How does one study America?
As the contemporary world's relatively newest major nation begins to celebrate its 250th birthday, the study of the American concept, the American Dream, American history, and American culture is being pulled in so many directions, it's difficult the find a defining narrative to something that for most of our lives seemed pretty obvious.
In the past couple weeks, the Wall Street Journal has published two pieces of commentary that begin to dig into the complicated question asked for most of American history: as Michel Crevecoeur asked in Letters from an American Farmer -- "What then is the American, this new man?" It was a question explored by the French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville in the esteemed Democracy in America.
Ben Fritz, the entertainment reporter for the WSJ delves into the concept of American "culture," specifically the vanishing idea of a singular national monoculture in terms of arts and entertainment, with a piece on "The Rise and Fall of the American Monoculture," asking the important question: For most of the 20th century, pop culture was the glue that held the U.S. together. But what will it mean now that everything has splintered?
“I Love Lucy.” “Star Wars.” “Thriller.” It doesn’t get more American than that.
All nations are held together by culture, but the U.S. is unique for the power of its pop culture. Our music, television shows and movies are a multitrillion-dollar business and the first way that billions of people around the world get to know us.
For most of the 20th century, they were also the glue that held the country together. In a sprawling nation founded on the precept of individual liberty and populated primarily by immigrants from around the world, there was hardly one American experience. Maids in Boston, factory workers in Chicago and farmers in California lived much different lives despite being part of the same country.
Cinemas, radios, television sets and records changed all that. Americans might do different things during the workday, but at night and on weekends, we were watching and listening to the same things—things made in America, primarily for Americans, by the first modern celebrities.
It was the birth of the monoculture—a word that captures the historically unique power of American entertainment in the 20th century. An estimated 200 million tickets were sold for “Gone With the Wind,” which came out in 1939, when the population of the U.S. was 130 million. The “Amos ’n’ Andy” radio show was so popular that movie theaters scheduled around it and piped the audio in on their speakers. In 1983, more than 100 million people watched the finale of “M*A*S*H.”
And, on the opinion page of the WSJ this week, policy analysts Richard D. Kahlenberg and Lief Lin discuss the complicated issue in the world of cultural criticism that "American Studies Can't Stand Its Subject."
On the one hand, America’s is a story of greatness: The U.S. is the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the planet. Its founders created what is now the world’s longest-lasting liberal democratic constitution. The Declaration of Independence put forth revolutionary ideas about human freedom and equality that ushered in a new era for the world. At the same time, the American experience is complicated. Our history includes the mistreatment of Native Americans, slavery and Jim Crow, and high levels of economic inequality that persist to this day.
Yet we found only one part of this narrative presented in most of almost 100 articles we examined from over a three-year period in American Quarterly, the flagship journal of the American Studies Association. Published by Johns Hopkins University, it’s widely considered the country’s premier journal of American studies.
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