American Culture Since September 11

...Denning is right to argue that behind much of this stood an independent left, deriving from an old and indigenous radical strain in American political and intellectual life...

...I don't want to defend all products of 1930s culture...

...The title of his autobiography, Rebel With a Cause, said it all...

...Time magazine told a story of a young boy on his way to a baseball game...

...As A HISTORIAN thinking about the recent visibility of ordinary working people, I can't help but look back at American culture in the 1930s...

...This was odd to hear, because after the Second World War the corporation seemed to have become a large transnational bureaucracy, faceless and impersonal, constituting the basis of what John Kenneth Galbraith called the "new industrial state...

...Perhaps this history can speak to us about the cultural image of ordinary people in the wake of 9/11...

...It's not difficult to imagine that 9/1 1 's aftermath could prompt a larger cultural reevaluation, at least pushing us to think about who is important, whom we most admire, what values we truly cherish...

...One of the many things that happened on that fateful day of 9/11 and immediately afterward was that the visages of ordinary people suddenly pushed aside the smiling celebrities in our mass media...

...His book stands today as a classic...

...Nonetheless, American history shows that we have often shifted back and forth from a love of the wealthy to a respect and admiration of ordinary people...

...Quite simply, their visibility helped justify the idea that something should be done— by them and for them...

...September 11 as coffeetable book, a display piece to help you 'share' such moments again and again 'with your children and grandchildren...

...Our middlebrow magazines, Time, Newsweek, U.S...

...It is alongside a collective revulsion against the sheer greed of many CEO's and the accommodating spirit of lackey accounting firms that we should situate the entry of ordinary people onto the national stage following the 9/11 tragedy...

...My references to the 1930s should not be taken as suggesting that we are on the brink of a new flowering in American culture or a recovery of our democratic heritage...

...The cultural historian Erika Doss has recently argued that American art during the 1930s had a tendency to "eroticize" the naked male body (think of the social realist tendency to paint male workers with their shirts thrown off...

...Though these events bore no relation to 9/11, they seemed to signal the end of an era...

...Knicks' games, free wine, and a free luxury apartment in Manhattan...

...Clement Greenberg, for example, argued that "kitsch is the culture of the masses," that is, the culture of totalitarianism...

...Greenberg and his Partisan Review compatriots had put their finger on a central weakness of American culture during the 1930s...

...This achievement wouldn't make up for the tragedy of 9/11, but it would suggest that we take the tragedy seriously enough to recognize the dignity of ordinary people and their common sacrifice...

...Historians and scholars in American Studies (an academic discipline whose roots go back to the 1930s) debate the significance of this culture...

...He honed his documentary skills as a practicing journalist while speaking openly about his emotional investment in the lives of the people he was discussing, thereby turning documentation into art and self-reflection...

...there you see the typical celebrity parade broken up with pictures of housewives and other ordinary citizens...

...The Farm Security Administration, in hopes of understanding rural poverty, sent photographers south to record the sad faces of sharecroppers...

...He asked a policeman to sign his ball...

...Their defense of high modernism made them bristle at cultural works that celebrated ordinary people or were directed toward them...

...I believe this is one of the legacies of September 11...

...Still others did their best to commodify our memory cells...

...There's something annoying about the fact that a larger, collective self-reevaluation did not take place in the wake of September 11, 2001...

...They were truly everywhere...

...Today, of course, Welch is better known as a wizard of selfishness, having cooked up an astounding retirement package, including free cell phones, free tickets to N.Y...

...ONETHELESS, there was nothing inherently anti-intellectual about document_ ing everyday activities...

...Witness the proliferation of CEO autobiographies, typically amalgamations of life stories, advice, and superficial philosophy...

...The documentary spirit spread quickly to other domains of expression...

...He argues that intellectuals, like the writers employed by the FWP, faced poverty themselves and thus allied with ordinary people, creating a vision of Americans bound together by social democracy and the hopes of producerism, ethnic inclusion, and antifascism...

...And I don't mean about our foreign policy, on which there is plenty of debate...

...With this said, though, it's hard to think that such a cataclysmic event wouldn't prompt us to think about ourselves...

...Eliot...

...Magazines ran pictures with no textual commentary...

...The independent artist Thomas Hart Benton, who refused any federal support for his painting, put into his grand public murals industrial laborers and farmers working alongside one another, creating what some call a modern version of republican DISSENT / Winter 2003 n 59 EVERYDAY HEROES producerism, the idea that what really creates collective wealth is the daily toil of regular people...

...Not only did the federal government directly encourage documentary art, echoes of its spirit could be heard in Roosevelt's famous "forgotten man" speech...

...Thus, we seemed to be settling back into our comfortable normalcy of vapid entertainment...

...This happened because ordinary people suddenly leaped to our attention...

...For soon after the planes smashed into the twin towers, the Enron scandal hit, then EVERYDAY HEROES the other scandalous accounting errors...

...But during the 1990s, CEOs (whose pay, of course, was skyrocketing) reasserted themselves and paraded their personalities in America's anemic public sphere...

...Most important is the connection between the visibility of ordinary people in American culture during the 1930s and the politics of the New Deal...

...Here in America's heartland, I ask people what they remember from 9/11 that isn't tragic, and they typically recollect iconic images of firefighters...

...Jack Welch, in Straight from the Gut, told a story that Americans love to hear: that of the poor, working-class kid climbing up the rungs of the corporation, eventually to lead it into new and trying times...

...John Sperling, the man who started the University of Phoenix (the private, Internet university that sells well on Wall Street) and CEO of the Apollo Group, portrayed himself as a gutsy man willing to buck the traditional ways of academia...

...Carl Sandburg tried to capture the spirit of a wide cross-section of Americans by writing a sweeping epic poem, The People, Yes...

...And then we watched what was once unimaginable: CEOs being taken away in handcuffs...

...Pundits scurried about, as they had a year before, in order to ask the big question: have we changed as a nation or not...

...As best he can, Denning disassociates this concept from its Communist Party moorings...

...We saw people we don't ordinarily see in magazines and on television - firefighters, ambulance drivers, police officers...

...Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes SEPTEMBER II, 2002, has passed away, and so too the expected memory-fest...

...Certainly, the sentimental populism of filmmakers like Frank Capra could become tacky, melodramatic, naïve at times...

...What I mean is different: what did September 11 and its af58 n DISSENT / Winter 2003 termath tell us about American culture—about what we had become during the orgiastic years of the 1990s and what we might learn about ourselves in the face of a national tragedy...

...I don't believe in such things as "cycles of history" (that the 2000s will be more liberal than the 1990s, for example...

...Though some of what he says is overdrawn (he tries too hard to disassociate this indigenous left from liberalism), Denning's central claim, one that Kenneth Burke and the historian Warren Sussman had already developed, is indisputable: "the people" themselves became an object of admiration, a cultural icon, during the 1930s...

...In the end, what really mattered were the daily activities of ordinary working people, the sort of people usually ignored...

...It was more than just the associations with Stalinism that drove people like the editors at Partisan Review to despair...

...and Sandburg's poetry didn't reach the intellectual depth of T.S...

...I think that in the tragic aftermath of 9/11 we recovered a sense of some of our core values, especially our collective sympathy for civic equality...

...The photographs taken during this period—by Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans—now stand as art...

...Doss argues that this turned workers into "passive objects of pleasure for others rather than the active subjects of their own autonomy and agency" Perhaps, but the point seems exEVERYDAY HEROES aggerated (a tendency common in cultural studies...

...Bill Gates, author of two books during the 1990s, assumed the role of public philosopher, doling out advice and offering his hand to help us enter a new world transformed by technology...

...In The Cultural Front, Michael Denning has done the most to revive 1930s popular culture, arguing that it helped to bring together an array of political forces in a "Popular Front...

...KEVIN MATTSON teaches American history at Ohio University and is author of Intellectuals in Action: • The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945-1970...

...Those at the top were largely nameless, almost inconsequential, due to the massive institutional apparatus that subsumed them...

...After all, one of the best modernist works arose out of the documentary spirit of the 1930s: James Agee's and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men...

...Within these books, CEOs made themselves heroic—showing themselves advancing their noble causes in the face of harrowing difficulties...

...DISSENT / Winter 2003 n 61...

...Writers employed by the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) went into the countryside to collect folk tales from ordinary people...

...They became cultural heroes, much like turn-of-the-century robber barons...

...So Andrew Grove, in Only the Paranoid Survive, referenced military heroes and a "classic scene in old western movies in which a bedraggled group of riders is traveling through a western landscape" in order to provide a sense of what it was like managing Intel...

...their subject matter has become iconic, burned into Americans' collective memory...

...Unfortunately, to say there might have been a lesson within this tragedy smacks of the ugly rhetoric of Jerry Falwell or the wacky left that we were getting what we deserved for sins at home or abroad...

...Kitsch retarded the efforts of a serious, intellectually superior avant-garde...

...The policeman suggested that he save the ball for the game, and the boy explained that he wanted a real hero's autograph...

...The journalist Hanna Rosin explained, "Life magazine's collections of haunting photos [of 9/11] has been turned into an heirloom edition—`accented with pure 22kt gold and crafted to last for generations'—complete with its own satinribbon page marker...

...After all, during the 1930s, workers organized themselves politically and won rights that they had never before possessed (and some might argue have been losing in the years since...

...after all, the image of a tired firefighter was enough to convey the necessary point—that civic sacrifice would pull us through this awful time...

...As Jack Welch, the infamous CEO of General Electric, quipped, "The world of the 1990s . . . will belong to passionate, driven leaders" (read: me...

...To remember this way seems not to remember at all...

...Agee balanced his desire to document the damage done to poor people with his hope to convey their dignity...

...News and World Report, pointed out that Americans were voting in record numbers to elect the next "American Idol"—the newest "reality" television event...

...Working-class citizens seemed to have disappeared during the 1990s, falling into the cracks as Americans celebrated the wealthy, and CEO's repositioned themselves as heroes...

...Working for Fortune magazine, Agee had lived with three sharecropper families in order to understand them as best he could (Evans was employed by the Farm Security Administration...

...Agee believed in the power of ordinary people but never succumbed to melodrama, schmaltz, or kitsch...

...I want instead to remember the spirit that stood behind them and try to figure out what they might tell us today...

...But if we extend our context by gazing a bit beyond 9/11, and then back into the 1990s, I think we can see a deeper significance...

...Americans may feast on an "American Idol," but many believe that celebrityhood matters less than the power of ordinary people helping one another...

...Nor do I believe that historians should go into the business of predicting the future...

...Maybe we can begin to carve out a politics that reflects the idea that those who work for a living and commit themselves to something larger than their own self-interest should be the primary subjects of public policy...

...Indeed, the documentary dominated cultural expression...

...Check out the 9/11 anniversary issue of People magazine...

...Onto the national stage these heroes walked, performing their civic acts of bravery for all to see...

...During the Great Depression, America's writers and artists made ordinary people the subject of their works in ways never seen before...

...Since the time of the depression, though, the anti-Stalinist left attacked anything that smacked of a popular front...

...What explained this entry of average citizens into the mass media, most would argue, was simply the sense of emergency inherent in the event...

...For during the economic bubble of the 1990s, CEOs had transformed their self-image...

...Though it seemed a bit hysterical to sniff out totalitarianism in popu6o n DISSENT / Winter 2003 list cultural sympathies (as Dwight Macdonald did when he famously attacked the literary critic Van Wyck Brooks, who had argued that modernism was inherently elitist), the PR crowd provided an important warning about the limits of cultural production that drew on or sought to appeal to the energy and emotion of ordinary people...

...Oral histories abounded, culminating in works like These Are Our Lives...

...The shock was not just local but national, and it was clearly due to what we had gotten so used to during the 1990s, when celebrity and wealth paraded everywhere in front of our eyes...

...Quite simply, making people visible made it easier to justify a liberal/left politics...

...A face that was unpainted and unprepared for the cameras represented a radical disjuncture...

...As Joshua Freeman pointed out in the Nation soon after 9/11, New Yorkers were shocked at seeing firemen—not celebrities— on the front pages of newspapers and magazines...