03-05-2017, 03:51 AM
Let's remember that American culture around 1940 was omnibus. Mass culture, as at the movie theater, had to appeal for a whole typical family -- children old enough to just get it, kids attending high school (and probably the first in the family to do so, as the 1930s were the time in which completing high school became the norm instead of the exception), and adults born as late as the mid-1910s and as early as the 1860s. Shock was not an option in mass culture because the sensibilities of elders were not amenable to such. (Contrast today's 60-something adults to those of 1940; today's 60-something adult, unless born into an ultra-religious household and never got out of the culture, has seen everything). So, yes, I have seen A Clockwork Orange and recognize it as a cinematic masterpiece. I wouldn't let pre-teen kids watch it.
But you must remember that the 1930s did not have the nuclear family as the norm. Times were hard enough that kids were not striking off on their own until they had well-paying jobs by the standard of the time. Elderly parents often retired to the home of a younger adult, typically that of a son or a daughter because the habit of sending the slightly-batty old people to the nursing home had not begun. Any cultural expression would be for all to experience, and if it offended a part of the family it would not be played on the single radio or phonograph (radios and phonographs were still expensive objects, so the typical household had but one).
Big Band music generally had to fit all sensibilities. As with the music of Haydn and Mozart in their heydays it worked on several levels of interest at once (catchy tunes, formality to fit the intellectual tastes of the time among the sophisticates, but none of the vulgarity or the over-wrought ruminative qualities that intellectuals love but non-intellectuals find off-putting). Today everyone has his own device capable of playing music, offering games, and reading material -- basically a tablet -- if under 70. It may also function as a digital camera, cell phone, or movie player as well. Just because the devices are identical does not mean that everyone is experiencing the same thing. But that trend began with radios and phonographs which got much less expensive in the 1950s, in which time distinct audiences for mass culture emerged. In recent times televisions and reader devices have become so inexpensive that everyone can have one.
So how do we end up with an omnibus culture? One way is through an authoritarian regime that crushes all individual expression and experience, inflicting propaganda as the sole means of getting entertainment. Nazi Germany (official racist nationalism in culture), Stalin's Soviet Union (Marxism-Leninism with a personality cult), and beginning in 1940 Churchill's Britain (a very homogeneous society then and in survival mode) were even more omnibus than FDR's America. The United States had ethnic and religious diversity and recognized it as useful, but after the Pearl Harbor attack any expression of cultural exoticism got subordinated to the message "We're all in this together".
Without question, President Trump is much more authoritarian than any prior US President in peacetime. Whether he can reshape American culture to his hierarchical dream is still much in doubt. The personality cult is forming, but many of us reject it with mockery. Can America unite around a low-brow populism that somehow unites Nashville and Greenwich Village? I doubt it. In theory an authoritarian America could suppress Nashville or Greenwich Village, but it could never merge them.
But you must remember that the 1930s did not have the nuclear family as the norm. Times were hard enough that kids were not striking off on their own until they had well-paying jobs by the standard of the time. Elderly parents often retired to the home of a younger adult, typically that of a son or a daughter because the habit of sending the slightly-batty old people to the nursing home had not begun. Any cultural expression would be for all to experience, and if it offended a part of the family it would not be played on the single radio or phonograph (radios and phonographs were still expensive objects, so the typical household had but one).
Big Band music generally had to fit all sensibilities. As with the music of Haydn and Mozart in their heydays it worked on several levels of interest at once (catchy tunes, formality to fit the intellectual tastes of the time among the sophisticates, but none of the vulgarity or the over-wrought ruminative qualities that intellectuals love but non-intellectuals find off-putting). Today everyone has his own device capable of playing music, offering games, and reading material -- basically a tablet -- if under 70. It may also function as a digital camera, cell phone, or movie player as well. Just because the devices are identical does not mean that everyone is experiencing the same thing. But that trend began with radios and phonographs which got much less expensive in the 1950s, in which time distinct audiences for mass culture emerged. In recent times televisions and reader devices have become so inexpensive that everyone can have one.
So how do we end up with an omnibus culture? One way is through an authoritarian regime that crushes all individual expression and experience, inflicting propaganda as the sole means of getting entertainment. Nazi Germany (official racist nationalism in culture), Stalin's Soviet Union (Marxism-Leninism with a personality cult), and beginning in 1940 Churchill's Britain (a very homogeneous society then and in survival mode) were even more omnibus than FDR's America. The United States had ethnic and religious diversity and recognized it as useful, but after the Pearl Harbor attack any expression of cultural exoticism got subordinated to the message "We're all in this together".
Without question, President Trump is much more authoritarian than any prior US President in peacetime. Whether he can reshape American culture to his hierarchical dream is still much in doubt. The personality cult is forming, but many of us reject it with mockery. Can America unite around a low-brow populism that somehow unites Nashville and Greenwich Village? I doubt it. In theory an authoritarian America could suppress Nashville or Greenwich Village, but it could never merge them.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.