American Culture

The Culture of Kansas City

May 8, 2014 by richardpells Leave a Comment

Most people who’ve never been there think of Kansas City as an overgrown cow-town. Yet when I was growing up in Kansas City in the 1940s and 1950s, the city had a reputation as one of the centers of modern American culture—especially in literature, art, music, and movies.

In 1959, when I was a freshman at Rutgers University, I was supposed to write a term paper for an English class. My father, a violinist with the Kansas City Philharmonic, arranged for me to meet with the conductor of the Philharmonic over Christmas vacation so that he could tell me about what the culture of the city was really like. He spent three hours with me on a Saturday afternoon, and that was my introduction to the surprising cultural history of the city in which I was born and raised.

What were the contributions that Kansas City made to American culture in the 20th century? None was more important or influential than the impact the city had on Ernest Hemingway. For six months, from October 1917 to April 1918, Hemingway worked as a reporter for the Kansas City Star. For all the mythology of what Hemingway absorbed from his fellow-expatriates in the 1920s in Paris, it was at the Star that Hemingway learned how to write—particularly the unadorned prose, bereft of adjectives and adverbs, that became his trademark in his novels and short stories, and shaped the prose of his successors throughout the rest of the century.

At the beginning of the century a real estate developer named J.C. Nichols visited Seville, Spain. He was so impressed with the architecture of Seville that he reproduced it in what he called the Country Club Plaza, which opened in 1922, and was the first outdoor shopping mall in the United States. Close to the Plaza, the Nelson Art Galley opened in 1933, and became one of the most important museums for Chinese art in America. At the same time in the 1930s, Thomas Hart Benton made his home in Kansas City where his rural esthetic, his portraits of farm dwellers and Depression-scarred city folk, blossomed.

In addition, ever since African American jazz musicians began to move north from New Orleans in 1918, Kansas City developed into a home of jazz, rivaling Chicago and New York. Indeed, no jazz saxophonist had more of a stimulus on what became known as “modern” jazz than Charlie Parker, who was born in Kansas City in 1920 and developed his musical techniques with jazz bands in the city until he moved to New York in 1939.

But perhaps it was at the movies that Kansas City had its greatest effect. Walt Disney’s family moved to Kansas City in 1911, and he remained in the city until 1928 when he departed for Hollywood. Before Disney left, however, he invented his greatest creation—Mickey Mouse, which launched Disney’s career as one of the most imaginative animators in film history. Meanwhile, Robert Altman was born in Kansas City in 1925, and grew up there before migrating to Hollywood in 1946. Altman started his film career as a television director, but soon graduated to the movies. In the 1970s, he made three of the most formidable films of the decade—MASH, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and Nashville.

Like most northern and midwestern cities in the late 20th century, the demography of Kansas City changed as white people moved to the suburbs in Kansas and the city’s population became largely African American. Still, when I attended the 50th reunion of my high school class in 2009, we all remembered what the city had given us as grateful recipients of its cultural heritage.

The Generation That Shaped America Over The Past 50 Years: War Babies

April 22, 2014 by richardpells Leave a Comment

In 2009, I attended the 50th reunion of my high school class in Kansas City, Missouri, where I grew up. All of my classmates had been born in 1940 or 1941. And they all contributed brief biographies of their lives since graduation. Most of them had become lawyers, doctors, teachers, or nurses. While none of them were famous, they had led productive lives.

At the time I was writing a book about the impact of foreign cultures on the United States, called Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies, and the Globalization of American Culture—a book that was published in 2011. Yet I was also beginning to think about my generation, the people who had been born during World War II, from 1939 to 1945—people I began to think of as “war babies.” No one had ever written about us as a distinctive generation with special contributions to make to American culture and politics. People constantly referred to the “greatest generation” of the 1930s and postwar years, a term coined by Tom Brokaw who was in fact a war baby, born in 1940. Plenty of books and articles had been written about Baby Boomers, but we were invisible in American history.

Except that we weren’t.

Once I began to do some research into my generation, I was astonished to discover how many major figures born during World War II became leaders in movies, music, journalism, and politics. In film, for example, the war babies included directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and George Lucas; and actors like Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Faye Dunaway, as well as a host of other actors who helped shaped movies from the 1970s to the present. Similarly, almost all the music we associate with the 1960s was written and/or performed not by Baby Boomers but by war babies: Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, Janis Joplin. In journalism, the war babies included the only two journalists in American history—Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—who helped bring down a president. War baby politicians include John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi (the first woman Speaker of the House), Barney Frank, Joe Biden, and Dick Cheney. And among social activists on the issues of race and gender equality, the war babies numbered Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, Muhammad Ali, and Billie Jean King.

So I decided to write about this generation and their accomplishments. The result is a book, soon to be published, called War Babies: The Generation That Changed America. I think anyone who buys and reads the book will find it a revelation, changing their views about who was important in transforming American life over the past 50 years.