Page 44 - Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction

CULT_C02.qxd 10/24/08 17:10 Page 28

28 Chapter 2 The ‘culture and civilization’ tradition

In Chapter 3 we shall begin to consider some of these radical and often unforeseen
consequences as they appear in the work of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams.

Mass culture in America: the post-war debate

In the first fifteen or so years following the end of the Second World War, American
intellectuals engaged in a debate about so-called mass culture. Andrew Ross (1989)
sees ‘mass’ as ‘one of the key terms that governs the official distinction between
American/UnAmerican’ (42). He argues that, ‘[t]he history behind this official distinc-
tion is in many ways the history of the formation of the modern national culture’
(ibid.). Following the Second World War, America experienced the temporary success
of a cultural and political consensus – supposedly based on liberalism, pluralism and
classlessness. Until its collapse in the agitation for black civil rights, the formation
of the counterculture, the opposition to America’s war in Vietnam, the women’s lib-
eration movement, and the campaign for gay and lesbian rights, it was a consensus
dependent to a large extent on the cultural authority of American intellectuals. As Ross
points out: ‘For perhaps the first time in American history, intellectuals, as a social
grouping, had the opportunity to recognize themselves as national agents of cultural,
moral, and political leadership’ (43). This newly found significance was in part due to
‘the intense, and quite public, debate about “mass culture” that occupied intellectuals
for almost fifteen years, until the late fifties’ (ibid.). Ross spends most of his time relat-
ing the debate to the Cold War ideology of ‘containment’: the need to maintain a
healthy body politic both within (from the dangers of cultural impoverishment) and
without (from the dangers of Soviet communism). He identifies three positions in the
debate:

1. An aesthetic–liberal position that bemoans the fact that given the choice the
majority of the population choose so-called second- and third-rate cultural texts and
practices in preference to the texts and practices of high culture.
2. The corporate–liberal or progressive–evolutionist position that claims that
popular culture serves a benign function of socializing people into the pleasures of
consumption in the new capitalist–consumerist society.
3. The radical or socialist position which views mass culture as a form of, or means to,
social control.

Towards the end of the 1950s, the debate became increasingly dominated by the first
two positions. This reflected in part the growing McCarthyite pressure to renounce any-
thing resembling a socialist analysis. Given limited space, I will focus only on the
debate about the health of the body politic within. In order to understand the debate
one publication is essential reading – the anthology Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in
America, published in 1957. Reading the many contributions, one quickly gets a sense