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Politics and the Problem of Subjectivity in Postwar America

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Politics and the Problem of Subjectivity in Postwar America THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO GETTING PERSONAL: POLITICS AND THE PROBLEM OF SUBJECTIVITY IN POSTWAR AMERICA A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE BY AMANDA SWAIN CHICAGO, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 2017 Amanda Swain [email protected] © Amanda Swain 2017 For dad. i Acknowledgments I owe a lot to Lauren and Debbie for all of their support, encouragement, and precious feedback throughout the years. Without their careful reading of drafts and enthusiasm about the significance of personalism, this project would never have become the dissertation that it is. I am also grateful for the scholarly community that I found at and through the University of Chicago, especially the American Cultures Workshop, my English department cohort, the staff at Critical Inquiry, and Debbie’s 20th century Americanists group. Finally, I must thank the friends that helped to lighten the burden of loneliness that research can so often demand. Katie, Carmen, Ingrid, David, Hadji, Cass, Haidee, Luca, and Matteo – I so appreciate all of the love. ii Table of Contents Introduction. The Individual, the Mass Subject, and the Personalist Alternative..……………………………………. 1 Chapter One. Humanity, “Year Zero”: Dwight Macdonald, Nicola Chiaromonte, and the Politics of Friendship ………………………….…………… 21 Chapter Two. Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Personal Politics of Spiritual Community..………………… 93 Chapter Three. Carl Rogers, Wellfleet Pyschohistory, and the 1960s Politics of Personality.………………………………. 147 Chapter Four. Personalizing ‘The Personal is Political’: Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Cade Bambara, and the Problem of Collective Identity ...………………………….... 207 Bibliography …………………………………………………..…..... 271 iii Introduction. The Individual, the Mass Subject, and the Personalist Alternative People were now individuals, on their own, rootless, fragmented. Individuals, but not persons. – A.J. Muste, “Saints for this Age”, 1962 There is a difference, however, between revealing personal material and being personal… One can be personal without revealing personal material; “personal” is an attitude, a way of running risks with people, not a content… it is a reaching out to another, not knowing what might happen next. – William Coulson, “Inside a Basic Encounter Group,” 1970 Related to this thinning of social commitment and social investment, we note an increased sensitivity to interpersonal relations—a desire for friendship, warm relationships at work and in the family, a desire for personal impact in everyday encounters…The search for satisfying warm relationships which was primarily a feature of middle-class, educated life in 1957 has spread more broadly in 1976. – Joseph Veroff, Inner American, 1981 My dissertation presents an archive of mostly American thinkers, political activists, scholars, and writers and their work from the period of roughly 1945-1975, as they elaborated responses to what they perceived as a crisis of social experience. The figures I trace throughout the project were personalists, in the sense that they saw personal relationships, values, problems, experiences, hopes, and fears—the stuff of the private, traditionally speaking—as provisions for repairing what seemed a broken world. The personalist thesis about a world broken by war and modernity was not a new idea in the postwar period.1 As Jonathan Flatley has noted, “melancholic concern” with modernity as an experience of loss already resonated discursively by the late 19th century, marking “the place where modernity touche[d] down in our lives in the 1 A version of what Mark Greif has termed “the crisis of man,” see Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in American from 1933-1973. 1 most intimate ways” (Flatley 3).2 By the early 20th century, expression of melancholic loss had become “a historical-aesthetic methodology” in its own right (Ibid. 3). Yet while the idea of a world in crisis had framed thinking about modernity long before the postwar period, the events of World War Two quickly proliferated belief in this crisis and extended its implications. The crisis thesis became a key organizing metanarrative for the intellectual and social life of the post- World War Two United States, linking a range of its political, philosophical, cultural, aesthetic, social, scientific, and religious conversations, as cultural commentators all along the political spectrum agreed that something had gone drastically wrong in human experience.3 By the early 1960s, public discourse in a variety of fields—including orthodox and mystical theology, liberal philosophy, utopian technocracy, liberal humanism, and psychology—took this premise for granted, maintaining that the postwar world was plagued with loneliness and anomie, ruptured social networks, misplaced moral anchors, and existential drift (Greif 15).4 The expanding explanatory power of this discourse was tied up in a plethora of well- noted historical transformations to the postindustrial United States that marked the rise of the postwar middle class and the growth of mass consumer culture, mass market advertising, and a bureaucratic managerial ethos—all of which were thrown into relief by the threats posed by the new forms of violence and atrocity that emerged during the Second World War. The conclusion drawn by many cultural commentators was that the post-Hiroshima landscape lacked the shared horizon of meaning that had previously ostensibly proffered social stability, common moral principles, and affective community. Though this world-in-crisis discourse originated in 2 For accounts of earlier instantiations of this discourse of world-in-crisis see for instance Grief’s The Age of the Crisis of Man, Flatley’s Affective Mapping, and Martin Jay’s Songs of Experience. 3 See for instance Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative, Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd, the Students for a Democratic Society’s “Port Huron Statement,” and Whitaker Chambers’s Witness. 4 Grief notes that “Man became at midcentury the figure everyone insisted must be addressed, recognized, helped, rescued, made the center, the measure, the ‘root,’ and released for ‘what was in him’” (Grief 8). 2 cosmopolitan intellectual circles, during the U.S. postwar period it quickly proliferated to become a site of mass concern, fashioning a consensus about social and moral experience that was largely a “false universalization” of the expanding American middle-class’s encounter with a transforming socio-political landscape—a consensus “forged by a similarity of outlook and experience and maintained by strong personal and institutional links” (Hoborek 4, Berman 9).5 The broken world thesis was moreover “confirmed” by postwar U.S. social science: an extensive, twenty-year study on the psychological state of the American people, funded by the national government, concluded that while “American social criticism tends to the hyperbolic” in its discussions of the postwar crisis of experience, and “relied too heavily on and generalized too widely from observations of special groups in the population (particularly intellectuals and the media elites),” its concerns “undoubtedly picked up on and reflected themes” with a basis in reality that were tied to “reduced integration of American adults into the social structure” (Veroff 16).6 The study upheld the crisis discourse’s main claim that “[s]ocial organization, social norms, [and] the adaption to and successful performance of social roles all seem to have lost some of their power to provide people with meaning, identity elements, satisfaction” in the postwar period (Veroff 17). The narratives proliferating around the broken world thesis, while generalizing an experience not nearly as common as many of its proponents assumed, did not merely express a conservative romantic nostalgia. They also indexed anxiety about a series of well-noted economic, social, and geographic transformations reorganizing the post-World War Two United 5 See Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America, Catherine Jurca’s The White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel, Andrew Hoborek’s The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work, and Leerom Medovoi’s Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity. 6 See the extensive study, Americans View their Mental Health, or the associated monograph elaborating its findings by Veroff, The Inner American: A Self Portrait from 1957 to 1976. 3 States. The postwar period saw, for instance, a pronounced geographic dislocation attending the increased economic mobility of a swelling middle class—which also resulted in shifts away from the domestic and social structures offered by the extended family toward the unit of the nuclear family. This middle-class boom changed patterns of U.S. private property ownership and was also proximate to the tradeoffs between labor and management underwriting the period’s Keynesian state-spending and regulation programs, aimed at promoting economic growth, and the Cold War containment politics that were consolidating the national government as a welfare- warfare state. The emerging global dominance of U.S. economic power and the rise of mass media and mass market advertising moreover began managing citizen desires in new ways, as the country transitioned toward a service and information-based economy. All of these changes were welded by the rise of an ever-growing
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