Richard Pells, Author | Contemporary Historian

Social and cultural history from a War Baby perspective

  • HOME
  • AUTHOR
  • BOOKS
  • INTERVIEW
  • EVENTS
  • NEWS
  • BLOG
  • CONTACT ME

The Culture of Kansas City

May 8, 2014 by richardpells Leave a Comment

Kansas CityMost 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.

Filed Under: Author Richard Pells Blog Tagged With: 1940s, 1950s, African American, American Culture, Art, Charlie Parker, Country Club Plaza, Ernest Hemingway, J.C. Nichols, Jazz, Kansas City, Kansas City Philharmonic, Kansas City Star, Literature, MASH, McCabe and Mrs Miller, Mickey Mouse, Movies, Music, Nashville, Nelson Art Gallery, Paris, Robert Altman, Rutgers University, Seville, Spain, Thomas Hart Benton, Walt Disney

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Foll us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter Follow us on LinkedIn Foll us on Pinterest Follow us on YouTube Follow us on Goodreads Follow us on email

Richard Pells’ Books

War Babies: The Generation That Changed America

Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies, and the Globalization of American Culture

Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture Since World War II

The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s

Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years

From Our Blog

David Cutler For The Chronicle Review

The Decline of American Studies

This article previously posted on The Chronicle … [Read More...]

Dalton Trumbo Story

Trumbo is an upcoming American, biographical, … [Read More...]

American Sniper Movie

Why ‘Sniper’ Trumps ‘Selma’ as History and Drama

Also posted on Chronicle of Higher Education:  … [Read More...]

The War of The Worlds

Orson Welles, Radio, and The War of the Worlds

As also posted on Yale Books Unbound:  … [Read More...]

Loyalties By Carl Bernstein

Excerpt From War Babies: Carl Bernstein’s Memories of McCarthyism

For those war babies who were teenagers in the … [Read More...]

Popular Topics

1940s 1950s Al Pacino American Culture Army-McCarthy Hearings Art Garfunkel Baby Boomers Barney Frank Billie Jean King Bob Dylan Bob Woodward Carl Bernstein Cold War Dick Cheney Ernest Hemingway Faye Dunaway FBI Francis Ford Coppola Generation George Lucas Janis Joplin Jesse Jackson Joan Baez Joe Biden John Kerry John Lewis Joni Mitchell Journalism Judy Collins Kansas City Martin Scorsese Movies Muhammad Ali Music Nancy Pelosi Paul Simon Politics Post-War America Richard Pells Robert De Niro Simon & Garfunkel Tom Brokow War Babies World War II WW II

©Author Richard Pells 2014 ~ All Rights Reserved ~ Customization of Genesis Framework by Weborization