Relocating the American Dream The America of the 1960s as Portrayed by the New Journalists Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe Master's Thesis Department of English University of Helsinki Supervisor: Bo Pettersson Date: 25.3.2009 Meri Laitinen 1. INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................3 1.1 Aims and methods ........................................................................................................................................... 5 1.2 Defining new journalism............................................................................................................................... 11 1.2.1 Norman Mailer ........................................................................................................................................ 16 1.2.2 Hunter S. Thompson................................................................................................................................17 1.2.3 Tom Wolfe............................................................................................................................................... 18 1.3 Defining the American Dream...................................................................................................................... 19 1.3.1 Origins of the term................................................................................................................................... 19 1.3.2 The American Dream in popular culture ................................................................................................. 23 2. LIFE: CRITICISM OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY .......................................................25 2.1 Ideology, politics and religion....................................................................................................................... 25 2.1.1 Issues of authority, hierarchy, and control............................................................................................... 26 2.1.2 Encounters with God ............................................................................................................................... 34 2.2 Capitalism and the American way of life .................................................................................................... 39 2.2.1 Corporate capitalism as the new creed..................................................................................................... 40 2.2.2 The squares and the straights: The American middle class .................................................................... 43 2.2.3 The American lifestyle ............................................................................................................................ 51 2.3 The media....................................................................................................................................................... 59 2.3.1 The mass media as a misrepresenting mirror........................................................................................... 60 2.3.2 Self-reflections of a journalist.................................................................................................................. 63 3. LIBERTY: CRITICISM OF WAR ...................................................................................67 3.1 The Dream in crisis: The Vietnam War ...................................................................................................... 68 3.2 Patriotic sentiments....................................................................................................................................... 77 4. THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS: IN SEARCH OF THE DREAM .................................80 4.1 The vision of a better America ..................................................................................................................... 80 4.2 The dark side of the Dream .......................................................................................................................... 91 5. CONCLUSIONS ..........................................................................................................102 BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................................................................................................106 1. Introduction Harmony and understanding/ Sympathy and trust abounding No more falsehoods or derisions/ Golden living dreams of visions Mystic crystal revelation/ And the mind's true liberation (From the song Aquarius by The 5th Dimension) Free love, psychedelic drugs, progressive rock... The sixties were a time of political and cultural turmoil in the United States: the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the space race, the civil rights movement, the emergence of the hippies, the sexual revolution, the Vietnam War protests, and the formation of the New Left all happened in that eventful decade. The American Dream of the 1950s—home ownership, nuclear families, television sets, laundry machines, and cars—was challenged by a potent counterculture. In the words of John Hollowell, author of Fact and Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel: The dominant mood of America in the 1960's was apocalyptic. Perpetual crisis seemed in many ways the rule. Throughout the decade the events reported daily by newspapers and magazines documented the sweeping changes in every sector of our national life and often strained our imaginations to the point of disbelief. Increasingly, everyday "reality" became more fantastic than the fictional visions of even our best novelists. (3) As Hollowell states, the phenomena of that era seemed nothing short of incredible to the average American reader. This inspired something interesting to take place in the literary field as well: alongside traditional journalism and fiction began to appear articles and reportages that seemed to be a strange mixture of both. Current events and changes in the society, such as protests, the flocking of hippies in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, and the surfacing of a psychedelic drug scene, were recorded in a way that borrowed stylistic and structural features from fiction, but documented real events 3 and characters: the sixties witnessed the birth of fictionalized accounts of nonfictional subject matter. Hollowell describes the new form of writing in terms of form and the role of the author. Contrary to traditional journalism, its focus was not on the neutrality or objectivity of reporting, but the introspections and observations of the writer: One significant direction the new writing took was toward documentary forms, eyewitness reports, and personal and confessional narratives. The work of certain novelists, as well as that of certain journalists, reflects an unusual degree of self- consciousness about the writer's role in society, and the unique character of American life. (5) These nonfiction narratives—either parts of them, or in full—were often initially published in magazines, such as The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The World Journal Tribune, Esquire Magazine, and Rolling Stone, and later in book form. The new style of writing inspired many attempts to classify it: creative nonfiction, the nonfiction novel, literary journalism, gonzo journalism, and (the) New Journalism were some of the labels put on the movement. In this paper, I will be using the term new journalism, because it best captures the mode of the movement: at the time, combining journalist writing with conventions of literary fiction was exceptional and, indeed, new. Furthermore, the term was established by a new journalist shortly after the movement started to gain interest and it is used more frequently to refer to the genre than the other ones mentioned above. In the frontline of the new journalists were three interesting writers: Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe. All of them wrote several works in the 1960s and early 1970s that can be regarded as new journalism. For the purpose of my study, I have chosen one work from each author: The Armies of the Night (1968) by Mailer, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971) by Thompson, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1967) by 4 Wolfe. The works vary a bit in form, but clearly utilize new journalist techniques and portray different aspects of the sixties counterculture, so I hold them as fitting examples of the genre. In my thesis, I discuss how Mailer, Thompson, and Wolfe portray the American society of the 1960s, and how this view corresponds to the notion of the American Dream. 1.1 Aims and methods Many would agree that the sixties, with its countercultural movements and fresh ideas, was a fascinating decade. But why dig deeper into new journalism, the American Dream, and the American society of the sixties? The hippies have trimmed their beards, the radicals gotten real jobs, and the last traces of flower power withered away long ago— so why bother? Well, this is why: the sixties left a profound imprint on American culture. It was a time when people thought they could really change the world into a better place through political activism, spiritual experimenting, and artistic expression. They hoped and demanded that the abstraction of the American Dream would become reality; a reality that included those previously left out, such as minority groups and the poor, and a reality where there was space for solidarity and humanity. Furthermore, there was also an alternative American Dream for