The cambridge companion to modern american culture 4516

t h e c a m b ri d ge co m p a n i o n t o
m o d e rn a m e r i c a n c u l t u r e
The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Culture offers a comprehensive,
authoritative, and accessible overview of the cultural themes and intellectual
issues that drive the dominant culture of the twentieth century. This companion
explores the social, political, and economic forces that have made America
what it is today. It shows how these contexts impact upon twentieth-century
American literature, cinema, and art. An international team of contributors
examines the special contribution of African Americans and of immigrant
communities to the variety and vibrancy of modern America. The essays
range from art to politics, popular culture to sport, immigration and race to
religion and war. Varied, extensive and challenging, this Companion is essential
reading for students and teachers of American studies around the world. It is the
most accessible and useful introduction available to a exciting range of topics in
modern American culture.
c h r i s t o p h e r b i g s b y is Professor of American Studies at the University of
East Anglia. He has published some thirty books on British and American
literature and is also a novelist and broadcaster.



THE CAMBRIDGE
COMPANION TO

MODERN
AMERICAN CULTURE
EDITED BY

CHRISTOPHER BIGSBY

cambridge university press
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Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
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© Cambridge University Press 2006
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the
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may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2006
Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Bigsby, C. W. E.
The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Culture / Christopher Bigsby.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-521-84132-0
isbn-10: 0-521-84132-1
isbn-13: 978-0-521-60109-2 (pbk.)
isbn-10: 0-521-60109-60 (pbk.)
1. United States – Civilization – 20th century. 2. United
States – Intellectual life – 20th century. 3. United States – Social
conditions – 20th century. 4. Popular culture – United States – History – 20th
century. 5. United States – Study and teaching. I. Title.
e169.1.b54 2006

973.9 – dc22
2006010014

isbn-13 978-0-521-84132-0 hardback
isbn-10 0-521-84132-1 hardback
isbn-13 978-0-521-60109-2 paperback
isbn-10 0-521-60109-6 paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for
external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee
that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.


CONTENTS

Notes on contributors
Chronology

page viii
x

1 Introduction: What, then, is the American?

1

CHRISTOPHER BIGSBY

2 The American century

33

GODFREY HODGSON

3 The regions and regionalism

53

RICHARD H. KING

4 Immigration to the United States in the twentieth century

73

ROGER DANIELS

5 Religion in the United States in the twentieth century: 1900–1960

96

P E T E R W. W I L L I A M S

6 Shifting boundaries: religion and the United States: 1960 to the present

113

WA D E C L A R K R O O F A N D N AT H A L I E C A R O N

7 The Hispanic background of the United States

135

N I C O L A´ S K A N E L L O S

8 African Americans since 1900

153

WERNER SOLLORS

9 Asian Americans

174

JAMES KYUNG-JIN LEE

v


contents
10 Women in the twentieth century

194

S. J. KLEINBERG

11 Queer America

215

ROBERT MCRUER

12 The United States, war, and the twentieth century

235

K E N N E T H P. O ’ B R I E N

13 The culture of the Cold War

256

STEPHEN J. WHITFIELD

14 Secret America: the CIA and American culture

275

HUGH WILFORD

15 Vietnam and the 1960s

295

JOHN HELLMANN

16 New York City and the struggle of the modern

314

ERIC HOMBERGER

17 Music: sound: technology

332

WILLIAM BROOKS

18 African American music of the twentieth century

354

PA U L O L I V E R

19 Hollywood cinema

374

WA LT E R M E T Z

20 Popular culture

392

PA U L B U H L E

21 Theatre

411

BRENDA MURPHY

22 Society and the novel in twentieth-century America
E M O RY E L L I O T T

vi

430


contents
23 “Preferring the wrong way”: mapping the ethical diversity of US
twentieth-century poetry

450

TIM WOODS

Index

469

vii


CONTRIBUTORS

c h r i s t o p h e r b i g s b y is Professor of American Studies at the University of East
Anglia and Director of the Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies.
w i l l i a m b r o o k s is Professor of Music at the University of York.
paul buhle is Professor of American Civilization, Brown University, Rhode Island.
n a t h a l i e c a r o n is Associate Professor in the department of British and

American Studies at the University of Paris 10 – Nanterre.
r o g e r d a n i e l s is Charles Phelps Taft Professor Emeritus of the University of
Cincinatti.
e m o r y e l l i o t t is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside.
j o h n h e l l m a n n is Professor of English at Ohio State University at Lima.
g o d f r e y h o d g s o n is Director of the Reuter Foundation Programme for Journalists, University of Oxford.
eric homberger is Professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia.
n i c o l a´ s k a n e l l o s is Professor of Hispanic Literature at the University of
Houston.
r i c h a r d h . k i n g is Professor of American Intellectual History at Nottingham
University.
s . j . k l e i n b e r g is Professor of American Studies at Brunel University.
j a m e s k y u n g - j i n l e e is Professor of English and Asian American Studies and
Associate Director of the Centre for Asian American Studies at the University of
Texas, Austin.
viii


notes on contributors
w a l t e r m e t z is Associate Professor of Media and Theatre Arts at Montana State
University, Bozeman.
b r e n d a m u r p h y is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.
r o b e r t m c r u e r is Professor of English at George Washington University,
Washington, D. C.
k e n n e t h p . o ’ b r i e n is Professor of History at the State University of New York
at Brockport.
p a u l o l i v e r was Associate Head of School of Architecture at Oxford Brooks
University, 1978–1988.
w a d e c l a r k r o o f is Professor of Religion and Society and Director of the
Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life at the

University of California, Santa Barbara.
w e r n e r s o l l o r s is the Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English
Literature and Professor of African American and American Studies at Harvard
University.
s t e p h e n j . w h i t f i e l d is the Max Richter Professor of American Civilization
at Brandeis University, Massachusetts.
h u g h w i l f o r d teaches in the Department of History, Sheffield University.
p e t e r w . w i l l i a m s is Professor of Religion and American Studies at Miami
University.
t i m w o o d s is Professor of Literature at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

ix


CHRONOLOGY

1900
1901
1903

1904
1905
1906
1908
1909
1910
1911
1912
1913
1914

1915
1916
1917
1918

x

William McKinley elected for a second term. One-dollar
Brownie camera on sale.
McKinley assassinated, Theodore Roosevelt assumes
the Presidency.
Panama grants canal rights to the United States. Henry
Ford sells first Model A for 850 dollars. Boston beats
Pittsburgh in the first Baseball World Series. Wright
Brothers aircraft makes twelve-second flight. W. E. B.
DuBois writes The Souls of Black Folk.
Theodore Roosevelt re-elected. Steerage fare from
Europe to America 10 dollars.
W. E. B. DuBois participates in the Niagara Movement.
William Benjamin Smith writes The Color Line.
San Francisco School Board segregates Asian schoolchildren. San Francisco earthquake.
Race riots in Springfield, Illinois. William Howard Taft
elected. First Ford Model T produced.
Robert Edwin Peary reaches North Pole.
NAACP founded.
Standard Oil broken up.
Woodrow Wilson elected. Sinking of Titanic.
Sixteenth Amendments allows income tax.
First World War begins in Europe. Panama Canal opens.
Birth of a Nation released. Death of Booker

T. Washington. Sinking of the Lusitania.
Wilson re-elected.
United States enters First World War. Russian Revolution begins.
Wilson’s fourteen-points peace plan.


chronology

1919
1920

1921
1922
1923

1924
1925
1926
1927
1929
1930
1931
1932
1933

1934
1935
1936

1937

1939
1940
1941

May Day Bombing and the Red Scare. Eighteenth
Amendment authorizes prohibition of alcohol.
Majority of Americans now live in cities. Nineteenth
Amendment gives votes to women. Warren G. Harding
elected.
Sacco and Vanzetti convicted of murder.
Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt published.
Calvin Coolidge assumes the Presidency following the
death of Harding. Supreme Court rules on Adkins v.
Childrens’ Hospital. W. G. Cash writes The Mind of the
South.
Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue released.
Calvin Coolidge declares that “the business of America
is business.”
Ernest Hemingway publishes The Sun Also Rises.
Lindbergh flies Atlantic.
Young Plan reduces German reparations. Wall Street
crashes and Great Depression begins.
US population 122 million. Grant Wood paints American Gothic.
Scottsboro Boys case in Alabama. Empire State Building
opens.
Franklyn Delano Roosevelt elected. New Deal initiated.
Agricultural Adjustment Act. National Industrial Recovery Act (N.I.R.A.). Tennessee Valley Authority. United
States recognizes USSR.
Huey P. Long starts Share Our Wealth Society. Bonnie
and Clyde killed.

The “Dust Bowl.” Huey Long assassinated. N.I.R.A
ruled unconstitutional.
F. Roosevelt re-elected. Agricultural Adjustment Act
ruled unconstitutional. Failure of Roosevelt’s “Court
Packing” plan to increase size of Supreme Court.
Hindenburg explodes.
Outbreak of Second World War. New York World’s Fair.
John Steinbeck publishes The Grapes of Wrath.
F. Roosevelt re-elected. Ernest Hemingway publishes For
Whom the Bell Tolls.
Pearl Harbour. United States joins Second World War.
Lend-Lease Act. Executive Order 8802 prevents racial
discrimination in defense industry.
xi


chronology

1942

1943
1944
1945

1946

1947

1948

1949

1950
1951
1952
1953

1954

1955

xii

Internment of Japanese Americans. Manhattan Project
to develop atom bomb begins. Congress of Racial Equality. Battle of Midway founded.
Race riots in more than forty-five cities. Rodgers and
Hammerstein’s Oklahoma.
D-Day landings. Gunnar Myrdal writes An American
Dilemma. F. Roosevelt wins fourth term.
Death of F. Roosevelt. Harry S. Truman becomes President. Atom bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
UN Charter signed.
George Kennan’s “Long Telegram,” an analysis of the
Soviet Union. Churchill delivers “Iron Curtain” speech.
G. I. Bill passed. Baby boom begins. Dr. Spock’s Baby
and Child Care published. Truman establishes President’s Committee on Civil Rights.
Establishment of Truman Doctrine, which promises support for countries threatened by communism. Marshall
Plan established to rebuild European economies. HUAC
hearings, including the “Hollywood 10.” Construction
begins on mass-produced “Levittowns.” Jackie Robinson breaks baseball’s color line. Chuck Yeager breaks
sound barrier.

The United States recognizes Israel. Berlin airlift. Executive orders desegregate armed forces and federal government.
NATO founded. Russia explodes first Soviet A-bomb.
Truman re-elected. Mao Tse Tung wins power in China.
Arthur Miller stages Death of a Salesman.
Korean War begins. Senator Joseph McCarthy makes
first accusations.
Truman dismisses General MacArthur.
Hydrogen bomb tested. Dwight D. Eisenhower elected.
Korean War ends. Death of Stalin. Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg executed for espionage. Playboy magazine
launched.
Supreme Court rules on Brown v. Board of Education.
Army–McCarthy hearings begin. Senate condemns
McCarthy.
Warsaw Pact established. G. L. Mehta – Indian Ambassador – refused service in restaurant. Rise of White
Citizens’ Councils. Montgomery bus boycott.


chronology

1956

1957

1958
1959
1960

1961
1962

1963
1964

1965

1966

1967
1968

1969

1970
1971

Uprising crushed in Hungary. Launch of Interstate
system. Suez crisis. Eisenhower re-elected. First appearance of Elvis Presley. Invasion of the Bodysnatchers
released in cinemas.
Sputnik launched. Martin Luther King elected leader of
Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Little Rock
crisis as Governor Orval Faubus attempts to prevent the
desegregation of Central High School. Civil Rights Act.
NASA created. US troops deployed to Lebanon.
Castro comes to power in Cuba.
Greensboro sit-ins. John F. Kennedy elected. Student
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee created. Birthcontrol pill becomes available. Freedom rides.
Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
Cuban missile crisis. Port Huron statement of Students
for a Democratic Society. John Glenn orbits Earth in

Friendship Seven.
Kennedy assassinated. Lyndon Johnson becomes President. March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
China explodes first A-bomb. Civil Rights Act. Gulf of
Tonkin resolution following a supposed attack on the
American destroyer Maddox by Vietnamese forces.
Johnson elected. First American appearance of the Beatles.
Johnson sets out plan for “Great Society.” Watts Riot
Voting Rights Act. Operation Rolling Thunder and
troop escalation in Vietnam. Malcolm X assassinated.
Black Power and Black Panthers appear. National Organization for Women established. Fulbright hearings on
Vietnam.
Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco. Race
riots in Newark, Detroit, and over 125 other cities.
Tet Offensive. Martin Luther King assassinated. Robert
Kennedy assassinated. Antiwar protests. Richard Nixon
elected.
Woodstock festival. Apollo 11 lands on Moon. Indian
occupation of Alcatraz. Nixon administration begins
affirmative action plan. My Lai massacre.
Invasion of Cambodia. Kent State and Jackson State
shootings.
Pentagon Papers.
xiii


chronology

1972
1973

1974
1975

1976
1977
1978

1979

1980
1981
1982
1983

1984

1986

1987
1988
1989
1990
1991

xiv

Nixon visits China and Soviet Union. Watergate breakin.
Paris agreement ends US involvement in Vietnam. Supreme Court rules on Roe v. Wade, permitting abortion.
Vice-President Spiro Agnew resigns, Gerald M. Ford
becomes Vice-President.

Nixon resigns, Ford becomes President.
Unemployment hits 8.5 percent. Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act. Last Americans
leave Saigon.
Jimmy Carter elected.
Elvis Presley dies.
Supreme Court rules on Regents of the University of
California v. Bakke: fixed racial quotas declared unconstitutional. Proposition 13 places cap on property taxes
in California.
Three Mile Island disaster at nuclear power plant. Camp
David accords between Israel and Egypt. American hostages taken in Iran. Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Ronald Reagan elected. Iranian hostages released.
AIDS first noted in US. Interest rates rise to 21.5 percent.
“Reaganomics” approved by Congress.
Unemployment reaches 10 percent – highest since Great
Depression. Ratification of ERA fails.
Strategic Defense Initiative proposes a missile defense
system. US Marines killed in Lebanon. United States
invades Grenada.
American aid to Contras in Nicaragua. Economic
recovery. Reagan re-elected. Mikhail Gorbachev begins
reform.
Iran–Contra scandal (in which the proceeds of arms sold
to Iran were used to finance the right-wing Contra guerillas in Nicaragua). Space shuttle Challenger explodes.
Palestinian Intifada begins.
George Bush Sr. elected.
Berlin Wall falls. United States invades Panama.
Collapse of communist regimes. Iraq invades Kuwait.
Gulf War begins. USSR dissolves. Pan-American World
Airways ceases flying.

chronology

1992

1993

1994

1995
1996
1998
1999

2000

2001

2003
2004
2005

Riots in Los Angeles after verdict in Rodney King trial.
Troops sent to Somalia. William Jefferson Clinton
elected.
Congress approves North American Free Trade Agreement. US Marines killed in Somalia, United States withdraws.
Republicans claim majorities in House and Senate.
Genocide begins in Rwanda. United States intervenes in
Haiti.
Oklahoma City bombing.

Welfare Reform bill. Clinton re-elected.
House votes to impeach Clinton.
Senate acquits Clinton. NATO airstrikes in Kosovo.
Anti-globalization protests at World Trade Organization
meeting in Seattle.
Longest economic expansion in nation’s history. Supreme Court rules in favour of George W. Bush in disputed election.
September 11 attacks on the twin towers of the World
Trade Center in New York and on the Pentagon. Patriot
Act. Enron scandal. United States intervenes in Afghanistan, Taliban regime falls.
United States invades Iraq.
George W. Bush re-elected.
Retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor, first female Supreme Court Justice. Death of Chief Justice Rehnquist.
New Orleans flooded as a result of Hurricane Katrina.
Continuing occupation of Iraq.

xv



1
CHRISTOPHER BIGSBY

Introduction:
What, then, is the American?

Every year, on March 22, Riverside, Iowa, celebrates an event that has not
yet happened and never will. It is the place and date designated for the birth
of Captain James Tiberius Kirk, Captain of the Star Ship Enterprise.
America has so successfully colonized the future that it has mastered the
art of prospective nostalgia. Its natural tense is the future perfect. It looks

forward to a time when something will have happened. It is a place, too,
where fact and fiction, myth and reality dance a curious gavotte. It is a
society born out of its own imaginings.
There are those who believe they can remember alternative past lives. The
science fiction writer Philip K. Dick claimed to remember a different present
life. In his case it may have had something to do with amphetamines, but in
fact we do inhabit different and parallel presents. The 1920s constituted the
jazz age, except for those who tapped their feet to different rhythms. The
1960s were about drugs and rock and roll, except for the majority for
whom they were not. Thoreau once wrote of his wriggling his toes in the
mud of Walden Pond in search of the rock beneath. The search for a secure
foundation is understandable but cannot always be satisfied. Nineteenthcentury American writers dealt in symbols for a reason. Unlike the metaphor, the symbol suggested a field of meaning, an ambiguity which in the
end perhaps could more truthfully capture a world in flux, desperate for
clear definitions yet aware that in stasis lay a denial of, rather than a route
to, meaning in a society wedded to the idea of possibility, always coming
into being and never fixed.
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick begins in a curious way. A late consumptive usher to a grammar school offers an etymology and a sub-sub librarian
supplies a series of abstracts which together identify what is described as a
“veritable gospel cetology,” a seemingly comprehensive account of whales,
their types, weight, size, reproductive habits. Detail after detail is offered
as if thereby to reveal an undeniable truth. It is a mock taxonomy or, as
Melville suggests, “a glancing bird’s eye view.” For what follows is a novel
1


christopher bigsby

with the ultimate in floating signifiers, the great white whale that is Moby
Dick, a screen onto which the characters project their own meanings in a
novel in which identity is problematic. Even the narrator coyly refuses to

define who he might be, offering instead a name which identifies him with
an ancestor of twelve tribes but a name which also means “outcast.” “Call
me Ishmael,” he suggests, as if mocking the desire for a true self and this in a
novel about the wish to pin down, harpoon a singular meaning.1 Here is
Melville’s allegory for the similar desire to stabilize America, identify what
it might be and thereby define its citizens.
James Fenimore Cooper, another chonicler of an emerging country,
created a protagonist who at one moment was the prosaic Natty Bumppo,
then Long Rife, Leatherstocking, Hawkeye. Only the British soldiers in
those novels, which track back near to the beginning of the American
experience, were manifestly who they seemed. The American was legion.
At the same time Nathaniel Hawthorne was creating his own fable of an
ambiguous identity in The Scarlet Letter, in which the letter A, inscribed on
the breast of Hester Prynne, offered as a definition by those intent to insist
upon a singular meaning, is transformed by experience, this being the
gift offered by a culture in which transformation is the essence. Call me
Chillingworth, says her cold-hearted husband, implying that a name is no
more than a convenience, as she suggests to her fearful lover that he could
change his name and so liberate himself from his own past, liberation from
the past being a national imperative.
At one moment America was to be self-evident fact; at another its virtue
lay in its resolute refusal of definition. For Henry Steal Commager, writing
in 1950, “Over a period of two and a half centuries, marked by such
adventures as few other people had known, Americans had created an
American character and formulated an American philosophy.” However,
“that character all but eludes description and that philosophy definition”
even if “both were unmistakable.”2
This was the existential space where existence preceded essence and yet
essence was in a curious way assumed. No one knew what America would
become and yet everyone assumed they knew it for what it was. America

was a blank sheet on which her identity was yet to be inscribed. It was also a
new Eden, undefined, yet one whose parameters were known because
delineated in myth. It was simultaneously what it was and what it would
become. It was the future and the past in the same moment.
To travel west was to travel back in time toward a primitive encounter with
nature and to travel forward into a new land of possibility. The writers knew
early that the essence of the country lay in a resistance to definition, hence
their preference for symbols rather than metaphor. It was a kaleidoscope of
2


Introduction: What, then, is the American?

shifting possibilities. At the same time the root meaning of the word
“symbol” is “thrown together”, so that there is the potential for this
centripetal urge to terraform a country, improvise it into being, and
improvisation has always been an American virtue and necessity. The
ache to be clear about national identity and destiny was clear in encomiums to what did not in truth yet exist but along with this went a
perception that this was a culture endlessly wedded to becoming, that
being its special gift to the world, charged with a kinetic energy you
could feel from across the oceans of the world but which could never
discharge completely or it would lose its force.
In 2004, Bruce Springsteen, in explaining his reluctant decision to involve
himself in that year’s presidential election, remarked that in the aftermath of
9/11 “I felt the country’s unity.” He could not, though, “remember anything
quite like it.” Nor did the feeling last. The election, he suggested, was
essentially about “who we are, what we stand for,” though what that
“who” and “what” might be was clearly no more evident to him than to
those who had sung America a century and a half before, a Walt Whitman,
say, who celebrated heterogeneity in what was offered as a national epic in

which the narrative voice was an I that contained multitudes. “Why is it,”
Springsteen asked,
that the wealthiest nation in the world finds it so hard to keep its promise and
faith with its weakest citizens? Why do we continue to find it so difficult to see
beyond the veil of race? How do we conduct ourselves during difficult times
without killing the things we hold dear? Why does the fulfilment of our
promise as a people always seem to be just within grasp yet for ever out of
reach?

He may have been “Born in the USA” but the question remained, what is
this thing, the USA?3 That question has echoed down the corridors of
American consciousness.
At 8.46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, a Boeing 767 American Airlines
plane flying from Boston to Los Angeles, carrying eighty-one passengers and
eleven crew, crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in
Manhattan. Seventeen minutes later, another 767, a United Airlines flight
carrying fifty-six passengers and nine crew, also en route from Boston to Los
Angeles, crashed into the South Tower. At 10.05 the South Tower collapsed,
followed, twenty-three minutes later, by the North. In just one hour and
forty-two minutes, 2,752 people died.
Those who had begun their day with a hurried kiss of farewell, thinking
of no more than what they must do and their destinations, found this to be
their last day on earth, never knowing why this should be so or that this
3


christopher bigsby

was, indeed, their fate. After the sudden shock of flame, smoke drifted
across the water, papers blew through streets rimed with dust, words unwriting themselves in the artificial night. People stood, unbelieving and yet

not altogether unprepared. Figures began to fall, dwarfed by the scale of the
buildings, as men and women chose to take their own lives rather than have
them taken by fire, until the towers themselves fell inwards and down as if
consuming themselves. It was, as many remarked, like a dream or a movie
and this is why a unique event seemed to stir a sense of de´ja` vu. For the fact
is that the towers had fallen before.
They had fallen in movies, in Armageddon and Independence Day. The
visual rhyme was so precise and disturbing as to prompt the question of
whether the terrorists had been filmgoers before they were killers of men
and women. New York was the site of apocalypse on film long before it was
in fact. The Manhattan skyline, symbol of modernity, had always carried
the promise and threat of the future. The city experience itself, with its raw
energy and reckless violence, its opportunities and corruptions, had always
been viewed ambiguously. And for those who wished not only to challenge
America’s power but modernity itself, what better way to bring the country
low, using nothing more advanced than box cutters and America’s technology turned against itself. In the luna dust which swathed the broken buildings and streets, cell phones rang their jaunty tunes, never to be answered.
Cars in station car parks stood abandoned, accumulating fines never to be
paid. Individuals came forward to recount final calls from the doomed
aircraft, love declared in the face of human dereliction. The twenty-first
century, it seemed, was to be recursive. In the course of a hundred and two
minutes, something had ended.
The Twin Towers were no more casually chosen than perhaps was the
date. September 11 was the anniversary of the British mandate in Palestine
and of George Bush Senior’s proclamation of a “New World Order,” just
as the Bali nightclub bombing and the attack on the USS Cole took place
on the anniversary of the opening of the Camp David peace talks between
Egypt and Israel. In Washington, the Pentagon came under attack while
almost certainly the White House was another target. Under assault were
symbols of America’s economic, military, and political supremacy. Those
who launched the assault, far from seeing America as the new paradigm,

rejected the very idea of its global primacy and in particular the presence in
the Middle East (and especially in Saudi Arabia) of military units, which
they saw as bridgeheads into Arab territory, and the export of cultural
values, which they saw as at odds with their own. There were few at
the time, however, inclined to look for rational explanations of a seemingly irrational action. Indeed, the very attempt to do so seemed akin to
4


Introduction: What, then, is the American?

believing that there could be a justification for the unthinkable. The
response was less analytical than visceral.
America’s primary response was bewilderment. What cause could be
served by mass murder? Why would America, which saw itself as carrying
the torch of freedom, as a model for the world, custodian of the future, be
targeted in this way? Flags flew from every building, house, car, truck.
Church services were held. New heroes were identified and celebrated.
Money was raised. For a brief while the world offered sympathy and shared
in the agony. But the question was, where was the enemy and how might it
be brought low?
Americans were so many trauma victims. They had been injured but the
full pain had yet to register. People wandered the streets, covered in grey
dust, like living statues, survivors of Pompeii. Soon, trucks began to make
their way through the streets, gathering up the rubble of broken lives along
with the concrete and steel, the smashed computers, memories wiped,
screens broken or blank. Yet behind this, often unspoken, because at such
a moment some things may not be spoken, there were other questions,
questions about national purpose and identity, the fate of the Great
Experiment.
Many had expected the millennium to precipitate apocalypse, to mark the

passing of the American Century. In the end the gestation of disaster lasted
nearly a full nine months longer but when it came it went far further than
the fear that computers would reset their internal clocks to 1900, though
America’s future has always tended to be seen in terms of its past, with
references to a dream first dreamed centuries ago and to a frontier closed for
more than a hundred years. Suddenly, the future seemed occluded, cataracted over with pain. America’s most intelligent television drama, The West
Wing, scrapped its season premiere. Its stars stepped out of character to
solicit funds for those who had suffered before staging a fictional debate
between White House staffers and a group of high school students on a visit
whose first question is “why is everybody trying to kill us?” Its determinedly
liberal scriptwriter tried his best to explain, warned against intolerance, but
the effect, though worthy, was inert. Later, 24, a taut adventure series,
envisaged a group of Americans hiding behind supposed terrorists in order
to provoke a Middle East war. The evidence is fraudulent. The war is
stopped. Except that it was not. A real war was launched on Iraq before
the series had finished shooting. Creators of fiction tried desperately to insist
on complexity. Devisers of national policy settled for something altogether
simpler.
Who are we, many asked, that others should seek our lives? What is this
America that they believe they know well enough to wish its end? And such
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questions had the force they did because they were questions which had
been asked before.
Since this was a country that had long believed itself the trailblazer, the
pathfinder, the pioneer of modernity, why were there those who not merely
refused to follow the yellow brick road to paradise but instead chose death,

their own no less than that of their victims, as a route to a paradise which
owed nothing to freedom of speech and assembly, to liberal democracy or
material prosperity? Beneath the confident recommitment to familiar principles, the announcement of a new Pax Americana, to be enforced by the
military might of the world’s only superpower, was a series of troubling
questions, questions whose answers would have taken them back, if
that were a direction Americans liked to go. What is America? Who are
Americans? What is this culture they have forged? What is the future
toward which they march? And what of those who march to a different
drummer? This book is hardly designed to answer those questions but in
looking back over a hundred or so years it does attempt to explore some
aspects of a country and its culture which are a central fact of the modern
experience.
Writing in 1782, just six years after the establishment of the new Republic,
Hector St. John de Crevecoeur asked a question that has hardly lost its
cogency with the centuries: “What, then, is the American, this new man?”
He offered an answer. “He is an American,” he explained,
who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new
ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he
obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received
in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are
melted into a new race of men whose labours and posterity will one day cause
great changes in the world. Americans are the western pilgrims who are
carrying along with them that great mass of arts, sciences, vigour, and industry
which began long since in the East; they will finish the great circle.4

What he offered, however, was largely a process not an identity, a destiny
rather than a description. His confidence in that destiny, though, was shared
half a century later by another French observer.
Writing in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville was entirely convinced that,
“whatever they do, the Americans of the United States will turn into one

of the greatest nations of the world . . . One day wealth, power, and glory
cannot fail to be theirs.” Admittedly, he was not right about everything. He
insisted, for example, that lawyers formed “the only enlightened class not
distrusted by the people.”5 For the most part, though, he was an excellent
analyst and fair prophet. He predicted that by 1935, 100 years later, there

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Introduction: What, then, is the American?

would be 100 million Americans living in 40 states and that one day the
figure would reach 150 million sharing the same religion and language. In
fact the twentieth century began with a population of 72,212,168, which
rose by the year 2000 to 281,421,906 (the population not only growing in
numbers but weight, gaining ten pounds each during the 1990s, causing
airlines to use an additional 350 million gallons of fuel releasing an additional 3.8 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere), while in
1935 there were 48 states and a population of 127,250,272. He was not,
then, so far off. Nor was he wrong about the religion and (until the late
twentieth century) the language. For him, slavery aside, the restless and
threatening power of the majority aside, the new country’s insufferably high
opinion of itself aside, the fact that the President seemed to place re-election
higher in his priorities than public service aside, America was a good news
story. At a time when its myths were still in the making, he was ready to
acknowledge the substance behind those myths. America was, indeed, he
insisted, about freedom and opportunity and he celebrated the new country.
What is a culture? It is, as the dictionary (Chambers) helpfully tells us,
“the total of the inherited ideas, beliefs, values, and knowledge, which
constitute the shared bases of social action, the total range of activities
and ideas of a group of people with shared traditions, which are transmitted

and reinforced by members of the group.” All of which makes the idea of
capturing it in a single volume a touch presumptuous. More simply, it is “a
particular civilization at a particular period.” It is also, though, in a more
restricted sense, “the artistic and social pursuits, expression, and tastes
valued by a society or class as in the arts, manners, dress, etc.”
What is the modern? The same dictionary (Chambers) insists it is the
historical period beginning with the Middle Ages, which would make
Chaucer our contemporary and the Black Death headline news. More
plausibly, it dates from those Enlightenment values which characterized
eighteenth-century England and France and which made their way into
American thought, indeed most conspicuously into the American Constitution. In that sense, the modern experience is coterminous with the
American experience. Such values stressed the politics of liberty, on a
personal and social level, and in America, certainly, religious tolerance
(though scarcely in the original Puritan settlement) and a certain moral
strenuousness, neither tolerance nor religion coming high on the list in
revolutionary France. It is not hard to see how this gave birth to classic
nineteenth-century liberalism, to a practical stress on the self-made man,
on private charity, and, indeed, to an emphasis on capitalism, whose
excesses would eventually be contained by a social ethic which was itself
a product of the Enlightenment.
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Such a definition of the modern, however, would in effect call for a
history of America and that is not what follows. For the purposes of this
study, then, I have chosen to define the modern more narrowly, focusing on
the twentieth century while taking both a broad and a narrow definition of
culture. This, in other words, is an attempt to explore what once used to be

called American civilization. It is an effort to understand America and its
cultural products. It is not a book about modernism, though that was one
expression of a self-conscious modernity, but about the modern, and for
much of the twentieth century America was seen as the embodiment of that,
so much so that for some the two became confused to the point that what
was often described as Americanization was in truth modernity, whose
wave first broke on the American shore. This is a study which moves us
from a time when America was regarded as marginal to the political,
economic, and artistic world to a moment, a few years into the twenty-first
century, when it had become the only superpower, when its cultural products were ubiquitous and when it had invaded the consciousness of virtually
everyone on the planet.
Quite the most contentious aspect of the title of this book, though, lies in
that word “American,” not simply because it seems to arrogate to a single
country the name of a continent but because its very identity has always
been the subject of debate and because to Janice Radway – the Presidentelect of the American Studies Association, speaking in 1998 – the word
seemed to homogenize what was in effect a series of groups previously
disempowered and ignored by such a seemingly singular designation. To
Daniel Bell, in The End of Ideology, America is a cluster of meanings and to
ask what its secret might be “is to pose a metaphysical question whose
purpose is either ideological or mythopoeic.” The emergence in the postwar
world of something called American studies was, to his mind, simply an
attempt to prove to the rest of the world “that America has a culture too,”6
itself an observation that betokens the self-doubt which he seems to be
attacking.
In fact, American studies had its roots before the war and displayed, at
least originally, a confident conviction that America could be located
through a study of its history, literature, and values even if its originators,
in the late 1930s, saw a contradiction between capitalism and the principles
on which the country had been founded. In other words, here was an
academic movement which still believed that the culture could be explained

to itself but whose members were simultaneously in contention with its then
current direction. This was how communism could be seen as twentiethcentury Americanism, the slogan which a young Leo Marx (author of The
Machine in the Garden, 1964, and later to be Chair of the American Studies
8