World War II

The Decline of American Studies

June 13, 2016 by richardpells Leave a Comment

This article previously posted on The Chronicle Review

From the 1940s through the 1960s, the most innovative movement in the American and international academic world was American studies. Now the last surviving giant of that movement is gone. Daniel Aaron, author of Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism and founder of the Library of America series dedicated to preserving and publicizing the work of America’s major writers, died on April 30, at the age of 103.

Aaron was part of an academic and intellectual generation in the United States — including Perry Miller, F.O. Matthiessen, Alfred Kazin, Henry Nash Smith, Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, Louis Hartz, John William Ward, Leo Marx, and Christopher Lasch — that revolutionized our perspectives on American culture. Their books reinterpreted the American past not only for professors and students but also for general readers.

Most American-Studies Programs Today Have Curricula Indistinguishable From the Courses and Syllabi in History or English Departments

The titles of their books alone give a sense of their ambition to approach the American experience from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining history, literature, political science, social psychology, art, and music. These were the books that anyone in the postwar years had to read if they wished to understand what was distinctive about America: Miller’s two-volume The New England Mind, Matthiessen’s American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, Kazin’s On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature, Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America, Boorstin’s three-volume The Americans and The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, Ward’s Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age, Marx’s The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, and Lasch’s The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type.

Most of the inventors of the American-studies movement were born during the second decade of the 20th century. Many were Jewish (Aaron, Kazin, Hofstadter, Hartz, Boorstin, Marx) and were the children or grandchildren of immigrants from Eastern Europe. All of them reached early adulthood during the Great Depression and World War II. Some were temporarily attracted to the Depression-era Marxism of the American Socialist or Communist Parties. By the end of World War II, they remained on the left, though mostly as liberal Democrats.

Their careers and their work, therefore, were indelibly shaped by America’s struggle with the totalitarian mystique. For them the dominant political figures of their age were Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Franklin Roosevelt. As a consequence, many served during the war, either in combat or as participants in the Office of Strategic Services (precursor of the CIA) or the Office of War Information (precursor of the Fulbright program and the United States Information Agency). In these capacities, both during World War II and the Cold War, their mission was to explain America to the world, a task they undertook in their books and as visiting professors in European, Latin American, and Asian universities.

At the first Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, in 1947, designed to familiarize European students with America’s history, two of the featured speakers were Matthiessen and Kazin. So even as the originators of American studies believed in the uniqueness of America, they were also internationalists; their vision and their audiences were both nationalist and global.

These founders of the American-studies movement dominated academic life in the United States until the late 1960s. Then, as with the country itself, their sense of common purpose disintegrated. As did their audience. In the context of the Vietnam War, racial upheavals, and new waves of immigrants arriving from Latin America and Asia, the phrases the American-studies practitioners loved to invoke — the American mind, the American character, the American experience — had ceased to resonate. There no longer seemed to be a shared, agreed-upon definition of what was “American,” either in the past or the present.

In 1971, Daniel Aaron left Smith College, where he had taught for 30 years, to assume the directorship of the American-studies program at Harvard. Aaron later told me that when he arrived at Harvard, he was informed by Bernard Bailyn (the great Colonial historian and once a student of Perry Miller’s) that whatever its former glories, the American-studies movement was dead, and that Aaron’s job was to give the entire enterprise an honorable burial.

Aaron was bemused. But Bailyn’s epitaph for American studies, or at least for the American-studies movement in its original and classic phase, was uncomfortably acute. By the 1970s and 1980s, the assumptions (often unacknowledged) of the creators of American studies were under attack. A new generation of academics in history and English departments — many of whom had been undergraduate and graduate students during the turmoil of the 1960s — regarded their American-studies elders as too conservative, methodologically and ideologically.

Their criticisms of American studies were often accurate. The creators of the movement were primarily interested in the marquee artists and intellectuals of the 19th and early 20th centuries; they wanted to demonstrate, especially to their audiences overseas, that America had a culture worth admiring. So their heroes were Emerson, Melville, Whitman, Twain, Henry Adams, Faulkner, and Hemingway. Missing from this exalted roster were women, African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians. Missing also was much awareness of the impact of modern mass culture in the 20th century — especially the effects on “ordinary” Americans of radio, television, and the movies.

Equally unnerving for younger scholars was the post-World War II notion that American history and culture were unique, or even worse, “exceptional.” The rejection of American exceptionalism coincided with the shift in the academic world from postwar liberalism to a post-1960s affection for radical, quasi-Marxist ideas. Above all, the younger generation of scholars dismissed the original American-studies conception of culture as incurably “elitist” — a term of opprobrium among professors on the political left.

It is, of course, hardly news that a younger generation might revolt against the assumptions of its elders. But this particular revolt effectively destroyed American studies as an intellectual and cultural force in the nation’s life.

Most American-studies programs today have curricula indistinguishable from the courses and syllabi in history or English departments. One finds a preoccupation with literary theory and cultural studies rather than with writers, with social history rather than with art or music. It is hard to imagine a professor or a graduate student in American studies today undertaking a book or a dissertation about, say, John Updike or Philip Roth, or about George Gershwin or Cole Porter, or about Edward Hopper or Jackson Pollock. Nor would it be customary — in fact obligatory — for professors in American studies to have had much experience abroad, or much desire to write a book comparing America’s political rhetoric with that of Britain or France or Germany, as Louis Hartz did in The Liberal Tradition in America.

We do not have in American studies today writers like Kazin or Aaron, Hofstadter or Boorstin, Matthiessen or Lasch, who tried to influence an audience that existed beyond the narcissistic confines of the academic world.

What, one wonders, is the special mission of American studies in our time? Where are the American-studies scholars eager to write for general readers, hoping to influence the culture and politics of the United States? Why are we content to speak only to our peers, those 20 other specialists on our turf, in exchange for tenure and professorial status, if not relevance in the outside world?

It was this narrowness, more than any other academic trait, that the founders of the American-studies movement tried to transcend. They dominated academic life for 30 years, and they have been neither superseded nor replaced.

Daniel Aaron’s death is a reminder of what we have all lost in the nation’s culture. So perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad idea if at least some of us reread Writers on the Left, as well as On Native Grounds, The Age of Reform, or The Machine in the Garden — not just as mementos of a golden age, but as models to which academics could still aspire.

Richard Pells is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent books are War Babies: The Generation That Changed America (Cultural History Press, 2014) and Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies, and the Globalization of American Culture (Yale University Press, 2011).

Orson Welles, Radio, and The War of the Worlds

October 28, 2014 by richardpells Leave a Comment

As also posted on Yale Books Unbound: http://blog.yupnet.org/2014/10/30/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds

October 30, 1938. The night before Halloween in America. After dinner, at 8:00 in the evening, Eastern Standard Time, families throughout the country gathered in their living rooms, as they usually did, to listen to the radio. At that hour, the highest-rated show on the radio was NBC’s Chase and Sanborn Hour, starring Edgar Bergen and his two celebrated puppets, Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd. (American audiences did not seem bemused by the idea of a ventriloquist performing on the radio despite their inability to see whether or not his lips moved.)

When a musical interlude interrupted the comic dialogue between Bergen and Charlie, many listeners apparently switched the radio dial to CBS. Instantly, they found themselves in the midst of hysterical news bulletins describing a battalion of Martians landing in New Jersey. Given that Americans were now accustomed to, if no less unsettled by, constant news reports on the radio of crises in Europe and warfare in China, the Martian invasion sounded credible. And some in the audience, especially in New Jersey and New York, panicked.

What the audience really heard was a dramatization by The Mercury Theater on the Air of H.G. Welles’s 1897 novel, The War of the Worlds. The program was conceived, directed, and narrated by a 23-year-old former magician and current theater actor, Orson Welles. Already labeled a “boy genius” for his modernist versions of Shakespearean plays in New York, featured on the cover of Time magazine and profiled in the New Yorker, Welles created in his rendition of The War of the Worlds what became the most legendary radio broadcast in the history of the medium. Three years later, in 1941, Welles directed, co-wrote, and starred in another illustrious venture, this time in Hollywood: Citizen Kane, the most influential movie in the history of the American cinema.

At the end of his own movie, Radio Days (1987), Woody Allen remarks mournfully: “I’ve never forgotten. . . any of the voices we would hear on the radio. Though the truth is, with the passing of each [year], those voices do seem to grow dimmer and dimmer.” The golden age of network radio was brief. It lasted for only twenty-five years, from the mid-1920s when the NBC and CBS networks were launched, to the end of the 1940s when television supplanted radio as the principal form of household entertainment.

But for those Americans who grew up during the Depression or World War II, network radio was indispensable. NBC and CBS offered an array of programs: comedies, adventure series, mysteries, dramas, classical music, jazz, and news. The stars on radio, besides Edgar Bergen, included Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Arturo Toscanini, Benny Goodman, and Edward R. Murrow, among many others. Only the movies were more popular, and more important, during these years. Orson Welles became a master of both mediums.

Like many of his predecessors in America’s culture—Mark Twain, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway—Welles was an entertainer as well as an artist. He did not share the elitist preconceptions of his European counterparts. Instead he understood that art in America had to attract and enthrall audiences before they could be enlightened or encouraged to see the world differently. He was steeped in the European traditions of literature and painting, but he used these to become a virtuoso of American mass culture.

Welles had one other attribute that distinguished him from his American and European forbears: his magisterial voice. Whether on stage, on the radio, or in the movies, Welles realized that his voice could beguile an audience—as it did in his narration of The War of the Worlds, in his portrait of both the charismatic young Charles Foster Kane and in Kane’s King Lear-like old age, and in his captivating portrait of the amoral Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949). In fact, Welles had all the wittiest dialogue, some of which he wrote himself, in The Third Man, including the most memorable lines in the film: “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love—they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”

At that moment in the movie, as in Citizen Kane and The War of the Worlds, Welles was the enchanting magician and raconteur, the global celebrity who could terrify and mesmerize audiences, while also making them ultimately laugh at their naïveté. He was a wizard at intuiting what his audiences feared and needed.

Since 1938, we have confronted a plethora of evil Martians. Nazis, Communists, sandal-clad revolutionaries, terrorists. From Pearl Harbor to the erection of the Berlin Wall to the jungles of Vietnam to the destruction of the World Trade Center, we have been engaged in a perpetual war of the worlds. So, in America, as Orson Welles recognized, it is always Halloween.

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.