ESQUIRE and the PROBLEM of the MALE CONSUMER. Stefan K
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
ABSTRACT Title of Document: THE LINEAMENTS OF PERSONALITY: ESQUIRE AND THE PROBLEM OF THE MALE CONSUMER. Stefan K. Cieply, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006 Directed By: Professor James B. Gilbert, History The male consumer has proven problematic for historians of consumer culture and gender. By approaching consumption as the expression or by-product of gender identity, historians and other commentators on gender fail to account for consumer culture as an important site where difference is itself constituted through the goods we purchase, the items we desire and the worlds we imagine. To this end, the male consumer becomes problematic when prevailing historiographic models construct him solely as a rational, goal-oriented purchaser of goods or as an amoral libertine who rejects responsibility for fleeting pleasures. Both approaches are untenable since they rely upon a problematic rhetoric of gender essentialism. What I argue for instead is an approach that places consumption within the unsettled discursive practice of gender. In this sense, the problem of the male consumer speaks in part to a larger issue in historiography, namely how we historicize pleasure and desire. My work on Esquire in the period from 1945-1965 attempts to address this gap by examining the role of cultural intermediaries in developing a discourse on socially legitimate forms of consumption. Against the background of the misogynistic “Masculinity Crisis” rhetoric, the postwar mass culture debates and a nascent counterculture, Esquire transformed itself from a crude men’s magazine to one of America’s premier periodicals. Between 1956 and 1963, Esquire published work by such distinguished figures as Richard Rovere, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Dwight Macdonald, Paul Goodman, Diana Trilling, Terry Southern, and Nat Hentoff. During this same period, Esquire also ran monthly fashion spreads, service articles on the newest consumer goods, travel advice columns and an annual Christmas gift guide. Through the figure of the “Uncommon Man,” the name given to the magazine’s imagined reader, and the rhetoric of the “New Sophistication,” Esquire attempted to negotiate the tension inherent in its contradictory parts. Drawing on research in cultural and intellectual history, gender theory, material culture studies and the sociology of culture, my dissertation investigates how Esquire opened a discursive space in which men could simultaneously construct themselves within and outside of consumer culture. THE LINEAMENTS OF PERSONALITY: ESQUIRE AND THE PROBLEM OF THE MALE CONSUMER. By Stefan Konstantyn Cieply. Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2006 Advisory Committee: Professor James B. Gilbert, Chair Maureen Beasley Myron Lounsbury Mary Corbin Sies Orrin Wang © Copyright by Stefan Konstantyn Cieply 2006 Dedication For Mary. ii Acknowledgements Numerous people and institutions have contributed greatly to the completion of this dissertation. Most importantly, I would like to thank my chair and advisor James Gilbert for his steady shepherding of this project from its rocky beginning to its final form. His sage advice shaped my thinking at every step of the process. His friendliness and catholicity of intellectual interests provide a model of intellectual life that I will continue to emulate for years to come. Most importantly, his patience and encouragement helped me complete a long distance dissertation written in Detroit and Charlottesville. Likewise, I sincerely thank the other members of my committee for their efforts on my behalf. Mary Sies provided a welcomed critique of a late draft as well as useful advice on the writing process and the profession. Orrin Wang preformed double duty as a critical reader and a lifesaving Director of Graduate Studies. Myron Lounsbury introduced me to Dwight Macdonald’s film criticism in Esquire. This, more than anything else, was the genesis of the dissertation. Myron’s “Culture and Communications” seminar, likewise, helped me clarify my approach to post-World War II intellectual history. Maureen Beasley contributed a number of helpful comments on the final version of the dissertation. This dissertation was completed with the generous financial assistance of the University of Maryland’s College of Arts and Humanities’ Mary Savage Snouffer Dissertation Fellowship, the University of Michigan’s Bordin/Gillette Researcher Travel Fellowship for research in the Bentley Historical Library, and Indiana University’s Helm Research Fellowship for research in the Lilly Library. iii I conducted much of my research at the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I wish to thank Francis Blouin and Karen Jania and their staff for all of their assistance in working through the Arnold Gingrich Papers and the Esquire, Inc. papers. I would also like to thank Breon Mitchell and his staff at the Lilly Library at Indiana University for their assistance. The Interlibrary Loan staffs at the Rochester Hills Public Library, Wayne State University and the University of Virginia deserve a hearty thanks for their diligence in processing my many loan requests. Finally, I thank the librarians and support staff at Wayne State University, the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia. I would like to thank the following individuals for their support during the course of the past decade: Corey Creekmur, Cynthia Erb, Marianne Conroy, Robert Kolker, Madeline Hage, Susan Lanser, Regina Harrison, Herman Belz, Gay Gullickson, Molly Beauregard, Mary Duncan, Christine McAuley, Dennis Nawrowcki, the late Dr. Dorothy Kostuch, Aniko Bodroghkozy, Andrea Press, Bruce Williams, David Golumbia, Matt Hughey, Judy McPeak, Ed Martini, Brian Bergen Aurand, Joe Schaub, Donald Snyder, Maria Maisto, Anne Matteson, Otto Buj, Erin Helmrich, David Silver and Dominic and Amy Perrone. I especially want to thank Robert Burgoyne for his friendship and his professional mentoring. Finally, I would like to pay tribute to the late Richard Harvey Brown. Richard was a kind and generous scholar who helped me become a more rigorous thinker. My lunchtime discussions with him were crucial to the direction this project took. Most importantly, I want to thank my family for their support through some difficult times. My father, Oleh Cieply, my stepmother, Alberta Beitinger, and my iv sister, Christina Pope, were always there to cheer me up when the going got tough. My in-laws, Bob and Emma Howard, provided much needed support. My mother, Theresa Cieply, and my uncle, Jaroslav Roman Babiak, passed away before this project was completed. A day has not gone by that I have not thought about them. Finally, I want to thank my wife Mary for sticking by me and giving me support when I needed it. She has sacrificed so much for this dissertation. For this reason, I dedicate it her. v Table of Contents Dedication.................................................................................................................ii Acknowledgements..................................................................................................iii Table of Contents..................................................................................................... vi Introduction: The Problem of the Male Consumer ..................................................... 1 Section 1: An Introduction to Esquire.................................................................... 1 Section 2. “Masculine as a Moustache” ............................................................... 13 Section 3. The Problem of the Male Consumer.................................................... 23 Section 4: The Lineaments of Personality............................................................ 40 Chapter 1: “You Have Forsaken the Average Man:” The Postwar Crisis of Masculinity and the Genesis of the “New” Esquire ................................................. 46 Section 1: “The Magazine for ‘Fairies’, Old Maids, or What Have You”............. 46 Section 2: From Esky to Esquire ......................................................................... 50 Section 3: Angry Men and the New Language..................................................... 57 Section 4: Enter the Young Turks........................................................................ 78 Chapter 2: The Prehistory of Uncommonness........................................................ 102 Section 1: “A Male Counterpart of Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar.” Esquire and Modern Urban Masculinity in the 1930s............................................................ 102 Section 2: Esquire, Masculinity and Post-Depression Consumer Culture........... 116 Section 3: The “Art of Living” in Post-Prohibition America .............................. 134 Section 4: Modernist Masculinity ...................................................................... 153 Chapter 3: “A New Genre of Men”: Sophistication, Consumption and the Uncommon Man....................................................................................................................... 173 Section 1: Defining Uncommonness.................................................................. 173 Section 2:“So Futile, So Destructive is this Solution!”: Uncommonness and the Besieged Masculinity of the Organization Man. ................................................ 176 Section 3: “An Intellectual Kick”: The Uncommon Man