The Twilight of the American Enlightenment

by George Marsden

  Leading cultural figures joined in the outcry, charging that America was losing its moral character. A striking instance was the reaction of novelist John Steinbeck. After nine months of working on a new book at a secluded English cottage, Steinbeck had just returned to America in November 1959 when the Van Doren story was at its height. In disgust, he wrote to his friend Adlai Stevenson that, “if I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, and sick.” The Van Doren scandal only verified how far the national corruption might reach. “On all levels,” Steinbeck wrote, the society was “rigged” and riddled with “cynical immorality.” The letter was published, “inadvertently,” said Steinbeck, in the Long Island newspaper Newsday. It soon became fuel on the fires of the national conversation about what was going wrong with American civilization. Specifically, it triggered a symposium in The New Republic on the topic, entitled “Have We Gone Soft?” The all-male cast of commentators included such luminaries as Reinhold Niebuhr and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Their reflections appeared in February 1960, just a few months before Life was to launch its more positively framed forum, but with the same subtext, on “The National Purpose.”2

  One reason that a few rigged TV shows could set off such an outpouring of national anxiety was that many people worried that the scandal was just the tip of a media iceberg that might be numbing the nation’s collective moral sensibilities. If what passed for culture in America was increasingly to be dominated by TV, then what hope was there to cultivate the higher ideals necessary for the survival of Western civilization?

  To appreciate such concerns one only has to look up the TV schedules of the day. For instance, the 1959–1960 primetime weekly lineup on the three national networks included more than a dozen westerns (Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Have Gun Will Travel, Wyatt Earp, Tales of Wells Fargo, Wagon Train, Maverick, The Lawman, The Rifleman, Cheyenne, Wichita Town, Black Saddle, and Rawhide), all with predictable moralistic plots. Alternatives on a typical evening included an assortment of crime and mystery shows (also mindless, except for Alfred Hitchcock Presents), variety shows (hosted by Ed Sullivan, Danny Thomas, Red Skelton, Perry Como, and the like), quiz shows, and sitcoms such as Leave It to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, and Father Knows Best. In the earlier part of the decade, there had been a hope that television would be a means by which higher culture could be brought to the masses. Many had thought that the best of the theater could be adapted to the medium. By 1959–1960, all that was left of that ambitious idea were Armstrong Circle Theater and Playhouse 90, shown on Wednesday and Thursday nights, respectively. Serious theater had not proven sufficiently popular, and critics of television saw the surviving adaptations as mediocre debasements that were part of the problem, rather than the cure.3

  The best known of the critics of TV and the mass media generally was Dwight Macdonald. A WASP purebred (Exeter and Yale), Macdonald had become prominent among New York intellectuals. Like many of his generation, he had gone through a Marxist stage in the 1930s before becoming staunchly anti-Communist in reaction to Stalinism. In a much-cited 1953 essay, Macdonald argued that popular culture was the new opiate of the masses in a capitalist society inexorably driven by the profit motive. (In the Soviet Union, the effect of mass media was similar, but the mind control was cruder and more direct than it was in the West.) According to Macdonald, kitsch (from the German term for popular but inferior art) and high culture could not simply coexist. Rather, in a capitalistic society, mass culture inevitably had a parasitic relationship with high culture. Driven as it was by the market and the profit motive, mass culture would overwhelm good taste. There was a “Gresham’s Law in culture,” as in monetary circulation, dictating that “bad stuff drives out the good, since it is easily understood and enjoyed.”

  Mass culture was inevitably degrading, said Macdonald, because, unlike folk art, it did not arise from the people but was manufactured and distributed from the top down. Often it would appropriate some of the characteristics of high culture and produce a “tepid flaccid Middlebrow Culture that threatens to engulf everything in its spreading ooze.” It was also exceedingly democratic. Like nineteenth-century capitalism, “mass culture is a dynamic, revolutionary force, breaking down the old barriers of class, tradition, taste, and dissolving all cultural distinction.” The result was a “homogenized” culture where everything was mixed together indiscriminately. Life magazine, Macdonald said, offered the perfect illustration of the problem. (One of Macdonald’s first jobs had been working for fellow Yale alumnus Henry Luce.) Life could be found “on the mahogany library tables of the rich” and “the oilcloth-covered kitchen tables of the poor.” It had something for everyone. Its cover might announce, in the same size type, “A NEW FOREIGN POLICY, BY JOHN FOSTER DULLES,” and “KERIMA; HER MARATHON KISS IS A MOVIE SENSATION.” Or it might have “nine color pages of Renoirs plus a memoir by his son, followed by a full-page picture of a horse on roller skates.”

  The problem, however, was not just slick magazines, bad television, too many adults reading comic books, or anything else that could be easily corrected by raising cultural standards and supporting the arts. Instead, it was that the whole character of the human race was being altered by the revolutionary force of the masses. “The masses are in historical time,” Macdonald declared, “what a crowd is in space: a large quantity of people unable to express themselves as human beings” because they are “not related to each other at all, but only to something distant, abstract, nonhuman.” They were no longer really a community or a folk or a people in whom there could be a healthy combination of individualism and community, which is conducive to great art. Rather, “a mass society, like a crowd, is so undifferentiated and loosely structured that its atoms, in so far as human values go, tend to cohere only along the line of the least common denominator; its morality sinks to that of its most brutal and primitive members, its taste to that of the least sensitive and most ignorant.” Yet it was to that “collective monstrosity” of the masses that the scientific and artistic technicians of the culture were catering.4

  Not everyone agreed, of course, that the situation was so dire. David Manning White, an early student of pop culture, for instance, offered a sharp critique of the doomsayers. In the middlebrow literary magazine The Saturday Review, White pointed out that the critics of mass culture seemed to assume that without the products of the new technology the cultural tastes of the masses would be much higher. In fact, he observed, “the critics who develop such a frenzy over the stereotyped activity of the Lone Ranger as he shoots a couple of bad hombres on a Sunday afternoon” might consider that in the simpler nineteenth century, one of the most popular diversions in London had been bear-baiting. Although “there can be no defense . . . for certain aspects of our mass culture which are banal, dehumanizing and downright ugly,” those qualities could be found in the entertainments of any age. Television, White argued, offered some serious drama, while paperback books, another medium of mass culture, made inexpensive editions of classics available to wide audiences. More Americans attended classical music concerts in 1955 than attended major league baseball games. As for totalitarianism, Germans had more high culture than any nation in history when in 1932 they voted Hitler into power.5

  The most vocal critics of mass culture would have none of this balance-sheet tallying of gains and losses from the new media. In their view, a cultural revolution had already taken place. “In none of the archeological ages,” wrote Bernard Rosenberg, a New York intellectual associated with the magazine Dissent, “has human society been so revolutionary as in the present.” For a million years humans had been forced to struggle for subsistence. Now, suddenly, with new technology that was spreading around the world, “the curse of Adam is being lifted” and “manual labor is becoming obsolete.” At least the prospect was that masses of people were being freed from the “drudgery, monotony, inanition, and brutishness” of constant work for mere survival. “The precondit
ion for transfiguring Homo sapiens into a higher species begins to exist,” wrote Rosenberg. The tragedy was that “before man can transcend himself he is being dehumanized. . . . Freedom is placed before him and snatched away. The rich and varied life he might lead is standardized.” Growing “more alike than ever” bred anxiety, loneliness, and a sense of loss of meaning: “And even if the incubus of hydrogen war could be lifted, these specters would still hover over us.” Such a sense of emptiness could have disastrous political implications. “At its worst, mass culture threatens not merely to cretinize our taste, but to brutalize our sense while paving the way to totalitarianism,” Rosenberg said. American freedom itself might be at stake.6

  At an all-star conference on “Mass Culture and Mass Media,” held in the fall of 1959, the leading expert on totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, tended to side with such pessimists. One of the many impressive German Jewish émigrés who had become leaders among American intellectuals, Arendt was already famous for her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism. She soon would be writing on Adolf Eichmann, a functionary in the Holocaust, and “the banality of evil,” a phrase suggesting that degraded cultural sensibilities left people susceptible to totalitarian control. Although she was not as alarmist as Rosenberg was in seeing mass culture as the direct road to tyranny, she expressed concerns, like Macdonald’s, that modernity was turning culture (in the sense of the arts) into objects of consumption. That meant that higher culture was inevitably being debased as its purveyors tried to turn it into something that would be more entertaining and hence more widely consumed. The assumption behind her analysis was that societies needed intellectual, artistic, and literary leadership. She did point out that there had never been a golden age of high culture led by intellectuals, especially not in America. Nonetheless, she agreed that the current “malaise of the intellectual” sprang from the fact that intellectuals found themselves surrounded by educated people who were rewriting, digesting, condensing, or adapting high culture to make it more consumable by the masses “to persuade them that Hamlet can be as entertaining as My Fair Lady, and educational as well.” Consumerism had become a nearly all-controlling force in the modern era. Everything had come to be valued in terms of its function. What was being lost was the ability to love the world for its own sake, to value art simply for its beauty. “We can say without exaggeration,” Arendt wrote, “that a society obsessed with consumption cannot at the same time be cultured or produce a culture.”7

  Novelist James Baldwin, speaking at the same conference, was just as pessimistic but much less inclined to blame the failing of mass culture on the banality of its producers. Instead, he was alarmed at the “overwhelming torpor and bewilderment of the people” who consumed it. “I am less appalled by the fact that Gunsmoke is produced than I am by the fact that so many people want to see it,” Baldwin wrote. Both the producers of American culture and its consumers were “afflicted by the world’s highest standard of living and what is probably the world’s most bewilderingly empty way of life.” In that setting, the role of the arts had become largely to shield people from these realities, since that was what they wanted. So, for instance, two recent “superior” movies, The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Defiant Ones, could not “really be called serious.” Kwai—the heroic story of British prisoners of war sabotaging a Japanese bridge project—put the viewer at a safe remove from a “kind of madness . . . that is far more dangerous and widespread than the movie would have us believe.” And the suggestion of The Defiant Ones—about two escaped prisoners (played by Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis) chained together as they tried to elude their pursuers—that “negroes and whites can learn to love each other if they are only chained together long enough runs so madly counter to the facts that it must be dismissed as one of the latest and sickest of liberal fantasies.” Americans, said Baldwin, had expectations that they could somehow be lifted above “the same catastrophes, vices, joys, and follies, which have baffled and afflicted mankind for ages.” They did not want to admit that “the American way of life [had] failed—to make people happier or to make them better.” They persisted in believing that social ills were the result of a handful of aberrants or of “some miscalculation in the formula (which can be corrected).” So the people wanted a popular art that shielded them from the perennial truths about “sad human nature.”8

  The most impressive voice at the conference for a more moderate view was that of Edward Shils, a highly regarded sociologist at the University of Chicago. In response to the thoroughgoing pessimists, Shils made the case that new mass culture and mass media were not necessarily destructive either of high culture or of the quality of civilization. Shils agreed with other analysts that a whole new order of society had taken shape in the United States and other leading industrialized nations just since World War II. But, unlike many other observers, Shils believed that this unprecedented “mass society” had many virtues. Its distinctive feature was that the new technology allowed all people—despite their differences in ethnicity, class, region, or religion—to be incorporated into the central institutions of the society, since they were more immediately connected with the center than the masses had been in earlier large-scale societies. This new order tended to diminish the sacredness of authority and the power of tradition. At the same time, such a society fostered a greater degree of civility than existed in the past societies. This civility was built upon a moral recognition of commonalities that came from living in the same human community. Certainly there was a long way to go, said Shils: hierarchical features, racism, and other prejudices persisted. “Nonetheless,” he affirmed with a supreme confidence in the liberal hopes of the day, “the fact remains that modern mass society has reached out toward a moral consensus and a civil order congruous with the adult population.” Rather than modern culture undermining higher values, “the sacredness that every man possesses by virtue of his membership in society finds a more far-reaching affirmation than ever before.”

  Contrary to pessimists such as Macdonald, Rosenberg, Arendt, or Baldwin, Shils believed that “mediocre culture” had many merits. “It often has elements of genuine conviviality, not subtle or profound perhaps, but genuine in the sense of being spontaneous and honest. It is often very good fun. Moreover, it is often earnestly, even if simply, moral.” Even the vulgar and sometimes brutal lower mass culture—in sports, games, crude comedies, and popular songs and dances of the emerging youth culture—despite its impoverished symbolic content, was not all bad for introducing the masses into some sort of shared culture. Furthermore, although there may have been some decline in superior culture of late, there was no reason why superior culture could not flourish side by side with the inevitably larger mediocre culture and contribute to its improvement.

  What is wrong, said Shils, “is wrong with the intellectuals and their institutions” and had little to do with culture produced for the mass media. American intellectuals tended to disdain every other elite in America and to disparage politics in such a way as to follow either of two courses: to come up with frivolous and now embarrassing Marxist solutions, as they so often did in the 1930s, or to simply fail to contribute anything to ameliorating the relationships among the various levels of culture. The sense of alienation among intellectuals was nothing new, and it was hardly constructive. True, some had become popularizers who had sold their souls. But the solution was for the best intellectuals and artists to simply do their jobs well, producing works that were truly great. If they did this, there would be “nothing to fear from the movement of culture in mass society.”9

  From the perspective of half a century later, a striking feature of these exchanges is the assumption that intellectuals and artists should provide cultural leadership for the society as a whole. As one of the conveners of the 1959 conference put it, all sides “tend to agree . . . that the health of mass culture is dependent on the vitality of elite culture.”10 The same might have been said of almost any such discussions of the topic t
hroughout the decade. On the one hand, it might not seem surprising that a collection of academics, intellectuals, and writers would think that the future quality of civilization depended on people like themselves. But on the other hand, few such persons today would entertain similar illusions; they would simply assume that society was so fragmented that no one group, especially not a group of intellectual elites, could guide the whole.

  One assumption of the midcentury era was that a society normally should have an overall cohesion. It would be shaped by a prevailing “climate of opinion” that ideally would be shared to some degree at all levels of society. Similarly, people often talked of “the American character” as though it were more or less one thing. Another assumption was that highly cultured men (including a few women) ought to be in some way guiding the society by providing its highest intellectual and artistic expressions. Most intellectuals and literary people were alarmed that higher culture was being overwhelmed by technologically driven mass culture and populist and business-class anti-intellectualism. But as Edward Shils argued, that alarm could be seen as an expression of the insecurities of the intellectual class, and even those anxieties suggested that the ideal of intellectual leadership, however beleaguered, still had some life.

  One reason that the fulfillment of such aspirations appeared at least plausible in the relatively conservative 1950s was that the cutting-edge liberal intellectuals of that era typically viewed themselves as the true guardians of the Western heritage. That way of thinking is in marked contrast to the culture-wars model that emerged a generation later, in which leading intellectuals and academics often emphasized subversion of the inherited ideals of the “imperialist” West. It also stood in strong tension during the 1950s themselves with the avant garde visual artists of the day, who anticipated the fragmentation of the heritage. For the aspiring intellectual and literary leaders of that time period, the dangers seemed largely those that came from the barbarians from below and the economic, social, and political forces and ideologies that might exploit them. Both World War II and the Cold War were about saving whatever was moral and good about Western civilization from forces that might distort and obliterate that heritage. Those goods were expressed in the best and most humane ideals found in the great literature, philosophies, and even some religious classics of the heritage. That was the heart of the higher education that was to help rebuild civilization after the war. Few aspiring intellectual leaders questioned those humane ideals. The challenge was to sustain them in the United States, which was renowned for its anti-intellectualism.