Inventing America, again

ABSTRACT

In US intellectual and academic life, the 1940s and 1950s stand out as a period abounding with attempts to assay the characteristic and distinctive forms of ‘American culture’ and ‘American society,’ from Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma and the oft-noted ‘Tocqueville revival’ to works by Harold Laski, Max Lerner, David Riesman, C. L. R. James, the ‘consensus historians,’ and the early writers in the field of American Studies. Viewed as the culmination of a half-century span (roughly 1900–1950) of cultural nation-building, this rush of ‘American’ definitions at mid-century was shot through with politics – but in complex ways that are not adequately captured by the familiar recourse to Cold War anticommunism as the presumed ideological bedrock of the time. By treating this cultural nationalism as the outcome of an uneven and combined intellectual-historical process, we see how elusive (and illusory) the enterprise of designating ‘American’ traits actually was.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. ‘Our Country and Our Culture, II’, Partisan Review, 19 (1952), p. 426.

2. S. Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (New York: Fawcett, 1965), p. 557.

3. Mon Oncle d’Amerique, directed by Alain Resnais (New York: New Yorker Video, 2000), DVD.

4. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941; New York: Barnes & Noble, 2009), p. xii.

5. Matthiessen, ibid., p. xii-xiii.

6. Matthiessen, ibid., xv, xix, pp. 685–717.

7. Matthiessen, ibid., p. 713.

8. Matthiessen, ibid., p. xxi.

9. Matthiessen, ibid., pp. 81, 181, 189, 191, 134, 144.

10. H. N. Smith, ‘The Salzburg Seminar’, American Quarterly, 1 (1949), pp. 30–37.

11. F.O. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 1.

12. Quoted in John Rackliffe, ‘Notes for a Character Study’, Monthly Review, 2 (1950), pp. 259–260.

13. For a related critique of historicism, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

14. The dismissal with American Studies of holistic vision of culture was already evident in the 1980s. An attempt to resist that trend and reanimate holistic analyses is H. Varenne (Ed), Symbolizing America (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 1986).

15. W. Wall, Inventing the ‘American Way’: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

16. J. Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

17. H. D. Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1914).

18. M. Green, New York 1913: The Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant (New York: Scribner, 1988); V. W. Brooks, America’s Coming-of-Age (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1915); C. N. Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); D. H. Borus, Twentieth-Century Multiplicity: American Thought and Culture, 1900–1920 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).

19. J. T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); G. Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994); N. Lichtenstein, A Contest of Ideas: Capital, Politics, and Labor (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013).

20. P. V. Murphy, The New Era: American Thought and Culture in the 1920s (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012); K. M. Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); D. A. Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

21. On the Melville revival, see F. G. Robinson, Love’s Story Told: A Life of Henry A. Murray (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). On the study of American literature, L. Maddox, Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline (Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 177, n. 15.

22. J. B. Hubbell, ‘Foreword’, American Literature, 1 (1929), p. 2.

23. B. Blower, Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars (Oxford: New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

24. H. Stearns, America; a Re-Appraisal (New York: Hillman-Curl, 1937).

25. P. Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1956); G. Wise, ‘“Paradigm Dramas” in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement’, in Maddox, Locating American Studies, op. cit., Ref. 21, pp. 174–176.

26. A. Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature, 3rd Harvest ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1995).

27. Matthiessen, From the Heart of Europe, op. cit., Ref. 11, p. 31; R. M. Cook, Alfred Kazin: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 120–123.

28. Miller, quoted by Wise, in Maddox, Locating American Studies, op. cit., Ref. 21, pp. 175–176 (emphasis added).

29. R. Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958); H. Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 86–98.

30. Brick, Transcending Capitalism, ibid., pp. 121–151.

31. Brick, ibid., pp. 98–120; H. Brick, ‘Discipline, Craft and Culture: The Politics of Holistic Thought’, Michigan Quarterly Review, 31 (1992), pp. 128–142.

32. E. R. May and National Security Council (U.S.), American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68 (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1993), p. 54.

33. G. D. Sumner, Dwight MacDonald and the Politics Circle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); H. Brick and C. Phelps, Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 41–48.

34. On the reinvention of Partisan Review after 1936 and its critique of Popular Front Americanism, see A. M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s, Thirtieth Anniversary Edition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), pp. 80–97. For a favourable view from the left of Popular Front Americanism, see M. Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1996), especially pp. 130–135, and M. Denning, ‘“The Special American Conditions”: Marxism and American Studies,’ American Quarterly, 38:3 (1986): 356–380. Wald points out the close connection between Partisan Review’s critiques of Popular Front Americanism and of ‘mass culture’; the latter animus clearly continued in the PR milieu long after the demise of the Communists’ Popular Front period of the 1930s. See The New York Intellectuals, p. 223.

35. I. Howe, ‘The Sentimental Fellow-Traveling of F. O. Matthiessen’, Partisan Review, 15 (1948), pp. 1125–1129.

36. I. Howe, in ‘Our Country and Our Culture,’ Partisan Review 19 (1952), pp. 575–581.

37. M. Newton, The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi: a History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2010), p. 102.

38. W. Goodman, The Committee; the Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1968), p. 183.

39. Schultz, Tri-Faith America, op cit., Ref. 20.

40. D. Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950); Brick, Transcending Capitalism, op. cit., Ref. 29, pp.172–180.

41. D. J. Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953); T. M. Roberts, Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009).

42. H. Brick, ‘The Disenchantment of America: Radical Echoes in 1950s Political Criticism’, in Kathleen G. Donohue (Ed), Liberty and Justice for All?: Rethinking Politics in Cold War America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012).

43. M. B. Young, ‘The Age of Global Power’, in Thomas Bender (Ed) Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), p. 288.

44. L. Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America; an Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955); R. Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage Books, 1955); L. Marx, The Machine in the Garden; Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

45. M. Lerner, America as a Civilization; Life and Thought in the United States Today (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957); C. L. R. James, American Civilization, (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993).

46. ‘Our Country and Our Culture’, Partisan Review, 19 (1942), pp. 282–326, 420–450, 562–597.

47. ‘Our Country and Our Culture, II’, Partisan Review, 19 (1952), p. 438.

48. ‘Our Country and Our Culture’, Partisan Review, 19 (1952), pp. 321–322.

49. ‘Our Country and Our Culture, III’, Partisan Review, 19 (1952), p. 580.

50. ‘Our Country and Our Culture, I’, op. cit., p. 100.

51. ‘Our Country and Our Culture, II’, op. cit., pp. 446–450.

52. ‘Our Country and Our Culture, III’, op. cit., pp. 562–565, 577.

53. ‘Our Country and Our Culture, III’, ibid., pp. 307–309; ‘Our Country and Our Culture, II’, op. cit., pp. 440–441.

54. D. Reid, The Brazen Age: New York City and the American Empire: Politics, Art, and Bohemia (New York: Pantheon Books, 2016), p. 44.

55. Freud, quoted in G. Izenberg, Identity: The Necessity of a Modern Idea (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), p. 14.

56. J. Baldwin, ‘Many Thousands Gone’, Partisan Review 18 (1951), reprinted in Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), p. 24.

57. Baldwin, ibid., pp. 35, 38, 25.

58. Baldwin, ‘Notes of a Native Son’, Harper’s, November 1955, reprinted in Baldwin, ibid., p. 106.

59. Baldwin, ibid., p. 39.

60. Baldwin, ibid., p. 36.

61. Baldwin, ibid., pp. 113–114.

62. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, op. cit., Ref. 4, pp. 372, 712, 559, 563–564, 378, emphasis added.

63. J. Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Dell, 1963), p. 136.

64. A. Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 10.

65. Baldwin, Fire Next Time, op cit., Ref. 63, p. 141, emphasis added.