great facilities for producing and marketing kitsch thrive, and the intellectual tradition (despite Macdonald’s illustrious presence) is “remarkably small, weak and disintegrated.” Mass culture will only get worse, and due to its status as “a manufactured commodity” rather than “art form,” its downward trend is always toward cheapness and further standardization. Referencing Adorno’s observation in ‘On Popular Music’ that the chorus of every popular song has the exact same number of bars, Macdonald states that anything new and fresh inevitably “is repeated until it becomes a nerveless routine,” a “formula” hardened by capitalists, efficiency experts, and audience- reaction analysts. The early Disney of Mickey Mouse, for instance, becomes “the vulgar pretentiousness of Fantasia.” With all these forces conspiring against the elevation of the country’s level of cultural sophistication, in the end there is no defense against “the spreading ooze of Mass Culture.”166 Notable about the 1953 essay is its perceptible shift in tone with regard to the mass culture audience, and absence of any expressed belief that it can be integrated into high culture. In 1944, Macdonald used the Marxist jargon ‘class rulers,’ but now abandoned such terminology in favor of ‘Lords of Kitsch,’ sprinkling disdainful terms such as the ‘mob,’ ‘mass man,’ and ‘collective mon-

166 Macdonald, ‘A Theory of Mass Culture,’ pp. 13-17.

104 Chapter 4 strosity’ among the former ‘masses.’ This change signals his lack of interest in Marxism as a viable theoretical concept, and move to a vision of societal relations, after Arendt, in which the anonymous masses are dominated from above by equally faceless technicians who reign over mass society. Also important is the clear indication that Macdonald’s hope for the cultural future and sympathy for the lower orders’ tastes seem to be fading as rapidly as the phenomenon of mass culture proliferates. In 1944 he heroically called for the creation of a ‘human’ culture to replace the high/mass dichotomy and its exploitive nature. In 1953 he discards such socialism-inspired whimsy and offers no solution to the problems he punctiliously presents. The reference to Gilbert Seldes in ‘A Theory of Mass Culture’ was the first in a series of defensive gestures that would eventually mark the closing pages of ‘Mass- cult and Midcult’ seven years later. The culture debate had given rise to dissenting voices and criticisms of the prevailing mass culture interpretations, some of which were leveled directly at Macdonald. The importance and visibility of ‘A Theory of Mass Culture’ in the 1950s was indicated in 1957, when the essay was featured in the opening chapter of Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, edited by Ber- nard Rosenberg and David Manning White. The compilation, published for use in university courses on contemporary cultural issues, included contributions by Greenberg, Adorno, and Lowenthal. Its introduction explained that although “mass culture was destined to play a pervasive role in American life from the moment printing presses were turned by steam early in the nineteenth century, it is only in recent years that scholars have paid substantial attention to the interplay between mass media and society.” The editors also duly noted that “there have been far more excoriators of mass culture than defenders.” The volume distinguished among these detractors, establishing the classification that prevails today. On one side there were the radical neo-Marxists, such as the Frankfurt School intellectuals, along with Macdonald and Greenberg, who feared the corruption of high culture and insisted that mass culture was a fabricated opiate that kept the laboring classes docile and unaware. They were joined by the aristocratic cultural conservatives, such as Eliot and Gasset, who saw mass culture as catering to the most vulgar instincts of mankind in its quest to find the lowest common denominator, thus leveling cultural traditions with the hyper-democracy of the masses. And lastly, Ries- man and Seldes were identified as liberals who saw some expectation of improvement in mass culture. Still, all above expressed their concern about issues such as cultural uniformity and the quality of mass culture, as in PR’s symposium five years earlier.167

167 Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds. Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (New York: Macmillan Publishing, Inc., 1964), pp. v, 3-4.

A Theory of Mass Culture 105

For his part, Macdonald was unhappy with the anthology, which he believed reflected three misguided currents in mass culture criticism: the liberals, or “Ac- ademic-Cautious” (which featured “statistical tables and other academic instru- ments of torture to produce an innocuous conclusion understood by all before reading the article”), the aristocratic and “pseudo-scholarly” / “Academic- Baroque” (which reveled in pomposity), and the “Pale-Marxist” (which saw mass culture as a ruling class conspiracy to further corrupt the morals of the downtrodden).168 The comments signify the degree to which Macdonald had rejected his quasi-Marxist past, though he still remained convinced of his democratic objections to the conservatives. Not yet included in Macdonald’s criticisms were Daniel Bell and Edward Shils, who, turned off by the elitism and shrill rhetoric of radical critics, were soon to offer their own analyses. At around the same time ‘A Theory of Mass Culture’ appeared in Mass Culture: The Popu- lar Arts in America, Bell and Shils attacked Macdonald’s views in print, chip- ping away at the foundations of his mass theories and notion of the mass man. Bell questioned the very legitimacy of these concepts, pointing to aspects of American life that debunked the notion of faceless swarms devoid of agency, while Shils took aim at Macdonald’s rendering of the cultural past and conjec- tured as to the motives behind his rabid dismissal of mass culture. In July 1956 Bell published a widely noted essay, ‘The Theory of Mass So- ciety: A Critique,’ in the journal Commentary. Like Macdonald, Bell once worked as a writer for Luce’s Fortune, holding the post of labor editor. He and Macdonald had been good friends for some years, with Bell often contributing to Politics and at times playing protégé to the older intellectual. Indeed, it is this history of friendship that likely restrained Bell from assailing Macdonald more directly in the article. The general tenor of Bell’s thought is best demonstrated in his study of social and political life, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (1960), an anthology of essays written for various politically-oriented periodicals. The collection has a major theme: the disparagement of utopian thought, tempered by the concession that people need some type of societal vision for the good of civilization. Bell declares in the introduction that social theories about the United States are inadequate, “due in large measure to the uncritical application of ambient ideas from European sociology to the vastly different experiences of America life.” He continues: “This is most evident in the theory of the mass society, a concept that has become the leitmotif of the radical…disparagement of American life.” Adding perfunctorily, “I think

168 Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald, pp. 323-24.

106 Chapter 4 these theories are wrong.”169 In their place, Bell recommends an empirical strat- egy that focuses on practical, achievable gains. Solving contemporary problems needs no ideological interference or calls for sweeping social change. Ideology is a dead end. Unlike Macdonald, then, Bell accepted the parameters of modern liberalism and saw it as a force unlikely to ever be overtaken by the radical left or far right. He cited the horrors of totalitarianism as proof of liberalism’s correctness as a middle-of-the-road political path. The mixed economy America had adopted, it was obvious, was the best solution to the problems of communist state control and runaway robber-baron capitalism. Likewise, the two-party political system, with its supposed promotion of compromise and bargaining, promised stability.170 Bell also saw no problem in a vast middlebrow culture taking hold in the United States.171 This sanguine assessment of American society is evident in his critique of the mass society theory. The essay upbraids aristocratic-minded critics who deplore modern culture, and depicts the United States as a healthy, diverse nation on the road to greater cultural appreciation. It is little wonder that today Bell’s thought is regarded as emblematic of Cold War complacency. ‘The Theory of Mass Society: A Critique’ begins: “The sense of a radical dehumanization of life which has accompanied events of the past several decades has given rise to the theory of ‘mass society.’” The social theory is the most influential of its day, save perhaps Marxism, and Bell proceeds to summarize its principle doctrines. Drawing mainly on Gasset, Riesman, and Arendt, he describes the process of individual estrangement that purportedly comes with technological advancement, the sundering of group ties among family and community, the absence of morally unifying values, the preponderance of propaganda in the modern world, and the perceived relinquishing of critical standards to the nameless masses. In an initially conciliatory tone, Bell acknowledges:

In a world of lonely crowds seeking individual distinction, where values are constantly translated into economic calculabilites, where in extreme situations shame and conscience can no longer restrain the most dreadful excesses of terror, the theory of mass society seems a forceful, realistic description of contemporary society, an accurate reflection of the quality and feeling of modern life. But when one seeks to apply the theory of mass society analytically, it becomes very slippery. Ideal types,

169 Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York: Macmillan Publishing, Inc., 1965), pp. 13-14. 170 Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s, pp. 130-37. 171 Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century, p. 44.

A Theory of Mass Culture 107

like the shadows in Plato’s cave, generally never give us more than a silhouette. So, too, with the theory of “mass society.”

The ‘silhouette’ mentioned is of course the characterization of the mass man, whose inclusion in the concept of mass society little reflects “the complex, rich- ly striated social relations of the real world.” Bell argues against the notion that large numbers of people who have shared the same experience also share the same “psychological reality” to the degree that individual differences have become irrevocably indistinguishable. No, he asserts, humans are not “tabulae ra- sae,” as we bring our own social conceptions, responses, and thoughts to every experience. Audience members might constitute a silent, detached, anonymous mass while viewing a film in a darkened theater, but afterward they share their opinions and judgments with their friends and colleagues, becoming once again individual members of a social group. Concerning such social groupings, Bell charges that the mass society theory’s emphasis on the isolated anomy of modern life has much to do with historical misunderstanding. “Behind the theory of social disorganization,” he writes, “lies a romantic notion of the past that sees society as having once been made up of small ‘organic’ close-knit communities…that were shattered by industrialism and modern life.” But such a wide-ranging transition took generations to accom- plish, and did not occur overnight. The persistence of ethnic groups and communal institutions is evidence of both differentiation and cohesion in the face of modernity (an important contention expanded on later). It is romantic emotion, therefore, that has clouded the minds of those attacking contemporary society, so much so that they have taken on a defense of an abhorrent aristocratic cultural tradition that carries with it “a doubt that the large mass of mankind can ever become truly educated or acquire an appreciation of culture.” Worse yet, in their aristocratic critiques “refracted through an idealized feudal past,” democracy is identified only with the total equality of people to judge, create, and demand. Any recognition of democracy’s benefits, such as constitutionalism, the rule of law and universal suffrage, are disregarded completely, and the end product is a portrait of the modern world irretrievably “debauched by concessions to popular taste.” This perspective additionally ignores the general rise in popular taste that has occurred. Bell points to the fact that “a greater proportion of the population today participates in worthwhile activities,” and this new appreciation of culture has been concomitant with the rise in the level of education in America. More money is spent on classical concerts than on baseball, book sales have doubled in the past decade, symphony orchestras and museums proliferate, as does a flourishing art market. Such indices reveal the “growth of a vast middlebrow society” – just the thing Macdonald loathed. But Bell happily forecasts that with

108 Chapter 4 the greater spread of education, productivity and leisure time, the United States will become an even greater consumer of culture. And though this trend has certain implications for the development of high culture, Bell shrinks from detailing them, stating that “they are outside the scope of this essay.” In view of mass society’s portrait of the masses as disconnected, lonely and frustrated, Bell wonders why contemporary America has been largely impervi- ous to “the politics of disaffection.” He agrees with the mass theorists’ contention that in the United States “urbanization, industrialization, and democratization have eroded older primary and community ties on a scale unprecedented in social history.” But at the same time he calls attention to the fact that despite the Great Depression’s being worse in America than in Europe, no communist or fascist movement arose. This rebuttal to the mass society position continues with an attack on the conception of society as “atomized” and isolated. How could this be the case, asks Bell, when the US boasts “at least 200,000 voluntary organizations, associations, clubs, societies, lodges, and fraternities with an aggre- gate (but obviously overlapping) membership of close to eighty million men and women.” No other country in the world likely has this high a degree of voluntary, communal activity, continues the rejoinder. Many of these political and social organizations are made up of America’s vast collection of ethnic groups, including countless Poles, Czechs, Fins, and Italians, and this reality further be- lies the homogeny and facelessness of the masses propagated by the mass theorists. Even in the largest cities, anonymity does not reign. Instead, community ties flourish along with local, specialized newspapers, with two hundred and six- ty-three in Chicago alone. And while social and cultural change is rapidly occur- ring, Bell firmly denies the supposition that social disarray and alienation ineluc- tably follow in its wake. In closing his essay, Bell makes his sympathies clear: “American society, for all its shortcomings, its speed, its commercialism, its corruption, still, I believe, shows us the most humane way.” The theory of mass society has little use as an account of the modern condition, and amounts to nothing more than a “romantic protest against contemporary society.” The essay’s final statements gently scold intellectual antagonists such as Macdonald, who fail to see that “one may be a thoroughgoing critic of one’s own society without being an enemy of its promises.”172 However comprehensive, Bell’s criticisms of the mass society theorists paled in comparison to Shils’ brutal attack. In 1957 Shils penned ‘Daydreams and Nightmares: Reflections on the Criti- cism of Mass Culture’ for the Sewanee Review, in which he panned the very ba-

172 Daniel Bell, ‘The Theory of Mass Society: A Critique,’ Commentary 22 (July 1956), pp. 75-83.

A Theory of Mass Culture 109 ses of the mass culture critique forged by Macdonald and his supposed ilk. De- spite Shils’ shrill objections, he was a reluctant if not peculiar warrior on the mass culture battleground. At a mass culture convention held in Berlin in 1960, William Phillips challenged Shils to a debate. After Shils stated his thoughts on the issue, he refused outright to listen to Phillips’ counterarguments.173 Nonethe- less, ‘Daydreams and Nightmares’ is combatively snide and dystopian in tone, and pulls no rhetorical punches in its arguments. The critical venom it unleashes on mass culture, meanwhile, is jarringly at odds with its concomitant attack on mass culture critics. Shils commences his assault by mocking “the dream of philanthropic liberalism” that Marxists have constructed over the last century, in which “man would be free from…brutish ignorance,” living in an intellectual realm of literature, philosophy, and art. In its place, progress has begotten (despite universal education) the “silliness of television, the childishness of the comic strips, the triviality of the press [and] the meanness of the luridly bound ‘paperbacks.’” This descent into the “swamps of vulgarity” threatens “the heights of the high culture of the west.” Having derided the left, Shils summarizes the evolution of mass culture criticism. He starts from Gasset, whose viewpoint is described as “only a subtle extension into the moral and aesthetic sphere of a conception of the coarseness and indiscipline of the lower classes which had prevailed among the [aristocratic] opponents of political democracy since the early 19th century,” and moves quickly on to Macdonald, “who, as the editor of Politics, did more than any other American writer to bring this interpretation of mass culture to the forefront of the attention of the intellectual public.” “It is not accidental,” Shils notes, “that most of the recent critics of mass culture are, or were, Marxist socialists.” He includes Macdonald on the list of offenders with the Frankfurt School and Czesław Miłosz, described uncharitably as “a Polish poet who served the Stalinist Polish Government as a cultural official for some years, then adumbrated the recent break-up of Polish Stalinism by quitting his post and going to live abroad while still adhering to the ideals which made him a Com- munist.” Though Shils admits that his targets no longer think of themselves as socialist in the Marxist vein, he asserts that “Marxism has left a formative imprint on their thought about mass culture,” their former criticism of capitalism transformed into “a moral and cultural criticism of the large scale industrial society.” This move away from explicit Marxism means that the former criticism of the ruling class has been replaced by condemnation of the “merchants of kitsch,” who at the behest of the industrial machine exploit the emotional needs of the

173 Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century, p. 179.

110 Chapter 4 masses rather than their labor. These emotional needs, meanwhile, find their wellspring in the industrial system itself. With the rising standard of living and technical advances that have eliminated the serious hardships of the past, Shils posits that these quasi-Marxists are left to rebuke modern society for its uninter- esting and vulgar aesthetic qualities. At the heart of this foolish inclination is disappointment and frustration, stoked by the idealism of their former philosophy, namely Engel’s contention that the proletariat is destined to be “the heirs of classical philosophy.” In the imaginary world socialism would produce, the working-class would be elevated to a condition of full humanity and share in the great discoveries and creations of the ages, becoming masters of their own minds, free of superstition and prejudice. As Trotsky envisaged during “the depths of [the Soviet Union’s] tyrannical and bureaucratic dogmatism”: “the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe or a Marx. And above this ridge, new peaks will rise.” But in the end, writes Shils, this romantic dream has failed to materialize, and Marxist intellectuals have lost their faith in the average man and become affronted by the frivolity of the population they thought destined to be both the agent of radical change and its chief benefi- ciary.174 Despite economic and social advances, rather than read Shakespeare, Goethe and Tolstoy, the public “reads comic books, sensational newspapers and magazines which concentrate on illicit sexual activity and crimes of violence.” So as it turns out: “Those from whom it was believed a hitherto hidden appreciation of the sublime and the beautiful world are, on the contrary, attracted by the trivial, the sensational, and the gruesome.” Uninterested in revolution and society’s transformation, they waste time on “self-indulgent and foolish pleasures.” Any potential drive towards socialism falls by the wayside, and as mass culture critics observe, further “deadens and deforms the [mass man’s] capacity to conceive of a better world.” Shils rejects the ex-Marxists’ assumption that the one and only legitimate social ideal rests in socialism, and indicates that few critics of mass culture “have had first-hand contact” with the lower classes that consume it. Instead, they derive their misguided hopes from “an image which was almost entirely doctrinal.” This disappointment with the mass man is compounded by the belief

174 Macdonald had admitted as much in an essay that came out that same year. Referring, often self-depreciatingly, to his left-wing activities during the Great Depression, he complained: “Thus all through the thirties there seemed to us radicals no reason to believe in the ‘viability’ of American capitalism. And yet the masses remained apathetic about socialism. We were right, but they wouldn’t listen. Nothing is more frustrating for an intellectual than to work out a logical solution to a problem and then find that nobody is interested.” He added in a footnote: “It’s even worse now.” See Macdonald, ‘Politics Past,’ p. 24.

A Theory of Mass Culture 111 that these “prospective heirs of high culture have turned out to be a menace to its survival.” Citing Macdonald’s preoccupation with this theoretical phenomenon, Shils details the arguments made in ‘A Theory of Mass Culture’ concerning the pull the lucrative culture industry exerts on artists who would otherwise produce for the sake of artistic creation. He questions the inexorable quality of the mechanism that Macdonald describes as killing high culture, and the analysis of mass culture in Macdonald’s and the Frankfurt School’s critiques: “If one were to take seriously the two fountainheads of the interpretation of mass culture, namely, the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung, led by Professor Horkheimer, and Politics under the editorship of Mr. Macdonald, one would believe that the ordinary citizen who listens to the radio, goes to films and looks at television is not just l’homme moyen sensual known to past ages. He is something new to this world.” The “image of modern man, of modern society and of man in past ages” found in this body of work, then, is not grounded in fact, but “political prejudices, vague aspirations for an unrealizable ideal, [and] resentment against Ameri- can society.” In this disenchantment left-wing intellectuals assume modern man is a mere atom, devoid of religious belief, without private life or family ties, swamped in anxiety, alienated in the extreme, and living a wholly standardized existence deprived of meaning. The ordinary man is “overwhelmed by the great society” and stands alone not as an individual, but as an anonymous cog in the humming machine of modernity. Kept in a stupor by the necessary distraction of mass culture, he loses his sensitivity, native intelligence, and affection for other humans. This portrait, Shils cannot accept. The corollary to the modern industrial society invented by mass culture critics is found in the past, which, as Shils acidly argues, is misconceived as a “legendary time” when art and works of culture were “vitally integrated into everyday life, the artist was aware of his function, and man was in a state of reposeful self- possession.” Shils dismisses this idealized view of folk societies, anchored not in reality, but in German Romanticism’s Hegelian dialectic. Labeling the above as “arbitrary constructions,” he criticizes the “chaos of motives” and “lack of intellectual discipline” for the “melodramatic conclusions” of mass culture critics like Macdonald. What such criticism lacks is “intimate experience” and “the sense of empathetic affinity” that would enable events “to be understood as they actually occur in the lives of those who experience them.” It is accepted that “realistic sociological research could tell us much about ‘modern man’ and his relations with the roaring ocean of ‘mass culture,’” but this work has yet to be done, and “there is no reason to believe that men and women in modern western society or that Ameri- cans in particular have much resemblance to the picture of them” painted by mass culture critics. Aside from the incorrect characterization of the masses, the major error of contemporary culture analysis is still to come.

112 Chapter 4

Shils’ main point of disgust with mass culture critics is their belief that due to mass culture “man has sunk into a hitherto unknown mire,” constituting “a necessary prelude to the further degradation, and perhaps ultimate extinction, of high culture.” In holding this position, they have forgotten that life has improved markedly in the twentieth century when contrasted with earlier ages of hunger, sickness, death, and burdensome labor. The culture of the lower classes of those times was one of “bear-baiting, cock-fighting, drunkenness, tales of witches, gossip about the malpractices of priests, monks and nuns, stories of murder and mutilation.” And while “the present pleasures of the working and lower classes are not worthy of profound aesthetic, moral, or intellectual esteem,” they “are surely not inferior to the villainous things that gave pleasure to their European ancestors from the Middle ages to the nineteenth century.” Consequently, only misguided prejudice and misplaced revulsion against contemporary society can explain why such socialism-worshipping intellectuals lionize the gentry of past ages for their ostensible cultural erudition, and incorrectly impose a life of dignity on an otherwise degraded peasantry. In reality, few among the upper classes of the past centuries read much, and much of the art produced was as worthless and trifling as the choices for the Book of the Month Club. Shils then questions the opinion that the twentieth century is remotely “a period of severe intellectual deterioration,” unique due to its corruption at the sullied hands of modern mass culture. On the contrary, mass culture is now less damaging than ever, and the reading of quality literature and the appreciation of serious music and painting, though still meager, is more widespread than at any time in history. The absurd hubbub created by Macdonald and company, it follows, is the result of a “frustrated attachment to an impossible ideal of human perfection, and a distaste for one’s own society and for human beings as they are.” The root of this controversy lies not in mass culture but in the intellectuals themselves. Mass culture, which would be otherwise relatively benign, has seduced and distorted the intellectual mind. The result is, ironically, intellectuals reading comic strips and junk literature, and condemning others for the same guilty pleasure. The advent of television, Shils reprimands, does not require university professors to watch asi- nine sitcoms and variety programming. These acts amount to a lowering of their standards, and it is mere snobbery to place guilt on those who have not had the benefit of higher education at elite universities. In a swing of rhetorical spirit, Shils puts forth several concessions much in agreement with the critics he has just castigated. The first is that “the wretched quality of the products of popular culture is a result of the producers’ and authors’ contempt for the tastes of their own prospective audience.” Employers in the culture industry often impose this abhorrent constraint, believing only the aesthetically inferior can please the masses. Shils makes the snooty assertion

A Theory of Mass Culture 113 that these employers are quite correct, as there certainly are “inherent limitations in the capacity of the audiences of the working and lower classes to respond ap- preciatively to works of good quality.” These limitations, he hopes (much like Macdonald did in the 1940s), can be expanded. In the concluding lines of his essay, Shils sounds more and more like those he holds in contempt, disclosing that the fears expressed by Macdonald are “not entirely without foundation.” Arguably, Shils even goes further than Macdonald and his dire predictions, stating that among other things such as “populism” and “commercial criteria,” even “popularity” is an impediment to great cultural achievements – an idea Macdon- ald firmly rejected in his praise of Dickens in ‘A Theory of Mass Culture.’ Shils also designates factors other than mass culture as the cause of high culture’s degradation in the United States, a problem that he previously denied in the essay, but now accepts. As it turns out, one unexpected culprit is “excessive educational and professional specialization,” which is suddenly deemed “more injurious to the cultural life of the educated classes,” and the main catalyst for mass culture’s spread. To counteract this development, Shils calls for the establishment of “a foundation for general responsiveness among our more gifted boys and girls and young men and women between the ages of five and twenty-one” in America’s system of education. Only this can stem the tide of commercial culture’s apparently inexorable spread and prepare the ground for the further- ance of high culture. Meanwhile, mass culture can suffice for “the mass of the less gifted.” Shils draws his thoughts to a close with an eloquent defense of the common man, placed neatly between alternatively understanding and chiding comments to his fellow men of letters:

Naturally there are intellectuals who feel guilty for not acting up to the standards of cultural life which they know to be right. That is no reason why they should take it out on others who come from strata which only now in the 20th century, have for the first time in history the possibility of becoming full members of their society, of living a human life with some exercise of cultural taste, and the means to acquire or come into contact with the objects of taste. Nor are their own shortcomings a good reason why intellectuals should, with such Schadenfreude, encourage the dilapida- tion of the high intellectual tradition to which they claim to be devoted.

It is elementary that such progeny of “an immemorially old, clod-like existence” should lack discriminating taste, and likely will in perpetuity. Perhaps, though, after several generations a minority of them can be assimilated into the traditions of high culture. This process can be helped only if intellectuals retreat from such criticism, stop denouncing “these newly-born strata for ruining what is neither

114 Chapter 4 yet ruined nor necessarily ruined,” and in substitute confine their potentially relevant wisdom to their own lofty traditions.175 Though it in many ways echoed the arguments and shared the same concerns as mass culture critics like Macdonald, ‘Daydreams and Nightmares’ is considered a breakthrough in writings on mass culture, signaling the start of a broader reevaluation of America’s commercial culture and the concept of the mass man.176 Despite his open elitism and tremendous haughtiness, in not arguing for the notion of common people as a completely irredeemable and stupid homogeneous mass, Shils offered a new, if restricted, understanding. Macdonald would pick up on this shift towards sensitivity and display it to a degree in his final mass-culture magnum opus, ‘Masscult and Midcult,’ though perhaps as unconvincingly as Shils. The 1960 essay would also respond in kind to Shils and Bell’s criticisms, offering a spirited yet often qualified defense while stealthily integrating some of their key arguments. Ultimately, though, with ‘Masscult and Midcult’ Macdonald would try to find resolution to the all-important issue consistently raised in his earlier writings: the survival of high culture.

175 Shils, ‘Daydreams and Nightmares: Reflections on the Criticism of Mass Culture,’ Se- wanee Review, pp. 587-608. 176 Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America, p. 188.

Chapter 5 Masscult and Midcult

Macdonald’s belief that mass culture and society were hopelessly beyond salva- tion left him with only one option: to defend high culture. ‘Masscult and Midcult,’ published in 1960 in Partisan Review, seeks answers on how to do so, and stands as a testament to Macdonald’s petrified pessimism concerning contemporary American civilization. The essay paints a scathing portrait of the cultural scene, giving free reign to a wide-ranging critique of mass culture. Addi- tionally, it identifies a new trend termed ‘Midcult,’ or mass culture claiming to be high culture, which targets America’s newly educated but aesthetically unenlightened populace. ‘Masscult and Midcult’ can be viewed as a stubborn harden- ing of Macdonald’s positions on the quality of mass culture, but also a subtle counterattack on Bell and Shils, as it appears that Macdonald’s substantial intellectual pride precluded a point-by-point defense. Instead, he opts for surrepti- tious inclusions and qualifications throughout the text, clearly inspired by the criticisms he and his theories had incurred at the hands of both men. In so doing, Macdonald takes an ‘I-knew-it-all-along’ approach, presenting insights made by Bell and Shils as his own, while dismissing some and treating others as axiomatic. Macdonald also further distances himself from left-wing critics of mass culture, disparaging the Marxists despite his partial reliance on their historical framework. Indeed, though ‘Masscult and Midcult’ draws on the work of many left-wing commentators on mass culture and society, from Greenberg to the Frankfurt School, the end result is a highly conservative tract more connected to Arnold’s prescriptions for high culture’s fortification, Eliot’s worship of tradition, and Gasset’s fear of the leveling masses. Macdonald commences with a blanket denunciation of contemporary commercial culture, defining its lowly status under the new abbreviated heading of ‘Masscult.’ Owing to its predominance, the United States has reached an un- charted stage of evolution:

This is something new in history. It is not that so much bad art is being produced. Most High Culture has been undistinguished, since talent is always rare – one has only to walk through any great art museum or try to read some of the forgotten books of past centuries… Masscult is bad in a new way: it doesn’t even have the theoretical possibility of being good... It is not even unsuccessful art. It is non-art. It is even anti-art.

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Making the admission that “most High Culture has been undistinguished” (obviously an implicit deflection of Shils), Macdonald continues his analysis: “Mass- cult offers its customers neither an emotional catharsis nor an aesthetic experience, for these demand effort. The production line grinds out a uniform product whose humble aim is not even entertainment, for this too implies life and even effort, but merely distraction.” The point is reinforced with a quotation from Adorno’s ‘On Popular Music’:

Distraction is bound to the present mode of production, to the rationalized and mechanized process of labor to which…the masses are subject… People want to have fun. A fully concentrated and conscious experience of art is possible only to those whose lives do not put such a strain on them that in their spare time they want relief from both boredom and effort simultaneously. The whole sphere of cheap commercial entertainment reflects this dual desire.

Invoking Gasset – consciously or not – Macdonald writes that Masscult is able to function so successfully due to the continuing massification of society, whose inherent transformative qualities reduce people to virtually nothing: “The tendency of modern industrial society, whether the USA or the USSR, is to transform the individual into the mass man… The mass man is a solitary atom, uniform with the millions of other atoms.” This prospect has irksome consequences for the future of the species:

A mass society, like a crowd, is inchoate and uncreative. Its atoms cohere not according to individual liking or traditions or even interests, but in a purely mechanical way, as iron filings of different shapes and sizes are pulled toward a magnet working on the one quality they have in common. Its morality sinks to the level of the most primitive members – a crowd will commit atrocities that few of its members would commit as individuals – and its taste to that of the least sensitive and most ignorant.

This state of affairs has implications for future culture production as well, leaving it equally at risk at the hands of both the hopelessly ignorant ‘average Joes’ and the fundamental outrage they represent, and those masters of the herd in the commercial entertainment business. “[T]his collective monstrosity, ‘the masses,’ ‘the public,’” Macdonald explains, “is taken as a human norm by the technicians of Masscult. They at once degrade the public by treating it as an object…and at the same time flatter it and pander to its taste and ideas.” Perhaps counter-intuitively, it is not a foul assessment of the common man’s taste that propels such condemnation. Macdonald insists (in an apparent response to Shils and Bell’s critical assertions concerning his ivory-tower perspec-

Masscult and Midcult 117 tive) that “it is precisely because I do believe in the potentialities of ordinary people that I criticize Masscult.” Here begins a lengthy and contradictory qualification of the mass-man theory, which at once seeks to implicate and exclude the vast populace:

[T]he masses are not people, they are not The Man in the Street or The Average Man, they are not even that figment of liberal condescension, The Common Man. The masses are, rather man as non-man, that is man in a special relationship to other men that makes it impossible for him to function as man (one of the human functions being the creation and enjoyment of art). “Mass-man,” as I use the term, is a theoretical construction, an extreme toward which we are being pushed but we shall never reach. For to be a mass man would be to have no private life, no personal desires, hobbies, aspirations, or aversions that are not shared by everybody else.

Yet these still-human masses are besieged, and society as a whole has lost its individualistic instincts. The perpetuation of Masscult, of course, is a contributing factor that simply disqualifies societal advancement. To those who value artistic expression so deeply, a great deal is at stake, so much that it warrants the following, arguably hyperbolic comparison: “Nazism and Communism…show us how far things can go in politics, as Masscult does in art.” As expressed in ‘A Theory of Mass Culture,’ Masscult holds within it one other primary danger that bears repeating: “Like the early capitalism Marx and Engels described in ‘The Communist Manifesto,’ Masscult is a dynamic, revolutionary force, breaking down the old barriers of class, tradition, and taste, dissolving all cultural distinctions. It mixes, scrambles everything together, producing what might be called homogenized culture.” Though Macdonald’s leftist political sympathies ostensibly look favorably on class integration, by no means will he tolerate it under the aegis of Masscult. And though the Masscult juggernaut is a process born of democracy, it is a democracy of the lowest common denominator variety. What remains after its triumph will be a tasteless world of the dolefully average and uninterrogated: “[T]his process destroys all values since value judgments require discrimination, an ugly word in liberal democratic America. Masscult is very, very democratic; it refuses to discriminate against or between anything or anybody.” The ensuing social and cultural muddle is best represented by one of Macdonald’s favorite targets: Life magazine. Life, Macdonald writes, appears “on the mahogany tables of the rich, the glass cocktail tables of the middle class, and the oil cloth kitchen tables of the poor.” As such, the periodical offers a panorama of bizarrely contrasting stories and images:

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The same issue will present a serious exposition on atomic energy followed by a disquisition on Rita Hayworth’s love life; photos of starving children picking garbage in Calcutta and of sleek models wearing adhesive brassieres; an editorial hail- ing Bertrand Russell’s eightieth birthday (A GREAT MIND STILL ANNOYING AND ADORNING OUR AGE) across from a full-page photo of a matron arguing with a baseball umpire (MOM GETS THUMB); nine color pages of Renoir paintings followed by a roller-skating horse; a cover announcing in the same size type features: A NEW FOREIGN POLICY, BY JOHN FOSTER DULLES and KERI- MA: HER MARATHON KISS IS A MOVIE SENSATION [caps in original].

The only thing worse than this absurd jumble of copy is the seemingly random insertion of advertising content, which Macdonald summarizes drolly in a worthwhile footnote:

[A] full-page photo of a ragged Bolivian peon grinningly drunk on coco leaves (which Mr. Luce’s conscientious reporters tell us he chews to narcotize his chronic hunger pains) appears opposite an ad of a pretty, smiling, well-dressed American mother with her two pretty, smiling, well-dressed children (a boy and a girl, of course – children are always homogenized in our ads) looking raptly at a clown on a TV set, the whole captioned in type big enough to announce the Second Coming: RCA BRINGS YOU A NEW KIND OF TELEVISION: SUPER SETS WITH “PICTURE POWER.” The peon would find the juxtaposition piquant if he could afford a copy of Life, which, luckily for the Good Neighbor Policy, he cannot [caps in original].177

Thus despite its purported purpose of elevating popular taste, Macdonald sees Life as merely “degrading the serious.” In riposte to the magazine’s pretensions, he jabs: “just think, nine pages of Renoirs! But that roller-skating horse comes along, and the final impression is that both Renoir and the horse were talented.” Publications such as Life render their readers helpless under Masscult’s sway, integrating “the masses into a debased form of High Culture and thus [becoming] an instrument of domination.” It is an inevitable, reciprocal process because “the demands of the audience, which has changed from a small body of connoisseurs into a large body of ignoramuses, have become the chief criteria of success.” The producers, by comparison, wish nothing more than to profit from the situation. Pecuniary desires so permeate the culture industry that the com-

177 Incidentally, by the late ‘50s Life had stated itself committed to a “search for national purpose” in response to the Soviet Union’s rapid economic expansion and technological break- throughs. It portrayed the United States as “the world’s best hope” and reaffirmed the magazine’s faith in the nation’s leadership. Featured were the opinions of Archibald MacLeish, who declared the United States’ national mission to be “the liberation of humanity.” See Baughman, Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American News Media, p. 181.

Masscult and Midcult 119 mercial press (here Macdonald points to the Saturday Review and New York Times Book Review) “consider books as commodities, rating them by audience response” rather than by artistic integrity, while those who pass for “critics” merely indicate what films audiences might like. As is his custom, Macdonald extols the one loosely-bound movement that arose at the turn of the century – the avant-garde, which he sees as the only legitimate oppositional force to the growing ascendance of commoditized culture. In its greatness, the avant-garde rejected the drift of western culture into mass entertainments and “recreated the old, traditional situation in which the artist communicated to his peers rather than talked down to his inferiors.” For these obvious reasons the avant-garde is not something easily integrated into weary, industrial society. Masscult, as a sorry substitute, fills the voids between working days, appealing to all with its stupidity-laden, knee-jerk qualities. Within this paradigm:

Masscult attempts to provide distraction for the tired businessman – or the tired proletarian. This kind of art is necessarily at a distance from the individual since it is specifically designed to affect not what differentiates him from everybody else – that is of what is of liveliest interest to him – but rather to work on the reflexes he shares with everybody else [emphasis in original].

Citing Greenberg’s ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch,’ Macdonald notes that Masscult “predigests art for the spectator and spares him effort, provides him a shortcut to the pleasures of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in the genuine art.” It does this so successfully by incorporating the audience’s reactions in the work itself, rather than forcing individuals to form their own responses and conclusions. Macdonald specifies the growing standardization of art, and a reliance on formulaic plots designed around easily predictable outcomes: “Such goods…are easier to consume since one knows what’s coming next – imagine a western in which the hero loses the climactic gunfight or an office romance in which the mousy stenographer loses out to the predatory blonde.” But standardization has a subtler aspect, called “The Built-in Reaction” – one of Macdonald’s major irri- tants. The Built-in Reaction ensures that at no time is there any question about what the spectator is supposed to feel, or what emotion is being preyed upon. Given the ubiquity of the Built-in Reaction, the artist has no recourse but to repeat well worn but popular blueprints, or risk failure. As always, Macdonald nostalgically lauds the traditional distinction between aristocratic and folk culture (à la Eliot in his reverence for the former, à la Greenberg for the latter), which unlike Masscult obviated the imperative to combine and homogenize the audience. While the structure of the old cultural

120 Chapter 5 order pleases him greatly, twentieth-century mass society is a direct hazard to the high culture that thrived unmolested in the past:

[T]he separation of Folk Art and High Culture in fairly watertight compartments corresponded to the sharp line once drawn between the common people and the aristocracy. The blurring of this line, however desirable politically, has had unfortunate results culturally. Folk Art has its own authentic quality, but Masscult is at best a vulgarized reflection of High Culture and at worst a cultural nightmare...while High Culture could address itself to the cognoscenti, now it must take the ignoscenti into account.

These facts, as well as the special make-up of US society, make Americans particularly vulnerable to Masscult because they lack a distinct cultural vanguard or tradition. High culture in America is therefore exposed to even greater danger because:

Masscult is not merely a parallel formation to High Culture, as Folk Art was; it is a competitor. The problem is especially acute in this country because class lines are especially weak here. If there were a clearly defined cultural elite here, then the masses could have their Kitsch and the classes could have their High Culture, with everybody happy.

The varying cornucopia of cultural products bombarding the average consumer also excludes a felicitous solution. Within such cultural clutter few have any hope of attaining Greenberg’s ‘true light,’ and much less Arnold’s ‘sweetness and light’:

[A] significant portion of our population is chronically confronted with looking at TV or old masters, between reading Tolstoy or a detective story; i.e., the pattern of their cultural lives is “open” to the point of being porous. For a lucky few, this openness of choice is stimulating. But for most, it is confusing and leads at best to that middlebrow compromise called Midcult.

But what exactly is this bastard compromise ‘Midcult?’ And who are its purveyors and consumers? ‘Midcult,’ or what Macdonald dubbed the ‘phony avant-garde’ in ‘A Theory of Mass Culture,’ is mass culture disguised as high culture, produced for an ever-duped public. Midcult has the same features as Masscult, particularly “the formula, the Built-In-Reaction, the lack of any standard except popularity,” but it “decently covers them with a cultural fig leaf.” This deception makes Midcult the silver bullet that might finally bring an end to elite forms of expression. Bell,

Masscult and Midcult 121 of course, had pointed to middlebrow culture as a positive development in American society, though he declined to comment on its effects on high culture. Macdonald, conversely, takes extreme care to demonstrate the wrong- headedness of this approach. For him, the irony of the situation rests in the fact that Midcult threatens the United States just as the nation has reached a stage of development that can finally support culture. In this “sophisticated period,” the ‘Wild West’ has already been won, the immigrants assimilated, the economy stabilized, and the standard of living raised among all sections of society, with college enrollment tripling over the past twenty years. Hence: “Money, leisure, and knowledge, the prerequisites of culture, are more plentiful and more evenly distributed than ever before.” Yet all this is for naught if the purveyors of Midcult have their way. Masscult’s main function is to please and distract its audience, but this new form offers an elevated status that dishonestly promises consumers the perceived standards and intellectual satisfaction of high culture. This tainted sham version entices culture-conscious consumers, fooling them into thinking they are getting the real thing:

In Masscult the trick is plain – to please the crowd by any means. But Midcult has it both ways: it pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them… It is its ambiguity that makes Midcult so alarm- ing. For it presents itself as part of High Culture.

The argument, though presented as new, harkens back to Greenberg’s warnings regarding ‘the naïve seeker of true light’ being drawn in by sophisticated kitsch. In order to enlighten those not attuned to such cultural trickery, Macdonald selects four Pulitzer Prize winning literary works as illustrations of Midcult in sinister action: Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1953), Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938), Archibald MacLeish’s J.B. (1958), and Stephen Vincent Benét’s John Brown’s Body (1928). Macdonald records that each has found critical and popular success among a cross section of the population, and each is “technically advanced” enough to impress but not alienate “the middlebrows.” In content, meanwhile, each deals with “universal” themes – a distinctive mark of the genre. The Old Man and the Sea was appropriately, as Macdonald points out, first published in Life magazine, winning the Pulitzer in 1953 and helping win Hem- ingway the Nobel Prize for Literature two years later. Macdonald ridicules the novel for what he calls its “fake-Biblical prose” and its lack of definition in the two main characters, known only as the ‘Old Man’ and the ‘Boy’ (adds Mac- donald: “I think it is a slip to identify the fish as a marlin though, to be fair, it is usually referred to as ‘the great fish.’”) There is no individualization because it

122 Chapter 5 would take away from the “Universal Significance” required of Midcult. The dialogue is both democratic and literary in a most incongruous manner (“‘Sleep well, Old Man,’ quotes The Boy; or alternatively, ‘Wake up, Old Man’”) and laden with poetic verse. The Boy speaks: “‘I can remember the tail slapping and banging…and the noise of you clubbing him like chopping a tree down and the sweet blood all over me.’” Macdonald quips: “Even the Old Man is startled by this cadenza. ‘Can you really remember that?’ he asks.” The Old Man and the Sea compares unfavorably with an earlier Hemingway story, ‘The Undefeated,’ the tale of a matador that has a similar theme of an “old-timer, scorned as a has- been, gets one last chance; he loses: the fish is eaten by sharks, the bullfighter is gored…but his defeat is a moral victory, for he has shown his will and courage are both intact.” However, the contrast is plain. ‘The Undefeated’ contains Hem- ingway’s characteristic “disciplined, business understatement,” as opposed to the “wordy and sentimental” The Old Man and the Sea, which labors under the “drone of the pastiche parable.” More criticism follows. While ‘The Undefeated’ contains characters sharply delineated by their actions and evokes emotions from the dialogue and story line, The Old Man and the Sea offers constant and improbable editorializing – “He is a great fish and I must convince him, he thought…Thank God, they are not as intelligent as we who kill them, although they are more noble and able” – along with insights such as: “He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility. But he knew he had attained it.” Ulti- mately then, The Old Man and the Sea stands as a degeneration of Hemingway’s art under the influence of Midcult and the market, which have corrupted the “stripped, no-comment method” that garnered him critical acclaim. In short, Hemingway has been ruined by popularity. The Old Man and the Sea dispatched, Macdonald turns to Wilder’s Our Town: “the final statement of the middlebrows’ nostalgia for small-town life, as Norman Rockwell has done for the lowbrows in his Post covers.” Our Town, set in idyllic Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, is punctuated with quaint scenes of Americana: from “puppy-lovers at the soda fountain” to “wives gossiping over the back fence.” What gives it its Midcult status amongst such lowbrow images is Wilder’s use of imaginary props and sets and the interlocutory stage manager, both derived from Chinese theater. The play also presents homespun mono- logues that are the bread and butter of Midcult. The stage manager, sucking on his corn-cob pipe, heartily pontificates in “ultra-simple and grandiose” terms:

Now there are some things we all know, but we don’t take ’m out and look at ’m very often. We all know something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars…everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings [emphasis in

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original]. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.

“The last sentence,” Macdonald bewails, “is an eleven word summary, in form and content, of Midcult. I agree with everything Mr. Wilder says but I will fight to the death against his right to say it in this way.” But who could not be taken in? The character is, after all, “such a nice, pipe-puffing, cracker-barrel philosopher – pungent yet broadminded – that only a highbrow can resist his spell.” Wilder, for his effort, is named the “cleverest” of the Midcult purveyors.178 Next comes MacLeish’s J.B. The play relates the story of a twentieth- century American banker-millionaire, named ‘J.B.’ to represent Job, who is stripped of his family and wealth, but refuses to blame God for his afflictions. Originally produced on Broadway, in addition to winning the Pulitzer it took the Tony Award for best play.179 To Macdonald, however, J.B. merely delivers “high-falutin” language and “advanced poetry” mixed with “family stuff.” Lines such as “Death is a bone that stammers” rest uncomfortably next to “That’s my girl!” As he puts it: “The question of God and man is chivvied about for two hours, no decision, and is then dropped in the last scene.” But the fatal error of J.B. is the playwright’s juxtaposition of his text next to that of the ‘Book of Job,’ which is read over a loudspeaker, and whose “somber and passionate elevation” jibes badly with McLeish’s “forcible-feeble style”:

Hast thou given the horse strength? Hast thou clothed his neck with thunder! He saith among the trumpets, Ha Ha!

As opposed to:

Job won’t take it! Job won’t touch it! Job will fling it in God’s face! With half its guts to make it spatter!

The author of Our Town, Macdonald observes, “would never have made such a gaffe.”180

178 Macdonald, ‘Masscult and Midcult,’ Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture (New York: Da Capo Press, 1983), pp. 3-44. 179 Scott Donaldson, Archibald MacLeish: An America Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992), pp. 456-57. 180 Macdonald, ‘Masscult and Midcult,’ pp. 44-47.

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Finally, there is Benét’s ode to the American Civil War, John Brown’s Body. Awarded the Pulitzer in 1929, it is forgotten today. The introductory notes boast that Benét’s work has “taught the average person that poetry can be highly readable.”181 This “patriotic yet sophisticated” tome incorporates both history and literature, displaying “an orgy of Americana” and distinguishing its author as the “master” of the “Built-in Reaction.” Macdonald ruefully points out: “it is impossible not to identify the emotion he wants to arouse. Sometimes solemn, sometimes gay, always straining to put it across, like a night club violinist.” Benét’s Abe Lincoln is gaunt and kindly, but “tough as a hickory rail” and seemingly touched by God. John Brown is a simple strong fanatic who knows “how to die.” Only the final verdict on the United States is ambiguous. Benét names it “the monster and the sleeping queen,” concluding with the following verse:182

So, when the crowd gives tongue And prophets, old or young Bawl out their strange despair Or fall in worship there, Let them applaud the image or condemn, But keep your distance and your soul from them. And, if the heart within your breast must burst Like a cracked crucible and pour its steel White hot before the white heat of the wheel, Strive to recast once more That attar of the ore In the strong mold of pain Till it is whole again, And while the prophets shudder or adore Before the flame, hoping it will give ear, If you at last must have a word to say, Say Neither, in their way, “It is a deadly magic and accursed” Nor “It is blest,” but only “It is here.”183

Macdonald chastises: “The American fear of ideas (bawling prophets) and in fact consciousness (If you must have a word to say) has never been more naively expressed. Or the American device for evading these terrors: Let’s stick to the

181 John Vincent Benét, John Brown’s Body (Rinehart and Company: New York, 1941), p. xi. 182 Macdonald, ‘Masscult and Midcult,’ pp. 47-48. 183 Benét, John Brown’s Body, p. 367.

Masscult and Midcult 125 facts; or Say only ‘It is here’” [emphasis in original]. Real ideas, Macdonald fur- 184 ther mocks, “might lead to conclusions.” Other enemies apart from critical thought abound in Midcult. The villains in these works are invariably those who introduce or represent intellectual or socially conscious threats to the established capitalist order. In J.B., of the three men who come to comfort the main character after he has lost everything, Bild- ad, who represents the supposed Marxist point of view, is most repulsive. Sounding off with clichés filled with socialist jargon, he explains J.B.’s suffering from a class-based viewpoint and offers economic answers to his problems. The character remonstrates against any humane view of progress, individuality, and life in general, ridiculing traditional notions of God and justice:

Screw your justice! History is justice! – time Inexorably turned to truth! – Not for one man. For humanity. One man’s life won’t measure on it. One man’s suffering won’t count, no matter What his suffering; but All will. At the end there will be justice! – Subsiding On the way – it doesn’t matter.185

Such philosophizing of course rings true to the ears of Cold War Americans, making J.B. smack of propaganda in its obvious demonizing of left-wing politics. Wilder’s play takes a lighter approach. In Our Town the mildly disconcerting voice comes from the “Belligerent man at back of auditorium,” who in one scene asks Mr. Webb (the editor of Grover’s Corners’ newspaper): “Is there no one in town aware of social injustice and industrial inequality?” Webb responds: “Oh yes, everybody is – something’ terrible. Seems like they spend most of their time talking about who’s rich and who’s poor.” When the ‘belligerent man’ protests, “So why don’t they do something about it?” Webb retorts: “Well, I dunno. I guess we’re all hunting like everybody else for a way the diligent and sensible can rise to the top and the lazy and quarrelsome can sink to the bottom. But it ain’t easy to find.” A bothersome “Lady in the box” poses a similarly critical question: “Oh Mr. Webb? Mr.

184 Macdonald, ‘Masscult and Midcult,’ p. 48. 185 Archibald MacLeish, J.B., A Play in Verse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1958), p. 121.

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Webb, is there any culture or love of beauty in Grover’s Corners?” The answer reads:

Well ma’am, there ain’t much – not in the sense you mean…But maybe this is the place to tell you that we’ve got a lot of pleasures of a kind here: we like the sun comin’ up over the mountain in the morning, and we all notice a great deal about the birds. …But those other things, you’re right ma’am, there ain’t much. Robinson Crusoe and the Bible; and Handel’s Largo, we all know that; and Whistler’s Mother – those are just about as far as we go.

Repellent sentiments to Macdonald. In this supreme work of Midcult, he points out that those who question the values of that ideal American town are “gro- tesques,” while Mr. Webb is the safe, simple, and satisfied norm. Wilder therefore presents “a social myth, a picture of a golden past age that is a paradigm for today. He has the best of both tenses – the past, veiled by the nostalgic feelings of the present, while the present is softened by being conveyed in terms of a safely remote past.” It is Wilder’s stage manager who best represents the way Midcult lulls its audiences into total complacency. He is “the perfect American pragmatist, …folksy and relaxed because that’s jest the way things are and if anybuddy hankers to change ‘em that’s their right only (pause, business of drawing reflectively on pipe) the chances are ‘t won’t make a sight of difference (pipe business again) things don’t change much in Grover’s Corners.” The four works fulfill what Macdonald deems a central Midcult function: “to demonstrate that though there are real Problems (death, for instance), it’s a pretty good world after all.” This surrender to an aesthetic designed to offend or stimulate no one is made all the more painful because the works are written by “lapsed avant-gardists” aware of “how to use the modern idiom in the service of the banal.” Indeed, that each of these authors was an expatriate in the 1920s and returned to America to seek popular acclaim reveals the insidiously powerful influence of Midcult. Macdonald suggests that the authors are unaware of their change of artistic motive, and that this accounts for their achievement: “That they are not conscious of any shifting of gears, that they still think of themselves as avant-gardists is just what makes their latter work so attractive in the Midcult sense.”186 What they produce is apparently literate, accomplished, and innovative, but “spectacularly without social criticism” and with no “tragic heat or comic bite.” Regarding the growth of such fare, 1953’s ‘A Theory of Mass Cul- ture’ warned: “There is slowly emerging a tepid, flaccid Middlebrow Culture

186 Macdonald, ‘Masscult and Midcult,’ pp. 48-54.

Masscult and Midcult 127 that threatens to engulf everything in its spreading ooze.”187 By 1960 it had turned into a flood: “A tepid ooze of Midcult is spreading everywhere.” Taking into account the arguments of Bell and Shils, Macdonald is com- pelled to admit that America has, outwardly, moved culturally upward: “Institu- tions like the Museum of Modern Art…once avant-garde and tiny, are now flourishing and respectable.” Yet something has been lost along the way, “perhaps their raison d’etre.” Hollywood, too, has improved its products, craftsman- ship, and sophistication – though exceptional talents such as Chaplin, Keaton, Wells, and Stroheim have been squeezed out in the process. Also, psychoanalysis has become a popular subject in magazines, summations of sociological studies have become best sellers, and even Bauhaus modernism has, in “vulgarized form,” integrated itself into household design. The question for Macdonald is whether this seeming rise in taste is a “transitional” stage or a permanent norm. Is it a case of the nouveau riche imitating high culture, or a bump in the road, the price of progress to a higher plane? Unsurprisingly, Macdonald opts for the most ominous option: “I see no reason Midcult may not be stabilized as the norm of our culture.” What has also become stabilized is the acceptable canon of high culture: Mozart in classical music, new masters such as Matisse in painting, and established playwrights such as Ibsen, Shaw, and Chekhov. But nothing of significance is being produced in the now. America has “become skilled at con- suming High Culture when it has been stamped PRIME QUALITY by the proper authorities, but we lack the kind of sophisticated audience that supported the achievements of the classic avant-garde, an audience that can appreciate and discriminate on its own” [caps in original]. The passage is a neat retort to Bell’s contention that the high arts are thriving and attracting a greater audience. For in reality, along with the commoditization of art, this expansion makes it impossible for artists and writers to develop because “a book tends to be a best seller or nothing, as a writer is either a success or failure; there is no middle ground because there is no intellectual class.” Macdonald concedes his line of argument might appear “undemocratic,” but insists that it is “beside the point” when seriously engaging matters of art. Ex- posing his true conservatism, he offers a lengthy quote from Eliot’s Notes toward the Definition of Culture:

Here are what I believe to be the essential conditions for the growth and for the survival of culture. If they conflict with any passionate faith of the reader – if, for instance, he finds it shocking that culture and equalitarianism should conflict, if it seems monstrous to him that anyone should have “advantages of birth” – I do not

187 Macdonald, ‘A Theory of Mass Culture,’ p. 7.

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ask him to change his faith. I merely ask him to stop paying lip-service to culture. If the reader says: “The state of affairs which I wish to bring about is right (or is just, or is inevitable); and if this must lead to further deterioration of culture, we must accept that deterioration” – then I can have no quarrel with him. I might even, in some circumstances, feel obliged to support him. The effect of such a wave of honesty would be that the word culture would cease to be absurd [emphasis in original].

The point is, adds Macdonald, that culture is now considered absurd, even “priggish, unctuous, [and] worn-slick with abuse,” so as to expose “how massified we have become.” In contrast the great civilizations of the past, which respected the notion of culture, were “all elite affairs” revolving around “small upper-class communities” that fostered creativity and criticism. Like Eliot, Macdonald finds a much healthier cultural environment in socially stratified Great Britain. Contrasting the UK and USA, he writes that the former, with its still basically intact class system, has necessary cultural lines “drawn with some clarity.” An American living in London, Macdonald claims, is often “delighted by the wide interest in arts and letters, the liveliness of the intellectual atmosphere, the sense he gets constantly from the press and from conversations of a general interest in what he is interested in.” Allowing that these qualities are likely shared only by five percent of the population, Macdon- ald suggests that in America one can only hope for a handful of acquaintances with any serious interests in culture. He is consequently befuddled by young British socialists, and their rebellion against tradition. What vexes him most is their belief that Hollywood somehow represents a democratic tool of people’s taste, or “a genuine expression of the masses,” rather than class exploitation. In a footnote Macdonald writes: “They see cultural lines as relics of a snobbish past, I see them as dikes against the corruption of Masscult and Midcult. They see standards as inhibiting, I see them as defining. They see tradition as deadening, I see it as nourishing.” Yet the problem still remains of how to shore up the dikes in America. Asking “What is to be done?” near the close of his essay, Macdon- ald names all those who have failed to find solutions – adding Bell and Shils to the list with Gasset, Eliot, and Seldes. In the end, Macdonald finds little potential for improving the American cultural scene. Divulging his total pessimism about the degradation of American mass culture, he rebuffs the schemes of Eliot and Gasset, and their argument that “since ‘the revolt of the masses’ has led to the horrors of totalitarianism and of California roadside architecture, the only hope is to rebuild the old class walls” and bring the people under the control of a guiding aristocracy. Popular, Mac- donald again reminds us, does not always mean the “cheap and vulgar,” as Eliot and Gasset claim (and Macdonald, as it turns out, has a different kind of aristoc-

Masscult and Midcult 129 racy in mind). Also taken to task are the Marxists and liberals who see the masses as Rousseau’s “noble savages,” good and healthy at heart, longing for “good stuff instead of Kitsch,” but swindled and exploited by their cruel and manipulative cultural masters. Both diagnoses fail to satisfy because “they assume that Masscult is (in the conservative view) or could be (in the liberal view) an expression of people, like Folk Art, whereas actually it is…an expression of masses, a very different thing” [emphasis in original]. While the conservative proposal is much more realistic than the democratic-liberal fantasy, it is still rendered limp in the face of ever-continuing massification and industrialization. There is another flawed alternative: the raising of the level of culture in general. According to Macdonald those who advocate this option, naming Bell and Shils in addition to Seldes, incorrectly assume that there have been great advances in this process already, and thus claim that the idea is to carry them further. Their vain hopes can be easily dismissed. They and their waywardly optimistic breed regard mass culture critics like him and the Frankfurt School as disgruntled left-wing romantics, who fail to see the error of their ways. On the contrary, Macdonald lets it be known that he will never belong to either of the categories, as he is neither romantic nor populist in matters of culture. In a summary of his grand concept, he proclaims:

I see Masscult – and its recent offspring, Midcult, – as a reciprocating engine, and who is to say, once it has been set in motion, whether the stroke or the counterstroke is responsible for its continued action? The Lords of Kitsch sell culture to the masses. It is debased, trivial culture that avoids both the deep realities (sex, death, failure, tragedy) and also the simple, spontaneous pleasures, since the realities would be too real and the pleasures too lively to induce what Mr. Seldes calls “the mood of con- sent”: a narcotized acceptance of the commodities it sells as a substitute for the un- settling and unpredictable (hence unsalable) joy, tragedy, wit, change, originality and beauty of real life. The masses – and don’t let’s forget that this term includes the well-educated fans of the Old Man in the Sea, Our Town, J.B., and John Brown’s Body – who have been debauched by several generations of this sort of thing, and in turn have come to demand such trivial and comfortable cultural products. Which came first, the chicken or the egg, the mass demand or its satisfaction (and further stimulation), is a question as academic as it is unanswerable. The engine is reciprocating and shows no sign of running down.

Having presented this inevitable continuation of cultural degradation, Macdon- ald’s conservatism surrenders any pretensions of lifting up the masses. The entertainment industry has treated them as homogeneous, passive, unthinking pota- toes, and they, to all indications, have accepted this status.

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In further answer to Seldes, Bell, and Shils, Macdonald invokes Walt Whit- man. Quoting the poet circa 1871, Macdonald illustrates his sad portrait of American culture:

Our fundamental want today in the United States, is of a class and the clear idea of a class, of native authors, literatures, far different, far higher in grade than any other yet known, sacerdotal, modern, fit to cope with our occasions, lands permeating the whole mass of American mentality, taste, belief, breathing into it a new life, giving it decision, affecting politics far more than the popular superficial suffrage…For know you not, dear, earnest reader, that people of our land may all read and write, and may all possess the right to vote – and yet the main things may be entirely lacking?…The priest departs, the divine literatus comes.

“The divine literatus,” Macdonald writes, “is behind schedule.” In it place, Masscult and Midcult have so pervaded the American psyche that Whitman’s dream of a democratic but sacred culture so wondrous as to swing elections now appears utterly ridiculous. The franchise of literacy and democracy extended to all has instead begotten very little, exploding the whitewashed portrait of cultural progress put forth by Macdonald’s detractors. Macdonald does at least give a nod to Eliot, admitting that that there “has never been a broadly democratic culture on a high level,” but he concurrently remains adamant (in an effort to distance himself from the accusations of Shils against the Marxist mass culture critics) that this is not because the ruling class has excluded them. Such notions are merely a “Marxist melodrama.” Instead, in a possible borrowing from Shils, the final reality is simply that “the great majority of people at any given time (including the ruling class for that matter) have never cared enough about [culture] to make [it] an important part of their lives.” Thus the only solution is such: “[L]et the masses have their Masscult, let the few who care about good writing, painting, music, architecture, philosophy, etc., have their High Culture, and don’t fuzz up the distinction with Midcult.” It is, of course, the exact conclusion that Matthew Arnold had come to a century earlier, with his vision of a self- perpetuating elite – a cultural aristocracy of sorts – to reign over the insensitive mass of humanity. Once again referencing Whitman, Macdonald confesses that the poet would have found such sentiments and conclusions abominable, yet he uses Whitman’s career as a case in point: “[Whitman] tried to be a popular bard but the masses were not interested, and his first recognition, excepting Emer- son’s lonely voice, came from the English pre-Raphaelites, a decadent and precious group if there ever was one.” The few, the informed, the literate, accepted him, and it is only to one’s peers that Macdonald proposes artists listen: “Let the majority eavesdrop if they like, but their tastes should be firmly ignored.”

Masscult and Midcult 131

In concluding, ‘Masscult and Midcult’ introduces some nuance to previous charges of capitalism’s inevitable leveling. Between the conservative and liberal positions, Macdonald finds optimism based in the existence of demographic groups seeking the ‘true light,’ minus the futile attempts to elevate the cultural sophistication of mass culture. This hope rests in the commercial viability of smaller, specialized audiences within the great audience, who make the production of high-end culture products profitable. Some possibility of dividing the mass audience is demonstrated by the “sale of ‘quality’ paperbacks and record- ings, and the growth of ‘art’ cinema houses, off-Broadway theatres, concert orchestras and art museums and galleries.” The more the mass audience is divided, the better, Macdonald counsels, even proposing pay television channels for subscribers, in which content would be determined by editors rather than advertisers – “a small gain, but a real one.” If these smaller audiences distinguish themselves as a new public for serious art, and insist on higher standards, they will set themselves apart from their fellow citizens and Masscult degradation, and the arts will begin to flourish once more, though likely in reduced abundance. Stressing the dangers that haunt high culture at every turn, ‘Masscult and Midcult’ ends with a quotation from Kierkegaard’s ‘The Present Age’ concerning the “monstrous abstraction” the public represents:

The public is a concept which could not have occurred in antiquity because the people en masse in corpore took part in any situation which arose… Only when the sense of association in society is no longer strong enough to give life to concrete realities is the Press able to create that abstraction, “the public,” consisting of unreal individuals who never are and never can be united in actual situation or organization – and yet are held together as a whole… A public is neither a nation nor a generation nor a community nor a society nor these particular men… Made up of such individuals, of individuals at the moment when they are nothing…so a public is something which everyone can claim, and even a drunken sailor exhibiting a peep-show has di- alectically the same right to a public as the greatest man. He has just as logical a right to put all those naughts in front of his single number [emphasis in original].

Macdonald’s final words read: “This is the essence of what I have tried to say…”188 ‘Masscult and Midcult’s’ significance lies not only in that it is Macdonald’s grand statement on the cultural debates of the 1950s and ‘60s, but in how he had integrated the ideas of left-wing culture critics into a critique that mutated into a defense of the ideals of the culture and civilization discourse. While this culmination may appear negative considering Macdonald’s idealism in the 1940s, he

188 Macdonald, ‘Masscult and Midcult,’ pp. 55-75.

132 Chapter 5 had not abandoned the notion that the masses were, somewhere, good at heart, though he had abandoned them to a state of cultural degradation at the hands of the Lords of Kitsch. No expectation that they might be uplifted is evinced, and the solution of two cultures for America rests in stark contrast to Macdonald’s bygone call for a shared ‘human’ culture. Gone, too, are any previous signs of cultural hope. ‘Masscult and Midcult’ mentions no heroes such as the Lone Ranger or Superman who represent the true desires of the people, redeeming to some extent mass culture and its audience. Possible indications of cultural advance, such as growth in museum attendance and the spread of classical music, are also simply bogus. The ending quotation offers Macdonald’s bleakest view of mass society’s awful ravages on the human soul, while the reciprocating engine of Masscult continues its debased and unfettered acceleration. Just as the Hollywood romance comes to its inevitable happy end, Macdonald’s criticisms come to their logical conclusion, coming down decisively on the conservative side of elite cultural tradition against the Barbarians outside the gates – be they Lords of Kitsch, middlebrow Philistines, or the teeming masses of the Populace.

Conclusion

Two years after ‘Masscult and Midcult’ appeared in Partisan Review it was reprinted in Macdonald’s collection of writings, Against the American Grain: Es- says on the Effects of Mass Culture (1962). The volume featured critical pieces on Joyce, Hemingway, and Twain, a thorough disembowelment of James Gould Cozzens’ Of Love Possessed, as well as a critique of Webster’s Third New Inter- national Dictionary, which Macdonald argued signaled a precipitous decline in language usage since the 1930s. In the preface, Macdonald describes himself as “an early settler in the wilderness of masscult,” who has sought to examine the phenomenon in literary rather than sociological terms, and explore the cultural “tide line” where “higher and lower organisms compete for survival.” He likewise repeats his arguments: traditional culture is under pressure from mass culture, making blanket vulgarization an acute symptom of modern existence. The logical solutions that exist are to integrate the masses into high culture (likely impossible) or to define two cultures: one for the intellectual elite, and one for the common man. As always, Macdonald makes his sympathies obvious: “I am for the latter.”189 Against the American Grain was reviewed extensively and sold better than any book that Macdonald had published before. It generated so much publicity that he was soon in demand for talk show interviews and conferences devoted to the subject of mass culture. He became an icon of sorts, whose views as the “high priest of culture snobs” were often consulted as an arbiter. Macdonald enjoyed his status as a minor celebrity, developing a recognizable persona and a rich social life. Esquire magazine asked him to take over their film reviews, which provided not only the chance to indulge in one of his primary interests, but to sound off on the issues of mass versus high culture. For six years, Mac- donald lambasted Hollywood for its role as the unsurpassed producer of cultural garbage and praised filmmakers such as Antonioni and Fellini for their avant- garde sensibility. Perhaps the greatest indicator of Macdonald’s fame came when he was asked to join the popular Today show for a ten-minute weekly spot devoted to cinema. By that time, he had been dubbed “the Film Ripper” by the national press. In the 1960s Macdonald also took up work as a featured writer for the New Yorker, remaining as a staff writer and editor for fifteen years. During this time he won a victory in his crusade to bring notice to socialist Michael Harrington’s The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962). The book, which high-

189 Dwight Macdonald, Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Cul- ture, pp. ix-x.

134 Conclusion lighted the persistence of the invisible poor and argued that poverty was still a widespread problem throughout the nation, received virtually no attention upon its debut. Macdonald’s January 1963 review in the New Yorker brought the book to national attention, making The Other America a bestseller and injecting the issue of poverty into political discourse. A myth soon circulated that President Kennedy, after reading Harrington’s book, was spurred to take action on the subject. It seems now, however, that Kennedy skipped the book and read Mac- donald’s article instead, making it the most effective political action of Macdon- ald’s career. The episode once again cemented his reputation as a public intellectual, and in recognition of his many achievements he received an honorary doctorate from Wesleyan University in 1964. Despite public notoriety and numerous invitations for guest professorships around the country, Macdonald’s lectures on ‘The Necessity for an Elite Culture,’ about the triteness of mass culture and the need to protect high art from the rabble, struck his student audiences as largely irrelevant. Eventually, he longed to return to the role of full-fledged political critic he had played in the 1940s. Macdonald found this opportunity in the Vietnam War, which subsumed his energies throughout the later 1960s. He had all but disavowed political involvement several years earlier out of pure disgust, but his vigorous anti-war protest- ing eventually became, as Michael Wreszin describes it, “an all-out commitment to oppose US policy.” Macdonald railed against the “war of atrocities” and the “horrors we now inflict on Vietnam,” picketing regularly, declaring himself an anarcho-pacifist, and speaking out on college campuses while his fellow left- wing intellectuals made decidedly more timid rhetorical gestures, if any. Invita- tions that Macdonald received to speak on mass culture often turned into tirades against American aggression in Southeast Asia, and he even managed to sabo- tage a White House social event by circulating a petition against the war. But just as covering the Second World War had taken its toll on him in the 1940s, after several years Macdonald’s peace activities resulted in exhaustion. At the end of the 1960s, he experienced a severe case of writer’s block and a generalized burnout. During this time, he sat on the sidelines as others made their mark on the landscape of cultural criticism – often at his expense.190 On the heels of Bell and Shils, intellectuals began to reassess the mass culture critique expounded by Macdonald and others. They began to feel that its overarching theories were inadequate to describe ever-changing phenomena, and that such views were either shaped by flawed ideologies such as Marxism or outright snobbishness. The failure of the critique to extend itself was perhaps

190 Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald, pp. 353-82, 442, 376-91, 393-404.

Conclusion 135 best explained by Irving Howe, who observed that one reason for its disappearance was its “static” nature – “it could be stated but apparently not developed.” As well, Howe recorded that “hostility toward the commercial pseudo-arts was hard to maintain with unyielding intensity, mostly because it was hard to remain all that interested in them,” though he noted that “only in Macdonald’s essays did both hostility and interest survive intact” [emphasis in original]. Thus the subject was collectively dropped, as the creators of the critique made no sustained effort to apply it to evolving currents of thought.191 By the 1970s the intellectual transformation was complete, as a host of new inquires laid waste to the work of Macdonald.192 A change in approach occurred, as scholars “stopped criticizing” mass culture and “starting explaining” it. This reorientation in perspective included a new, more sympathetic conception of the common man and eventually a questioning of the high versus low artistic hierarchy that Macdon- ald held so dear.193 As Macdonald stood by as intellectuals debated the meaning and value of mass culture, he must have taken some delight in the 1970 reprint of The Great Audience, which Seldes prefaced with an explanatory note entitled ‘Confession of Error.’ “Twenty-five years ago,” he begins, “I made a proposal that seemed modest at the time: that popular entertainment could be accepted and criticized on the same basis as the fine arts.” This was, Seldes admits, a “serious error.” “I didn’t perceive then,” he continues, “the direction American entertainment was going to take.” Having come to the conclusion that “our mass entertainments are, practically speaking, the great creative arts of our time,” he expresses deep regret at the “machine-made products” that “repeat themselves endless- ly, using a handful of contrived formulas for plot and stereotyped figures for characters.”194 Seldes had finally come to the conclusion about mass culture that Macdonald had stuck with all along. Indeed, in an interview in 1979, three years before his death, Macdonald firmly repeated that mass culture was junk, and that most people “don’t give a goddamn about culture.”195 This comment stands as his final justification for ‘Masscult and Midcult’s’ solution to the culture problem.

191 Irving Howe, ‘The New York Intellectuals: A Chronicle and Critique,’ Commentary 46 (October, 1968), p. 35-37. 192 Kammen, The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States, p. 341. 193 Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America, pp. 191, 186-92. 194 Seldes, The Great Audience, p. 3. 195 Trilling, ‘An Interview with Dwight Macdonald,’ p. 148.

136 Conclusion

Macdonald filled his remaining years drinking alcohol. When asked why he imbibed so incessantly, he shot back: “I’m an alcoholic, goddamn it!”196 During his phase of decline, Macdonald would often attend films and plays, where he would give a running, critical commentary in a loud voice, and at times even shout at the actors if some aspect of the performance offended him. Drink ruined both his physical and mental health, and Dwight Macdonald died on December 19, 1982, in a New York City hospital, shortly after a visit by his second wife and two sons.197 Many epitaphs have been written for Macdonald. Those who admire his political output, but do not necessarily support his cultural theories, refer to him as an “American Orwell” who is “unjustly forgotten.”198 Others commend his talents as a journalist and intellectual, and his highly “humanistic” approach to political criticism.199 Stephen Whitfield labels Macdonald “the New Left’s ances- tral voice,” who “located the scars inflicted by totalitarianism, war, and technology.”200 And Michael Wreszin offers much scholarly praise in A Rebel in De- fense of Tradition. Some commentators even cite the need for a Macdonald-type figure today, arguing that high culture is sagging into mediocrity in a world where “some critics seriously regard Andrew Lloyd Webber as a composer of operas.”201 Among those who fail to see Macdonald as a product of his intellectual era, criticizing him instead of explaining why he held his views on culture, condemnation is rife. Gorman, best representing the Macdonald antagonists, characterizes his entire output as “misguided.” Taking Macdonald to task for his critical assessment of common people’s tastes and assumptions about how they consume mass culture, Gorman labels ‘Masscult and Midcult’ a “sad ending” for the surrender to the mass society and culture models it embodies.202 Levine, too, dismisses the entirety of Macdonald’s work as lacking “empathy” with average people, dubbing his essays mere “polemics” that present “far more half-thought- through arguments than careful and relatively consistent definitions.”203 Natural-

196 Garner, ‘Dwight Macdonald’s War on Mediocrity,’ online. 197 Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald, pp. 481-82, 488. 198 John Rodden and John Rossi, ‘Dwight and Left,’ American Prospect Online, (March 10, 2006), accessed July 10, 2007, online. 199 Barry Gewen, ‘Dwight Macdonald’s Legacy,’ New Leader, (February 11-25, 1985), pp. 13-14, and Epstein, ‘Dwight Macdonald: Sunburned by Ideas,’ online. 200 Whitfield, A Critical American: The Politics of Dwight Macdonald, pp. 99, 5. 201 John Elson ‘No Foolish Consistency,’ Time 143, April 4 (1994), accessed July 7, 2007, online. 202 Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America, pp. 191, 183. 203 Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, p. 7.

Conclusion 137 ly, it is easy to pass judgment in hindsight, on those who are products of their time. Such disapproval is unsurprising today, when political correctness pre- vents Macdonald’s cultural stances from being palatable. Though much of what Macdonald posited is academically indefensible from a contemporary standpoint, the criticisms above are selective. His writing offered more than just disparagement of common folk, and the charge that he lacked empathy ignores his lifelong political commitments to progressive, antiwar causes, his personal dealings, and essays for Politics, which even express compassion for the German citizenry at the moment the repulsive Nazi crimes were revealed in all their infamy.204 Regardless, Gorman sees Macdonald’s ab- horrence of mass taste as the central contradiction of his left-wing political sympathies and simultaneous appreciation of high culture. This dynamic is however better viewed as a compartmentalization of concerns.205 Macdonald best explained the division himself in a 1964 interview, in which he fends off accusations of snobbism and manages to turn such notions on their head:

Well, it’s true that I am often accused of being a snob. But I’m not a social snob – I’m quite a democratic fellow, really. But I admit I am a snob in an intellectual and cultural sense. I think it is important to stand up for certain standards and not to re- lax these standards at all, not even for the very worthy cause of democratizing culture or bringing a great many into contact with great works of art. Mind you, I’m not at all against that. As many people as possible should take an interest in reading and writing and theater and good cinema and music. …But this business of making concessions to the public in order to interest them, I don’t understand why this should be done at all. This is where real snobbishness comes in, it seems to me. The assumption is that you somehow cannot be a really dignified human being without deep cultural interests. I don’t agree. I can respect somebody even if he hasn’t the faintest interest in “culture.”206

Here Macdonald straightforwardly describes the separation between the idea of integrity on the human level and integrity on the cultural level – in much clearer terms than in his culture essays.

204 One of his former students, for instance, called him the “democrat of democrats; aware of class distinctions, he paid no attention to them.” For more explication of this aspect of Macdonald’s personality see: Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald, p. 472. See also p. 447 for a discussion of Macdonald’s hatred of social hierarchy and ‘genteel pomposity.’ 205 This ‘compartmentalization’ idea is also suggested in Louis Menard, ‘Browbeaten: Dwight Macdonald’s War on Midcult,’ The New Yorker (September 5, 2011), p. 72. 206 Roy Newquist, ‘Dwight Macdonald Interview,’ Interviews with Dwight Macdonald, ed. Michael Wreszin, p. 30.

138 Conclusion

From today’s perspective Macdonald’s Achilles’ heel is undeniably his attachment to the theory of the mass man within mass society, which Gorman sees as another defining defect in his thought.207 While ‘Masscult and Midcult’ displays a subtle downplaying of the mass man’s actual reification in favor of a more humane portrait of the American public that qualifies the concept almost to non-existence, ‘his’ appearance is problematic. It is little surprise that Macdon- ald eventually dropped the mass man abstraction in favor of simple arguments concerning humanity’s basic indifference to culture. As for the mass society model, while its homogenizing character is inadequate in confronting American diversity, Macdonald’s reliance on the concept is not difficult to understand given that these vulnerable theoretical mechanisms dominated social thought during his most active period, before the explosion of nonconformity in the 1960s. For these sins, along with his brief quasi-Marxist past, Macdonald is often mistaken- ly associated with the Frankfurt School. Macdonald, though he admired the avant-garde, did not embrace the Germans’ stress on oppositional art inciting revolution, nor did he wish to ignore the heritage of past centuries. Also, the avant-garde was quickly canonized during Macdonald’s lifetime, becoming another part of the cultural tradition he wished to defend. Indeed, his main emphasis was protecting all high culture – as it was from the very beginning during the Phelps incident at Yale – and criticizing aesthetically inferior mass culture products that had no enriching qualities. As to why Macdonald did embrace mass theories, one must look to how his outlook was shaped by the historical experience he lived through, whose struggles, horrors, and immediate impact, so pal- pable then, are so remote now. Perhaps Gorman is partly correct about the ‘sad ending,’ not because of ‘Masscult and Midcult’s’ theoretical blind alley, but because of the loss of hope in a man who, as it were, gave a damn. But as Mac- donald would have likely pointed out, happy endings are rare outside of Holly- wood. In the end it is his relative fame that has left Macdonald to bear the brunt of later observers’ scorn. The Frankfurt School writers (who mostly returned to Germany and hung on to their original cultural analysis until the end) have avoided such opprobrium, as have the New York intellectuals. With the prosper- ity of the postwar era and a lessening of discrimination against Jews, the expanding American university system absorbed the PR writers. By the 1950s their old idealism had been subordinated to a new pragmatism in matters political, cultural, and financial. Phillips and Rahv took lucrative university posts, and Greenberg became a regular contributor to the once reviled Saturday Evening Post. None of them rejected the new spoils and settled easily into comfortable, upper-middle-class life. As they shrank from the ideals that had animated them,

207 Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America, pp.180-84.

Conclusion 139 only Macdonald kept up his public struggles against grinding poverty, cata- strophic imperialist war, and desecration of the arts.208 To the finish he carried the torch, but at the same time was left holding the bag. The question remaining is what can be salvaged from Macdonald’s critique, and what potency it retains. Macdonald irrefutably made a serious point when he wrote that “Masscult is a dynamic, revolutionary force, breaking down the old barriers of class, tradition, and taste, dissolving all cultural distinctions.”209 It has been well established by Michael Kammen, for instance, that: “Correlations between [taste preferences and social class] that were often (though not invariably) clear during the period from the 1870s and ‘80s until well after World War II have become much less so since the later 1950s when most of the full force of mass culture as we know it became evident.”210 It is as well difficult to deny the ubiquitous nature of mass culture consumption in American society, where, to cite just one example, watching primetime television often sets the contours of daily routine, and consumes two full months a year, or nine full years of the average American’s life.211 As ever, the repetitiveness of profit-seeking mass culture prevails on the flimsiest of premises or catchphrases: Beverly Hills Cop begets Beverly Hills Ninja, which begets Beverly Hills Chihuahua – the number one film in October of 2008.212 And the record-holding, most popular television show on the planet, at its height captivating 1,100,000,000 viewers per week, is Baywatch, whose allure rests on little more than the fleeting promise of titilla- tion.213 Baywatch appears to have made Macdonald’s presaging of a universal mass-produced and constantly devolving kitsch, shared among all classes and cultures, a reality – one regularly adrift in daydreams of conspicuous consumption such as Sex and the City 2 and Keeping Up with the Kardashians. These are curiously popular products of a society that in the past twenty years has seen the top one percent double its share of national wealth as millions fall into poverty.214 But if taking into account such data, Hollywood and television “would reveal capitalism to be an exploitive class society and not the harmonious commonwealth its apologists say it is.”215 Mass culture is powerful, and the strain

208 Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World, pp. 308-13. 209 Macdonald, ‘Masscult and Midcult,’ pp. 12-13. 210 Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century, p. 243. 211 ‘Television and Health,’ accessed December 6, 2011, online. 212 ‘October 3-5, 2008,’ Box Office Mojo, accessed December 6, 2011,online. 213 ‘Guinness World Records,’ Wattpad, online. 214 Salvatore Babones, ‘United We Fall: Inequality on the Rise,’ Inequality.org (Decem- ber 6, 2011), accessed December 11, 2011, online. 215 Macdonald, ‘A Theory of Popular Culture,’ p. 20.

140 Conclusion that Macdonald described does exist. While someone like Shils might point out that such fare is still superior to bear-baiting, that is hardly a strong recommendation.216 As well, no one credits the fact that Macdonald’s remarks at the end of ‘Masscult and Midcult’ have turned out to be prophetic. His hope that smaller audiences could make high culture profitable has been borne out through the prevalence of art house cinema in major cities and special arts channels on cable and satellite television. The point of this passage is not to argue forcefully for the complete rightness of Macdonald’s critique, but to suggest – however briefly and crudely – that there are claims to its relevance. Macdonald naturally erred in viewing the capitalist system of culture production and reception as monolithic, and in not always taking into account products that break its mold. But cultural historians such as Levine and Gorman arguably err equally in refusing to engage the central aspect of Macdonald’s mass culture criticism – the appraisal of its quality and content. Instead, they attack him for his perceived superciliousness, skirting the issue of whether mass culture is as mind-deadening and trivial as Macdonald insisted, tacitly admitting that he is correct in his estimations of the phenomenon. Gorman cannot help but confess in his introduction to Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture that he shares many “sympathies” with culture critics such as Macdonald,217 while Lev- ine, in deeming cultural hierarchy more “permeable” than is generally considered in Highbrow/Lowbrow, qualifies the argument with the statement that: “Obviously we need to make distinctions within culture as within every other realm of human endeavor.”218 And while Macdonald’s solution of two cultures may appear aesthetically undemocratic, this de facto division prevails regardless. Few people are interested in high culture, and few people work for its perpetuation, while the vast majority consumes mass culture. Macdonald’s apparently high-handed solution appears decidedly less so in later statements. He explained in an interview in the early 1970s:

I don’t believe in taking people by the hand and force-feeding them culture. I think they should make their own decisions. If they want to go to museums and concerts, that’s fine, but they shouldn’t be seduced into doing it or shamed into doing it.

216 As argued earlier in general terms, Shils was sorely wrong to equate Macdonald and the Frankfurt School. Wreszin agrees that Shils erred in his lumping of the two together, and that Macdonald’s critiques bear more similarities to Eliot and Gasset – though he fails to make the connection with Arnold. See A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald, p. 326. 217 Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America, p 12. 218 Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, pp. 7-8.

Conclusion 141

Macdonald continues, saying that the only requirement for those seeking to in- habit higher realms of culture is true curiosity in this “eccentric” interest, divorced from “any direct connection with either money or social class.” As he stressed, “the game is open to anybody who wants to play.”219 But to understand Macdonald’s proper place in the greater context of cultural studies one must return to Matthew Arnold.220 Despite the radical political sympathies and selected invocations of left-wing culture critics that have left Macdonald incorrectly classified, he was, in a multitude of ways, the English critic’s twentieth-century heir. The similarities are remarkable. For both, culture was “the best which has been thought and said in the world,” revealing the shared bond of all humanity, and an almost sacred power that could transform thought and society in accordance with the Christian Gospel for Arnold, and anarchism for Macdonald.221 Precious and delicate, culture’s very existence required protection from the menaces of plebian anarchy, or mass society’s Mass- cult, which threatened to raze humankind’s morality to “the level of the most primitive members” and “its taste to that of the least sensitive and most ignorant.”222 Arnold’s world, made up of Barbarians, Philistines and Populace, and Macdonald’s, made up of Lords of Kitsch, middlebrows and masses, teetered on the brink of total aesthetic annihilation through rank materialism and rowdy cultural democratization. Arnold wrote of his Barbarians’ weakness for cupidity, how it “block[ed] their mental horizon,” discounting them as a force for civilization. To their egregious detriment his Philistines, seduced, wanted little more than to imitate the luxury of the upper classes, feebly falling back on “a narrow range of intellect and knowledge, a stunted sense of beauty, [and] a low standard of manners.” And the sorry members of the Populace, with hopes of any better life so far out of reach, had no choice but to stick to “their beer, their gin, and their fun.” Macdonald’s analysis of mid-century America was little different. His Lords of Kitsch, driven only by the profit motive, aided in the destruction of the high culture they were meant to safeguard. Even worse, they trapped the middlebrows within the deceptive web of Midcult, effectively denying cultural

219 Paul Kurtz, ‘Conservative Anarchism: An Interview with Dwight Macdonald,’ Inter- views with Dwight Macdonald, ed. Michael Wreszin, pp. 85-86. 220 Macdonald read Arnold at Yale, though he was apparently unimpressed by his poetry. Why Macdonald never explicitly cited the English critic’s writings on culture is unknown but obvious. Along with the fact that Macdonald always thought himself in the vanguard of cultural criticism, one assumes he would not have liked to align himself with someone so critical of political democracy. See Wreszin, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald, p. 12. 221 Arnold, ‘Preface to Culture and Anarchy,’ p. 190. 222 Macdonald, ‘A Theory of Mass Culture,’ p. 14.

142 Conclusion enlightenment. And Macdonald’s poor masses, though perhaps good at heart, stood pummeled by gross spectacles that stunted any true awareness of political reality, much less the complex fragility of the human condition. Arnold was adamant that any such fundamentally corrupt and unequal condition of society “materialises our upper class, vulgarises our middle class, and brutalises our lower.”223 Macdonald would have certainly agreed. Yet somewhere in these men’s dark appraisals of society there dwelled seekers of the true light, ‘aliens,’ who regardless of social class held within them the potential, desire, and facility for aesthetic illumination and edification. They existed as the only hope among those millions who “don’t give a goddamn about culture,”224 and for whom “Knowledge and truth in the full sense of the words, are not attainable.”225 Arnold and Macdonald thus shared a final answer for how to maintain high standards within an increase of undiscriminating mass democracy: a self-perpetuating intellectual elite to act as cultural sentinels, walling off treacherous intrusions from below. But within this paradigm, a primary function of culture was lost. For Arnold culture’s path led to God’s Kingdom on Earth. For Macdonald it led to a politically egalitarian, pacifistic social order. And for both, the noble aspiration was the elimination of violence, injustice, pain, and ignorance. Yet in the end, these idealistic visions yielded in importance to culture’s imperative, and the masses were left to wallow in numbing spirits, frustrated brawling, banal sitcoms, and absurd but predictable celluloid fantasies. ‘Masscult and Midcult,’ then, is not the culmination of the twentieth century’s left-wing mass culture critique, but that of the nineteenth century’s culture and civilization discourse. In closing, it is appropriate to note the irony of Macdonald’s final statements on culture. In his loss of hope he had become the figure harshly criticized in ‘For Lancelot Andrewes,’ constrained by a “narrow and rigid” philosophy and unwilling to make “concessions to the mob.” Yet simultaneously he remained the ‘happy warrior of the mind,’ who fought the “errors of his time” and “chaos of modern values.”226 Though Macdonald lost his battle, one can appreciate his vigorous attempt to confront the problems of culture, politics, and life, as so few do.

223 Arnold, ‘Inequality,’ p. 236. 224 Trilling, ‘An Interview with Dwight Macdonald,’ p. 148. 225 Quoted in Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, p. 22. 226 Macdonald, ‘For Lancelot Andrewes,’ pp. 38-39.

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Macdonald, Dwight. Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture. 1962. New York: Da Capo Press, 1983. Macdonald, Dwight. “Masscult and Midcult.” Partisan Review. Spring, 1960. Reprinted in Macdonald, Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of MassCulture. Da Capo Press, New York, 1983. Macdonald, Dwight. Memoirs of a Revolutionist: Essays in Political Criticism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957. Macdonald, Dwight. “A Theory of Mass Culture.” Diogenes 3. Summer, 1953. Macdonald, Dwight. “A New Theory of Totalitarianism.” The New Leader. Vol. 34. May, 1951. Macdonald, Dwight. “The Bomb.” Politics 2. September, 1945. Macdonald, Dwight. “Field Notes.” Politics 2. April, 1945. Macdonald, Dwight. “The Responsibility of the Peoples.” Politics 2. March, 1945. Macdonald, Dwight. “A Theory of Popular Culture.” Politics 1. February, 1944. Macdonald, Dwight. “The Future of Democratic Values.” Partisan Review 10. July-August, 1943. Macdonald, Dwight. “Kulturbolschewismus is Here.” Partisan Review 8. No- vember-December, 1941. Macdonald, Dwight. “The Soviet Society and its Cinema.” Partisan Review 6. Winter, 1939. Macdonald, Dwight. “The Soviet Cinema: 1930-38, Part II.” Partisan Review 5. August-September 1938. Macdonald, Dwight. “The Soviet Cinema: 1930-38.” Partisan Review 5. July 1938. Macdonald, Dwight. “Laugh and Lie Down.” Partisan Review 4. December, 1937. Macdonald, Dwight. “Notes on Hollywood Directors.” Symposium, 4, 1933. Macdonald, Dwight. “Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Others.” Miscellany 1. March, 1931. Macdonald, Dwight. “Robinson Jeffers.” Miscellany 1. July, 1930. Macdonald, Dwight. “Our Elizabethan Movies.” Miscellany 1. December, 1929. Macdonald, Dwight. “For Lancelot Andrewes.” Miscellany 1. December, 1929. MacLeish, Archibald. J.B., A Play in Verse. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Com- pany, 1958. Phillips, William and Philip Rahv. “Editorial Statement.” “Our Country and Our Culture.” Partisan Review 19. No. 3. May-June, 1952. Rahv, Philip. “How the Wasteland Became a Flower Garden.” Partisan Review 1. September-October, 1934.

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Riesman, David. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Chara- cter. 1950. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961. Riesman, David. “Our Country and Our Culture.” Partisan Review 19. No. 3. May-June, 1952. Rosenberg, Bernard and David Manning White, eds. Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America. 1957. New York: Macmillan Publishing, Inc., 1964. Seldes, Gilbert. The Great Audience. 1950. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1970. Shils, Edward. “Daydreams and Nightmares: Reflections on the Criticism of Mass Culture.” Sewanee Review. 1957. Winters, Yvor. “Robinson Jeffers.” Poetry 35. February 1930. Reprinted in Cri- tical Essays on Robinson Jeffers. James Karman, ed. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1990.

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Cummings, Robert. “Resistance and Victimization: Dwight Macdonald in the 1940s.” New Politics 1. Summer, 1981. Donaldson, Scott. Archibald MacLeish: An America Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992. Edwards, Thomas S. “The Pursuit of the Ideal: Mass Culture and Politics in the Works of Dwight Macdonald.” Unpublished Dissertation. Bowling Green University, August 1989. Epstein, Joseph. “Dwight Macdonald: Sunburned by Ideas.” New Criterion. Vol. 20, No. 3. November, 2001. Gewen, Barry. “Dwight Macdonald’s Legacy.” New Leader. February 11-25, 1985. Gorman, Paul R. Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Held, David. Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas. Ber- keley: University of California Press, 1980. Kammen, Michael. American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Kammen, Michael. The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Karman, James. Introduction. Critical Essays on Robinson Jeffers. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1990. Kojecky, Rodger. T. S. Eliot’s Social Criticism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972. Lasch, Christopher. “Mass Culture Reconsidered.” Democracy. Vol. 1, October 1981. Lazere, Donald. “Introduction: Entertainment as Social Control.” American Me- dia and Mass Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Leitch, Vincent, B. American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eigh- ties. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Levine, Lawrence. The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Levine, Lawrence. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Nelson, Raymond. Van Wyck Brooks: A Writer’s Life. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981. O’Brian, John, ed. Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume I: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

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Katowice Interdisciplinary and Comparative Studies Literature, Anthropology and Culture

Edited by Tadeusz Sawek

Volume 1 Agnieszka Graff: This Timecoloured Place. The Time-Space Binarism in the Novels of James Joyce. Preface by Micha Gowiski. 2012.

Volume 2 Jacek Gutorow: Luminous Traversing. Wallace Stevens and the American Sublime. 2012.

Volume 3 Tadeusz Lewandowski: Dwight Macdonald on Culture. The Happy Warrior of the Mind, Reconsidered. 2013. www.peterlang.de