In 193X, Constance Rourke's Book American Humor Was Reviewed In

Home , Air Wave, American humor, Bernard DeVoto, Carl Bridenbaugh, Chalky (comics), Coffee table book

OUR LIVELY ARTS:

AMERICAN CULTURE AS THEATRICAL CULTURE, 1922-1931

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

Jennifer Schlueter, M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University

2007

Dissertation Committee: Approved by

Professor Thomas Postlewait, Adviser

Professor Lesley Ferris Adviser

Associate Professor Alan Woods Graduate Program in Theatre

Jennifer Schlueter

c. 2007

ABSTRACT

In the first decades of the twentieth century, critics like H.L. Mencken and Van

Wyck Brooks vociferously expounded a deep and profound disenchantment with

American art and culture. At a time when American popular entertainments were

expanding exponentially, and at a time when European high modernism was in full

flower, American culture appeared to these critics to be at best a quagmire of philistinism

and at worst an oxymoron. Today there is still general agreement that American arts

“came of age” or “arrived” in the 1920s, thanks in part to this flogging criticism, but also because of the powerful influence of European modernism.

Yet, this assessment was not, at the time, unanimous, and its conclusions should not, I argue, be taken as foregone. In this dissertation, I present crucial case studies of

Constance Rourke (1885-1941) and Gilbert Seldes (1893-1970), two astute but

understudied cultural critics who saw the same popular culture denigrated by Brooks or

Mencken as vibrant evidence of exactly the modern American culture they were seeking.

In their writings of the 1920s and 1930s, Rourke and Seldes argued that our “lively arts”

(Seldes’ formulation) of performance—vaudeville, minstrelsy, burlesque, jazz, radio, and

film—contained both the roots of our own unique culture as well as the seeds of a

burgeoning modernism. In their analysis, Rourke and Seldes stood against easy

conceptual categories (especially “highbrow vs. lowbrow”) that did not account for the ii

richness of American culture. Both resisted the tendency to evaluate American art by the standards of European modernism. And by foregrounding matters of race and ethnic identity (even when they dealt imperfectly with them), they showed popular entertainment to be a matter of national significance. Most importantly, the American culture they defined was, above all, theatrical; it craved performance, it was performance.

My research project, therefore, finds its mission in relation to two primary developments: (1) the growth of American modernist arts and (2) the growth of cultural criticism of those arts. My argument, however, cuts a path between—and often in opposition to—the standard explanations for both of these developments. Indeed, against the received wisdom that modern American culture depends upon the pervasive spread of

European modernism, I argue that American popular performance itself is the necessary foundation for our modern culture.

iii

For my parents.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To the library staff at The Ohio State University. In a time of transition during major

building construction, the libraries have elected to provide a new service to all patrons:

staff will pull any article (both in their own collection and from other sources) and

scan it for researcher use. In light of the extreme productivity of my major figures in

newspapers, magazines, and journals in the period, I benefited immensely by this

amazing service. To all the anonymous work study students who scanned through

reels of microfilm for me, my profound thanks.

To other librarians and archivists who made this work possible: Vincent Fitzpatrick at

the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Brooke Hubner at the MacDowell Colony, Valerie

Hawkins at the American Library Association, Polly Armstrong at the Stanford

University Libraries, Dean M. Rogers at Vassar College, Naomi Saito at Yale

University’s Beinecke Library, and Suzanne Eggleston Lovejoy at Yale University’s

Irving Gilmore Library. Thanks also to the able staffs at the Library of Congress, the

New York Public Library, and the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg Rare Book

and Manuscript Library.

To Dan O’Brien and Jeannie Anderson, for hospitality during research trips.

To Keith Doubt, for his 1993 course on the American social character, my first push

into the subject matter. v

To Joan Shelley Rubin and Michael Kammen, impeccable scholars both, who cleared

the way for study of Rourke and Seldes. Both generously entertained my queries.

To Tom Postlewait, whose patience, good humor, and incisiveness have made me a

better writer and thinker. Not only did he challenge me to think more deeply about

American culture, he wielded the editorial pen with certain grace.

To Lesley Ferris and Alan Woods, for their insights, and for their questions.

To Margo Jefferson, for good conversation.

To Rich Riley, for comic relief.

To the For/Word Company, for creative respite.

To Brad and Henry, for the rest.

This work was supported by an Alumni Grant in Graduate Research and Scholarship and

an Ohio State University Presidential Fellowship.

VITA

September 1, 1973 ...... Born—St. Louis, Missouri

1995...... B.A., Theatre. Truman State University.

2003...... M.A., Theatre History, Literature, and Criticism.

The Ohio State University. Columbus, Ohio

2000-2005 ...... Graduate Teaching Assistant

Department of Theatre, The Ohio State University

2006...... Lecturer and Theatre 100 Administrator

Department of Theatre, The Ohio State University

2007...... Presidential Fellow

The Ohio State University

PUBLICATIONS

1. Schlueter, Jennifer. “Patronage and Playwriting: Richard B. and Jeanne Donovan

Fisher's Support of Charles L. Mee.” Angels in American Theatre. Ed. Robert

Schanke. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007.

2. Schlueter, Jennifer. “Review of Heather Woodbury’s What Ever.” Theatre

Journal. December 2004.

vii

3. Schlueter, Jennifer. “Review of Redmoon Theatre’s The Cabinet.” Theatre

Journal. May 2006.

4. Schlueter, Jennifer. “Staging Versailles: Charles L. Mee and the Re-Presentation

of History.” Journal of American Theatre and Drama. 17.3. Fall 2005.

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: Theatre

viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Abstract...... ii Dedication...... iv Acknowledgments...... v Vita...... vii List of Illustrations...... xi

Chapters:

1. Introduction ...... 1

1.1 Opening...... 1 1.2 Introducing Rourke...... 6 1.3 Introducing Seldes...... 10 1.4 On the popular, for the people ...... 14 1.5 Conclusion...... 20 Chapter 1 Endnotes...... 22

2. Approaching American Modernism...... 26

2.1 The literary fallacy...... 26 2.2 Realism and its discontents...... 34 2.3 Passionate pessimism: Brooks and the Beloved Community...... 39 2.4 Debunking: H.L. Mencken’s American...... 46 2.5 Civilization in the United States ...... 50 2.6 Expatriation...... 53 2.7 Rourke and Seldes against the grain ...... 55 Chapter 2 Endnotes...... 59

3. Constance Rourke and American Performance, 1885-1931 ...... 62

3.1 Introduction...... 63 3.2 First publications...... 68 3.3 A foot in the door...... 71 3.4 Retreat: The MacDowell Colony...... 75 3.5 Trumpets, Troupers, and a Character...... 78 3.6 Trumpets of Jubilee...... 82 ix

3.7 Troupers of the Gold Coast...... 90 3.8 American Humor...... 99 3.9 Conclusion...... 123 Chapter 3 Endnotes...... 127

4. Gilbert Seldes and American Performance, 1893-1931 ...... 134

4.1 Introduction...... 134 4.2 Early journalism, 1916-1924...... 138 4.3 At MacDowell...... 147 4.4 Seven Lively Arts...... 150 4.5 On the theatre, 1924-1931...... 172 4.6 In the popular press, 1927-1931...... 178 4.7 Stammering Century ...... 189 Chapter 4 Endnotes...... 195

5. Conclusion ...... 202

5.1 Continuities and changes...... 202 5.2 Rourke to the future ...... 206 5.3 Seldes to the future...... 213 5.4 An argument sustained...... 217 Chapter 5 Endnotes...... 227

Appendices:

A. Works by Constance Rourke ...... 231

B. Works by Gilbert Seldes ...... 245

C. Reviews of Works by Constance Rourke ...... 299

D. Reviews of Works by Gilbert Seldes...... 307

E. Works about Constance Rourke...... 317

F. Works about Gilbert Seldes ...... 320

Bibliography ...... 322

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Illustration Page

3.1 Portrait of Constance Mayfield Rourke ...... 63

4.1 Portrait of Gilbert Vivian Seldes...... 135

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Opening

In the first decades of the twentieth century, America was teeming with technological change. In 1910, one third of the world’s railroad mileage was in the

United States; just twenty years later, the automobile had come to primacy, with 30 million cars on a nationwide network of systematically numbered roads. In 1923, about

40 million Americans saw a film; in 1930, following Al Jolson’s transformative “talkie”

The Jazz Singer (1927), 100 million people went to the movies. Pittsburgh’s KDKA, the first radio station, began broadcasting in 1920 by transmitting the results of the Harding election. By 1923, over 500 radio stations were in operation, producing a variety of musical and dramatic programs; by 1929, twelve million families owned a radio.

Urbanization was in full swing, with Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Boston all over one million people by 1920; New York was over five million. The

New Woman and the New Negro made their way within these growing cities, enfranchised but not entirely welcomed.

In New York, both publishing and printing were booming industries, second only to the making of women’s garments. Magazines and journals proliferated, with The New 1

Republic, The Dial, The New Yorker, Partisan Review, The Saturday Review of

Literature, The New York Herald Books, The Masses, Time, and Vanity Fair adding to

venerated standards like The Nation, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s. New publishing

houses were springing up, including Viking, Boni/Liveright, Dial Press, and Alfred A.

Knopf. Critics and intellectuals of all stripes abounded: the pages of American magazines

and books overflowed. “It was a good time for magazine writers, and I suppose,” Gilbert

Seldes wrote dryly, “for book writers of all kinds.”1 H.L. Mencken skewered the

“booboisie” (his coinage) and their grotesque foibles in the pages of The Smart Set and

American Mercury, as Sinclair Lewis did in his novels Babbitt and Main Street. Upton

Sinclair and Ida Tarbell had touched off a torrent of muckraking, exposing the treachery

of big business and the corruption of politicians. Dorothy Parker and Alexander

Woollcott held court at the “round table” at the Algonquin Hotel, passing withering

judgment on the tasteless and the gauche. In Crisis and Opportunity, as well as in their

speeches, lectures, and books, W.E.B. DuBois and Alaine Locke defined the New Negro.

From the “beloved community” of Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, Randolph Bourne, and Lewis Mumford, to the Vanity Fair coterie of Edmund Wilson and Frank

Crowninshield, through the bracing intellectual histories of Charles and Mary Beard: the

list of American critics and their pet projects (and peeves) in the early decades of the

twentieth century is long. As historian Michael Kammen has suggested, it was at this

moment that American “cultural criticism truly came of age as a vocation.”2

At the same time, Alan Brinkley points out, these critics “experience[ed] a disenchantment with modern America so fundamental that they were often able to view it

only with contempt.”3 Both the intellectuals and the artists of the new generation, in the 2

process of creating a modernist culture, turned a critical eye on American society.

Whether they decamped for Europe, like Ernest Hemingway or Gertrude Stein, or

obstinately remained, like Ambrose Bierce, American culture appeared to them a

stagnant quagmire of Puritanical philistinism, lacking both the grace of certain European

traditions and the iconoclastic energy of modernism.

Yet, this negative assessment was not unanimous, and its conclusions not

foregone. Two writers in particular—Constance Rourke (1885-1941) and Gilbert Seldes

(1893-1970)—proposed an alternative view of America’s burgeoning culture. With optimistic gusto, Rourke and Seldes evaluated the popular (and populist) roots of

American culture. Both maintained the skeptical eye of the disenchanted as well as a commitment to modernist experimentation; at the same time, they reformulated (and reaffirmed) many of the values and ideas of Emerson, Whitman, and Twain. In doing so,

Rourke and Seldes rejected a growing separation (in critical discourse at least) between elite and popular culture, locating a vibrant and hybrid American identity in the “lively arts” (Seldes’ formulation) of performance: vaudeville, musicals, storytelling, radio, and film. Through their critical engagement with performance, they made the case for a special kind of modernist culture in America.

In this project, Rourke and Seldes found new ways to fulfill the role of public intellectual. For them, the vocation of cultural critic became one of both advocacy and attack. Both stood against easy conceptual categories (including that of “highbrow vs. lowbrow”) that did not fully account for the richness of American culture. Both resisted the tendency to evaluate American art by the standards of European modernism. And by foregrounding matters of race and ethnic identity (even when they dealt imperfectly with 3

them), they transformed the seemingly insignificant topic of popular entertainment into a

matter of national importance. Throughout, against a backdrop of a torrent of critical

writing that focused its attention almost exclusively on American literature and society,

Rourke and Seldes defined an American culture that was, above all, theatrical. It craved

performance. It was performance.

I am not the first to note the affinities (if not overt connections) between Rourke

and Seldes. Their names have often been evoked in the same breath. For example, Greil

Marcus names Seldes and William Carlos Williams as Rourke’s only peers in his

introduction to the 2004 reissue of Rourke’s landmark American Humor. In his foreword

to the 1965 reprint of Seldes’ Stammering Century, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. lists Rourke,

Bernard De Voto, and Lewis Mumford as part of Seldes’ cadre of “gifted amateurs who

illuminated the past with such flair and vivacity.”4 In her comprehensive history of New

York in the 1920s, Ann Douglas praises both Seldes and Rourke (this time in conjunction with Zora Neale Hurston) for establishing “the credentials of popular culture as the center of American Studies.”5 More suggestive, though, is Douglas’ observation that Rourke’s

American Humor possessed a “dazzling interpretation of the American hybrid identity

that Gilbert Seldes explicated in The Great Audience…. Like the skyscrapers, like The

Great Audience, American Humor is a celebration of the polyglot national character.”6

Yet, despite this recognition of Seldes and Rourke, none of those astute commentators

provides more than a passing homage. Consequently, no study has yet drawn Rourke and

Seldes into conversation. It is precisely this that I aim to do. More importantly, I hope to

reconfigure our understanding of American culture in the 1920s and 1930s by listening closely to what they have to say.

I will not, however, claim that Rourke and Seldes were in perfect accord. On the contrary, they are in some ways fundamentally opposed. For example, Rourke was an adamant regionalist who lived her entire life in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and argued against the presumed centrality of New York City for American culture. Seldes, a transplanted New Yorker who relished the thrum of the city, trumpeted its primacy.

Rourke looked to folklore for the roots of American culture while Seldes turned to mass entertainment for the same. But these differences are salient, and make for fruitful discord. The tensions they evoke (i.e. urban vs. rural society, folk vs. mass culture, past vs. present values) are, in fact, central to the American culture that they both explored.

Moreover, I will not claim that Rourke and Seldes perfectly understood (or

described) American culture. As a writer, Rourke is often elliptical; Seldes sometimes

turns glib. In argumentation, Rourke fell prey to special pleading; Seldes became at times

a chest-thumping exceptionalist. Most importantly, both Rourke and Seldes stumbled on

matters of race: she conflating minstrelsy’s portrayals of African Americans with the

actual culture, he succumbing periodically to racist caricature of African Americans as

savage in dance and song. Yet these imperfections are also salient; they run as subtext

throughout the material, reminding us how difficult and how dangerous it is to set about

the task of defining any aspect of “the American experience.”

1.2 Introducing Constance Rourke

On December 14, 1932, author and critic Constance Rourke wrote a

characteristically generous response to graduate student Esther Porter, who requested

advice on the construction of her dissertation. One guesses that Porter approached

Rourke, then riding the crest of success from her landmark book American Humor: A

Study of the National Character (1931), because they shared the same alma mater, Vassar

College. Porter was attempting to construct a history of Montana theatricals.

Approaching Rourke made good sense because west coast performance was one of the

subjects she knew best: her book, Troupers of the Gold Coast (1928), was a history of

Lotta Crabtree and nineteenth century west coast traveling players. In a letter filled with

suggestions on individual caches of handbills and personal collections of newspaper

clippings, Rourke offers a bit of advice that crystallizes her animating concerns as a

writer, scholar, critic, and advocate:

There is a certain sort of book on theatricals about which I feel rather bitterly. Let me be high handed and urge you to avoid it. With a very rich factual material I suppose O’Dell7 may be forgiven for writing in this manner. The example I have in mind is W.G.B. Carson’s recent The Theatre on the Frontier with its inviting title and dry interior. When the plays and the acting are not of intrinsically the greatest importance I cannot see the point of a long, loving, detailed account of the movements of actors and the members of casts. No one could value the history of the theatre in this country more than I do: it seems to me to belong in the very heart of our social history, being perhaps as important as camp meetings. Of course the theatre is nothing without an audience, and obviously it’s nothing without an interaction between the audience and the stage. To treat the theatre in a vacuum seems to me to be an almost useless thing to do. The absolute interaction in the past is of course exceedingly difficult to reconstruct…. What I’m hoping you’ll do is write your thesis as a social history rather than purely theatrical history. If you think I’m being very impassioned, set it down to the state of mind one’s in on finishing a book, plus the conviction that all this is really important if ever we are to know our own character and history and literature.8 6

In this ephemeral note of encouragement and advice, Rourke sums up the threefold

concerns that run throughout her work. First, she took it as a matter of principle that her

role as a public intellectual required that she write in an accessible and lively way: no

antiquarian or scholarly chronicles for her.

Second, she tirelessly sought to articulate “our own character and history and

literature.” That is, she directly engaged Van Wyck Brooks’ 1918 declaration, in his “On

Creating a Usable Past,” that America’s lack of an aesthetic or cultural tradition resulted

in the pale artistic capabilities of the nation. Rourke, who was given her start as a critic

by Brooks himself, vehemently disagreed.9 Countering his argument, Rourke celebrated

the rich brew of folk and popular culture of an energetic, modern country. Significantly,

by the 1930s, Brooks came to take a more catholic view of American culture, a stance he

credited to Rourke: “my horizon was indefinitely broadened by Constance Rourke’s

eager and eloquent studies. She was already preparing for the general history of

American culture of which she finished parts before her death; and she wrote, from time

to time, to tell me of the proofs she found that America had its own definite aesthetic

tradition.”10 When Rourke died unexpectedly in 1941, it was Brooks who edited her last notes and writings into The Roots of American Culture (1942).

Third, and most important, is Rourke’s claim that the theatre is at “the very heart of our social history.” The theatre, as well as the theatricality of American culture more broadly construed, is in fact a fundamental trope which threads throughout her entire body of work. It is essential to her argument. It shapes her writing style. It is the core of the American culture she explicates. She argues, consistently and eloquently, that the

theatre is the essential core of American culture. 7

In American Humor, hailed by Lewis Mumford as “the most original piece of investigation and interpretation that has appeared in American cultural history,” Rourke set about the ambitious task of finding a way to “know our own character and history and literature.” To do so, she delineated three main American cultural types as comic figures: the Yankee, the backwoodsman, and the Negro minstrel. She traces their transformation through a variety of popular media, including jokebooks, almanacs, newspapers, and what she calls “theatricals.” For her, the category is a broad one, encompassing the legitimate stage, from Royall Tyler’s The Contrast onward, as well as burlesque, vaudeville, minstrelsy, and the host of anonymous strolling players who traveled westward with the pioneers. On the basis of this investigation, she identified a native performative tradition of importance that predates the modernist drama of her contemporaries, like Eugene O’Neill. But, she also reveals in American Humor the understanding that guides all of her writings: “Americans had emerged as a theatrical race.”11 That is, the American character was in itself a performative one.

For example, in American Humor, the “stroller” (for her, the itinerant performer, whether actor, lecturer, evangelist, or orator) garners a chapter all to himself. He is, in fact, a fourth type, in league with her Yankee, backwoodsman, and minstrel. But more importantly, he encompasses all three: in her examples, each of them appeared onstage, and all of them were roles played (or masks donned, in Rourke’s parlance) by nascent

Americans. The stroller, then, becomes for Rourke both a archetype and an emblem of the American character. He bridges and he unites: in her imagining, Americans become, above all, a nation of “self-delineators.”12 We construct an identity and we perform it.

In her selection of subject matter, Rourke suggests that the widespread presumption that culture equals literature is a fallacy. First, Rourke defines American culture in theatrical rather than literary terms. Performance looms large in her thinking, but drama is scarcely seen. In addition to the emphasis on performance in American

Humor, Rourke wrote in depth about Lotta Crabtree, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and P.T.

Barnum. One hundred pages of her three-hundred page Roots of American Culture was devoted to a chapter on the “Rise of Theatricals.” Later in her career, Rourke would turn to the visual arts, writing full-length studies of John James Audubon and Charles Sheeler.

She edited the Federal Arts Project’s Index of American Design, and wrote several smaller studies on Shaker art. The bulk of her original work (as opposed to her prolific book reviews) is, in fact, on subjects other than the literary. Her consistent, if tacit, approach suggests an insistence on a comprehension of American culture that encompasses not merely the recognized and celebrated tradition of poetry, novels, and the essay, but also, most tellingly, popular performance, folklore, folk art, and celebrities.

Yet the two books and one extended article that have been written on Rourke primarily focus on her literary criticism in the last portion of American Humor. These studies, though informative, gloss over her work on art and the theatre.13 Scholars of performance, too, have improbably neglected her, for her work on performance, which makes a persuasive case for the centrality of theatre and performance studies in the formation of American character and culture, has gone largely unremarked.

1.3 Introducing Seldes

If Constance Rourke made popular (and populist) performance essential to the

construction of the American character, then Gilbert Seldes made the same kinds of performance essential to the definition of American modernism.

Seldes began his life as a cosmopolitan cultural critic in New York. As an editor

at The Dial, he was responsible for the first American publication of works by James

Joyce and T.S. Eliot. But by the 1920s, Seldes began to chafe against the too-neat critical divide between art and entertainment. He also rejected the oft-repeated suggestion that

American art paled in comparison to European. In his The Seven Lively Arts (1924),

Seldes writes:

What Europeans feel about American art is exactly the opposite of what they feel about American life. Our life is energetic, varied, constantly changing; our art is imitative, anaemic (exceptions in both cases being assumed). The explanation is that few Europeans see our lively arts, which are almost secret to us, like the mysteries of a cult. Here the energy of America does not break out and finds artistic expression for itself. Here a wholly unrealistic, imaginative presentation of the way we think and feel is accomplished. No single artist has yet been great enough to do the whole thing—but together the minor artists of America have created the American art. And if we could for a moment stop wanting our artistic expression to be necessarily in the great arts—it will be that in time—we should gain infinitely.14

Seldes would go further, arguing that the “lighting strike” of modernism in America was

intimately linked with its modernity. It found its fruition in native arts, like musicals, movies, and comic strips. It grew out of a particular mix of immigrant and native cultures and an embrace of (and experimentation with) new technologies. Seldes was in line with

Gertrude Stein’s suggestion that America had been modern longer than the rest of the

world. It is American modernity, she suggested—that is, popular entertainments, media,

and technology—that drives its modernism. Seldes’ writing, especially his Seven Lively 10

Arts and Mainland, vociferously expounds this position, calling for American artists and critics to leave behind their genteel, Puritan confinements and to embrace what is most

American about America: its clamoring, pleasurable, urban entertainments. This was not a simple battle, however. Later, in a revised introduction to Seven Lively Arts, Seldes suggested that, early in his career, he had insufficiently named “the enemy.” The real liability for American culture was not Mencken’s “booboisie,” but instead those self- important arbitrators of the arts who had “long emancipated themselves from the gentility of the 1890s, who were acclaiming Eugene O’Neill and Strawinsky, but had not yet recognized the existence of the popular arts…. I had taken the position that these entertainments not only merited, but needed, critical examination.”15 That is, critics like

H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan had spilled much ink in juxtaposing the banality of bourgeois tastes against iconoclastic avant-garde ones. But they had failed, Seldes suggests, to separate these bourgeois tastes from vital popular ones. In doing so, they had failed to recognize the real modern art he saw reflected in Al Jolson, Fannie Brice,

Keystone Kops films, or Krazy Kat. Instead, they had favored a particularly literary avant-garde.

Seldes would search for similar examples of misguided highbrow criticism in the nineteenth century. Although Seldes’ The Stammering Century (1928), which examined reformist zeal in the nineteenth century, could be taken as yet another work attempting to uncover Brooks’ useable past, it is less a work of historical exegesis and more a piece of sustained criticism of highbrow condescension. The tacit point of the book is that the

American character is at core a reformist character given to a grotesque zaniness. And, though a real disgust with Puritanical censure underlies his point of view (springing from 11

his deep resentment of Prohibition and its infringement of liberty), Seldes takes pains in

the introduction to Stammering to remind his readers that his work is one built on affection for American eccentricity. Again, he stands against Mencken’s critical cynicism, writing that Stammering could have been “a history of what Mr. Mencken calls the booboisie.”

It is, however, nothing of the kind. In private conversation—and possibly also in print—Mr. Mencken maintains that no quackery has ever been given up by the American people until they have had a worse quackery to take its place. He holds, explicitly and implicitly, that the difference between intelligent and unintelligent people is the gullability of the boobs, their irremediable tendency to believe anything sufficiently absurd. The distinction is one of the reasons for Mencken’s distrust of democracy and the history of manias and crazes in American annihilates this distinction entirely.16

Seldes argues the obverse: mesmerism, Christian Science, and various strains of

utopianism were all, he says, first taken up by the educated classes. In the end,

Stammering is one sustained argument against Mencken’s disdain for the masses. Seldes writes, “The anti-influence of—or the reaction against—Mencken is explicit from the first page of this book” because “[h]e was the energy in the whole decade of debunking.”17 And debunking, with its concomitant shunning of American popular

culture, was something for which Seldes would not stand.

Seldes’ bibliography is tangible evidence of his refusal to delimit his work (or his

audience) by the judgmental standards of a Brooks or a Mencken. As a critic, Seldes

moved with ease from the highbrow Dial to the middlebrow Saturday Evening Post to the

lowbrow New York Graphic, and to various points between, including: Bookman, New

York Evening Journal, Vanity Fair, the Saturday Review, and Esquire. Later, as Seldes

embraced the new media in entertainment, he would write for TV Guide at the same time

as he was writing for the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social

Science. In fact, Seldes was a pioneer in radio and television, eventually becoming the first dean of the Annenberg School of Communication. He produced, wrote, and performed before the microphone and before the camera for CBS, where he served as the first Director of Television. Rather than dismiss radio and television, Seldes spent the second half of his career striving to make them popular, entertaining, and useful.

So Seldes’ support for popular art, his deep appreciation of the modernist revolution in

the arts, his embrace of new media, and his defense of American culture (which

sometimes bordered on an exceptionalist standpoint) form the touchstones of his prolific critical work. Throughout, as Michael Kammen indicates, “was Seldes’ abiding interest

in theatrical production of all kinds. That fascination was perhaps the most enduring of

his entire career.”18 Not only did Seldes work for nearly a decade as the theatre critic for

the Dial, but, along with the countless radio scripts he created, he also wrote several

plays. More important were his two translation/adaptations: of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata

(1930) and of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1939). Lysistrata, which

hewed closely to Aristophanes’ original, was a minor success, running a respectable 252

performances. Swingin’ The Dream, Seldes’ retitled reinvention of Shakespeare’s

comedy, was more daring in its fusion of high and low culture. Set in a jazzed up New

Orleans, Swingin’ starred Louis Armstrong as Bottom, featured Benny Goodman’s

orchestra, and sported designs from Walt Disney and Norman Bel Geddes. It was warmly

anticipated, but foundered with just 13 performances. Seldes was eternally frustrated by

the failure. However, both productions were key examples of Seldes’ desire to discover and to create modern American art in the theatre. If Rourke turned to the theatre to find the American character, Seldes turned to the theatre to find American art.

1.4 On the popular, for the people

Like other public intellectuals of their time, Seldes and Rourke were consciously writing for a wide audience. Their works are short on footnotes and long on vibrant prose. Both serialized their work in popular magazines—Rourke in Woman’s Home

Companion and Seldes in Vanity Fair. Both dabbled in fiction—Rourke in short stories published by the Dial, Seldes in a series of full-length detective novels published pseudonymously, as “Foster Johns”. But their failure to conform to more contemporary assumptions about the critic (the most significant of which is that serious criticism is academic criticism) has posed a problem for their posthumous reputations.

For example, Rourke published Davy Crockett in 1934 as a book for young adults. The lively book has usually been read as a ripsnorter that conflates the myths about Crockett with the facts of his life. Yet, the research on which the book was built was extensive, painstaking, and groundbreaking. As Rourke wrote to her friend

Constance Lindsay Skinner: “the Crockett legends…are my own particular discovery. I don’t mind that no one has fastened that medal on me as yet; sometime I hope it will be pinned, for they are important; they were thoroughly buried, and none but myself has found them…. Fact is nobody quite knows enough about this early lore to recognize the fact that I discovered them.”19 In a later letter Rourke expands further:

I have been able to clarify the known facts about Crockett very considerably and to set them against their background. Most of the biographies hitherto have been much scrambled; one wouldn’t know from them anything distinctive about the life from which Crockett emerged. Also in the field of fact I have got to the bottom, I believe, of his political career. Able historians have made ridiculous statements about him, or have neglected him altogether…. My sources were the Crockett almanacs, of which there were many issues for twenty years; I have discovered fifty….they have never been considered before as part of the Crockett saga.20

Rourke goes on to discuss the controversy surrounding Crockett’s presumed illiteracy

and the authorship of his autobiography: “It wasn’t an impossible job to find out just

what Davy’s powers as a writer were, if one wanted to take the time to scour the

collections. Of course he wrote the Narrative!” Thus, in writing a book for teenagers,

Rourke undertook deep, creative, and pathbreaking research. It is as if the book is in disguise, a landmark reimagining of an American legend masquerading as a children’s book. Or perhaps it is something more audacious: a serious study of a popular American figure purposefully written for a popular audience.

Crockett is the most graphic example of the disjuncture between Rourke’s innovative work as a cultural historian (which, given her interest in popular culture, always involved unearthing material not commonly held, even today, by scholarly archives) and the critical perception of it. But even American Humor, widely recognized as her most important work, was sometimes dismissed. In his review of the book in the scholarly journal American Literature, Walter Blair “mistrusted” her work because “like many who write for both scholarly and general readers, the author provokes the former by failing to document thoroughly.”21 This review provoked Rourke, not in the habit of

public squabbles, to “break a friendly lance” with Blair in the next issue of the journal.

She wrote tersely, “My bibliographical note of ten pages, which Mr. Blair does not 15

mention, contains a full outline of my materials.”22 The criticism of the academic for the

popular historian is one that would ever plague Rourke, to her frustration. But it did not

motivate her to stop writing for a popular audience. This purposeful choice has continued

(erroneously, I will argue) to cloud her work and her reputation.

Seldes, unlike Rourke, never styled himself a popular historian. Although two of his most important books—Stammering Century and Mainland—were works of history,

he was, always, a critic and a journalist who wrote on the broader meaning of

contemporary performances and events. He was proudly free from the constraints of the

archive, as his 1957 foreword to the reissue of Seven Lively Arts, makes clear: “Except

for a folio of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat and a few clippings, I don’t recall having with me any notes, data, or documentation. The whole book was written, in a sense, from memory.”23 Despite his freewheeling style, Seldes, unlike Rourke, did not rile academics

by writing in a popular vein. Rather, Seldes’ problem was the quicksilver buoyancy of his

writing. In a 1929 Bookman article entitled “The Young Critics of the Nineteen-

Twenties,” Gorham B. Munson noted that Seldes’ work is “light and agile, and the

serious-minded therefore put him down as superficial.”24 Of course, Seldes himself fans the flames of such criticism when he writes, as he did in 1964, “I am nothing of a scholar.

I haven’t ever, consciously, written to suggest that I knew much of an intricate subject when I hadn’t studied it. But I have been content to be superficial.”25 But Seldes was a

serious writer, one whose affectations of popular superficiality have (erroneously, I will

argue) marked him as exactly that.

Ultimately, then, writing style, voice, and target audience are a key part of both

Seldes’ and Rourke’s overall project to find ways to act as public intellectuals. But also, 16

their modes of writing attempt to do justice to their topics and aims. They sought a

consistency and unity between the popular subject matter and a popular, accessible voice

and style. In this, they attempted to define and to reach a readership that did not separate

into high and low, even though various intellectuals had accepted (and propounded) the

necessity, as they saw it, of such a divide. And, of course, by the second half of the

twentieth century, much of the critical and historical study of American culture and

society had become academic—university professors writing exclusively for university

professors. The voice, style, and audience had become academic, even if the subject

matter remained popular.

Not surprisingly, then, Rourke and Seldes became marginal figures for most

academics. But their particular underuse in the fields of theatre and performance studies,

fields which they celebrated as central to the construction of an American identity, is more vexing. Is it possible that there is a blind spot in theatre studies, grown out of the art theatre movement’s self-conscious attempts to wrench theatre from the grips of entertainment?

At the height of the art theatre movement, critic Sheldon Cheney founded Theatre

Arts magazine in his campaign for the movement. In its November 1916 inaugural issue,

Cheney contributed an article entitled “The Art Societies and Theatre Art” which crystallizes a philosophy that still lurks within the books we write about the theatre. In the article, Cheney called upon “the sister-arts,” pleading with them to “lend a helping hand to the drama, the one of them all that fell farthest and began its recovery last.”26 Like a fallen woman, the American theatre had been seduced and corrupted by its dalliance with mammon. It needed, Cheney suggested, to be elevated, to be pulled up out of the tawdry 17

mire of entertainment and replaced in the pantheon of the “sister-arts” of painting,

sculpture, and music. It needed to recover, to quit, cold turkey, the bespangled temptations of the popular stage. It needed, in short, to become more like the European

avant-garde: hard, austere, and purposeful. And it needed to be adversarial.

Of course, Seldes would chortle at the reformist habit of mind implicit in

Cheney’s plea for purification a la European culture. But both Seldes and Rourke would strenuously oppose the notion that the theatre, the most popular of the arts, should be reformed, elevated, or otherwise protected. It is a democracy’s democratic art, and as such it is (and should remain) steadfastly of and for the people. Certainly, as Seldes’ theatre criticism demonstrates, its aesthetic standards could be improved. And Rourke’s studies expose the theatre’s exploitative ambivalence on matters of gender and race that mirror the culture’s own. But the American theatre, both argue, shows the nation more clearly than any other art what it is and what it wishes to be. Pressing it into the mold of

European modernism would void that real significance.

So, as thinkers, Seldes and Rourke work at the interstices of a variety of

schizophrenic divides that are still regularly invoked as organizing principles in teaching

and writing about twentieth-century American performance. For example: popular

theatre, with all its lowbrow vulgarity, sits on one side of a divide and art theatre, with all

its highbrow aspirations, claims the other. There are cognate binaries that contribute to

this truism: mass v. folk, film vs. theatre, or modernism vs. modernity. Seldes and Rourke

pushed against such simplified and straw-man adversarial argument to look at the

theatre’s broader function within American culture.

Yet the discipline of theatre studies has retained a tendency to configure

American theatre history along these same binaries. From Cheney forward, it seems, our

discipline (a discipline formed, in many ways, out of his campaign) has been so focused

on why it is legitimate (that is, like the other arts) that it has forgotten why it matters. We

have lost sight of what makes our field of study essential to understanding American

culture, broadly construed. In accepting (and, through generations of scholarly writing,

perpetuating) the criticism of theatre’s essentially popular nature that the art theatre

movement propounded, we have ceded the theatre’s real importance in the articulation of

the American character to fields like literature and sociology.

This is not to say that we have not, in the last twenty years or so, seen the error of

our ways. The field of American theatre studies has produced important work that takes a

more synthetic approach (for example, Bruce McConachie’s Theatre for Working Class

Audiences, W.T. Lhanom’s Jump Jim Crow, Charlotte Canning’s The Most American

Thing in America). All of these works, it should be noted, have moved us away from the

“scriptocentric” focus on drama that Dwight Conquergood (presaged by Constance

Rourke herself) has critiqued. Some of the credit for this awakening can be laid at the

doorstep of performance studies and its embrace of thinkers like Erving Goffman and

Victor Turner. Of course, performance studies has not been a cure-all; its scholars still,

too often, maintain a neat oppositions between high and low (or, sometimes, colonial and

indigenous) that are as inappropriate cattegories as the entertainment/art divide that

theatre studies habituates. Yet, performance studies, with its focus on the present

moment, political action, and anthropological intervention, does insist that performance

matters. And it is true, as Jill Dolan has written, that “The new language of performativity

propelled performance to new visibility in academic discourse.”27

But we would not have needed that propulsion, we would not have wallowed in scriptocentrism, we would not, in fact, have thought we required a book like Diana

Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire (2003) to remind us that the study of performance requires both, if, in the first decades of the twentieth century, we had listened more closely to Constance Rourke and Gilbert Seldes. Working historically, from both the archive and the repertoire, Rourke made the case for the absolute centrality of performance, onstage and off, to the American character. Working critically, Seldes established that same performance as the foundation of an American modernism that rivaled, if not superseded, the European. America was modern before the rest of the world, Gertrude Stein declared. And Rourke and Seldes fused theatre and performance studies before the rest of us had pulled them apart.

1.5 Conclusion

Constance Rourke and Gilbert Seldes believed they were engaged in a vital task for our nation. This task was a fusion of the historian’s act of reconstruction and the critic’s act of advocacy. So Rourke wrote:

traditional store from which consciously or unconsciously they have drawn. The difficult task of discovering and diffusing the materials of the American tradition—many of them still buried—belongs for the most part to criticism; the artist will steep himself in the gathered light.28

The light gathered by Rourke and Seldes illuminated an America that was, as Ann

Douglas has told us, “hybrid” and “polyglot.” What fused this hybrid nation, what gave it a common language was, according to Rourke and Seldes, nothing more nor less than performance.29 Ultimately, both argued, explicitly and implicitly, that it was through a

long tradition of popular American performance that we could most clearly discern the

outlines of an American character and modern culture. It is that story that I am about to

tell.

Endnotes

1 Quoted in Michael Kammen, The Lively Arts, 126. From the manuscript to Seldes’ autobiography, As in My Time, in possession of Marian Seldes.

The publishing industry had begun its tremendous expansion in the late 1800s. A steep reduction in postage rates for magazines in 1879 coupled with the introduction of the halftone press and color rotogravure in the 1880s made it possible to produce and distribute captivating magazines for something close to 10 cents per issue. Moreover, a boom in effective advertising, which moved away from columnar type to full-page, image-based spreads, brought significant profit to the magazine publishing industry for the first time. By the first decades of the twentieth century, a fertile field of publications were available for young writers, and more were on the way. See Douglas, The Smart Magazines 11-17.

2 Kammen, The Lively Arts 7.

3 Brinkley 639-40.

4 Rourke, American Humor xx. Seldes, Stammering Century xii.

5 Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 480.

6 Ibid, 569.

7 Rourke is referring here to George C. Odell’s Annals of the New York Stage. The first of his sweeping fifteen volume chronicle appeared in 1927. Volumes five through seven were published in 1931; they happened to be glowingly reviewed for their “magnitude” by Arthur Hobson Quinn in the November 1931 issue of American Literature on pages 335-339. Rourke’s American Humor was reviewed by Walter Blair in the same issue on pages 340-343, so harshly that she (quite uncharacteristically) wrote in response in the following issue (March 1932, pp 207-210). Perhaps some of her animus might be ascribed to this yoked encounter.

8 Constance Rourke to Esther Porter. 14 December 1932. Vassar autograph file.

9 Rourke met Brooks in 1920, via a letter of introduction from a former student. Brooks gave Rourke work reviewing for The Freeman, and later suggested to her a study of American popular figures that became Trumpets of Jubilee. See Joan Shelley Rubin, Constance Rourke 27.

10 Quoted in Rubin, Constance Rourke 59. The statement comes from Brooks’ Days of the Phoenix (1957).

11 Rourke, American Humor, 92.

Endnotes

12 Ibid., 91.

13 Joan Shelley Rubin’s sensitive Constance Rourke and American Culture (1980) and Samuel I. Bellman’s Constance M. Rourke (1981) were published within a year of each other. They were predated by Stanley Hyman’s incisive chapter on Rourke in his Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism (1948). Since 1981, no major works on Rourke have appeared. Rubin’s book, which grew out of her 1974 dissertation, is the last work to be constructed with access to Rourke’s personal papers in her family’s possession. Margaret Marshall, longtime friend of Rourke’s and literary editor at The Nation, had intended in the late 1940s to write a biography of Rourke. Her papers, in Yale’s Beinecke Library, include elliptical notes made from Rourke’s papers.

The story of Rourke’s literary estate is complex. When Rourke died unexpectedly in 1941 she was unmarried and childless. Her papers reverted to the possession of her mother, Constance Davis Rourke. When her mother died four years later, there was no immediate family, as Rourke’s father had died when she was a child and she had no siblings. All family possessions, including Rourke’s library, manuscripts, notes, letters, journals, and her vast collection of American art and Shaker furniture, were inherited by extended relatives who had tended to Rourke’s mother in her last years (to the disappointment of family friend and neighbor Linda Butler, who was administratrix of Rourke’s estate; see Butler’s files in the Marshall collection). Marshall gained access to this material and mentioned in letters that she was trying to persuade the family to donate or sell Rourke’s papers to Vassar College, Rourke’s alma mater. This hope never materialized; but neither did Marshall’s planned book on Rourke. By the early 1950s, after many false starts, Marshall formally abandoned the project. In 1951, Nelle Curry, another family friend, wrote a short biographical sketch of Rourke (unpublished), for which she won the University of Michigan’s Avery Hopwood writing award in 1951. This sketch is also in the Marshall collection at Yale. Appended to it are Linda Butler’s notes of dispute on several points.

Rourke’s papers remain in Carbondale, IL, under the control of the Shoaff family.

However, letters from Rourke can be found scattered throughout the collections of her correspondents and friends, in archives at Vassar, the New York Public Library, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Kentucky, and Stanford University. Rourke’s correspondence was wide, and it is in these sprinklings that we get a picture of her broad interests.

14 Seldes, Seven Lively, 301.

15 Ibid., 6, 8.

16 Seldes, Stammering xiv.

17 Ibid, xxiii.

18 Kammen, The Lively Arts, 161.

Endnotes

19 Constance Rourke to Constance Lindsay Skinner, 3 August 1933. Constance Lindsay Skinner Collection, New York Public Library.

20 Constance Rourke to Constance Lindsay Skinner, 1 February 1934. Constance Lindsay Skinner Collection, New York Public Library.

21 Walter Blair, “American Humor,” 343.

22 Rourke, Letter to the Editor, 210.

23 Seldes, Seven Lively Arts, 4.

24 Gorham Munson, “Van Wyck Brooks: His Sphere and His Encroachments” 370.

25 Quoted in Kammen, Lively Arts 127. From the manuscript to Seldes’ autobiography, in Marian Seldes’ possession.

26 Sheldon Cheney, “The Art Societies and Theatre Art,” 30.

27 Jill Dolan, “The Polemics and Potential of Theatre Studies and Performance,” 510.

28 Rourke, American Humor, 235-6.

29 Two studies which predate my own are worth acknowledging here. Jeffrey H. Richards has explored the metaphorical usage of theatrical terminology in the construction of American identity in his Theater Enough: American Culture and the Metaphor of the World Stage, 1607- 1789 (1991). The book turns up interesting anecdotes and usages from Cotton Mather, George Washington, and James Madison. However, as he writes in his introduction, his book is a “historically limited, primarily literary issue” focused on “the appearance of theatrical figures of speech in early American writing” (xiv). In his Portable Theatre: American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Stage (1999), Alan R. Ackerman, Jr., studies “the relationship between theater and literature in nineteenth-century America,” arguing that the theatre was “a pervasive form of popular culture and an important forum for public life” (xii). So Richards is looking at theatre as metaphor and Ackerman is primarily interested in how the theatre influenced literature. Both studies are solid, useful work. But neither attempt the radical argumentation of Rourke or Seldes—that is, that American culture is theatrical culture.

CHAPTER 2

APPROACHING AMERICAN MODERNISM

2.1 The literary fallacy

Christine Stansell’s American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (2000) is a well-received work of intellectual history, written by a professor of history at Princeton University. Soundly researched and vivaciously written,

Stansell’s study makes the all-too-familiar argument that it was New York’s bohemians who, in the early decades of the twentieth century, forced a dawdling and recalcitrant

America to become modern. That is, to become modern like Europe was modern, and, in doing so, to throw over an oppressively genteel Victorianism.

The tides of modernity, which had washed over Paris in the 1870s and subsequently over Vienna, Prague, Munich, Berlin, and London, had finally reached American shores…. This book is about the men and women who ushered in that day of transformation in America, the people who embraced the “modern” and the “new”—big, blowsy words of the movement. The old world was finished, they believed—the world of Victorian America, with its stodgy bourgeois art, its sexual prudery and smothering patriarchal families, its crass moneymaking and deadly class exploitation. The new world, the germ of a truly modern America, would be created by those willing to repudiate the cumbersome past and experiment with form, not just in painting and literature, but also in politics and love, friendship and sexual passion.1

Stansell’s quick summation embraces a cornucopia of presuppositions about the

American character at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is prudish,

commercialist, tasteless, repressed, inhibited. It embodies every quality symptomatic of

an American Puritanism which crossed the Atlantic with the Mayflower and continued to

color every element of the national culture. Too, Stansell celebrates the free spirits and

iconoclasts who rejected this stereotyped American character: among others, Emma

Goldman, Max Eastman, Eugene O’Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Beyond the presumption of an uptight American culture and its “lag” behind the

experimentation of the European, is another far more insidious presumption. She writes:

New York in the 1910s was a writer’s city, literature the paramount art form. Downtown, books and magazines were the chief forms of entertainment and obsession, not painting or music, and bohemian conversation sooner or later settled on what the talkers were reading that week.2

Certainly, the publishing industry contributed to the major changes in American society

in the early decades of the twentieth century. As the population of American cities

increased and the literacy rate increased, the market for reading material increased as

well. Two hundred magazines were in circulation in 1860, eighteen hundred by the end of

the nineteenth century, and six thousand by 1905. A variety of journals that voiced the concerns of their emerging cultural communities—The Masses (1911), Poetry (1912),

The Smart Set (1913), The Little Review (1914), The New Republic (1914), Seven Arts

(1916), and the new Dial (1917)—were all part of this ferment. In 1918, 2,500 daily

newspapers were in circulation across the country. These copious possibilities for seeing

one’s work in print, aided by the passage of international copyright protection in 1891,

provided a significant outlet for both critical and artistic writing.3 Certainly the invention

of the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1923 and the Literary Guild in 1926 assisted in this

growth, as did the continuing work of publishers like Alfred A. Knopf and Harcourt

Brace.

Yet, Stansell’s assertion that “literature was the paramount art form…not painting

or music,” is inherently problematic. Even if we restrict our view of modern American

culture to New York alone, as Ann Douglas quite successfully did in Terrible Honesty:

Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (1995), the notion that literature was more intrinsic to the developing culture of the iconoclastic bohemians than music or art (or theatre, one adds, noting that it did not even make Stansell’s exclusionary list) seems extreme. With jazz and ragtime in the air, with Alfred Steiglitz’s 291 galleries and the 1913 Armory

Show and moving pictures before their eyes, with skyscrapers stretching to the clouds,

and (if we imagine they abjured the Ziegfeld Follies, which they did not) the Greenwich

Village Follies for diversion, the centrality of literature to modern American culture

seems a risky presumption to make.

Risky, indeed, but not unfounded. In making her case, Stansell is following the

rhetoric produced by a panoply of writers, bohemian and other, who were concerned with

the state of American culture as it entered the Great War. So Van Wyck Brooks

(psycho)analyzed Henry James and Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken celebrated Theodore

Dreiser, Edmund Wilson promoted F. Scott Fitzgerald. Critics are writers, and these

critics turned to writers to criticize, diagnose, and make their case for the successes and

failures of the national culture. A presupposed equation is endemic, as the title to a recent

anthology crystallizes: American Literature, American Culture (1999). Literature equals

culture. 28

Yet even Bernard De Voto, himself a major literary figure in the period, raised

major doubts in 1944 about the yoking of literature and culture. He wrote, with brutal

clarity, of The Literary Fallacy, which presumes:

…that a culture may be understood and judged solely by means of its literature, that literature embodies truly and completely both the values and the content of a culture, that literature is the highest expression of a culture, that literature is the measure of life, and finally that life is subordinate to literature.4

Yet, the fallacy (if it is a fallacy) persists, all the way through the work of contemporary historians and literary scholars. Even Ann Douglas, in her gold-standard Terrible

Honesty, is under its sway: though she uses the theatre as a potent metaphor to frame her study, her focus is squarely on the literary. Her study is based on the lives of 120 New

Yorkers, but the vast majority are writers: in a list of 58 significant residents of New

York between 1920 and 1930, she names nine musicians, five stage performers, one

sports star, three playwrights, and forty writers. The tilt is clear.

The focus on literature as culture has much to do with the accessibility of

evidence for the construction of a history. Edmund Wilson, himself an eminent literary

critic from the period and editor for Vanity Fair and the New Republic, mused on the

problem of evanescence. In a eulogy written for one of his most influential professors,

Wilson noted that “the work of a great teacher who is not…a great writer is almost as

likely to be irrecoverable as the work of a great actor.”5 That which is performed—

music, dance, theatre, and it seems, pedagogy—evaporates. But writing? Writing exists

as composed. It explains itself. Of course literature has become the foundation on which

we build our cultural studies. Writing remains.

Moreover, literary figures and critics alike in this period were particularly keen on

telling their readers why their work mattered. Their voices are saucy and strident, and it is

easy to take them at their word. In the foreword to Shores of Light, a collection of his own critical writing of the 1920s and 1930s, Wilson begged forgiveness for the tone:

The self-assertive approach of the twenties, which seems rather brash today, I have not always been able to eliminate. We had grown up on the journalism of Shaw and Chesterton, Belloc and Max Beerbohm, and later, in the United States, of the Mencken and Nathan of the Smart Set and the Woollcott and Broun of the World. All these writers were everlastingly saying “I”: the exploitation of personality had become an integral part of criticism.6

The newer, younger critical voices between 1918 and 1941—Van Wyck Brooks, H.L.

Mencken, Randolph Bourne, Waldo Frank, Bernard De Voto, George Jean Nathan, Lewis

Mumford, Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Dorothy Parker, Carl Van Vechten— were marked by a pugilistic tone and by a penchant for ad hominem rhetoric. And they

were, to a man (minus Parker), focused on literature as the source of the potential (and

failure) of an American culture. Why? Perhaps, as Douglas suggests:

In no one of the traditional elite arts save literature did modern American discover it had an edge; most of its exciting classical music, sculpture, painting, and architecture was created during and after the Great War, not before it. But the way that classic American literature suddenly and surprisingly took the lead was nonetheless emblematic of what happened with American culture more broadly speaking.7

Douglas implies that American literature surged ahead of the rest of the arts, to compete

with and to surpass European literature. This is, possibly, the case. However, her

observation is loaded with the key assumptions that shape the way we write about

American modernism: concern with cultural lag, with what American art is, and with an

elite/popular divide that separates art from entertainment. For Douglas as for Stansell, it’s

important to note that theatre doesn’t even make the list. 30

To be sure, culture and literature had been bound together long before the loquacious modern American critics were on the scene. In 1868, John De Forest published “The Great American Novel” in The Nation, in which he called for a novel that would articulate a particular American region while at the same time also expressing the broader American character. That he turned to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1850-1851) as the best example so far would later mark him for the modern critics as hopeless anachronistic. Yet, from the earliest days of nationhood (and before), the call went out for an American culture unique in its lineaments, grown separate from its Anglo-Saxon heritage. And from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “American Scholar” (1837) to Nathaniel

Hawthorne’s prefaces (1850s) to Walt Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas” (1871), the call often found its voice in the quest for American literature, praised by Whitman himself as the “highest of art’s forms, namely, the literary form.”8 The quest was perennial, and perennially ended in disappointment:

Few countries have felt this chronic pressure to justify themselves; few have worried as anxiously about the legitimacy, coherence, and achievement of their nation’s literary heritage as America has, insofar as that literature was supposed to express something true and profound about the United States.9

Surely, anxiety over the status of American culture, especially in comparison to the seeming monolith of European culture, also informed the aggressive tone of the work of the critics in the period.

The same set of questions led to the flowering of literary history as a field of study in the United States. In the wake of De Forest’s call for an American novel came canon construction through the teaching of American literature. Moses Coit Tyler produced A History of American Literature, 1607-1765 (1878) and The Literary History

of the American Revolution, 1763-1785 (1897). Between 1888 and 1890, Edmund

Stedman produced an eleven volume anthology, entitled the Library of American

Literature (1888-1890). A wildly comprehensive collection, it included, amongst the work of Hawthorne and Stowe, a section on Negro spirituals. Brander Matthews, whose secondary school text Introduction to the Study of American Literature (1896) sold over

250,000 copies, lobbied for the study of American literature at Columbia University.

Eventually, he developed the first course in American literature and in American literary history for the institution; later, he would also pioneer theatre studies, of a decidedly modernist sort, at Columbia as well. Barrett Wendell’s Literary History of America

(1900) was popular, remaining in print until the 1940s, though its focus on the British roots of American culture marked it as outmoded. Even children’s magazines were part of the upswing: St. Nicholas ran a series of American author biographies in the 1890s.

During World War I, the Cambridge History of American Literature (1917-1921), edited by John Erskine, William Peterfield Trent, and Carl Van Doren, definitively established an American literary canon.10

These anthologies and chronological studies were quickly followed by a trio of

more critical studies: Vernon L. Parrington’s Main Currents In American Thought (1927-

1930), Van Wyck Brooks’ Flowering of New England (1936), and Robert E. Spiller’s

Literary History of the United States (1948). With the intervention of New Criticism,

which made critical study of a writer’s biography passé if not forbidden, Spiller’s work remained, by default, the standard reference work on literary history until the Columbia

History of American Literature (1988).

In Main Currents in American Thought, Parrington studied not only fiction and poetry, but also sermons, political tracts, legal arguments, and philosophical works as part of the body of written material created by the culture. Later, in 1950, Lionel Trilling would, in his The Liberal Imagination, take Parrington to task for his over-reliance on a realistic model, the conspicuous absence of private women like Emily Dickison and Anne

Bradstreet as well as African American figures like Frederick Douglass, and for a sort of bourgeois presumption of a developmental model in American literature. And though

Main Currents has been called, by John Higham, a “noble ruin on the landscape of our scholarship,” it was taking stock of the foment of literary work at the turn of the twentieth century. In doing so, it not only embraces and promulgates the myth of literature as the anchor of culture, it also articulates two other key assumptions many of the critics held in common: that (1) American commerce has thwarted (and continues to thwart) any burgeoning culture, and (2) American culture would benefit from a tonic “realism,” or from a more “realistic” approach. Throughout, the overall tone of Parrington’s books remained one of pessimistic disappointment with and frustration in a poorly defined

“mass,” “mob,” “bourgeoisie,” or, as H.L. Mencken would put it, “boobery,” that stood in the way of the creation of great American art. These concerns are synthesized in the third volume of Parrington’s study:

It is the man of letters—poets and essayists and novelists and dramatists, the eager young intellectuals of a drab generation—who embody the mind of present-day America; not the professional custodian of official views…. It is to them therefore that one must turn to discover the intellectual currents of later America—to their aspirations as well as to their criticisms…. Amidst all the turmoil and vague subconscious tendencies, certain ideas slowly clarified: first, that the earlier democratic aspirations had somehow failed…. second, that even in the supposed heyday of our democracy, we had never achieved a democracy, but rather a careless individualism that left society at the mercy of a rapacious middle class; 33

third, that we must take our bearings afresh and set forth on a different path to the goal. As these convictions slowly rose into consciousness, a quick suspicion of our earlier philosophies arose to trouble us. With the growing realism of the times came a belief that our French romantic theories were mainly at fault and we must somehow go back to the rationalistic eighteenth century and start once more to create a democratic philosophy…. Utopias no longer seem so near at hand as they once did…. Our jauntiness is gone…. and in the spirit of sober realism we are setting about the serious business of thinking.11

Thus, the “man of letters” confronting the failures of democracy, especially those perpetuated by “a rapacious middle class,” responded with a call for sober, if pessimistic, realism.

2.2 Realism and its discontents

Parrington’s notion that literature could, and should, be a transformative force in society was not a new one. In the half century before the publication of his book, the idea had been propounded by nineteenth-century writers, like Harriet Beecher Stowe or Ralph

Waldo Emerson. William Dean Howells may have been preceded by Hamlin Garland or

Henry James, but his call, in the June 1887 issue of Harper’s Monthly, for a realistic

American literature was the one that resounded:

Let fiction cease to lie about life; let it portray men and women as they are, actuated by the motives and the passions in the measure we all know; let it leave off painting dolls and working them by springs and wires…let it not put on fine literary airs; let it speak the dialect, the language, that most Americans know—the language of unaffected people everywhere.12

The campaign for literary realism continued into the early decades of the twentieth

century. Ann Douglas calls this modern truth-telling urge “terrible honesty” and ably chronicles its appearance in letters, novels, and articles of the period. Raymond Chandler, she notes, suggested that “all writers…have a terrible honesty;” the shattering of rose-

colored-glasses became a fetish amongst them.13 So it should come as no surprise that the

third volume of Parrington’s Main Currents is subtitled “The Beginnings of Critical

Realism in America, 1860-1920.” Writers of fiction and critics alike expected that their

work would expose the reality of American life. In this desire, they were following on the

generation of work by muckrakers and Progressive reformers, but with a crucial

difference. Muckrakers and Progressives saw the failures of American culture, but

believed wholeheartedly that they had the power to change things. In the hands of the

next generation of critics, these reformist instincts would become mere pessimistic

debunking. This dissatisfaction has its roots in two basic critiques of middle class culture:

(1) the corruption of capitalism, also uncovered by the muckrakers and (2) the stilted and precious qualities of “genteel culture,” first named by George Santayana in 1911.

In 1906, with urban life expanding exponentially and American business booming, President Theodore Roosevelt coined the term “muckrakers” to corral a loosely

organized cohort of authors devoted to investigative journalism focused on corporate

corruption. Like the Man with the Muckrake in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress

(1678), the muckrakers kept their eyes on the ground, turning over the filth that others

merely ignored. In magazines like McClure’s, Cosmopolitan, and Collier’s Weekly, the

muckrakers exposed the dark side of the up-by-your-bootstraps myth made famous by

Horatio Alger’s Luck and Pluck (1869). In Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure

Class (1899), Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives (1890), Lincoln Steffens’ The Shame

of the Cities (1904), Ida Tarbell’s History of the Standard Oil Company (1904), and

Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), unsafe working and living conditions, as well as the

greed of corporate bosses, were exposed in graphic prose. Immense disappointment in the abuses of unfettered capitalism, as well as dismay at the inability to rectify the problems, suffused the work of the muckrakers with profound, if passionate, dissatisfaction.

Similar sentiments were reflected in the fiction of hard-nosed realists embraced by the young critics, like Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) or

Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900). However, the muckrakers as a group came to be viewed as overly earnest writers mired in Progressive Era crusading. From the vantage point of Prohibition, which took effect in 1920 and was repealed in 1933, they began to look like a prissy cousin of the Anti-Saloon League. The truth-tellers of the 1920s thus rapidly conflated the Progressive Era with the Gilded Age. And criticism of what came to be called “gentility” in both became the standard critical approach.

On August 25, 1911, Spanish-born George Santayana delivered a speech, entitled

“The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” before the Philosophical Union at the

University of California at Berkeley. In it, Santayana suggested that American culture was built upon a precarious but pervasive divide: democracy fostered an energetic, sometimes barbarian, culture that the traditional culture wanted to reform and to control.

“The genteel tradition” was Santayana’s term for the fallout from the collision of the two.

More importantly, Santayana thought in terms of dichotomies, and shaped his understanding of American culture to conform. He wrote, “The American Will inhabits the sky-scraper; the American Intellect inhabits the colonial mansion. The one is the sphere of the American man; the other, at least predominantly, of the American woman.14

The one is all aggressive enterprise; the other is all genteel tradition.”15 So, in his formulation of a genteel approach to culture, Santayana aligns the will against the 36

intellect, the urban against the rural, the male against the female, and change against habit. His assessment would become the basis for, and the rallying cry of, the criticism of a generation of thinkers focused on the failures of American culture.

It would be a mistake, however, to understand Santayana’s genteel tradition as taking a position on another dangerous binary: that of high art versus low art. The genteel tradition, as Santayana set it forth, impeded the potential of a true American culture and art, of any variety. As Robert Dawidoff states, “The genteel makes the mistake of trying to civilize what is best left alone.”16 This part of Santayana’s viewpoint was often conflated with a broader critique, especially by H.L. Mencken, of the more vulgar (if vibrant) aspects of American culture in general. So Santayana, when he called for

Americans to be “frankly human,” it seems, was misheard. In the nineteenth century, critical concern had been focused on the barbarianism of the nation, so unsuited for the finer things of culture. But Santayana, proposes the obverse of this criticism. He articulated a disgust instead with the mannerisms of literary politeness and with a culture that attempts to civilize its urges by papering them over with a delicate, but shallow, veneer.

This is not to say that the tone of Santayana’s lecture is anything but condescending. He seemed to support both high and low in American culture, yet the tone of the piece suggests that the whole project might be a foolish impossibility.

Parrington described the approach, as employed by critics following Santayana, as a disgust with three main elements of the “bourgeois ideals and habitat, its tyrannical herd-

mind, its poverty-stricken materialism.”17 The stakes, in this critical approach, were

extraordinary. As Gordon Hutner notes in the introduction to American Literature,

American Culture:

Not only was the face of America changing amid the new immigration and not only was the new consumer economy being put into place, but Western culture was undergoing its greatest challenge in the Great War that raged across Europe. The criticism of literature became one of the primary ways that citizens could gauge the vitality of a national spirit and thus preserve a sense of the nation’s destiny.18

The work of the new generation of critics was profoundly shaped by two titans in the

field: Van Wyck Brooks and H.L. Mencken. Brooks and Mencken anchored two distinct

approaches to the criticism of American culture. However, their take on the period was in concert and their enemies, for the most part were held in common. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

noted:

Van Wyck Brooks had instructed the post-war generation that the American past had been dominated and destroyed by Puritanism. Mencken, while disagreeing with Brooks on many things, agreed that the past was sterile and the Puritan was the enemy, adding only that the excesses of Puritanism had been compounded by the follies of democracy.19

In attempting to act as a tonic for a foundering American culture, Brooks and Mencken

together inaugurated a period of intensely pessimistic criticism of American culture and

society. They drew a cohort of like-minded critics about them, and in great measure they

framed the basic terms of the conversation on American culture.

2.3 Passionate pessimism: Van Wyck Brooks and the “Beloved Community”

Van Wyck Brooks came to general attention with the publication of his Wine of the Puritans in 1908. Written a year after his graduation from Harvard, Wine of the

Puritans inaugurated Brooks’ career-long critique of the puritanical qualities in the

American character. According to Brooks, the sterility of American life thwarted any artistic attempt on its soil. America’s Coming of Age (1915) furthered this line of argumentation.

One section of America’s Coming of Age is headed “Highbrow and Lowbrow.” In it, Brooks begins by asserting that the judgmental university ascetic has enforced a divide between theory and practice that poisons the waters of creativity. Brooks traces this divide to the Puritans, for whom things were either godly or secular, with no gradations in between: all, he says, is “piety and advertisement.”20 This separation is what Brooks means when he refers to “highbrow” and “lowbrow,” terminology which he has been credited with placing into critical usage. He writes:

These two attitudes of life have been phrased once and for all in our vernacular as ‘Highbrow’ and ‘Lowbrow.’ I have proposed these terms to a Russian, an Englishman, and a German, asking each in turn whether in his country there was anything to correspond with the conceptions as implied in them. In each case they have been returned to me as quite American, authentically our very own, and, I should add, highly suggestive.

What side of American life is not touched by this antithesis? What explanation of American life is more central or more illuminating? In everything one finds this frank acceptance of twin values which are not expected to have anything in common: on the one hand a quite unclouded, quite unhypocritical assumption of transcendent theory (‘high ideals’); on the other a simultaneous acceptance of catchpenny realities. Between university ethics and business ethics, between American culture and American humor, between Good Government and Tammany, between academic pedantry and pavement slang, there is no community, no genial middle ground.

According to Brooks, this divide first appeared in the eighteenth century, and is personified on the puritan’s side by Jonathan Edwards (and his “desiccated culture) and on the pragmatist’s side by Benjamin Franklin (and his “stark utility”). But the divide had been enforced, Brooks argued, by the university, a place “where ideals are cherished precisely because they are ineffectual, because they are ineptly and mournfully beautiful.” This ivory tower impotency, writes Brooks, “is surely the last and the most impenetrable stronghold of Puritanism, refined to the last degree of intangibility, which persists in making the world a world inevitably sordid, basely practical, and whose very definition of the ideal consequently is that which has no connection with the world!”

Brooks, then, proposed a binary that Santayana had not, four years before, addressed. Yet Brooks uses the terms “highbrow” and “lowbrow” in a manner quite distinct from their more colloquial connotations of “high class” and “low class” or “art” and “entertainment.” Through his usage, Brooks proposed a cultural divide anchored in the bifurcation of theory from practice, or between academic remove and business pragmatism. He did not argue for the need to bring the lowbrow up to the level of the highbrow, or for the need to bring the highbrow down to the level of the lowbrow.

Instead, he sought “a genial middle ground” which can acknowledge, for example, that

“slang has quite as much in store for so-called culture as culture has for slang.” The middle ground he seeks is one of “self-fulfillment” for writers: an independent track between either a career spent in an attempt to satisfy the high-minded dictates of literature professors or a career dedicated to the low-minded dictates of one’s own wallet.

In his 1918 Dial essay “On Creating a Useable Past,” Brooks’ extended his

argumentation in America’s Coming of Age to diagnose the causes of what he saw as a

pale American literary canon: “we have had,” he writes, “no cumulative culture.”21 That is, though the American character was predominantly, in Brooks’ opinion, Anglo-Saxon, the nation’s status as hybrid and polyglot left it with no common artistic lineage. So,

Brooks said, writers as diverse as Irving, Longfellow, Cooper, Bryant, and Harte “have all come to a bad end, artistically speaking” because they lacked a clear American tradition from which to draw. Because “the past that survives in the common mind of the present is a past without living value” and because we are currently existing in “a travesty of a civilization,” writers are powerless to create an American literature that is both culturally relevant and successfully executed. And so, Brooks proposed, because “we need another past so badly, is it inconceivable that we might discover one, that we might even invent one?”

Of what exactly that invented or discovered past might consist goes unaddressed by Brooks. However, the call was a magnetic one for a collection of critics, dubbed “the beloved community” by Randolph Bourne, who gathered around Brooks at a short-lived but influential magazine, The Seven Arts.

The Seven Arts was founded by James Oppenheim in November 1916 in order help “that lost soul among the nations, America” become “regenerated by art.” The magazine, which published work by Sherwood Anderson, Robert Frost, Paul Rosenfeld,

John Reed, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, John Dewey, Carl Sandburg, Max

Eastman, Eugene O’Neill, and H.L. Mencken, combined politics with culture as it sought for a radicalized democracy through an American artistic rebirth. It ceased publication in 41

October 1917, with the evaporation of financial backing that followed on its opposition to

American entry into World War I, noting in its final editorial that it had attempted the job

of “interpreting and expressing that latent America, that potential America which we

believed lay hidden under our commercial-industrial national organization.”22 Seven Arts was absorbed into the new Dial.

In its brief lifetime, Seven Arts was a haven for the writing and thinking of a set of critics whose work dovetailed with Brooks’ own. Waldo Frank was an associate editor with Brooks, Lewis Mumford, and Randolph Bourne. Sometimes dubbed the “Young

Americans,” Brooks, Frank, Mumford, and Bourne, by virtue of their collective desire for a communitarian society that places emphasis on self-realization through democratic participation, are usually viewed as sentimental nationalists, given to utopian fantasy.

Later, their ideas were dismissed as socialist silliness. As Bourne declared in 1916, “All our idealisms must be those of future social goals in which all can participate, the good life of personality lived in the environment of the Beloved Community.”23

According to Casey Nelson Blake, whose Beloved Community (1990) is a key

study of the quartet, their writings, which offered a critique of capitalism, derived from

the transcendentialism of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. Their political ideas were

anchored in a kind of civic republicanism, itself a critique (especially via the work of

John Dewey) of industrial capitalism. In both cases, however, the Young Americans

turned this critique away from the public sphere to emphasize the key necessity of personal fulfillment in small communities. Their work was moral, aesthetic, and personal.

Yet each of the four brought varied concerns and approaches to the table. Certainly, as they matured, their interests diverged and altered. Mumford would turn to an examination 42

of urbanity, science, and design. Frank would broaden his interest to the entire American

hemisphere. Brooks would, following a paralyzing nervous breakdown, emerge more optimistic about American culture. Only Bourne, who died of influenza in 1918, would

remain, forever, a “Young American.” But between 1916 and 1925, the “beloved

community” would hold in common a pessimistic vision of an American culture unable,

by virtue of its crass commercialism, to nurture their vision of artistic achievement.

For example, Waldo Frank believed that “in a dying world, creation is

revolution.” In Our America (1919), Frank criticized the moral shallowness in modern

American life brought on by capitalism. He proposed a “countermythology, a revision of

the cultural history of the United States in direct opposition to the official folklore of

Plymouth Rock, the frontier, and rugged individualism.”24 In a country focused on

pioneering and conquest, Frank suggested, the spirit and culture were shunted aside. For

this reason, he idealized the minority cultures of Native Americans, Hispanics, African-

Americans, and culturally-bound Jews. He was drawn to what can be called mysticism in

the writings of Bourne, Brooks, and Alfred Steiglitz. The Re-Discovery of America

(1927-1928) was Frank’s sequel, in which he explored how mystical or intuitive values

might be restored in the United States through psychoanalysis, relativistic physics, and

modernist art in general.

Lewis Mumford established himself, in the 1920s, as a critic of literature and

architecture, an urban theorist, and a utopian. In addition to his work for Seven Arts,

Mumford wrote for magazines as various as the Dial, Freeman, and New Republic. His

The Golden Day: A Study in American Experience and Culture (1926) was his most

important early work. Here Mumford picked up on the familiar strain of failed 43

materialism, suggesting that America had the opportunity to start civilization anew, yet it

succumbed to a capitalist anti-utopia, out of harmony with nature. The work of Emerson,

Thoreau, Melville, and Hawthorne which synthesized nature and culture promised a

“golden day” in nineteenth century New England. However, the broader pioneering

instinct that subjugated the land to commerce laid waste to the delicate promise of such

thinkers.

Amongst the Young Americans, Randolph Bourne stands out, for unlike the

others he did not reject institutions like family, region, religion outright as oppressively

genteel. Rather, he complained that they had not been successful enough in providing a

strong alternative to the desires of a capitalist civilization. But Bourne also stands out for

his embrace of what he dubbed “transnationalism.” In a July 1916 article for Atlantic

entitled “Trans-national America,” Bourne wrote: “America is coming to be, not a

nationality, but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of

many threads of all sizes and colors.”25 His embrace of America’s polyglot, hybrid, or

mongrel (as Ann Douglas would call it) intermixture of cultures stood him in direct opposition to Brooks (and to Mencken). Stanley Hyman noted in his seminal Armed

Vision that by 1947 Brooks had become “a narrow and embittered old gentleman with a white mustache.” He could also say this:

[Brooks] has emerged as increasingly xenophobic, his early resentment of immigrants, particularly “young East Siders,” with their “alien wants” bewildering the “hereditary Americans,” hardening in later books to a kind of Yankee racism, so that New England declined when “alien races pressed on the native race,” and in the last books “race” and “racial” are scattered as nuts in fudge.26

Certainly, an undercurrent of xenophobia can be detected in Brooks’ critiques; in fact, for him, New England was synonymous with a vision of an American aristocracy. And

Bourne stood in opposition to this general approach. Yet, despite his faith in transnationalism, Bourne did not fully embrace the possibilities of a non-literary popular culture as crucially American. For Bourne, the movies were as damaging as genteel parlor songs. Though he “should like to believe passionately in the movies,” they were nothing but “lowbrow snobbery.”

In a thousand ways it is as tyrannical and arrogant as the other culture of universities and millionaires and museums. I don’t know which ought to be more offensive to a true democrat—this or the cheapness of the current life that so sadly lacks any raciness or characteristic savor. It looks as if we should have to resist the stale culture of the masses as we resist the stale culture of the aristocrat. It is very easy to be lenient and pseudo-human, and call it democracy.27

Lacking its own unique culture or tradition, the only thing America could offer to all comers, Bourne bemoaned, were its popular arts: newspapers, movies, Tin Pan Alley songs, and vaudeville. These, Bourne argued, “tend to create hordes of men and women without a spiritual country, cultural outlaws, without taste, without standards but those of the mob.”28 So, though his critique of American culture seems initially more all- embracing than that of Brooks or Frank, it ultimately withdrew in disdain from the popular or folk arts and aligned itself with the standard of literature as high art.

Ultimately, then, the “beloved community” that surrounded Brooks was united in its quest for a uniquely American culture that was to be found primarily in literature.

Though this quest had at its core a nationalistic fervor, it was, for these figures, continually marked by disappointment, a doomed enterprise beset by the stultifying influence of pragmatic capitalism and incurious pioneering. They wanted to find, or to

nurture, American literary art; at the same time, they were profoundly pessimistic about

the chance of it ever existing at all. So they sought for a useable past, but what they

uncovered was always, to them lacking: Howells failed for being too genteel, Henry

James for being too uncertain, Twain for being too comic, Stowe for being too feminine.

And on and on. In this perspective of fatalistic idealism, Brooks and his “beloved community” established the dominant tenor of criticism in the period.

2.4 Debunking: H.L. Mencken’s American

If the members of the “beloved community” were pessimistic in their search for an American culture, H.L. Mencken, while no less convinced of the fruitlessness of the search, took more pleasure in the cataloguing of its failures. Mencken’s flippant voice permeated American critical discourse in the early decades of the twentieth century through his “Free Lance” column for the Baltimore Sun, as well as through two influential magazines. For the Smart Set, Mencken was book critic from 1908 to 1923; he would assume co-editorship with theatre critic George Jean Nathan for the last nine of

those years. On their severing of connection with Smart Set, the pair founded American

Mercury in 1924. Mencken’s own preferences were for European (and Germanic) literature and philosophy: Shaw, Nietzsche, Galsworthy, Gorki, Hauptmann, Wells, and

Synge. He ascribed American second-rateness to its Puritanism, and also to its stupidity.

Edmund Wilson sized Mencken up:

The human race, according to Mencken, is composed of “gentlemen” and “boobs”; the gentlemen, by virtue of their superiority, have made themselves masters of the good things of the world; and the peasants, who, by virtue of their ineptitude, remain fettered to the plough and the bench, are embittered by envy of “their betters.” It is this envy which supplies all the issues of politics in a 46

democracy: it is the desire on the part of the peasants to rob the superior classes of rewards unattainable by themselves or to restrain them from the enjoyment of activities that they are unable to understand. The superior classes possess a monopoly not merely of property and pleasure, but of the higher virtues as well: they embody all the learning, all the taste, all the fortitude, all the intelligence, all the sense of personal honor and all the sense of social obligation. A government by the people, therefore—that is to say, a government by persons characterized by the opposites of those qualities—is sure to be a scandal and a farce. The United States is such a farce and scandal.29

So Mencken’s philosophy is, Wilson succinctly says, “a sort of obverse of Leaves of

Grass.”30 If Santayana had his will vs. the intellect or the raw vs. the genteel, and if

Brooks had his highbrow vs. lowbrow, then Mencken brought another set of polarities to

the table: gentlemen vs. boobs, superior vs. inferior, and European vs. American. This divide would animate the entirety of his body of work, and would shape the tone of the critics who followed, or aped, his style.

As Brooks and his circle were motivated by a desire to discover a renaissance in

American culture, Mencken too produced work that praised some aspects of the nation.

In 1919, one year after the publication of Brooks’ “On Creating a Useable Past,” H.L.

Mencken’s magnum opus, The American Language, went into its first printing. The book

is a linguistic Declaration of Independence, going to great pains, and 770 pages, in order

to demonstrate the ways in which “American” speech and writing differs from “English.”

Mencken collates, quantifies, and creates taxonomies. He shows how American linguistic

innovation springs from necessity, as in the adoption of Native American words for

indigenous animals and plants (raccoon, squash), from our polyglot heritage

(kindergarten, shebang, smithereens, yen), and, most importantly, from a creative,

aggressive approach to neologisms (to fizzle out, cloudburst, spreadeagle, to dodge the

issue). 47

In many respects, the book is motivated by what seems like a faith (or at least a

delight) in the vibrant vulgarity intrinsic to American culture that Santayana suggested

needed to remain unhampered by genteel reformism. Mencken, certainly, saw his work

that way:

Let it be admitted that American is not infrequently vulgar; the Americans, too, are vulgar (Bayard Taylor called them Anglo-Saxons relapsed into semi- barbarism); American itself is unutterably vulgar. But vulgarity, after all, means no more than a yielding to natural impulses in the face of conventional inhibitions, and that yielding to natural impulses is at the heart of all healthy language-making.31

Overall, Mencken says, American has “tang.” Its vibrance springs from the American character itself which, Mencken writes, encompasses “a general impatience of rule and restraint, a democratic enmity to all authority, an extravagant and often grotesque humor, an extraordinary capacity for metaphor.”32

In The American Language, Mencken seems to have found a wellspring of the usable past that Brooks claimed did not yet exist. It is America’s very pragmatism,

Mencken seems to say, its willingness to get dirty to find a solution, that formed its

special character—a character which was played out in its democratic linguistic

innovations. Yet Mencken, as a critic and a man, was actually profoundly undemocratic.

He made a career out of tweaking the “booboisie.” In fact, if Brooks’ dichotomy was

highbrow vs. lowbrow, then Mencken’s was patrician vs. boob. And he was decidedly the

champion of the former. Indeed, in his own writings, he perfected his voice of the

patriarch.

When Mencken founded American Mercury with George Jean Nathan in 1924,

the magazine was established with his credo in mind: “to depict America for the more

enlightened sort of Americans—realistically, with good humor and wholly without cant.

It is read wherever a civilized minority survives the assaults of the general herd of

yawpers and come-ons. Its aim is to entertain the minority—and give it consolation.”33 In fact, according to Edmund Chielens, over a third of the essays published in the magazine between 1924 and 1929 lampooned some aspect of the American scene, including pedagogy, chiropractic, Christian Science, Prohibition, puritanism, and the sad credulity of rural America. The topic had been a ripe one for Mencken’s flogging, for in 1920 he had published The American Credo (again with George Jean Nathan, his partner in crime), a joshing romp listing 869 points that the American boob takes as truth: “every circus clown’s heart is breaking for one reason or another,” for example, or “the farmer is an honest man and greatly imposed upon,” or “the real President of the United States is

J.P. Morgan.” He propounded a similar line of critique in his Prejudices, a six volume collection, published between 1919 and 1927, of his pieces from his Free Lance column in the Baltimore Sun and in the Smart Set.

Indeed, unlike Brooks, who bemoaned the failures of American literature,

Mencken took permanent and perverse pleasure in mocking its shortcomings, calling the act “debunking.” Brooks wanted to diagnose and prescribe; Mencken wanted only to grouse and eviscerate. Mencken’s foolish American was as straw a man as Santayana’s genteel reformer was a straw woman, of course, but that did not stop him stirring up a delightful storm about him for several decades. And, in fact, Mencken’s American boob

became one of the greatest caricatures of all time, impressing itself, as Edmund Wilson noted, “on the imagination of our general public in a way that has not been equaled by any other recent literary creation.”34

2.5 Civilization in the United States

So we see two basic camps of critical approach. In one corner was Brooks and the other “young Americans” who cried out for a useable past that would ground a new production of truly American literary art. In the other stood Mencken, a force unto himself, who excoriated the foibles of the American democratic bourgeoisie as he yearned for an aristocratic barrier to protect the production of a truly American literary art. In harmony with Mencken were Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, and the other wits of the sharp-tongued Algonquin “round table.” Both groupings followed the basic outline of Santayana’s critique of the genteel tradition in America.

All of these criticisms were folded together in one touchstone repository in 1922, when Harold Stearns edited an ambitious volume on Civilization in the United States.

The nucleus of the book was brought together by common assumptions. As long ago as the autumn of last year [1921] Mr. Van Wyck Brooks and I discussed the possibility of several of us, who were engaged in much the same kind of critical examination of our civilization, coming together to exchange ideas, to clarify our individual fields, and to discover wherein they coincided, overlapped, or diverged…. We wished to speak the truth about American civilization as we saw it, in order to do our share in making a real civilization possible.35

The book consists of thirty chapters, each of which took up a discrete topic of concern.

Conrad Aiken wrote about Poetry, John Macy about Journalism, Walter Pach about Art,

Elsie Clews Parsons about Sex, Geroid Tanquary Robinson about Racial Minorities, J.E.

Spingarn about Scholarship and Criticism, Deems Taylor about Music, and Harold 50

Stearns himself about America’s Intellectual Life. Civilization in the United States also

provided a repository of work by Van Wyck Brooks on Literary Life, H.L. Mencken on

Politics, Lewis Mumford on The City, and George Jean Nathan on the Theatre. These

four shared three basic areas of concern, articulated by Stearns in his introductory matter

to the book:

That in almost every branch of American life there is a sharp dichotomy between preaching and practice…. That whatever else American civilization is, it is not Anglo-Saxon, and that we shall never achieve any genuine nationalistic self-consciousness as long as we allow certain financial and social minorities to persuade us that we are still an English Colony. Until we begin seriously to appraise and warmly to cherish the heterogeneous elements which make up our life, and to see the common element running through all of them, we shall make not even a step towards true unity; we shall remain, in Roosevelt’s class-conscious and bitter but illuminating phrase, a polyglot boarding house…. That the most moving and pathetic fact in the social life of America to-day is emotional and aesthetic starvation…. We have no heritages or traditions to which to cling except those that have already withered in our hands and turned to dust.36

Elements from Brooks’ highbrow/lowbrow divide infuse the first area of concern, and his call for a useable past informs the last. The desire to shrug off Anglo-Saxon culture resonates with Mencken’s American Language as well as with Bourne’s call for

transnationlism. The premise seems, in short, sound, even open minded. Yet the essays

themselves are overwhelmingly cynical and jeering in tone. So Mumford declares that

“there was neither fellowship nor social stability nor security in the scramble of the

inchoate commercial city, it remained for a particular institution to devote itself to the

gospel of the ‘glad hand.’”37 Or Mencken declares that the average politician’s

“intelligence is that of a country newspaper editor, or evangelical divine…. To demand

sense of such a man, or wide and accurate information, or a delicate feeling for the public

and private properties, is to strain his parts beyond endurance.”38 It’s possible to open the 51

book up and within a page find examples of just such self-satisfied crabbing. Santayana is certainly a spectral presence in Stearns’ criticism of “the extraordinary feminization of

American social life, and…the intellectual anaemia or torpor that seems to accompany it.”39 To Santayana’s critique, Stearns adds that “the grandiose maintenance of our

women” coupled with the fact that “the things of the mind and the spirit have been given

over, in America, into the almost exclusive custody of women” have made advance in the

intellectual arena virtually impossible.40 Brooks’ declaration that “what immediately strikes one, as one surveys the history of our literature during the last half century, is the singular impotence of its creative spirit”41 crowns the book’s pessimistic approach. It is young, and it is angry. Most importantly, in his chapter on “Literary Life,” Brooks ties himself to Mencken in a call for a clearer divide between artists and the general population:

Considered with reference to its higher manifestations, life itself has been thus far, in modern America, a failure. Of this the failure of our literature is merely emblematic. Mr. Mencken, who shares this belief, urges that the only hope of a change for the better lies in the development of a native aristocracy that will stand between the writer and the public, supporting him, appreciating him, forming as it were a cordon sanitaire between the individual and the mob. That no change can come without the development of an aristocracy of some sort, some nucleus of the more gifted, energetic and determined, one can hardly doubt. But how can one expect the emergence of an aristocracy outside of the creative class, and devoted to its welfare, unless and until the creative class itself reveals the sort of pride that can alone attract its ministrations?42

The desire for a barrier, and for a protected creative class, was made tangible in a wave of

expatriation: the Atlantic ocean itself separated the artist from the suffocating influences

of American culture itself. If Brooks rejected the genteel mob and Mencken rejected the

gauche one, the expatriates rejected the American mob entirely. After putting together

Civilization in the United States, Harold Stearns moved to Paris: to handicap horses.43

2.6 Expatriation

The list of American literary expatriates is a long one. Ezra Pound left for London in 1907, but he ended up in Paris between 1920-1924. In a Paris anchored by Gertrude

Stein, writers like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald (as well as European artists like James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Constantin Brancusi, Tristan Tzara, and

Andre Breton) found themselves rubbing shoulders with over 32,000 Americans living permanently in Paris by 1924.44 In fact, many of the artists and critics that were deeply

interested in writing about America, including Sherwood Anderson, Djuna Barnes, Kay

Boyle, Malcolm Cowley, Hart Crane, E.E. Cummings, Matthew Josephson, Gorham

Munson, and William Carlos Williams, spent a significant amount of time in Paris.

The departures were so numerous that, in 1924, they led Paul Rosenfeld, who also

participated in Seven Arts, to write Port of New York: Our America in 1924. The

metaphor of transatlantic travel served as the organizing principle. The book raises a

series of questions, which would thread throughout the concerns of critics as a whole in

the period. What should be the relationship of American artists to their own culture?

Should artists ship out for Paris or remain docked in their home port? Where can

American artists find inspiration? What is American art? But the cultural axis the book

describes, stretched between Paris and New York, belies other key binaries in the critical discourse of the period. Central among these is an antagonism between European culture and an American culture whose presumed center was New York City.45 53

Of course, not everyone went to Paris. T.S. Eliot, a more total expatriate than most, headed to London, where he eventually took British citizenship. While there, he published a magazine entitled Criterion between October 1922 and 1939. The magazine, which concurrently published the Waste Land with the American Dial in 1922, took up an eclectic variety of topics. It was pugnacious, saucy, and international. It was also suffused with Eliot’s approach to culture in general, which he eventually articulated in

Notes Toward a Definition of Culture in 1948. In that book, he wrote, “…it is an essential condition of the preservation of the quality of the culture of the minority, that it should continue to be a minority culture.”46 The protection of the artistic minority from the

(presumably artless) majority resonates with Mencken’s call for a protective American aristocracy. In fact, in the third volume of his Prejudices (1922), Mencken argued that the reason why so many writers were expatriating was precisely because of the absence of such an aristocracy. There is a strain of modernism, characterized by the work of T.S.

Eliot and Ezra Pound, that was in general suspicious of democracy, progress, and the contemporary world. It was also skeptical of the efficacy (or possibility) of finding a

Brooksean useable past. This approach clearly resonates with Mencken’s own. Yet,

Mencken always remained resolutely on the American side of the Atlantic, the better vantage point from which to harass the bozarts. Between Eliot and Mencken, however, a debunking style of criticism was coined: Wilson noted that they “between them rule the students of the Eastern university: when the college magazines do not sound like

Mencken’s Mercury, they sound like Eliot’s Criterion.”

The general tenor of the time was, as Parrington noted in the outline to his final volume of Main Currents in American Thought, one of “disgust.” He intended to take his book through 1920 and died before he could do so. In that section, he planned a portion on “purveyors of current disgusts,” with a focus on Mencken. Within this he saw three main elements of critical concern: “the attack on democracy,” “the attack on industrialism,” and “the attack on the middle class.” The choice of the words “disgust” and “attack” are crucial; certainly, the three strands of democracy, capitalism, and the bourgeoisie are those that anchor the writings of Brooks, Mencken, and the expatriates.

That is, for most of these artists and critics, modernism and democracy (and its popular culture), were in necessary conflict. Modernism, by definition and by design, was basically anti-democratic in its oppositional values, and as it appealed to an exclusive, minority elite.

2.7 Rourke and Seldes against the grain

Into this climate of disappointment and debunking stepped Gilbert Seldes and

Constance Rourke. Not surprisingly, what Brooks, Mencken, and the expatriates had to say influenced them both. However, both of their careers can be understood as a series of sustained arguments against key elements of these perspectives. For example, Brooks’ critique of American literature shadowed Rourke’s search for its roots in folk culture.

And Mencken’s critique of the American character shadowed Seldes’ search for its enactment in popular culture. Mencken’s pervasiveness would draw Seldes’ exasperation and ire. For her part, Rourke would find in Mencken, and in his “booboisie”, nothing but

a contemporary example of the tall-talking, swaggering, perpetually over-the-top

American. She was amused, she said, by the “noise” he made.

Seldes and Rourke, then, disputed the mainstream of young critics between 1915

and 1941 in five major ways. These five distinctions form the bedrock of their critical

ideas on American culture and identity.

1. They examined the nonliterary. In contradistinction to the habitual search for

Americanness in literature, Rourke and Seldes explicitly searched for nonliterary

roots to American culture. They examined folk traditions, performance, visual art,

media, and popular writing (like jokebooks and almanacs) with the same intensity

and respect that most critics brought to the works of Eugene O’Neill or F. Scott

Fitzgerald. The choice to do so was a rebellious one.

2. They emphasized the nonrealistic. Rourke was explicit on this count. She frankly

refused to use the word “realistic” because she found it so mismanaged. But more

importantly, the American character she detailed in her major works was

“fantastic,” “mythical,” “bombastic,” “larger than life,” and “theatrical.” In a

climate of criticism that campaigned for “terrible honesty” and realistic novels,

Rourke sought out an alternative vision of American art. And she tracked the

roots of that vision back to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. For

his part, Seldes argued that American popular entertainment was at its best when

it was “fantastic”, “demoniac,” “lunatic,” and “grotesque.” He praised the surreal

turns in comic strips and in comic monologues as particularly American. He

sought for “distortion, caricature, and transposition” in the theatre. Like Rourke,

his understanding of American art ran in contradistinction to the prevailing

critical attitudes.

3. They reconsidered the heritage of the American nineteenth century. Both saw it as

a period more radical than Brooks, Mencken, or Santayana might have thought. It

was also more fertile than the trio imagined. It certainly provided the useable past

Brooks desired; however, that past, Rourke would show, was lodged in the non-

literary creations of the period. Moreover, in examining popular entertainments of

the period, Rourke named decidedly un-genteel traditions as the dominant

heritage in American culture, upsetting Santayana’s presumptions. For his part,

Seldes found in the nineteenth century penchant for fads and cults a touchstone

example of the “herd mind” of Mencken’s own “better classes.” Seldes would use

this discovery to unsettle the very foundations of modernist elitism.

4. They were optimistic. In their own work, both Seldes and Rourke bring a more

positive perspective to American culture than the dark vision of the “beloved

community” or the expatriates. Both looked to the “smiling aspects of life” that

the then-passe William Dean Howells had named as “the more American.” That

is, Rourke and Seldes saw comedy and burlesque as more indicative of the

American character than realism. They were not Pollyannaish in their optimism,

as I hope to show, but they were weary of the negativism of Brooks and Mencken.

In this, they maintained a more friendly view of “the people” than most critics.

Seldes was overt in this attitude in his articles for the Saturday Evening Post. And

Rourke embodied this spirit in her life lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan. 57

5. They were frankly untroubled by working in the commercial marketplace. Though

Brooks and his “beloved community” saw the commercial aspects of American

culture as inherently stultifying, Rourke and Seldes took work for pay without

apology. Both wrote some of their best work under contract to popular magazines,

and both would eventually write about the positive influences of capitalism and

patronage. Seldes, in particular, would use his platform in the popular press (and

later, in the popular media) to encourage the mass audience to stand up against the

demagoguery of critics like Mencken in particular. Rourke would argue that there

was no point in writing about popular culture if the work created would not be

consumed by a popular audience.

In short, according to Seldes and Rourke, American culture should be praised for precisely those qualities for which the majority of critics denigrated it. Their project was audacious, and it remains, in large part, unfinished.

Endnotes

1 Christine Stansell, American Moderns 1-2.

2 Ibid. 147.

3 Tom Quirk, “The Historical Context,” The Portable American Realism Reader. New York: Penguin Books, 1997, xvii. Edwin Emery, The Press and America, 345; John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, The Magazine in America, 1741-1990, 68.

4 Bernard De Voto, The Literary Fallacy 43.

5 Edmund Wilson, Shores of Light, 10.

6 Ibid. x.

7 Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 347.

8 Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” in American Literature, American Culture edited by Gordon Hutner, 127.

9 Gordon Hutner, American Literature, American Culture, 1.

10 Claudia Stokes, Writers in Retrospect, 18.

11 Vernon I. Parrington, Main Currents, vol. 3, xxvii-xxviii.

12 William Dean Howells, Selected Literary Criticism, 49-50.

13 Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 33.

14 On this topic, see Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Knopf, 1977.

15 George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” 201.

16 Robert Dawidoff, The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage, xxii.

17 Parrington xv.

18 Hutner, American Literature, American Culture, 184.

19 Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “Foreword,” to Gilbert Seldes, Stammering Century, x.

Endnotes

20 Brooks, America’s Coming of Age, excerpted in Van Wyck Brooks: The Early Years, 79-96. All subsequent citations from this edition.

21 Brooks, “On Creating a Useable Past,” excerpted in Van Wyck Brooks: The Early Years, 219- 226. All subsequent citations from this edition.

22 Quoted in Casey Blake, “Waldo Frank,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. Jay, 125.

23 Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America,” (1916) in War and the Intellectuals, 113.

24 Casey Blake, “Waldo Frank,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. Jay, 125.

25 Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America,” (1916) in War and the Intellectuals, 113.

26 Stanley Hyman, The Armed Vision 106-107.

27 Randolph Bourne, “The Heart of the People,” New Republic 3 (3 July 1915): 233. Reprinted in Bourne, War and the Intellectuals, 171-174.

28 Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America,” (1916) in War and the Intellectuals, 113.

29 Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light, 293.

30 Ibid. 294.

31 H.L. Mencken, The American Language, 27.

32 Ibid., 75, 140.

33 Edward E. Chielens, ed. American Literary Magazines, 8.

34 Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light, 297.

35 Stearns, Civilization in the United States iii-iv.

36 Ibid. vi-vii.

37 Lewis Mumford, “The City,” Civilization in the United States, ed. Stearns, 5.

38 H.L. Mencken, “Politics,” Civilization in the United States, ed. Stearns, 23.

39 Harold Stearns, “The Intellectual Life,” Civilization in the United States, ed. Stearns, 135.

Endnotes

40 Harold Stearns, “The Intellectual Life,” Civilization in the United States, ed. Stearns, 139, 141. It’s worth noting here that Santayana himself reviewed the book for the Dial in June 1922. On the whole, he was displeased with the tone of the book. The authors, some of which had been his students, were “morally underfed, and they are disaffected” (4).

41 Van Wyck Brooks, “The Literary Life,” Civilization in the United States, ed. Stearns, 179.

42 Ibid., 193-194.

43 Selzer, Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village 10.

44 Ibid. 9.

45 See Wanda Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-1935 for an excellent analysis both of Rosenfeld’s book and of the broader expatriation movement, especially as it pertains to American painting and sculpture in the period.

46 Quoted in John Storey, Inventing Popular Culture 26.

CHAPTER 3

CONSTANCE ROURKE ON AMERICAN PERFORMANCE, 1885-1931

3.1. Introduction

Constance Rourke was born on November 14, 1885, in Cleveland, Ohio. Her

father, Henry B. Rourke, is lost to history, mentioned only in oblique passing as a

“designer of hardware specialties” who died of tuberculosis by the time Rourke was three

years old.1 Rourke and her mother, Constance Davis Rourke, were left alone, thrown onto their own devices; for the rest of her life, they would remain a close-knit, self- sufficient pair. Their relationship was intense and guarded, sometime secretive. It was certainly the most significant one of Rourke’s life, which was spent, with the exception of research trips often taken in her mother’s company, entirely in her mother’s home in

Grand Rapids, Michigan. As a family friend noted, “Everyone who begins talking about

C. soon shifts to her mother.”2 And indeed, her mother permeates her story and her work.

Yet, we must guard against simple psychologizing. When Margaret Marshall,

former book editor for The Nation, was granted access to Rourke’s papers in the late

1940s, she noted the vast correspondence between mother and daughter. They exchanged

letters almost daily when Rourke was in college and when she was on trips to New York

on business. 62

Illustration 3.1

Portrait of Constance Mayfield Rourke, 1934

From the collection of Linda Butler Reprinted in Joan Shelley Rubin, Constance Rourke and American Culture

I saw a lot of letters. Most of them were rather perfunctory—the sort of letters you’d write to a person if you were writing them every day—but I did find some interesting statements of plans and ambitions. And of course they gave me a picture of the relationship. It was an extraordinary one, as you know. It was amazingly free and based on mutual confidence and love that is so seldom present between mother and daughter that one naturally hesitates to believe in it without the strongest evidence. They were deeply dependent on each other, but it’s much too simple to say that either dominated the other.3

This may or may not be the case. The truth, as it is so often, is probably somewhere in the

middle. But the fact is that Rourke’s mother was an indelible presence in her life.

Certainly, the relationship was one that fostered economic, social, and intellectual

independence for two women ahead of their time.

By all accounts, Elizabeth Davis Rourke (1852-1944) was a fiercely independent

woman. At a young age, she left her Illinois home in rejection of the evangelism of her

revivalist preacher father. She became a progressive teacher, training with Susan Blow, a

pioneer in kindergarten education, in St. Louis. She married and divorced a man known

only as “Linton.” She studied painting and sculpture, and may have met her second

husband, Henry Rourke, after seeing a display of his work in a store window and tracking

him down. She took up metalwork herself. She lived an itinerant life with Henry, staying

in hotels and boardinghouses as they peddled their wares. She changed her first name, for

reasons uncertain, to Constance. And she cut off all relations with immediate and

extended family, never turning to them for assistance when Henry died in 1887 or 1888.4

It’s unclear how the mother and daughter came to Grand Rapids, Michigan in the winter of 1888. But they were alone, and in need of money. To begin with, Mrs. Rourke scrounged up art students, baby Constance in her arms as she went door to door. Later,

she started a movement for kindergartens in Grand Rapids; by 1892, she was a school

principal.5 Through force of her considerable will, she managed to forge a comfortable

life for herself and her daughter in their adopted home town. And always, Mrs. Rourke’s

daughter was her constant companion, and to all outward appearances, an exceedingly

devoted one. Reticent and difficult in other relationships, Rourke turned always to her

mother.

Constance Rourke entered Vassar College in 1903. As Joan Shelley Rubin,

Rourke’s expert biographer, notes, “Vassar promised young women solid training in

independent thinking, offering an education backed by traditions of social responsibility

as well as social grace. It was a logical choice for a woman determined to provide the

best for her daughter, and perhaps to see her attain the intellectual and social benefits of

the eastern education she herself had never had.”6 Vassar in the Progressive era

emphasized social service and enrichment, a position which dovetailed with Mrs.

Rourke’s own interest in newer educational theories. And its literature courses, on which

Rourke focused, was guided by what Gertrude Buck, a Vassar professor, described as

“social criticism.” According to Buck, “social criticism” stood against examination of

literature by broad standards of “timelessness” and instead focused on the efficacy of any

given work for any given reader: “the real, that is, the social, value of literature depends

primarily not on what is read, but how it is read.” 7 As Rubin notes, Buck had also acknowledged the importance of work done by fellow Vassar instructor Laura Wylie, who pushed students to look for “social forces beneath rhyme and rhythm and metaphor.”8 The examination of literature as a social, not aesthetic, document, would

inform Rourke’s critical methodology in the years to come. 65

When Rourke graduated from Vassar in 1907, she was voted by her classmates as

the first recipient of the William Borden Fund, which provided $1500 “to enable some

member of the senior class to enjoy a year of leisure and study in Europe with the general

purpose of a broader view of life and the intensifying of life toward social service.”9 But

Rourke chose to defer the award for a year, returning to Grand Rapids to teach grade school for a year. This arrangement may have been based on financial necessity, but it may also have accommodated her mother, who would travel with her as chaperone and who wanted to attend the Third International Art Congress in London in 1908.10

Whatever the reason, Rourke began her post-college life in education, a field in which two thirds of professional women of her day worked, and a field to which she would return, reticently, through 1915.

Rourke and her mother traveled together to Europe from 1908 to 1909. During this time, she studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and was a reader in the Bibliotheque

Nationale and the British Museum. She visited schools undertaking educational experiments. She attended lectures, observed suffrage meetings, frequented art galleries.

Although the Borden Fund required recipients to stipulate a plan of study, no coherent picture of Rourke’s time abroad emerges from her varied activities. Save, perhaps, this, from a letter sent to her mother, who had returned early from the journey: “I am very genuinely interested in education, but I also feel the necessity of doing continuously a certain amount of creative work. This as far as I can see is incompatible with a ‘career’ as a teacher.”11

Despite her doubts about a career in education, and despite her growing desire to undertake “creative work,” on her return to the States, Rourke accepted a position as a tutor for a family in Poughkeepsie. When that job concluded in 1910, she took another, teaching argumentative writing at Vassar. She did publish, albeit in the field of education, one essay, on “The Rationale of Punctuation,” for the Educational Review (1915).

Whether or not she wanted it, education was rapidly becoming her career.

And then, in 1915, Rourke resigned from Vassar. At the age of 30, Rourke

decided to turn to gamble on a career of writing. She was fully aware of the problems

such a choice would present for her and for her mother. “Success is difficult,” she wrote,

“especially if one aspires to belong to the very first rank, as I do.”12 She might have

added, though she did not, at any point, seem to have explicitly acknowledged the role of

gender in her career: “especially if one is a woman.” It was surely the case in the early

decades of the twentieth century that the role of public intellectual was mainly the

province of the “man of letters,” who might, upon graduating with an east coast

education, stroll into a critic’s position at a magazine or newspaper. It would not be so

easy for Rourke.

In 1915, when Rourke was deciding to pursue her new career, Van Wyck Brooks

published America’s Coming of Age, the book which contained an essay on highbrow and

lowbrow that would influence the rhetoric of cultural criticism for decades to come. He

was just a year younger than Rourke herself. In his equally significant “On Creating a

Useable Past” (1918), Brooks had written “we have had,” he writes, “no cumulative

culture…. Is it inconceivable that we might discover one, that we might even invent

one?”13 67

Of what exactly that invented or discovered past might consist goes unaddressed by Brooks. In many ways, however, Constance Rourke’s entire career can be understood as an answer to his question. It can also be seen as a rebuke: the assumptions that underlie his perception of a void at the heart of American culture are predicated on a search for meaning exclusively within the realm of literature. Rourke pointed out, however, that if we stepped away from such assumptions a whole new world might come into focus. We might, as she wrote in Trumpets of Jubilee, be able to “make a world out of wilderness.”

Certainly, his 1918 essay prompted much of her thinking in the years to come.

3.2 First publications

The years between 1915 and 1920 are a poorly documented time in Rourke’s life.

After declaring in August 1915 that she would focus on writing, Rourke returned home to

Grand Rapids, ostensibly to do so. But she appears to have been taken ill for a time, possibly with tuberculosis, though this is unclear. Finances must have been a concern, because she returned to teaching for a time in 1917 at a local high school. But then, she had a breakthrough: in June 1918, Rourke saw “An English Raconteur,” her first professional review, published in the New Republic. At the time, the Republic, which commenced publication in 1914, was itself a young magazine amidst a surfeit of young magazines, part of the publishing boom in the first decades of the twentieth century. Like many of these publications, the New Republic was constantly in search of writers to fill their pages. But just how Rourke got her foot in the door, even at a new publication, is unknown.

“An English Racounteur” was a review of an assortment of short stories about

“English low life” written by Neil Lyons. This may seem an odd topic for a woman who

would make the delineation of the American character the object of her life’s work.

However, Lyons’ research and writing technique, as Rourke describes it in the review, closely mirrors what would eventually be her own. According to Rourke, Lyons documents the lives and characteristics of the British poor, taking “a robust delight” in their “mind and methods,” and is “at no pains to maintain a consistent front, sociological or literary,” in his writing. She notes with approval that Lyons turns to humor, even satire, for his insights. Most importantly, Rourke notes, Lyons’ rich rendering of colloquial language provides “the direct revelation of character which makes the pieces substantial.”

In conclusion, she notes, that “His fresh immediacy springs from a real companionship, with subject and audience alike.” 14 It is almost as though Rourke is forecasting her own

work in American Humor, which would come to fruition thirteen years later.

“An English Racounteur” was the first of nine reviews and articles that Rourke

would write for the New Republic between June 1918 and August 1920. The subjects of

the reviews were surely not hers alone to determine, and they meander topically.

However, two of the nine articles were not reviews, and these hold within them clues to

her growing interest in popular and folk culture.

The first long article was entitled “Vaudeville,” published in August 1919. In it,

Rourke critiques vaudeville staging practices. Its scenic drops, she writes, fail to echo the

elaborate fun of its performances: “the accomplishments of a troupe of acrobatic dogs, for

example, may be set in a chalky grey imitation French drawingroom.”15 The solution to

the thoughtless incongruity, Rourke says, lies in savvy use of color, surprise, fantasy, and 69

“a touch of absurdity.”16 Presaging her later work on the American character, Rourke

says that the vaudeville stage should not turn to realism, but rather to humor. The piece

would be one of the few that Rourke would write on her own period.

Rourke’s second long article, “Paul Bunyon,” was published in July 1920. This

piece is Rourke’s first documented foray into folk tales and legend. The piece is largely a

summation of key tales collected by Professor P.S. Lovejoy of the University of

Michigan’s forestry school, with whom Rourke had planned on co-writing a book on the

legendary lumberjack. The project failed to materialize; however, it is her analysis of the

tales in the New Republic article which demonstrates her burgeoning interest in and

approach to American folktales. She opens the article with this statement:

The lumber industry in the United States has produced something more than the ferment of discontent known as the I.W.W. Coming out of the same harsh conditions, rising from the same soil of isolation, there has developed a cycle of stories which may be as near as we shall come to a native American folk-lore, centering about a huge, preternaturally clever lumberjack called Paul Bunyon, for whom there is no known origin or prototype.17

The search for a “native American folk-lore” will continue to percolate throughout

Rourke’s work. But it is in the concluding paragraph to the article that Rourke’s critical

agenda becomes, for the first time, clear. She argues that, although the Bunyon stories might have a close kin in Scandinavian or French-Canadian tales, they are at root

American:

…think of them as a purely American invention, a spontaneous reflex of the imagination, with foreign influences having a partial moulding effect. Certainly the rapid fertility and ingenuity of the stories seem indigenous, as is the zest with

which situations are pushed to their furthest and their absurdity explored with a tireless patient logic; and the whole basic method of solemn, preposterous exaggeration touches the very core of American humor.18

This paragraph holds the germ of American Humor. Already, she is marking out the

territory as her own.

3.3 A foot in the door

1920 was a watershed year for Rourke, who spent about five months on the east

coast knocking on doors, trying to scrounge up review assignments to allow her to stay in

Grand Rapids. Within that year, June was a crucial month. First, her string of reviews had

begun to garner her some reputation as a critic. This reputation gained her a meeting with the publishers at Harcourt, Brace, and Howe on a possible book. In a letter to her mother dated 5 June 1920, Rourke wrote:

Result of my talk with Howe of H.B. and H. He is interested in my plan for a book, and prepossessed in its favor by introd. from MacC [MacCracken, professor at Vassar College]. I told him that I wanted to make some changes in the mm [manuscript] and he said that in any case he couldn’t promise to read it for two or three weeks…. I don’t feel sure that he will take it but I think there is a chance; and if he doesn’t I have an introduction to the Yale Press from Dr. MacC, and Ruth [Pickering Pinchot, a former student of Rourke’s] thinks that Heubsch, who makes a speciality of rather small books and who also published Hackett’s Ireland and his Horizons would be interested…. Miss Wylie and Miss Buck and Dr. MacC were all so pleased with the narrative paper, and people do seem to know my critical work; so on the whole I feel encouraged to think that something may come of it.19

The book proposal in question was to be an extension of some of her educational work,

on “the psychology of narration.” At roughly the same time, Rourke submitted a short

form of it to the Yale Review, which rejected it.20 This would mark the termination of her

work in education: Rourke would never return to the field, as a scholar or practitioner.

It was also in June 1920 that Rourke first met Van Wyck Brooks. Again, Ruth

Pickering Pinchot intervened for Rourke, writing a letter of introduction to Brooks. Of

the meeting, Rourke wrote to her mother:

I went to see [Brooks] yesterday afternoon, and as a result am taken on as a reviewer for The Freeman with three books to do whenever I get ready…. I am very pleased about this for several reasons. In the first place Brooks knew my work, and I had only to ask for the work and got it without any discussion. Then he told me that the reviewing on The Freeman is on just getting going; it is going to be a much bigger thing.21

The Freeman, a short lived literary magazine, had just begun circulating in 1920. The

first two reviews Brooks commissioned from her were on a book about Jane Austen and

“Learned Ladies” in England in the seventeenth century, published in August and

September of 1920 respectively—two appropriately ladylike topics. But, with the growth of Rourke’s interest in American culture, Brooks began to supply her with more topically appropriate review work, including William Dean Howell’s edited collection, The Great

American Short Story (1920). Through 1921, Rourke juggled reviewing responsibilities for the New Republic and The Freeman. Later that year, Brooks recommended that

Rourke write a study of significant American popular figures; the suggestion pushed her towards what would be her first book, Trumpets of Jubilee (1927).22

Of course, when Rourke first wrote her mother of her intention to reject a career

as a teacher she did not say that she wanted to be a critic, or a historian: she said she was

interested in pursuing “creative work.” Rourke’s interests included the writing of fiction.

Alongside her developing career as a critic, Rourke had been writing short stories. Two

of these (“The Porch” and “Portrait of a Young Woman”) appeared in the Dial, in

October and November 1921, shortly after a young critic named Gilbert Seldes had

become managing editor for the publication.

It is tantalizing to imagine Seldes selecting Rourke’s pieces for publication. In an

August 1923 review of several collections of short stories, Seldes complained bitterly of

the general lack of quality within them. In a footnote to the review, Seldes noted, “The

Dial will offer, presently, a collection of stories from its pages, under the imprint of

Alfred A. Knopf. So those who feel that my objections to other stories are chiefly due to

the fact that they haven’t appeared in the Dial can add that to their justification. The

objections remain; and Stories from the Dial will only enforce their validity. They will,

additionally, be good stories.”23 Though this cannot be substantiated, it is important to

note that one of her pieces, “The Porch,” was selected for inclusion in Stories from The

Dial (1924), an anthology of fifteen stories that had run in the publication. In this

collection, her short story rubs shoulders with works by Sherwood Anderson, D.H.

Lawrence, Padraic Colum, Arthur Schnitzler, and Thomas Mann. Surely this selection

suggests that her work was deemed outstanding by the editors, of which Seldes was the

most influential.

“The Porch” is the story of Maude, a young bohemian woman living in a small

town where front porches are both stage and audiences, sites of public action and the

judgment of that action. When Maude disappears with a carload of her friends for the freedom of the West, her mother knows she will neither return nor marry the boy she left with. Rather than endure the gawping of the neighbors, Maude’s mother stages performances for them on their porches, attempting to convince them that Maude, in a 73

nod to propriety, had married. The story ends ambiguously, with Maude’s mother refusing to move from her home because she has just fixed up her porch the way she wants it.

Both “The Porch” and “Portrait of a Young Woman,” which is a snapshot of a

spoiled, fast-living bohemian woman, fit awkwardly within Rourke’s body of work. She never published any further fiction, for example. And, as tempting as it might be to analyze the stories as the fantasies and wish-fulfillment of a lonely spinster, it seems

more likely that they are actually Rourke’s riff on her mother’s own biography: Elizabeth

“Constance” Davis Rourke was forever close-lipped about her own youth, which was

tinged with suggestions of bohemianism, flight, and small-town gossip. Whatever the

case, as 1921 came to a close, Constance Mayfield Rourke had established herself as a critic and author.

So it may seem peculiar to examine her list of publications and see, after her

hustle to gather publications and reputation, a gap in published work between January

1922 and August 1925. She seems to have disappeared. In actuality, Rourke made a calculated choice to withdraw from the deadline pressures of review work in order to

focus on more extended studies in American popular and folk culture. Her next move

would be to a writers’ colony in New Hampshire for a short tenure.

3.4 Retreat: The MacDowell Colony

In the summer of 1922 Rourke arrived at the MacDowell Colony, an artist’s

colony and writers’ retreat in the rolling hills of rural Vermont. Over the next few years,

it would become for her a regular retreat and a place to forge new professional

connections. That summer, Rourke was in residency with Mary and Padraic Colum,

Dorothy and DuBose Heyward, Elinor Wylie, and, notably, with Gilbert Seldes.24

The MacDowell Colony, which continues to operate, was founded in 1907 on a two hundred acre tract of land outside of Peterborough, New Hampshire. The property belonged to composer Edward MacDowell and to his wife, Marion. Edward was best known in his lifetime for Indian Suite (1896), a work blending Native American melody with Romantic orchestration. That same year, he was tapped by Columbia University to head their newly-formed Department of Music. In his position as Chair, he was often too busy to undertake his own compositions. So the MacDowells purchased the land in New

Hampshire as a retreat for Edward.25 When the main farmhouse on the property itself

became too distracting for Edward, Marion arranged to have a cabin built in the woods as

a studio for him. The division of living space from working space became intrinsic to the

Colony in the coming years.

Unfortunately, by 1907, MacDowell was in prematurely failing health (and would

die a year later). The question of what to do with the property gave rise to an inspired

decision: turn it into an artists’ colony.26 The idea was not his alone: MacDowell had,

since 1900, been on the board of trustees for the Corporation of Yaddo, another artists’

colony located in Saratoga Springs, New York. In fact, artists’ colonies, of varying sorts,

abounded in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dublin, 75

a colony within miles of MacDowell in New Hampshire, and Cornish, further away on

the Connecticut River, were both well into their existences. Most importantly, a colony in

Old Lyme, Connecticut was presided over by Marion MacDowell’s cousin, Florence

Griswold. But the MacDowell Colony was set apart from the rest by Edward’s, and later,

Marion’s, focus on “the affiliation of the arts.” Edward firmly believed in a Wagnerian

fusion of all arts, and so an essential component of his colony became its simultaneous

support of writers, artists, and musicians.27

By the time of Rourke’s time there in 1922, the Colony had grown into thirty-two

individual studios with various support buildings. Then as now, each studio was

relatively isolated, allowing for working solitude. Every day, a picnic basket lunch was

quietly delivered to the door of each studio, allowing for uninterrupted work. Breakfast

and dinner were taken in the Colony Hall, a centrally located common building, and sleeping dormitories are located in three buildings near to it.28 Residency at the Colony

was fellowship-based; that is, residents could choose to pay a modest fee for their tenure,

but were not required to do so.

Of course, in addition to their remarkably utopian value to those in residency,

artists’ colonies had a whiff of self-indulgence about them. And financing an operation like MacDowell, which tried to accommodate any artist it deemed worthy, regardless of ability to pay, was a challenge. J.P. Morgan, when approached by Marion MacDowell for support, reportedly offered her a personal annuity on which to live but “not a cent for a

damn-fool scheme for indigent Bohemians that would never work.”29 To counter this

perception, the MacDowell Colony in its early years focused on a kind of propriety and structure quite in contrast to the stereotype of bohemian life. There were but two rules at 76

the Colony: do not visit another studio without invitation, and no one may be in a studio after dark. In her memoir about the Colony, Pulitzer Prize winner Margaret Widdemer stressed the strict mores of the place:

There were few written rules in the Colony, and what there were, were in the main sensible and intelligent. But the unwritten ones, or Colony policy, were those of her [Marian MacDowell’s] girlhood’s day, with a few improvements of her own. Also, though her heart was buried in Mr. MacDowell’s grave (you might visit it on Sunday, if in a serious and reverent frame of mind, but not sit on it, and not as a mixed twosome), she frankly preferred the male to the female. She expected and usually got from the men something close to the attitude of the medieval troubadours to their ladies, a single-hearted platonic worship which kept their minds off anybody else. I must say they got a lot more work done that way. Women colonists, therefore, were in the minority. It wasn’t that Mrs. MacDowell kept them out. But all too often they were as she said regretfully, “not the Colony type”…. The Colony type as I observed it, which most of the women were, was rather mousy, rather neuter, and rather past youth.30

It would seem Constance Rourke fit the disparaging bill. Yet, despite the aura of propriety, the Colony was known for its vibrant conversation and easy connection- making. Colonists were forbidden to return to their studios after dark (ostensibly for reasons of safety), which meant that evenings were given over to lectures, concerts, readings, exhibitions, and long discussion.

These evenings of discussion surely influenced Rourke’s work. And her perspectives surely influenced those of her interlocutors. What conversation she must have had with Gilbert Seldes, who was in residence with her in 1922 and in 1924, is impossible to recover. But other traces of her time at MacDowell have survived. In a

1930 letter to Canadian author and folklorist Constance Lindsay Skinner, Rourke wrote,

“Thornton Wilder was here for a month, and I always find him extraordinarily interesting; he is so chock full of material for one thing, reference, intuitional judgments, and that sort of thing.”31 Rourke’s time with Wilder at MacDowell first overlapped in 77

1924; they were there again together in 1930. From 1930 forward, references to Wilder are sprinkled throughout Rourke’s work. For example, she lectured on his work at various locations in 1931. And she wrote an article in 1940 entitled “Art in Our Town” for the Nation that called to mind several elements of Wilder’s 1938 play Our Town.

Certainly, Wilder’s textured approach to American culture would have resonated with her own.

But we’ll return to that issue later. For now, it’s 1922 and Rourke is leaving

MacDowell to return to her town, Grand Rapids, Michigan. There, she nursed her mother through breast cancer. And she wrote.

3.5 Trumpets, Troupers, and a Character: Naming a Useable Past, Framing a Useable

Present

The significance of the critic is measured by the problems he puts to us.

Gilbert Seldes, “The Artist at Home,” 20 May 1925

Between 1924 and 1931, Constance Rourke was selective in her journalistic work.

She produced just seventeen reviews or articles, almost all for New York Herald Tribune

Books. These seventeen were savvily chosen, on topics in what was becoming Rourke’s area of expertise: nineteenth century American popular culture. Primarily, in this slice of time, Rourke investigated the aspects of American history and life that would provide the topics for her three major books—Trumpets of Jubilee (1927), Troupers of the Gold

Coast (1928), and American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931)—all published by Harcourt Brace and Company. The first two of the three were, in 1927- 78

1928, serialized in Woman’s Home Companion, to fund Rourke’s ongoing research. And

all three studies, as well as all of her reviewing work, focused on the same period and

subject matter: nineteenth century American popular and folk culture.

In these projects, Rourke developed a working method that was uniquely her own.

When figures like Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis Mumford were parsing literary works by

Mark Twain and Henry James to find the roots of American culture, Rourke was scouring junk shops, estate sales, and oddball collections across the country for nineteenth century joke books, almanacs, handbills, and small-town newspaper clippings. Brooks and

Mumford looked to the urban and the expatriate for their material; she searched the frontier, the rural, and the very-rooted folk.

Through the subjects of her three books in this period—Harriet Beecher Stowe,

P.T. Barnum, Lotta Crabtree, Horace Greeley, blackface minstrels, stump speakers, stage

Yankees, and yarn-spinners of all stripes—Rourke wove a tapestry of popular figures in nineteenth century America. In doing so, she argued that they, not major literary figures or artists, constituted the very fabric of American culture. Without obvious argumentativeness, she rejected Brooks’ belief that America had no culture and gently showed him where it was that he had failed to look to find it.

By July 1924, Rourke was already deep at work on what would become the first of her major studies of popular culture in nineteenth-century America. She had turned her attention to the Beecher dynasty, and in her writing about Henry Ward Beecher she was struggling to deal with his infamous affair with Elizabeth Tilton. In a letter to her mother she described her struggle:

The Beecher scandal…will indeed be a problem to handle. It cannot possibly be blinked; in fact, it makes the core and center of my study of Beecher…. I think there is no question Beecher was guilty…. I shall be glad to see the Mencken article. It is usually interesting to hear the noise he makes. But as a matter of fact they were pretty outspoken about sex in the Beecher days, if somewhat more naïve than some of our modern writers.32

She was curious about what Mencken had to say, but unperturbed by his “noise.” She was also unimpressed and unconcerned. Unlike Gilbert Seldes, whose ire sometimes was raised by Mencken’s baiting, Rourke simply immersed herself in her work with poise and with diffidence.

One of the handful of articles Rourke wrote during these years was a review of two books on Paul Bunyan for the Saturday Review of Literature in August 1925. She was interested in Bunyan because she had intended, years earlier, to collaborate on a book on the legends; the project was eventually abandoned. In her review, she describes the perils of criticism:

The path of the critic is perhaps as simple as the crooked logging road which was finally pulled straight by Paul’s Blue Ox. “You’d be walkin’ along it, all unsuspectin’, and of a sudden you’d see a coil of it layin’ there behind a tree, that you never knowed was there, and lyin’ there lookin’ like it was ready to spring at you.33

The critic’s winding journey of discovery (and surprise) echoed Rourke’s own experience

in gathering the material for the two books she would create in these years.

Though Rourke still maintained her permanent residence in Grand Rapids with

her mother, she made an extended trip to the east coast in 1924. In July, she returned to the MacDowell Colony, where she made the acquaintance of Margaret Widdemer, Elinor

Wylie, Dorothy and DuBose Heyward, William Benet, and, of course, Thornton Wilder.

Here she began intense writing on Harriet Beecher Stowe, a study which would become

part of Trumpets of Jubilee. When the Colony closed for the season in October, Rourke

went immediately to New York with a book proposal for Harcourt Brace. From there, she

wrote to her mother with glee:

Am sending you a check for five hundred dollars by registered mail today. Brace offered it to me Friday before reading Harriet B.S. [Beecher Stowe] but decided it was more dignified to wait. They are all enthusiastic about Harriet…. I may drop in at The Dial this afternoon. Gilbert Seldes is going to give me a copy of his Seven Lively Arts.34

Five days later, Rourke was meeting with Van Wyck Brooks, noting “he likes my work

immensely, has read both portraits. I asked Mr. Brace to show them to him. He is in at

H.B. [Harcourt Brace, where Brooks was a reader] twice a week now. This was vastly encouraging.”35 Later that week, on November 11, she went to see a production of What

Price Glory.

Rourke’s breathless immersion in the critical and cultural world of New York was

unusual. Unlike the vast majority of critics in the period—including Kenneth Burke,

Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Lewis Mumford, George Jean Nathan, or Gilbert

Seldes himself—Rourke did not place New York City at the center of American culture.

She was more solitary, generally working from home and making forays into the big city

only for research. In fact, the networking process did not come naturally to her. By 1928,

after the publication of Trumpets and Troupers of the Gold Coast, Rourke was more

aware of the need to build contacts and establish a network:

One other kind of thing has been added which I hadn’t thought about at all except in an incidental way, and that is the possibility of seeing and meeting new people just in a general way. As a rule when I am very busy during these trips east, I just don’t, except for incidental visits with old friends. But it has been borne in upon me (by my publishers, among others) that I ought not to pass by the opportunity of meeting more interesting people who are interested in my work. Of course

there are not millions of them, but it is a pleasure of course, and then a number of insistent advisers have been telling me that I just must anyway, with one book out not very far back, and another soon to come. But it does take time!36

And time was something that Rourke did not yet know was, for her, exceedingly limited.

3.6 Trumpets of Jubilee

Though Rourke made her early deals on the book that would become Trumpets of

Jubilee in 1924, in actuality, she had begun to formulate her ideas for it nearly six years before its final publication. According to Rubin, in July 1921 Van Wyck Brooks suggested that she create a study of some of the more popular figures of the nineteenth century.37 Why he did so is unclear. In 1921, Brooks had just completed The Ordeal of

Mark Twain (1920) and was deep at work on The Pilgrimage of Henry James (1925).

Both books are extremely pessimistic about American culture, making the claim that both

Twain and James had the potential for true literary greatness but were thwarted by

American pragmatism and irreverence. So a supportive study of the very popular culture and popular figures he believed limited American cultural production is a curious move.

Clearly, even as Brooks seemed to support her study of popular figures, Rourke continued to take issue with his own approach to the matter.

Whatever the case, one year after Brooks’ apparent recommendation, in July

1922, Rourke wrote to Alfred Harcourt with an outline of her proposed study: Trumpets of Jubilee would be a study of five figures from the mid 1800s: Lyman Beecher, Harriet

Beecher Stowe, Henry Ward Beecher, Horace Greeley, and P.T. Barnum. It was, in a way, Rourke’s own revisionist version of Emerson’s Representative Lives: instead of focusing on major authors and philosophers, Rourke would turn her attention to the lives 82

of popular figures who were truly representative of their time and place. The title referred to the golden trumpets of the biblical book of Joshua, whose blasts caused the walls of

Jericho to crumble. In the selection, Rourke underscored the place of religion in the

period. More importantly, she at the same time announced her own critical aims and part

of the revolutionary intention of the book. Rourke sounded a challenge to her fellow

critics: Trumpets of Jubilee, she hoped, would bring down the walls proscribing the usual

presumptions about the American nineteenth century.

At the time of proposal, Rourke already had a particularly clear sense of her

organizational approach and writing style. She intended that the book would be presented

“dramatically” and she wanted it to “read somewhat like a novel, with an effect of

connection between the portraits and progression and even climax, the four or five

personal dramas revealing a larger social drama.”38 From the beginning, even in a book

that touched on the theatre obliquely, Rourke would use drama, theatre, and performance

as the cultural frame for her story. Performance suffused the book. For example, Rourke

narrates the stories of her five key “characters” in a highly visual, very theatrical manner:

“Into this numbered company steps another character, or rather crowds his way, as indeed

from the briefest acquaintance one might guess that he would do.” She refers to the

“panorama” of their careers or, she qualifies, “the scenic diorama, as it might have been

called by his friend and contemporary, Barnum, who purveyed this entertainment at the

American Museum”).39 The language of the theatre is threaded throughout the book, quite purposefully.

But Rourke had another purpose beyond that of fine writing and storytelling. The

five figures selected for presentation were chosen in particular for their hardy popularity,

and Rourke made the fact of their popularity a central point of the book. In the forward to

Trumpets of Jubilee, Rourke summed up her approach:

It is a habit in these days to scorn popularity, and to measure successful leaders by their product, which may not always be exquisite. But popularity is a large gauge and a lively symbol; the popular leader is nothing less than the vicarious crowd, registering much that is essential and otherwise obscure in social history, hopes and joys and conflicts and aspirations which may be crude and transitory, but none the less are the stuff out of which the foundations of social life are made. At certain times and in certain places popularity becomes a highly dramatic mode of expression. One of the places, surely, is our own country; one of the times that middle period of our history when at last the great experiment in voicing the public will was fairly launched…. In this era of shattering change, many shrill or stentorian voices were lifted; orators appeared on every platform; with their babel rose an equal babel of print; perhaps there never was such noisy chorus or so fervid a response…. Out of that large and stirring confusion arose a few orphic figures: Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, possibly Hawthorne, and in another arena, Lincoln; but we shall be concerned with these only as they oddly mix with the multitude or clash with it, or cross the paths of our popular figures.40

Implicit, then, in Trumpets of Jubilee is an answer to Brooks’ call for a useable past.

Here, Rourke seems to say to Brooks, are five figures who lived alongside the major

literary figures that you feature. But my figures, she suggests, influenced the society

around them in more direct and more lasting ways than Emerson and or Melville, and certainly in more direct and lasting ways than the debunking critics of her day cared to

acknowledge. Throughout the book she presses Greeley to the foreground as she pushes

Thoreau to the background, and regularly links her characters with the activities of the

more “major” literary figures.

In her five central figures, Rourke touches on four key elements of the middle

years of the nineteenth century: abolition, evangelism, journalism, and entertainment. She 84

expertly demonstrates, albeit quite implicitly, how these four interplayed. But, as in all of

Rourke’s studies, her framework and argument are submerged beneath her quite vivid

writing. Ironically, her storytelling skill as a writer would, in the coming decades, impede

her reception as a serious scholar.

For example, in the first paragraph of the first chapter of Trumpets, on Lyman

Beecher, Rourke opens her story like any old-time storyteller, with “once upon a time.”

According to family legend, one of the remoter grandfathers of Harriet Beecher Stowe could lift a barrel of cider and drink from the bung-hole. His son could lift a full barrel into the cellar. They came of English stock, with a Welsh and Scotch strain through the women of the family, and sprang from the Puritan soil of Guilford in Connecticut, the home of the Beechers from the time of the Davenport settlement. They were all blacksmiths.41

The storytelling quality of Rourke’s writing is clear. In fact, the Beecher lineage, from father Lyman to children Harriet Beecher and Henry Ward, would become a sort of dynastic morality tale or dramatic cycle anchoring Trumpets of Jubilee. Three of the five chapters in the book are about the family. Together, these three chapters expose, in the guise of one family, the complex interplay of evangelism and theatre, the desire for fame that can animate social activism, and the first stirrings of American celebrity. Rourke told their stories, but in doing so she advanced a thesis about American culture.

For example, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) is perhaps the best known

Beecher, both for her abolitionism and for her serialized book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851-

1852). But in Rourke’s telling, however, Harriet is shown less as a bleeding-heart supporter of the anti-slavery cause and more as a woman with a deep desire for fame, fed by chronic self-aggrandizement and an iron will. Her religious faith intertwined with a powerful desire to perform, to be seen. Rourke eloquently describes Harriet’s drive to

work situated amidst the chaos of home life with four children (the surviving of seven),

as well as her marriage to Calvin Ellis Stowe, a bland clergyman who acquiesced to her

drive for fame.

The interplay of evangelism and performance is further emphasized in Rourke’s

chapter on Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887). Henry followed in his father’s footsteps as

a preacher, and throughout his career he advocated for women’s suffrage, temperance,

evolution, and abolition. But Rourke emphasizes his famed pulpit theatrics, like the

trampling of the chains which had bound John Brown or a mock auctions at which his congregation purchased the freedom of slaves. As a famous orator, Henry drew Abraham

Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain to his Plymouth Church in Boston. And, in

Rourke’s analysis, Henry embodied the “roar of sound and the tumult of feeling” that

Whitman poured into his poetry. Yet Henry had what Whitman did not: “from Whitman public favor was withheld. With all his passion for the crowd he failed to gain the public which he sought, either through writing or through speech.” Henry Ward Beecher “with an idiom which often closely approached that of Whitman, with an approach to rhapsody…which seemed more fluently or more crudely molded from the same stuff that

Whitman used, Beecher kept the channels of public intercourse free; and—there was no doubt about it—among all the thronging number of public speakers he received the adulatory crown, the rosy native laurel.” In Rourke’s portrayal, Henry possessed the same expansive, embracing persona as Whitman, but he also possessed popularity and influence that had eluded Whitman. Finally, in Rourke’s analysis, Henry Ward Beecher was a man both embraced and then, in the wake of his infamous affair with Elizabeth

Tilton, rejected by the crowd. He was spectacular, in every sense of the word. “A

remorseless English critic,” Rourke notes dryly, “called him the Barnum of religion.”42

For Rourke the intense popularity and subsequent obscurity of a man like Henry

Ward Beecher, who retained such marked similarities to a figure like Walt Whitman, clearly was at the core of the problem with the habitual elucidation of an American

“useable past.” In her chapter on Horace Greeley (1811-1872), the newspaper editor and erstwhile presidential candidate who had exhorted America’s youth to “Go West, young men, and grow up with the country!,” Rourke noted, “An obtuse contradiction exists between the insubstantial figure of today and the living presence of Greeley in the florid mid-century….Was there something transient rather than elementary in Greeley’s character, so that he belonged to an era and quickly passed with it?”43 How a figure could tower so high above his period and then disappear so completely from public memory interested Rourke. The dilemma underscored and animated her desire to uncover the non-literary ephemera which was so intrinsic to daily life in its time but so easily disposed of.

P.T. Barnum (1810-1891) is the subject of Rourke’s final chapter. She approaches him as the quintessence of the American experience. “His history,” she writes, “grows into fable, mixed with the caprices of time—not the great fable, perhaps, but a portion of what might be called the American legend.” Rourke accords him special attention. Of course, Barnum’s flair for the fictitious led him to exhibition of creative bunkum at his

American Museum, including such hoaxes and curiosities as Tom Thumb, the Fiji

Mermaid, and the Siamese twins Chang and Eng. For Rourke, though, “he was something

more than a creator of emporiums to give the public what it wanted….he let play upon 87

the faint stirrings of popular desires the energy of a sportive imagination, a fancy primitive but dramatic.”44 In this, and through the “lecture room” in the Museum,

Barnum, Rourke says, unleashed an American appetite for the theatrical.

Perhaps more than any other single force or figure Barnum broke down the barriers which had long kept the American public from the theater; irresistibly his audience must have filtered into the unsanctioned playhouses. But if he opened a sluice, he also deepened a channel. Though his designation was a shell, and his drama itself a caricature, he magnified the notion that the play must teach a lesson.45

Despite regular failures and losses, including the incineration of several of his museums,

Barnum built an impressive entertainment empire (and fortune). He was a tireless self-

promoter and savvy marketer, whose many-editioned autobiographies both solidified his

reputation as well as drummed up consistent business. Yet, Rourke notes “almost nothing

substantial about him emerges from the ruck of contemporary evidence; scarcely another

figure of equal proportions has left so little behind him by way of personal print.

Necessarily he becomes a legend—an outcome he would have relished.”46

But Barnum is not the only figure to have left behind less tangible evidence than

his considerable reputation in his historical moment might seem to warrant. Rourke went

so far as to make the case that the popular, in the mid-nineteenth century and beyond, was

traceless. She wrote of Barnum’s audiences, “As they came and went, looking at his

preposterous conglomeration, who can say what they found? The imagination of the

forties and fifties, like that of youth, is difficult to recover; and Barnum’s greatest exhibit,

the public, left little trace of its conclusions.”47 Rourke would make it her career’s work

to uncover as many of these traces as possible, by looking for evidence where few

scholars of her day would follow.

In her conclusion to Trumpets, Rourke suggests that the most important thing that links her five figures together is what she variously calls “bombast” and “magnitude.”

Of all modes of expression bombast is perhaps the most difficult to understand, because it uses contemporary metaphor, and may spring from both terror and exhilaration, and from heroic enterprise…. Magnitude seems the single positive legacy of that forgotten time: magnitude which is upon us in a thousand rapid guises, with multiplied roaring sounds, with the greatest speed, the greatest numbers, with an infinitely expanding universe From that younger era shall we receive a warning, or a hope, or a challenge? Or a tradition?.... Surely we find ourselves in a predicament not unlike that by which they were confronted: we too must make a world out of a wilderness. In this endeavor traditions would offer a foothold, no doubt: but traditions are often hard to discover, requiring a long and equitable scrutiny…. Yet certain clear emblems remain out of the past, for times of hesitation. Magnitude, which to us often seems deadening and terrifying and meaningless…. can inhere in human intentions. Largeness belonged to the leading figures of that day—belonged to its popular spokesmen.48

In the conclusion to her first book, Rourke laid out what would be her critical agenda for the rest of her career. The nineteenth century in America can provide a “tradition”—a useable past—if we look to its popular figures. She provocatively asks us to consider:

“Among many characters, great and small—who perhaps was small, and who was great?.... As the task of possessing the continent grew monstrous and chaotic, who offered imperishable counsel? Not Emerson, or Whitman.”49 Why, then, were critics looking to Whitman and not to Ward Beecher, to Emerson and not to Barnum, in their quest to explicate American culture? Rourke demanded, politely, that they think again.

Most importantly, the popular figures she emphasized in Trumpets of Jubilee were, all of them, marked by a kind of larger-than-life magnitude or theatricality. The core significance of performance and of theatre would motivate and shape her next book,

published immediately after Trumpets. In it Rourke would turn more directly to the theatre itself, writing “A passion for the theater ran like a strong and brilliant coloring through all that animated life.”50

3.7 Troupers of the Gold Coast

In 1926 and 1927, pieces of what would become Trumpets of Jubilee were first published in a ladies’ magazine, Woman’s Home Companion, alongside advertisements for baby formula and foundation garments. The magazine was an eclectic repository of information deemed to be of interest to women, but the information was broadly scoped.

For example, the same issues in which Rourke’s work was published also featured poetry by Carl Sandburg and essays by DuBose Heyward. Rourke’s story of Harriet Beecher

Stowe ran in six installments between February and July 1926; her story of Henry Ward

Beecher ran in five sections between September 1926 and January 1927. Publication in the popular magazine was lucrative for its authors: from her sale, Rourke earned a cool

$10,000. The funds from the sale would support months of painstaking primary source research for Rourke’s second book, Troupers of the Gold Coast (1928).

Troupers extended two key elements of Rourke’s vision of American culture in

Trumpets. A full-length study of Lotta Crabtree (1847-1924), the actress and entertainer who made her name in the mining camps of gold-rush California, Troupers shifted

Rourke’s interest in the theatre as the primary American mode of expression away from the realm of metaphor (where it had been situated in Trumpets) and into the world of the theatre itself. Second, as she had done in Trumpets, Rourke revealed that America’s vital energy and character could be discovered in the supposedly minor or marginal people 90

whose popularity outstripped that of the elite figures about whom most literary studies

had been written. In both of these techniques, Rourke sustained her work in answer to

Van Wyck Brooks’ lament. She celebrated a useable past in American popular culture.

In this work, Rourke pioneered her “living research” techniques. First, the funds

from Trumpets supported seven months of research in California in 1927, during which

Rourke and her mother duplicated the journey of Lotta Crabtree and her mother up the

Pacific Coast.51 It also supported her painstaking primary source research, in old

newspaper offices, in the personal collections of Lotta fans, in scattered caches of

playbills and programs throughout the American west, and in the testimony of

eyewitnesses to her performances. Lotta Crabtree, it’s important to note, had died just three years prior to Rourke’s study. Yet Lotta’s story, and her reputation, were already beginning to disintegrate. So Rourke’s work was also an act of preservation.

Rourke opened Troupers with not a “Foreword” but with a “Salutation.” In nine

pages, she acknowledged the contributions of a variety of memoirs, interviews, and

personal collections from which she had drawn, noting, “Seldom has a compact era had

so ample a personal literature.” To reconstruct Lotta’s life, Rourke drew from newspapers

in San Francisco, Sacramento, Sonora, Grass Valley, Placer and Sierra County, and

Shasta, including Golden Era, Pioneer, Californian, Dramatic Chronicle, and Figaro.

She also studied “old play-bills, miners’ song-books, minstrel and variety songsters, prints, scrapbooks…. A wealth of suggestion appears on the broad hangers as to favorite lyrics, entr’actes, and afterpieces, as well as sharp glimpses of personal destiny through the shifting of parts or changes in companies.”52 To find these, she ran ads in local papers

requesting information on Lotta, followed leads, and generally relied on the kindness of 91

strangers. She discovered a vast network of personal collectors who held photographs,

programs, posters, and pamphlets that were the essential material of her study (material

which is, even today, poorly collected by most major libraries). And she interviewed

surviving troupers, including Blanche Chapman, Emelie Melville, Clay Greene, Blanche

Bates (of The Girl of the Golden West), and Ina Coolbrith (who toured with Adah

Mencken and Mark Twain).

In putting together Troupers, Rourke adhered to the organizing principle that had

worked to her success in Trumpets. She placed Lotta Crabtree, a seemingly minor

popular figure, in the foreground of a story through which moved famous performers,

like Edwin Booth, Adah Menken, and Mrs. John Drew. In foregrounding Lotta, Rourke

made an implicit argument about American culture. That is, in employing such a

narrative strategy, Rourke implied that Booth could be better understood if Crabtree and

her milieu were understood. Moreover, Rourke insisted that the dancing and singing of

young Crabtree before miners in California revealed as much, if not more, about

American culture than the staging of Shakespeare by Booth in New York city and elsewhere.

It is crucial to note, however, that Rourke at no point directly or clearly states this

point of view. Unlike the vast majority of her fellow public intellectuals in the 1920s and

1930s, Rourke made a habit of writing without directly picking fights. Her argument is

submerged beneath engaging writing and persuasive marshalling of detailed evidence.

Rourke says, without saying, that America’s generally accepted major figures can only be

understood if their popular counterparts are fully comprehended. Moreover, those figures

generally deemed popular or less significant may in fact be exactly what American

culture hinges upon. The point of view would sustain her most important work, American

Humor (1931).

At the age of four, Lotta Crabtree moved to Grass Valley, California, with her

mother and father who were seeking their fortune as part of the Gold Rush. While there,

her neighbor, dancer Lola Montez, coached the young girl’s burgeoning performance

skills. Soon after, Lotta began touring mine camps throughout the state as a juvenile

performing curiosity. Eternally petite and saucy, Crabtree returned in 1864 to the east

coast to much success as Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Little Nell in The Old

Curiosity Shop. By 1870, she would headline her own theatrical company. She retired a wealthy woman at 45 in 1892, and when she died in 1924 her estate was valued at $4 million. She left most of the money to charity.

Rourke opens her book on Lotta by suggesting that the entire 1840s boom town

culture was fundamentally theatrical:

If not wholly theatrical these sounds and appearance were in friendly alliance with the theater. Interludes of singing and dancing were popular on every stage, as if the cult of an earlier California had joined with that of the roaring, song-singing newcomers. But the amazing circumstance was the spontaneous eagerness with which the Americans had turned to the drama itself. Even the soldiers of Stevenson’s regiment who had arrived before the discovery of gold, who had come for the soberest of reasons, not only as soldiers, to hold the country, but as colonizers to settle there, had begun almost at once to give plays….At Monterey in the spring of 1848 the wing of a long adobe house was fitted up for them as a theater, with a pit, a little stage, and a wooden drop curtain which was lifted and lowered like the lid of a box. Here they produced stout old English farces and even Shakespeare. At Sonoma in the Valley of the Moon another company of the regiment turned to theatricals at about the same time, and played for four months in a miniature theater. The unexpected enthusiasm sprang up in San Francisco. A few young stragglers of fortune united in the spring of 1848 to give plays. Another

band met in the autumn for the same purpose at the dubious Shades Tavern. The building of a theater was discussed even when the town was only a scattered village of tents and tiny wooden houses.53

Rourke continues her chronicle of west coast theatricals for thirty-five pages. Against the

generally accepted view that American theatre was developmentally anchored on the east coast, Rourke suggests that it flourished first, and most fully, in the West. From there it imbued the entire culture:

In no other area of the country had the theater come into such unchastened, free and abundant life. Elsewhere the theater had always suffered from repression, except perhaps in a few scattered cities of the South. On this new frontier nothing was repressed, either plays, actors, or the audience. Men quarreled over renderings, and protested when lines were cut. Acting versions of the plays often changed hands among the miners for more than their weight in gold. If burlesque and extravaganza prevailed, every new experiment in the theater was welcomed. Recondite plays like The Critic had been produced; and the rewards offered to favorite players remained lavish, taking the form of a rain of nuggets in the camps and often in San Francisco, with the cosmopolitan addition of diadems and watches, golden flowers and jeweled brooches.54

In Rourke’s analysis, the theatre, away from the east coast, was vibrant, essential, and

very very popular. Of course, the frontier, as Frederick Jackson Turner had famously

suggested in his “Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893), itself created

freedom by loosening the bonds of custom. In a significant way, Rourke suggests, the

frontier itself made Lotta’s remarkable career possible.

Within this milieu, Lotta’s career success turned on two key choices. The first

was to shift from “legitimate” pursuits to the more popular blackface minstrelsy. Though

her mother balked at the roughness of the form and consistently worked to find Lotta

dramatic roles “worthy” of her talents, Lotta would have her some of her greatest

successes when she blacked up, as Topsy. She also learned the banjo and took key parts

in the minstrel walkaround.55 The tiny redhead, now known as “Miss Lotta,” was beloved for her explosive dancing and her raw theatrical energy. Minstrelsy, as a form, encouraged such displays.

The second move came later in Lotta’s career, toward the playing of “hoydenish” roles. Lotta had always performed mostly for men; in the mining camps where she made her start, she was a spectacle both for her youth and her femininity. She, and her mother, capitalized on the combination. But, when Lotta moved east and took on roles in The Pet of the Petticoats, for example, she began to cultivate an alluring, but rough, persona. She smoked on stage, and off. She continued to engage in physical humor, “roll[ing] off sofas and show[ing] far more than an ankle….her short skirts were daring.” Of this risk,

Rourke writes:

She was shattering traditions as if she could not contain herself within stereotyped forms. She was already a comedian, or comedienne, as the stage prefers it, foot- loose, turning to new amusement whatever she touched, creating the airy structure of extravaganza in unlikely places. Broad comedy for women was still rebellion. In a period when a delicate distance was considered an ultimate feminine quality, it was rebellion indeed to forget the prerogative of a languishing charm; it was nothing short of revolt to diminish the aura by which woman—it was hoped—might always be surrounded, and actually to laugh with an audience, thus shattering distance altogether. Few actresses even in the liberal California days had attempted it, even though a tradition for comedy prevailed there.56

Rourke had reappraised Harriet Beecher Stowe in Trumpets as a powerful woman who consciously directed her own career. Similarly, in Troupers, Rourke looked to Lotta as a counter to the critical charges regularly leveled against a genteel, fainting femininity in

American culture. Here, Rourke shows us a woman who was immensely popular and

admired who did not fit the mold. Lotta embodied a lively, theatrical, rough, non-Puritan, and native strain of American culture. She stood in stark contrast to the gentility which the likes of George Santayana perceived in the same period.

More important for Rourke’s broader understanding of American culture as

theatre, however, is her observation that Lotta belonged “to the theater but not to the

drama.” Rourke writes:

The cry then and later was for native plays with a pictorial embodiment of American life. But perhaps more perishable materials were to prove deeply American. Keeping a pace which belonged to her own period, Lotta came to the brink of contemporary musical comedy, the blackface revue, of comic opera. She gave impetus to a form of fantasy in which native actors and composers and writers were to prove singularly adept. Perhaps this light and transient expression, appearing like fireworks, quickly dying, catching the changing color of the day, could never in itself endure. Yet it could be transmitted through the years by the most definite artistic heritage—quickly as this seems to vanish—that of the stage, with a momentum which seemed to belong inalienably to Lotta’s small figure, giving it a continued life.57

Rourke’s observations here are incisive, and come to the heart of her growing case for the

theatre as central to American culture. In this passage, Rourke proposes the popular

theatre, in all its transience, topicality, and perishability, as more “deeply American” than

any work of dramatic literature America had yet produced. Crucially, this profoundly

American expression hinged on fantasy. In Trumpets of Jubilee, Rourke had named

“bombast” and “magnitude” as key qualities of American art. With Troupers, she adds

“fantatsy” to the stable of adjectives she would use to flag an essentially non-realistic

core to American cultural expression. The significance of this insight would coalesce in

her next book, American Humor.

Of course, the call had been put forth, from Metamora onward, for a peculiarly

American drama. Much to the chagrin of the majority of critics, the call was regularly

answered with what had been called a disappointing failure to produce American

dramatic literature on par with that of the European tradition. Where, critics wondered, was the American Shakespeare, Shaw, Goethe, or Ibsen? Rourke tells us that in figures

like Lotta Crabtree—light, comic, exuberant, and most of all, fantastical—America could find its “most definite artistic heritage.” There is a tradition in American culture, Rourke asserts, and it is transmitted from performer to performer, from Lotta all the way to

Fanny Brice, on the stage. It is a lived, vital culture—ephemeral and non-literary to be

sure—and it constitutes a heritage, perhaps the heritage, of a lively American culture.

Both Trumpets and Troupers were generally well received. Often, however, the

books were taken as pleasant and interesting reads, but they were not addressed as the ground-clearing works that they are. Rourke’s prose was charming, and the essential

argument of the books was often lost (or buried) beneath it. Gilbert Seldes reviewed both

works. His assessment of them is more insightful than most. Trumpets of Jubilee rates

only a paragraph in the “Briefer Mention” section of the Dial’s book reviews; however,

the tone of the analysis is uniformly positive. Seldes writes:

Miss Rourke has written not biography, but social history; she has managed to give the sense of the life of the time, and also to acquaint us with the serious and with the trivial problems of the time. Except that the documentation is a little too great for cursory reading, the book has every charm, not least the charm of an interesting temperament observing outlandish and beguiling movements of the spirit in others.58

It must be noted that her handling of documentation would ever present Rourke with criticism, either for being too extensive (in the case of Trumpets) or for being to scanty

(as in the case, later, of American Humor). In both cases, dissatisfaction with the quantity

of documentation was rooted in the nature of her work itself: it was directed at the

general reader but produced by a serious scholar. Neither constituency, it seemed, would

be satisfied with her final approach.

But Seldes was insightful when he declared that Rourke’s book, though it unfolded in a series of biographically-based chapters, was really looking at a broader social history. In both Trumpets and Troupers, Rourke begins with a personality and expands into the culture at large. And the personalities she chooses are uniformly from popular culture. Seldes, himself a critic focused on contemporary popular culture, saw that her historical work supported his critical work.

When Seldes came to review Troupers in 1929, he again stressed the significance of Rourke’s analysis of nineteenth century popular culture. He also noted her extraordinary writing style. The review, for Bookman, was entitled “How, and How Not, to Write About Women.” Troupers of the Gold Coast was his prime example of how to do so:

The precision of [Rourke’s] words, the cadence of her prose, the justice and vividness of her observation, all seem to me remarkable even in an age of superior biographical and historical style. She cannot write a paragraph without distinction; and she seems incapable of copying the mannerisms of anyone, so that everything is fresh and personal. …Miss Rourke has contributed something important to the history of the American theatre…. In brief, this history indicates how universal and how profound acquaintance with the theatre was nearly a century ago and, through the chief character, shows how the type of theatrical which is now most typically American rose out of the older, imported theatre.59

Seldes again keyed on the significance of Rourke’s work for his own. Rourke proves, he writes, that popular theatrical entertainments were central to the American experience in the nineteenth century. Moreover, though their roots can be traced to European performance, the comic entertainments that Lotta promoted—especially blackface minstrelsy, early musical comedy, and even her virtuoso solo comic acts—were fundamentally American inventions. They presaged the contemporary popular entertainments, in vaudeville and film, that Seldes was busy promoting as essentially

American. Again, Rourke’s historical study supports Seldes’ contemporary criticism.

Seldes sees that their approaches and concerns are allied. Rourke’s next work, American

Humor: A Study in the National Character (1931) could only cement this point of view.

3.8 American Humor (1931)

Trumpets of Jubilee was published in book form in 1927 and Troupers of the Gold

Coast in 1928. Both had, in many ways, been but a prelude for Rourke’s most important work, American Humor: A Study in the National Character (1931). Both required research in popular American print, song, and performance, and it was in these explorations that Rourke began to formulate her theories about American culture.

American Humor would expand Rourke’s observations on popular culture and American performance to an all-encompassing approach to the American character, broadly construed. In the four years between 1927 and 1931, Rourke worked continuously, as she said, “like a house afire,” steadily building upon the methodological and interpretive groundwork she had previously laid.60 In 1929, she went to England for six months, accompanied by her mother, as a kind of writing retreat. And she returned to the 99

MacDowell Colony in 1930 to begin the intensive writing on the book. Of her work on

American Humor, she wrote to her friend Constance Lindsay Skinner from the Colony on

19 August 1930: “My book has been exacting, and I have had both the pleasure and the

tantalizing spectacle of having it grow rather continually. It’s been fortunate, for I have to

work over things whose outcome I pretty well know, yet it has been slavish too.”61

Upon publication, American Humor would establish Rourke’s reputation as a cultural critic. Lewis Mumford, whom Rourke had met in 1927 during his lecture tour to her home base of Grand Rapids, reviewed the manuscript for Harcourt Brace. He effused,

“Miss Rourke has done the most original piece of investigation and interpretation that has appeared in American cultural history. It is in every way a brilliant book; and it casts

fresh light, not merely on our own folk literature, but upon the great literary figures that

have emerged from this primitive soil.”62 The praise is high, but not unwarranted. As in

Troupers, Rourke examines a welter of primary source material from the popular arts to

construct her vision of American culture. It is a highly original piece of research and analysis. Moreover, Rourke connects her discoveries in popular culture to the standard major literary figures of the nineteenth century. As in Trumpets, these figures are illuminated by the popular material, not the other way around.

The prime source of the “fresh light” that Rourke casts on these figures comes from American performance. In American Humor, Rourke explicitly yokes her understanding of American culture as expressed through bombast, magnitude, and fantasy to the stage, addressing American humor as anchored to the “fantasies of the theater.” Rourke shows the fantastical (and non-realistic) work created on the American comic stage to be rough, crude, and primitive. But rather than argue, as Brooks or 100

Mumford might, that these qualities impede American artistic achievement, Rourke

suggests that they foster the full development of a vibrant American culture. Crucially,

because “[t]here is scarcely an aspect of the American character to which humor is not

related, few which in some sense it has not governed,” it is American humor, not its

serious literature, that reflects and anchors the American character.63

Rourke opens the book with a rejection of the prevailing critical attitude of

pessimism and debunking. In the foreword to her book, she writes:

Of late the American character has received marked and not altogether flattering attention from American critics. “It’s a wretched business, this virtual quarrel of ours with our own country,” said Rowland Mallett in Roderick Hudson. The quarrel seemed to begin in that period within which [Henry] James laid his story, soon after the Civil War; traces of it may be seen even earlier. It has deepened; it has occasionally grown ponderous; it has often been bracing; at times it has narrowed to a methodical hilarity. Since the prevailing note has been candid, candor may be offered in turn. This book has no quarrel with the American character; one might as well dispute with some established feature in the natural landscape. Nor can it be called a defense. Some one has said that a book should be written as a debt is gratefully paid. This study has grown from an enjoyment of American vagaries, and from the belief that these have woven together a tradition which is various, subtle, sinewy, scant at times but not poor.64

Rourke’s statement of purpose for her book is clear. She is not in sympathy with the

“wretched business” of the negative criticism of America promulgated by Mencken or

Brooks. At the same time, she is not attempting to write a mere “defense” of the culture.

Rather, she chooses a middle ground, in which she declares that American culture is. She

has found a rich vein of material in popular, humorous print and performance that proves, she believes, that there is, after all, an American cultural heritage which reaches back as

far as the first settlements. Rourke suggests that the book is neither critique nor defense,

but rather an explication of an extant “useable past” which has gone overlooked in the

long tradition of American self-evaluation. It is a work of history. 101

Yet (misguided) negative criticism from the young intellectuals has had its effect.

Rourke begins her study, which focuses on the years roughly between 1800 and 1880,

with an attempt to clear this effect away. Asserting that the roots of American culture can

be most clearly seen in its comic entertainments, she turns to Henri Bergson’s “Laughter:

An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic,” for support, quoting his influential 1900 essay:

“The comic…comes into being just when society and the individual, freed from the

worry of self-preservation, begin to regard themselves as a work of art.” From her

evaluation of the surviving ephemera of joke books, almanacs, monologues, and stage routines, Rourke says that “by 1815 the American seemed to regard himself as a work of art, and began that embellished self-portraiture which nations as well as individuals may undertake.”65 However, the American character developed extremely rapidly, and that rapidity, in combination with a significant amount of international and critical attention focused on the birth of the new nation, presented problems brought on by a kind of adolescent self-awareness:

Other national types had developed slowly, even through centuries, without close definition by themselves or by others. The American stepped full-length into the public glare, and steadily heightened the early yellow light. He gazed at himself…as in a bright mirror, and developed the habit of self-scrutiny, which may have its dangers for the infant or youth, whether the creature be national or human.66

The cycle of self-creation followed by immediate self-scrutiny created a kind of hyper-

aware feedback loop which Rourke suggests has hampered attempts to fully develop as a

culture. In this, she implicates the strongly negative criticism of public intellectuals.

Rejecting this approach, Rourke turns to her core analysis.

102

She begins her description with the analysis of three basic comic types that

underlie the American character: the Yankee, the backwoodsman, and the minstrel.

Rourke’s Yankee is a lean east coast swindler, whose rustic deadpan belies considerable manipulative savvy. Her backwoodsman, who often takes on the guise of a pioneer or a

riverboatman, is a swaggering, animalistic barbarian for whom strength was an

“obsession—size, scale, power: he seemed obliged to show their symbols as if after all he

were not wholly secure in their possession.” Finally, (and most problematically) Rourke’s

minstrel was a “black-faced Yankee,” tricky and sly, but without the Yankee’s deadpan.67

He was outwardly ebullient; inwardly he was profoundly despondent. The very fact that

Rourke chose the minstrel as one of her triumvirate of types is significant. In doing so, she acknowledges race, and the problems of racial masquerade, as essential to the formation of American culture. At the same time, in her analysis of the minstrel, as we shall see, she makes risky presumptions about (and risky conflations of) African-

Americans and minstrels within the broader culture. These complexities will warrant further analysis in this chapter.

Throughout the book, Rourke acknowledges several other popular comic types

(including Bowery B’Hoy Mose, the stage Irishman, and the stage Dutchman) but she argues that none of them became as indelibly linked to the American character at large as her three key figures eventually did. These three comic types held essential qualities in common. All were tricksters of some sort. All were wanderers. All were resilient. All employed bravado. And, perhaps most importantly, because “laughter produced the illusion of leveling obstacles in a world which was full of unaccustomed obstacles…These mythical figures partook of the primitive; and for a people whose life 103

was still unformed, a searching out of primitive concepts was an inevitable and stirring

pursuit, uncovering common purposes and directions.”68 The three comic types were

rough, and sometimes objectionable. But they served as starting point for the working out

of the American character against a backdrop of a still-forming nation.

The articulation of, and serious analysis of, these three figures was but one part of

Rourke’s project in American Humor. Her argumentative framework is, to a certain extent, submerged beneath her graceful (and purposefully non-confrontational) prose.

However, it can be distilled into four basic propositions. In Rourke’s analysis, the

American character, as presented in its popular arts, is

1. A native, and original, construction. It is not merely a pale reflection of its

European roots. It is also not, as critics were commonly suggesting, Puritanical.

2. Mythical and fantastical. It is, therefore, explicitly non-realistic.

3. Theatrical. It is drawn to theatre as a mode of expression, and it is in and of itself

a performative character.

4. Grounded in the popular, not the literary, arts. Therefore, attempts to evaluate it

by literary standards will inevitably come up lacking.

1. The American character is a native, and original, construction. It is not merely a pale reflection of its European roots. It is also not, as critics were commonly suggesting, Puritanical.

Throughout American Humor, Rourke is keen to prove that her three comic types were American inventions necessitated by life in the new land. As she elucidates her key

examples from the popular stage and print, she makes statements like: “The Yankee 104

seemed an aboriginal character sprung suddenly, long-sided and nimble, from the gray rocks of his native soil. Surely he was no simple son of the Pilgrim fathers.”69 That is, the

Yankee was a folkloric type with no antecedent in Europe, and also, crucially, with no easy relation to the austere world view of the Puritan colonists.

Rourke does not deny the influence of Puritan constrictiveness on the development of American culture. But she refuses to make it the definitive element.

Rourke argued, “As the texture of early Puritan life is examined, sources of Yankee strength become apparent, but not of Yankee humor: for humor is a matter of fantasy, and the fantasies of the Puritan, viewed with the most genial eye, remain sufficiently dark.”

There is, she says, a “constant opposition” between “the dark emotions and an earthy humor” that is fundamental to the deadpan detachment and pragmatism of the Yankee.70

In this analysis, Rourke implicitly rebukes critics, like Brooks, who have placed too much emphasis on the Puritan without accounting for the subversive shift inherent in the

Yankee as displayed in comic materials in the American archive. They do not see the

Yankee, she tells us, because they do not look: if the sermons of Cotton Mather are all that are analyzed, then the radical wit of the Yankee in comic monologue will be missed.

And the picture of American culture that emerges will be hopelessly skewed.

The fact that the Yankee (and, by extension, her other two comic types) are peculiarly American inventions has not, Rourke notes, always been a source of pride. In fact, she tells us, from Royall Tyler’s The Contrast forward, Americans have been insecure about their cultural significance in relation to that of Europe. The insecurity, she points out, has tended to play out in a dual-layered defensive rejection: “first that all refinements might be found at home; then that they didn’t matter.”71 105

The insecurity was abetted by a continuous trickle of criticism in continental

travelogues, from the work of de Toqueville to Mrs. Trollope. The French, with the

“amiable light luggage” of Rousseau, saw the American as a child of nature. The British,

on the other hand, displayed “extreme credulity” in examining Americans and, in general, found them to be barbarously regressed from their British roots. The critics of Rourke’s

own day were still laboring to refute such criticism, often acquiescing by agreeing that

the continent was right in its assessment of a barren American culture. But Rourke sees things differently, noting that the American stage “from 1825 onward, when the British

commentaries were in full swing” had already become a place to answer the charges. For

example, the Yankee would lope onstage, “half bravado, half cockalorum,” and take the

form of a peddler or a merchant who got the better of continental snobs. But, to the

dismay of some, he was always, perversely, portrayed as everything that repelled Mrs.

Trollope: “indefatigably rural, sharp, uncouth, witty. Here were the manners of the

Americans! Peddling, swapping, practical joking, might have been national

preoccupations.” Later, the backwoodsman “assumed in gross form the faults with which he was charged. He was considered uncouth, and he swaggered the more roughly. He was called a bragger and a liar: he gently retouched his exploits.”72 That is, creators and

consumers of American humor flaunted their roughness in the face of the pretty

refinements of the Continent. American humor hinged on this tactic: as Gilbert Seldes

noted in Seven Lively Arts, “Juvenal and Johnson may have been superior to the thing

attacked; it pleased the democratic American to pretend to be beneath it.”73 Or, as Rourke

wrote of the American penchant for burlesque: “American audiences enjoyed their own

deflation; they liked the boldness of attack, the undisguised ridicule.”74 106

Of course, the critique of American roughness was not solely European.

Sometimes it was an internal affair, with sophisticated city-dwellers ranged against frontier rubes. So, Rourke points out, the rural New England Yankee quickly moved from duping the British gentry to fooling New York urbanites in the plays Rourke cites.

Likewise, the frontier-forging backwoodsman had to respond to “opprobrium of New

England” that was “often as marked as that of Great Britain.”75 Thus, Rourke’s nuanced analysis of the insecurities and defensiveness inherent in American humor encompassed both the tensions between America and Europe as well as burgeoning regional posturing on the matter of culture and status.

2. The American character is mythical and fantastic. It is, therefore, explicitly non- realistic.

As she insisted in Trumpets of Jubilee and Troupers of the Gold Coast, Rourke again asserts that American popular culture is defined by its attraction to the mythical and the fantastic. In fact, the two words pepper the book. Her three key comic figures are, she stresses, “a myth, a fantasy.” All three figures, she writes, “join in a new national mythology.” Rourke links fantasy and myth directly to the nonrealistic. In her analysis of

American burlesque, she notes: “It was not a realistic spirit…. The world of burlesque was still the familiar native world of phantasmagoria.”76 The Yankee, the backwoodsman, and the minstrel did not, she writes, invite “the literal view or the prosaic touch. The fantasies surrounding them might often be crude and earthy, but they were fantasies. These odd and variegated creatures were firmly planted in the spacious realm of legend.”77 Myth, fantasy, legend, phantasmagoria: the terms, all of which serve as 107

synonyms for “non-realistic” circulate insistently throughout American Humor. It is clear

that a construction of American culture as rooted in fantasy and myth is crucial to

Rourke. In light of a critical and artistic climate that was focused on realism as the apotheosis of artistic expression—from the paintings of the Ash Can school to the photography of Lewis Hines to the novels of Sinclair Lewis—her assertion was a radical one.

The point of view clearly caught the attention of critic Bernard De Voto. On 25

September 1931, just a few months after American Humor was published, Rourke sent a

seven-page, typewritten letter in responding to a series of criticisms about the book’s

approach to realism that DeVoto raised. DeVoto had apparently attempted to argue (as he

was about to in his Mark Twain’s America) that Twain, the quintessential American

humorist, was deeply realistic. Rourke demurred, and in doing so, clarified her position

on the matter:

Now we reach the nub of a real controversy. I knew of course that the point was controversial and I believe that it is new—that is, the stress upon the poetic rather than the realistic strain in our literature…. I’m convinced the primary motive and color and impulse in [Huckleberry Finn] as in The Gilded Age or any other essential work of Mark Twain’s was not realistic. The moment you find burlesque you are out of the realm of the realistic—you are out of the field where the plumb- line can be sunk in a leisurely fashion and the slighter human foibles perceived— you are off hot-foot into a gay and glorious and impossible world, explosively larger than reality.78

She saucily concluded this section of the letter: “I’m really hoping that if my work should

ever come into the purview of future critical judgment this idea [realism vs. fantasy] will

be put down to my credit.”

108

De Voto was clearly unconvinced, as the debate continued through their next letters. Rourke responded, more pointedly, on 3 March 1932:

…if your contention is that American humor is mainly realistic, what do you do with the tall tale? What do you do with the repeated use of the tall tale or its effect constantly in Mark Twain? Surely the tall tale is highly American. It appears in anecdote, in speech, in monologue…. How do you explicate the tall tale as an example of realistic art? 79

Rourke stresses in the letter that she does not believe that American humor is antirealistic; rather, she argues that realism is not the dominant mode of communication within it. Here, she offers DeVoto some teasing advice on his planned Mark Twain’s

America:

I wish you weren’t going to nail a tattered flag like that of realism to your mast in what sounds to me like a grand book. Of course realism is immensely important, as is any distinct aspect of human perception. But if there were time I believe I could show you that it comes as both an outcome and a dead in most literatures, a climax and a finish.80

She concludes the letter with a direct explanation of the import of her work in American

Humor.

I feel that the outlining of the element of fantasy as continuous in American humor is something specially my own. So far as I know this has not been done before, though here and there the mythological may have been mentioned in connection, say, with the Paul Bunyan tales or some other specific group: but as a continuous element, shown in sequence, I think this had not been defined…. I believe that even the use of the word “fantasy” in relation to American humor is entirely my own.81

In both the September 1931 letter and the March 1932 letter, then, Rourke stresses that

American humor (and thus, American culture) is rooted in fantasy or myth. She explicitly states that it is not grounded, though it is related to, realism. That she forcefully reiterates this point, along with the credit she feels she is due on the matter, suggests that the point

109

was exceptionally important to her. It also suggests that she was aware that the proposal ran distinctly counter to the general critical viewpoint, even for a fellow spirit like

Bernard De Voto.

So in her correspondence, Rourke is abundantly clear about her approach.

However, in her book, Rourke was at pains to avoid embroiling herself in arguments over terminology that would, she felt, bog down her writing. She steadfastly avoiding using freighted concepts such as “Realism.” In a letter to De Voto, she noted:

I have rather consistently avoided the use of the word “realism” throughout the book, because I think it is really difficult to define, because it immediately invites consideration of the usual antithesis of romanticism, because it seemed best to me in handling the material under consideration to use the directly descriptive attributes rather than the abstraction and the pigeon-hole.82

The very word “realism” seemed to Rourke both limiting and misleading. She preferred, she says, to describe what she saw rather than to attempt to categorize it. This reticence is in keeping with Rourke’s decision to “rather consistently not [argue] with everybody” because “[i]f I had begun taking up arguments they would have swamped the book all along the line.”83 She knew she was addressing the broader critical conversation about

American culture, yet she refused to directly engage in it. Instead, she set up her alternative view as an impregnable truth.

3. The American character is theatrical. It is drawn to theatre as a mode of expression, and it is in and of itself a performative character.

The theatre, the “truant mode,” is the core of Rourke’s work on the American character. In making her case, she draws upon the rich heritage of American performance, noting that “Theatrical histories, memoirs, and accounts of travel by 110

strolling players have supplied a considerable bulk of material; these writings all but

match the almanacs in importance as revealing popular humor, popular preoccupations,

and evidences of the national character.” So Rourke addresses the work of performers

(like George Handel Hill, a Yankee monologist), recurring characters in popular drama

(like Sam Slick, a recurring rube character), and the musings of figures in popular print

(like Jack Downing, of the Downing Papers). In all of these cases, even those that appeared exclusively in print, Rourke stresses their performative nature. For example, in her analysis of a book, Jonathan Slick in New York by Ann Stephens, Rourke says “the book is a monologue…Jonathan himself was there, talking.”84 Even in a book, there is

performance.

The fourth chapter of American Humor is entitled “Strollers,” and it focuses on

the itinerant performers on makeshift stages across the nation in the middle years of the

nineteenth century. Here, Rourke makes a case for the apprehension of the traveling

performer as a foundational figure, encompassing the Yankee, the backwoodsman, and

the minstrel. That is, all three figures were portrayed on the stage, which became, in

Rourke’s analysis, the crucible for experimentation with their form. For example,

Rourke’s first illustration of the backwoodsman comes from the stage. She writes, “In

1822, at a theater in New Orleans whose pit and parquet were crowded with flatboatmen, an actor stepped out in buckskin shirt and leggings, moccasins and fur cap, with a rifle on his shoulder. He might have come from the audience.”85 According to Rourke, the Davy

Crockett-esque backwoodsman, as an American type, makes his first appearance in the

theatre. But his presentation there is, significantly, doubled. This backwoodsman is both a

creature of the stage and of the frontier, both actor and audience. Rourke opens up the 111

complicated exchange between the performance of character on the stage and the

performance of self in daily life. For her, the American character is a performed

construction.

So Rourke’s presentation of the backwoodsman indicates two major elements of

the significance of performance in American Humor. First, the history of the American

stage Rourke narrates is that of the popular theatre, and especially of the popular theatre

in locations beyond the east coast corridor. The backwoodsman does not first appear on

the legitimate stages of Boston or Philadelphia; he bestrides the rough and ready boards

of New Orleans. So part of Rourke’s contribution in American Humor is a quick history

of the American stage that first asserts that the theatre was ubiquitous: “Everywhere they

found theaters, or theaters were improvised for them; every one came, black and white,

children and their elders.”86 But she also picks up from where she left off in Troupers of

the Gold Coast. In that book, Rourke had argued that American theatre had flourished in

the South and in the West when it still remained repressed in New England. In American

Humor, she chronicles a detailed history of the American popular theatre that begins with

Increase Mather on the topic in 1686, and extends through the work of itinerant

companies in Kentucky in 1815, a Natchez theatre built in an old graveyard in 1820, and

a variety of commandeered plantation ballrooms and saloons. Her strollers hop trains

from Chattanooga to Savannah, stopping to perform The Spectre Bridegroom, The

Wizard Skiff, and an incalculable quantity of burlesques. Ultimately, then, in Rourke’s

history of the American theatre, the popular stage is of immense, central significance to

the construction of both the national character and the nation itself.

112

But beyond the significance of the stage itself, Rourke’s presentation of the backwoodsman signals a second key element of her evaluation of performance in relation to the American character. Rourke writes,

The Americans had in fact emerged as a theatrical race. No doubt many obscure influences tended to create this bias of character. The new country made a strangely painted backdrop before which the American seemed constrained to perform…. And theatrical tendencies in the American character were heightened by a long intimacy with the stage.87

For Rourke, the American character was, at root, a performative one. First, she attempts

to prove the “long intimacy with the stage” by bringing to light popular theatrical

performance often obscured by a focus on the east coast legitimate stage. But she also

underscores the essential theatricality of the American character itself. The

backwoodsman, then, is a character constructed both on the stage and in life.

Rourke extends her analysis of American theatricality by exploring the ways in

which characters, both on stage and off, choose to counterfeit and to pretend. Thus, the

notion of masking or masquerade is central to the picture of the American types she

draws. The stage Yankee, for example, pulled his pranks by pretending to be something

he was not:

Masquerade was as common to him as mullein in his stony pastures. Long- backed, thin, “lank as a leafless elm,” a New England coach driver might look as though a high wind would blow him away, yet he would wear nankeens and low shoes in winter weather, and was not fragile but lusty….he was an actor and troupe.88

The Yankee used his apparent physical weakness to convince his marks that he was

harmless; then he would swindle them out of their very last dime. He pretended to be

something he was not. The Yankee’s face itself served as a mask, of deadpan passivity:

“In a primitive world crowded with pitfalls the unchanging, an averted countenance had 113

been a safeguard, preventing revelations of surprise, anger, or dismay…. No doubt the mask would prove useful in a country where the Puritan was still a power and the risks of

pioneering by no means over. The Yankee retained it.” Moreover, his manner of

speaking, “not so much a dialect as a lingo,” was also a form of subterfuge: “its oddities

were consciously assumed. It was another form of masquerade.”89

Of course, as a type, the minstrel is pure masquerade. In the form, a white man literally masked his face with burnt cork, and sang, danced, and joked in the guise of a

comically stereotyped version of African Americans. Of the form, Rourke writes:

Minstrelsy was of course white masquerade; and the double use of the mask seemed to create a profound satisfaction for American audiences, as if the sheer accomplished artifice aroused an instinctive response among them. The mask might be worn as inheritance or for amusement or as a front against the world in any of these impersonations, concealing a childish and unformed countenance: but it was part of a highly conscious self-projection.90

Rourke’s approach to blackface minstrelsy is, in many ways, more nuanced than that of

many of her contemporaries. By 1931, the minstrel show had long since waned as a key

form of entertainment in America. This is not to suggest that blackface performance had

disappeared: figures like Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor continued to don the burnt cork

mask on the vaudeville stage, and Amos and Andy had made their radio debut. But the

minstrel show, with its typically all-male, all-white, three-part form, was but a memory

save for amateur home, school, and lodge theatricals. At the time of American Humor’s

publication, the books that existed on the topic, including Dailey Paskman and Sigmund

Spaeth’s “Gentlemen, Be Seated”: A Parade of the Old-Time Minstrels (1928), were

114

primarily nostalgic in tone. Harkening back to the good old days of the 1850s, these

works generally presented the minstrel show as an honest, if idealized, representation of

the jolly character of the plantation Negro, who would “cut capers in chains.”

Such oversimplification of the dynamics of the form have long since been dismantled. From Ralph Ellison’s influential article “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke”

(1958) to major works like Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the

American Working Class (1993) and Dale Cockrell’s Demons of Disorder (1997), scholarly understanding of blackface minstrelsy has moved from naïve nostalgia to angry rejection. It has settled, in the past two decades, into a middle approach that envisions the form as ambivalent, oscillating in its portrayals between racial hatred and racial desire.

Rourke’s approach to blackface minstrelsy is similarly complex. Yet she was not immune to the dangerous conflation of the African American character with the minstrel character. For example, she repeats the anecdote of T.D. Rice discovering a handicapped

Jim Crow in a Lexington horse stable and presenting Crow’s limping jig and lilting song

on the stage to much success. Rice, she says, collected “plantation melodies” for

“Ethiopian opera.”91 The notion that Rice’s performance was an “authentic”

representation of slave life is fraught with assumptions about the character and status of

African Americans.

The problem of assumptions about “authentic” representation expands as Rourke

indicates that Rice’s Jim Crow, which was first seen in New York in 1832, was predated

by blackface performance by Edwin Forrest.

In the early ‘20’s, at almost the precise moment when the backwoodsman appeared in legend with his “Hunters of Kentucky,” the southern plantation Negro was drawn on the stage in Cincinnati by young Edwin Forrest. Made up for the 115

part, Forrest strolled through the streets, when an old Negro woman mistook him for a Negro whom she knew; he persuaded her to join him in an impromptu scene that evening. This little sketch seemed unimportant, but Forrest had studied the Negro character; he inaugurated a tradition for faithful drawing. Other impersonations, now lost to view, no doubt followed, like tentative portraits; and punctually in the early ‘30’s, when both the Yankee and the backwoodsman leapt to full stature on the stage, the Negro was also pictured in firm, enduring outlines.92

“A tradition for faithful drawing” is, most scholars would agree, not at the core of the

blackface performance impulse. The minstrel is, if anything, a caricature of blackness.

The intentions and effects of that caricature might be hotly debated, but the fact that

minstrelsy fails to accurately presents blackness is not.93

It is important to note that Rourke never claimed that the Yankee or the

backwoodsman were “faithful” representations of the American character. That is, she

does not claim that they are real. Rather, the Yankee and the backwoodsman are

discussed by Rourke as reflections of fantasies Americans were inventing about

themselves, or as images engendered by the working out of the national character—

images that were worked out, more often than not, in performance. “The young American

Narcissus had looked at himself in the narrow rocky pools of New England and by the

waters of the Mississippi,” Rourke wrote, “he also gazed long at a darker image.”94

So it is difficult to account for Rourke’s insistence on “faithful drawing” in the

character of the minstrel. In some ways, it seems she is straining in an attempt to accord

very legitimate significance to African American culture itself. For example, she argues,

against the prevailing assumptions, that Stephen Foster “was the borrower” from African

American musicians. She declares that the walkaround was “patterned on Negro dances….which in turn went back to the communal dancing of the African.” She asserts

116

that “Rice and [Dan] Emmett can only have borrowed the fables, probably with their

tunes.”95 She is attempting to give real credit to African American culture for its

contributions to American culture as a whole; unfortunately, in that act, she turns to the

simplifying rhetoric of authenticity. More frustrating is that fact that, in her letters to

Bernard De Voto, it is clear that she was not unaware of the complexities of cultural

exchange between white and black. De Voto clearly took her to task for

oversimplification, and she defended herself:

The fact that, as Mr. Gordon says, one can’t find a genuine spiritual earlier than 1843, proves nothing, as it seems to me. We are dealing with an expression whose transmission is almost wholly oral and which was recorded, if at all, by white men. I believe it is true that there was taking on both sides. For example, I’ve been fairly sure that I found Irish jig tunes in one or two spirituals. But the handling has been transmuted, and I would defy anyone to take a pile of sheet music representing the songs of the day and the songs of minstrelsy through the forties and fifties—anyone, that is, who can read music and is sensitive to literary values—and find that they all belonged to the same general class—that of white composition.96

Rourke’s perceptive analysis of her primary source material has been borne out by that of

musicologists, like Dale Cockrell. Minstrel songs and spirituals alike commonly represent

a fusion, and a transformation, of African and Irish tunes and rhythms. Yet in American

Humor, Rourke pushed aside her nuanced understanding of the complexities of cultural exchange in favor of an argumentative preference for the debt white culture owes to black.

Rourke is clearly aware of the negative connotations of blackface minstrelsy, and she attempts, in American Humor, to debunk them in order to salvage the form:

Blackface minstrelsy has long been considered a travesty in which the Negro was only a comic medium. To the primitive comic sense, to be black is to be funny, and many minstrels made the most of the simple circumstance. This exploitation was deeply resented by the anti-slavery leaders of an early day, and in the end 117

they went far toward creating the idea that the Negro lacked humor. After the Civil War it would still have been possible to reveal the many-sided Negro of the old plantations, but minstrelsy with its air of irreverence seems to have blocked the way. Because minstrels had sported with the Negro and had even sentimentalized his lot in a few songs, because of his tragic fate and wish to prove that he possessed moral worth, dignity, and capacity, his friends collected and discussed and displayed only his religious pieces, the spirituals which have seemed his special creation. But Negro humor was always abundant, and from it early minstrelsy drew as from a primal source, keeping the tradition for direct and ample portraiture. Burlesque appeared, but burlesque was natural to the Negro.97

Rourke is sensitive to the conundrum blackface minstrelsy presents: it appears profoundly, irredeemably racist and, at the same time, it reflects key elements of the

American temperament and experience. To her credit, in choosing the minstrel as one of her triumvirate of comic types, Rourke asserts that the figure cannot be ignored. And the notion that a black countenance, however counterfeited, is intrinsic to the American character is radical, even in contemporary scholarship. However, Rourke’s essentialist assumptions about “Negro humor” or about what might be “natural to the Negro,” in combination with her drive to prove the legitimating authenticity of the representation, make her study of the minstrel deeply problematic.

In “Indivisible Man,” a 1970 interview with James Alan McPherson in the

Atlantic, Ralph Ellison would hail Rourke’s work on minstrelsy as a pioneering and transformative explication of American culture that, for whatever its problems, had succeeded in positioning the African American central to it. And in his “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” (1958), he adopted and expanded Rourke’s basic argument about the theatricality of American culture, writing, “When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical….We wear the mask for purposes of aggression as well as for defense; when we are projecting the future and preserving the past. In short, the motives

118

hidden behind the mask are as numerous as the ambiguities the mask conceals.”98 Ellison refines Rourke’s analysis, but his understanding shares much with her insights, on not only minstrelsy but also the performative basis of American history and character.

4. The American character is grounded in the popular, not the literary, arts.

Therefore, attempts to evaluate it by literary standards will inevitably come up lacking.

By framing the American character as a theatrical character, Rourke emphasizes performance, especially performance in popular entertainments. But she also de- emphasizes literature, which critics like Brooks and Mencken had propounded. She writes:

No drama came out of this broad movement: nothing can be clearer than the fact that drama as a powerful native form did not appear in America at this time or even throughout the entire nineteenth century. But the theatrical seemed a native mode. The Yankee first fully emerged in the theater; each of the trio of native characterizations was seen there…. Now the theatrical, as opposed to the dramatic, is full of experiment, finding its way to audiences by their quick responses and rejections.... [I]ts measure is human, not literary. The American theater then…had significance, not because it might at some later time evolve into great national art, but because it was closely interwoven with the American character and the American experience.99

The theatre of the mid-nineteenth century should not be measured, Rourke demands, by

the aesthetic standards of great art. Nor should it be berated for failing to produce stunning dramatic literature. Rather, it should be apprehended on its own terms, as the prime location of the working out of the American character. And if the theatre is a

“native mode” itself “closely interwoven with the American character and the American experience,” then when Rourke asserts that its “measure is human, not literary,” she is 119

calling into question the familiar critical act of evaluating American culture by the literature it has produced. To understand American culture, critics should, she asserts, examine, with seriousness, the ephemeral stage.

Rourke takes this deflating of the primacy of American literature to the study of

American culture one step further. In the latter half of American Humor, Rourke evaluates a series of “major” American writers by the standards of the American character as uncovered by in her performing Yankee, backwoodsman, and minstrel. The strategy is similar to her approach in Trumpets of Jubilee, in which Rourke closely examines popular figures, noting how the “major” figures stack up against them.

So, in Rourke’s analysis in American Humor, Abraham Lincoln “was consistently the actor, the mimic, caricaturist, and even a maker of burlesque. He used stories as weapons…. In a political contest in 1840 he mimicked his opponent on the platform in gesture and voice and walk and the smallest idiosyncracies of manner with so bitter a ridicule that at the end the man was reduced to tears.”100 In chapter six, Emerson,

Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville are examined in light of the American comic character. Rourke shows how Emerson and Thoreau, for example, rely upon the monologue form. She declares that Whitman’s “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world” is the cry of a backwoodsman. And for her, Poe’s grotesquerie draws as much upon American comic violence as it does on German or French romanticism.

Chapters seven and eight of American Humor represent a sustained, if perspicuous, dismantling of the influential work of Van Wyck Brooks on Mark Twain and Henry James. In his The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1922) and The Pilgrimage of Henry

James (1925), Brooks had proposed both writers as key examples of failed American 120

artistic potential. Twain, Brooks suggested, was thwarted by his own willingness to

capitulate to the American marketplace. James, on the other hand, lost touch with his

country by expatriating and was rendered artistically impotent. Both suffered, he writes,

because they lacked, in Brooks’ parlance, access to a “useable past.”

Rourke, however, reevalutes these two key American figures, each of whom rates

their own chapter in her book, by the standards of a richly theatrical American culture.

Rourke draws Mark Twain as a comic fabulist and raconteur, and argues against the

necessity of making of him a realist or a naturalist. Henry James, Rourke says, “has been pictured as a troubled evasionist without a country; and the charge has been turned in to a militant charge against American civilization. Yet this theory can hardly account for the long engagement of a major talent.”101 Instead, Rourke shows James, too, as a fabulist,

and one steeped in the tradition of Barnum and the stage, at that. She reminds us that

James had wanted to be a dramatist and failed, and argues that the dramatic form

remained strong within his novels.

In fact, the entirety of American Humor can be understood as an answer to

Brooks’ claim that America lacked a useable past. In her exploration of popular print and

performance, Rourke shows Brooks exactly where it lies: in the popular culture he so

distrusted. She writes, “The primitive base maybe full of coarse and fragmentary

elements, full of grotesquerie or brutality; it may seem remote from the wide and tranquil

concepts of a great art: but it provides materials and even the impulse for fresh life and

continuance.” To ignore or to denigrate American popular culture because it does not match up with predetermined evaluative standards inherited from Europe is to miss the point. In fact, Rourke went to far as to declare that even Brooks’ call for a useable past 121

was ahistorical, since, starting in the 1860s, there was already a concerted effort to

“recover the past:” “The years beginning in the late ‘60s and culminating in the ‘80s, so

often considered an arid waste so far as creative expression is concerned, were in fact alive with a consistent purpose. It was as if a people were trying to bury itself in its deeper resources.”102 During this time, figures from the American past, like Davy

Crockett, were placed on stage for scrutiny. The national self-searching culminates, in her

telling, with the 1880 founding of the Journal of American Folk Lore. Decades before

Brooks’ call for a useable past, a repository for just that material had already been

constructed. Brooks, simply put, refused to see it.

In addition to her critique of Brooks’ pessimism, Rourke spends some time in

American Humor taking on Santayana’s appraisal of the genteel tradition in American

culture. In particular, Rourke dismantles Santayana’s suggestion that gentility is a

feminized habit of mind that stultifies more virile attempts at culture-making. Rourke is

strategic when she writes:

Twittering poetasters and essayists, pretty story-tellers and studious novelists were springing up by the dozen as if to refute the classic charge that Americans were coarse. There was a great effervescence of what may be called the false- feminine; a thin sweep of genteel writing, dreary to read, easy to destroy by a touch of satire, came on like a weedy second growth when forests are cut…. Gentility was assuaging; it was a convenient means by which recognition of native literature could be avoided.103

Rourke does not deny that pale, polite writing exists. However, she insists that it is not

feminine but rather false-feminine. And it is not the predominant American approach: it

is a “thin sweep” that allows “recognition of native literature” to be “avoided.” That is,

122

preoccupation with gentility in American literature flags an unwillingness to regard the

unavoidably rough, hardy tall tales and burlesques of the frontier as actual, legitimate,

capital-C, Culture.

In the final, concluding paragraph to American Humor, Rourke deflates the two

most damning critiques of American culture promulgated by Brooks, Santayana,

Mencken, and their compatriots: that Americans have no art because they are

materialistic and because they are philistines. And she neatly turns the criticism right

back around on the critics themselves:

A favored explanation for the slow and spare development of the arts in America has lain in stress upon the forces of materialism. But these have existed in every civilization; they have even at times seemed to assist the processes of art. The American failure to value the productions of the artist has likewise been cited; but the artist often seems to need less of critical persuasion and sympathy than an unstudied association with his natural inheritance. Many artists have worked supremely well with little encouragement; few have worked without a rich traditional store from which consciously or unconsciously they have drawn. The difficult task of discovering and diffusing the materials of the American tradition—many of them still buried—belongs for the most part to criticism; the artist will steep himself in the gathered light. In the end he may use native sources as a point of radical departure; he may seldom be intent upon early materials; but he will discover a relationship with the many streams of native character and feeling. The single writer—the single production—will no longer stand solitary or aggressive but within a natural sequence.104

It is not, Rourke tells us, that Americans have no art, no past, no taste. What they lack is enlightened, catholic criticism.

3.9 Conclusion

Critical reception of American Humor was, in the main, exceptionally positive.

The book was named one of the American Library Association’s notable fifty books for

1931, and in 1933 it was chosen as one of the best books of the century by American 123

women.105 But if reviews were mainly positive, they were also a little less incisive than

Rourke would have liked. For example, Eda Lou Walton, writing for the Nation stressed, as many reviewers did, the “charm” of Rourke’s book: “Miss Rourke is one of the few truly scholarly critics who write a beautiful prose. She is able so naturally to fuse her documentary evidence with her critical exposition as to convince any reader that her book…was written for pure pleasure.” Rourke was so grateful that Bernard De Voto had noted some of her deeper intentions in the book that she wrote to him: “Your emphasis on my attitude toward the American character as against the current deprecation pleases me very much. One or two of the reviews have touched upon this, but I would have liked an even greater stress, for I believe the feeling underlies the whole book, and that really in a sense the book stems from it.”106

But there was also a thread of negative criticism of American Humor, and

Rourke’s response helps clarify her ambitions for the book. In a review for the scholarly

journal American Literature, Walter Blair of the University of Chicago said the book was

“daring,” “startling,” and of “real value.” However, he staunchly rejected what he saw as

the book’s thesis: that American literary work “of the highest order” is as rooted in

American popular culture as in the aesthetics of Europe. He in particular objected to

precisely what Bernard De Voto objected to in Rourke’s book: the suggestion that the

American character is drawn more towards fantasy or legend than to realism. Her book,

he argues, suffers because her writing is too “mystic.” Her research is useful, he

concludes, but her analysis “topples.” Finally, “it seems desirable to remark,” he notes,

“that, like many who write for both scholarly and general readers, the author provokes the former by failing to document thoroughly.”107 124

Rourke wrote in response to Blair in the following issue of American Literature.

She focused her rejoinder on two elements of his complaint: that American humor is realistic and that writing for a popular audience is at odds with scholarly scruple. On the first matter, Rourke clarifies:

…in his contention that realism is the dominant element in American humor as against mine that its prevailing character is that of fantasy, Mr. Blair has undoubtedly raised an important critical question…. Let me say at the outset that I do not deny the presence of realism in American humor, as Mr. Blair suggests…. American humor often—even quite typically—seems to start with realism, but at the moment of humor it breaks into fantasy.108

From there, she carefully, and cogently, dismantles each of his complaints. Yet, as in her letters to De Voto on the subject, she is far clearer about her purposes in these rebuffs than she is in the book itself. Her writing is, sometimes, elliptical and oblique. She proceeds quickly through her material, rarely pausing to explain or defend. The smooth flow of her prose can, unfortunately, work against her.

On the second major critique—that her work is slim on documentation—Rourke is unapologetic, and, it seems, more than a little miffed:

I must disclaim a motive which he ascribes to me, that of attempting to please the general reader, with a consequent omission, as he says, of full documentation. For the most part I have indicated the general sources of new material within the text. There are some exceptions, but these were not arrived at because I hoped to beguile the general reader—a hypothetical creature!—but because as steadily as possible I tried to keep an eye on the object, in this case, native humor. Humor has a way of vanishing when too closely tied down by explanations and references. In some instances I have slipped stories into the text much as they were slipped into casual talk by native story-tellers, without a statement of sources. Mr. Blair says that scholars will be “provoked.” My bibliographical note of ten pages, which Mr. Blair does not mention, contains a full outline of my materials.109

Rourke will have none of the condescending divide Blair imputes between the scholarly and the general reader, which she points out is a fictional construct. In her defense of her 125

handling of evidence, she stresses the gulf between the painstaking, and groundbreaking,

research that went into the book (which is detailed in her extensive bibliographical note)

and the crafted form of the book itself. Rourke intended to create a study that maintained

the ebullient flow of American humor itself: a book that talked big and stood tall, a book

that, in short, performed.

In 1925, Lewis Mumford declared, “We Americans have always had an infirm

sense of history: to us, the past is simply the immediate precursor of the present; it is

something we are outliving or sloughing off or getting beyond; that is, something almost

disreputable, or at least indiscreet.”110 Rourke’s work, from Trumpets of Jubilee to

American Humor, attempts to place that history squarely before her audience, in all of its disreputable and indiscreet glory. And, in fact, she suggests that the only Americans who

tried to push it to the side were the critics and intellectuals who refused to acknowledge

the vibrant lineage of real culture in America’s popular arts.

126

Endnotes

1 Nelle Curry, “The Constance Rourkes,” unpublished essay, 11. Margaret Marshall MSS.

2 Joan Shelley Rubin, Constance Rourke, 3. I am indebted to Rubin’s work on Rourke not only because of her thoroughness and perceptiveness, but because she was granted access to Rourke’s personal papers, in the possession of the Carl Shoaff, Jr. family.

3 Margaret Marshall to Linda Butler, 25 May 1946, Linda Butler papers. Marshall MSS.

4 Linda Butler, notes on Constance Rourke, 1979. Linda Butler papers. Marshall MSS.

5 Ibid.

6 Rubin, Constance Rourke, 8.

7 Buck, The Social Criticism of Literature, 48.

8 Qtd Rubin, Constance Rourke, 11.

9 Poughkeepsie Daily Eagle, 13 June 1907. Qtd Rubin, Constance Rourke, 15.

10 Rubin, Constance Rourke, 15.

11 Constance Rourke to Constance Davis Rourke, December 1909. Rourke MSS. Qtd in Rubin 17.

12 Constance Rourke to Constance Davis Rourke, 27 August 1915. Rourke MSS. Qtd in Rubin 24.

13 Brooks, “On Creating a Useable Past,” excerpted in Van Wyck Brooks: The Early Years, 219- 226. All subsequent citations from this edition.

14 Rourke, “An English Raconteur,” 180-182.

15 Rourke, “Vaudeville,” 115.

16 Ibid., 116.

17 Rourke, “Paul Bunyon,” 176.

18 Ibid. 179.

127

Endnotes

19 The text is excerpted from seven pages of typewritten notes in box 14, folder 339 of the Marshall papers at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. The notes appear to be transcriptions of letters from Rourke to her mother that Marshall was collecting in preparation for her planned book (which never came to fruition) on Rourke. The original letters from which these excerpts are drawn are in the private possession of the Shoaff family, who hold all of Rourke’s papers.

20 Rubin, Constance Rourke, 27.

21 Op.cit.

22 Rubin, Constance Rourke, 27.

23 Seldes, “Shorter and Better Stories,” Dial (August 1923): 187.

24 Brooke Hubner of the MacDowell Colony consulted Colony records to find times in residence by Rourke and Seldes, and provided me with databases of their fellow Colonists during their tenures in 1922 (as well as Rourke’s tenure there in 1924 and 1932).

25 MacDowell is himself a fascinating figure in the history of arts education in the United States. In 1904, he resigned from Columbia in frustration with the university’s refusal to more fully integrate the arts into undergraduate education. He published his letter of resignation, and a debate was touched off in the New York press.

26 The history of the MacDowell Colony is rich and varied. For a study of its impact on American musicians, see Bridget Falconer-Salkeld’s The MacDowell Colony: A Musical History of America’s Premier Artists’ Community (2005). For a study of its impact on American artists, see Community of Creativity: A Century of MacDowell Colony Artists (1996), the gallery guide to an exhibition organized by P. Andrew Spahr for the Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH. One recent biography of Edward MacDowell himself exists, Alan H. Levy’s Edward MacDowell (1998), as does an anthology of writings that came out of the Colony, The Peterborough Anthology (1923), collected by Jean Wright and Herbert S. Gorman. Finally, there is a pamphlet memoir, delightfully gossipy in tone, on the extracurricular goings-on at the Colony, Summers at the Colony (1964) by Margaret Widdemer. Falconer-Salkeld’s book provides a useful timetable chronicling composers’ time at the Colony. However, no current book offers a similar overview of the writers or artists in residence. A history of the Colony that widened its scope to encompass all fields in residence would be immensely useful.

27 Bridget Falcolner-Salked, The MacDowell Colony 22.

28 P. Andrew Spahr, Community 15.

29 From Theodore Pratt “Place of Dreams Untold,” New York Times Magazine, 24 March 1947, 19-22. Quoted in Falconer-Salked, 39.

30 Widdemer, Summers at the Colony 2.

128

Endnotes

31 Constance Rourke to Constance Lindsay Skinner, 19 August 1930, Constance Lindsay Skinner Collection.

32 See note 19 above.

33 Rourke, “The Making of an Epic,” Saturday Review of Literature (29 August 1925): 81.

34 See note 19 above.

35 Ibid.

36 Constance Rourke to Linda Butler, 23 February 1928, Linda Butler papers, Marshall MSS.

37 Rubin, Constance Rourke 27. Rubin refers to two letters in the privately-held Constance Rourke papers, from Brooks to Rourke on 1 July 1921 and 17 July 1921. She does not quote from them, however, so the precise content of Brooks’ encouragement and/or directives are unclear.

38 Quoted in Rubin, Constance Rourke 163.

39 Rourke, Trumpets of Jubilee viii, 242.

40 Ibid. vii.

41 Ibid. 3.

42 Ibid. 229, 174, 175, 237.

43 Ibid. 241-242.

44 Ibid. 426, 371

45 Ibid. 399.

46 Ibid. 370.

47 Ibid. 401.

48 Ibid. 430-3.

49 Ibid. 429.

50 Rourke, Troupers vi.

129

Endnotes

51 Rubin, Constance Rourke 30. All kinds of Freudian possibilities have been imputed to this journey, which Rubin delves deeply into.

52 Rourke, Troupers v, vi-vii.

53 Ibid. 22-23.

54 Ibid. 57.

55 Ibid. 136, 156.

56 Ibid. 203-205.

57 Ibid. 224-225.

58 Seldes, “Briefer Mention.” Dial (August 1927), 175.

59 Seldes, “How, and How Not, to Write About Women,” 583.

60 Constance Rourke to Linda Butler, 17 June 1939, Linda Butler papers, Marshall MSS.

61 Constance Rourke to Constance Lindsay Skinner, 19 August 1930, Constance Lindsay Skinner Collection.

62 Quoted in an advertising brochure for American Humor. Constance Lindsay Skinner Collection.

63 Rourke, American Humor 124, 11.

64 Ibid. 12.

65 Ibid. 22.

66 Ibid. 26.

67 Ibid. 40, 73.

68 Ibid. 86.

69 Ibid. 19.

70 Ibid. 20.

71 Ibid. 24.

130

Endnotes

72 Ibid. 24, 25, 46.

73 Seldes, Seven Lively 122.

74 Op. cit. 109.

75 Ibid. 45.

76 Ibid. 17, 67, 110.

77 Rourke, American Humor 69.

78 Constance Rourke to Bernard DeVoto, 25 September 1931, Bernard DeVoto papers.

79 Constance Rourke to Bernard DeVoto, 3 March 1932, Bernard DeVoto papers.

80 Ibid.

81 Ibid.

82 Ibid.

83 Constance Rourke to Bernard DeVoto, 25 September 1931, 3 March 1932, Bernard DeVoto papers.

84 Ibid. 123, 243, 33.

85 Ibid. 38.

86 Ibid. 95.

87 Ibid. 92.

88 Ibid. 18.

89 Ibid. 21, 28.

90 Ibid. 87.

91 Ibid. 73.

92 Ibid. 72.

131

Endnotes

93 Eric Lott has argued, for example, that because the minstrel form originated and thrived in a racist, slave-holding society, scholars have assumed that its sole purpose was the creation and perpetuation of demeaning characterizations of African Americans. However, in his analysis, the racist content of the sketches and songs is exposed as not nearly so absolute as the hideous blackface mask seems to suggest.

94 Op. cit. 90.

95 Ibid. 78, 76.

96 Constance Rourke to Bernard DeVoto, 25 September 1931, Bernard DeVoto papers.

97 Op. cit. 74.

98 Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” 54-55. The article first ran in the Partisan Review in 1958.

99 Op. cit. 93.

100 Ibid. 126.

101 Ibid. 187.

102 Ibid. 130, 180.

103 Ibid. 131.

104 Ibid. 235-236.

105 The reference to the ALA list comes from an undated letter from Constance Rourke to Constance Lindsay Skinner in the Constance Lindsay Skinner collection at the New York Public Library. In it, Rourke writes, “I was pleased that American Humor got on the ALA list of the notable 50 for 1931. It’s sometimes a practical honor.” On 28 July 1933, Rourke wrote to Skinner: “I’m pleased that “American Humor” is on the list of the best books of the century by American women—and entirely astonished. I’ve had a couple of letters but haven’t seen the list.” Valerie Hawkins of the American Library Association confirms the 1931 list: it was run in Booklist magazine. I have been unable to confirm the second listing.

106 Constance Rourke to Bernard DeVoto, 29 March 1931, Bernard DeVoto collection.

107 Blair, “American Humor,” 340-343.

108 Rourke, “Miss Rourke Replies to Mr. Blair,” 207-211.

132

Endnotes

109 Ibid. 210.

110 Lewis Mumford, “The Emergence of a Past,” 19.

133

CHAPTER 4

GILBERT SELDES on AMERICAN PERFORMANCE, 1893-1931

4.1 Introduction

Gilbert Seldes was born on January 3, 1893, in Alliance, New Jersey. The town

was established as a utopian farm colony, and Seldes’ father, George, was a central figure within it. Like Rourke, Seldes lost a parent at three years old: his mother, Anna, died in

1896. Like Rourke, he grew up in the thrall of his surviving parent’s powerful

personality. And as Rourke’s mother had rejected her religious upbringing, so too did

Seldes’ father. A Russian Jew by birth, George Sergius Seldes was an adamant

freethinker. Though Gilbert himself remained basically atheistic all his life, his Jewish

lineage would become, from time to time, the topic of critique amongst his fellow

writers.

Although Gilbert assimilated his father’s religious philosophy (or lack thereof), he

was far less enamored of his politics. The colony at Alliance was without electricity,

telephone, bathrooms, and running water. It was peopled with anarchists, faddists, and

cranks. According to Michael Kammen, Seldes’ impeccable biographer, the time Seldes

spent in rural New Jersey digging potatoes with utopians left him with “a penchant for

moderation, a mistrust of wild-eyed idealism, and an appreciation for what he later called 134

Illustration 4.1

Portrait of Gilbert Vivian Seldes, 1934

From the collection of Marian Seldes Reprinted in Michael Kammen, The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States

135

‘humane capitalism.’ Unlike many of his generation, socialism never attracted Seldes.”1

At the same time, Seldes found something poignant in the idealism of such places. In a

1923 review of H.G. Wells’ Men Like Gods, itself an essay in utopianism, Seldes observed, “The truth about Utopias is that they are all 110-proof. For all of our arguments that they won’t work, break on the rock of the Utopian character which can make them work; and all our arguments that they are silly or trivial or inhuman are shattered by the direct rebuttal that the arguments only prove how much we are in need of Utopia.”2

Seldes was not disappointed, then, to move to Philadelphia, where he attended its prestigious Central High School. Nor was he surprised when the colony at Alliance began to disintegrate, leaving his father to work as a pharmacist and drugstore proprietor in

Philadelphia and, later, in Pittsburgh. Much later, in 1929, Seldes would write a novel,

Wings of the Eagle, which would tell the story of the creation and failure of “Unity,” a utopian farm colony much like his father’s own.

When Seldes entered Harvard University on scholarship in 1910 (the same year

Rourke began teaching at Vassar), his interests were turned toward literature, as he studied British and American writers. However, more important than the classes he took were the people he befriended. In a 1922 article commissioned by H.L. Mencken for a series on the subject of “Higher Learning in America,” Seldes said that he associated with a wide variety of men during his time at Harvard:

Of the 609 men in my class I know a dozen by their first names, four of whom I knew before entering college; I know about five times that number of men who were in college in my time far better than I do even that dozen…. I knew chiefly those who attracted and interested me; to wit, in part: two poets, one millionaire man about town, one dilettante, one aesthete, the members of the dramatic club, the successive staffs of one college periodical, three Phi Beta Kappa men, two H

136

men, the members of the Socialist club and their chief enemies, two law students, several editors of the Lampoon, three uplifters, a debater, a debauché, a dramatist.3

Amongst this motley crew were: Scofield Thayer and James Sibley Watson, who later

employed Seldes at The Dial; ee cummings; John Dos Passos; and Harold Stearns. For

Seldes, the wide variety of acquaintances, and their varied tastes and politics, was by far

more significant that the coursework he undertook. In the same article, Seldes dismissed

what today we’d call the “networking” aspect of his college days: “The only important

thing to me about being at Harvard is that it actually encourages an interest in the

activities of civilized human beings.” However, when considered in conjunction with

Rourke’s equally privileged education at Vassar, the professional connections Seldes

made at Harvard considerably smoothed his way in the world of writing. In fact, in the

spring of his senior year, Seldes wrote to his cousin, Judith Randorf, that he had been

offered the opportunity to run a periodical when he was ready to assume “complete

editorial control—I probably won’t be reading until 1920—but the offer, with finances,

will be just as good then.”4 Michael Kammen theorizes that this “paper” might have been

The Dial, where Seldes became managing editor in 1920; even if it was not, however, the

notion that Seldes could have had such career security placed before him is radically

divergent from the limited career opportunities that Rourke faced. And so, immediately following his graduation in 1914, despite having no prior training in the field, Seldes went to work for the Philadelphia Evening Ledger as their music critic.

137

4.2 Early journalistic work, 1916-1924

With the dawning of World War I, the Philadelphia Evening Ledger sent Gilbert

Seldes, their music critic, to London in 1916. While there, he also served as a

correspondent for the Boston Evening Transcript, The Forum, Boston’s Living Age, and

London’s The New Statesman. He made a few forays to the battle fronts of World War I.

However, the bulk of Seldes’ work was directed towards reporting on British culture for an American audience and on American culture for a British audience. In this time,

Seldes assumed a role of cultural interpreter and translator. In 1919, Mencken would assert, through The American Language, that American culture was so distinct from

British as to have necessitated its own vernacular. In 1916 and 1917, Seldes was putting this distinction into action as he served as a critical bridge between the two cultures.

During this time abroad, however, Seldes also gained the expatriate’s perspective on his home country. For Seldes, this took the form of “frightful patriot[ism]. I can’t stay abroad very long,” he wrote, “because I feel myself drifting away from any sympathy with the

U.S. That’s fatal.”5 In many ways, Seldes’ overarching concerns in the rest of his career

were determined by this time abroad with its focus on cultural issues in particular.

But Seldes was also caught up in the war effort. Both he and his activist brother

George tried to enlist when the draft did not pick them up quickly, and Gilbert eventually reached the level of sergeant during her service at Camp Lee in the deep South. He also wrote his first book, released on April 6, 1917, on the subject of the war: The United

States and the War. The book, as he wrote to his cousin was not just a polemic to draw the country into the war to end war; rather, it was his attempt to “analyse the feelings of the U.S., to trace them back to their sources in the history and habits of the country, and 138

to explain why things are as they are, how they can become different.”6 Again, Seldes is

interested in interpreting America to itself. Through this book, and his work as a

journalist abroad, Seldes had achieved clarity about his career path: he would be a

freelance writer. He was twenty four. Though he came to his decision sooner than Rourke

at thirty, he had in mind a similar goal of mixing criticism and fictive writing.

With the war’s end, Seldes returned to the States. From 1918 to 1919, L’Echo de

Paris became part of the stable of journals for which he worked. He also began to write

some reviews for The Dial, and became an associate editor at Collier’s Weekly.7 Then, in

1920, Seldes was taken on as a second associate editor for The Dial, under Scofield

Thayer, his Harvard friend who purchased the publication with James Sibley Watson in

1919. Seldes became managing editor shortly thereafter. It was at The Dial that Seldes began to make his name as a critic, and where he began to put roots down in New York, his adoptive home.

The Dial had itself adopted New York as its home. It had been founded by

Francis Browne in 1880, in Gilded Age Chicago. Its title, however, was a reference to a quarterly of the same name that ran between 1840 and 1844 in Boston as an organ of transcendental philosophy under the leadership of Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo

Emerson. Browne’s iteration was to be “A Semi-Monthly Journal of Literary Criticism,

Discussion, and Information.”8 During its variegated lifetime, the politics and tastes of

the Dial would fluctuate, based on editorial interest. In the nineteenth century, the

publication published mainstream genteel writers, but by the early twentieth century, it

would prefer avant-garde work.

139

In 1916, the journal shifted to the ownership of Martyn Johnson, who merged the

Dial with his own publication, the Trimmed Lamp. Under Johnson’s tenure, the Dial

featured major figures like James Sibley Watson, Paul Rosenfeld, and Randolph Bourne.

When it absorbed the Seven Arts, it took on Van Wyck Brooks as one of its contributing

editors. It also regularly published many of the Seven Arts’ stable of writers: D.H.

Lawrence, Robert Frost, Sherwood Anderson, and Eugene O’Neill. Despite this rich

literary vein, the Dial was, at the time, more similar to the Nation than to a purely literary

magazine, publishing articles on politics and society alongside new poems and stories.

The Dial moved its headquarters to Greenwich Village in New York in July 1918.

Under internal pressure for transformation, in November of 1919 the Dial published an

announcement of termination of the editor and the entire editorial staff. James Sibley

Watson was its new owner and Scofield Thayer its new editor. They declared in April

1920 that the Dial “cannot be everything to everybody. It is non-political and has no

message for the million.” The goal of the Dial became, in keeping with Randolph

Bourne’s call for “transnationalism,” the publication of the best creative and critical

works from the United States and Europe in order to transform American culture. It published Djuna Barnes, John Dos Passos, Marianne Moore, William Butler Yeats. In

1922, it published T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” Ezra Pound’s “Cantos,” and Thomas

Mann’s Death in Venice. It also published two stories by Constance Mayfield Rourke. 9

The Dial became, in key ways, a voice of modernism, “widely considered the finest

American journal of literature and the arts.”10 And the modernism that the Dial

promoted was, in large measure, European in tone.

140

Seldes, as managing editor, was firmly in the middle of this ferment. As he served

as a cultural bridge between the United States and Europe during World War I, so during

his time at the Dial did Seldes stretch between literati on either side of the Atlantic. He

regularly corresponded with Yeats, Picasso, Lawrence, Pound, Eliot, and H.G. Wells.

And he regularly made connections for them, and various lesser known writers, with his

magazine and others. For example, even though Seldes was not H.L. Mencken’s biggest

fan (as we shall see), he tried to connect writers with Mencken’s influential magazine, the

Smart Set. In July 1922, Seldes wrote to Mencken about an author identified only as

“Wright:”

My dear Mencken: I do not know whether Wright has done anything for you before. He has written for us and for The Freeman and I recommend him to your most thoughtful consideration. Perhaps you would be good enough to return it to me if you cannot use it. His own address is on the back of the last page.

In 1923, Seldes recruited Mencken himself as a reviewer for the Dial, of Thomas Beer’s book on Stephen Crane. Later that year, he recommended a reviewer to Mencken:

Lisle Bell has been writing brief reviews for us ever since I remember, and some of the wisest and snappiest that have appeared in The Dial are his work. In his misguided enthusiasm for The Dial he seems to think that these facts ought to commend him to you and on the whole I think he is right.11

The tone of these missives to Mencken suggest some of the sheer delight Seldes took in

his work at the Dial. They also indicate the ferment of the time, when there was constant

(if sometimes heated) exchange between publications and authors, and lots and lots of

work to go around for young intellectuals.

141

In fact, there was often more work to go around than writers to take it on. Seldes

often contributed as many as four articles to a given issue of the Dial. In November 1922,

he provided one under his own name, one each under pseudonyms Vivian Shaw and

Sebastian Cauliflower, and the last anonymously.12 In 1920, at 27 years old, Seldes began to work as the theatre critic for Dial. In this capacity, he would write seventy three

“The Theatre” columns between 1920 and 1929, on top of those he wrote on specific

performers, plays, or styles in the Dial and in other publications. His “The Theatre”

column marked the beginning of what would become a lifelong interest in writing about

the theatre. It would also mark the beginning of his articulation of an American

modernism anchored in the popular performing arts.

Like many theatre critics and practitioners of the time, Seldes was interested in

the transformative goals of the art theatre movement. Yet, he was also, already, skeptical of many of its claims of highbrow superiority. For example, in his March 1920 “The

Theatre” column, Seldes reviewed a production of Tolstoy’s Power of Darkness, observing that “The practitioners of the new art of stage settings are sometimes given to demand absolute praise or blame and to belittle the spectator’s appreciation of the set in relation to the play.”13 He, like many of the new scenographers he would critique, was

frustrated with the failure of acting to keep pace with the innovations of design. In an

analysis of Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon, he declared, “What do we want of our

actors? We want beauty and we want ecstasy, and we are not getting much of either.” 14

So, lots of what Seldes was writing in his “The Theatre” columns of the early 1920s resonated with the calls to “make it new” of the Provincetown Players or the Washington

Square Players. But his solution to the problem differed radically from the art theatre’s. 142

In May 1920, for example, he called on the American theatre to look to the

“demoniac vitality” of Al Jolson.15 Seldes argued that Jolson, especially in his blackface

persona, possessed a unique ability to control and to thrill an audience. Jolson’s full-

throttle performances were, Seldes wrote, “electric.” Yet, behind their seeming exhaustive output, they were also models of restraint: Jolson skillfully managed his technique. His work was created as pure entertainment, but in its execution, it attained the level of art.

Seldes’ assessment of Jolson’s work and its significance would appear again in his first major book, Seven Lively Arts (1924). But as far back as 1920 Seldes’ predilection for the techniques, skills, styles, and joys of the popular stage was informing his vision for what the art stage might become. Similarly, in July 1920, he noted “Our regular stage has so little of fantasy; its nearest approach is through extravaganza, which is not the same thing.” The current season, he complained was a “totally unnecessary sacrifice on the altar of realism.”16 In this critique, the germinal form of his idea of the

theatre can be deduced: the American stage needed fantasy, not realism. And popular

performance knew how to achieve it.

In April 1922, Vanity Fair magazine published an index to current critical opinion

in an article entitled “The New Order of Critical Values.” Ten “modern critics of

America” were selected for inclusion: Heywood Broun, Henry McBride, H.L. Mencken,

George Jean Nathan, Burton Rascoe, Raul Rosenfeld, Deems Taylor, Edmund Wilson,

Willard Huntington Wright, and Gilbert Seldes. By simple fact of his inclusion in the ten

it’s clear that Seldes had “arrived” as a major critical figure. But the information on taste

and preference disclosed in the piece is perplexing. The editors of Vanity Fair asked each 143

of their ten critics to rank a list of about 250 figures from “the whole field of life and thought” on a scale from -25 (“utter condemnation”) to +25 (“complete approval”).

Some, but not all, of the critics asked to do the evaluating, including Mencken and

Nathan, were themselves included on the list. The results of the free-for-all were printed as a matrix in Vanity Fair, so that each critic’s scores could be compared to those of his fellows.

The figures included for evaluation ranged from Homer, Erasmus, Bach, and

Ibsen to John Barrymore, Babe Ruth, Fanny Brice, and Billy Sunday. The matrix provides some amusing overlaps: Krazy Kat and Samuel Johnson both come out with an average critical score of 7.6. Douglas Fairbanks and Lenin both averaged 0. But it tells the reader significantly more about the values of the evaluators than the status of the evaluatees. Seldes was on the whole more positively disposed towards pop culture figures than most of the other critics. But he was not outrageously more favorable in his opinions. He diverged from Mencken, for example, in significant way only on the matter of major German figures. Bach got +25 from Mencken and 0 from Seldes, for example.

And they agreed wholeheartedly on Mencken himself, both rating him a 5. The difference was largely in the matter of degree: a quick scan down the matrix shows pugnacious

Mencken doling out primarily the extremes of -25, +25 and 0. Seldes was more measured in his evaluations, with few +25 or -25 rankings given, and a range of numbers in between.17

The next month, in May 1922, Bookman followed up on Vanity Fair’s article with its own “Spring Elections on Mount Olympus.” The same list of 250 names to be evaluated was given by Bookman to nine more critics it identified as the “centre” of 144

American critical opinion: Ernest Boyd, Henry Seidel Canby, Floyd Dell, John Farrar,

Llewellyn Jones, Ludwig Lewisohn, John Macy, Louis Untermeyer, and Carl Van

Doren.18 In the introductory matter to Bookman’s matrix, the predilections of the ten

“liberal” critics from the Vanity Fair round-up were dissected. H.L. Mencken was

pronounced a “hardened Germanophile.” George Jean Nathan was “a man bored,

skeptical, and blasé” who “hates a good deed shining in a naughty world.” And Gilbert

Seldes was criticized for the something “abnormal about his conception of the most

significant genius of the past three thousand years being expressed in Henry James,

Nietzsche, Charlie Chaplin, and Krazy Kat.”19

The assessments, though playful, were incisive. Seldes was increasingly working

to bridge high art and low entertainments in his critical work. In fact, he did enjoy Henry

James, Nietzsche, Charlie Chaplin, and Krazy Kat. And he believed that each, despite

their variances in content, form, or style, deserved serious critical attention. Bookman’s

implication that there was something “abnormal” in the belief that they might together be

considered “significant genius” was precisely the sort of highbrow critical condescension

that Seldes was pushing against. For example, as Seldes continued to review mainly the

art theatre for the Dial, he insistently added tags at the end of his essays like “The highest

moment of the month for your correspondent was when he heard Mr. Al Jolson sing

Swanee. That remains.”20

It is crucial to understand that Seldes was not interested in uplifting or purifying

the American popular theatre. Nor did he want to label it as “art” in order to give it

legitimacy. Rather, he wanted it to be valued on its own terms, for the particularly vibrant

Americanness it exuded. In an extended article for the Dial on vaudeville, he pointed out 145

approvingly that “vaudeville has refused to be uplifted and to reform itself.” It maintained

an “inclusiveness” and a “freedom” that was “ peculiarly and brilliantly its own.”

American vaudeville, that is, was a hybrid and a polyglot form. It drew together disparate performances and disparate audiences. It was sometimes vulgar, often peculiar, but never dull. “The moral proposal I make,” Seldes concluded, “is that our critics leave it alone.”21

In fact, in his critical work in the early 1920s, Seldes began to craft an inclusive approach

to American culture that would animate his work for the rest of his career.

During these years, Seldes was working at an almost unimaginable clip. In

addition to his work for the Dial, Seldes had been writing regularly for Van Wyck

Brooks’ Freeman and for Vanity Fair. It was in the Vanity Fair articles, especially, that

Seldes had begun to take on a different kind of critical voice. Vanity Fair was a “minor

literary magazine” in comparison with the likes of the Dial. That is, it did not place such

a heavy premium on modernist writing. Rather, it “reflected the personality of its suave

and urbane editor, Frank Crowninshield.”22 In fact, it was one of a handful of “smart”

magazines aimed at urban (generally male) sophisticates who relished equally the

devastating wit of Dorothy Parker, a rollicking night on the town, a good suit of clothes,

and an essay on politics. Its circulation in 1920 was a healthy 90,000.23 In its pages,

Seldes began to write in earnest about popular culture. Most of the articles would find

their way, in one form or another, into Seldes’ first major book, Seven Lively Arts.

According to Kammen, it was in this writing on popular entertainment Seldes

“sensed that he was investing himself in a subject that might give him distinctive identity

as a critic” in much the same way that Rourke sensed that her work on folk culture was

determining hers.24 But Seldes was fatigued and found he had little time to devote to 146

thinking about his work in any context beyond the next deadline. And so he applied to,

and was accepted for, a stay at the MacDowell Colony, an artists’ retreat in New

Hampshire.

4.3 At MacDowell

Seldes made his first retreat to MacDowell in 1921; he followed this quickly with

his second in 1922. That year, Constance Rourke was also in residence. Rourke was at

the Colony “for part of the summer,” but continued her stay (there and at the homes of

friends on the east cost) to an eventual five consecutive months. For his part, Seldes had

“hoped to spend time there during the summer of 1922, but because he could not get

away from The Dial his brief sojourn was delayed until mid-September.”25

Both critics were in the early stages of their careers; both were working out the material for their first major works. Although neither of them left a record of their interaction during their time at the Colony, the place had a reputation for rich conversation and lasting friendships. It seems impossible that they did not discuss their writing, projects, and their strikingly similar ideas on aspects of American society and culture, for their time there overlapped by at least a month.26

What did Rourke and Seldes discuss after the work day was through? They had

published in the same magazines, and Seldes had selected Rourke’s short stories for

inclusion in the Dial and the Dial anthology of short stories. Both figures were building a

reputation as critics with a mission. Their perspectives on American culture were in

alignment. Both saw much to argue against in the vociferous and influential writings of

Brooks and Mencken. The projects they were working on reached into the same subject 147

area. Rourke was deeply engaged in writing Trumpets of Jubilee (which Seldes would

later review warmly and acknowledge directly as he delved into the exact same subject

matter in the coming years). Seldes was at the Colony to work on the germ of Seven

Lively Arts. Surely Rourke would have been fascinated by his approach. Their moment of

overlap came at a point of key career transition for each.

On departing the Colony, in the fall of 1922, Seldes made arrangements to travel

to Europe for nine months. While there, he planned to undertake four major projects.

First, at the behest of Henry Seidel Canby, he would work on creating a book for Harpers

out of the articles in popular culture he had been writing. Second, he would look for new

authors for The Dial (and remain on payroll). Third, he would look for new European

plays for the Theatre Guild (and earn some money there, too). Finally, he would get some

rest. He sailed in January 1923.27

Out of his retreats, Gilbert Seldes burst into creative life. Between 1924 and 1931, a space of seven years, Seldes wrote two plays (Wisecrackers, 1925 and Love of Two

Oranges, 1931), one adaptation (Lysistrata, 1930), and two novels (Square Emerald,

1927 and Wings of the Eagle, 1929). He translated several plays (Plays of the Moscow

Art Theatre Musical Studio, 1925). And he published four books (Seven Lively Arts,

1924, Stammering Century, 1928, An Hour with the Movies and the Talkies, 1929, and

The Future of Drinking, 1930).

Seldes also produced a vast quantity of journalistic writing. Between 1926 and

1930, he wrote dramatic criticism regularly for the New York Graphic. Starting in 1931, he penned five columns per week under the title “True to Type” for the New York

Evening Journal. And on top of all this, in the same span of seven years, he wrote no 148

fewer than 285 articles and reviews for the Dial, Saturday Evening Post, Vanity Fair,

Bookman, Freeman, Nation, New Yorker, Harper’s, New Republic, and Criterion. He even reviewed his own pseudonymous detective novel, Victory Murders (and not

altogether positively) in the September 1927 Bookman.28

Between 1924 and 1931, Gilbert Seldes was a man on a mission, spreading the

gospel of the popular arts to as wide an audience as he could reach. He moved freely and

purposefully from the Dial’s highbrow aestheticism to the Saturday Evening Post’s

unmatchable popularity, from the miniscule circulation of T.S. Eliot’s America-averse

Criterion to the massive audience of Bernard McFadden’s unabashedly pulpy New York

Graphic, and back again. He analyzed The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with the same perspicuity as he examined The Kid, invoked Pablo Picasso’s cubism and George

Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” comics in the same breath, and put the Ziegfeld Follies on equal footing with the Theatre Guild. He wrote history, drama, journalism, propaganda, and, for his own pleasure, fiction. In every forum, his subject matter or argumentation called for serious attention to be paid to the popular arts. He was iconoclastic and ubiquitous. He was also unfocused: his rangy productivity (coupled with his choice of subject matter) practically begged for the charge of dilettantism to be leveled against it. In the midst of this maelstrom, Seldes created his most influential work, Seven Lively Arts (1924), which would establish his critical credo for the decades to come.

149

4.4 Seven Lively Arts

In 1922, Gilbert Seldes’ reputation as a critic in the popular arts was established

enough that he was commissioned by Frank Crowninshield and Edmund Wilson to write a series of essays on the popular arts for Vanity Fair. That same year, Henry Seidel

Canby, the editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, commissioned Seldes to write a

book on the popular arts for Harpers. The shape of that book was clear in Seldes’ mind by

November 3, 1922, shortly after his tenure at the MacDowell Colony (and perhaps

because of his respite there). He wrote of his plan to Canby:

The idea of my book is a series of essays on The Seven Lively Arts—among them, and the number need not be exactly seven—will be Slapstick Moving Pictures Comic Strips Revues Musical Comedy Colyums29 Slang Humour Popular Songs Vaudeville and such things. There will also be at lease one article on the admittedly “supreme” people, such as Chaplin, Jolson, Brice, in which the quality of supremacy will be analyzed. In each of those I try to characterize the quality of the art and to do something with its more notable practitioners. Some are written or will be written around one outstanding figure, some on the general practice involved. In addition there will be an essay to be published in the middle or toward the end of the book, showing the relation of the minor or lively arts to the major arts; and further, there will be two or three pieces dealing with the pretentious fake which passes for high art and which I shall distinguish only as bogus art— classical dancing and probably grand opera. These are the subjects. Behind them is one general idea to which I propose not to devote an essay, namely an examination of the genteel tradition, as Mr. Santayana calls it, in the way Americans assume that which is serious and pretentious is by nature high art and that which is simple and cheap cannot possibly have any artistic value. That is, I propose the book to have a sound and entirely unobtrusive critical basis.30

150

The Seven Lively Arts, published in April 1924, closely follows Seldes’ original outline.

However, his desire to construct the book with a “sound” but “entirely unobtrusive

critical basis” would hamper its efficacy.

Seldes famously claimed, in the preface to the first edition, that he had composed

the book, whilst in France, from memory, with no notes, clippings, or books at hand. This

is, it seems, essentially true. However, of the twenty two chapters in The Seven Lively

Arts, eighteen were previously published between May 1922 and January 1924 in their

entirety, with only minor revisions for their reincarnation in the book.31 These include

full articles from the Dial as well as the majority of his commissioned series on the popular arts for Vanity Fair. Seldes double-dipped: using the same material, he satisfied his contract to Harpers for the book, as well as fulfilled his commission from

Crowninshield at Vanity Fair for a series of articles.32 The sometimes disjointed and

uneven quality of the writing in the book makes sense when one considers the fact that its

contents were composed as discreet essays. And by having these articles released in the

Dial and Vanity Fair before publication of Seven Lively Arts, Seldes publicly laid the

critical groundwork for his coming book. At the same time, he established his reputation

as an iconoclastic expert in the material in the months just prior to the book’s release. He both cleared the field and established his preeminence within it.

The title Seven Lively Arts is a playful reference to the classical “seven arts.”

Critic J.G. Hunecker had already played on the phrase as the “seven deadly arts,” which he applied to poorly crafted versions of the classical seven. For his part, Seldes never

pretended that he had exactly seven popular arts in mind: “There were those who thought

(correctly) that you couldn’t find seven and there were those who felt (stuffily) that the 151

seven were not arts.” Seldes wasn’t counting; he was more interested in shaking up the hallowed seven by introducing them to their lively counterparts. In that respect, the title was not playful at all.

The coinage caught on; it has since become a permanent part of American parlance. Seldes himself was well aware that, sometimes, “the history of The 7 Lively

Arts is largely the history of its title.” In fact, it seeped out into the general culture at large:

Five radio programs, two magazine departments, and other enterprises used the name (the last try was for a charm bracelet)—and in most cases the title was abandoned when I muttered something a bout using it myself, which I did in Esquire and elsewhere. Some years later Billy Rose bought the title for a revue and then gave it back to me. In 1956 the Columbia Broadcasting System leased the title, without reference to the book, for a television program.33

The phrase filled a gap in the language, providing an umbrella term that is still useful today.

Beyond the popularity of the title, critical response to the book was mixed. Early reviews were quite positive, in a generic recognition of the fun inherent in Seldes’ book.

But two lines of attack against the book stand out as both incisive and illuminating. The first comes from Ernest Boyd at the Independent. Seldes’ book was little more than

“aesthetic vaporing,” Boyd yawned.

[It] turns out to be nothing more revolutionary than the periodical discovery that there are virtues in vaudeville undreamt of in the philosophy of those who restrict their pleasures to symphony concerts and classical drama. The normal critic of diversified and civilized tastes has always taken these things in his stride, feeling no compulsion to explain himself, beyond the fact that performances of genuine excellence, whether in vaudeville, musical comedy or opera, must be the work of genuine artists, and deserving of comment for that reason.34

152

Boyd waved away the book as a simple compendium of appreciations of popular

performance written by a slightly immature and overzealous critic.

The other line of attack comes from Edmund Wilson, the Vanity Fair

commissioner of the original series of articles and Seldes’ friend. The review was

presented in the pages of the Dial, Seldes’ home turf. In it, Wilson pointed out Seldes’

tendency to hyperbole: “In his most ecstatic moments he is given to making extravagant

claims for his heroes—as when he asserts that Herriman and Charlie Chaplin are the only

two ‘great artists’ in America.” But unlike Boyd, Wilson focused his review on Seldes’

vision of the lively arts as intrinsic to American culture. And though Wilson praised the

fact that Seldes accomplished a “feat of some daring in bringing [the popular arts] within the field of criticism,” he disagreed in significant measure with Seldes’ basic belief that those popular arts constituted an American artistic lineage. Wilson argued that America

has “no homogeneous culture…. We have a whole race that arrives at maturity with

practically nothing that can be called genuine contact with the classic Anglo-American

culture which is all we have for a heritage.” Therefore, Wilson continued, those with

artistic ability within such a culture-starved race, “speaking no other language but the

common slang” are “obliged to turn their gifts to account in the practice of some slap-

stick form of entertainment.” They may achieve “extraordinary brilliance,” but their work

remains, Wilson implies, derivative and not quite legitimate.35

Though Boyd and Wilson came at their critique of Seldes’ book from differing perspectives, they together underscore the prime assumption about American culture that

Seldes sought to undo. Neither Boyd nor Wilson were willing to grant popular American entertainment the status of the full flowering of American culture. Boyd was right to note 153

that critics before Seldes had turned their attention, at least periodically, to the popular

arts. However, Seldes’ purpose in Seven Lively extended beyond demanding that critics

address, and enjoy, popular and elite art forms. And Wilson was correct in noting that

popular performers were, often, brilliant. But Seldes wanted to push critical

understanding of such performers beyond acknowledgment of their artistry. He wanted,

in short, to demonstrate how the popular performers that critics have enjoyed, and

sometimes written about, were in the process of creating a distinctly American, and a

distinctly modern, art and, therefore, culture.

But it must be admitted that, sometimes, Seldes does overdo it in Seven Lively. At

points, the writing has a touch of the breathless guidebook about it. Heavy on description

and full of examples, the book feels addressed to an audience that is unfamiliar with the

performer described (a presumption of ignorance on Seldes’ part that explains some of

the rankling of critics like Boyd). Yet, as Edmund Wilson later wrote of Seldes in 1926,

the descriptive passages are evocative and well-constructed: “In my opinion, he is seen at

his best in passages of straight description of some movie or vaudeville act which has

aroused his imagination.”36 Ultimately, the point Seldes is straining to make about

American culture is difficult to discern through the book’s disjointed structure, a problem which stems from its origination as discrete articles.

The biggest problem, however, comes down to Seldes’ first sense of the book’s organization, as cited earlier. It should have, he wrote, “a sound and entirely unobtrusive

critical basis” to which he would not “devote an essay.” This meant that his basic

argument ran the risk of getting swamped beneath a tidal wave of detail. And though

Seldes was aware, by the time he composed a revised preface to the book in 1957, that 154

the book “did not sufficiently name an enemy.” 37 Certainly, as he noted in his The Public

Arts (1956), he had pushed too hard in some directions and not hard enough in others:

I know that I wanted to be effective, I wanted to prove my points, and I probably exaggerated the indifference of some intellectuals and the hostility of others, as if there had been a conspiracy of silence which I had to break into. Of one thing I then felt certain: my enemies were not the college professors and the pedants; they were the bright young generation ready to accept any novelty in the arts provided it was not native to America and not popular among the lowbrows.38

Despite this, it is possible to pull Seldes’ buried argumentative framework to the foreground. In doing to, the following five key elements of his view of the interrelation of

American culture and performance emerge.

1. Contra Brooks and Mencken, America has a culture in its popular

entertainments, which rise to the level of art. Because the popular arts

constitute America’s culture, there is no shame in enjoying them.

2. The popular arts, because they are art, are not in conflict with the classical

arts. Rather, both are in opposition to what Seldes calls the faux bon or

“arty.”

3. Unlike a folk culture, which Seldes does not always believe America has,

the popular arts provide the basis for future development of American art.

They constitute a kind of “useable present.”

4. At their best, the popular arts evince an impeccable and accomplished

technique, as well as a “fantastic” or “demoniac” aesthetic that leaps

beyond realism.

5. Undergirding, and shadowing, this set of arguments is an implied fifth

idea. Race and ethnicity—particularly, for Seldes, the African American

155

and the Jew—are essential to any evaluation of both the lively arts and

American culture itself. Seldes approach to this point of view is

complicated enough to warrant examining it on its own.

1. Contra Brooks and Mencken, America has a culture in its popular

entertainments, which rise to the level of Art. Because the popular arts constitute

America’s culture, there is no shame in enjoying them.

This argument is the bedrock of the motivation behind the entire book. First,

Seldes asserts that popular entertainments provide the essential qualities of American culture and that these entertainments are art. For example, in “Toujours Jazz,” the first of three articles for the Dial that would reappear in Seven Lively Arts, Seldes offers a vibrant

definition of jazz that hinges on its Americanness:

Jazz is a type of music grown out of ragtime and still ragtime in its essence; it is also a method of production and as such an orchestral development; and finally it is the symbol, or the byword, for a great many elements in the spirit of the time— as far as America is concerned it is actually our characteristic expression.39

By naming jazz as America’s “characteristic expression,” Seldes establishes a popular

entertainment as a key element of an American culture. But it is also, as he defends later

in the article, art.

I have always used the word art in connexion [sic]with jazz and jazzy things; if any one imagines that the word is belittled thereby and can no longer be adequate to the dignity of Leonardo or Shakespeare, I am sorry…. I suggest that people do what they please about the gay arts, about jazz; that they do it with discrimination and without worrying whether it is noble or not, or good form, or intellectually right. I am fairly certain that if they are ever actually to see Picasso it will be because they have acquired the habit of seeing without arriere-pensee, because they will know what the pleasure is that a work of art can give, even if it be jazz art.40

156

Jazz (good jazz, that is) is art, and learning to take pleasure in art of whatever sort only

enhances one’s ability to apprehend art more broadly. Though highbrow critics might

imply otherwise, there is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying jazz. Thus, in his analysis

of the form, Seldes laid out, in miniature, the entirety of his argument on popular art as

American culture.

In an article in Vanity Fair that ran as Seven Lively Arts was hitting the

bookstores, Seldes underscored the right of the American audience to choose to enjoy

what their culture has created:

What I am suggesting is not an excuse for liking jazz or the slang of Ring Lardner, or the comic strip or Fannie [sic] Brice; I am suggesting a clean conscience and an open mind in regard to them. If you need an excuse, you are probably too far gone to be helped, and are exactly in the situation of those who care nothing for symphony concerts, but go because they are socially correct. Those who can and do like the Seven Lively Arts need only throw out of the window the inherited social prejudices against them—and they will discover that these arts are capable of giving actual pleasure, of a singularly attractive kind.41

Clearly, pleasure is a key word of approbation for Seldes. The lively arts give pleasure, good art gives pleasure; it is false art only that bores and benumbs.

The “social prejudices” that the American audience had “inherited” had been bequeathed to them by critics like H.L. Mencken and Van Wyck Brooks. They, and their compatriots, not only doubted the capacity of American culture to produce art, but they themselves were so pessimistic, Seldes declares, that they could not enjoy the work around them. In an essay for T.S. Eliot’s Criterion, Seldes noted:

Brooks is a moralist without any profound aesthetic pleasure, and is a good parallel to Mencken, a moralist in a rather vulgar Nietzschean mode, who equally lacks aesthetic interests and has even less aesthetic perceptions. Where Brooks seeks a good life, Mencken derides a stupid State; they have both been pioneers after whom hundreds of young men have followed, some to definite aesthetic ends. That is the measure of their importance; it is remarkable that Brooks with 157

his passion for the creative life should be so shut off from enjoying it and that Mencken, so homogeneous, so undistracted from wayward impulses, should be so careless of it.42

Pleasure itself, the exuberant joy that popular entertainments provided, was not, for

Seldes, suspect. Rather, the astringent moralism that the ironically anti-Puritan critics like

Brooks and Mencken embodied stunted the development of American culture along its native lines.

Such critics routinely compared American culture to European culture and found the former lacking, for precisely the qualities that its popular entertainments embodied. It was too rough, too vulgar, too comic. Yet Seldes declared that these popular entertainments were not only America’s culture, but America’s modern culture. The fact that this American modernism might not look like European modernism did not perturb

Seldes. He noted that there was “an explosion of creativity” throughout both continents after World War I: “The Keynes-Strachey axis in London, the Joyce-Pound-Eliot international, Dada in Paris, Der Sturm in Berlin which ultimately created Caligari, were parallel manifestations. Where should the lightning strike in the United States,” he asked,

“if not where the native art flourished?”43 Where, that is, except in its popular entertainments?

2. The popular arts, because they are art, are not in conflict with the classical arts.

Rather, both are in opposition to what Seldes calls the faux bon or “arty.”

In “Before a Painting by Picasso,” the third article he provided the Dial and reproduced in Seven Lively, Seldes stressed the notion that the popular arts and modernist art are not opposed to each other; rather, both are opposed to bad art, false art, and fake 158

art. The title of the article flags its point. While examining a painting by Picasso, already at the time a darling of the modernists, Seldes saw a connection between great works of high art and great works of popular art. They stood on the same side of a battle he was attempting to frame: “there exists no such hostility between the two divisions of the arts which are honest—that the real opposition was between them, allied, and the polished fake.” He proceeds to take the “great arts” and the “minor arts” and tie them together, writing, “The characteristic of the great arts is high seriousness…. And the essence of the minor arts is high levity.” Both should stand against “solemnity which is not high, against ill-rendered profundity, against the shoddy and the dull.” Seldes here creates, most overtly, the manifesto which was his credo for the arts:

That there is no opposition between the great and the lively arts. That both are opposed in spirit to the middle or bogus arts. That the bogus arts are easier to appreciate, appeal to low and mixed emotions, and jeopardize the purity of both the great and minor arts. That the lively arts as they exist today are entertaining, interesting, and important. That with a few exceptions these same arts are more interesting to the adult cultivated intelligence than most of the things which pass for art in cultured society. That there exists a “genteel tradition” about the arts which has prevented any just appreciation of the popular arts, and that these have therefore missed the corrective criticism given to the serious arts, receiving instead only abuse. That therefore the pretentious intellectual is as much responsible as anyone for what is actually absurd and vulgar in the lively arts. That the simple practitioners and simple admirers of the lively arts being uncorrupted by the bogus preserve a sure instinct for what is artistic in America.44

It’s important to note that, in this distilled credo, Seldes continues to embrace a divide between “great” and “minor” or “lively” arts. In these formulations, he does distinguish between certain aspects of the traditionally divided “elite” and “popular” arts, between

159

Picasso and Chaplin. Yet, by allying them against the “bogus” arts, which is his

terminology for the “genteel,” he holds to some familiar distinctions while still realigning

them.

For example, in a companion listing to his philosophical manifesto, Seldes offers concrete examples of that which he believes is great or lively art and that which is merely a bogus counterfeit of either. Here he draws distinctions of quality within both the great arts and the lively arts. “If there were an Academy,” Seldes-as-Luther declares, “I should nail upon its doors the following beliefs:”

That Al Jolson is more interesting to the intelligent mind than John Barrymore and Fanny Brice than Ethel; That Ring Lardner and Mr. Dooley in their best work are more entertaining and more important than James B. Cabell and Joseph Hergesheimer in their best; That the daily comic strip of George Herriman (Krazy Kat) is easily the most amusing and fantastic and satisfactory work of art produced in America to-day; That Florenz Ziegfeld is a better producer than David Belasco; That one film by Mack Sennet or Charlie Chaplin is worth the entire oeuvre of Cecil de Mille; That Alexander’s Ragtime Band and I Love a Piano are musically and emotionally sounder pieces of work than Indian Love Lyrics and The Rosary; That the circus can be and often is more artistic than the Metropolitan Opera House in New York; That Irene Castle is worth all the pseudo-classic dancing ever seen on the American stage; and That the civic masque is not perceptibly superior to the Elks’ Parade in Atlantic City. Only about half of these are heresies, and I am quite ready to stand by them as I would stand by my opinion of Dean Swift or Picasso or Henry James or James Joyce or Johann Sebastian Bach.45

In this listing, Seldes sometimes juxtaposes two obvious extremes from high and low

culture, as he does the circus and the Metropolitan Opera. But mostly he draws

distinctions within the broad category of popular entertainment, asserting that Ziegfeld is

art and Belasco is bogus, or that Mack Sennet’s Keystone Kops films are art where the

160

Cecil B. DeMille’s film epics are bogus. In this way, Seldes asserts a distinction of

quality within popular entertainment that breaks along the “lively art” and “bogus” divide

he is establishing. And Seldes ties the quality works in popular entertainment into the

lineage of classical art like that of Swift and Bach, as well as into the lineage of

modernist art, like that of Picasso and Joyce, by asserting that he would “stand by them as

I would stand by my opinion” of the more traditional arts. Seldes does not, in short, make

the totalizing (and diminishing) move of inverting the highbrow/lowbrow divide. Rather,

he links together quality in both.

So, in “Before a Picture by Picasso,” Seldes took pains to make it clear that he did not believe that the popular arts were better than the traditional arts, nor did he have a desire to elevate one over the other. He addressed his argument to Van Wyck Brooks’

highbrow vs. lowbrow dichotomy, in an attempt to circumvent its unhelpful dominance:

And now a detour around two of the most disagreeable words in the language: high- and low-brow. Pretense about these words and what they signify makes all understanding of the lively arts impossible. The discomfort and envy which make these words vague, ambiguous, and contemptuous need not concern us; for they represent a real distinction, two separate ways of apprehending the world, as if it were palpable to one and visible to the other. In connection with the lively arts the distinction is clear and involves the third division, for the lively arts are created and admired chiefly by the class known as lowbrows, are patronized and, to an extent enjoyed, by the highbrows; and are treated as impostors and as contemptible vulgarisms by the middle class, those who invariably are ill at ease in the presence of great art until it has been approved by authority.46

However, rather than making a detour, Seldes has furthered what he clearly believes is a false divide. His rhetoric is unfortunately garbled here, for his point seems to be that the

words “highbrow” and “lowbrow” are class markers in a Marxist sense, put into practice

by the bourgeoisie. However, his definition of the “middle class” as “those who

invariably are ill at ease in the presence of great art until it has been approved by 161

authority” is an aesthetic, not an economic, critique: he is articulating a kind of Shavian

disgust with Philistines. (It’s not for nothing that one of Seldes’ nom de plumes was

“Vivian Shaw.”) Yet, as his career progressed, Seldes would evince a real affection for,

and a profound faith in, the American middle class. So it is unfortunate that Seldes seems to ally himself here with Mencken in a sweeping critique of mainstream Americans. In a

more indicative passage, Seldes states that the ideal road, “if one is going to live fully and not shut oneself away from half of civilized existence,” is to take delight in excellent examples of both “highbrow” art and “lowbrow” entertainment: “one must care for

both.”47

3. Unlike a folk culture, which Seldes does not always believe America has, the popular arts provide a contemporary basis for the future development of American art.

The terms are slippery, but in general, popular (or mass) culture has been juxtaposed to folk culture as far back as Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869)

or Edward Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871).48 Folk culture is usually considered to

consist of song, dance, stories, crafts, and customs associated with pre-industrial life,

while popular culture is made up of diversions engendered (and engineered) by an

industrial society. In any case, because the United States is a young country, Seldes

suggests that it has no folk culture:

It happens that what we call folk-music, folk-dance, and the folk-arts in general have only a precarious existence among us; the “reasons” are fairly obvious. And the popular substitutes are so much under our eyes and in our ears that we fail to recognize them as decent contributions to the richness and intensity of our lives. The result, strange as it may appear to devotees of culture, is that our major arts 162

suffer. The poets, painters, composers who withdraw equally from the main stream of European tradition and from the untraditional natural expressions of America, have no sources of strength, no material to work with, no background against which they can see their shadows.49

Seldes, in short, makes the case for American (modern) popular arts as its only real folk

art. Here, of course, Rourke would demur. Yet, in April 1924, when Seldes penned an

article for Arts and Decoration in which he reiterated the above point, he made a crucial

modification. “The position of jazz,” he writes, “and its capacity to interest intelligent

people, will be more easily understood if we concede at once that America has no

separate tradition of culture; except for architecture, I can think of no art in which we

have a specific mode of our own.” He seems, with such an argument, to be slyly conceding ground to Brooks’ search for America’s useable past and Mencken’s disgust with bourgeois gaucherie. But then Seldes makes a turn:

This is neither a fault nor a disgrace; it even has large advantages. Nor have we, strictly speaking, any folk arts of our own. The result is that the creative artist, fulfilling the normal desire to take root, falls back on European tradition and it is only in the case of a great genius that this adventure succeeds. It is now suggested that he link his spirit with the thing which in our country takes the place of the folk arts and, in a slender way, is art itself. This is in music, popular ragtime: generally it is the minor arts, what I have called “the seven lively arts.”50

By modifying and challenging Brooks, Seldes is arguing, in sum, for a comprehension of the popular arts as a “useable present.” Seldes denies what Rourke is so certain exists, yet at the same time acknowledges the necessity of a tradition from which artists can both draw and react. To that end, Seldes can say, for example, that jazz “isn’t a last feverish excitement, a spasm of energy before death. It is the normal development of our resources, the expected, the wonderful, arrival of America at a point of creative intensity.”51

163

4. At their best, the popular arts evince an impeccable and accomplished technique, as well as a “fantastic” or “demoniac” aesthetic that leaps beyond realism.

Seldes’ first three key arguments in Seven Lively are really political positions.

They focus on asserting that America has its own culture of quality in its popular arts, and that these popular arts pave the way for further development in American work. His fourth argument, however, is an aesthetic declaration. Here, Seldes asserts what he believes makes great art. It achieves something more than the basic and abiding task of art to represent the world, as the Aristotelian idea of mimesis requires. In addition, and perhaps in opposition to delivering the real and recognizable aspects of human life and action, art taps a vital energy, a burning flame, that possesses the qualities of fantastic, even demoniac, creativity. This performance exceeds any of the constraining limits of a realistic or representative code of artistic expression. What Seldes sought was “The essential distortion, caricature, or transposition which you find in a serious work of art or in a vaudeville sketch.”52 His purposeful linkage of “a serious work of art or in a vaudeville sketch” is crucial: for Seldes, the leap beyond realism required something antic. It could be found “with Alice in Wonderland, at a dada cabaret or with the terribly logical clowns of Shakespeare.”53

It could also be found in the American lively arts. “There is a definite type of

American humor,” Seldes wrote in the Criterion, for a British audience, “which seems wholly lunatic, and is insanely funny; it exists in vaudeville, and flashed, on the side of the grotesque and fantastic, in our newspaper comic strips.”54 Lunatic, grotesque, fantastic: these are larger-than-life qualities of extremity. They border, at times, on the 164

surreal. Warren Susman pointed out in his Culture as History that the quality is endemic

to the lively arts, and noted that “the full import of the surreal tendency in the popular arts

has never been assessed.”55 But Seldes saw it as essential to American art; Rourke, of

course, found it fundamental to the American character as well.

Throughout Seven Lively, Seldes looked to the caricatured and the surreal for his

best examples of popular art. From the mechanical violence of Keystone Kops films to

the zany chaos of Ed Wynn’s solo act, Seldes celebrated off-kilter presentations of the

world. Even jazz fit his model, giving American culture “a wholly unrealistic,

imaginative presentation of the way we think and feel.”56 But Seldes had his favorites.

Two worked in print: George Herriman and Ring Lardner. And two worked the stage: Al

Jolson and Fanny Brice. All four worked in some way in the fantastic or surreal.

George Herriman, whom Seldes called “our great master of the fantastic,” drew

“Krazy Kat,” a weekly comic strip about an eternally inexplicable relationship between the Kat and his nemesis (and beloved) Ignatz the mouse. The strip, which ran from 1913 and 1944, was a distillation of Seldes’ belief in the necessity of the fantastic:

It is rich with something we have too little of—fantasy. It is wise with pitying irony; it has delicacy, sensitiveness, and an unearthly beauty. The strange, unnerving, distorted trees, the language inhuman, un-animal, the events so logical, so wild, are all magic carpets and faery foam—all charged with unreality. Through them wanders Krazy, the most tender and the most foolish of creatures, a gentle monster of our new mythology.57

The fantasy Herriman constructs in of the Kat is something “monstrous” yet magnetic. It

is grotesque and surreal, and it is patently non-realistic.

Seldes maintained a deep fondness, throughout his entire career, for Ring Lardner.

Lardner gained fame as author of the satirical “You Know Me Al” columns in the

165

Saturday Evening Post in 1916. He went on to write a variety of short humorous stories,

as well as several collections that extended the story of Jack Keefe, the narrator of “You

Know Me Al.” He also dabbled in the theatre, writing twenty plays, several of which

were decidedly surreal in tone. The best known of his theatrical work, June Moon (1929)

was, however, a straightforward comedy completed in collaboration with George

Kaufman. Seldes would, in his career, edit two volumes of Lardner’s comic writing,

suffused with slang and gentle kidding of sports culture. Though less grotesque than the

“Krazy Kat” strips, Lardner’s work still evinced, for Seldes, both “clear-eyed observation

of America” and “a gift for the fantastic.”58 Throughout the chapter in Seven Lively that

focuses on Lardner, Seldes praises him for his fantastical comic flights.

Though Seldes can find examples of his grotesque and fantastic in print media, the preponderance of his examples come from the stage. It seems, in fact, that the stage is

somehow uniquely fitted for expression of this particular style. Seldes found fantasy in

the extravagant, spectacular Follies, from Zeigfeld to Greenwich Village, and in the

various American musicals that were flowering in the period. But the vaudeville stage,

Seldes declared, was the crucible out of which the grotesque was formed. There, Seldes,

noted, there was but “One man on the American stage, and one woman” who were

“possessed”: Al Jolson and Fanny Brice.

Solo performers both, Jolson and Brice rated an essay all their own in Seven

Lively, entitled “The Daemonic in the American Theatre.” Jolson became known in the

1910s and 1920s for his blackface rendition of songs like George Gershwin’s “Swanee.”

Brice got her start in the Zeigfeld Follies in the 1920s singing “My Man” and “Second

Hand Rose.” Both maintained commanding stage presences and large fan followings. 166

Ironically, both stars would reach their peak of fame after the publication of Seven Lively, and off of the stage. Jolson starred in The Jazz Singer (1927), the first talking picture;

Brice took her character, Baby Snooks, to the airwaves in 1936 for CBS, and then for

NBC, radio.

But in 1924, Seldes declared, the electricity of their performances, the sheer force of will with which they controlled their audiences, created a popular theatrical style that moved beyond the real: “I use the word possessed,” he wrote, “because it connotes a quality lacking elsewhere on the stage, and to be found only at moments in other aspects of American life—in religious mania, in good jazz bands, in a rare outbreak of mob violence.”59 He’s talking about the ecstatic, in all of its untidy, sometimes intimidating,

larger-than-life excess. And Seldes anchors this quality, found primarily in the popular

theatre, to core defining elements of American culture. Rourke, of course, would name

this same phenomenon “bombast,” “magnitude,” or “theatricality.” Both agreed that it

was essentially non-realistic, and that it came to its clearest fruition on the popular

American stage.

5. Race and ethnicity—particularly, for Seldes, the African American and the Jew—

are essential to any evaluation of both the lively arts and American culture itself.

To write about Jolson or Brice, to write, in fact, about the popular arts in the

1920s at all, including popular music and live performance, is to write, implicitly or

explicitly, about race and ethnicity in America. From Bert Williams to Al Jolson, from

Florence Mills to Sophie Tucker, from Fats Waller to Paul Whiteman, a complex

interchange of racial “love and theft,” to invoke Eric Lott’s evocative title, was enacted 167

on stages across the country. To write about those interactions is to attempt to explain an

almost-inexplicable cascade of mockery, imitation, inspiration, masquerade, envy,

adulation, and emulation. The path is fraught with peril, and certain pitfalls. And for all

his insights on the popular arts, Seldes stumbled along the way.

For example, when Seldes wrote about jazz, he was eloquent on the subject of its

aesthetics: its structure and potency as an art form. But when he turned to its politics, to the core issue of race that jazz raises, he embraced the most basic of prejudices. Jazz, he

wrote, might “divide and follow two strains—the negro and the intellectual.”

In words and music the negro side expresses something which underlies a great deal of America—our independence, our carelessness, our frankness, and gaiety. In each of these the negro is more intense than we are, and we surpass him when we combine a more varied and more intelligent life with his instinctive qualities…. [He is] only a little more simple and savage than we are.60

Savage, nonintellectual, carefree, and simple: in a passage which starts out allying the

African American with American culture as a whole, Seldes ends up cataloging four

racial stereotypes, espousing them as fact. In his notes to the 1957 edition of the book,

Seldes acknowledges the inflammatory nature of the words he chose. Yet, he does not

exactly attempt to take them back:

Some fifteen years later, this passage was unearthed as proof—not of my ignorance of the best Negro music, but of a prejudice against it, with implications of grosser prejudice still. By that time I knew several of the great Negroes in music, Paul Robeson, Fats Waller, Taylor Gordon, and others. I can’t be sure with which of these I discussed the supposedly offensive wording, but I know they went far to reassure me. The simple fact is that the qualities of Negro music exploited at the time were the anti-intellectual ones, and this happened over and over again in the years that followed.61

The fact that Seldes offers neither an apology nor a retraction by the late 1950s is

regrettable. And yet, it would be a mistake to dismiss Seldes on the topic of race because

168

of the undeniably problematic assumptions about African American intellect he makes.

Mixed in with these statements are an important, and (for the period) iconoclastic assertion of the value of the contributions of African American art to American culture as a whole. In the same article in which Seldes dismisses “Negro intellect”, he also writes:

I do feel that the treatment of a negro melody, by negroes, to make a popular and beautiful song for Americans ought not to be always neglected, always despised. I say also that our serious composers have missed so much in not seeing what the ragtime composers have done that (like Lady Bracknell) they ought to be exposed to comment on the platform…. I do not think that the negro…is our salvation. But he has kept alive things without which our lives would be perceptibly meaner, paler, and nearer to atrophy and decay.62

Clearly, Seldes recognized the immense contribution of African Americans to American culture as a whole. Yet his presentation of that insight foundered, as did Rourke’s on minstrelsy, on the shoals of his own period’s endemic racism.

Making matters more complex, Seldes also addressed the peculiar synchronicity of African American and Jewish contributions to popular entertainment.63 In a review of three collections of spirituals (Dorothy Scarborough’s On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs,

R. Emmet Kennedy’s Mellows, and James Weldon Johnson’s The Book of American

Negro Spirituals), Seldes spent most of his article theorizing about the relationship of

African Americans and Jews to American culture as a whole: “The American popular song, at this moment a significant part of American music, is composed almost entirely by the descendants of African Negroes and Russian Jews.” From the Johnson brothers to the Gershwin brothers, American popular music did indeed have strong roots in both cultural groupings.

Yet, despite its popularity, such music, especially that composed by Jewish musicians, sometimes became watered down and derivative of its original significance: 169

The Negro, accepting Christianity, discovered for himself the parallel between his own and the bondage of the Hebrews and among his more poignant songs are those drawn out of Exodus. If the Russian-Jewish-American composers were at all affected by the poetic themes of the Negro, the circle would be complete; but the typical American composer of this type attaches himself almost exclusively to the negro rhythm and, a little obviously, to his melody. The longing which in the spirituals is a longing for Heaven and salvation is changed in American popular terms to a nostalgia for backdrop “Sunny South” and Mammy.

Acknowledging the diminishment that can occur in the hybridizing of culture, Seldes pressed to the underlying question: what, then, constitutes American culture? He writes,

But even if you combine the Negro and the Jew, where are you to find the unbreakable bond between them and the Anglo-Saxon American, or even the American of mixed descent who has been here for generations? Can the Negro and the Jew stand in the relation of a folk to a nation? And if not, can the music they make be national music?

This question (like many of the questions Seldes poses) remains unanswered. But the asking of it is provocative, and productive, as is Seldes’ ultimate observation:

…we have in the negro songs, as collected above, as sung in concert and on records, a body of beautiful music. It has been neglected, distorted, made pretty, made tawdry, and now is being presented in various approaches to its native beauty…. And, possibly, when the present wave of enthusiasm subsides a little, we shall discover that these songs, like everything else brought to our shores, are part of the body of our arts, not the only possible source of our music, but one of inestimable value.64

For all his flippant reference to the African American as “savage,” Seldes clearly saw the music that came from the culture—spirituals, ragtime, and jazz—as a key piece of

American culture as a whole.

Seldes was well aware that much of the searching for the roots of American culture so prevalent in his time involved a look towards the Anglo-Saxon constituents of

New England (in Brooks’ case) or the Germanic culture that came with its immigrants to

America (in Mencken’s). The artistic works of more recent immigrants, especially those

170

of Italian, Slavic, Irish descent, as well as that of African Americans through their

heritage as slaves were presumed to be of lesser significance, relevance, and quality, as

were the people who created such works.

In a December 1924 article for Vanity Fair, released seven months after Seven

Lively Arts, Seldes addressed the presumption of cultural homogeneity directly: “If

America to-day is racially a unit (an Anglo-Saxon unit) without taint of Latin, Slav, or

Jew, an American art may develop as “pure” as the French, for example.” However,

Seldes dryly points out, “there has been an immigration into the United States of millions

of non-Nordics, and if the K.K.K. does not expel them,” our art, our American art, has become “the richer for it.” There is no pure American, Seldes reminds us, and searching

for a pure American culture is a fool’s errand: “We are all of us, even the Ku Kluxers, the

results of thousands of generations of mixed cultures. We can add another generation to

our sum, but we can hardly subtract ourselves from the past.”65 And that’s a good thing, indeed, for the creation of a vibrant American art. Its hybridity is its strength. Seldes noted that Fanny Brice and Al Jolson, Jewish both, “bring something to America which

America lacks and loves—they are, I suppose, two of our most popular entertainers—and that both are racially out of the dominant caste. Possibly this accounts for some of their fine carelessness about our superstitions of politeness and gentility.”66

In this observation, Seldes brings his understanding of the essential nature of

American racial and ethnic diversity around to his understanding of performance as

central to modern American culture. The popular American art (like jazz or like the

performances of Brice and Jolson) that Seldes has declared to be America’s “lightning

strike” of modernism is often created by the blacks, Jews, Slavs, Poles, Italians, and Irish 171

that make up America’s hybrid social fabric. The very variety these groups provide is

intrinsic to the vibrant popular entertainment that is America’s cultural heritage. And its

modern character.

4.5 On the Theatre, 1924-1932

In January 1924, shortly after returning to the United States from his time in

France creating Seven Lively (where he also wedded Alice Wadhams Hall), Seldes edited

his last issue of the Dial.67 He continued to write for them, however, maintaining his

monthly column on the theatre through May 1929. During this span of years, Seldes used

his column in the Dial to argue for live performance, both in the dramatic theatre and in vaudeville, as a key source of fantasy in American art. Even when his column at the Dial

ceased, Seldes continued his campaign for serious criticism applied to the lively arts in

publications as varied as Harper’s, Saturday Evening Post, and the New York Evening

Journal. He also took the proponents of the new stagecraft and art theatre to task for their

puffed-up belief in their own modernist import. In the process, he explored the reasoning

behind his own predilection for the light over the serious. And he tried his hand at writing

and producing his own theatrical work, to mixed results. Throughout, he attended to how

the theatre was an index and a reflection of American culture.

Of the myriad subjects Seldes wrote about over the course of his prolific career,

he returned with the most frequency to the theatre. He loved film and radio, he enjoyed

jazz and great fiction, but the theatre was where he found fertile ground for the creation

of American culture. Because he was so taken by the form, it naturally caused him great

critical pain when it went, for him, astray. In the first half of the 1920s, Seldes was an 172

outspoken proponent of vaudeville and musical comedy over the art theatre. In a climate of theatrical criticism that either praised the work of the Theatre Guild as revolutionary or fell in step with general satisfaction with a mediocre Abie’s Irish Rose, Seldes fashioned himself an iconoclast of the third way: neither the modernist highbrow nor the arty middle ground, but the saucy technical mastery of the popular stage. He threw down rhetorical gauntlets:

I am going to establish a lyric theater in America. Not an art theater and not a temple of the drama, and not an experimental theater. A lyric theater where there will always be Mozart and Jerome Kern, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Lehar—and never by any chance Puccini, or the Ring, or Ibsen. I will avoid the good things and the bad alike in the serious forms; I shall have Russian Ballets and American Ballets. It will be a theater devoted to all the forms of light musical entertainment and to nothing else.68

He would declare with confidence, “George M. Cohan’s mastery of his instrument is as

complete as Ibsen’s of his.” Or he would scold, “You may be indulgent to a bad performance of Ibsen, because it is Ibsen. You are not indulgent to a second-rate

production of a musical show.”69

In fact, Ibsen (and all he represented) was a subject of particular irritation for

Seldes. Throughout his theatrical criticism, Ibsen’s plays (especially in “arty”

productions) rankled Seldes. In May 1925, he went to see Alla Nazimova in the Actor’s

Theatre production of The Wild Duck with trepidation, as the play itself, he said, was what had “turned [him] against Ibsen.” Yet, Seldes found that this particular production succeeded because it played against the heavy-handed elements of Ibsen’s realism that he so despised. Never one to become entrenched in his views, when Seldes saw

Rosmersholm, a few months later he noted,

173

I have held off from Ibsen a long time, and I am afraid I may have sneered at him. His interests and temperament, as shown in his work, still do not enchant me. But when he is presented as a dramatist and not as a philosopher—which has been his fortune twice this year—I yield entirely and pray Heaven that my stupidity was not too publicly made known.70

Seldes saw a distinction between the theatre as an art and as a platform for ideas. He firmly believed that a play with a message still needed to be produced well. And so his preference leaned toward slim ideas produced well over rich ideas produced poorly: “It is hard to be indifferent to the passion of Heartbreak House or untouched by the humours of Meet The Wife;” he wrote, “but it has for long seemed to me that if you isolate these things from the way of their presentation, you make the theatre a dull and ignoble place.”71

In November 1925, Seldes wrote a short history of the theatre with this distinction in mind. One line of the theatre’s history belonged to the playwright, he said, and the other to the players:

The zealot of great theatre tends to forget that we have on the contemporary stage two separate developments, from almost entirely separate sources. There is the serious theatre developed out of the religious drama (Greek or Miracle Play) and the light theatre developed out of the make-up box (the commedia dell’arte, according to Dr. Winifred Smith). This second theatre is the theatre of technique; it is the player’s theatre as the other is the playwright’s; it does not deal in ideas, and does not try to exalt, but to divert. From it we get, if not genealogically, at least in a spiritual descent, our vaudeville, and vaudeville to-day penetrates into all the other forms of light entertainment. As in the Italian professional comedy, there is improvisation in vaudeville; I have heard Joe Cook outline a brief scene to his company and then watched the scene being made up on the stage in accordance with the general scenario and leading up to the resumption of the text. This whole theatre, divorced from emotion and almost free of intellectual content, is supremely satisfactory in its form; it has a grease-paint technique which often is superb. It is pure theatre and depends for its success on its theatrical value, not on the presentation of acceptable or startling ideas. That is why it is so interesting aesthetically.72

174

And it was the aesthetics that interested Seldes. In particular, he saw in the theatre’s

aesthetics a movement towards the fantasy that he found so striking in American art.

“Illusion,” he wrote “is the object of the theatre’s existence.” To object to it is “as

puritanical as the objection to the artifice by which the theatre creates its effects.” 73 Yet for Seldes, the theatre was at its best when it stepped away from realism and into a world of delightful implausibility.

It is usually in fantasy that we experience specifically the existence of a world created by laws other than our own, existing under a logic we cannot grasp, having a flow and ebb which perhaps do not correspond to the courses of our blood, and a pulse which we cannot relate to our own, yet which we feel to be intrinsically right. This creation of a world not ours is to me the grandeur of the theatre….[onstage] a clerk might walk like Napoleon and yet be all clerk, without offense to our apprehension, because in that theatre the milieu in which the clerk moved would have already created its own laws, and so long as the clerk existed in accordance with those laws, however different from our own, we should accept him, as we accept poetry in the theatre or magic.74

That is, the theatre operates on a level magically beyond the real. Similarly, in a 1929

review of The Front Page, Seldes praised the play not for its rollicking farce or satire, but

because, “The play is mad and rowdy and Messrs MacArthur and Hecht have added

fantasy both in the run of the plot and in the language and ideas of their characters. If this is what comes of living in Chicago, I propose that a lot of our dramatists make the supreme sacrifice and try it.”75 What Seldes appreciated about the immensely popular

production was the way it leapt (as American comedy does, Rourke would note) into the

realm of the fantastic.

175

Seldes tried, in December 1925, to put his theatrical criticism into action, when he

wrote his first play, The Wisecrackers. Staged at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, the play was a

satire on the acidic wits of the Algonquin circle, including Dorothy Parker and Alexander

Woollcott. Although the players may have been charming, the playwright’s play was not

a success. Time magazine described it as “courageous at least.”

The author deliberately attacked the shrewd, irreverent group that eats luncheon at the Algonquin Hotel, Manhattan, jests bitterly at life and works. Mr. Seldes, though much in their line of work, has never been a member of the group…. The hero [of Wisecrackers] was the wittiest man in Manhattan. His wife left him because he was so witty that he never had time to be serious. All of which fell pretty flat, as Mr. Seldes neglected to supply him with one real witticism during the evening.

The review summed up Wisecrackers as “one of the most astoundingly inefficient that

the oldest inhabitant can recall from the pen of a presumably intelligent person.”76

Seldes seemed to take the failure in good humor. In his February 1926 column on the theatre in the Dial, he noted, with irony:

With this report I lose my hitherto unquestioned amateur status and, at the moment, am questioning whether the loss will be compensated by any adequate gain. The unanimous displeasure of the critics of the daily papers in their reviews of The Wise-Crackers startled, without pleasing, me. I can assure you that it isn’t as bad as all that; and if by a miracle it should still be current when these pages are printed, I cordially urge all sound citizens to see it. But not preferentially. I’d much rather see The Cocoanuts myself.77

Seldes here refers to the Marx brothers comedy he had glowingly reviewed one issue

prior. Wisecrackers would be Seldes last original play, though he would adapt two other classics for the stage. One would succeed; the other, like Wisecrackers, would not.

Seldes also examined the way the burgeoning field of theatre history addressed

itself to popular entertainments. In February 1928, Seldes wrote a review, entitled

“Theatre, Show-Shop, and Drama,” of two books on American theatre: Theatre: Essays 176

on the Arts of the Theatre edited by Edith Isaccs and A History of the American Drama written by Arthur Hobson Quinn. While noting the great differences between the books

(Isacc’s work is focused on the art of the contemporary theatre and Quinn’s is a chronological history focused on names, dates, and productions), Seldes points out that they share in common one conspicuous lack:

It does not seem to me that either of these books is sufficiently aware of the show- shop: our commercial theatre with its outstanding technical virtuosity, our vaudeville, musical shows, and burlesque where a technique is constantly in development. I am not riding a hobby to death; when I worked on the seven lively arts I was interested in them purely for themselves and remain so; but I am aware of a life in them which can do many things for both the theatre and the drama. The second needs to be made more fruitful, the first more native and less arty. It is not enough to say, generously, that burlesque is good theatre, and I fear that the virtue of vaudeville will be a little dissipated if we go on for ever calling it commedia dell’arte…. [P]arallels between our cheap theatre and the Venetian comedy are accurate enough; but there is something else in vaudeville and burlesque which the art theatre ought to study. For this is a theatre of actors and of masks, of players and of characters, in a sense almost unknown in the serious theatre.78

In the very first stages of the writing of theatre history in America, Seldes observes the problem which besets the field to this day. Studies of theatre, as an art, tend to rush past popular entertainment. Modernist and avant-garde theatre are usually separated from popular theatre. Scholars have become specialists on one or the other. And though the

“art theatre ought to study” the virtuosity and approaches of comedy and burlesque, for example, such scholarship tends to confine itself to safe parallels with the commedia dell’arte.

177

4.6 In the popular press, 1927-1932

Seven Lively Arts was Seldes’ first major book, published when he was 31 years

old. It became, in many ways, the defining credo for the rest of his career. The judgments

Seldes passed in Seven Lively would echo, and mutate, throughout his subsequent

journalistic work, as well as in his subsequent book-length studies. Constance Rourke

worked differently. She slowly and steadily built her early historical work towards her

major thesis about American culture in American Humor. But Seldes exploded out of the

gate with a thesis, a manifesto of sorts. Rourke began by looking at American culture,

and moved towards analyzing it as intimately tied to a theatrical impulse in the native

character she was examining. Seldes began with the theatre as his proving ground, and he moved outward, over the course of his career, into examining American culture more broadly. Their trajectories, that is, are opposite but complementary.

In 1927, Seldes’ critical work began to shift away from the aesthetic agitation and advocacy of his Seven Lively Arts columns and essays and towards a broader concern with American culture itself. Undoubtedly, Seldes’ own interests began to move towards the more playful polemics he created in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post. But the venue itself for which he was writing was also a significant part of the shift. During these years Seldes wandered from publishing in the Dial, one of the highest of highbrow journals, to the Saturday Evening Post, the quintessential middlebrow magazine, to the

New York Graphic, one of the city’s most lowbrow publications. And he moved back again. This formal migration reflected Seldes’ own commitment to reach as wide an audience as possible. That is, Seldes moved, quite purposefully, from writing about popular culture to writing for popular culture. 178

Throughout, Seldes maintained his engagement with the theatre. He simply shifted his publication venue. In a letter to Edmund Wilson dated 14 August 1929, Seldes writes, “To your—and my surprise—I shall be a dramatic critic this winter—as befits the critic of the late Dial. I shall write for the Graphic. Don’t laugh.”79 In fact, Seldes had

accepted a position reviewing the theatre for “Bernard McFadden’s bizarre New York

Graphic.”80 The Graphic was widely referred to as a newspaper of fakery, whose bread

and butter was constituted of cut-and-pasted photographs intended to shock and titillate.

According to Seldes, the flyers advertising his arrival at the paper read: “From The Dial

to The Graphic in One Flying Leap!” In fact, the division in tone, content, style, and

concern might have given pause to any other writer. But Seldes had prided himself on the

comparatively breezy style of writing he maintained at the highbrow Dial; he took equal

pleasure in the comparatively lofty tone of his writing for the Graphic. Yet, his style and

approach to his subject matter remained consistent. Similarly, when he began his daily

column for the New York Evening Journal in 1931, he was touted in advertisements in

the paper as a hybrid high/lowbrow:

Who is this Gilbert Seldes whose name is mentioned in so many connections, whether it is the vulgarity of the Athenian dramatists or the art of Jimmy Durante? The answer is that he is a highbrow, a man of amazing cerebral altitude. The explanation of his popularity is that he is regular. From the critical eminence of the editorship of the most highbrow publication this continent has yet seen (The Dial), he wrote “The Seven Lively Arts,” a book of appreciations on comic strips, the movies, dance music and other indigenous flowerings of genius not before dignified by the term art. (At least not by the highbrows.)…. He writes a column of whatever occurs to him daily for the Journal, and, believe us, it always is interesting.81

179

More and more, Seldes occupied a middle ground, in which he demanded quality from

the popular arts, open-mindedness from the highbrow critics, and a platform to speak

from in the mainstream press.

Of course, the case could be made that the shift in print venue from the Dial to the

Graphic, Evening Journal, and Saturday Evening Post was financially expedient for

Seldes. According to Michael Kammen, Seldes got involved with the Saturday Evening

Post when he returned from Europe, cash-strapped, with his wife in the summer of 1926.

His agent suggested that he submit something to the Post, which paid exceptionally well.

Although Seldes thought that they would not be interested in his work, his reputation from Seven Lively Arts preceded him. His first article proposal was accepted, inaugurating a six-year period in which the Post became Seldes’ major source of income.

A short story in the magazine was reputedly worth $1750; Seldes said he was paid about

$850 for a one page, with continuation, article.

When Seldes began at the Post, the circulation of the magazine was close to two million; by 1929, it had spiked to three million.82 When the stock market crash came that

October, Seldes noted that the “size of the magazine diminished (it seemed) over

night.”83 But by then, several of Seldes’ articles were already “in the vault,” so to speak,

and so he continued to draw a healthy income through 1932. The editor of the Post

during these years was George Horace Lorimer, an affable fellow of whom Seldes was

fond. Though onlookers (including Seldes’ friend, Edmund Wilson) questioned whether

Seldes had freedom akin to his editorial latitude at the Dial, Seldes was adamant that

Lorimer gave him free rein: “I look back at some of the work with grave doubts; but the

Post itself was irreproachable. I always submitted an outline of major articles. If the 180

outline was approved, the Post never changed nor asked me to change a word of the

text.”84

So it is safe to assume that Seldes’ selection of subject matter for the pages of the

Post was his own choice. Clearly, Seldes knew he was reaching a broad audience: the

very audience, in fact, that critics like Mencken, Brooks, and the other young intellectuals had argued (and were continuing to argue) were the cause of American failure to produce a rich culture on par with Europe’s. Seldes would make this critique the subject of every

article he wrote for the Post. It became Seldes’ mission to address the “common man”

who had been dismissed as a hayseed, a Babbitt, and a boob. Seldes wanted, as the title to

one of his articles read, to use his space in the Post (and, later, in the Graphic and the

Evening Journal) to “debunk the debunkers.”

Sometimes Seldes’ approach at the Post was to satirize or mock the “intelligent”

classes of which these critics were a part. So he wrote an article like “Park Avenue

Voodoo” (24 November 1928), in which he critiqued out the upper class predilection for

astrology as expensive voodoo. In “Complaint Against Critics: They Tell You What You

Are and Where You Get Off” (1 June 1929), Seldes laid out a long series of cultural

dichotomies that “critics” trap the general reader into accepting and, in the process,

implicate them within. In “The City’s Giddy Whirl” (31 May 1930), Seldes claimed that

city-chauvinists suffer from “agoraphobia” and an unwillingness to conceded that the

radio and the automobile have made life in other locations far more pleasant.85

So part of Seldes’ approach is to “debunk the debunkers” by exposing the foolishness that they, too, espouse. But three key articles in Seldes’ Post collection more directly take on the criticisms these debunkers had leveled at the Post’s audience. In these 181

three—“A Super-American Credo” (1 July 1928), “The Art Bogy” (12 January 1929),

and “The Better Americans” (20 April 1929)—Seldes more clearly articulated his critical

beliefs about American culture than he did at any other place in his body of work. Surely,

he played out his animus towards Mencken, especially, more directly than in many of his

other writings. In these articles, Seldes would set out to prove, ultimately, that “The boob haters, with a few exceptions, are only boobs with a superior vocabulary.”86 Turnabout,

for Seldes, was fair play. And it was a logical extension of his work on the popular arts in

Seven Lively. Therefore, these articles warrant closer analysis.

“A Super-American Credo”

In “A Super-American Credo,” one of the first articles he wrote for the Post,

Seldes created a mock version of H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan’s American

Credo (1920). Its sequel, The New American Credo, had been published in 1927, just a

year before Seldes’ article ran. Mencken and Nathan’s Credo claimed to merely

catalogue the things which every average American believed—silly simplicities like “the

farmer is an honest man and greatly imposed upon.” In Mencken and Nathan’s Credo, the

average American becomes a credulous gawper of below average intelligence with little

knowledge of culture and even less taste.

In his satirical skewering, Seldes never names the American Credo directly,

though the title to the article clearly refers to it. Here, he notes that, though “the

scientists” have anatomized the average American, there is, however yet still “a field

untouched. Superior in intelligence and experience to all other Americans, the

investigators of the boob mind have so far failed to supply a body of beliefs held by the 182

super-American himself. I submit that this is unfair to the superior people.”87 Poking at

Mencken’s predilection for the Nietzschean Superman, Seldes proceeds to chronicle the things the superior “super-American” believes. These include:

That there is a great difference between six lowbrows telling dirty stories in a Pullman smoker and six intellectuals telling dirty stories in a New York speak- easy…. That shocking and making fun of the middle classes is a new and effective way of indicating a superior attitude toward life and differs from the activities of the French romanticists in every way…. That nothing essentially fine was ever popular…. That if you join a lodge you are a herd man; but if you join a literary group and lunch with the same people every day you are a man of force and originality…. That America has no history, no historical sense and no traditions…. That no great novel can be written in America because the background is thin, because American social life is not based on class distinctions, and because Americans look down on the arts…. That small-town people are dying with envy of smart New Yorkers. Or ought to be….88

In a space of three pages, Seldes calls out every one of the basic presumptions that

undergird the critique of American culture set into motion by Brooks and Mencken in the

late 1910s and early 1920s. Seldes undercuts the notion that there is a great divide (a

divide that should be, in Mencken’s view, policed by a protective aristocracy) between

the hoi polloi and the artist: both engage in the time-honored lowbrow pastimes of telling

dirty stories and joining clubs. And, by distilling Brooks’ argumentation in America’s

Coming of Age down to two pithy sentences—“America has no history, no historical

sense and no traditions” and “no great novel can be written in America”—he exposes

them for the sweeping, impossible generalizations that they are. And anyway, he notes,

“small-town people” and the “middle classes” aren’t “dying with envy” of the

intelligentsia anyway. Who cares what they think? One is reminded of Constance

183

Rourke’s assessment of the American comic character, which defended itself thusly:

“first that all refinements might be found at home; then that they didn’t matter.”89

This point of view is echoed, in more negative terms, in an article entitled

“Debunking the Debunkers” for the New York Herald Tribune. Published 28 October

1928, the article sported a subtitle (“The Attack of the Intelligentsia on the Small Town Is

Based on False Standards, an Inadequate Knowledge of American Life, and the

Intimation That Bunk Does Not Exist Elsewhere, in Both Business and Art”) that more or less summed up Seldes’ entire set of concerns in this period. He was aware that such a point of view was destined to rankle: “If I should say,” Seldes wrote in the article, “that the fault of all the debunkers is that they are destructive, instead of constructive, critics, a loud hoot would rise behind my left ear and I would be accused (I have heard it already) of having sold out to the capitalists since I began to write for ‘a magazine of national circulation.’” Of course, the “magazine of national circulation” was the Saturday Evening

Post.90 Certainly, the fact that Seldes had begun writing for them, hot on the heels of his work for the Dial, made his critique of the debunkers if not suspect, then at least easy to, well, debunk. Yet, Seldes’ basic point is salient: the critique of American culture raised by Brooks and by Mencken was, in the main destructive without hope (in Brooks’ case)

or desire (in Mencken’s) to perceptibly improve the situation.

184

“The Art Bogy”

In “The Art Bogy” (12 January 1929), Seldes continued his defense of the critically put-upon American middle class. In the article, Seldes suggested that the

American business man should no longer feel bad for not liking what the critics tell him is Art.

The American business man, known in cultural circles as “that worm,” has managed to put up a respectable fight against most of the attacks on his character. By definition, he is a thick-skinned animal—which is unusual in a worm—and the thump of a critical brick on his hide is like the falling of the leaf. Let him be told that he does not know how to enjoy life or make his wife happy or bring up his children: he shrugs his shoulders and goes on his way. But he is vulnerable in one spot. Whisper in his ear, “You hate art,” and he breaks into unmanly sobs. Art is the mouse which sends this elephant into fits of impotent rage and shame.91

The problem, Seldes declares, is not that which critics have suggested: that his straw-man

“business man” was too materialistic or dumb to appreciate art. Rather, the problem was

threefold, and it was the critics’ problem. First, “art was offered to the American man as

something dead.” Second, it “was remote” in time and space and “what was done today

could not by any chance be as worthy as what was done yesterday, and a painting three

hundred years old was obviously better than one three weeks old.” Third, and damningly,

critically sanctioned art “had nothing to do with the American man’s life.” The artist,

Seldes writes, was treated as “something sacred, and to be protected. He was not be

bothered with money affairs, nor with crass details of trains, food, clothes, barbers,

servants, marriage vows, and the like.” Clearly, Seldes is again here taking on Mencken’s

suggestion that the artist should be protected from the mob as well as Brooks’ opinion

that American materialism spoils the artistic temperament. Even the theatre, the “[o]ne

form of art the business man traditionally cared for,” was ruined by the critics. It “was

185

promptly taken away from him. The common theater had to be transformed into the art

theater before he could get any credit for liking it.”92 And, of course, Seldes’ business

man did not like the emotings of the art theatre’s experimentations. He preferred the

jovial entertainments of the Follies or of the vaudeville stage—forms which Seldes had

already argued in Seven Lively Arts were particularly American, and modern, art.

Seldes is on a tear. But he makes a peculiar move near the end of the article. In

defending the American business man’s taste as legitimate, he embraces Santayana’s

conflation of gentility and feminized culture. Seldes writes:

In a strange way the business man has had his revenge. For a century, art was specifically a feminine interest in America; it meant to the average man a crowd of idle women clustering around a rather unkempt faker who gave them a sort of foolish thrill, either by talking about things they did not understand or by being mildly improper. And generation after generation the man stood aside and saw the things his women had praised go sliding down the chute to oblivion.93

Seldes moves away from his focus on condescending critics and towards silly women as

he recounts the sorry state of aesthetic affairs. Art became removed from daily life when

women had too much leisure, he writes, and it is becoming more vibrant with the

“emergence of what used to be called ‘the new woman’—the woman who went in for sport instead of maladies, and for business, who was self-reliant and created a life of her

own, with its own interests and excitements, whether she remained at home or went to an

office.” Ultimately, Seldes brings the two threads of argumentation together, however

tenuously, by asserting, “The misunderstood artist is as outmoded as the misunderstood

woman.”94

186

More and more, it becomes clear that Seldes’ work for the Post is motivated by a

very real frustration with the state of criticism in American and by a very real desire to

reach out to the broadest audience possible to stand up against it. However, his

argumentative approach is sometimes built on straw-man oversimplifications and

overheated rhetoric. The object of the articles is clearly not to prove his point of view, but

to defend and to excite.

“The Better Americans”

“The Better Americans” (20 April 1929) continued Seldes’ critique of the critics

of American culture. He began the article by dismantling the meanings behind the phrase

“the better Americans,” which he asserted was a condescending code used by “those who

despised America” during WWI. “Better Americans” sided with the British, and as such

were less unruly than their fellow colonists. More importantly, “better Americans”

believed that European culture was superior to their own. So, for example, “The average

high school student learns that Whitman and Poe enjoy European reputations and

therefore are our greatest writers; the standard of measurement is always outside the

country.”95 Placing the standard of judgment outside of American culture itself had rankled Seldes for years: in “Debunking the Debunkers,” for example, Seldes had noted that “the debunkers have almost invariably applied European standards of culture to an

American product.”96 But in “The Better Americans,” Seldes imputes the causes of the

problem mainly to expatriates, who complain loudly in Europe, and to their allies (like

Mencken, though he does not name him) who stay behind on “the Atlantic Seaboard….

They are city people, rich people, people of some prestige; they have natural access to 187

organs of publicity. They are vocal!.... From them never comes any suggestion that

America is worth studying, observing and developing along its own natural lines.”97

Seldes is aware of the dangers that attend such statements. If the “better

American” rejects out of hand American literature and entertainment because it is

American, there is, at the other extreme, “the jingo, who believes that nothing is done right in this world unless an American does it. Obviously the two types are related—one is the other turned inside out.”98 Seldes sides with neither: though his rhetoric is pointed and his argumentative style pugnacious, he himself believes in taking a middle road.

American culture is neither perfect nor hopeless. But it is, he asserts, a culture.

Seldes paints with a broad brush in his Post articles. He’s aggressive, and he overstates. He works at the level of polemic. Periodically, he implicates himself in with the hotheaded critics he is rejecting: “If I seem to be a little unsympathetic in this restatement of what young people felt in 1919 and 1920, it is not from any sense of superiority. I was one of them myself.”99 Yet, beneath his rhetoric, his deep belief in a middle road is often apparent. Certainly, his desire to defend American culture against its detractors is, when it’s well written, refreshing. But Seldes, no doubt about it, has an axe to grind. He tries to out-shout Mencken, to counter his complaints. He even sees

Mencken when he is not there. In a December 1928 Bookman review of a series on

American faith, Seldes can’t resist a quick, though unnecessary jab. In a parenthetical to his analysis of the books, Seldes writes, “it remains only to discover at what church the

Menckenites worship every Thursday.”100 Mencken haunts Seldes’ thinking and shadows

188

his work. So it should come as no surprise that Seldes’ next book, composed while he

was writing his Post polemics, again spars with a spectral Mencken.

4.7 Stammering Century

In Stammering Century (1928), published the same year as Constance Rourke’s

Troupers of the Gold Coast, Seldes too looks back to the nineteenth century to find the

roots of the American character. “This stammering century,” Horace Greeley reputedly called it, in which voices were heard and repeated, was one of evangelism, cults, and fads. In his introduction, Seldes suggests that the book gives “a background in American history for the cults and manias of our own time: the Prohibitionists and Pentecostalists; the diet-faddists, and dealers in mail-order Personality; the play-censors, and

Fundamentalists, and Point Loma theosophists; the free-lovers and eugenists; the cranks and, possibly, the saints.” So Seldes wanted to look back to the nineteenth century to find the continuities in the contemporary American reformist character. That is, he wanted to

…compose a sort of anatomy of the reforming temperament and to follow it, by winding roads, to the spiritual settlements it made for itself. What the man thinks who sets himself apart from humanity and expects humanity to follow him, how such people acted, what they did, where they found strength to struggle and consolation in defeat, what victories they won, how they held their faith or lost it, why the ended in all-embracing disaster—these things seemed to me exceptionally interesting. The facts became my actual subject—not debunking, not analyzing, not interpreting—only the facts themselves.101

The move into the writing of history was a new one for Seldes, though he had begun publishing pieces of what would become Stammering Century in various publications as early as 1927.

189

The topic of fads, cults, and other assorted bunkum on the surface seems precisely

the subject matter that might be fodder for Mencken’s “Americana” column in the

American Mercury. “It is, however,” Seldes demurs, “nothing of the kind.” Seldes calls

out Mencken by name in the first page of his preface to Stammering:

In private conversation—and possibly also in print—Mr. Mencken maintains that no quackery has ever been given up by the American people until they have had a worse quackery to take its place. He holds, explicitly and implicitly, that the difference between intelligent and unintelligent people is the gullability of the boobs, their irremediable tendency to believe anything sufficiently absurd. The distinction is one of the reasons for Mencken’s distrust of democracy and the history of manias and crazes in America annihilates this distinction entirely.

In Seldes’ assessment, quackeries “were first accepted by superior people, by men and

women of education, intelligence, breeding, wealth, and experience. Only after the upper

classes had approved, the masses accepted each new thing.”102 This is a stretch of logic

for a book ostensibly only about “the facts themselves.” And although some of the

evidence Seldes marshals seems to bear out his conclusion, all of it does not. Rather,

Seldes seems driven to both distance himself from Mencken’s ill-temper and, at the same

time, silence his critiques.

In the 1965 reissue of Stammering Century, which featured an appreciative introduction by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Seldes expanded his prefatory note to acknowledge that “The anti-influence of—or the reaction against—Mencken is explicit from the first page of this book.” Indeed. And why?

He was the energy in the whole decade of debunking; he was the worst judge of fiction even in that rather backward time—he thought Joseph Hergesheimer was a great writer, he thought Joseph Conrad was one, too, for all the wrong reasons. He was intellectually a bourgeois gentilhomme—and he was the most invigorating, the most exciting man of our time. In his expressed contempt for the common man you could, by a vigorous effort, detect a trace of Fascism—but it was only the residual effect of his own partial and superficial reading of Friedrich 190

Nietzsche (about whom he wrote the worst book—certainly in English—ever written)…. He never gave the impression of wanting to enlighten the ‘booboisie’—it would have spoiled his fun…. What was zestful in Mencken turned peevish in many of his followers, and he supplied them with handy ideas which they turned into catchwords as silly as any appearing in the “credo” which he ascribed to Americans. He helped in blowing up the few bridges between the educated and the ignorant, the intelligent and the indifferent. His followers were not bright examples of the independent thinking man.103

Through all of Seldes’ implicit critique of Mencken in his work for the Post, and even in

Stammering Century itself, Seldes was never as directly ad hominem as he was in this revision to his introduction. The critique of the serious flaws in Mencken’s work—the pugilistic debunking, the cynical judgmentalism, the overheated rhetoric, the nearly

Fascist certain superiority—are intermixed by Seldes with tangential critiques of his bad taste in literature and his poor philosophical writing. It’s clear that, decades on (and nearly ten years after his death), Mencken still roused Seldes’ ire. It is also clear that

Seldes had profound respect, and even affection, for “zestful” Mencken, “the most invigorating, the most exciting man of our time,” that he patently did not hold for the

Menckenites, younger critics who aped Mencken’s style. The nub of the problem was, ultimately, that Mencken served more to divide than to bring together. If Mencken blew up bridges, Seldes (especially in his later years, when he moved into radio) strove to build them, in order to create a truly American culture.

Other forms of intellectual extremism were equally irritating to Seldes. They were, in fact, irritating enough that three basic categories of thought—communism, psychoanalysis, and Prohibition—motivated his explorations in Stammering Century. He found all three, in great currency during the late 1920s, to be the grandchildren of the quackeries and utopias espoused in the mid-1840s. He writes, “In the third decade of the

191

twentieth century, we are living in a spiritual world they helped to form. Our radicals, and

reformers, and faddists, and charlatans, are all descendants of the ‘ultraists’—the

radicals—of the 1840s…. There is a continuity in our mental habits.”104

So the motivating influence behind Stammering was twofold. First, by

demonstrating that foolishness and gullibility is not confined to the common man alone,

Seldes wanted to debunk Mencken’s persistent critiques. Second, Seldes wanted to

demonstrate that the roots of what he found to be extreme revolutionary thought (as in the

case of communism and Prohibition) or faddish totalizing philosophies (as in the case of

psychoanalysis) were to be found in the cults and quackeries of the American mid

nineteenth century. Here Seldes is an equal-opportunity offender. While communist

rhetoric and psychoanalysis were popular amongst the New York intelligentsia of the

period, Prohibition was, to most of them, anathema. By drawing together popular and

unpopular extremes, Seldes tacitly underscored the notion that noting separated the critic

from the criticized but, as he had previously noted, “a superior vocabulary.”

In Stammering Century, Seldes is treading the same territory worked by

Constance Rourke in her Trumpets of Jubilee, published one year earlier. In that book,

Rourke had pushed aside the “major” figures of the mid-nineteenth century in order to

chronicle the popular and influential social and religious evangelism of the Beecher

dynasty, along with the politics of Horace Greeley and the entertainments of P.T.

Barnum. Seldes had reviewed the book, quite favorably, in the Dial. In Stammering,

Seldes similarly emphasizes the narrative of popular interest over that of the more elite.

And both studies do so to get at the core of what the American character, and the

American useable past, might be. 192

So it is not surprising that Seldes names Rourke’s work directly in his study. He is

not always in agreement with her interpretations. For example, he takes issue with

Rourke’s explanation of the clash between Lyman Beecher and Charles Finney over the use of revivals. Yet, in the main, he finds much to respect in her work: “Impeccable in taste and judgment throughout her Trumpets of Jubilee, Constance Mayfield Rourke is again perfect in her attitude toward bibliography. ‘To end a book,’ she says, ‘with a

display of the machinery by which it has been assembled is to stress the toil which has

gone into its making, not the pleasure.’” Like Rourke, Seldes keeps his bibliography brief

and descriptive.105

The praise went both ways. In her review of Stammering Century, Constance

Rourke praised Seldes for standing up against Mencken. She stressed that Seldes did not

“reach smug conclusions as to the American character. The virtue of the book is that it temperately describes strange people and bizarre movements with an acute discernment.”

However much she appreciated Seldes’ overall approach, she wanted more clarity and specificity from his writing. In response to Seldes’ overtly anti-Mencken argument that fads were first accepted by what he called “superior” people and only later picked up by the general populace, Rourke writes, quite rightly, “We would relish also more definite proof than Mr. Seldes offers as to the extent to which our superior minds have been engaged in fanaticism…. And the question arises, who are superior people?” Seldes, she observes, often goes in for “extremes” in his writing; however, she declared the book as a whole to be a worthwhile contribution to the study of the American character.106

193

Rourke’s criticism was insightful, and gets to the heart of the most fundamental

power, and excess, of Seldes’ writing. Later, Seldes would articulate his penchant and style in this way:

Every writer has, I suppose, a book for which he has a special feeling because it seems unjustly forgotten. The Stammering Century is mine. It was my first book after The Seven Lively Arts…. The two books represent my major professional interests. One is the popular arts as they developed into the mass media and are still developing into something that needs a more definitive title than I have found for them; the other is the nature, the essential character of America. In this, it was wise of me to start at a tangent. If I had tried to reach the center, I should have become hopelessly lost and perhaps never have returned to the work for which I was temperamentally more suited. I tried again in the depression of the early 1930’s and found that I was essentially a pamphleteer; I wrote because I wanted a result, an action. It is not the attitude of an historian.107

Seldes’ criticism of his own work is by far more incisive than any other. Indeed, though he made a foray into the field of history with Stammering, he is, as he notes “essentially a pamphleteer.” He goads, he incites, he disturbs: Seldes is a rhetorical rabble-rouser.

Indeed, it is not the attitude of an historian. At least, not that of a measured historian like

Constance Rourke. Yet, as Seldes’ work matured into the 1930s and 1940s, especially as he delved into the mass media, his twin concerns of the popular arts and the American character would more fully dovetail. Seven Lively Arts and Stammering Century were just the beginning.

194

Endnotes

1 Kammen, The Lively Arts, 21. I am indebted to Kammen’s work on Seldes, not only for its thoroughness and insight, but also because Kammen was granted full access to Seldes’ papers, in Marion Seldes’ possession.

2 Seldes, “Mr. Wells’ Ancients.” Dial (September 1923): 285.

3 Seldes, “The Higher Learning in America: IV Harvard,” 61. Apparently, Mencken wanted Harold Stearns to write the piece but was forced to turn to Seldes. See Mencken, My Life as Author and Editor. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. 397.

4 Kammen, The Lively Arts, 33.

5 Ibid., 33.

6 Ibid.

7 And he undertook a complicated love affair. See Kammen, The Lively Arts 35-38.

8 Edward E. Chielens, ed. American Literary Magazines, 79.

9 Ibid., 79-85

10 Emory Elliot, ed. The Columbia Literary History of the United States, 744

11 Gilbert Seldes to H.L. Mencken, 13 July 1922. Gilbert Seldes to H.L. Mencken, 31 October 1923. Mencken MSS.

12 Kammen, The Lively Arts 65-66.

13 Seldes, “The Theatre,” March 1920, 406.

14 Seldes, “The Theatre,” April 1920, 406-407.

15 Seldes, “The Theatre,” May 1920, 673.

16 Seldes, “The Theatre,” July 1920, 104.

17 “The New Order of Critical Values,” 40-41.

195

Endnotes

18 It’s amusing to note that two of the Bookman slate of critics—Floyd Dell and Louis Untermeyer—had been themselves rated in the Vanity Fair matrix. Dell averaged +.1 in the first go-around. Untermeyer earned a respectable +4, though Seldes had given him a 0.

19 Edward Paramore Jr, 285-292.

20 Seldes, “The Theatre,” April 1922, 445.

21 Seldes, “Vaudeville” 238.

22 Chielens, ed. American Literary Magazines 398.

23 George H. Douglas, The Smart Magazines 93-128.

24 Kammen, The Lively Arts 77.

25 Ibid.

26 Colony records in the early years indicate only year of attendance and, sometimes, which studio a colonist used. I have relied for dates of attendance for Rourke and Seldes on contextual clues in Rubin and Kammen respectively. Without access to the private papers of Rourke and Seldes, I have been unable to ascertain whether or not the two interacted at the Colony.

27 Op. cit., 77-78.

28 Seldes, “Diplomat’s Delight: Detective and Mystery Stories, Good and Bad, Passed in Review.” Bookman 66 (September 1927): 91-93.

29 “Colyums” was Seldes’ word for newspaper columns written in character, like Mr. Dooley or Ring Lardner’s “You Know Me, Al” series.

30 Quoted in Kammen, The Lively Arts 88.

31 Fifteen articles ran in Vanity Fair; three ran in The Dial. In chronological order, they are:

“Golla, Golla, The Comic Strip’s Art,” [renamed “The ‘Vulgar’ Comic Strip” in Seven Lively] Vanity Fair (May 1922) “The Damned Effrontery of the Two-A-Day” Vanity Fair (October 1922) “Darktown Strutters on Broadway” Vanity Fair (November 1922) “A Revue Reviewed” [renamed “A Tribute to Florenz Ziegfeld in Seven Lively] Vanity Fair (January 1923) “The First Merryandrews of Europe” [renamed “The True and Inimitable Kings of Laughter” in Seven Lively] Vanity Fair (July 1923) “Say It With Music” Vanity Fair (July 1923)

196

Endnotes

“The One-Man Show” Vanity Fair (August 1923) “Toujours Jazz” Dial (August 1923) “The Daemonic in the American Theatre” Dial (September 1923) “The Newspaper Colyumnists” [renamed “St. Simeon Stylites” in Seven Lively] Vanity Fair (September 1923) “Before a Picture by Picasso” Dial (October 1923) “For a Lyric Theatre in America” [renamed “Plan for a Lyric Theatre in America” in Seven Lively] Vanity Fair (October 1923) “I Am Here To-Day” Vanity Fair (November 1923) “Some Makers of Ecstasy in the Theatre,” [renamed “These, Too” in Seven Lively] Vanity Fair (January 1924)

Under his pseudonym Vivian Shaw, Seldes published the following four articles that appeared in Seven Lively Arts:

“The Great God Bogus” Vanity Fair (August 1923). This article constitutes the book’s philosophical core. “A Letter to the Movie Magnates” [renamed “An Open Letter to the Movie Magnates” in Seven Lively] Vanity Fair (September 1923). “They Call it Dancing” Vanity Fair (October 1923) “Tearing a Passion to Ragtime” Vanity Fair (November 1923)

32 Seldes seems at pains to brush past the fact that it is a collection. In the introductory matter to the revised 1957 version of the book, Seldes refers to his “phobia about reprinting magazine articles” (7). In fact, in the book, the only place in which he acknowledges the use of previously published material is in a footnote, included in the revised edition, that was originally placed in the 1924 version. Seldes disparages, “This review [Darktown Strutters] appeared in Vanity Fair sometime in the summer of 1922 [it actually ran in November 1922]. I allow it to stand with nothing more than verbal corrections in spite of my dislike of books which collect articles expressly written for magazine publication…” (145).

In the 1924 edition, he thanks John Peale Bishop, Edmund Wilson, and Frank Crowninshield, saying, “they published several essays which later served as the raw material for chapters here, published portions of other chapters written expressly for this book, and otherwise encouraged and prospered me—to such an extent that I owe to them and to my fellow-editors of the Dial the holiday which made it possible for me to write at all” (391). But in comparison, the previously published articles and the chapters of Seven Lively Arts bear very little difference.

33 Seldes, The Seven Lively Arts, preface to the 1957 edition, 8.

34 Ernest Boyd, “Readers and Writers.” Independent (10 May 1924): 112.

35 Edmund Wilson. “The Seven Low-Brow Arts.” Dial (September 1924): 244-250.

197

Endnotes

36 Anonymous (Edmund Wilson). “The All-Star Literary Vaudeville,” New Republic (30 June 1926). See Michael Kammen’s analysis of the disagreement; Seldes appeared, at least on the surface, not to know where the criticism was coming from.

37 Seldes, Seven Lively Arts 5.

38 Seldes, Public Arts 288.

39 Seldes, “Toujours Jazz” Dial (August 1923): 151.

40 Ibid., 165.

41 Seldes, “Cakes and Ale Return to Favor,” Vanity Fair (May 1924): 49, 108

42 Seldes, “New York Chronicle,” Criterion 3 (October 1924): 286-287.

43 Seldes, Seven Lively Arts, 301.

44 Seldes, “Before a Picture by Picasso.” Dial (October 1923): 408.

45 Seldes, Seven Lively Arts, 264.

46 Seldes, “Before a Picture by Picasso.” Dial (October 1923): 411.

47 Ibid.

48 For a full consideration of the shifting definitions of popular culture, see John Storey, Inventing Popular Culture. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.

49 Op. cit.

50 Seldes, “Position of Jazz in American Musical Development,” Arts and Decoration (April 1924): 21.

51 Ibid.

52 Seldes, Seven Lively 268-269.

53 Seldes, Seven Lively 228. Seldes, “Damned Effrontery” 102.

54 Seldes, “New York Chronicle,” Criterion 3 (October 1924): 285.

55 Warren Susman, Culture as History xxvii.

198

Endnotes

56 Seldes, “Position of Jazz,” 412.

57 Seldes, Seven Lively 208.

58 Seldes, “The Singular—Although Dual—Eminence of Ring Lardner.” Vanity Fair 24 (July 1925): 45, 94.

59 Seldes, “The Demoniac in the American Theatre,” Dial (September 1923): 303.

60 Seldes, “Toujours Jazz,” 158.

61 Seldes, Seven Lively Arts 99.

62 Seldes, “Toujours Jazz,” 159-160.

63 For an early example of Seldes’ thinking through of the issues of Jewishness on the American stage, see his article “Jewish Plays and Jew-Plays in New York” for the February 1922 The Menorah Journal.

64 Seldes, “The Negro’s Songs.” Dial (March 1926): 247-251.

65 Seldes, “Thompson’s Panorama,” Vanity Fair (December 1924): 108, 118.

66 Ibid., 308.

67 On June 21, 1924, Seldes married Hall in Paris; they honeymooned on the Riveria, at the home of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. They had met in June 1923 at the wedding of John Peale Bishop. Seldes always called Hall “Amanda.”

68 Seldes, “For a Lyric Theater in America,” Vanity Fair (October 1923): 71. The essay can also be found in The Seven Lively Arts. In his preface to the 1957 reissue of the book, Seldes suggested that he had, perhaps, been a bit dismissive: “I’m not sure I chose the best examples at the time and poor Puccini, for whom I now have an almost apologetic liking, seems to have been an obsession of mine. But the thing remains.” (5).

69 Seldes, “The Theatre,” Dial (November 1925): 435 andn“Cakes and Ale Return to Favor,” Vanity Fair (May 1924): 49.

70 Seldes, “The Theatre,” Dial (May 1925): 430. Seldes, “The Theatre,” Dial (July 1925): 83.

71 Seldes, “The Theatre,” Dial (June 1924): 563.

72 Seldes, “The Theatre,” Dial (November 1925): 437.

199

Endnotes

73 Seldes, “The Artist in the Theatre,” Dial (February 1927): 109.

74 Ibid., 110.

75 Seldes, “The Theatre,” January 1929, 82.

76 Anonymous review of Gilbert Seldes Wisecrackers. Time Magazine. 28 December 1925.

77 Seldes, “The Theatre,” Dial (February 1926): 169.

78 Seldes, “Theatre, Show-Shop, and Drama” 158-159.

79 Gilbert Seldes to Edmund Wilson, 13 August 1929, Edmund Wilson MSS.

80 Yoder, “Gilbert Seldes and the Criticism of Mass Culture” 21.

81 Undated newspaper clipping. Ruth Draper MSS.

82 Kammen, The Lively Arts 146.

83 Quoted in Kammen, The Lively Arts 147. From the As in My Time manuscript, in Marian Seldes’ possession.

84 Quoted in Kammen, The Lively Arts 125. From the As in My Time manuscript, in Marian Seldes’ possession.

85 Seldes, “The City’s Giddy Whirl,” 44.

86 Seldes, “The Boob Haters,” Saturday Evening Post (1 October 1927): 43.

87 Seldes, “A Super-American Credo,” 23.

88 Ibid., 45-46.

89 Rourke, American Humor 24.

90 Seldes, “Debunking the Debunkers” 21 October 1928, 2.

91 Seldes, “Art Bogy” 33.

92 Ibid.

93 Ibid.

200

Endnotes

94 Ibid., 130.

95 Seldes, “The Better Americans” 90. Emphasis Seldes’.

96 Seldes, “Debunking the Debunkers” 21 October 1928, 3.

97 Seldes, “The Better Americans” 93.

98 Ibid.

99 Seldes, “Finding the Lost Generation” 69.

100 Seldes, “The Degradation of Dogma” 469.

101 Seldes, Stammering Century xiv, xxi.

102 Ibid., xiv.

103 Ibid., xxiii-xxiv.

104 Ibid., 5.

105 Ibid., 109-110, 412.

106 Rourke, “Anatomy of Zeal,” New York Herald Tribune Book (9 December 1928): 5-6.

107 Op. cit., xxv.

201

CHAPTER 5

CONCLUSION

ROURKE, SELDES, AND A VISION OF AMERICAN CULTURE

5.1 Continuities and changes

Bracketed by their two most important works of cultural criticism and anchored by a trio of historical studies of popular culture in the nineteenth century, the years between 1924 and 1931 were for Constance Rourke and Gilbert Seldes a declaration of intellectual independence. In these eight years, Rourke and Seldes undertook a strong counterattack to the prevalent “debunking” of their contemporaries. To do so, they embraced popular performance as the locus of American identity, especially as the foundation and identity of the modern artistic movements. In this, Rourke located the historical and Seldes celebrated the contemporary.

Of course, Seldes and Rourke differed in significant (and productive) ways in their writing methods, voices, and ideas. For example, between 1924 and 1928 Seldes produced over 200 articles; Rourke wrote two long book projects which would also be serialized. If Seldes wrote with scattered enthusiasms, Rourke maintained a steady focus.

So Seldes’ work was all loquacious ebullience. Rourke’s was all taciturn reserve. Seldes had a passion; Rourke had a strategy.1 Seldes seemed to relish publicly bantering with 202

and baiting the other young (male) critics of his day. His criticism—usually first-person,

often tongue-in-cheek, always saucy—tilts towards the self-consciously provocative.

Rourke’s work is more detached: she rarely calls out opponents by name, almost never

uses the first person, and is reserved in rhetoric. On American Humor, she noted, “in the

main I had decided not to take on all the known antagonists of whom I was aware, since

to do so and to include my rebuttals would be immensely to complicate the outlines of the

book. I felt that my materials were in themselves very full and complex and many of

them new.”2 So Seldes sets Eugene O’Neill against George M. Cohan and declares a winner and a loser; Rourke sets Henry James alongside Davy Crockett and lets the reader

decide. In short, Seldes was a polemicist and Rourke was a historian. Their temperaments

guided their selection of material and their argumentative approaches.

Still, Seldes’ belligerence and Rourke’s reticence presented each with problems.

Seldes enthusiastic work at times devolved into straw-man special pleading as he ground

his axe against Mencken. And Rourke’s consistent choice to suppress overt argument left

her work feeling, at times, vague and detached; Alfred Kazin suggested that Rourke’s

work in these moments is but “an image, a story told, not ready ground on which we can

stand.”3

Despite these rhetorical and argumentative flaws, between 1924 and 1931

Constance Rourke and Gilbert Seldes established the prime critical concerns and basic

working method that each would sustain through the remainder of their careers. The

period is bracketed by their career-defining studies of American popular entertainments

and culture: Seldes’ Seven Lively Arts (1924) and Rourke’s American Humor (1931). It is

anchored in the middle by their trio of revisionist and reclamatory studies of the 203

American nineteenth century: Rourke’s Trumpets of Jubilee (1927) and Troupers of the

Gold Coast (1928), and Seldes’ Stammering Century (1928). Together, Rourke and

Seldes make an effectual pair, their work proposing an alternative to the pessimistic

debunking approach to American culture propounded by the majority of the young

intellectuals of the 1910s and 1920s. As Seldes would put it in Mainland, his 1936 cri de

coeur:

Between 1914 and 1929 the dominant tone in American literature was dislike of America. Cynical in Mencken, satirical in Sinclair Lewis, mystic in Waldo Frank, idealist in Lewisohn, stupid in Dreiser, emotional in Sherwood Anderson, aesthetic in the writers for The Dial, indignant in The Nation, more reformist in The New Republic, abusive in symposia, tragic in O’Neill, actually gay in the plays of Kaufman and Connolly, the literature of this period is a long sustained attack on the outcome of a century and a half of American life. From sex to scenery, nothing in American life was good.4

The debunkers’ voices were pervasive. Their urgency and their disdain have sustained

them into the present moment, where standard approaches to the period still take them at their word. Of course, modernist art and sensibilities were pervasively critical of bourgeois society and values, so not surprisingly many of the American modernists and their advocates took a negative, often dark perspective. Optimism and progressivism were in short supply. But both Rourke and Seldes argued that this understanding of modernism was incomplete as an explanation of key aspects of modern American identity and culture.

So Rourke and Seldes stood outside this now-canonical approach, critiquing it as

it unfolded in three major ways. First, they had little to do with the Greenwich Village

and bohemian crowds that most commonly are evoked to typify the 1920s in the United

States. Seldes might have had Dorothy Parker to his home as a dinner guest, but he was

204

never a member of her witty (and often cruel) Algonquin Round Table. Rourke

maintained a strong circle of friends in Grand Rapids, Michigan, but she didn’t hold forth

at Mabel Dodge’s bohemian salons. Though Seldes was a longtime editor and contributor

to the Dial, neither he nor Rourke wrote for the little journals like Broom, Secession,

Masses, Crisis, or, especially, The Little Review, whose subtitle—“Making No

Compromise with the Public Taste”—was assuredly at odds with their catholic embrace

of “the people.”

Second, despite their profound and abiding interest in the theatre as the chief

expression and reflection of the American character, neither contributed to art theatre

organs like Theatre Arts Monthly. Neither, in fact, was a strong supporter of the art

theatre movement in general. While Seldes adored E.E. Cummings’ him, he was in

general mistrustful of the “arty” work by the Theatre Guild or Eugene O’Neill. He

preferred designs by Lee Simonson to those by Robert Edmond Jones, and he preferred

the spectacle of the Ziegfeld Follies to both of them. He found the psychological and

understated productions of Arthur Hopkins generally banal and self-indulgent in

comparison with the power and control of Fanny Brice’s vaudeville act. While Sheldon

Cheney was campaigning for an art theatre purified of its commercial and entertaining elements, Seldes was campaigning for a popular theatre that had commerce and entertainment as its defining mission. He praised a kind of popular entertainment that could be embraced by intellectuals and non-intellectuals alike for its vibrant

Americanness. Throughout, Constance Rourke was steadily making the case that the very entertainments that Cheney wanted to purify—minstrelsy, burlesque, and rough frontier comedy—were the crucible out of which the American character had been formed. 205

Seldes would note, ruefully, that the art theatre approach was hardening into doctrine in

the texts written by figures like Edith Isaacs and taught in the newly-formed departments of theatre across the country.

Third, though both Rourke and Seldes regularly traveled to Europe, they were never part of the Lost Generation expatriates. Both traveled to Europe for the solitude it provided them. It’s telling that Seldes wrote Seven Lively Arts in France and Rourke wrote American Humor in England. Seldes regularly vacationed in Europe, visiting with friends like Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, and T.S. Eliot. But he never sympathized with or considered expatriation for himself. In fact, Seldes was stridently opposed to the belief that culture was better, purer, more refined, or more elevated in Europe. Such views, he insisted, revealed silly post-colonial insecurity. Rourke did Seldes one better on this count, refusing even to move to cosmopolitan New York. She sustained, by choice, her entire career from the middle of Michigan, where she lived her life fully amongst lumberjacks, school teachers, and paper merchants.

As Rourke and Seldes moved into the 1930s and beyond, their basic philosophical approach to American culture remained consistent with their original observations in their major works from 1924 to 1931. But they would also bloom in new directions.

5.2 Rourke to the future

Following the publication of American Humor in 1931, Constance Rourke embarked on a decade of intense productivity. Building on her discoveries about and insights into American folk culture, Rourke published three biographies. Each of these would take her work further away from the literary bias she detected in the mainstream 206

studies. Davy Crockett (1934) expanded on her work on the Crockett almanacs in

American Humor, taking Crockett seriously as a literate and effective statesman as well

as reevaluting his status as one of her backwoodsman types. Her next two books,

Audubon (1936) and Charles Sheeler: Artist in the American Tradition (1938), both

moved her into closer study of the visual arts. For years, Rourke had been collecting

American crafts during her travels in search of the ephemeral, popular materials on which her books like Trumpets of Jubilee or Troupers of the Gold Coast had been based. In

Audubon, Rourke examined the naturalist’s paintings of native flora and fauna as art rather than “mere” illustration. She begins making the case, persuasively, that a divide between art and illustration is anchored in an imposed, and false, boundary between that which is useful that which is not. Rourke would continue this campaign in her work with the first National Folk Festival (1934), for which she gathered Michigan lumberjacks to perform camp songs. She would also contribute to the Federal Arts Project as an editor for the Index of American Design (1936-1938), traveling the country to collect and organize materials that documented the rich heritage of American folk arts. This work brought her into connection with American painter and photographer Charles Sheeler, on whom she completed a biography in 1938. In her first full-length work on a living person,

Rourke examined Sheeler and his work as rooted in and reflecting on the long tradition of

American folk arts. About this work, poet William Carlos Williams wrote to Sheeler on

17 July 1938, “It is something for us all that Rourke has grasped so much of what we have been thinking and saying for the past twenty years and objectively summarized it in you. She seems on the way to becoming our Moses.”5

207

The praise is high, and it was prescient. Throughout all her work, from American

Humor forward, Rourke was slowly building the evidence and the argument for what was to be a major study on American culture. As she continued to take magazine work for pay, Rourke regularly applied for (and was regularly rejected from) a series of major research grants from organizations like the Carnegie Corporation and the Guggenheim

Foundation. Her letters are sprinkled with enthusiasm for the massive project she was nurturing. She wrote to Lewis Mumford that the book “goes along insurgently, still strongly cleaving its own way, not always permitting as methodical a line of work as I have intended, which is a good sign, I think.”6 Several months later, she would admit to

Margaret Marshall that “my old man of the sea of a book continually reminds me how

[much] remains to be done before the book can materialise.”7

In an undated two-page document headed “A History of American Culture by

Constance Rourke,” collected in a file of Rourke’s letters to Lewis Mumford at the

University of Pennsylvania, Rourke laid out the plan, probably for a grant application, for what her study was to become. She wrote at length:

This study proceeds chronologically, and is divided into five broad sections. My approach has been governed by a deep-seated conviction that understanding of popular and folk materials is essential for an interpretation of American culture. I do not by any means exclude the fine arts; but I am convinced that in a country such as ours, developing with a strong admixture of folk elements and popular strains, these must be defined in expressive terms if our creative forces are to be fully understood. The book has expanded from what I first planned as an interpretation of American literature in these terms. I had expected to use materials relating to music and the space and graphic arts as background. They have become foreground, and the purely literary interest is somewhat diminished. My concern is with the full fabric. The emphasis of the book is regional, but the regional structure is not rigidly sustained, giving way to broader passages as these seem required.

208

With so wide a scope, the problem has been not only that of research but of synthesis. I believe I have been able to solve this problem by presenting typical clusters of material in successive periods and by establishing inter-relations between them. The entire book is outlined. Some sixty or seventy thousand words are in draft, with other portions in approximate draft or close outline. I have an extensive and thoroughly organized bibliography which is particularly rich in monographs and articles. The book will run to approximately two hundred thousand words, and will contain sixty four pages of illustrations, exemplifying the crafts and the graphic and space arts. The groupings on each page will be planned for simple effects and for integration with the text. Since my other books have centered on related materials, work on them has afforded a long preparation for this study, involving travel, research in widely scattered collections, and a generous experience in known the American arts, popular or otherwise, at first hand. For the special purposes of this study I have worked extensively at the American Antiquarian Society Library, the Frick Art Reference Library, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress. For its completion I need further work in these collections, at the Western Reserve Historical Society, at the University of Kentucky. I should like to see a voluminous collection of Louisiana material, now being indexed, at Melrose, Louisiana, and to collect photographic material from near St. Francisville. I should like a first hand view of materials at Taos and Santa Fe, I must stress the fact that groundwork for research in these places and institutions has been thoroughly prepared and that what I need to accomplish in this respect is not extensive, though it is essential. Travel for illustrative materials will dovetail with travel for research. The photographic material which I require is not altogether for illustration but also for comparative purposes and for conclusions within the text. In many instances, paintings and other objects which I have already located will be presented for the first time.8

The project was ambitious, and it promised to be significant. It was also constantly evolving. In March 1940, she wrote to Lewis Mumford of a developing plan to divide the book into two volumes, with the first being “an introductory volume which I have decided to split off from the main stem and am enlarging to small book length since I think the materials warrant it. This first would study the fraught usage of the term

“culture;” the second volume was to be a series of case studies.9

209

Amidst Rourke’s other commitments, the book developed steadily, yet slowly. Its progress was further hampered when the United States came to the brink of entry in

World War II. In accord with Lewis Mumford, who would title his 1939 book Men Must

Act, Rourke threw herself into the war effort. In a January 1938 letter to Mumford,

Rourke chronicled her efforts, detailing her myriad speeches to local Grand Rapids groups, including Calvin College, Rotarians, Episcopal churches, and a woman’s club.

Not surprisingly, Rourke believed that local political action was essential. However, she lamented:

This was the year when I was to do no public speaking! It’s been a very driving effort because we worked within no established organization but set up a committee of our own. It has meant hundreds of ten minute personal speeches to individuals on the part of the rather small number who did the actual work, because we were doing an unprecedented thing. But I can’t think of anything I’ve done that has brought a greater sense of rightness and satisfaction….American culture has been substituted for American Culture: I’ve done next to no work on the book, but I’m sure I have more for it: there’s no doubt of it. I’ve always through that in spite of some obvious losses I’ve gained a good deal by living in a fairly complex community. This immediate and rather drastic plunge seems very much an extension. One’s personal gain at such a time of course matters very little, yet certain ideas which I hope to develop in the book have become all the more urgent.10

Rourke had in fact set aside her book, temporarily. And she always thought she could come back to it, enriched from her work in the world. But when she returned home from a meeting of the local branch of the Committee to Defend American by Aiding the Allies late one winter evening in 1941, she slipped on her icy front porch and broke a vertebra.

She was hospitalized for the injury and made good progress towards recovery. She was discharged several days later, and, as she was preparing to return home to convalesce, she

210

suffered an embolism and died, quite by surprise, on March 23, 1941. She was 56 years old, survived only by her mother. Rourke’s unfinished book remained behind, in scattered notes and draft pages.

What happened next was an extraordinary bit of turnabout. Van Wyck Brooks, whose pessimistic vision of American culture Rourke had countered so vehemently, stepped forward to organize, edit, and publish Rourke’s planned study posthumously. In

1942, her last work, The Roots of American Culture, was published, in one volume. In his introduction, Brooks praised her mightily;

When Constance Rourke died in 1941, she had gone far in a work that would have given her a unique position among the American writers of her day. This work, a History of American Culture, was to have filled three volumes, presenting a point of view that was wholly her own. It was to have been the expression of thirty years of exploration during which she had published a series of preliminary volumes…. There was no phase of American culture that she had not planned to include in this monumental survey.11

Despite this praise, Brooks maintained doubts about the project. In February 1942, he wrote to Donald Brace, the book’s publisher, noting:

I have now done what I can with the Constance Rourke MSS and am sending you the results today…. As you will see, this MS runs to about 70,000 words. I am sorry it could not have been longer. There were two or three other papers that might have been included, but it seemed to me best to omit them. In the big cartons of MSS there was astonishingly little that could have been used in any way. I had to do a good deal of rewriting and combining but I think the results are solid. I found I could make no use of the suggested outline which someone had worked out on the two yellow foolscap sheets.12

It seems that the work Rourke left behind was far from being fully drafted. She had assembled her materials, but she had not yet fully organized them. However, considering

Brooks’ own consistently literary bias and his perennially highbrow tastes, it also seems possible that he was unable to see the work she had undertaken for what it was.

211

Brooks would, in 1957, acknowledge Rourke’s influence on him, writing in Days

of the Phoenix, “my horizon was indefinitely broadened by Constance Rourke’s eager

and eloquent studies. She was already preparing for the general history of American

culture of which she finished parts before her death; and she wrote, from time to time, to

tell me of the proofs she found that America had its own definite aesthetic tradition.”13

Yet, fifteen years earlier and immediately following the publication of Roots of American

Culture, Brooks seemed less ready to give Rourke such credit. In August 1942, John

Chamberlain reviewed Roots quite positively for the New York Times, noting that

Rourke’s work had consistently acted as a tonic against the “Brooks-Mumford generation” whose criticism was “sterile” and “pessimistic.” Mumford took great issue with the suggestion, composing a letter to Chamberlain that attempted to paint their work as embracing pluralistic American culture as far back as 1925.14 Mumford sent a copy of his letter to Chamberlain to Brooks, and in response Brooks wrote, “Of course Constance

Rourke did not influence either of us, though she was a fine companion on the way. My

own reorientation came with my breakdown, when I cleared a huge neurosis out of my

system, and recovered my original temperament.”15 Here, thirteen years before Days of

the Phoenix, Brooks gives more credit to his 1926-1931 nervous breakdown than to

Rourke’s revolutionary studies.

Rourke’s reputation would languish after 1942. Margaret Marshall’s planned

biography on her never materialized. And subsequent attempts to study Rourke were

hampered by the inaccessibility of her personal papers. Though her work was regularly

“rediscovered” by critics and thinkers as diverse as Ralph Ellison, Margo Jefferson, or

Greil Marcus, it never really surfaced as a cohesive whole. 212

5.3 Seldes to the future

Gilbert Seldes would outlive Constance Rourke by three decades. Over the course

of his relentlessly productive career, he would move, with the culture at large, from a

strong interest in stage entertainment to a fascination with broadcast and televised media.

That is, his critical purview would shift from popular culture to mass culture.

Throughout, his perspective on the utility and aesthetics of the forms would remain

consistent. As Seldes stood against Mencken’s mistrust of popular culture in the 1920s,

so too would he reject Dwight Macdonald’s disgust with mass culture in the 1950s. In both cases, Seldes made his points of view abundantly clear in print and, eventually, over

the airwaves.

From 1932 until his death in 1970, Seldes remained a quicksilver critic, shifting

amongst publications as varied as Harper’s, The Saturday Evening Post, The Saturday

Review of Literature, The New Yorker, Americana, Scribner’s, Today, Atlantic,

Hollywood Quarterly, TV Guide, The Nation, and the Annals of the American Academy of

Political and Social Science. In particular, he would sustain a daily column, entitled

“True to Type,” for the New York Herald Tribune from 1931 through 1938. He also

wrote a monthly column on the “Lively Arts” for Esquire, from its first issue in 1933

through 1946.

He would also publish eleven more books, varied in content, form, and approach.

Two of these were works of history. In Years of the Locust: America, 1929-1932 (1933),

Seldes attempted to study the causes and the effects of the Great Depression. In Mainland

(1936), he composed a polemic which, in its analysis of a broad sweep of American

culture, argued for seeing the United States as a special historical case. Another book, 213

This is New York (1934), was a coffee-table book of glossy photographs of his adopted

home. Two other works overtly called for political action. Your Money and Your Life

(1938), masquerading as a self-improvement book, attempted to push the American

middle class to engaged, liberal citizenship in order to defend the nation against both

Fascism and Communism.16 This was followed in short order by Proclaim Liberty

(1942), a war-era assertion of the core significance of stage, screen, and radio

performance to the war effort, in which Seldes wrote, “the radio, the movies, and popular

print are the three tools by which we can create democratic action.”17 And Seldes’

abiding interest in popular entertainment led to six diverse works on the topic. The

Movies Come from America (1937) chronicled the development of the moving picture; it was renamed, less nationalistically, Movies for the Millions for its British release. The

Great Audience (1950) synthesized Seldes’ vision of popular entertainment in The Seven

Lively Arts (1924) with the mediatized shift in the entertainment landscape; The Public

Arts (1956) would expand and revise this work, drawing together popular and mass entertainment under the rubric “the public arts.” In the same vein, with Previews of

Entertainment (1952), Seldes provided a guide to television, film, radio, and stage entertainments for a full year. That same year, Writing for Television (1952) codified much of what Seldes had learned about the medium. And The New Mass Media: A

Challenge to Free Society (1957), while critical of the television industry, retained the optimism and faith in the audience that Seldes had always championed. In the book,

Seldes noted that the critics of the medium were “unlikely to be effective if we begin with

214

contempt for the product and a sense of superiority to those who enjoy it.”18 Throughout these works, Seldes can be seen moving steadily more fully into the political ramifications of his vision of American culture.

In addition to his print work, Seldes would write, produce, and, sometimes, perform in a variety of film, radio, television, and stage productions. In 1933, he produced a documentary film, This is America, culled from key newsreels from the previous decades. Seldes forays into script doctoring were unsatisfactory: in 1936, he spent the fall in Hollywood, and from 1946 to 1947, he served an ill-fated term as a scriptwriter and consultant for Paramount Pictures. His work in live theatre, however, swung wildly between great success and profound failure. For example, his bawdy and modern 1930 update of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata was a sensation, running 252 performances.19

But in 1939, Seldes mounted Swingin’ the Dream, an ambitious, but unsuccessful, restaging of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It ran a scant thirteen performance at the Center Theatre in New York. The failure took Seldes by surprise; in many ways, Swingin’ the Dream was a concrete representation of the cohabitation of popular and elite art that Seldes had always propounded. In his revision, created in collaboration with Erik Charell, Seldes retained much of the original text of

Shakespeare’s comedy. However, he shifted its location and genre: it became a musical set in jazz-hot New Orleans in 1890. Swingin’ featured music by Felix Mendelssohn conjoined with jazz from a sextet conducted by Benny Goodman and also from Bud

Freeman’s Summa Cum Laude band. It sported juke joint dancing as well choreography by Agnes De Mille. Its design was “inspired” by Walt Disney. It starred Louis Armstrong 215

as Bottom, Butterfly McQueen as Puck, Maxine Sullivan as Titania, Jackie “Moms”

Mabley as Quince, the Dandridge Sisters as pixies, and a tap dancing Bill Bailey. Such a conjunction of performers and material is tantalizing in its rich sweep. Photographs, as well as Hirschfeld caricatures, seem to show a vibrant reimagining, in an American idiom, of a classic dramatic work. But reviews were scathing. Some reviewers suggested that the problem was that Benny Goodman’s skillful jazz was simply far more interesting than the generally untrained actor’s performances in Shakespeare’s comedy. Others noted that the piece was too busy: it was “overcrowded, over-elaborate, too much of a good thing.”20 Surprisingly, perhaps, none of the reviewers complained about mistreatment of the classic text, as Seldes might have expected.

Seldes work in radio and television was more successful. In 1937, he became the first director of television for CBS. There, he would experiment with the possibilities of the new medium through 1945, producing short, live broadcasts. Later, Seldes would joke that the television department “consisted then of myself and a secretary, neither of us with any work to do.”21 Possibly this is why, in 1938, he was tapped by the same network to write, produce, and perform in a series of educational programs on American culture for its radio wing. Here Seldes continued his populist approach, creating programs that celebrated the contributions of everyday people to American life. He produced Americans

All, Immigrants All, a program created in conjunction with the United States Office of

Education, the Department of the Interior, and the Service Bureau for Intercultural

Education to highlight the contribution of various ethnic groups to the overall fabric of

American culture. He also spearheaded Living History, a fifteen-minute weekly series addressing American history that took as its mission the desire to “take history out of the 216

text-books and into your lives.” His longest-running series was Americans at Work,

which traveled to various job sites, including those of the steelworker, department store

buyer, milkman, song writer, and meat packer. There, Seldes would interview workers as

well as describe what they do, producing programs that would run with recorded audio of

the person at work.22

In recognition of his pioneering work in the mass media, Seldes was named the

founding Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication in Philadelphia in 1959. He served in that capacity through 1963, when his health began to deteriorate. He died at home seven years later, with his daughter, actress Marian Seldes at his side, on

September 29, 1970. His planned autobiography, As in My Time, remains in draft form.23

5.4 An argument sustained

As they moved into the years beyond 1931, Rourke and Seldes sustained, and sharpened, four key observations about American culture and character. They stressed, both in argument and in their selection of subject matter, the following:

1. American culture, including modern culture, is tethered to popular

culture. This popular culture is, in fact, America’s “useable past.”

2. American culture, especially as it is expressed in its popular culture, is

demonic, grotesque, excessive, multiple, diverse, wasteful, and antic. In

this, it does not fit a European model for high culture.

3. American culture, because it is linked to its popular culture, is

expressed, and should be critiqued, in the commercial arena.

4. American culture is, fundamentally, performative. 217

1. American culture, including modern culture, is tethered to popular culture. This

popular culture constitutes, in fact, America’s “useable past.”

Throughout their careers, both Rourke and Seldes gave serious historical and critical attention to the entertainments of the general American population, proposing these entertainments as essential to the fabric of the culture at large. Rourke made the case, most overtly in Trumpets of Jubilee and in American Humor, that key figures from popular culture provided the foundation of America’s unique culture. These uniformly theatrical figures included performers (like Lotta Crabree), clergymen (like Henry Ward

Beecher), and impresarios (like P.T. Barnum). But they also included the fictionalized inventions of a growing nation, like the stage Yankee, backwoodsman, and minstrel. For his part, Seldes turned to his contemporary entertainments, including vaudeville, film, jazz, and radio, to find proof of America’s unique, and uniquely indicative, contributions to world culture.

Moreover, against the prevailing critical opinion of the American nineteenth century as a sterile wasteland of pioneering, pragmatism, puritanical ill-temper, and strained feminine gentility, Rourke and Seldes described a creative and downright iconoclastic milieu that was the very foundation of an American “useable past.” After his

Stammering Century, Seldes would continue to demonstrate the vigor of the period in his

CBS radio histories, in books like Mainland and Proclaim Liberty!, and in many of his journalistic essays. And though Rourke’s work remains unfinished, her intention to survey the entirety of American cultural history in Roots of American Culture signals her continuing interest in the period. Certainly, if Trumpets, Troupers, and American Humor are any indication, she believed with fervor that the reclamation of the vibrancy of the 218

nineteenth century was an essential project to undertake in the articulation of a

particularly American culture. This culture, as Rourke would assert in Roots of American

Culture, should be understood as “tillage, a fertile medium, a base or groundwork

including germination and growth. Surely a culture is the sum of such growth in terms of

expression. Not the separate arts but the whole configuration will tell the story.”24 That

is, the American culture she (and Seldes) uncovered in nineteenth and twentieth century

popular entertainments served as the very “useable past” that Brooks and Mencken

doubted American could ever possess.

2. American culture, especially as it is expressed in its popular culture, is demonic, grotesque, excessive, multiple, diverse, wasteful, and antic. In this it does not fit a

European model for high culture.

The popular entertainments that Seldes and Rourke examined were often comic and usually nonrealistic. So Seldes had his “daemonic” Al Jolson and Fanny Brice as touchstones of exceedingly fine popular performance. Rourke proffered Lotta Crabtree’s exuberant antics, the tall talk of the backwoodsman and Yankee types, the bombast of nineteenth century oration, the myth of Davy Crockett, and the outsize claims of P.T.

Barnum as more indicative of the American character. In all of these, Rourke and Seldes found touchstone examples of a vibrant, unruly America. And they knew that, in embracing these as positive models, they were proposing an audacious alternative portrait of the American people.

219

Like other critics of their day, both Rourke and Seldes stood against the limiting constraints of polite, genteel culture. However, they both saw the turn towards European standards of culture, including European modernism, as an option that was as invested as gentility was in rejecting the roughness of American popular culture. That is, the genteel tradition and the new modernists had in common one thing only: their distaste for

American popular culture. So, in Mainland, Seldes would savvily fuse the two when he critiqued Lewis Mumford’s “positively Puritan rage” at the obstreperous American pioneers who “did not heed Wordsworth’s advice to seek Nature ‘in a wise passiveness’” as “advice based on the poet’s love for the English lake district, about as uncivilized then as Northern Vermont is today.” In response to Mumford, Seldes argued in Mainland that it is undeniable that American pioneers were wasteful and aggressive. However, this wastefulness and aggression stemmed from, he says, the fact that the seemingly limitless physical expanse of the nation meant that Americans did not have to carefully squeeze every last drop of possibility out of a tiny European tract of overworked land. “This may be morally reprehensible,” Seldes writes, “but politically it had a satisfactory result: the

American farmer exhausted the soil, but did not let the soil exhaust him; so that we established the tradition of waste, but escaped the worse tradition of a stingy, frightened, miserly, peasant class. The more aesthetic American critics of America never quite forgave us for not having peasant arts and crafts, the peasant virtues, the peasant sturdiness, and all the rest of the good qualities which go with slavery to the soil.”25 That is, American critics craved, erroneously, a recreation of European culture in the United

States.

220

Rourke would more carefully sum up the habit of mind in her Roots of American

Culture this way:

Gross materialism is said to have blocked the arts…. Life on our successive frontiers has been declared destructive of these concerns…. Puritanism is said to have repressed the fine arts…. Sometimes these charges have become links in a chain: Puritanism created materialism, both forces were strengthened on the frontier, and none of them permitted leisure. These arguments have culminated in the theory of cultural ‘lag.”26

In short, critical pessimism where American culture was concerned was intimately bound

up with a misguided desire to replicate visions (real or imagined) of European culture.

The prolific, but unquestioned, notion that American culture “lagged” behind was, Seldes and Rourke state clearly, flawed in the extreme. So Seldes wrote:

What did the critics want their country to be? Noble, idealistic, sophisticated, delicate, moved by sense of tragic destiny, philosophical, artistic, devoted to the mind and the soul, all beauty and refinement and spirituality—from the contemplation of what society did they derive these ideals? From no actual time and place, for the most part, but from an idealized picture of an aristocratic Europe, from the literature of Europe.27

And in fact, the European model for high culture was also, often, intrinsically tied to

literary culture as its core manifestation of excellence. Both Rourke and Seldes rejected

this proposition. Seldes stated unequivocally, “Mr. Mumford, and a hundred others, start

from literature and end in literature, and dismiss, as they pass, the creation of the New

World as the corruption of one literary ideal, proved by another.” This habit of mind, for

Seldes, was fused with the pessimism he detested: “The literary approach to America is

almost always negative.”28 In Roots of American Culture, Rourke was characteristically

more gracious in her statement of the same point: “Indeed to this day the word culture in

this country is practically synonymous with literary culture, with an emphasis upon belles

lettres, the more refined and recondite levels of literature, the peaks of achievement.”29 221

In place of this emphasis on the literary and on the European, Rourke and Seldes turned to American popular culture, in all of its rough, messy, and vibrant glory. And

though they did not argue that everything that sprang from the shores of the New World

was perfect, or good, or worthwhile, they did insist that it was ineffably, not derivatively,

American. According to Rourke, “Whatever the gaps, the mischances, the downright

inferiority of some of our early arts, they cannot be considered in the main as the first

fumblings of mere ambitious imitation. They sprang from a life peculiar to these shores;

they were part of a fresh configuration.”30 They were, in short, not European. And they should not be evaluated as such.

3. American culture, because it is linked to its popular culture, is expressed, and should be critiqued, in the commercial arena.

For many critics, including especially Van Wyck Brooks and his “beloved community,” the most damning aspect of American popular arts was their unabashed commerciality. So, Brooks would declare that Mark Twain failed to become a great writer because he capitulated to the commercial marketplace by writing charming comic stories. Lewis Mumford asserted, in The Golden Day, that America had the opportunity to create a new utopian civilization but instead succumbed to capitalism. And even though Randolph Bourne embraced America’s “trans-national” and hybrid status, he rejected the popular entertainments of that hybrid as “lowbrow snobbery.” In fact, the credo of many of the bohemians and radicals of the 1920s was, at least overtly, an explicitly anti-capitalist (sometimes communistic) philosophy.

222

To assert without irony, as Rourke and Seldes did, that the popular entertainments of the American capitalist marketplace were, in fact, its most indigenous and indicative expression, was a radical move. More radical still is the fact that Rourke and Seldes not only embraced such arts, but they also embraced the consumers of those arts. They produced their own critical work for the very audience decried as foolish philistines by mainstream critics. Throughout his career, Seldes wrote for publications as varied as the

Dial and Vanity Fair to TV Guide and the Saturday Evening Post. In this mobility, Isaac

Golberg noted, Seldes always “skillfully adapt[ed] his style but never lower[ed] his

standards.”31 Indeed, Seldes rejected wholeheartedly the notion that “the audience” was

of a significantly different caliber amongst the publications for which he wrote. In The

Public Arts (1956), Seldes noted with disdain, “The concept of the audience as boobs is

satisfying to hucksters and to highbrows. It is not accurate, nor is it permanently

acceptable to democrats.” Moreover, Seldes always believed that any critic worth their

salt had a responsibility to the audience at large: “There grows up in critics a contempt

for what the public likes, and this contempt is itself contemptible, for it is part of the duty

of the critic to guide the public taste.”32 On this issue, Constance Rourke would note,

simply, in a 1939 letter to publisher Alfred Harcourt that “It seems to me that there would

be no point in centering upon popular culture, and it would be odd to have a great belief

in it, without making an attempt to write for those who in some way belong to it.”33

In important ways, both Rourke and Seldes stood for the most positive interpretation of the middlebrow, as what Brooks named in America’s Coming of Age as a “genial middle ground.” Both had very real, if possibly idealistic, faith in “the people” as intelligent readers. Both distrusted, and disliked, the coterie of intellectuals with which 223

they never really fit. Both mined popular material to construct their histories and theories of American culture. Neither Rourke nor Seldes suffered from boosterism, though both did, from time to time, especially as they strained to make their point against the general critical consensus, lapse into exceptionalism and chauvinism. And their work roamed, by choice, amongst genres, publications, and disciplines. In building careers that bridged the

“brows,” Rourke and Seldes embodied the American audience and the American culture they were advocating. In this, their careers may be the single strongest argument against

Lawrence Levine’s dichotomous vision of American culture in his Highbrow/Lowbrow

(1988).

4. American culture is, fundamentally, performative.

Between 1924 and 1931, Rourke and Seldes turned, in large measure, to the theatre and to the theatrical as the prime location of the American character and

American culture. Rourke asserted, in American Humor, that the theatre “was closely interwoven with the American character and the American experience” and that

Americans were a “theatrical race” whose tendencies were “heightened by a long intimacy with the stage.”34 In Troupers of the Gold Coast, performer Lotta Crabtree became for Rourke emblematic of exactly that American character and experience. And in Trumpets of Jubilee, P.T. Barnum loomed large as a key example of American bombast, magnitude, and inherent theatricality.

So Rourke’s first three historical studies were suffused with the theatre, and worked the theatre as a key metaphor in American culture. Seldes, on the other hand, wrote about specific contemporary performances. Beginning with theatrical criticism for 224

the Dial in 1921, Seldes consistently wrote, throughout his career, about and for the stage, screen, radio, and television. And against a climate of criticism focused on art theatre experimentation, he advocated for a sophisticated and incisive understanding of popular performance. His landmark work, Seven Lively Arts (1924), established such popular performances as crucial not to the American character (as Rourke’s studies did) but rather as essential to American modernism. They were, he said, its “lightning strike” of revolutionary creativity.

In turning to performance, both Rourke and Seldes grappled with the problems of race and ethnicity (and the representations of these) in American culture. Minstrelsy was fundamental to Rourke’s study of the American character; the contributions of Jews and blacks was implicated in Seldes’ analysis of American modernism. There were, to be sure, flaws in both of their assessments. However, the fact that they placed race and ethnicity so squarely at the center of America’s unique culture was an important critical move.

It is crucial to understand that both Rourke and Seldes would sustain their interest in the theatre and in performance. But neither, ever, limited such analysis of American culture to the theatre alone. Seldes had always, and would continue, to study film, radio, and television as part of the performance of the American character. But from the 1930s forward, his work became increasingly political. More and more, in books like Mainland and Your Money and Your Life, as well as in his essays for the Saturday Evening Post,

Seldes shifted his critical attention from the entertainments enjoyed by American audience to the American audience itself. Throughout, Seldes remained consistent in his

225

advocacy for the intelligence of the general populace, which was, in fact, the underlying

argument that animated his desire to advocate for popular performance in the first place.

In addition, though Rourke would devote fully a third of Roots of American

Culture to the stage, she too turned her critical attention away from the theatre

exclusively. She embraced, more and more, popular American visual arts. So Rourke

would study figures like John James Audubon, Charles Sheeler, and, for the Index of

American Design, a wide swath of folk artists. She continued to find theatrical elements in much of this work. But she primarily evaluated it on its own terms: as an example of a vibrant popular art that, like the theatre, provided an alternative creative lineage to the literature examined by so many of her contemporaneous critics.

Ultimately, then, both Rourke and Seldes discovered a unique American culture in their analysis of the stage. But both, to their credit, were able to extend their analyses and employ their insights beyond theatrical criticism alone. The theatre engendered and undergirded their studies. But it was not the limit of them. Perhaps their most radical act, for those working the field of theatre studies, was to assert that the theatre is not an end in itself. Rather, they show us how the theatre can be an intrinsic element of, and a key trope for the apprehension of, American culture at large.

226

Endnotes

1 Though Seldes comes through to us, in his writing, as more playful and ebullient than Rourke, it would be a mistake to imagine that she was a stick in the mud. For example, On January 26, 1937, Rourke wrote of her time in New York: “Friday night I went on a long bat…. We went first to ‘The Country Wife’…. As a rule I don’t like 18th century revivals but this was acted very fast and very amusingly. Then to a nightclub called ‘Hickory House,” then to the Onyx Club, which has a ‘swing’ band led by a darkey called Stuff Smith…. We stayed until five and then went to a restaurant and had some breakfast. Appt. at 9:30 which I kept promptly. Then to bed for the rest of the day.” Margaret Marshall MSS.

2 Constance Rourke to Bernard De Voto, 3 March 1932, Bernard De Voto MSS.

3 Quoted in Rubin, Constance Rourke 156.

4 Seldes, Mainland 13.

5 Williams to Sheeler, 17 July 1938, Rourke MSS. Quoted in Rubin, Constance Rourke xii.

6 Constance Rourke to Lewis Mumford, 14 January 1939. Lewis Mumford MSS.

7 Constance Rourke to Margaret Marshall, 24 October 1939. Margaret Marshall MSS.

8 Rourke, “A History of American Culture by Constance Rourke,” nd. Lewis Mumford MSS.

9 Constance Rourke to Lewis Mumford, 22 March 1940. Lewis Mumford MSS.

10 Constance Rourke to Lewis Mumford, 1 January 1938, Lewis Mumford MSS. Emphasis mine.

11 Brooks, “Introduction,” in Constance Rourke Roots of American Culture, v, xi.

12 Van Wyck Brooks to Donald Brace, 2 February 1942. Van Wyck Brooks MSS.

13 Qtd in Rubin, 59. The statement comes from Brooks’ Days of the Phoenix (1957).

14 Mumford wrote to Chamberlain on 6 August 1942:

Dear John Chamberlain: I was delighted with your warm-hearted and generous appreciation of Constance Rourke’s book: you did justice to a writer whose work was always rather under-valued; so much so that it took endless struggles to get any of the foundations to give her even a modest backing for the writing of the now-unwritten book.

227

Endnotes

But in giving her the praise that is due her and more than due her, you fell quite naturally into an error which I am tempted, for the sake of history, to correct: this has to do with her influence upon Brooks. He had known her back in the Freeman days, if not before, and when he was at Harcourt’s he was zealous in getting them to take her first book. That came out in 1927, and if one didn’t check oneself on dates one might easily take Brooks’ affirmative attitude toward American culture as the result in part of this and later books by Constance Rourke. I have no doubt that he was affected by her, as was I: we all maintained a fairly close relationship by correspondence. But that fact is it was not Miss Rourke, but Emerson, that effected a great change in Brooks: it was in the midst of writing the Emerson in 1925 and 1926 that he fell in love with America, as his letters to me then, ecstatic, glowing letters, plainly show. In giving Constance Rourke a formative part in Brooks’ change you have merely overlooked the actual dates. But I think you do something a little less just in your suggestion that she turned the “Brooks-Mumford generation from an increasingly sterile pre-occupation with American artistic failure”—at least if by that you mean Brooks and Mumford themselves. It is probably a long time since you looked at The Golden Day (published in 1926—a year before C.R.’s first), and the chances are ten to one that you remember it, not for what it was, but for what unsympathetic critics like Farrell and DeVoto have sought to make of it. If that can happen to you, dear John, it must be even more true for the young who have never even heard of The Golden Day; and for that reason I call your attention to the injustice of this sentence. [Here Mumford goes on to defend, strenuously, The Golden Day, for a full paragraph.] By now you probably believe that I was one of the querulous, nay-saying spirits of the 1920’s. Constance Rourke, who backed me up in 1938 on my publication of Men Must Act, when all the clever people knew I had gone crazy, never made that mistake about my contributions to our cultural history. (see pages 218-219 in The Van Wyck Brooks / Lewis Mumford Letters)s

15 Van Wyck Brooks to Lewis Mumford, 9 August 1942. The Van Wyck Brooks / Lewis Mumford Letters 218-219.

16 Your Money and Your Life is a striking, peculiar book. It is suffused with a real desire to rectify the inequities of the American capitalist system, thrown into particularly stark relief by the Depression, without retreating to a Marxist utopia. Seldes seems in earnest: he wants the middle class, with which he identifies, to become the agent of prudent, rational change. It would be easy to assume that the book would berate the Babbits, but, in keeping with Seldes’ consistently optimistic approach on this count, it does not. Seldes writes, “But in writing this book and several others about America of the past and present, I have become more than ever aware of the dangers through which the unorganized middle class must pass. I have never accepted the idea that the man in the middle class is unintelligent and contemptible; but I see in him a kind of weakness of the will brought on by years of prosperity, by a fatalistic belief in ever-expanding wealth and by the surrender of his political rights in order to relieve himself of his political duties”(292-293). And then Seldes sets about showing the middle class man why he must act on behalf of the poor. The book is oddly affecting, and warrants re-reading.

17 Seldes, Proclaim Liberty 166.

18 Seldes, The New Mass Media 97.

228

Endnotes

19 Lysistrata, directed and designed by Norman Bel-Geddes, opened in Philadelphia on April 28, 1930 at the Philadelphia Theatre Association. It moved to Broadway in late May to run 252 performances. Later, the text was published (both in Theatre Magazine and as a book) as well as restaged around the country. According to Kammen, “Measured in purely financial terms, it ranks as the most successful project—book, play, or radio series—that Seldes ever undertook.” See Kammen, The Lively Arts 162-165.

20 Time 34 (11 December 1939): 50. Quoted in Kammen, The Lively Arts 205. For a thorough analysis of Swingin’ the Dream, which makes strides towards reconstructing it, see Frances Teague’s Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage, 120-130.

21 Seldes, Seven Lively Arts, 9-10.

22 Incomplete, but fascinating, runs of Seldes’ radio scripts can be found in the CBS radio scripts collection at the Library of Congress. Living History (which ran from 4 June to 28 September 1938) can be found in box 28. Americans at Work (which ran, with short hiatus, from 5 May 1938 to 7 May 1940) can be found in boxes 28-30. Americans All, Immigrants All (which ran from 19 July 1938 to 25 March 1939) can be found in box 32. The scripts give a good sense of the conversational, spontaneous-sounding style that Seldes crafted for his on-air persona. He also contributed a “Headlines and Bylines” piece periodically. These are not collected at the Library of Congress; however, the text of a lone broadcast, from 27 November 1938, can be found in box 124 of the Gertrude Stein collection at Yale’s Beinecke library. The feature was clearly eclectic: Seldes mentions her forthcoming version of Faust, along with an Emporia, Kansas newspaper, a film version of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, Pins and Needles, and Thomas Mann.

Seldes also worked in early television for CBS. Caches of scripts for his experiments do not seem to be in the archives; however, a 2 March 1942 letter to Henry McBride in the McBride collection at the Beinecke library at Yale University gives a sense of what kinds of projects Seldes was undertaking. In this instance, he was pulling together a panel of art historians and critics to discuss a collection of paintings live on TV.

23 Seldes’ personal papers are held by his daughter, Marian Seldes.

24 Rourke, Roots of American Culture 47-48.

25 Seldes, Proclaim Liberty! 134-135.

26 Rourke, Roots of American Culture 46-47.

27 Seldes, Mainland 13-15.

28 Ibid. 15, 17.

29 Rourke, Roots of American Culture 49.

229

Endnotes

30 Ibid. 51.

31 Seldes, “American Humor” 341.

32 Seldes, Public Arts 293, 294.

33 Quoted in Rubin, Constance Rourke 157.

34 Rourke, American Humor 92, 93.

230

APPENDIX A

WORKS BY CONSTANCE ROURKE

231

Works By Constance Rourke

(listed chronologically)

1907

“The Music of Poetry as Distinguished from the Music of Prose,” Vassar Miscellany, February 1907: 109-111.

1909

“Report Submitted to the William Borden Memorial Fund Committee.” Vassar Miscellany, October 1909: 438-441.

1914

“Changes at Vassar.” Vassar Miscellany, November 1914: 37-42.

“The Rationale of Punctuation.” Educational Review, October 1914: 246-58.

1916

The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Opening of Vassar College. Poughkeepsie: Vassar College, 1916.

1918

“An English Raconteur.” Review of Arthur’s Sixpenny Pieces, Robert Blatchford, Cottage Pie, Clara, Simple Simon, Kitchener Chaps, and Thereabouts, by Neil Lyons. New Republic, 8 June 1918: 180-182.

232

1919

“Inducements for Elementary School Teachers.” Vassar Quarterly, February 1919: 180- 182.

“Caradoc Evans.” Review of My People and Capel Sion by Caradoc Evans. New Republic, 1 February 1919: 30-32.

“The Ethical Novel.” Review of The Modern Novel by Wilson Follett. New Republic, 17 May 1919: 94-97.

“The Antique World of Bliss.” Review of Far Away and Long Ago by W.H. Hudson. New Republic, 24 May 1919: 125-126.

“Vaudeville.” New Republic, 27 August 1919: 115-116.

“Dorothy M. Richardson.” Review of Pilgrimage, Pointed Roofs, Backwater, Honeycomb, and The Tunnel by Dorothy M. Richardson. New Republic, 26 November 1919: 14-15

1920

“Virginia Woolf.” Review of The Voyage Out and Night and Day by Virginia Woolf. New Republic, 5 May 1920: 320-322.

“Paul Bunyon.” New Republic, 7 July 1920: 176-179.

“Transitions.” Review of Peace in Friendship Village and Miss Lulu Bett by Zona Gale. New Republic, 11 August 1920: 315-316.

“Under the Microscope.” Review of Jane Austen by O.W. Firkens. Freeman, 18 August 1920: 549-550.

“Scholars and Gentlewomen.” Review of The Learned Lady in England, 1650-1760 by Myra Reynolds. Freeman, 29 September 1920: 68-69.

“The American Short Story.” Review of The Great American Short Stories edited by William Dean Howells. Freeman, 6 October 1920: 91.

“Contemporary French Writers.” Review of Twentieth Century French Writers by Mary Duclaux. Freeman, 20 October 1920: 140-141.

233

“Mr. Robinson’s Lancelot. Review of Lancelot by E.A. Robinson. Freeman, 27 October 1920: 164.

“A Tale of the Folk.” Review of Ditte: Girl Alive by Martin A. Nexö. Freeman, 10 November 1920: 213.

“Contemporary Poets.” Review of Studies of Contemporary Poets by Mary C. Sturgeon. Freeman, 15 December 1920: 331-332.

1921

“The Brahmin Caste.” Review of Crowding Memories by Mrs. Thomas Bailey Aldrich. New Republic, 5 January 1921: 175-176.

“Novels with a Purpose.” Review of The Romantic by Mary Sinclair. Freeman, 12 January 1921: 429.

“On the Road to Castaly.” Review of Development by W. Bryher. New Republic, 26 January 1921: 270.

“Portrait of a Home Town.” New Republic, 23 February 1921: 369-371.

“Concerning Satire.” Review of Satire by Gilbert Cannan and Satire in the Victorian Novel by F.T. Russell. Freeman, 2 March 1921: 596-597.

“The Adams Mind.” Review of A Cycle of Adams Letters edited by W.C. Ford and Letters to a Niece and Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres by Henry Adams. Freeman, 23 March 1921: 43-44.

“A Middle Class Emperor.” Review of Memoirs of the Empress Eugenie by Comte Fleury. Freeman, 27 April 1921: 164.

“Enchantment.” Review of The Boy Who Knew What the Birds Said, The Boy Apprenticed to an Enchanter, The Girl Who Sat By the Ashes, The Children of Odin, and The Children’s Homer by Padraic Colum. New Republic, 4 May 1921: 300-301.

“When Feminism Was in Flower.” Review of Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan translated by K. Doi. Freeman, June 15, 1921: 333-334.

“The Disintegration of a Poet.” Freeman, 27 July 1921: 468-469.

“Private Life for Children.” New Republic, 10 August 1921: 294-296. 234

“The Porch.” Dial, October 1921: 418-422.

“The Springs of Poetry.” Review of Poetic Origins and the Ballad by Louise Pound. Freeman, 12 October 1921: 116-117.

“Portrait of a Young Woman.” Dial, November 1921: 149-151.

1922

“The Genius of the Novel.” New Republic, 4 January 1922: 149-151.

“Some Vassar Letters: 1865-70.” Vassar Quarterly, May 1922: 153-163.

1924

“The Porch.” Stories from the Dial. New York: Dial Press, 1924.

1925

“The Flying Horse.” Review of Gold by Gold by Herbert S. Gorman. New Republic, 26 August 1925: 6.

“The Making of an Epic.” Review of Paul Bunyon by James Stevens and Paul Bunyon by Esther Shephard. Saturday Review of Literature, 29 August 1925: 81.

1926

“Harriet Beecher Stowe Part I.” Woman’s Home Companion. 53 (February 1926): 22-23.

“Harriet Beecher Stowe Part II.” Woman’s Home Companion. 53 (March 1926): 12-13.

“Harriet Beecher Stowe Part III.” Woman’s Home Companion. 53 (April 1926): 24-25.

“Harriet Beecher Stowe Part IV.” Woman’s Home Companion. 53 (May 1926): 14-15.

“Henry Ward Beecher Part I.” Woman’s Home Companion. 53 (September 1926): 21-22.

235

“Henry Ward Beecher Part II.” Woman’s Home Companion. 53 (October 1926): 29-30.

“Henry Ward Beecher Part III.” Woman’s Home Companion. 53 (November 1926): 25- 26.

1927

Trumpets of Jubilee: Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lyman Beecher, Horace Greeley, P.T. Barnum. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1927.

“Henry Ward Beecher Part IV.” Woman’s Home Companion. 54 (January 1927): 30-32.

1928

Troupers of the Gold Coast, or, The Rise of Lotta Crabtree. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928.

“The Vanishing Evangelical.” Review of In the Service of the King by Aimee Semple McPherson. New York Herald Tribune Books, 8 April 1928: 5.

“Troupers of the Gold Coast Part I.” Woman’s Home Companion. 55 (May 1928): 7-10.

“Troupers of the Gold Coast Part II.” Woman’s Home Companion. 55 (June 1928): 18- 20.

“Troupers of the Gold Coast Part III.” Woman’s Home Companion. 55 (July 1928): 15- 17.

“Troupers of the Gold Coast Part IV.” Woman’s Home Companion. 55 (August 1928): 31-33.

“Troupers of the Gold Coast Part V.” Woman’s Home Companion. 55 (September 1928): 30-31.

“Poetry of the North.” Review of The Search Relentless by Constance Lindsay Skinner. New York Herald Tribune Books, 16 September 1928: 7

“Troupers of the Gold Coast Part VI.” Woman’s Home Companion. 55 (October 1928): 13-14s. 236

“Portrait of a Reformer.” Review of Susan B. Anthony: The Woman Who Changed the Mind of a Nation by Rheta Childe Dorr. New York Herald Tribune Books, 21 October 1928: 3.

“Tall Tales of the Northwest.” Review of Homer in the Sage-Brush by James Stevens. New York Herald Tribune Books, 25 November 1928: 19

“Not All Ladies.” Review of Forgotten Ladies by Richardson Wright. New York Herald Tribune Books, 9 December 1928: 20.

“An Anatomy of Zeal.” Review of Stammering Century by Gilbert Seldes. New York Herald Tribune Books, 9 December 1928: 5.

1929

“This is Legend.” Review of Eilly Orum, Queen of the Comstock by Swift Paine. New York Herald Tribune Books, 21 April 1929: 20.

1931

American Humor: A Study of the National Character. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931.

“Our Comic Heritage.” Saturday Review of Literature, 21 March 1931: 678-679.

“Rafinesque.” Review of Green River: A Poem for Rafinesque by James Whaler. New York Herald Tribune Books, 26 April 1931: 14.

“For Friends.” Review of Girl of the Eighties by Martha Pike Conant. New York Herald Tribune Books, 16 August 1931: 10.

“Folk Songs of America.” Review of American Songs for Children collected by Winthrop B. Palmer. New York Herald Tribune Books, 23 August 1931: 6.

“A Myth Comes Into Its Own.” Review of John Henry by Roark Bradford. New York Herald Tribune Books, 6 September 1931: 1.

“Drawn from a Rich Abundance.” Review of Jane Matthew by Eda Lou Walton. New York Herald Tribune Books, 11 October 1931: 7.

237

“An American Grand Style.” Review of Portrait of an American by Robert P. Tristram Coffin. New York Herald Tribune Books, 25 October 1931: 1.

“Romanticism of the Border.” Review of The Rediscovery of the Frontier by Percy H. Boynton. New York Herald Tribune Books, 1 November 1931: 16.

1932

“Keene, Laura.” Dictionary of American Biography. Volume 5, part 2. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932, 1933. 283-284.

“Bret Harte.” Review of Bret Harte: Argonaut and Exile by George R. Stewart, Jr. New Republic, 2 March 1932: 77-78.

“Emily Dickinson’s Own Story.” Review of Letters of Emily Dickinson edited by Mabel Loomis Todd. New Republic 20 April 1932: 279-280.

“Letters to the Editor.” American Literature, May 1932: 207-210.

“In the Time of Daniel Boone.” Review of Debby Barnes, Trader by Constance Lindsay Skinner. New York Herald Tribune Books, 5 June 1932: 9

“In Defense of Mark Twain’s Genius.” Review of Mark Twain’s America by Bernard De Voto. New York Herald Tribune Books, 11 September 1932: 3.

“Rich Seeding Ground.” Review of Sketches in Criticism by Van Wyck Brooks. New York Herald Tribune Books, 23 October 1932: 4.

“One Reality in a World of Shadows.” Review of Biography and the Human Heart by Gamaliel Bradford. New York Herald Tribune Books, 4 December 1932: 2.

“The Unfolding Earth.” Review of Earth Horizon: An Autobiography by Mary Austin. New York Herald Tribune Books, 21 December 1932: 166-167.

1933

“On the Texas-Mexican Border.” Review of Tone the Bell Easy edited by J. Frank Dobie. New York Herald Tribune Books, 1 January 1933: 5.

238

“Cross Country.” Review of Folksay IV edited by B.A. Botkin. New Republic 1 February 1933: 331.

“The Early American Mind in the Making.” Review of American Folk Art by Holger Cahill. New York Herald Tribune Books, 12 March 1933: 3.

“The King of Mississippi Keelboatmen.” Review of Mike Fink by Walter Blair and Franklin J. Meine. New York Herald Tribune Books, 2 April 1933: 4.

“The Seacoast of Bohemia.” Review of Garrets and Pretenders by Albert Parry. New York Herald Tribune Books, 23 April 1933: 10.

Review of Josh Billings: Yankee Humorist by Cyril Clemens. American Literature, May 1933: 199-200.

“The Gaudy Life of San Francisco’s Underworld.” Review of The Barbary Coast by Herbert Asbury. New York Herald Tribune Books, 6 August 1933: 5

“Singing on the Kentucky Mountainsides.” Review of The Traipsin’ Woman by Jean Thomas. New York Herald Tribune Books, 13 August 1933: 2.

“Fur Trading and the Destiny of Nations.” Review of Beaver, Kings and Cabins by Constance Lindsay Skinner. New York Herald Tribune Books, 17 September 1933: 7.

“The Significance of Sections.” New Republic, 20 September 1933: 148-151.

“Marvels, a History, and a Character.” Review of The Journey of the Flame by Anthony de Fierro Blanco. Nation 8 November 1933: 543.

1934

Davy Crockett. Garden City, NY: Junior Deluxe Editions, 1934.

“Stowe, Harriet Beecher.” Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. 1934.

“Vassar Classrooms: ‘English J’ and ‘Romanticism.’” In Miss Wylie of Vassar edited by Elizabeth Woodbridge Morris. New Haven: Yale UP, 1934. 72-76.

“Davy Crockett: Forgotten Facts and Legends.” Southwest Review 19 (January 1934): 149. 239

“The Land and Its People in a Living Alliance.” Review of Culture in the South edited by W.T. Couch. New York Herald Tribune Books, 4 February 1934: 4.

“Comic Undertones of American Humor.” Review of A History of American Graphic Humor by William Murrell. New York Herald Tribune Books, 18 March 1934: 8.

“Eastward of Lake Michigan.” Review of Belly Fulla Straw by D.C. DeJong. New York Herald Tribune Books, 1 April 1934: 7.

“The National Folk Festival.” New Republic, 30 May 1934: 72-73.

“Words and Music.” Review of Stephen Foster: America’s Troubadour by J.T. Howard. New Republic 4 July 1934: 217-218.

“Story of a Dictator.” Review of Pico, Bandit and Dictator by Antonio de Fierro Blanco. Nation 8 August 1934: 166-167.

“The Noble Sport of Ballad Hunting.” Nation 14 August 1934: 192-193.

“Our Wealth of Song and Legend.” New York Herald Tribune Books, 11 November 1934: 1.

“In America’s Hearty, Sentimental Years.” Review of The Sentimental Years: 1836-1860 by E. Douglas Branch. New York Herald Tribune Books, 18 November 1934: 9.

1935

“The First National Folk Festival.” Vassar Quarterly, February 1935: 9-13.

“Examining the Roots of American Humor.” American Scholar Spring 1935: 249-254.

“The Significance of Sections.” Review of The United States, 1830-1850 by F.J. Turner. Nation, 17 April 1935: 458.

“Settling of the Southeast.” Review of Trades and Travel Around the Southern Appalachians by Randall Bond Truett. New York Herald Tribune Books, 16 June 1935: 13.

“American Art: A Possible Future.” Magazine of Art, July 1935: 390-405.

“Continuities in Music.” Review of The Puritans and Music in England and New England by Percy A. Scholes. Nation, 3 July 1935: 23-24.

240

“Glory Days.” Review of Kit Carson Days by Edwin L. Sabin. New York Herald Tribune Books, 8 September 1935: 12.

1936

Audubon. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936.

“Yankee Crusader.” Review of Theodore Parker by Henry Steele Commager. Yale Review, June 1936: 833-834.

“Artists on Relief.” New Republic, 15 July 1936: 286-288.

“A Way of Living.” Review of Small House in the Sun by Samuel Chamberlain. New York Herald Tribune Books, 13 September 1936: 20.

“American Prints of Variety and Power.” Review of America Today: A Book of One Hundred Prints published under the auspices of the American Artists’ Congress. New York Herald Tribune Books, 27 December 1936: 6.

1937

Index of American Design. Catalog for exhibition at Fogg Museum, January 27-February 10, 1937. Federal Arts Project, Works Progress Administration, 1937.

“Biography and What Makes It by Biographer.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 2 January 1937, p. 6.

“Index of American Design.” Magazine of Art, April 1937: 207-211

“Authentic American Communal.” Review of Shaker Furniture by Edward Andrews and Faith Andrews. New York Herald Tribune Books, 16 May 1937: 17.

“The Mystery of Audubon.” Review of I Who Should Command All by Alice Jaynes Tyler. New York Herald Tribune Books, 25 July 1937: 13.

“How Primitive Races Look at the Whites.” Review of The Savage Hits Back by Julius Lips. New York Herald Tribune Books, 26 September 1937: 5. 241

“Traditions for Young People.” Nation, 20 November 1937: 562-564.

“Native Crafts.” Review of Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands by Allen H. Eaton and The Arts Workshop of Rural America by Marjorie Patten. New York Herald Tribune Books, 5 December 1937: 37.

1938

Charles Sheeler: Artist in the American Tradition. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938

“A Survey of Regionalism.” Review of American Regionalism: A Cultural Historical Approach to National Integration by Howard W. Odum and Harry Estill Moore. Nation, 1 October 1938: 330-331.

“Ballads as History.” Review of Minstrels of the Mine Patch by George Korson. Nation 10 December 1938: 630-632.

“From Nast to Disney.” Review of A History of American Graphic Humor, 1865-1938 by William Murrell. New York Herald Tribune Books, 25 December 1938: 3.

1939

“From Plains to Salt Water.” Review of Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads by John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, Songs of American Sailormen by Joanna Colcord, and Whale Ships and Whaling by Albert Cook Church. Nation 21 January 1939: 96.

“In Time of Hesitation.” Review of Men Must Act by Lewis Mumford. Nation 18 February 1939: 206-207.

“Our Earliest Cities.” Review of Cities in the Wilderness by Carl Bridenbaugh. Nation 6 May 1939: 535-536.

“Studies in American Culture.” Review of Liberal Kentucky, 1780-1828 by N.H. Sonne, Jedidiah Morse, A Champion of New England Orthodoxy by James King Morse, and The Early Days of Christian Socialism by James Dombrowski. Nation 23 September 1939: 327-328.

242

“Storehouse of Balladry.” Review of Ballads and Songs of Southern Michigan edited by Emelyn E. Gardner and Geraldine J. Chickering. New York Herald Tribune Books, 24 September 1939: 10.

“Voltaire Combe.” Nation 7 October 1939: 379-381.

“An Artist by Way of Philadelphia and Tahiti.” Review of An American Artist’s Story by George Biddle. New York Herald Tribune Books, 8 October 1939: 7.

“Have We An American Art?” Review of Gist of Art by John Sloan, An American Artist’s Story by George Biddle, And He Sat Among the Ashes by William Slack, Modern American Painting by Peyton Boswell, A Treasury of Arts Masterpieces by Thomas Craven, Have We An American Art? by E.A. Jewell, America’s Old Masters by James Thomas Flexner, and The Artist of Revolution by Charles C. Sellers. Nation 11 November 1939: 527-529.

“Prints With Life, Fun, Character.” Review of A Treasury of American Prints by Thomas Craven. New York Herald Tribune Books, 19 November 1939: 10.

“Letters to the Editors.” Nation 25 November 1939: 592.

1940

“Good Morning.” Review of Art Young: His Life and Times by Art Young. Nation 10 February 1940: 214-216.

“American Painting as American.” Review of The Birth of the American Tradition in Art by Oskar Hagen. Nation 9 March 1940: 342.

“Art in Our Town.” Nation 30 March 1940: 424-425.

“Study of a Culture.” Review of Modern French Painters by R.H. Wilenski. Nation 20 July 1940: 54-55.

“Audubon.” Review of Audubon’s America edited by Donald C. Peattie. Nation 7 December 1940: 565-568.

1942

The Roots of American Culture. Ed. Van Wyck Brooks. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942. 243

1959

American Humor: A Study of the National Character. Reprint. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: 1959.

1973

“What is American Design?” In Art for the Millions: Essays from the 1930s by Artists and Administrators of the WPA Federal Art Project edited by Francis V. O’Connor. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973. 165-166.

2004

American Humor: A Study of the National Character. 2nd ed. Introduction by Greil Marcus. New York: New York Review of Books, 2004.

244

APPENDIX B

WORKS BY GILBERT SELDES

245

Works By Gilbert Seldes

(listed chronologically)

1913

“The American Novel II: Chaos and Lightening.” Harvard Monthly 56 (March 1913).

1914

**Following his graduation in May from Harvard, Seldes began writing a regular column as the music critic for the Philadelphia Evening Ledger. 1914-1915

“Marionettes: A Modern Fantasy.”Harvard Monthly 57 (January 1914): 124-129.

“Emancipated.” Forum 51 (June 1914): 899-910.

“The Changing Temper at Harvard.” Forum 52 (October 1914): 523-527.

George and Gilbert Seldes. “The Press and the Reporter,” The Forum 52 (November 1914): 722-3.

1916

Seldes to London for Philadelphia Evening Ledger. Through 1917.

1917

The United States and the War. London: Allen and Unwin: 1917.

“The United States and the World.” The Living Age 292 (13 January 1917): 114-115.

“The United States and the World” The Living Age 292 (3 February 1917): 304, 308.

“A New Literature of Peace.” Dial 62 (25 January 1917): 61-64.

246

“Rediscovery and Romance.” Review of Limehouse Nights: Tales of Chinatown by Thomas Burke. Dial 62 (19 July 1917): 65+.

“A Parnassian Romance.” Review of the King of Alsander by James Elroy Flecker. Dial 62 (25 October 1917): 396+.

“England Shows Prosperity Is Sound Despite War’s Demand.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 10 November 1917, p. 2.

“Confusion of Peace Terms.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 18 November 1917, p. G9.

1918

“British Foreign Policy.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 10 February 1918, p. C7.

“Army Morals.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 17 February 1918, p. D5.

1920

**In 1920, Seldes became an editor at the Dial

Sganarelle (Gilbert Seldes). “A Competent Critic.” Review of Books in General by Solomon Eagle. Dial 68 (January 1920): 107-112.

“In the Smoker.” Collier’s 65 (14 February 1920): 47.

“The Theatre.” Dial 68 (March 1920): 405-407.

Sganarelle (Gilbert Seldes). “I Too Have Been In.” Review of Gun Fodder by A. Hamilton Gibbs and A Private in the Guards by Stephen Graham. Dial 68 (March 1920): 391-398.

“The Theatre.” Dial 68 (April 1920): 504-505.

Sganarelle (Gilbert Seldes). “The Old Order.” Review of The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes. Dial 68 (April 1920).

“The Theatre.” Dial 68 (May 1920): 672-673.

“Mr. Mackenzie’s Jest.” Review of Poor Relations by Compton Mackenzie. Dial 68 (May 1920): 611+. 247

“Making Books as Plentiful at Home as They Were at the Front.” Collier’s 65 (15 May 1920): 76-77.

“Comment.” Dial 68 (June 1920): 106-108.

“The Theatre.” Dial 68 (June 1920): 808-809.

Sganarelle (Gilbert Seldes). “The Peace of God.” Review of Before the War by Viscount Haldane, How the War Came by The Earl Loreburn, The Inside Story of the Peace Conference by Dr. Edward J. Dillon, and The Responsibilities of the League by Lord Eustace Percy. Dial 68 (June 1920): 799-783.

“The Mind of An Artist.” Review of The Letters of Henry James edited by Percy Lubbock. Dial 69 (July 1920): 83.

“The Theatre.” Dial 69 (July 1920): 104-105.

“A Novelist of Courage.” Review of The Rescue by Joseph Conrad. Dial 69 (August 1920): 15.

“The Theatre.” Dial 69 (August 1920): 19-20.

“The Theatre.” Dial 69 (September 1920): 324-325.

“The Theatre.” Dial 69 (October 1920): 436-437.

“The Theatre.” Dial 69 (November 1920): 555-556.

“The Theatre.” Dial 69 (December 1920): 672-673.

1921

“The Theatre.” Dial 70 (January 1921): 120.

“Mr. Vachel Lindsay’s Future.” Review of The Golden Book of Springfield by Vachel Lindsay. Dial 70 (February 1921): 208.

“The Theatre.” Dial 70 (February 1921): 242.

“The Last Stand.” Review of The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton and In Chancery by John Galsworthy. Dial 70 (March 1921): 340.

“Our Beggar’s Opera.” Dial 70 (March 1921): 303-306. 248

“The Theatre.” Dial 70 (March 1921): 364.

“The Theatre.” Dial 70 (April 1921): 486.

“In the New York Theaters.” Washington Post, 24 April 1921, p. 65.

“The Theatre.” Dial 70 (May 1921): 604.

Sganarelle (Gilbert Seldes). “Some English Critics.” Review of Life and Letters by JC Squire, Reputations by Douglas Goldring, The Art of Letters by Robert Lynd, The Evolution of an Intellectual by John Middleton Murry. Dial 70 (June 1921): 710- 713.

“Struldbrugs and Supermen.” Review of Back to Methuselah by George Bernard Shaw. Dial 71 (August 1921): 227.

Vivian Shaw (Gilbert Seldes). Review of the Education of Eric Lane by Stephen McKenna, Coquette by Frank Swinnerton, The Journal of Henry Bulver by C. Veheyne, Revolution by J.D. Beresford, and The Death of Society by Romer Wilson. Dial 71 (September 1921): 368-371.

“Daguerreotypes and Water-Colors.” Review of Notes and Reviews by Henry James and Master Eustace by Henry James. Dial 71 (October 1921): 472.

“The Theatre.” Dial 71 (October 1921): 492-493.

Sganarelle (Gilbert Seldes). “Non Expedit.” Review of Clerambault by Romain Rolland. Dial 71 (October 1921): 469-471.

“The House of Esau.” Nation 113 (5 October 1921): 374.

“Arriviste and Aristocrat.” Review of Erik Dorn by Ben Hecht and Beginning of Wisdom by Stephen Vincent Benet. Dial 71 (November 1921) :597.

“The Theatre.” Dial 71 (November 1921): 620-621.

Vivian Shaw (Gilbert Seldes). Review of The Man in the Street by Meredith Nicholson. Dial 71 (November 1921): 604-605.

“The Theatre.” Dial 71 (December 1921): 724-725.

249

1922

“Duodecimo, 250 PP.” Review of Seeing Things at Night by Heywood Broun, Sinband and His Friends by Simeon Strunsky, The Margin of Hesitation by Frank Colby, A Parody Outline of History by Donald O. Steward, The Cruise of the Kawa by Walter E. Traprock, Pastiche and Prejudice by A.B. Walkley, More Trivia by Logan Pearsall Smith, and And Even Now by Max Beerbohm. Dial 72 (January 1922): 94-96.

“The Cinema Novel.” Vanity Fair 18 (June 1922): 73.

“The Theatre.” Dial 72 (January 1922): 114-115.

“Madame a sa Tour Monte….” by Louis Aragon, translated by Gilbert Seldes. Dial 72 (January 1922): 20+.

“Documents.” Review of Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche edited by Oscar Levy and The Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence edited by Elizabeth Foerster- Nietzsche. Dial 72 (February 1922): 211.

“The Higher Learning in America IV: Harvard.” The Smart Set 67 (February 1922): 60- 61.

“Jewish Plays and Jew Plays in New York.” Menorah Journal 8 (February 1922): 236.

“The Theatre.” Dial 72 (February 1922): 230-231

“The New York Theaters.” Washington Post, 26 February 1922, p. 55.

“The Art of the Novel.” Review of The Craft of Fiction by Percy Lubbock. Dial 72 (March 1922): 318.

“The Theatre.” Dial 72 (March 1922): 337-341.

Vivian Shaw (Gilbert Seldes). Review of Cytherea by Joseph Hergesheimer. Dial 72 (March 1922): 310-313.

“The New York Theaters.” Washington Post, 12 March 1922, p. 53.

“The New York Theaters.” Washington Post, 19 March 1922, p. 58.

“The Best Butter.” Review of The Best Short Stories of 1921 edited by Edward J. O’Brien, O.Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921, The Stories Editors Buy and Why edited by Jean Wick, and Selected Stories from O. Henry edited by C. Alphonso Smith. Dial 72 (April 1922): 427+. 250

“The Theatre.” Dial 72 (April 1922): 444-445.

Vivian Shaw (Gilbert Seldes). Review of The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Dial 72 (April 1922): 419-421.

“The New York Theaters.” Washington Post, 2 April 1922, p. 51.

“The New York Theaters.” Washington Post, 9 April 1922, p. 59.

“Manners Maketh Man.” The Freeman 5 (12 April 1922): 115-116.

“The New York Theaters.” Washington Post, 16 April 1922, p. 56.

“The New York Theaters.” Washington Post, 25 April 1922, p. 25.

“The New York Theaters.” Washington Post, 30 April 1922, p. 54.

“Golla, Golla, the Comic Strip’s Art.” Vanity Fair 18 (May 1922): 71.

“Prologue to an Edition.” Review of A Survey by Max Beerbohm, And Even Now by Max Beerbohm, and Max Beerbohm in Perspective by Bohun Lynch. Dial 72 (May 1922): 522+.

“The Theatre.” Dial 72 (May 1922): 548-549.

“The New York Theaters.” Washington Post, 7 May 1922, p. 53.

“The New York Theaters.” Washington Post, 14 May 1922, p. 57.

“The New York Theaters.” Washington Post, 21 May 1922, p. 54.

“The Theatre.” Dial 72 (June 1922): 660-661.

“The New York Theaters.” Washington Post, 4 June 1922, p. 58.

“A Trick of Memory.” Review of Merton of the Movies by Harry Leon Wilson. Dial 73 (July 1922): 106-107.

Lucien Bluphocks (Gilbert Seldes). “Twas Brill-ig and the Slith Freuds.” Vanity Fair 18 (July 1922): 59, 106.

“The Theatre.” Dial 73 (July 1922): 116-117.

Vivian Shaw (Gilbert Seldes). Review of Readers and Writers by A.E. Orage. Dial 73 (August 1922): 228-229. 251

“Ulysses.” The Nation. 115 (30 August 1922): 211-212.

“Not Literary.” Dial 73 (August 1922): 228-229.

“Vaudeville.” Dial 73 (August 1922): 237-238.

“The Altar of the Dead.” Review of The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton. Dial 73 (September 1922): 343-345.

“The Theatre.” Dial 73 (September 1922): 356-357.

“The New York Theaters.” Washington Post, 10 September 1922.

“The New York Letter.” Washington Post, 24 September 1922.

“Claude Bovary.” Review of One of Ours by Willa Cather. Dial 73 (October 1922): 17+.

“The Damned Effrontery of the Two-a-Day.” Vanity Fair 19 (October 1922): 51, 102.

“The Theatre.” Dial 73 (October 1922): 463-464.

“New York Letter.” Washington Post, 8 October 1922, p. 64.

“New York Letter.” Washington Post, 15 October 1922, p. 66.

“The New York Theaters.” Washington Post, 22 October 1922, p. 57.

“New York Letter.” Washington Post, 29 October 1922, p. 62.

“The Darktown Strutters.” Vanity Fair 19 (November 1922): 67.

“Nineties—Twenties—Thirties.” Review of The Eighteen Nineties by Holbrook Jackson and The Undertaker’s Garland by John Peale Bishop and Edmund Wilson Jr. Dial 73 (November 1922): 574-578.

“The Theatre.” Dial 73 (November 1922): 584-585.

“What’s Doing on the Rialto in ‘Little Old’ New York.” Washington Post, 26 November 1922, p. 66.

“The Theatre.” Dial 73 (December 1922): 688-689.

“Zoe Akins’ Comedy Opens, Starring Jobyna Howland.” Washington Post, 3 December 1922.

252

“T.S. Eliot.” Nation 115 (6 December 1922): 614-616.

“Mr. Seldes Opinionizes on Current New York Plays.” Washington Post, 10 December 1922, p. 63.

“A National Theatre Sits in the Wind.” Washington Post, 17 December 1922, p. 68.

1923

“First Inversion.” Review of Babel by John Cournos, Gargoyles by Ben Hecht, and The Boy Grew Older by Heywood Broun. Dial 74 (January 1923): 100-102.

“The Revue Reviewed.” Vanity Fair 19 (January 1923): 57.

“The Theatre.” Dial 74 (January 1923): 109-110.

Vivian Shaw (Gilbert Seldes). “Moving Pictures.” Dial 74 (January 1923): 111-112.

“The Sultan’s Turret.” Review of Continental Stagecraft by Kenneth Macgowan and Robert Edmond Jones. Dial 74 (February 1923): 204-205.

“The Theatre.” Dial 74 (February 1923): 215-216.

Vivian Shaw (Gilbert Seldes). Review of Anne Severn and The Fieldings by May Sinclair. Dial 74 (February 1923): 197-198.

“Omitting Scotland Yard.” Review of The Man Who Knew Too Much by Gilbert K. Chesterton. Dial 74 (May 1923): 518-519.

“The First Merryandrews of Europe.” Vanity Fair 20 (July 1923): 57.

“Say it With Music.” Vanity Fair 20 (July 1923): 61.

“Shorter and Better Stories.” Review of O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1922, The Best Short Stores of 1922 edited by Edward J. O’Brien, The Advance of the American Short Story by Edward J. O’Brien, and As We Are: Stories of Here and Now edited by Walter B. Pitkin. Dial 75 (August 1923): 184-187.

“The One-Man Show.” Vanity Fair 20 (August 1923): 54.

“Toujours Jazz.” Dial 75 (August 1923): 151-166.

253

Vivian Shaw (Gilbert Seldes). “The Great God Bogus.” Vanity Fair 20 (August 1923): 64.

“The Demoniac in the American Theatre.” Dial 75 (September 1923): 303-308.

“The Newspaper Colyumnists.” Vanity Fair 21 (September 1923): 46.

Vivian Shaw (Gilbert Seldes). “A Letter to the Movie Magnates.” Vanity Fair 21 (September 1923): 62.

“Mr. Wells’ Ancients.” Review of Men Like Gods by H.G. Wells. Dial 75 (September 1923): 285-287.

“Before A Picture By Picasso.” Dial 75 (October 1923): 406-412.

“For a Lyric Theatre in America.” Vanity Fair 21 (October 1923): 71.

“I Am Here Today!” Vanity Fair 21 (November 1923): 47.

“The Theatre.” Dial 75 (November 1923): 512-514.

“An African Legend in Choreography.” Vanity Fair 21 (December 1923): 73, 92.

“The Theatre.” Dial 75 (December 1923): 617-618.

1924

The Seven Lively Arts. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1924.

“Some Makers of Ecstasy in the Theatre.” Vanity Fair 21 (January 1924): 45.

“The Theatre.” Dial 76 (January 1924): 98-99.

“The Famous Touch of Nature.” Vanity Fair 21 (February 1924): 40, 74.

“The Moods of Satire.” Review of The Oxford Circus by Alfred Budd. Dial 76 (February 1924): 188-190.

“The Theatre.” Dial 76 (February 1924): 205-206.

“George M. Cohan: The Song and Dance Man.” Vanity Fair 21 (March 1924): 59, 82. 254

“The Great Theatre Hoax of 1914.” Vanity Fair 22 (March 1924): 39, 94.

Vivian Shaw (Gilbert Seldes.) “The Old Fashioned Menace of the Screen.” Vanity Fair 21 (March 1924): 40.

“The Theatre.” Dial 76 (March 1924): 293-294.

“Fred Stone and W.C. Fields.” Vanity Fair 22 (April 1924): 42, 88.

Lucien Bluphocks (Gilbert Seldes). “The Ultimate Movie.” Vanity Fair 21 (April 1924): 51.

“The Theatre.” Dial 76 (April 1924): 383-384.

“Position of Jazz in American Musical Development.” Art and Decoration 20 (21 April 1924): 21.

“Cakes and Ale Return to Favor.” Vanity Fair 22 (May 1924): 49, 108.

Vivian Shaw (Gilbert Seldes). “The Cuckoo School of Humor in America.” Vanity Fair 22 (May 1924): 46.

“The Theatre.” Dial 76 (May 1924): 474-475.

“American Noises: How to Make Them, and Why.” Vanity Fair 22 (June 1924): 59, 86.

“A Popular Novel.” Review of The Rover by Joseph Conrad. Dial 76 (June 1924): 541- 543.

“The Theatre.” Dial 76 (June 1924): 563-564.

“Art and ‘Artiness’.” Arts and Decoration 21 (June 1924): 13.

“The Menace of the Un-Kept Press.” Vanity Fair 22 (July 1924): 28.

Lucien Bluphocks (Gilbert Seldes). “How to Be Frightfully Foreign.” Vanity Fair 22 (August 1924): 55.

“Letter to the Editor.” The Independent 113 (16 August 1924): 112.

“The Empty Triumph of the Liberal Mind.” Vanity Fair 23 (September 1924): 52, 92.

“New York Chronicle.” Criterion 3 (October 1924): 284.

“The Cult of the Second Rate.” Vanity Fair (October 1924): 68. 255

“Notes and Queries.” New Republic 44 (21 October 1924): 231.

“The Restoration of Slavery in America.” Vanity Fair 23 (November 1924): 35.

“The Theatre.” Dial 77 (November 1924): 440-441.

“The Theatre.” Dial 77 (December 1924): 527-528.

Vivian Shaw (Gilbert Seldes). “The Advantages of Being a Witty Englishman.” Vanity Fair 23 (December 1924): 49+.

“Thompson’s Panorama, the Woolworth Building, and Do It Now.” Vanity Fair 23 (December 1924): 39, 108, 118.

1925

Seldes, George and Gilbert, eds. and trans. Plays of the Moscow Art Theatre Musical Studio. New York: Brentano’s, 1925.

The Wisecrackers (ms only) play by Seldes. Produced late 1925.

“The Theatre.” Dial 78 (Janaury 1925): 81-82.

Lucien Bluphocks (Gilbert Seldes). “The Ultimate Fat-Head, the Most Important Man in the World.” Vanity Fair 23 (February 1925): 48, 86.

“Some Premature Reviews of Our First Jazz Opera.” Vanity Fair 24 (March 1925): 42, 94.

Lucien Bluphocks (Gilbert Seldes). “Vanity Fair’s Own Guide to Palm Beach.” Vanity Fair 24 (March 1925): 61.

“The Theatre.” Dial 78 (March 1925): 252-254.

“Again We View-with-Alarm: The Moving Picture.” Vanity Fair (April 1925): 57, 104.

“The Theatre.” Dial 78 (April 1925): 341-345.

“Path of the Movies.” Nation 120 (29 April 1925): 498, 500.

“The Hysteria of the He-Man.” Arts and Decoration 23 (May 1925): 36. 256

“The Theatre.” Dial 78 (May 1925): 430-433.

“The Artist at Home.” New Republic 42 (20 May 1925): 341.

“Movie Director.” New Republic 43 (27 May 1925): 19-20.

“Some Elaborate Pictures.” Nation 120 (27 May 1925): 607.

“Briefer Mention.” Review of Joseph Pulitzer by Don C. Setiz. Dial 78 (June 1925): 522.

“Provincialism and Charm.” Vanity Fair 24 (June 1925): 69-70.

“The Theatre.” Dial 78 (June 1925): 524-526.

“Europe Unvisited.” New Republic 43 (3 June 1925):46-47.

“Some Sour Commentators.” New Republic 43 (10 June 1925): 74.

“This Little Girl.” New Republic 43 (17 June 1925): 99.

“Comic Touch in the Movies.” Nation 120 (24 June 1925): 723-724.

“The Living Christ.” New Republic 43 (24 June 1925): 127.

“The Singular—Although Dual—Eminence of Ring Lardner.” Vanity Fair 24 (July 1925): 45, 94.

“The Theatre.” Dial 79 (July 1925): 80-83.

“A Note on Advertising.” New Republic 43 (8 July 1925): 180.

“Service.” New Republic 43 (15 July 1925): 207-208.

“Lunacy as Literature.” New Republic 43 (22 July 1925): 237-238.

“Three for a Quarter.” New Republic 43 (29 July 1925): 261-262.

“ ‘Art’ in the Movies.” Nation 121 (29 July 1925): 148.

“Spring Flight.” Review of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Dial 79 (August 1925): 162-164.

“Jazz and Ballad.” New Republic 43 (5 August 1925): 293-294.

“Nietzsche After an Interval.” New Republic 43 (12 August 1925): 320-321. 257

“Shower-Bath Ballads.” New Republic 43 (26 August 1925): 19.

“In an Aeroplane.” New Republic 44 (2 September 1925): 35-36.

“Salvation and 5 Percent.” New Republic 44 (9 September 1925): 70.

“Plot and the Picture.” New Republic 44 (15 September 1925): 97-98.

“Henry Ford’s English.” New Republic 44 (23 September 1925): 125-126.

“Briefer Mention.” Review of Studies from Ten Literatures by Ernest Boyd and Gold by Gold by Herbert S. Gorman. Dial 79 (November 1925): 433.

“The Theatre.” Dial 79 (November 1925): 435-438.

“Shake Your Feet.” New Republic 44 (4 November 1925): 283-284.

“Certain Enthusiasms.” New Republic 44 (11 November 1925): 306-307.

“Chaplin and Some Others.” Nation 121 (11 November 1925): 549-550.

“Letter to the International Film Art Guild.” New Republic 44 (18 November 1925): 332- 333.

“The Theatre.” Dial 79 (December 1925): 519-521.

“A Few Lessons in English.” New Republic 45 (2 December 1925): 44-45.

“Two Parades.” New Republic 45 (16 December 1925): 111-112.

“Complaint.” The New Yorker 1 (19 December 1925): 14.

1926

Seldes writes occasional columns for the New York Graphic from 1926 to 1930

“Jazz Opera or Ballet?” Modern Music 3 (January 1926): 10.

“New York Chronicle.” Criterion 4 (January 1926): 175.

258

“Briefer Mention.” Review of Contemporary Plays edited by Thomas H. Dickinson and Jack R. Crawford, Uninvited Guests by J. Jefferson Farjeon, Desire Under the Elms by Eugene O’Neill, Dramatic Values by C.E. Montague, No More Parades by Ford Madox Ford, Tales of the Long Bow by Gilbert K. Chesterton, Wild Geese by Maria Ostenso, Under the Black Flag by Don C. Seitz, and Glamour: Essays on the Art of the Theatre by Stark Young. Dial 80 (January 1926): 67-72.

“The Theatre.” Dial 80 (January 1926): 73-76.

“Things and Places.” New Republic 45 (13 January 1926): 214-215.

“Three Clowns.” New Republic 45 (20 January 1926): 243-244.

“Annexation is the Best Policy.” The New Yorker 1 (14 January 1926): 13-14.

“Briefer Mention.” Review of Imprisonment by Bernard Shaw, The Negro and His Songs by Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson, and Playwrights of the New American Theatre by Thomas H. Dickinson. Dial 80 (February 1926): 161-165.

“The Theatre.” Dial 80 (February 1926): 166-169.

“The New Inquisition.” The New Yorker 1 (13 Feburary 1926): 17.

“Surfaces.” New Republic. 45 (17 February 1926): 357-358.

“The Negro’s Songs.” Review of On the Trail of Negro Folk Songs by Dorothy Scarborough, Mellows by R. Emmet Kennedy, and The Book of American Negro Spirituals edited by James Weldon Johnson. Dial 80 (March 1926): 247-251.

“The Theatre.” Dial 80 (March 1926): 255-259.

“Posters and Billboards.” New Republic 46 (10 March 1926): 74-75.

“Briefer Mention.” Review of The Prince of Wales and Other Famous Americans by Miguel Covarrubias, Americana, 1925 by H.L. Mencken, and Christina Albertan’s Father by H.G. Wells. Dial 80 (April 1926): 339-342

“Grock and Guignols.” New Republic 46 (7 April 1926): 198-200.

“Furnished Apartment for Rent.” The New Yorker 2 (10 April 1926): 13.

“Good Old Sex Appeal.” New Republic 46 (21 April 1926): 275-276.

“Questions and Answers.” New Republic 46 (5 May 1926): 331-332.

259

“Notes on the Director in the Theatre.” Dial 80 (June 1926): 487-494.

“Pictures and Landscapes.” New Republic 47 (2 June 1926): 61.

“Dance on the Yellow Sands.” New Republic 47 (16 June 1926): 112-113.

“Sense of Life.” New Republic 47 (7 July 1926): 198-199.

“Federation of the World.” New Republic 47 (21 July 1926): 253-254.

“Joe Cook—Broadway’s Funny Man.” Theatre 44 (September 1926): 12.

“Abstract Movie.” New Republic 48 (15 September 1926): 95-96.

“Pen, Pencil, and Poison.” The New Yorker 2 (18 September 1926): 23-25.

“New York Chronicle.” Criterion 4 (October 1926): 734.

“The Theatre Abroad.” Dial 81 (October 1926): 12-16.

“A Civilized Metropolis.” The New Yorker 2 (16 October 1926): 28-29.

“Jerome Kern.” New Republic 48 (20 October 1926): 244-245.

“Exit the Poor Actor.” Theatre 44 (November 1926): 10.

“Dainty Cubes of Ice.” New Republic 48 (17 November 1926): 376-377.

“Tariff and Character.” New Republic 49 (24 November 1926): 19-20.

“The Theatre.” Dial 81 (December 1926): 521-525.

“Some Movie Disproportions.” New Republic 49 (29 December 1926): 161-162.

1927

The Square Emerald. (as Foster Johns). New York: John Day, 1927.

“The Theatre.” Dial 82 (January 1927): 76-80.

“A Fine Game.” The New Yorker 2 (1 January 1927): 14-15. 260

“Uneasy Chameleons.” Saturday Evening Post 199 (1 January 1927): 21.

“Satire, Death of…” New Republic 49 (5 January 1927): 193.

“Matches are Made in America.” The New Yorker 2 (15 January 1927): 22-23.

“A Footnote on Match Covers.” The New Yorker 2 (22 January 1927): 22.

“What Happened to Jazz.” Saturday Evening Post 199 (22 January 1927): 25, 102.

“Cocktailiana.” The New Yorker 2 (29 January 1927): 29.

“Artist in the Theatre.” Dial 82 (February 1927): 108-116.

“Briefer Mention.” Review of Ashe of Rings by Mary Butts and The New Negro edited by Alain Locke. Dial 82 (February 1927): 164-166.

“The Theatre.” Dial 82 (February 1927): 169-171.

“Briefer Mention.” Review of The Collected Parodies of Louis Untermeyer . Dial 82 (March 1927): 254.

“The Theatre.” Dial 82 (March 1927): 258-260.

“Camera Angles.” New Republic 50 (3 March 1927): 72-73.

“Cassandras of Europe.” Saturday Evening Post 199 (5 March 1927): 31.

“The Intellectual Pressure.” The New Yorker 4 (19 March 1927): 22-23.

“Listening In.” New Republic 50 (23 March 1927): 140-141.

“The Last Resort.” The New Yorker 3 (26 March 1927): 29-30.

“Man Ray and Metropolis.” New Republic 50 (30 March 1927): 170-171.

“The Theatre.” Dial 82 (April 1927): 349-352.

“The Theatre.” Dial 82 (May 1927): 436-440.

“Christ in the Movies.” New Republic 50 (4 May 1927): 298-299.

“Ocean of Lemonade.” Saturday Evening Post 199 (7 May 1927): 10-11.

“Chang: A Great Picture.” New Republic 50 (11 May 1927): 332-333. 261

“Rx for Revolution.” Saturday Evening Post 199 (21 May 1927): 22-23, 62, 64.

“Outline of a Preface.” New Republic 51 (25 May 1927): 18-19.

“Briefer Mention.” Review of Technique in Dramatic Art by Halliam Bosworth. Dial 82 (June 1927): 527.

“The Golden Day.” Review of The Golden Day by Lewis Mumford. Dial 82 (June 1927): 518-521.

“The Theatre.” Dial 82 (June 1927): 533-536.

“Transatlantic.” New Republic 51 (1 June 1927): 46-47.

“Hatchet and the White Ribbon.” Saturday Evening Post 199 (4 June 1927): 24-25.

“Captious Columbuses.” Saturday Evening Post 199 (11 June 1927): 31.

“An End and a Beginning.” Review of The Second Book of Negro Spirituals edited by James Weldon Johnson and Seventy Negro Spirituals edited by William Arms Fisher. Dial 83 (July 1927): 70-72.

“The Theatre.” Dial 83 (July 1927): 81-84.

“Machine Wreckers.” Saturday Evening Post 200 (23 July 1927): 27.

“Progress in the Movies.” New Republic 51 (27 July 1927): 255-256.

“Briefer Mention.” Review of Shoot by Luigi Pirandello, Pirandello by Walter Starkie, The Ruin by Edward Sackville West, Translations and Tomfooleries by Bernard Shaw, Trumpets of Jubilee by Constance Rourke, A History of the Jewish People by Max L. Margolis and Alexander Marx. Dial 83 (August 1927): 172-177.

“Diplomat’s Delight: Detective and Mystery Stories, Good and Bad, Passed in Review.” Bookman 66 (September 1927): 91-93.

“Old Disbeliever.” New Republic 52 (21 September 1927): 124-125.

“Boob Haters.” Saturday Evening Post 200 (1 October 1927): 43-44.

“Les Americains Toujours Presses.” Saturday Evening Post 200 (22 October 1927): 41

“An Enquiry into the Present State of Letters.” Review of The American Caravan edited by Van Wyck Brooks. Dial 83 (November 1927): 434-438.

262

“Outlaws from Parnassus.” Saturday Evening Post 200 (5 November 1927): 35.

“Mr. Nathan and the Movies.” New Republic 52 (9 November 1927): 313-314.

“Complex of Radicalism.” Saturday Evening Post 200 (19 November 1927): 35.

“Briefer Mention.” Review of Gilbert and Sullivan by A.H. Godwin. Dial 83 (December 1927): 525.

“The Theatre.” Dial 83 (December 1927): 529-531.

1928

The Stammering Century. New York: The John Day Company, 1928.

“Introduction” to him AND the CRITICS: a collection of opinions on e e cummings’ play at the provincetown playhouse. New York: 1928. 2-4.

“Briefer Mention.” Review of The Theatre in Life by Nikolai Evreinoff. Dial 84 (January 1928): 71.

“Jonathan Edwards.” Dial 84 (January 1928): 37-46.

“The Theatre.” Dial 84 (January 1928): 78-83.

“Pen, Paper, and Parlor.” The New Yorker 3 (21 January 1928): 23-24.

“American Chronicle.” Criterion 7 (February 1928): 169-175.

“Briefer Mention.” Review of New York is Not America by Ford Madox Ford, The Theatre by Stark Young, the Best Plays of 1926-1927 by Burns Mantle, The Field God and In Abraham’s Bosom by Paul Green, The Art of Theatre-Going by John Drinkwater. Dial 84 (February 1928): 161-162.

“The Theatre.” Dial 84 (February 1928): 166-170.

“Theatre, Show-Shop, and Drama.” Review of Theatre edited by Edith J.R. Isaacs and A History of the American Drama by Arthur Hobson Quinn. Dial 84 (February 1928): 155-159.

“Imported Goods Only.” Saturday Evening Post 200 (11 February 1928): 25. 263

“Briefer Mention.” Review of The Revolutionary Spirit in France and America by Bernard Fay, America and French Culture by Howard Mumford Jones. Dial 84 (March 1928): 428-430.

“The Theatre.” Dial 84 (March 1928): 257-261.

“Fine American Movie.” New Republic 54 (7 March 1928): 98-99.

“Prejudices of Liberalism. Saturday Evening Post 200 (17 March 1928): 29.

“Open Your Mouth and Shut Your Eyes.” North American 225 (April 1928): 425-434.

“The Theatre.” Dial 84 (April 1928): 348-352.

“Lachaise: Sculptor of Repose.” New Republic 54 (4 April 1928): 219-220.

“Mice and Men.” The New Yorker 4 (21 April 1928): 32.

“Investigations.” Review of The Revolutionary Spirit in France and America by Bernard Fay and America and French Culture by Howard Mumford Jones. Dial 84 (May 1928): 428-430.

“Briefer Mention.” Review of The Great Detective Stories compiled by Willard Huntington Wright. Dial 84 (May 1928): 434.

“The Theatre.” Dial 84 (May 1928): 438-441.

“Air Industry, Hot.” Saturday Evening Post 200 (5 May 1928): 33.

“Films Across the Sea.” New Republic 55 (30 May 1928): 46-47.

“Briefer Mention.” Review of the Greene Murder Case by S. S. Van Dine, Tracks in the Snow by Lord Charnwood. Dial 84 (June 1928): 522.

“Extra Good Ones.” Review of Fourteen Great Detective Stories edited by Vincent Starrett. Dial 84 (June 1928): 519-521.

“The Theatre.” Dial 84 (June 1928): 528-532.

“Briefer Mention.” Review of Daisy and Daphne by Rose Macaulay. Dial 84 (July 1928): 72.

“The Theatre.” Dial 85 (July 1928): 77-81.

“Super-American Credo.” Saturday Evening Post 201 (1 July 1928): 23, 45-46. 264

“Background of Bigotry.” New Republic 55 (11 July 1928): 200-201.

“Briefer Mention.” Review of The Plays of Georg Buchner and The Patriot by Alfred Neumann. Dial 85 (August 1928): 174.

“Theory About Talkies.” New Republic 55 (8 August 1928): 305-306.

“Splash!” New Republic 56 (22 August 1928): 21-22.

“Better than Ecstasy.” Review of Letters from Joseph Conrad edited by Edward Garnett. Dial 85 (September 1928): 249-253

“Briefer Mention.” Review of The Torches Flare by Stark Young, Let Freedom Ring by Arthur Garfield Hays, American Inquisitors by Walter Lippman, The Closed Garden by Julian Green, and The Other Side by Struthers Burt. Dial 85 (September 1928): 265-267.

“An Outline of Mystery.” Bookman 68 (September 1928): 100+.

“The Patriot.” The New Yorker 4 (15 September 1928): 40-46.

“Briefer Mention.” Review of Armance by Stendhal, Adventures of An African Slaver by Theodore Canot. Dial 85 (October 1928): 356-359.

“The Road to Athens.” Bookman 68 (October 1928): 224+.

“Be Yourself.” Saturday Evening Post 201 (6 October 1928): 42.

“Debunking the Debunkers.” New York Herald Tribune, Sunday Magazine, 21 October 1928: 1-3.

“Debunking the Debunkers.” New York Herald Tribune, Sunday Magazine, 28 October 1928: 12-13, 16.

“Movies Commit Suicide.” Harper 157 (November 1928): 706-712.

“Briefer Mention.” Review of The Happy Mountain by Maristan Chapman, The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, and Five Eighteenth-Century Comedies edited by Allardyce Nicoll. Dial 85 (November 1928): 436-442

“Mr. Eliot’s Favourite.” Review of The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. Dial 85 (November 1928): 437-440.

“The Theatre.” Dial 85 (November 1928): 445-449.

265

“Markert and the Marxes.” New Republic 56 (14 November 1928): 351-352.

“Park Avenue Voodoo.” Saturday Evening Post 201 (24 November 1928): 23.

“Caravan Two.” Review of The Second American Caravan edited by Alfred Kreymborg, Lewis Mumford, and Paul Rosenfeld. Dial 85 (December 1928): 513-516.

“Degradation of Dogma.” Bookman 68 (December 1928): 467+.

“The Theatre.” Dial 85 (December 1928): 533-536.

“Harvard.” College Humor 17 (December 1928): 116.

“Irving Berlin.” New Republic 57 (12 December 1928): 100-102.

“Background and High-Lights.” New Republic 57 (26 December 1928): 165-166.

1929

An Hour With the Movies and the Talkies. Philadelphia: JB Lippincott, 1929.

The Wings of the Eagle. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1929.

“Briefer Mention.” Review of Swindlers and Rogues in French Drama by Hilda Laura Norman, Spy and Counter-Spy by Richard W. Rowan, Costumes by Eros by Conrad Aiken, and John Wesley by Abram Lipsky. Dial 86 (January 1929): 76- 79.

“How, and How Not, To Write About Women.” Bookman 68 (January 1929): 581-583.

“The Theatre.” Dial 86 (Janaury 1929): 80-83.

“The Return.” The New Yorker 5 (8 June 1929): 19.

“Art Bogy.” Saturday Evening Post 201 (12 January 1929): 33.

“Jimmie Is Exhubilant.” New Republic 57 (16 January 1929): 247.

“Briefer Mention.” Review of Traveling Light by M.H. Harrigan. Dial 86 (February 1929): 164.

266

“Briefer Mention.” Review of The Crime of Dr. Garine by Boris Sokoloff, Dreiser Looks at Russia by Theodore Dreiser, Boston by Upton Sinclair, The Art of Play Production by John Dolman Jr., The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan by Isaac Goldberg, Types of Social Comedy edited by Robert M. Smith, Types of Farce Comedy edited by Robert M. Smith, and Plays by John Galsworthy. Dial 86 (February 1929): 264-266.

“Some Amateur Movies.” New Republic 58 (6 March 1929): 71-72.

“What a Memory!” The New Yorker 5 (30 March 1929): 19-20.

“Better Americans.” Saturday Evening Post 201 (20 April 1929): 29.

“Briefer Mention.” Review by The Mourning Bride by William Congreve, The Art of Playwriting by Jesse Lynch Williams, Cotton Mather by Ralph and Louise Boas, and The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti edited by M.D. Frankfurter and G. Jackson. Dial 86 (May 1929): 437-439.

“Tad.” New Republic 58 (15 May 1929): 358-360.

“Fete Champetre.” The New Yorker 5 (24 May 1929): 44-51.

“Ted Cook.” New Republic 59 (29 May 1929): 45-46.

“A Varied Shelf.” Bookman 69 (June 1929): 444+.

“Complaint Against Critics: They Tell You What You Are and Where to Get Off.” Saturday Evening Post 201 (1 June 1929): 18.

“Some Current Talkies.” New Republic 59 (12 June 1929): 97.

“Van Dine and His Public.” New Republic 59 (19 June 1929): 125-126.

“Back From Utopia.” Saturday Evening Post 201 (29 June 1929): 6-7.

“Briefer Mention.” Review of Gladstone and Palmerston edited by Philip Guedalla. Dial 87 (July 1929): 633.

“Other Side of It.” Century 118 (July 1929): 297-302.

“Some Russian Films.” New Republic 59 (2 July 1929): 179-180.

“Back From Utopia.” Saturday Evening Post 202 (6 July 1929): 18-19.

“A Man Can’t Do More Than Apologize.” The New Yorker 4 (6 July 1929): 24-25. 267

“Back From Utopia.” Saturday Evening Post 202 (13 July 1929): 20-21.

“Back From Utopia.” Saturday Evening Post 202 (20 July 1929): 33-35.

“Summer Shows.” New Republic 59 (24 July 1929): 262-263.

“Let’s Play Post Office.” The New Yorker 5 (27 July 1929): 13.

“All About the Big Merger.” The New Yorker 5 (3 August 1929): 18.

“Twelve Men and Santa Claus.” Saturday Evening Post 202 (10 August 1929): 14.

“The Summer Resort.” The New Yorker 5 (17 August 1929): 21-23.

“American Satire.” New Republic 60 (28 August 1929): 52.

“Talkies’ Progress.” Harper 159 (September 1929): 454-461.

“Diaghlieff.” New Republic 60 (11 September 1929): 97-98.

“In a Loud Voice with the Tongues of Angels.” The New Yorker 5 (14 September 1929): 24-25.

“Censor.” Saturday Evening Post 202 (21 September 1929): 16.

“Business Bogeyman.” Saturday Evening Post 202 (28 September 1929): 29.

“Form and the Novel.” Bookman 70 (October 1929): 128.

“The Benefits of Travel.” The New Yorker 5 (5 October 1929): 26-27.

“What Songs the Sirens Sang.” The New Yorker 5 (12 October 1929): 50-54.

“The Home Front.” The New Yorker 5 (26 October 1929): 34.

“Mobile Camera.” New Republic 60 (30 October 1929): 298-299

“Dress and Undress.” Mentor 17 (November 1929): 13-15, 56, 58.

“History’s New Hero.” review of Claude G. Bowers The Tragic Era. Forum 82 (November 1929): 8.

“Musicals Imp. and Dom. [sic]” New Republic 60 (20 November 1929): 375.

268

“A Varied Shelf.” review of William Bolitho Twelve Against the Gods. Bookman 70 (December 1929): 458.

“New Wagon.” Saturday Evening Post 202 (21 December 1929): 21.

1930

The Future of Drinking. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1930.

“A Study in Power.” Review of Hanna by Thomas Beer. Forum (January 1930): 10.

“Musicals Plain and Fancy.” New Republic 61 (12 February 1930): 327-328.

“Appetite of Tyranny.” Saturday Evening Post 202 (22 March 1930): 25.

“Traffics and Annoyances.” The New Yorker 6 (29 March 1930): 24-25.

“City’s Giddy Whirl.” Saturday Evening Post 202 (31 May 1930): 43-44.

“This Play’s the Thing—Aristophanes’ Lysistrata.” Theatre Magazine 52.2 (August 1930): 33.

“Mr. Carroll’s Vanities.” New Republic 63 (13 August 1930): 370-371.

“Finding the Lost Generation.” Saturday Evening Post 203 (30 August 1930): 21+.

“Found Money.” Mentor 22 (November 1930): 11-13.

“Big, Little, and Good Shows.” New Republic 64 (5 November 1930): 323-324.

“Torch Songs.” New Republic 65 (19 November 1930): 19-20.

“A Revival Sets Records.” New York Times, 30 November 1930, p. X3.

“Long Retrospect.” Review of the Changing Years by Norman Hapgood. Forum and Century 84 (December 1930): 12.

“Some Movie Notes.” New Republic 65 (10 December 1930): 103.

269

1931

From 1931 to 1937, Seldes wrote a daily column for the New York Evening Journal, entitled “True to Type.” For space considerations, every column has not been listed here.

Love of Two Oranges. Unpublished MSS. Dorothy Lockhardt papers. 1931.

“Actress-Manager.” The New Yorker 6 (14 February 1931): 23-25.

“Chaplin Masterpiece.” New Republic 66 (25 February 1931): 46-47.

“Newsreels and Pictures.” New Republic 66 (11 March 1931): 96.

“Hewer of Stone.” The New Yorker 7 (4 April 1931): 28-31.

“Late Afternoon of a Patrolman.” The New Yorker 7 (11 April 1931): 19-21.

“The Emperor Jones: Profile of Robert Edmond Jones.” The New Yorker 7 (9 May 1931): 25-28.

“Some Radio Entertainers.” New Republic 67 (20 May 1931): 19-20.

“A Whole House.” The New Yorker 7 (23 May 1931): 18-19.

“Man with Camera.” The New Yorker 7 (30 May 1931): 21-25.

“The Great Glorifier.” The New Yorker 7 (25 July 1931): 19-23.

“The Great Glorifier.” The New Yorker 7 (1 August 1931): 18-21.

“Artist in a Factory.” The New Yorker 7 (29 August 1931): 22-24.

“Flash.” The New Yorker 7 (17 October 1931): 21-24.

“Note on Television.” New Republic 69 (2 December 1931): 71-72.

“Mickey Mouse Maker: Profile of Walt Disney.” The New Yorker 7 (19 December 1931): 23-27.

270

1932

“American Humor.” in Fred J. Ringel, ed. America as Americans See It. New York: 1932. 342-360.

Against Revolution. New York: The John Day Company, 1932.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 8 January 1932: 19.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 9 January 1932: 9.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 14 January 1932: 17.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 16 January 1932: 7.

“The Party Spirit.” The New Yorker 7 (23 January 1932): 17-18.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 26 January 1932: 15.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 3 February 1932: 17.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 11 February 1932: 23.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 20 February 1932: 16.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 24 February 1932: 17.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 1 March 1932: 15.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 2 March 1932: 19.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 12 March 1932: 7.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 15 March 1932: 17

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 22 March 1932: 17.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 31 March 1932: 21.

“Fat Ladies.” New Republic 70 (30 March 1932): 182-183.

“Music Plays Rule Broadway Theatres.” D’A’C News (April 1932): 42, 44.

271

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 2 May 1932: 21.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 7 May 1932: 8.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 18 May 1932: 17.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 24 May 1932: 19.

“Industrial Design.” Saturday Evening Post 204 (28 May 1932): 34.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 31 May 1932: 17

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 2 June 1932: 13

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 7 June 1932: 13.

“Disney and Others.” New Republic 71 (8 June 1932): 101-102.

“Tramps—Are We?—Abroad.” Saturday Evening Post 204 (11 June 1932): 65.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 13 June 1932: 13.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 14 June 1932: 17.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 15 June 1932: 13.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 22 June 1932: 13

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 25 June 1932: 14.

“Hammerstein the Extravagant.” Harper’s 165 (July 1932): 187-197.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 1 July 1932: 13.

“A Harvest of Inventions.” The New Yorker 8 (2 July 1932): 16-20.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 11 July 1932: 13.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 20 July 1932: 13.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 26 July 1932: 13.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 27 July 1932: 13.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 28 July 1932: 13. 272

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 3 August 1932: 17.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 15 August 1932: 13.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 31 August 1932: 17.

“Have Americans Lost Their Nerve?” Scribner’s 92 (September 1932): 149-152.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 1 September 1932: 12.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 3 September 1932: 15.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 6 September 1932: 14

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 13 September 1932: 17.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 17 September 1932: 15.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 24 September 1932: 14.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 19 October 1932: 17.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 26 October 1932: 17.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 5 November 1932: 15.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 8 November 1932: 5.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 9 November 1932: 15.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 10 November 1932: 15

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 11 November 1932: 19.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 21 November 1932: 17.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 22 November 1932: 13.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 25 November 1932: 19.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 28 November 1932: 15.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 30 November 1932: 17.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 6 December 1932: 16. 273

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 7 December 1932: 17.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 17 December 1932: 15.

1933

The Years of the Locust (America, 1929-1932). Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1933.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 5 January 1933: 13.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 6 January 1933: 18.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 10 January 1933: 17.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 26 January 1933: 15.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 30 January 1933: 13.

“Naked and Uninteresting.” Americana (February 1933): 9.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 2 February 1933: 15.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 3 February 1933: 15.

“Portrait.” Saturday Review of Literature 9 (4 February 1933): 409-410.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 7 February 1933: 13.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 16 February 1933: 17.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 21 February 1933: 13.

“The Long Road to Roxy.” The New Yorker 9 (25 February 1933): 22-26.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 27 February 1933: 17.

“An Earful of Fun.” Americana (March 1933): 14.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 3 March 1933: 21.

274

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 14 March 1933: 15.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 18 March 1933: 14.

“Post-Mortem.” Americana (April 1933): 8.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 5 April 1933: 4.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 11 April 1933: 15.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 15 April 1933: 18.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 18 April 1933: 26.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 21 April 1933: 32.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 25 April 1933: 26.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 27 April 1933: 28.

“The Movies.” Americana (May 1933): 18.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 11 May 1933: 17.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 12 May 1933: 17.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 20 May 1933: 15.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 29 May 1933: 10.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 5 July 1933: 15.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 2 August 1933: 18.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 3 August 1933: 18.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 11 August 1933: 14.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 15 August 1933: 17.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 8 September 1933: 21.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 17 September 1933: 17.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 25 September 1933: 17. 275

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 29 September 1933: 17.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 6 October 1933: 27.

“True to Type. New York Evening Journal, 24 October 1933: 17.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 30 October 1933: 17.

“I Am Dying, Little Egypt.” Esquire 1 (Autumn 1933): 40.

“An Open Letter to Roxy.” Modern Music 10 (November 1933): 7.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 2 November 1933: 27.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 22 November 1933: 19.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 29 November 1933: 15.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 6 December 1933: 23.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 7 December 1933: 25.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 20 December 1933: 19

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 30 December 1933: 11.

1934

Aristophanes. Lysistrata. Trans. and adapt. Gilbert Seldes. New York: The Limited Editions Club, 1934.

This Is New York: The First Modern Photographic Book of New York. New York: D Kemp, 1934.

“Male and Female and Radio.” Esquire 1 (January 1934): 35, 140.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 29 January 1934: 13.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 31 January 1934: 15.

“Pick ‘em Where You Find ‘em.” Esquire 1 (February 1934): 70, 123. 276

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 1 February 1934: 17.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 2 February 1934: 21.

“Delight in the Theatre.” Modern Music 11 (March 1934): 138.

“Sugar and Spice and Not So Nice.” Esquire 1 (March 1934): 60, 120.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 10 March 1934: 10.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 13 March 1934: 13.

“George M. Cohan.” The New Yorker 10 (17 March 1934): 27-31.

“George M. Cohan.” The New Yorker 10 (24 March 1934): 23-27.

“The Blackout Fades Out.” Esquire 1 (April 1934): 65, 148.

“A Strain on the Faith and Hope of Teachers.” American Teacher 18 (April 1934): 21.

“The Masculine Revolt.” Scribner’s 95 (April 1934): 279-282.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 28 April 1934: 15.

“Men are Funny.” Esquire 1 (May 1934): 48, 121.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 2 May 1934: 21.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 8 May 1934: 19.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 21 May 1934: 9.

“An Old Masterpiece.” Esquire 2 (June 1934): 74.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 8 June 1934: 21.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 13 June 1934: 17.

“True to Type.” New York Evening Journal, 20 June 1934: 17.

“Stage Door Johnny, Pro-Tem.” Esquire 2 (July 1934): 134.

“Was Ring Lardner a Humorist?” Esquire 2 (July 1934): 44.

“Mr. Jeeves’ Gentleman.” Esquire 2 (August 1934): 65. 277

“Stage Door Johnny, Pro-Tem.” Esquire 2 (August 1934): 137.

“Melancholy in the Comics.” Esquire 2 (September 1934): 78, 107.

“Stage Door Johnny, Pro-Tem.” Esquire 2 (September 1934): 137.

“The Gershwin Case.” Esquire 2 (October 1934): 108, 130.

“The Prize-fighter and the Bull.” Esquire 2 (November 1934): 52.

“In Defense of Dirty Words.” Esquire 2 (November 1934): 173.

“Is Sport an Art or an Orgy”? Esquire 2 (December 1934): 71, 144.

“Industrial Classicist.” The New Yorker 10 (15 December 1934): 28-32.

1935

“The Itsy-Bitsy Actors.” Esquire 3 (January 1935): 56, 128.

“The Man Who Went to Pieces Entirely.” Harper’s 170 (January 1935): 250-252.

“The Movies in Peril.” Scribner’s 97 (February 1935): 83-84.

“Professor, I’m Through.” Esquire 3 (February 1935): 64.

“The Business of Fun.” Today 3 (16 February 1935): 8.

“Advertisement for Angna.” Esquire 3 (March 1935): 78.

“Fun for the Millions.” Today 3 (2 March 1935): 6.

“The America of the Intellectuals.” Saturday Evening Post 207 (9 March 1935): 11, 94, 96, 98.

“Stand Up and Kick.” Today 23 March 1935: 6-7, 18-19.

“The Park Avenue Hill-billies.” Esquire 3 (April 1935): 79.

“The Unreal Newsreel.” Today 4 (13 April 1935): 6.

“Notes and Queries.” Today 4 (20 April 1935): 18.

278

“Notes and Queries.” Today 4 (27 April 1935): 18.

“The Half-way Van Winkle.” Esquire 3 (May 1935): 82.

“Notes and Queries.” Today 4 (4 May 1935): 18.

“Notes and Queries.” Today 4 (11 May 1935): 18.

“Notes and Queries.” Today 4 (18 May 1935): 16.

“Notes and Queries.” Today 4 (25 May 1935): 19.

“A Discouraging Word.” Esquire 4 (June 1935): 70.

“Notes and Queries.” Today 4 (1 June 1935): 18.

“Two Great Women.” Esquire 4 (July 1935):86, 143.

“Wanna Buy a Truck?” Esquire 4 (August 1935): 86, 131.

“The Kat Comes of Age.” Esquire 4 (September 1935): 103.

“Also Selected Shorts Subjects.” Esquire 4 (October 1935): 86.

“They Did It For Money.” Saturday Evening Post 208 (12 October 1935): 16-17, 94, 98.

“No Decameron?” Publisher’s Weekly 128 (19 October 1935): 1460.

“Music With Meals.” The New Yorker 11 (19 October 1935): 26-30.

“Parents versus Non-Parents.” Scribner’s 98 (November 1935): 299-302.

“Production No. 5.” Esquire 4 (November 1935): 94.

“Cosmetically Sealed.” Esquire 4 (December 1935): 86.

1936

Mainland. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936.

“To Hell, in a Word, with Art.” Esquire 5 (January 1936): 94. 279

“Esquire’s Playboy Pro team.” Esquire 5 (February 1936): 105.

“Until George Flies.” Esquire 5 (February 1936): 87.

“The Sikirevtzima System.” The New Yorker 12 (29 February 1936): 18.

“Before It’s Too Late.” Esquire 5 (March 1936): 72.

“Eros in Metropolis.” Esquire 5 (April 1936): 106.

“Extremely Foreign Affairs.” Esquire 5 (April 1936): 52, 165.

“Over the Tops.” Saturday Evening Post 208 (25 April 1936): 85.

“Funniest Thing About Radio.” Esquire 5 (May 1936): 93.

“Buckshot and Beauty.” Esquire 5 (June 1936): 89.

“Culture on the Hoof.” The New Yorker 12 (27 June 1936): 37-43.

“The Alien Menace of Sex.” Esquire 6 (July 1936): 83.

“Stuff the Little Children.” Esquire 6 (August 1936): 97, 167.

“Lie Down and Die.” Esquire 6 (September 1936): 88, 122.

“Bing Crosby, Marcel Proust….and Others.” Scribner’s 100 (October 1936): 78-79.

“The Quicksands of the Movies.” Atlantic 158 (October 1936): 422.

“Tintypes and Tenderness.” Esquire 6 (October 1936): 98, 115.

“Portrait.” Saturday Review of Literature 14 (3 October 1936): 7.

“Portrait.” Saturday Review of Literature 14 (10 October 1936): 8.

“The Vandals of Hollywood.” Saturday Review of Literature 14 (17 October 1936): 14.

“No More Swing?” Scribner’s 110 (November 1936): 70.

“The Worst People in the World.” Esquire 6 (November 1936): 108, 131.

“The Mike Swallowers.” Esquire 6 (December 1936): 100, 250.

“Notable Plays…and Popular Art.” Scribner’s 100 (December 1936): 77-79. 280

1937

“The Beginnings of Popularity.” In C.S. Marsh, ed. Educational Broadcasting 1936. Chicago: 1937.

The Movies Come From America. New York: C. Scribners’ Sons, 1937.

“Is It Thrifty To Be Smart?” Esquire 7 (January 1937): 95.

“‘Dear Null’—and Void.” Esquire 7 (February 1937): 87, 205-206.

“The People and the Arts.” Scribner’s 101 (February 1937): 79.

“The Ford of the Movies.” Today 7 (13 February 1937): 14.

“Four Forgotten Books.” Today 7 (20 February 1937): 18.

“The People and the Arts.” Scribner’s 101 (March 1937): 69-70.

“Rabbi Ben Advertise.” Esquire 7 (March 1937): 85, 137.

“The Juvenile Leads.” Esquire 7 (April 1937): 99, 133-134.

“The People and the Arts.” Scribner’s 101 (April 1937): 60-62+.

“The Errors of Television.” Atlantic 159 (May 1937): 531-541.

“The People and the Arts.” Scribner’s 101 (May 1937): 65-67.

“What Makes Men Dance?” Esquire 7 (May 1937): 106, 194.

“Your Money and Your Life.” Saturday Evening Post 209 (22 May 1937): 27+.

“Apology to Crooners.” Esquire 7 (June 1937): 103, 168.

“People and the Arts.” Scribner’s 101 (June 1937): 61-62, 64.

“That Was Woollcott Speaking” Esquire 8 (July 1937): 79, 122.

“The People and the Arts.” Scribner’s 102 (July 1937): 56-58+.

281

“Something About Pegler.” Esquire 8 (August 1937): 82.

“No Art, Mr. Disney?” Esquire 8 (September 1937): 91, 171-172.

“The People and the Arts.” Scribner’s 102 (September 1937): 63-64.

“The Horse without a Heart.” Esquire 8 (October 1937): 104, 167, 168.

“The People and the Arts.” Scribner’s 102 (October 1937): 63-64.

“The People and the Arts.” Scribner’s 102 (November 1937):63-64.

“A Shop in Every Port.” Esquire 8 (November 1937): 105.

“The People and the Arts.” Scribner’s 102 (December 1937): 51-52.

“Phony Takes All.” Esquire 8 (December 1937): 137, 243.

1938

Your Money and Your Life: A Manual for the Middle Classes. New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1938.

“The Book Forum.” Reviews of From these Roots by Mary Colum, Madame Curie by Eve Curie, Try Living by William Moulton Marston, Home Grown by Della T. Lutes, CIO: Industrial Unionism in Action by J. Raymond Walsh, Human Affairs, ed. by R. B. Cattell, The Birds of America by James John Audubon [sic], The Country Scene by John Masefield and Edward Seago, and This is My Life by Eleanor Roosevelt. Forum and Century 909: 4.

“Good Theatre.” Atlantic 161 (January 1938): 82-85.

“The Number One Blight.” Esquire 9 (January 1938): 91, 193.

“The People and the Arts.” Scribner’s 103 (January 1938): 67-68.

“Biographical Note.” Saturday Review of Literature 17 (15 January 1938): 19.

“Don’t Tread on Me!” Esquire 9 (February 1938): 75, 126.

“The People and the Arts.” Scribner’s 103 (February 1938): 65-66+. 282

“Casual Consumer.” Literary Digest 125 (19 February 1938): 14.

“From Chicken Shack to Casino.” Esquire 9 (March 1938): 75, 135.

“The People and the Arts.” Scribner’s 103 (March 1938): 65-66+.

“Are People Critics?” Esquire 9 (April 1938): 70, 208.

“The People and the Arts.” Scribner’s 103 (April 1938): 65-66+.

“The People and the Arts.” Scribner’s 103 (May 1938): 63-64.

“So They Got a Plot.” Esquire 9 (May 1938): 78, 138.

“From Griffith to Garbo.” Saturday Review of Literature 18 (21 May 1938): 13.

“Mr. Cagney is Tough Enough.” Esquire 9 (June 1938): 93, 177.

“Good-bye to a Friend.” Esquire 10 (July 1938): 72, 135.

“The Best Pictures of Last Tuesday.” Esquire 10 (August 1938): 72, 90.

“First Aid to Producers.” Esquire 10 (September 1938): 89, 134.

“What to Do for Money.” Esquire 10 (October 1938): 76, 124-125.

“Credit to Mr. Wiman.” Esquire 10 (November 1938): 84, 148.

“No Soul in the Photograph.” Esquire 10 (December 1938): 121, 242.

1939

“Experiment in Broadcasting.” Esquire 11 (January 1939): 78, 130.

“Uplift by Wireless.” Esquire 11 (February 1939): 51.

“No Timing Whatever.” Esquire 11 (March 1939): 66, 166.

“Stage and Film.” Kenyon Review 1 (Spring 1939): 205.

“The Eternal Hotfoot.” Esquire 11 (April 1939): 66.

“The Movies Go Literary.” Esquire 11 (May 1939): 108-179. 283

“Portrait.” Fortune 19 (May 1939): 72.

“Give Us a Song.” Esquire 11 (June 1939): 75.

“What Are Abbott’s Shows Made Of.” Esquire 11 (July 1939): 67.

“The Cost of a Song.” Esquire 12 (August 1939): 65, 102.

“Ten Cents from Times Square.” Esquire 12 (September 1939): 75.

“Fun for One and All.” Esquire 12 (October 1939): 65, 146.

“Could Those Boys Write?” Esquire 12 (November 1939): 75, 147, 148.

“What Happened to Love?” Esquire 12 (December 1939): 163, 164, 166.

1940

“After All These Years.” Esquire 13 (January 1940): 70, 165.

“Tots Save the Show.” Esquire 13 (February 1940): 75, 99.

“A Chance to Make Money.” Esquire 13 (March 1940): 65

“Mr. Abbott and Mr. Costello.” Esquire 13 (April 1940): 80, 156, 157.

“Poets Can Learn from Acrobats.” Esquire 13 (May 1940): 140.

“Television in Education.” Education 60 (June 1940): 653-655.

“Who’s Running Away?” Esquire 13 (June 1940): 92, 156.

“The Goblins Catch Up.” Esquire 14 (July 1940): 92.

“Suggestion for Hollywood.” Esquire 14 (August 1940): 71, 165.

“Mr. Garner and Thelma Oonk.” Esquire 14 (September 1940): 79, 161.

“Composer with a Light Touch.” Esquire 14 (October 1940): 85, 156.

“And Twice as Natural.” Esquire 14 (November 1940): 84, 156.

“The Master of Them All.” Esquire 14 (December 1940): 150, 152, 154. 284

1941

“Chaplin’s Triumph of Comedy.” Esquire 15 (January 1941): 72, 134-136.

“The Nature of Television Programs.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 213 (January 1941): 138-144.

“Nine Strike in the Ballet.” Esquire 15 (February 1941): 66.

“The Two-Thirds Masterpiece.” Esquire 15 (March 1941): 89, 175-176.

“Radio for the Future.” Atlantic 167 (April 1941): 453-461.

“Retreat from the Undecorated Age.” Esquire 15 (April 1941): 72, 144, 146.

“Pictures and Politics.” Esquire 15 (May 1941): 87, 103.

“The Natives Return.” Esquire 15 (June 1941): 68, 169-170.

“Songs for Times of Jeopardy.” Esquire 16 (July 1941): 65, 174.

“Radio Boy Makes Good.” Esquire 16 (August 1941): 57, 111.

“Big Name Takes Over.” Esquire 16 (September 1941): 65, 156, 157.

“This Can’t Be Corn.” Esquire 16 (October 1941): 51, 160.

“How They Brought the Bad News.” Esquire 16 (November 1941): 166.

“Cartoonists’ Ups and Downs.” Esquire 16 (December 1941): 143, 281.

1942

Proclaim Liberty! New York: Greystone Press, 1942.

“Anything for a Laugh.” Esquire 17 (January 1942): 98, 194.

“What Cooks With Slang.” Esquire 17 (February 1942): 68, 113.

“Hollywood Goldfish Bowl.” Esquire 17 (March 1942): 58, 114.

285

“Restatement About Liberty.” Esquire 17 (April 1942): 63, 130.

“Portrait.” Publishers Weekly 141 (25 April 1942): 1564.

“There’s Gold in Them Camps.” Esquire 17 (May 1942): 64, 171.

“What Every Woman Hater Knows.” Esquire 17 (June 1942): 54, 164.

“No More Parades?” Esquire 18 (July 1942): 62, 179.

“Open Letter to George Jean Nathan.” Esquire 18 (August 1942): 60, 112.

“This Weapon in Your Hand.” Esquire 18 (August 1942): 17.

“Transplanted Writers.” Books Abroad 16.4 (Autumn 1942): 385.

“Highbrows Hate Sport.” Esquire 18 (September 1942): 65.

“Not Quite Beyond Recall.” Esquire 18 (September 1942): 49.

“Apple Trees and Jerks on Jeeps.” Esquire 18 (October 1942): 60-95.

“Preliminary Report on Superman.” Esquire 18 (November 1942): 63.

“Who Wants a Noble Movie?” Esquire 18 (December 1942): 215.

1943

“Those Star and Garter Blues.” Esquire 19 (January 1943): 83.

“The Gibson Girl for Me.” Esquire 19 (February 1943): 49, 149.

“The Fall of the Flattering Word.” Esquire 19 (March 1943): 68, 118.

“Eight 21-Gun Salutes.” Esquire 19 (April 1943): 73, 151.

“Terror in the Newsreels.” Esquire 19 (May 1943): 88, 162.

“Short Hooray for Hollywood.” Esquire 19 (June 1943): 85, 151.

“The Great American Face.” Esquire 20 (July 1943): 80.

“Durante is Exhubilant.” Esquire 20 (August 1943): 88. 286

“Serenade to Fred Allen.” Esquire 20 (September 1943): 72, 147.

“An Actor Who Knows When to Fight.” Esquire 20 (October 1943): 86.

“The Talking Machine-Sensational!” Esquire 20 (November 1943): 72.

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 20 (December 1943): 176.

“Lament for Music Makers.” Esquire 20 (December 1943): 173-174.

1944

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 21 (January 1944): 140.

“Sing Us a New Song.” Esquire 21 (January 1944): 88.

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 21 (February 1944): 99.

“The Incomparable Bing.” Esquire 21 (February 1944): 38.

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 21 (March 1944): 106.

“Singing and Dancing and Fun.” Esquire 21 (March 1944): 70.

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 21 (April 1944):114.

“Guaranteed Innocent Praise.” Esquire 21 (April 1944): 78.

“Mr. Seldes on ‘Bias’ and ‘Opinion.’” New York Times, 23 April 1944, p. 28.

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 21 (May 1944): 121.

“Great Big Beautiful Thoughts.” Esquire 21 (May 1944): 92, 156.

“Television and the Museums.” Magazine of Art (May 1944): 178-179.

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 21 (June 1944): 108.

“In Motion Pictures It’s Timing.” Esquire 21 (June 1944): 90, 177.

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 22 (July 1944): 132.

“My Neck Out on Swing.” Esquire 22 (July 1944): 69, 156. 287

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 22 (August 1944): 120.

“So You’ve Written a Song.” Esquire 22 (August 1944): 89, 141.

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 22 (September 1944): 106.

“Evolution of the Night Club.” Esquire 22 (September 1944): 66

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 22 (October 1944): 134.

“Oh, Rare Miss Bergman.” Esquire 22 (October 1944): 84, 161.

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 22 (November 1944): 132.

“The Vagaries of Jimmy Savo.” Esquire 22 (November 1944): 93.

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 22 (December 1944): 224.

“Perspective on Popularity.” Esquire 22 (December 1944): 174.

“Regarding Video Experiments: Mr. Seldes Discusses Television Tests at CBS.” New York Times, 24 December 1944.

1945

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 23 (January 1945): 124.

“Should the Movies Tell?” Esquire 23 (January 1945): 105, 122.

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 23 (February 1945): 108.

“The Old Hokum Bucket.” Esquire 23 (February 1945): 68.

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 23 (March 1945): 114.

“The State of the World.” Esquire 23 (March 1945): 66.

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 23 (April 1945): 122.

“Miss West and Mr. Proust.” Esquire 23 (April 1945): 75.

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 23 (May 1945): 124.

288

“The Future of Television.” Esquire 23 (May 1945): 51.

“How to Laugh on the Air.” Esquire 23 (May 1945): 88, 156.

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 23 (June 1945): 122.

“MacLeish: Minister of Culture.” Esquire 23 (June 1945): 103.

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 24 (July 1945): 116.

“The Songs America Sings.” Esquire 24 (July 1945): 57.

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 24 (August 1945): 112.

“The Most Popular Man in the World.” Esquire 24 (August 1945): 61.

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 24 (September 1945): 124.

“Sam Goldwyn and the Movies.” Esquire 24 (September 1945): 60, 151-152.

“The Case for the Commercial.” Esquire 24 (October 1945): 77, 78, 160.

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 24 (October 1945): 130.

“An ABC of GJN.” Esquire 24 (November 1945): 77.

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 24 (November 1945): 136.

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 24 (December 1945): 198.

“The Little Things.” Esquire 24 (December 1945): 147.

1946

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 25 (January 1946): 150.

“Nice Clean Post-Atomic Fun.” Esquire 25 (January 1946): 107-108.

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 25 (February 1946): 131.

“The Eternal Western.” Esquire 25 (February 1946): 101.

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 25 (March 1946): 118. 289

“Notes and Queries.” Esquire 25 (March 1946): 78.

“Back to the B’s Boys?” Esquire 25 (April 1946): 94, 177-178.

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 25 (April 1946): 132.

“Einstein, Kip, and Stoop.” Esquire 25 (May 1946): 89.

“Esquire on the Record.” Esquire 25 (May 1946): 122.

“An Actor for a Night.” Esquire 24 (June 1946): 107-108.

“The Accent of Truth.” Esquire 26 (July 1946):107-108.

“Law, Pressure, and Public Opinion.” Hollywood Quarterly 1 (July 1946): 422.

“Musician, Spare That Tune!.” Esquire 26 (August 1946): 83.

“Book Reviews.” Review of The Hucksters by Frederic Wakeman and The Big Noise by Fielden Farrington. Hollywood Quarterly 2 (October 1946): 104.

“The Esthetics of Hawkshaw: Art and Techniques of Whodunit, and its Place in Our Reading Today.” New York Times Magazine.

1947

Review of Aurora Dawn by Herman Wouk. Hollywood Quarterly 2 (July 1947): 436.

“Slang.” Review of The American Thesaurus of Slang by Lester Berrey and Melvin Van Den Bark. New York Times, 27 July 1947, p. BR 1.

“Radio’s Slow-Growing Child.” Review of Television Techniques by Hoyland Bettinger. New York Times, 10 August 1947, p. BR5.

“A Panorama of American Life Between Two Wars.” Review of I Remember Distinctly by Agnes Rogers and Frederick Lewis Allen. New York Times, 7 September 1947, p. BR7.

290

1948

“How Dense is the Mass?” Atlantic 182 (November 1948): 25, 27.

1949

“Television: The Golden Hope.” Atlantic 183 (March 1949): 34-37.

“Are the Foreign Films Better?” Atlantic 184 (July 1949): 49.

1950

Lardner, Ring. The Indispensable Ring Larder. Ed. Gilbert Seldes. New York: The Book Society, 1950.

The Great Audience. New York: Viking Press, 1950.

“Nickelodeon to Television.” Mclean’s Magazine, 1 January 1950: 12-13, 44.

“The Film Till Now.” Films in Review 1 (July 1950): 29.

“The Magic of the Movies: Exploring the Motives of Film-Going.” Films in Review 1 (September 1950): 10.

“Can Hollywood Take Over Television?” Atlantic 186 (October 1950): 51-53.

“Life on the Tinsel Standard.” Saturday Review of Literature 33 (28 October 1950): 9-19.

1951

“The News on Television.” New Republic (18 January 1951): 7-9.

“Pressures and Pictures.” Nation 172 (3 February 1951): 104-106.

“Pressures and Pictures.” Nation 172 (10 February 1951): 132-134.

“Charlie Chaplin.” Films in Review 2 (April 1951): 39. 291

“Whither TV?” Printer’s Ink 235 (20 April 1951): 33-35.

“The Lively Arts.” Park East (June 1951): 42.

“A Short Angry View of Film Censorship.” Theatre Arts 35 (August 1951): 56-57.

“Benton Bill Puts TV on Defensive—Again.” Printer’s Ink 237 (7 December 1951): 45.

1952

Previews of Entertainment. New York: Bantam, 1952.

Writing for Television. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1952.

“Jon Huston in Darkest Africa.” Saturday Review of Literature 35 (23 February 1952): 29.

“Politics—Televised and Sponsored.” Saturday Review of Literature 35 (15 March 1952): 30-31.

“Three—Count ‘Em—Three.” Atlantic 189 (May 1952): 85-86.

“Delight in Seven Minutes.” Saturday Review of Literature 35 (31 May 1952): 27.

“The Commercial as a Work of Art.” Saturday Review of Literature 35 (20 September 1952): 35-36.

“The Great American Handshake.” Saturday Review of Literature 35 (18 October 1952): 32.

“A Time for Anger?” Saturday Review of Literature 35 (8 November 1952): 34.

“Air Wave Idioms.” Saturday Review of Literature 35 (29 November 1952): 36.

“TV and the Voter.” Saturday Review of Literature 35 (6 December 1952): 17-19, 57-59.

1953

“The TV Year.” Saturday Review of Literature 36 (3 January 1953): 55-56. 292

“The Comic Spirit.” Saturday Review of Literature 36 (10 January 1953): 32.

“Notes on an Event.” Saturday Review of Literature 36 (7 February 1953): 28.

“A Quiz for Professors.” Saturday Review of Literature 36 (7 March 1953): 37-38.

“Mr. Elmer Davis.” Saturday Review of Literature 36 (4 April 1953): 44-45.

“Comical Gentlewomen.” Saturday Review of Literature 36 (2 May 1953): 37.

“Wednesday Night on the Box.” Saturday Review of Literature 36 (6 June 1953): 29.

“The Genuine Article.” Saturday Review of Literature 36 (27 June 1953): 32.

“Domestic Life in the Forty-ninth State.” Saturday Review of Literature 36 (22 August 1953): 28-29.

“Radio, TV and the Common Man.” Saturday Review of Literature 36 (29 August 1953): 11-12, 39-41.

“For Pluralistic TV.” Saturday Review of Literature 36 (19 September 1953): 31-32.

1954

“Radio, TV, and the Common Man.” Is The Common Man Too Common?: An Informal Survey of Our Cultural Resources. Edited by Joseph Wood Krutch. Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P, 1954. 45-55.

“Lexicon of a New Folklore.” Saturday Review of Literature 37 (2 January 1954): 10.

“Critique and Accompaniment.” Saturday Review of Literature 37 (20 March 1954): 15.

“Stop Unselling Present Customers!” Printer’s Ink, 23 April 1954: 37-39.

“TV and the Hearings—An Interim Report.” Saturday Review of Literature 37 (29 May 1954): 24.

“TV and the Hearings: Unfinished Business.” Saturday Review of Literature 37 (10 July 1954): 27-28.

“New Bubbles for Soap Opera.” NYT Magazine, 12 September 1954: 25, 38, 42, 44.

“The More the Media.” Saturday Review of Literature 37 (27 November 1954): 29-30. 293

“A Clinical Analysis of TV.” NYT Magazine, 28 November 1954: 13, 55-56, 59-60.

1955

“Rich You Will Get.” Saturday Review of Literature 38 (31 December 1955): 27.

1956

The Public Arts. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956.

“Television.” Nation 182 (26 May 1956): 457-458.

“His Players Were People.” New York Times Magazine, 17 June 1956.

“Question Reversed.” Saturday Review of Literature 39 (18 August 1956): 30.

“Memories of Marlene.” New York Times, 26 August 1956.

1957

The New Mass Media: Challenge to a Free Society. (1957; Washington DC: 1968)

The Seven Lively Arts. 2n rev. ed. New York: Sagamore Press, 1957.

“TV and Radio.” Saturday Review of Literature 40 (19 January 1957): 50.

“Such Popularity.” Saturday Review of Literature 40 (16 February 1957): 27.

“Read by Millions.” New York Times, 17 February 1957, p. 2.

“The Lesson of Mayerling.” Saturday Review of Literature 40 (2 March 1957): 27.

“Plays in Series.” Saturday Review of Literature 40 (20 April 1957): 28.

“Five Years of This?” Saturday Review of Literature 40 (25 May 1957): 24. 294

“TV and Radio.” Saturday Review of Literature 40 (2 March 1957): 27.

“Bad Manners and Good Rules.” Saturday Review of Literature 40 (16 March 1957): 28.

“Culture, Blessed Word.” Saturday Review of Literature 40 (6 April 1957): 28.

“Television in Print.” Nation 184 (9 May 1957): 217-218.

“Taste, Mediocrity, and Everyman.” Saturday Review of Literature 40 (11 May 1957): 46.

“What Makes the Customer Tick?” Saturday Review of Literature 40 (1 June 1957): 29- 30.

“America and the Face of Nikita Khrushchev.” Saturday Review of Literature 40 (29 June 1957): 20.

“TV’s Year of Crisis.” Esquire (December 1957): 96.

1958

“Notes from a Wheel-Chair.” Saturday Review of Literature 41 (8 February 1958): 29.

“Mr. Ernst Objects.” Saturday Review of Literature 41 (8 March 1958): 44-45.

“Much Less Noise, Please.” Tide, 11 April 1958: 23-25.

1959

“Two Suggestions for Art on TV.” Art in America 47 (1959): 44.

“A Light in the Sky.” Saturday Review of Literature 42 (24 January 1959): 26-27.

“The Limits of Liberty.” Saturday Review of Literature 42 (21 February 1959): 33.

“Postoperational Joy.” Saturday Review of Literature 42 (21 March 1959): 35.

“Tic for Tac.” Saturday Review of Literature 42 (11 April 1959): 34.

“Worse than a Crime.” Saturday Review of Literature 42 (23 May 1959): 29.

295

“Opinions Handed Down.” Saturday Review of Literature 42 (6 June 1959): 30.

1960

“The Petulant Highbrow and TV.” TV Guide, 2 January 1960: 17-19.

“Broadcast Plan Opposed: Proposal to Rotate Public-Service Programs Viewed as Compulsion.” New York Times, 24 January 1960, p. E10.

“Escape from a Blind Alley.” Saturday Review of Literature (20 February 1960): 30.

“Public Participation.” Public Opinion Quarterly 24 (Spring 1960): 5.

“Both Sides, No Middle.” Saturday Review of Literature (16 April 1960): 31.

Review of One Day in the World’s Press edited by Wilbur Schramm. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 329 (May 1960): 155.

“The Bold Concept.” Saturday Review of Literature (28 May 1960): 55.

“The Reader Replies.” American Scholar 29 (Summer 1960): 450.

“How Many Systems?” Saturday Review of Literature 43 (2 July 1960): 27.

“The Limits of Balance.” Saturday Review of Literature 43 (13 August 1960): 25.

“The New Mass Media and the Thinking Man.” Journal of the American Association of University Women 54 (October 1960): 24.

“Invitation to Serfdom.” Saturday Review of Literature 43 (22 October 1960): 20.

1961

Review of Northcliffe by Reginald Pound and Geoffrey Harmsworth. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 334 (March 1961): 166.

“Are Critics Necessary?” TV Guide 6 May 1961: 23

296

1962

The New Mass Media: A Challenge to a Free Society. Washington: American Society of University Women, 1962.

“Some Impressions of Television.” Journal of Social Issues 18.2 (1962): 30-31.

“We Might Still Create an Art of Television.” TV Guide, 7 April 1962: 11, 13-14.

“Omissions and Errors.” TV Guide 28 July 1962: 2.

1963

Review of Living with Television by Ira O. Glick and Sidney J. Levy. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 345 (January 1963): 190.

1964

“ ‘Patient’ Diagnoses ‘Dr. Strangelove.’” New York Times, 5 April 1964, p. X7.

“If the President Debates: Gilbert Seldes Points to Restrictions Incumbent Faces.” New York Times, 6 August 1964.

“Destruction in a Little Black Book.” Saturday Review of Literature (14 November 1964): 34-35.

1965

The Stammering Century. 2nd rev. ed. Introduction by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. New York: Harper & Row, 1965.

“Deliberate Speed.” New York Times, 3 March 1965, p. 1.

“To the Editor.” New York Times, 7 March 1965, p. BR40.

297

1966

“Public Entertainment and the Subversion of Ethical Standards.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 363 (January 1966): 91.

1970

“Russell’s Greatness.” New York Times, 8 February 1970, sec. 4, p. 13.

1993

“The Great Glorifier.” New Yorker 31 May 1993: 60-61. Reprinted from 1931.

298

APPENDIX C

REVIEWS OF WORK BY CONSTANCE ROURKE

299

Reviews of Work by Constance Rourke

Trumpets of Jubilee (1927)

Bakeless, J. Review of Trumpets of Jubilee. Saturday Review. 144 (12 November 1927): 144.

Beach, Stewart. Review of Trumpets of Jubilee. Independent 118 (7 May 1927): 495.

Gorman, Herbert S. “Idols of the Public Who Yearned for the Millennium.” Review of Trumpets of Jubilee. New York Times Book Review, 4 April 1927, p. 3.

Jan, Florabelle. Review of Trumpets of Jubilee. American Journal of Sociology. 33 (November 1927): 485.

Leech, Margaret. Review of Trumpets of Jubilee. Literary Review (7 May 1927): 1.

Pearson, Edmund. Review of Trumpets of Jubilee. Outlook. 146 (11 May 1927): 55.

Review of Trumpets of Jubilee. Booklist. 23 (July 1927): 427.

Review of Trumpets of Jubilee. Catholic World. 125 (September 1927): 857.

Review of Trumpets of Jubilee. Cleveland Open Shelf. (September 1927): 110

Review of Trumpets of Jubilee. Nation. 124 (17 June 1927): 675.

Review of Trumpets of Jubilee. Review of Reviews. 75 (June 1927): 668.

Review of Trumpets of Jubilee. Survey. 58 (1 July 1927): 390.

Review of Trumpets of Jubilee. Times London Literary Supplement. 15 September 1927, p. 616.

Review of Trumpets of Jubilee. Wilson Library Bulletin. 23 (June 1927): 164.

Schriftgiesser, K. Review of Trumpets of Jubilee. Boston Transcript, 7 May 1927, p. 5. 300

Scoville, Samuel. Review of Trumpets of Jubilee. Yale Review (1928): 620.

Snider, L. Review of Trumpets of Jubilee. New York Herald Tribune Books. 8 May 1927, p. 5.

Woolf, Leonard. Review of Trumpets of Jubilee. Nation and Atheneum. 41 (6 August 1927): 609.

Troupers of the Gold Coast (1928)

Eaton, Walter Prichard. Review of Troupers of the Gold Coast. New York Herald Tribune Books, October 1928, p. 5.

Haxton, Florence. Review of Troupers of the Gold Coast. New Republic. 58 (20 February 1929): 23.

Kelsey, Vera. Review of Troupers of the Gold Coast. Outlook. 150 (12 December 1928): 1333.

Lowrie, M. Review of Troupers of the Gold Coast. The New Yorker 4 (9 February 1929); 75-76.

Review of Troupers of the Gold Coast. Booklist 25 (February 1929): 212.

Review of Troupers of the Gold Coast. Pittsburgh Monthly Bulletin. 33 (December 1928): 639.

Review of Troupers of the Gold Coast. New York Times Book Review, 30 December 1928, p. 18.

Review of Troupers of the Gold Coast. Springfield Republican, 22 February 1929, p. 8.

Review of Troupers of the Gold Coast. Theatre Arts Monthly. 12 (November 1928): 12.

Review of Troupers of the Gold Coast. Wilson Library Bulletin. 25 (February 1929): 75.

American Humor (1931)

Arvin, Newton. Review of American Humor. New Republic. 66 (22 April 1931): 278

Bauer, C.K. Review of American Humor. Bookman. 73 (June 1931): 431. 301

Beer, Thomas. Review of American Humor. New York Herald Tribune Books, 22 March 1931, p. 1.

Blair, Walter. “American Humor.” Review of American Humor. American Literature November 1931: 340-343

Britten, F.H. Review of American Humor. New York Evening Post, 21 March 1931, p. 7D.

Chamberlain, John. Review of American Humor. Forum. 85 (June 1931): iv.

Duffus, R.L. Review of American Humor. New York Times Book Review, 29 March 1931, p. 2.

Review of American Humor. Boston Transcript, 18 April 1931, p. 1.

Review of American Humor. Catholic World. 134 (November 1931): 248.

Review of American Humor. Outlook. 157 (1 April 1931): 472.

Review of American Humor. Pittsburgh Monthly Bulletin. 36 (October 1931): 69.

Review of American Humor. Springfield Republican, 22 March 1931, p. 7E.

Review of American Humor. Wilson Library Bulletin. 27 (April 1931): 108.

Shaw, W.B. Review of American Humor. Review of Reviews. 83 (May 1931): 8.

Spiller, R.E. Review of American Humor. Saturday Review of Literature. 7 (18 April 1931): 746.

Walton, Eda Lou. “The Roots of American Literature.” Review of American Humor. Nation 22 April 1931: 456.

Whipple, Leon. Review of American Humor. Survey Graphic. 66 (1 June 1931): 267.

Williams, S.T. Review of American Humor. Yale Review. 21 (Winter 1932): 432.

Davy Crockett (1934)

Becker, M.L. Review of Davy Crockett. New York Herald Tribune Books, 4 March 1934, p. 9.

302

Chittick, V.L.O. Review of Davy Crockett. American Literature 6 (1934): 368-370.

Commager, Henry Steele. “The Old Frontier.” Review of Davy Crockett. Yale Review (June 1934): 844-848.

Eaton, Annie T. “From Davy Crockett.” Review of Davy Crockett. New York Times, 1 April 1934, p. BR11.

Gordon, Caroline. Review of Davy Crockett. New Republic 78 (18 April 1934): 280.

Parks, E.W. Review of Davy Crockett. American Review. 4 (November 1934): 126.

Review of Davy Crockett. Booklist. 30 (April 1934): 126.

Review of Davy Crockett. Boston Transcript, 17 March 1934, p. 1.

Review of Davy Crockett. Cleveland Open Shelf. (July 1934): 16.

Review of Davy Crockett. Saturday Review of Literature. 11 (21 July 1934): 12.

Review of Davy Crockett. Springfield Republican, 15 April 1934, p. 7.

Review of Davy Crockett. Survey Graphic. 23 (May 1934); 242.

Review of Davy Crockett. Wilson Library Bulletin. 30 (April 1934): 94.

Van Doren, Mark. “A Coonskin Classic.” Review of Davy Crockett. Nation (28 February 1934): 252-253.

Watson, Katherine. Review of Davy Crockett. Library Journal. 59 (1 June 1934): 480.

Audubon (1936)

Becker, M.L. Review of Audubon. New York Herald Tribune Books, 20 September 1936, p. 12.

Benet, Stephen Vincent. Review of Audubon. New York Herald Tribune Books, 1 November 1936, p. 1.

Boyd, A.W. Review of Audubon. Manchester Guardian, 16 October 1936, p. 6.

Bradley, J. H. Review of Audubon. Atlantic. December 1936.

303

Brickell, Herschel. Review of Audubon. Review of Reviews. 94 (November 1936): 14.

Cleveland, E.J. Review of Audubon. Churchman. 150 (15 October 1936): 18.

Duffus, R.L. “A Fine Biography.” Review of Audubon. New York Times, 1 November 1936, p. BR 1.

F.B. “Audubon, Lost Dauphin or No, Is Fascinating Biography.” Review of Audubon. Chicago Daily Tribune, 31 October 1936, p. 15.

Gilmore, A.F. Review of Audubon. Christian Science Monitor, 6 January 1937, p.4.

Milner, Florence. Review of Audubon. Boston Transcript, 31 October 1936, p. 1.

Moore, A.C. Review of Audubon. Horn Book Magazine 12 (November 1936): 372.

Review of Audubon. Commonweal. 25 (22 January 1937): 368.

Review of Audubon. Christian Century. 53 (18 November 1936): 53.

Review of Audubon. Forum. 97 (February 1937): iv.

Review of Audubon. The New Yorker 12 (31 October 1936): 66-67.

Review of Audubon. Springfield Republican, 1 November 1936, p. 7E.

Review of Audubon. Time. 28 (2 November 1936): 67.

Review of Audubon. Times London Literary Supplement. 3 October 1936, 779.

Review of Audubon. Wilson Library Bulletin. 32 (October 1936): 99.

Roberts, E.M. Review of Audubon. New Republic. 89 (4 November 1936): 23.

Scoggin, M.C. Review of Audubon. Library Journal. 61 (1 November 1936): 815.

Scudder, Townsend. Review of Audubon. Saturday Review of Literature. 15 (31 October 1936): 5.

Smith, C.E. Review of Audubon. Library Journal. 62 (1 January 1937): 39.

Van Doren, Mark. “The Age of Animals.” Review of Audubon. Nation (31 October 1936): 525.

304

Williams, Stanley R. “Explorers of the Natural World.” Review of Audubon. Yale Review (December 1936): 399-401

Charles Sheeler (1938)

Cahill, Holger. Review of Charles Sheeler. New York Herald Tribune Books, 4 September 1938, p. 4.

Coates, R.M. Review of Charles Sheeler. New Republic 96 (31 August 1938): 111.

Marshall, Margaret. “The Artist in America.” Review of Charles Sheeler. Nation (17 September 1938): 270-271.

Mellquist, Jerome. Review of Charles Sheeler. Commonweal. 28 (2 September 1938): 480.

Review of Charles Sheeler. Booklist. 35 (1 September 1938): 8.

Review of Charles Sheeler. Christian Century. 55 (7 September 1938): 1069.

Review of Charles Sheeler. New Yorker 14 (20 August 1938): 63.

Ryerson, Margery A. “Sheeler and the American Tradition.” Review of Charles Sheeler. New York Times, 9 October 1938, p. 95.

Taylor, Prentiss. “Sheeler.” Review of Charles Sheeler. Washington Post, 9 October 1938, B10.

Roots of American Culture (1942)

Chamberlain, John. Review of Roots of American Culture. New York Times, 6 August 1942: 17.

Duffus, R.L. Review of Roots of American Culture. New York Times, 9 August 1942: BR4.

Fadiman, R. Review of Roots of American Culture. The New Yorker 18 (8 August 1942): 54.

305

Kazin, Alfred. “The Irreducible Element.” Review of Roots of American Culture. New Republic (31 August 1942): 259-260.

- - - . “Letters to the Editor.” Nation. (14 November 1942): 523.

Williams, Stanley R. “Our Early Literature.” Review of Roots of American Culture. Yale Review (December 1942): 375-377.

306

APPENDIX D

REVIEWS OF WORK BY GILBERT SELDES

307

Reviews of Work by Gilbert Seldes

Seven Lively Arts (1924)

Aiken, Conrad. Review of Seven Lively Arts. Criterion (October 1924): 148-150.

Anonymous. Review of Seven Lively Arts. Outlook (19 November 1924): 466.

Bell, Clive. Review of Seven Lively Arts. New Republic (30 April 1924): 263.

- - - . Review of Seven Lively Arts. Nation and Atheneum. 35 (10 May 1924): 179.

Boyd, Ernest. “Letters to the Editor: Mr. Boyd Replies.” The Independent (30 August 1924): 140.

- - - . “Readers and Writers.” Review of Seven Lively Arts. The Independent (10 May 1924): 260.

Craven, T. Review of Seven Lively Arts. Nation 119 (17 September 1924): 290.

Eaton, Walter Prichard. Review of Seven Lively Arts. Atlantic (July 1924).

Galantiere, Lewis. Review of Seven Lively Arts. transatlantic 2 (July 1924): 128-129.

Gorman, Herbert S. Review of Seven Lively Arts. New York Times, April 27, 1924, p. 6.

Grattan, C. Hantley. Review of Seven Lively Arts. Journal of Social Forces 2 (1924): 791.

Seldes, Gilbert. “Letters to the Editor.” The Independent (16 August 1924): 112.

Review of Seven Lively Arts. Booklist. 21 (October 1924): 13.

Review of Seven Lively Arts. Outlook. 138 (19 November 1924): 466.

Review of Seven Lively Arts. Springfield Republican, 7 May 1924, p. 10.

Review of Seven Lively Arts. Theatre Arts Monthly 8 (August 1924): 574.

Review of Seven Lively Arts. Wilson Library Bulletin. 20 (July 1924): 174.

Seligman, H.J. Review of Seven Lively Arts. Literary Review of the New York Evening Post, 24 May 1924, p. 770. 308

Van Doren, D.G. “Mr. Seldes Patronizes.” Forum (August 1924): 282.

Van Loon, Hendrik Willem. Review of Seven Lively Arts. New York Herald Tribune, April 27, 1924, p. 25.

Wagenknecht, Edward. Review of Seven Lively Arts. Yale Review (1925): 612-615.

Wilson, Edmund. “The Seven Low-Brow Arts.” Dial (September 1924): 244-250.

Stories From the Dial (1924)

Morand, Paul. “A Notable Collection.” Dial (January 1925): 51-53.

Stammering Century (1928)

Adams, J.T. Review of Stammering Century. Bookman 68 (November 1928): 68.

Brickell, Herschel. Review of Stammering Century. North American. (28 November 1928): 226.

Collins, Joseph. Review of Stammering Century. New York Evening Post, 20 October 1928, p. 9.

Curti, Merle. Review of Stammering Century. Springfield Republican, 11 November 1928, p. 7.

Leonard, A. Review of Stammering Century. The New Yorker 4 (15 September 1928): 103.

Lovett, R. M. Review of Stammering Century. New Republic 56 (19 September 1928): 129.

Review of Stammering Century. Booklist. 25 (December 1928): 115.

Review of Stammering Century. Outlook. 150 (12 December 1928): 1331.

Review of Stammering Century. World Tomorrow. 12 (December 1928): 520.

Riley, Woodbridge. Review of Stammering Century. Saturday Review of Literature. 5 (8 December 1928): 455.

309

Rourke, Constance. “An Anatomy of Zeal.” Review of Stammering Century. New York Herald Tribune Books, 9 December 1928: 5.

Russell, Bertrand. “Wasted Idealism.” Review of Stammering Century. Dial (April 1929): 329-331.

Schlesinger, A.M. Review of Stammering Century. Yale Review (1929): 800.

Schriftgiesser, K. Review of Stammering Century. Boston Transcript, 15 September 1928, p. 2.

Solow, Herbert. Review of Stammering Century. Nation. 127 (26 September 1928): 127.

Thompson, W. Review of Stammering Century. New York Times Book Review, 16 September 1928, p. 3.

The Wings of the Eagle (1929)

Dawson, M.C. Review of Wings of the Eagle. New York Herald Tribune Books, 20 October 1929, p. 14.

Review of Wings of the Eagle. Bookman. 70 (November 1929): 314.

Review of Wings of the Eagle. Nation. 129 (25 December 1929): 782.

Review of Wings of the Eagle. New Republic. 61 (1 January 1930): 177.

Review of Wings of the Eagle. New York Times Book Review. 27 October 1929, 7.

Robbins, F.L. Review of Wings of the Eagle. Outlook 153 (16 October 1929); 269.

Russell, Harris. Review of Wings of the Eagle. New York Evening Post, 19 October 1929, p. 12.

Smith, J. Review of Wings of the Eagle. The New Yorker 5 (19 October 1929): 129-130.

The Future of Drinking (1930)

Bell, Lisle. Review of The Future of Drinking. New York Herald Tribune Books, 13 July 1930, p. 5.

310

Brock, H.I. Review of The Future of Drinking. New York Times Book Review. 27 July 1930, p. 9.

Hansen, Harry. Review of The Future of Drinking. New York World, 15 July 1930, p. 9.

Josephy, R.S. Review of The Future of Drinking. Bookman. 71 (August 1930): 569.

Review of The Future of Drinking. Boston Transcript, 15 November 1930, p. 5.

Robbins, F.L. Review of The Future of Drinking. Outlook. 155 (16 July 1930), 428.

An Hour with the Movies and the Talkies (1930)

Wagenknecht, Edward. Review of An Hour with the Movies and the Talkies. Yale Review 19 (1930): 637.

Years of the Locust (1933)

Abbot, W.J. Review of Years of the Locust. Christian Science Monitor. 18 February 1933, 6.

Chamberlain, John. Review of Years of the Locust. New York Times Book Review, 5 February 1933, p. 3.

Coates, D. Review of The Years of the Locust. The New Yorker 8 (11 February 1933): 62.

Godwin, Murray. Review of Years of the Locust. New Republic. 74 (12 April 1933): 254.

McDonald, William. Review of Years of the Locust. Saturday Review of Literature. 9 (4 February 1933): 409.

McKean, Dayton D. Review of The Years of the Locust. Quarterly Journal of Speech 20 (1934): 126.

Millis, Walter. Review of Years of the Locust. New York Herald Tribune Books, 5 February 1933, p. 6.

Review of Years of the Locust. Booklist. 29 (March 1933): 199.

Review of Years of the Locust. Current History. 38 (April 1933): iv

311

Review of Years of the Locust. Forum. 89 (March 1933): v.

Review of Years of the Locust. Wilson Library Bulletin. 29 (March 1933): 80.

Sands, W.F. Review of Years of the Locust. Commonweal. 17 (12 April 1933): 668.

Stolberg, Benjamin. Review of Years of the Locust. New York Evening Post, 4 February 1933, p.7.

Warner, Arthur. Review of Years of the Locust. Nation. 136 (15 February 1933):180.

Whipple, Leon. Review of Years of the Locust. Survey Graphic. 22 (June 1933): 22.

This is New York (1934)

Asch, Nathan. Review of This is New York. New Republic. 81 (12 December 1934): 140.

Review of This is New York. Springfield Republican, 19 September 1934, p. 10.

Mainland (1937)

Bates, E.S. Review of Mainland. New York Herald Tribune Books (8 November 1936).

Brown, Francis. “The American Way of Life.” Review of Mainland. New York Times, 4 October 1936, p. BR1.

DeVoto, Bernard. Review of Mainland. Saturday Review of Literature. 14 (3 October 1936): 7.

Forty, James. Review of Mainland. Nation (10 October 1936).

Hutchinson, Paul. Review of Mainland. Christian Century. 53 (2 December 1936): 1615.

McInnis, Edgar. Review of Mainland. Canadian Forum. 16 9november 1936): 26.

Mann, D.L. Review of Mainland. Boston Transcript, 10 October 1936, p. 6.

Peel, Robert. Review of Mainland. Christian Science Monitor, 2 December 1936, p. 14.

Review of Mainland. Current History. 45 (November 1936): 4.

312

Review of Mainland. Foreign Affairs. 15 (January 1937): 390.

Review of Mainland. Forum. 96 (December 1936): vii.

Review of Mainland. Springfield Republican, 27 September 1936, p. 7E.

Review of Mainland. Wilson Library Bulletin. 32 (November 1936): 107.

Rohrlich, Chester. Review of Mainland. Journal of Social Philosophy 3 (1937): 191.

Rorty, James. Review of Mainland. Nation. 143 (10 October 1936): 423.

Smith, Bernard. Review of Mainland. New Republic. 89 (6 January 1937): 307.

Thomson, J.S. Review of Mainland. Dalhousie Review 17 (1937): 128.

Whipple, Leon. Review of Mainland. Survey Graphic. 25 (November 1936): 627.

The Movies Come From America (Movies for the Millions) (1938)

Jenckes, E.N. Review of The Movies Come From America. Springfield Republican. 27 November 1937, 6.

Leyda, Jay. Review of The Movies Come From America. Theatre Arts Monthly. 21 (December 1937): 987.

Review of The Movies Come From America. Booklist. 34 (1 December 1937): 127.

Review of The Movies Come From America. Cleveland Open Shelf. (November 1937): 24.

Review of The Movies Come From America. Connoisseur 101 (January 1938): 337.

Review of The Movies Come From America. Manchester Guardian. 19 October 1937, p. 7.

Review of The Movies Come From America. Times London Literary Supplement. 23 October 1937, p. 784.

Watts, Richard Jr. Review of The Movies Come From America. New York Herald Tribune Books. 19 December 1937, p. 2.

313

Wright, Basil. Review of The Movies Come From America. Spectator. 159 (31 December 1937): 1188.

Your Money and Your Life (1938)

Baerwald, Friedrich. Review of Your Money and Your Life. Commonweal. 28 (29 April 1938): 22.

Bates, E.S. Review of Your Money and Your Life. New York Herald Tribune Books, 20 March 1938, p. 11.

Coyle, D.C. Review of Your Money and Your Life. Saturday Review of Literature. 17 (15 January 1938): 5.

Elting, M.L. Review of Your Money and Your Life. Forum. 99 (February 1938): iv.

Lewinson, Paul. Review of Your Money and Your Life. Social Education. 2 (September 1938): 2.

MacDonald, William. “A Warning to the Middle Class.” Review of Your Money and Your Life. New York Times, 16 January 1938, p. 103.

Review of Your Money and Your Life. Booklist. 34 (15 February 1938): 225.

Review of Your Money and Your Life. Christian Science Monitor, 25 January 1938, p. 18.

Review of Your Money and Your Life. Cleveland Open Shelf (January 1938): 2.

Review of Your Money and Your Life. Journal of Home Economics. 30 (September 1938): 491.

Review of Your Money and Your Life. New Republic. 93 (2 February 1938): 376.

Review of Your Money and Your Life. Times London Literary Supplement. 23 April 1938, 283.

Seaver, R.W. Review of Your Money and Your Life. Boston Transcript, 12 February 1938, p. 1.

White, W.A. Atlantic. June 1938.

314

The Great Audience (1950)

Hunt, Thomas Barry. Review of Great Audience. Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers 56 (February 1951): 254.

North, Sterling. “On Improving the Popular Arts.” Review of Great Audience. New York Times, 5 November 1950, p. B7.

Review of The Great Audience. Cornell Law Quarterly 37 (1951): 139.

Wilson, Edmund. Review of The Great Audience. The New Yorker 26 (28 October 1950): 121-126.

Writing for Television (1952)

Freedley, George. Review of Writing for Television. Library Journal. 78 (15 January 1953): 152.

Review of Writing for Television. Booklist. 49 (15 January 1953): 169.

Review of Writing for Television. Bookmark. 12 (February 1953): 102.

Review of Writing for Television. Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers 60 (June 1953): 743.

Review of Writing for Television. Kirkus. 20 (1 August 1953): 485.

Review of Writing for Television. Springfield Republican, 12 October 1952, p. 11C.

Sangster, Allan. Review of Writing for Television. Canadian Forum. 33 (October 1953):165.

The Public Arts (1956)

Adams, Phoebe. Review of The Public Arts. Atlantic. 198 (August 1956): 83.

Alpert, Hollis. Review of The Public Arts. Saturday Review. 39 (21 July 1956): 24.

Cunliffe, Marcus. Review of The Public Arts. Encounter 7 (October 1956): 79.

315

Freedley, George. Review of The Public Arts. Library Journal. 81 (1 October 1956): 2265.

Hogan, William. Review of The Public Arts. San Francisco Chronicle, 27 June 1956, p. 21.

Lardner, Ring, Jr. Review of The Public Arts. Mainstream 9.11 (December 1956): 53.

Nordell, Rod. Review of The Public Arts. Christian Science Monitor, 5 July 1956, p. 4.

Review of The Public Arts. Booklist. 52 (15 July 1956): 477.

Review of The Public Arts. Bookmark. 16 (October 1956): 7.

Review of The Public Arts. Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers 65 (September 1956): 524.

Rosten, Leo. Review of The Public Arts. New York Herald Tribune Book Review, 15 July 1956, p. 5.

Siepmann, Charles. Review of The Public Arts. New York Times Book Review, 1 July 1956, p. 3.

Walbridge, E.F. Review of The Public Arts. Library Journal. 81 (1 June 1956): 1511.

Wolters, Larry. Review of The Public Arts. Chicago Sunday Tribune, 8 July 1956, p. 4.

The Seven Lively Arts, 2nd Ed. (1958)

Freedley, George. Review of Seven Lively Arts. Library Journal. 83 (1 January 1958): 96.

Gannett, Lewis. Review of Seven Lively Arts. New York Herald Tribune Book Review, 16 February 1958, p. 11.

Review of Seven Lively Arts. Booklist. 54 (15 February 1958): 329.

316

APPENDIX E

WORKS ABOUT CONSTANCE ROURKE

317

Works About Constance Rourke

(listed alphabetically by author)

Barstow, Jane Missner. “Constance Rourke.” One Hundred Years of American Women Writing, 1848-1948. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press Inc., 1997. 231-233.

Bellman, Samuel I. Constance M. Rourke. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981.

- - - . “Where the West Begins: Constance Rourke’s Images of Her Own Frontierland.” Women and Western American Literature. Edited by Helen Winter Stauffer and Susan J. Rosowski. Troy, NY: Whitston, 1982.

Caskey, Marie. “Rourke, Constance Mayfield.” In Dictionary of American Biography: Supplement Three: 1941-45. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973. 672-673.

“Constance Rourke, Author, Educator.” The New York Times 24 Mar. 1941.

Hyman, Stanley. “Constance Rourke and Folk Criticism.” The Armed Vision. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1947.

Lynn, Kenneth. “Rourke, Constance Mayfield.” In Notable American Women, 1607- 1950: A Biographical Dictionary, 3:199. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1971.

Marshall, Margaret. “Constance Rourke: Artist and Citizen.” Nation (21 June 1941): 726- 728.

- - - . “Constance Rourke in the Critics’ Den.” Nation (24 October 1942): 418-420.

Reed, Amy. “Homage to Constance Rourke.” Vassar Alumnae Magazine (October 1941): 12-13.

“Rourke, Constance Mayfield.” Twentieth Century Authors. Eds. Stanley Kunitz and Howard Haycraft. New York: The HW Wilson Company, 1942.

Rubin, Joan Shelley. Constance Rourke and American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

- - - . “A World Out of Wilderness: Constance Rourke and the Search for a Usable Past.” Diss. Yale University, 1974.

318

Obituaries

Current Biography 1941

Nation 152 (29 March 1941): 368.

New York Times (24 March 1941).

Publishers Weekly 139 (5 April 1941): 1467

School and Society 53 (29 March 1941): 414.

Wilson Library Bulletin 15 (May 1941): 710.

319

APPENDIX F

WORKS ABOUT GILBERT SELDES

320

Works About Gilbert Seldes

(listed alphabetically by author)

Auerbach, Jonathan. “American Studies and Film, Blindness and Insight.” American Quarterly 58.1 (Mar 2006): 31-50.

Dumaine, Libby. “The Lively Critic: Gilbert Seldes.” Thes. University of Maryland, 1973.

Hutchens, J. “One Thing and Another.” Saturday Review (15 April 1969): 37+.

Kammen, Michael. The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

“Seldes, Gilbert.” Twentieth Century Authors. Eds. Stanley Kunitz and Howard Haycraft. New York: The HW Wilson Company, 1942

Shea, Laura. “Gilbert Seldes.” Advocates and Activists, 1919-1941: Men and Women Who Shaped the Period Between the Wars. Edited by David Garrett Izzo. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 2003. 228-236.

Anonymous (Edmund Wilson). “The All-Star Literary Vaudeville,” New Republic (30 June 1926).

Woods, David Lyndon. “The Criteria of the Radio and Television Criticism of Gilbert Seldes.” Thes. Stanford University, 1955.

Yoder, Jonathan Lipscomb. “Gilbert Seldes and the Criticism of Mass Culture.” Diss. Northwestern University, 1975.

Obituaries

New York Morning Telegraph (1 October 1970)

New York Times (30 September 1970): 46.

Newsweek (12 October 1970): 84.

Time (12 October 1970): 62.

321

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archival Collections

At the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, MD.

H.L. Mencken Collection. Enoch Pratt Free Library.

At the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Columbia Broadcasting System. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

At the New York Public Library, New York, NY.

Dorothy Lockhart Papers. Manuscript Division. Constance Lindsay Skinner Papers. Manuscript Division.

At the Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA.

Bernard De Voto papers. Special Collections.

At the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Philadelphia, PA.

Van Wyck Brooks papers. Manuscript library. Lewis Mumford papers. Manuscript library.

At Vassar College Special Collections, Poughkeepsie, NY

Autograph file, Constance Rourke. Ruth Benedict papers. Special Collections.

322

At Yale University, New Haven, CT.

Alfred Steiglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. YCAL MSS 85.

Henry Seidel Canby Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. YCAL MSS 64.

Ruth Draper Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. YCAL MSS 49.

Margaret Marshall Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. YCAL MSS 10.

Zora Neale Hurston Collection. James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. JWJ MSS 9.

Gertrude Stein Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. YCAL MSS 76.

Edmund Wilson Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. YCAL MSS 187.

323

Journals, Magazines, and Newspapers

American Mercury (1924-1950) New York Herald Tribune Books (1924- 1963) American Literature (1929- ) New York Graphic (1924-1932) American Scholar (1932- ) New Republic (1914- ) American Spectator (1932-1937) New York Times (1851- ) Americana (1925-1926) New Yorker (1925- ) Atlantic (Atlantic Monthly) (1857- ) The Best Plays series (1920-1953) One Act Play Magazine and Radio Drama Review (1937-1942) Bookman (1895-1933) Opportunity (1923-1949) Century (1881-1930) Partisan Review (1934- ) Collier’s Weekly (1888-1957) Printer’s Ink (1888-1967) Crisis (1910-1996) Saturday Evening Post (1821- ) Criterion (1922-1938) Saturday Review of Literature (1924- Dial (1880-1929) 1986) The Drama (1911) Scribner’s (1887-1939) Drama League Monthly (1916-1919) The Seven Arts (1916-1917) The Dramatic Mirror (1919-1920) The Smart Set (1900-1930) Esquire (1933-) Southwest Review (1924- ) Federal Theatre (1935-1937) The Stage (1932-1939) Forum (1929-1938) Theatre Arts (1916-1937) The Freeman (1920-1924) Theatre Guild Magazine (1928-1932) Harper’s (1850- ) Theatre Workshop (1936-1938) Hollywood Quarterly (1945-1951) Theatre World (1920-1924) Literary Digest (1890-1938) Time (1912- ) Menorah Journal (1915-1962) Today (1933-1937) Mentor (1920-1930) TV Guide (1953- ) Modern Music (1924-1946) Vanity Fair (1913-1936) The Nation (1865- ) Variety (1905- ) New York Evening Journal (1895-1937) Woman’s Home Companion (1873-1957)

324

Published Sources

Abrams, Richard M. The Shaping of Twentieth Century America: Interpretive Essays, Selected and with Commentary by Richard Abrams and Lawrence W. Levine. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971.

Ackerman, Alan J., Jr. The Portable Theater: American Literature and the Nineteenth Century Stage. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

Allen, Robert C. Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1991.

American Stage Designs: An Illustrated Catalogue of the Models, Drawings and Photographs Exhibited at the Bourgeois Galleries in New York, April 5th to 26th, 1919 with Articles by Maxwell Armfield, Michael C. Carr, Norman Bel-Geddes, C. Raymond Johnson, Robert Edmond Jones, Rollo Peters, Irving Pichel, Hermann Rosse, Lee Simonson, J. Blanding Sloan, Joseph Urban, John Wenger, and Kenneth Macgowan. New York: Theatre Arts Magazine, 1919. np

Aronson, Arnold, ed. Architect of Dreams: The Theatrical Vision of Joseph Urban. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

Atkinson, W. Patrick. Theatrical Design in the Twentieth Century: An Index to Photographic Reproduction of Scenic Designs. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Bank, Rosemarie K. “The Doubled Subject and the New Playwrights’ Theatre, 1927- 1929.” Critical Theory and Performance. Eds. Janelle Reinelt and Joseph Roach. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1992. 324-335.

- - - . Theatre Culture in America, 1825-1860. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.

Bannerman, R. LeRoy. Norman Corwin and Radio: The Golden Years. Birmingham, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1986.

Banta, Martha. Imaging American Women. New York: Columbia UP, 1987.

Barfield, Ray E. Listening to Radio, 1920-1950. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996..

Barrish, Phillip. American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Prestige, 1880-1995. New York: Cambridge UP, 2001.

Benchley, Robert. “Drama: ‘Destroy the Audience!’” Life 78 (22 December 1921): 18.

Benedict, Ruth. Patterns of Culture. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1934. 325

Bernheim, Alfred L. The Business of the Theatre. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1964.

Bindas, Walter. All This Music Belongs to the Nation: The WPA’s Federal Music Project and American Society. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995.

Blair, Walter and Hamlin Hill. America’s Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury. New York: Oxford UP, 1978.

Blake, Casey Nelson. Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Caolina Press, 1990.

Bledstein, Burton J. The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle-Class and Developments of Higher Education in America. New York: Norton, 1976.

Bloom, Thomas Alan. Kenneth Macgowan and the Aesthetic Paradigm for the New Stagecraft in America. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.

Bochner, Jay and Justin D. Edwards, eds. American Modernism Across the Arts. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

Bogard, Travis. Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattos, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. Fourth Edition. New York: Continuum, 2001.

Boyd, Ernest. “Readers and Writers.” The Independent 113 (27 September 1924): 198.

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.

Bourne, Randolph. The Radical Will: Randolph Bourne Selected Writings, 1911-1918. Edited by Olaf Hansen. New York: Urizen Books, 1977.

- - - . War and the Intellectuals, Collected Essays 1915-1919. Edited by Carl Resek. New York, 1964..

Bricker, Herschel L., ed. Our Theatre Today: A Composite Handbook on the Art, Craft, and Management of Contemporary Theatre. New York: Samuel French, 1936.

Brinkley, Alan. The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People. Boston: McGraw Hill, 1993.

326

Brockett, Oscar and Robert Findlay. Century of Innovation: History of European and American Theatre Since the Late Nineteenth Century. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1991.

Brodkin, Sylvia Z. and Elizabeth J. Pearson, eds. On the Air: A Collection of Radio and TV Plays. New York: Scribner, 1977.

Brooks, Van Wyck. America’s Coming of Age. New York: BW Huebsch, 1915.

- - -. The Confident Years: 1885-1915. Volume 5 of Brooks’ Makers and Finders. New York: Dutton, 1952.

- - - . Days of the Phoenix: The Nineteen-Twenties I Remember. New York: Dutton, 1957.

- - -. The Flowering of New England. Volume 1 in Brooks’ Makers and Finders. New York: EP Dutton and Company, 1936.

- - - . New England: Indian Summer. Volume 2 of Brooks’ Makers and Finders. EP Dutton, 1940.

- - - . “On Creating a Usable Past.” The Dial. 64:764 (11 Apr 1918) 337-341.

- - - . The Ordeal of Mark Twain. New York: Dutton, 1933.

- - - . The Pilgrimage of Henry James. New York: Octagon Books, 1925.

- - - . The Times of Melville and Whitman. Volume 4 of Brooks’ Makers and Finders. New York: Dutton, 1947.

- - - . Van Wyck Brooks: The Early Years. Edited by Claire Sprague. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993.

- - - . The Wine of the Puritans: A Study of Present Day America. New York: M. Kennerley, 1909.

- - - . The World of Washington Irving. Volume 3 of Brooks’ Makers and Finders. New York: EP Dutton, 1944.

Brown, John Mason. The Art of Playgoing. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1936.

- - - . Broadway in Review. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1940.

- - - . Through These Men: Some Aspects of Our Passing History. New York: Harper’s, 1956.

327

Brown, Milton W. American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1955.

Buck, Gertrude. The Social Criticism of Literature. New Haven: Yale UP, 1916.

Budd, Louis J. and Edwin H. Cady, eds. On Humor: The Best from American Literature. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1992.

Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. Rev. ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1957.

Burke, Peter. What is Cultural History? Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004.

Burt, Struthers. Escape from America. New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1936.

Bustard, Bruce. A New Deal for the Arts. Washington DC: National Archives and Records Administration, 1997.

Butsche, Richard. The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750- 1990. New York: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Buxton, Frank. The Big Broadcast, 1920-1950. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1997.

Campbell, Robert. The Golden Years of Broadcasting: A Celebration of the First 50 Years of Radio and TV on NBC. New York: Scribner, 1976.

Canning, Charlotte. The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2007.

Carey, John. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligensia, 1880-1939. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 2002.

Carter, Paul Allen. Revolt Against Destiny: An Intellectual History of the United States. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.

Chansky, Dorothy. Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004.

Chartier, Roger. “Popular Culture: A Concept Revisited.” Intellectual History Newsletter. 15 (1993): 3-13.

Cheney, Sheldon. The Art Theatre: Its Character as Differentiated from the Commercial Theatre; Its Ideals and Organization; And a Record of Certain European and American Examples. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1917.

328

- - - . The New Movement in the Theatre. New York: M. Kennerley, 1914.

- - - . Primer of Modern Art. New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1924.

- - - . Stage Decoration. New York: John Day Company, 1928.

- - - . The Theatre: Three Thousand Years of Drama, Acting and Stagecraft. New York: Tudor Publishing Co, 1929.

- - - . A World History of Art. New York: The Viking Press, 1937.

Cheney, Sheldon and Martha Candler Cheney. Art and the Machine: An Account of Industrial Design in 20th-Century America. New York: Acanthus Press, 1936.

Chielens, Edward E., ed. American Literary Magazines: The Twentieth Century. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992.

Clayton, Virginia Tuttle. “The Index of American Design: Picturing a National Identity.” Magazine Antiques. Dec 2002. 14 January 2005.

Cloud, Stanley. The Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

Coben, Stanley, and Lorman Ratner, eds. The Development of an American Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983.

Cohen, Lester. The New York Graphic: The World’s Zaniest Newspaper. Philadelphia: Chilton, 1964.

Collins, Jim, ed. High-Pop: Making Culture into Popular Entertainment. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002.

Collins, Theresa M. Otto Kahn: Art, Money, and Modern Time. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Conquergood, Dwight. “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research.” The Performance Studies Reader. Edited by Henry Bial. London: Routledge, 2004. 311-322.

Corn, Wanda M. The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915- 1935. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Corwin, Norman. Years of the Electric Ear. Interviewed by Douglas Bell. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1994.

329

Cowley, Malcolm. After the Genteel Tradition: American Writers, 1910-1930. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1964.

Cox, Jim. Frank and Anne Hummert’s Radio Factory: The Programs and Personalities of Broadcasting’s Most Prolific Producers. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003.

Criticism in America: Its Functions and Status. Essays by Irving Babbitt, Van Wyck Brooks, WC Brownell, Ernest Boyd, TS Eliot, HL Mencken, Stuart P Sherman, JE Spingarn, and George E. Woodberry. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1924.

“The New Order of Critical Values.” Vanity Fair 18 (April 1922): 40-41.

Dawidoff, Robert. The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage. Chapel Hill: U of NC P, 1992.

DeHart, Jane. The Federal Theatre, 1935-1939: Plays, Relief, and Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1967.

DeMuth, James. Small Town Chicago: The Comic Perspective of Finley Peter Dunne, George Ade, and Ring Lardner. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1980.

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso, 1996.

De Voto, Bernard. “Civilization in the U.S.A.” Saturday Review (3 October 1936): 7.

- - - . The Literary Fallacy. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1944.

- - - . “The Rocking Chair in History and Criticism.” Forum and Century 89 (February 1933): 104-107.

DiMaggio, Paul. “Cultural Boundaries and Structural Change: The Extension of the High Culture Model to Theater, Opera, and the Dance, 1900-1940.” Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality. Eds. Michèle Lamont and Marcel Fournier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 21-57.

Dolan, Jill. “The Polemics and Potential of Theatre Studies and Performance.” The SAGE Handbook of Performance Studies. Ed. D. Soyini Madison and Judith Hamera. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006. 508-526.

Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Knopf, 1977.

- - - . Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar Strouss Giroux, 1995. 330

Douglas, George H. The Early Days of Radio Broadcasting. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1987.

- - - . The Smart Magazines: 50 Years of Literary Revelry and High Jinks at Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Smart Set. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1991.

Dunning, John. On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

Eaton, Walter Prichard. The American Stage of Today. Boston: Small, Maynard, and Company, 1908.

- - - . At the New Theatre and Others, 1908-1910. Boston: Small, Maynard, and Company, 1910.

- - - . Plays and Players: Leaves from a Critic’s Scrapbook. Cincinnati: Stewart & Kidd, 1916.

- - - . The Theatre Guild: The First Ten Years. New York: Brentano’s, 1929.

Elliott, Emory, ed. Columbia Literary History of the United States. New York: Columbia UP, 1988.

Ellison, Ralph. “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke.” Shadow and Act. New York: Random House, 1964. 45-59.

Ellison, Ralph and James Alan McPherson. “Indivisible Man.” The Atlantic (December 1970): 45-60.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Representative Men. Joseph Simon Publisher: 1980.

Emery, Edwin. The Press and America. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: 1962.

Engle, Ron and Tice Miller, eds. The American Stage: Social and Economic Issues from the Colonial Period to the Present. New York: Cambridge UP, 1993.

Falconer-Salkeld, Bridget. The MacDowell Colony: A Musical History of America’s Premier Artists’ Community. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2005.

Fang, Irving E. Those Radio Commentators! Ames: Iowa State UP, 1977.

Feinsod, Arthur. The Simple Stage: Its Origins in the Modern American Theater. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992.

331

Fields, Armond and L. Marc Fields. From the Bowery to Broadway: Lew Fields and the Roots of American Popular Theatre. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

Firestone, Ross, ed. The Big Radio Comedy Program. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1978.

Flanagan, Hallie. Arena: The History of the Federal Theatre Project. New York: Duell Sloan and Pierce, 1940.

Fleischhauer, Carl and Beverly W. Brannon, eds. Documenting America, 1935-1943. Berkeley: U of California Press in association with the Library of Congress, 1988.

Frank, Waldo. Our America. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919.

- - - . The Re-discovery of America: An Introduction to the Philosophy of American Life. New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1929.

- - - . “The Treason of the Intellectuals.” Modern Quarterly 5 (Spring 1929): 161-166.

Frick, John W. and Stephen M. Vallillo, eds. Theatrical Directors: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Gale, Steven H., ed. Encyclopedia of American Humorists. New York: Garland Publishing, 1988.

Gilder, Rosamond. Enter the Actress: The First Woman in the Theatre. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1931.

- - - . A Theatre Library: A Bibliography of One Hundred Books Relating to the Theatre. New York: Theatre Arts Inc, 1932.

Gilder, Rosamond and George Freedley . Theatre Collections in Libraries and Museums. New York: Theatre Arts Inc., 1936.

Glassberg, David. American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1990.

Godfrey, Donald G. A Directory of Broadcast Archives. Washington DC: Broadcast Education Association, 1983.

Goldstein, Malcolm. George S. Kaufman: His Life, His Theater. New York: Oxford UP, 1979.

332

Gorman, Jean Wright and Herbert S., eds. The Peterborough Anthology: Being a Selection of the Work of the Poets who have been members of The MacDowell Colony. New York: Theatre Arts, Inc., 1923.

Gorman, Paul. Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth Century America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Graham, Philip. Showboats: The History of an American Institute. Austin: U of Texas P, 1951.

Grams, Martin. Radio Drama: A Comprehensive Chronicle of American Network Programs, 1932-1962. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000.

Gramsci, Antoni. A Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916-1935. Edited by David Forgacs. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998.

Gutfeld, Arnon. American Exceptionalism: The Effects of Plenty on the American Experience. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2002.

Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’.” Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. 2nd edition. Athens, GA: The U of GA Press, 1998. 442.

Hansen, Jonathan M. The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890- 1920. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003.

Harmon, Jim. The Great Radio Comedians. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970.

- - - . The Great Radio Heroes. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967.

Harris, Jonathon. Federal Art and National Culture: The Politics of Identity in New Deal America. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Hart, Moss. Act One. New York: Modern Library, 1959.

Hegeman, Susan. Patterns for America. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999.

Herrmann, Dorothy. With Malice Toward All. New York: GP Putnam’s Sons, 1982.

Hewitt, Barnard. Theatre USA, 1665-1957. New York: McGraw Hill, 1959.

Hickerson, Jay. The Ultimate History of Network Radio Programming: A Guide to All Circulating Shows. Hamden, CT: Presto Print II, 1992.

Hill, Errol and James V Hatch. A History of African American Theatre. New York: Cambridge UP, 2003. 333

Hinshaw, John and Paul Le Blanc, eds. US Labor in the Twentieth Century: Studies in Working-Class Struggles and Insurgency. Amherst: Humanity Books, 2000.

Hirsch, Jerrold. Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Hoffman, Michael J. and Patrick D. Murphy, eds. Critical Essays on American Modernism. New York: GK Hall, 1992.

Hohenberg, John. The Pulitzer Diaries: Inside America’s Greatest Prize. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1997.

- - - . The Pulitzer Prizes: A History of the Awards in Books, Drama, Music, and Journalism Based on the Private Files Over Six Decades. New York: Columbia UP, 1974.

Hopkins, Arthur. How’s Your Second Act? New York: Philip Goodman Company, 1918.

- - - . “How to Pick a Popular Play.” New York Times 9 May 1915: sec. 7: 5.

- - - . Reference Point. New York: Samuel French, 1948.

- - - . To a Lonely Boy. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc., 1937.

Hosley, David H. As Good As Any: Foreign Correspondence on American Radio, 1930- 1940. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984.

Houghton, Norris. Advance from Broadway: 19,000 Miles of American Theatre. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1941.

Howells, William Dean. Selected Literary Criticism: Volume 2. Edited by Ulrich Halfmann, Donald Pizer, and Ronald Gottesman. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.

Hughes, Glenn. A History of the American Theatre, 1700-1950. New York: Samuel French, 1951.

Hutner, Gordon, ed. American Literature, American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986.

Index of American Design Manual. Washington DC: Works Progress Administration, Division of Women’s and Professional Projects, Federal Art Project, 1938. 334

Isaacs, Edith J.R. The Negro in the American Theatre. College Park, MD: McGrath Pub. Co, 1947.

Isaacs, Edith J. R., ed. Plays of American Life and Fantasy. New York: Coward, McCann, 1929.

- - - . Theatre: Essays on the Art of Theatre. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1927.

Jay, Gregory S., ed. Modern American Critics, 1920-1955. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1988.

Jefferson, Margo. “Remapping the Cultural Territories of America.” The New York Times 16 November 2005: B1.

Jenks, Chris. Culture. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2005.

Johnson, Edgar. “American Biography in the Modern World.” The North American Review 245 (364-380.

Johnson, J. Stewart. American Modern, 1925-1940. New York: Harry N Abrams, 2000.

Jones, Robert Edmond. The Dramatic Imagination. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1941.

Joost, Nicholas. Scofield Thayer and the Dial. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1964.

Jovett, Garth. Film: The Democratic Art, a Social History of American Film. Boston: Focal Press, 1985.

Kahn, Otto. The American Stage: Reflections of an Amateur. np, 1925?

- - - . Art and America. np, 1924?

- - - . Art and the People. New York: Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebration Committee, 1916.

- - - . The Value of Art to the People: An Address by Mr. Otto H. Kahn at the Annual Dinner of the American Federation of the Arts Held in Washington on May 16, 1924. Washington DC: 1924.

Katz, Vincent, ed. Black Mountain College: An Experiment in Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.

335

Kaufman, George S. Kaufman and Co: Broadway Comedies. New York: Library of America, 2004.

Kazacoff, George. Dangerous Theatre: The Federal Theatre Project as a Forum for New Plays. New York: P. Lang, 1989.

Keough, William. Punchlines: The Violence of American Humor. New York: Paragon House, 1990.

Kibler, M. Alison. Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1999.

Kunitz, Stanley and Howard Haycraft eds. Twentieth Century Authors. New York: The HW Wilson Company, 1942.

Lackmann, Ronald W. Remember Radio. New York: Putnam, 1970.

- - - . The Encyclopedia of American Radio: An A-Z Guide to Radio from Jack Benny to Howard Stern. New York: Facts on File, 2000.

LaCapra, Dominick. “Culture and Ideology: From Geertz to Marx.” Soundings in Critical Theory. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.

Lahr, John. Notes on a Cowardly Lion: The Biography of Bert Lahr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

Larson, Orville K. Scene Design in the American Theatre from 1915 to 1960. Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 1989.

Lears, TJ Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920. New York: Pantheon, 1981.

Leavis, F.R. Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture. John Storey, ed. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. 2nd ed. Athens, GA: The U of GA Press, 1998. 18.

Leavis, F.R. and Denys Thompson. Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness. London: Chatto & Windus, 1933.

Leja, Michael. Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004.

Lerner, Max. America as a Civilization. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957.

336

Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.

- - - . Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of a Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988.

- - - . The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.

- - - . The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

Levine, Lawrence W. and Robert Middlekauff, eds. The National Temper: Readings in American History. New York: Harcourt, Brace &World, 1968.

Levy, Alan H. Edward MacDowell: An American Master. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Pres, Inc., 1998.

Lewis, David H. Broadway Musicals: A Hundred Year History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co, 2002.

Locke, Alain. “The New Negro.” The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David Levering Lewis. New York: Viking, 1994.

LoMonaco, Martha. Every Week, A Broadway Revue: The Tamiment Playhouse, 1921- 1945. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992.

Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

Lynd, Robert and Helen. Middletown: A Study in American Culture. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1929.

Lynes, Russell. “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow.” Harper’s (February 1949). Reprinted in The Tastemakers. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954. 310-322.

- - - . The Lively Audience: A Social History of the Visual and Performing Arts in America, 1890-1950. New York: Harper and Row, 1985.

Macdonald, Dwight. “Masscult and Midcult: I.” Partisan Review 27 (Spring 1960): 203- 233.

- - - . “Masscult and Midcult: II.” Partisan Review 27 (Fall 1960): 589-631.

337

- - - . “A Theory of Mass Culture.” John Storey, ed. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. 2nd ed. Athens, GA: The U of GA Press, 1998. 23.

Macgowan, Kenneth. Footlights Across America: Towards a National Theater. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929.

- - - . “Gordon Craig from Broadway,” Dial 23 May 1918, 478.

Macgowan, Kenneth and Robert Edmond Jones. Continental Stagecraft. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1922.

Mackaye, Percy. Community Drama: Its Motive and Method of Neighborliness. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912.

Mackenzie, Harry. The Directory of the Armed Forces Radio Service Series. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999.

McArthur, Benjamin. Actors and American Culture, 1880-1920. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2000.

McConachie, Bruce. “New York Operagoing, 1825-1850: Creating an Elite Social Ritual.” American Music (Summer 1988): 181-192.

McConachie, Bruce and Daniel Friedman, eds. Theatre for Working Class Audiences in the United States, 1830-1980. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985.

McNamara, Brooks. Shuberts of Broadway. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.

McNamara, Brooks, ed. American Popular Entertainments: Jokes, Monologues, Bits, and Sketches. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1983

Manganaro, Marc. Culture, 1922: The Emergence of a Concept. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2002.

Mason, Jeffrey and J. Ellen Gainor, eds. Performing America: Cultural Nationalism. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1999.

Matthews, Brander. American Character. New York: TY Crowell and Co., 1906.

- - - . The American of the Future and Other Essays. New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1909.

- - - . A Book about the Theatre. New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1916.

- - - . A Confident Tomorrow: A Novel of New York. New York: Harper, 1900. 338

- - - . Vistas of New York. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1912.

Matthiessen, F.O. The Responsibilities of the Critic. New York: Oxford UP, 1952.

Melosh, Barbara. Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991.

Mencken, H.L. The American Language. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1919.

- - - . A Book of Prefaces. London: J. Cape, 1922.

- - - . My Life as Author and Editor. New York: Knopf, 1993.

- - - . Notes on Democracy. New York: Knopf, 1926.

- - - . Prejudices: First Series. New York: Knopf, 1919.

- - - . Prejudices: Second Series. New York: Knopf, 1920.

- - - . Prejudices: Third Series. New York: Knopf, 1922.

- - - . Prejudices: Fourth Series. New York: Knopf, 1924.

- - - . Prejudices: Fifth Series. New York: Knopf, 1926.

- - - . Prejudices: Sixth Series. New York: Knopf, 1927.

Mikotowicz, Thomas J. Theatrical Designers: An International Biographical Dictionary. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992.

Mintz, Lawrence E., ed. Humor in America: A Research Guide to Genres and Topics. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988.

Moderwell, Hiram. The Theatre of To-Day. New York: John Lane Company, 1914.

Morand, Paul. “A Notable Collection.” Review of Stories from the Dial. Dial 78 (January 1925): 51-53.

Morrison, Michael A. John Barrymore, Shakespearean Actor. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.

Moses, Montrose J. The American Dramatist. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1917.

- - - . The Literature of the South. New York: TY Crowell and Co., 1910. 339

Moses, Montrose J., ed. Representative American Dramas, National and Local. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1925.

Moses, Montrose J. and John Mason Brown, eds. The American Theatre as Seen By Its Critics, 1754-1932. New York: W.W. Norton, 1934.

Moussinac, Leon, ed. The New Movement in the Theatre: A Survey of Recent Developments in Europe and America. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1932.

Mumford, Lewis. “The Emergence of a Past.” New Republic 45 (25 November 1925): 19.

- - - . The Golden Day: A Study in American Literature and Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957.

- - - . Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization. New York: Dover, 1955.

- - - . “The Story of the Seven Arts.” American Mercury 20 (June 1930): 156-164.

Munson, Gorham B. “Van Wyck Brooks: His Sphere and His Encroachments.” Dial 78 (January 1925): 28-42.

Nash, Roderick. The Nervous Generation: American Thought, 1917-1930. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1970.

Nathan, George Jean. “The Critical Circus.” Forum 83 (May 1930): 308-309.

- - - . The Popular Theatre. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1918.

Nathan, George Jean and H.L. Mencken. The American Credo: A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind. New York: Octagon Books, 1920.

- - - . The New American Credo: A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1927.

Neitzche, Freidrich. The Antichrist. Trans. H.L. Mencken. Tuscson: Sharp Press, 1999.

Network Radio and Television Program History, 1927 to 1951. Compiled by graduate students in Radio-Television Programming, Department of Speech, Ohio State University, 1951

“The New Order of Critical Values” Vanity Fair 18 (Apr 1922): 40-41.

Nicholls, David G. Conjuring the Folk: Forms of Modernity in African America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. 340

Nye, Russell. The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America. New York: Dial Press, 1970.

O’Connor, Francis, ed. Art for the Millions: Essays from the 1930s by Artists and Administrators of the WPA Federal Art Project. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society Ltd, 1973.

O’Connor, John and Lorraine Brown, eds. Free, Adult, and Uncensored: The Living History of the Federal Theatre Project. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978.

Old Time Radio. 2 records, 33 1/3. Columbia Musical Treasuries, 1968. Including Rudy Vallee, Will Rogers, Bing Crosby, Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante, Harry Hershfield, Kay Kyser, Kate Smith, WC Fields, Al Jolson, Burns and Allen, Arthur Tracy, Baby Rose Marie, Uncle Don, Arthur Godfrey, Cliff Edwards, Morton Downey, Eileen Farrell, Victor Borge, Ray Noble.

O’Meally, Robert G., ed. The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1998.

O’Neill, Eugene. “As Ever, Gene”: The Letters of Eugene O’Neill to George Jean Nathan. Ed. Nancy L. Roberts and Arthur W. Roberts. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1987.

Ortega y Gasset, Jose. Revolt of the Masses. New York: Norton, 1932.

Orvell, Miles. The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880- 1940. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989.

Owen, Bobbi. Scenic Design on Broadway: Designers and Their Credits, 1915-1990. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991.

Paramore, Edward E., Jr. “Spring Elections on Mount Olympus.” Bookman 55 (May 1922): 285-291.

Paskman, Dailey and Sigmund Spaeth. “Gentlemen, Be Seated”: A Parade of the Old- Time Minstrels. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company Inc, 1928.

Peters, Margo. House of Barrymore. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1990.

Pitts, Michael R. Radio Soundtracks: A Reference Guide. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1976.

Pizer, Donald. American Expatriate Writing and the Paris Moment: Modernism and Place. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1996.

341

Platt, Susan Noyes. “Sheldon Cheney: Crusader for Modernism.” Archives of American Art 25:3 (1985), 11-17.

Poggi, Jack. Theater in America: The Impact of Economic Forces, 1870-1967. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1968.

Pollack, Rhoda-Gale. George S. Kaufman. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988.

Postlewait, Thomas. “From Melodrama to Realism: The Suspect History of American Drama.” Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre. Eds. Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

- - - . “The Hieroglyphic Stage: American Theatre and Society, Post-Civil War to 1945.” The Cambridge History of American Theatre. Vol 2. Cambridge: UP, 1999.

Proceedings of the Conference on the Drama in American Universities and Little Theatres: Held at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, November Twenty-Seven and Twenty-Eighth. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1925.

Quirk, Tom. “The Historical Context.” The Portable American Realism Reader. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.

Reising, Russell J. The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature. New York: Methuen, 1986.

Richards, Jeffrey H. Theater Enough: American Culture and the Metaphor of the World Stage, 1607-1789. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.

Roedinger, David. Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso, 1991.

Rogers, Will. Autobiography. Ed. by Daniel Day. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Co, 1949.

Rosenfeld, Paul. Port of New York: Essays on Fourteen American Moderns. New York, 1924.

Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Rozenzweig, Roy. Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Individual City, 1870-1920. New York: Cambridge UP, 1983.

342

Rubin, Joan Shelley. The Making of Middle/Brow Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

Santayana, George. “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy.” American Literature, American Culture. Edited by Gordon Hutner. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

- - - . “Marginal Notes on Civilization in the United States.” Dial (June 1922): 2-17.

Savage, Barbara Dianne. Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race 1938-1948. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Savran, David. A Queer Sort of Materialism: Recontextualizing American Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.

- - -. “The Search for America’s Soul: Theatre in the Jazz Age.” Theatre Journal 58 (2006): 459-476.

- - - . “Toward a Historiography of the Popular.” Theatre Survey 45.2 (November 2004): 211-217.

Sayler, Oliver. Our American Theatre. New York: Brentano’s, 1923.

- - - . Revolt in the Arts: A Survey of the Creation, Distribution, and Appreciation of Art in America. New York: Brentano’s, 1930.

Schlesinger, Arthur Jr. “Foreword.” Stammering Century by Gilbert Seldes. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.

Schwartz, Bonnie. Voices from the Federal Theatre. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.

Selzer, Jack. Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village: Conversing with the Moderns, 1915- 1931. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.

Shank, Barry. “The Continuing Embarrassment of Culture: From the Culture Concept to Cultural Studies.” American Studies 38.2 (Summer 1997): 95-116.

Shapiro, Mitchell E. Radio Network Prime Time Programming, 1926-1967. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002.

Sheringham, George and James Laver, eds. Design in the Theatre. London, 1927.

Shi, David E. Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850-1920. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. 343

Shumway, David R. Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline. Minneapolis: U of MN Press, 1994.

Sievers, W. David. Freud on Broadway: A History of Psychoanalysis and the American Drama. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, Inc., 1970.

Silvester, Robert. United States Theatre, A Bibliography from the Beginning to 1990. New York: GK Hall, 1993.

Sklar, Robert. Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.

Skutch, Ira, ed. Five Directors: The Golden Years of Radio, Based on Interviews with Himan Brown, Axel Gruenberg, Fletcher Markle, Arch Oboler, Robert Lewis Shayton. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998.

Smart, James R. Radio Broadcasts in the Library of Congress, 1924-1941: A Catalog of Recordings. Washington DC: Library of Congress, 1982.

Snyder, Robert. The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Spahr, P. Andrew. Community of Creativity: A Century of MacDowell Colony Artists. Manchester, NH: The Currier Gallery of Art, 1996.

Spiller, Robert E. The Van Wyck Brooks Lewis Mumford Letters: The Record of a Literary Friendship, 1921-1963. New York: EP Dutton and Co, 1970.

Sprague, Claire, ed. Van Wyck Brooks: The Early Years. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1993.

Stansell, Christine. American Moderns. New York: Met Books, 2000.

Stearns, Harold. America and the Young Intellectual. New York: George H. Doran Company, 1921.

Stearns, Harold E., ed. Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry by Thirty Americans. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1922.

Stevenson, Isabelle and Roy M. Somlyo, eds. The Tony Award: A Complete Listing of Winners and Nominees of the American Theatre Wing’s Tony Awards with a History of the American Theatre Wing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001.

Stokes, Claudia. Writers in Retrospect: The Rise of American Literary History, 1875- 1910. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

344

Storey, John. Inventing Popular Culture: From Folklore to Globalization. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2003.

Storey, John, ed. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. 2nd edition. Athens, GA: The U of GA Press, 1998.

Strasbaugh, John. Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imitation in American Popular Culture. New York: Penguin, 2006.

Stumpf, Charles K. Ma Perkins, Little Orphan Annie and Heigh Ho Silver. New York: Carlton Press, 1971.

Sullivan, Mark. Our Times: The United States, 1900-1925. New York: Scribner, 1926.

Susman, Warren I. Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.

Swartz, Jon David. Handbook of Old-Time Radio: A Comprehensive Guide to Golden Age Radio Listening and Collecting. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1993.

Taylor, Glenhall. Before Television: The Radio Years. South Brunswick, NJ: AS Barnes, 1979.

- - - . Radio Programs, 1924-1984: A Catalog of Over 1800 Shows. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998.

- - - . Radio’s Golden Years: The Encyclopedia of Radio Programs, 1930-1960. San Diego: A.S. Barnes, 1981.

Teague, Frances. Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.

Tebbel, John and Mary Ellen Zuckerman. The Magazine in America, 1741-1900. New York: 1991.

Terrace, Vincent. Radio Program Openings and Closings, 1931-1972. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1962.

Vanderbilt, Kermit. American Literature and the Academy: The Roots, Growth, and Maturity of a Profession. Philadelphia: U of PA Press, 1986.

345

Veysey, Laurence. The Emergence of the American University. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1965.

Wainscott, Ronald. The Emergence of Modern American Theatre, 1914-1929. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997.

- - - . Staging O’Neill. New Haven: Yale UP, 1988.

Wasserstrom, William. The Legacy of Van Wyck Brooks: A Study of Maladies and Motives. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1971.

- - - . The Time of the Dial. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1963.

Whitman, Willson. Bread and Circuses: A Study of the Federal Theatre. New York: Oxford UP, 1937.

Widdemer, Margaret. “Message and Middlebrow.” Saturday Review of Literature (18 February 1933): 433-434.

- - - . Summers at the Colony. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Library Associates: 1964.

Wilde, Larry, ed. The Great Comedians Talk About Comedy. New York: The Citadel Press, 1968.

Wilkinson, Rupert. The Pursuit of American Character. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.

Williams, Raymond. The Sociology of Culture. New York: Schocken, 1982.

Williams, William Carlos. In the American Grain. New York: A&C Boni, 1925.

Wilmeth, Don and Christopher Bigsby, eds. The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Vols I-III. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.

Wintz, Cary D., ed. The Politics and Aesthetics of “New Negro” Literature. New York: Garland Publishers, 1996.

Witham, Barry. The Federal Theatre Project: A Case Study. New York: Cambridge UP, 2003.

Woll, Allen. Black Musical Theatre: From Coontown to Dreamgirls. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State P, 1989.

346

Wonham, Henry. Playing the Races: Ethnic Caricature and American Realism. New York: Oxford UP, 2004.

Woolf, Virginia. “Middlebrow.” Death of the Moth. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1942. 180-184.

Woollcott, Alexander. Enchanted Aisles. New York: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1924.

- - - . Going to Pieces. New York: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1928.

- - - . Shouts and Murmurs: Echoes of a Thousand and One First Nights. New York: The Century Co., 1922.

Yates, Norris W. The American Humorist: Conscience of the Twentieth Century. Ames, IA: Iowa State UP, 1964.

Young, Donald, ed. The American Negro. Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1928.

Young, Stark. The Theatre. New York: George H. Doran Company, 1927.

Zellers, Parker. Tony Pastor: Dean of the Vaudeville Stage. Ypsilanti: Eastern Michigan UP, 1971.

Ziegfeld, Richard and Paulette. The Ziegfeld Touch. New York: HN Abrams, 1993.

Ziff, Larzer. Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence in America. New York: The Viking Press, 1981.

Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: New Press, 2003.

Dissertations

Anderson, Martha S. “The Indigenous Roots of New York Dada.” Diss. University of Maryland College Park, 1986.

Arnoff, Eric Paul Wallach. “Mapping the ‘Inland Empire’: American Literature, Criticism, and the Problem of Culture, 1915-1941.” Diss. Rutgers, 2003.

Dorman, Robert Lee. “The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920-1945.” Diss. Brown University, 1991.

347

Dowell, Peter Winthrop. “Van Wyck Brooks and the Mind of his Generation.” Diss. University of Minnesota, 1965.

Firestone, Paul. “The ‘Educational Value and Power’ of the Pulitzer Prize Plays.” Diss. Columbia University, 1969.

Hoffman, Kitty. “A History of ‘Vanity Fair’: A Modernist Journal in America.” Diss. University of Toronto, 1980.

Hopper, Arthur. “Sheldon Cheney: Spokesman for the New Movement in American Theatre.” Diss. Indiana University, 1969.

Jacklin, Thomas Michael. “Progressives and the Usable Past: Historical Themes in the Literature of American Reform, 1880-1915.” Diss. The Johns Hopkins University, 1981.

Jerving, Ryan Ross. “Hep: Jazz Modernisms.” Diss. University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, 2000.

Law, Andrew Davis. “Chance and Necessity: Reengaging John A. Kouwenhoven and Tradition-Oriented Criticism.” Diss. University of Minnesota, 1987.

Levine, Ira Alan. “Theatre in Revolt: Left-Wing Dramatic Theory in the United States (1911-1939).” Diss. University of Toronto, 1980.

Moore, David Ryan. “Exiled America: Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Hart Benton, Benjamin A. Botkin, Constance Rourke, Arthur Raper, and the Great Depression.” Diss. Brown University, 1992.

Mount, Barbara Ladner. “The Genial Middle Ground: Regionalism, High Art, and Popular Culture in Thirties America.” Diss. Yale University, 1987.

Muller, Adam Patrick Dooley. “The Importance of Being Elsewhere: Modernist Expatriation and the American Literary Tradition (Gertrude Stein, Van Wyck Brooks, Harold Stearns).” Diss. McGill University, 1998.

Obropta, Mary M. “Hunters and Gatherers: American Women Working in the Documentary Arts, 1928-1939.” Diss. State University of New York at Buffalo, 1995.

Platt, Susan Noyes. “Responses to Modern Art in New York in the 1920s.” Diss., University of Texas-Austin, 1981.

Robinson, Valleri. “Beyond Stanislavski: The Influence of Russian Modernism on the American Theatre.” Diss. The Ohio State University, 2001. 348

Ross, Dale Howard. “The ‘Amos 'n' Andy’ Radio Program, 1928-1937: Its History, Content, and Social Significance.” Thesis. University of Iowa, 1974.

Ruland, Richard Eugene. “A Usable Past in the Criticism of Babbitt, More, Sherman, and Mencken.” Diss. University of Michigan, 1960.

Schifter, Elliott. “An Examination of Brooks Atkinson’s Reviews of the Pulitzer Prize Winning Plays, 1939-1950.” Diss. California State-Fullerton, 1977.

Taylor, Jo-Beth. “The New York Drama Critics’ Circle: Its Activities, Procedures, and Achievements.” Diss. East Texas State University, 1968.

Tompkins, Vincent Joseph Jr. “Twilight of Idols: American Social Criticism, 1918- 1930.” Diss. Harvard University, 1991.

Toten Beard, DeAnna M. “The New Art of the Theatre: the Aesthetic Discourse on Theatrical Modernism in the United States, 1911-1922 (W.P. Eaton, Clayton Hamilton, Kenneth Macgowan, Sheldon Cheney).” Diss. Indiana University, 2001.

Wallace, Gregory. “Sheldon Cheney and the Historiography of Modern Art in America.” Diss, Brown University, 1996.

349