The Formation of Mass Culture Part I: “Incorporation”

Making of the Modern WorldWeek 19

Culture Industries?

• Formation of national culture post 1865• Tension between middleclass and working-class

cultures (folk to mass)• Racial appropriation and exclusion• Interlocking roles of advertising, publishing,

theatre• Reliance on female artists and consumers;

performance of gender• Motion pictures and working-class entertainment• Resistance to cultural hegemony?

Origins of the Modern Mass Media

• Early inventions:

• Newspapers – 17th century, widespread after c. 1750

• Photography – from 1838, dry plates in 1870s

• Phonograph - from 1876, widespread after c. 1895

• Motion Picture –1890s, feature films after c. 1915

• Major shifts in western society 19th and early 20th centuries:

• Industrialization

• rise of middle class

• Consumer economies

• Leisure time

• Cultural hierarchies: high art and mass culture

“Incorporating” Culture

• C 19th C: favors growth of new class united by pursuit of money and pleasure

• Rise of cultural elites (incorporation of culture)

• Thorstein Veblen: wealthy elites embrace culture as “conspicuous consumption”

• Founding of major national museums (Met, 1872; new wing of Louvre 1874; Kunsthistorisches Museum, 1891)

• New white middle class• Culture as means of self-

improvement and moral uplift (via Arnold)

• Patrons for museums, public libraries, opera, theatre, etc.

• Middle-class childhood boon for toy industry and literature (mostly authored by women)

• Appropriation and exclusion of aberrant cultures: canonicity

High Art, Popular, and Mass Culture

• Culture as adjective, 1870-• Transformation of low European culture (Opera,

Shakespeare, etc.) into “high” art for wealthy American elites

• Culture becomes ‘incorporated’ when small group dictates standards

• Educating and spiritually uplifting aspects of culture; search for “great” literature, art

• Key historical events and figures repackaged as bedrock of national culture: potential ambivalence of text and audience

• Potential of popular/workingclass culture vs. capitalist mass culture (1920-)

Is popular culture an alternative/form of resistance to hegemony or an acceleration

of the dominant ideology?• Hobsbawm’s “optimism”: “The cultural revolution of the latest twentieth

century can thus best be understood as the triumph of the individual over society, or rather, the breaking of the threads which in the past had woven human beings into social textures.”

• Williams’ faith in the ordinariness of culture and a ‘painless’ Marxist cultural criticism: “Culture includes the organization of production, the structure of the family, the structure of institutions which express or govern social relationships, the characteristic forms through which members of the society communicate.”

• Frankfurt School traditionally sees only cultural productions’ manipulation of audiences and complicity rather than agency and capacity for critique (unlike variants of classic Marx): however, globalization may prove Althusser right: one cannot escape ideology: “ideology has no history”

• Traditional Marxist cultural criticism inadequate in handling questions of race and gender

Birth of Discourse: Advertising Mass Culture

• Right: early Coca Cola ad ca 1886

• 1838-1900: First department stores revolutionize retail marketing

• 1872: Montgomery Ward Establishes Mail-Order Business

• 1893: Columbian Exposition

• 1894: Kellogg's Corn Flakes Launch the Dry Cereal Industry

• In US: post Civil War technology boom; birth of modern corporations

Integration of folk cultures• German immigrants create Tin Pan Alley and

New York music industry; promote Af-Am ragtime (1893)

• Blackface mistrelsy and vaudeville (1880s): white cultural theft

• Amusement parks like Coney Island (1895) and World’s Fairs (Chi, 1893) spaces for working-class audiences

• Mass-produced dime novels for working class• “women’s literature” dominates publishing

industry • Baseball (1845); first Natl League 1876;

Spaulding turns it corporate; 1884 black Cincinnati player Moses Walker fired

Blackface and cultural appropriation

• Right: “Coon” song by black song writer Ernest Hogan c 1890

• Early 19thC minstrel shows focus on plantation life but prettify slavery

• Conservative discourses make fun of women’s suffrage and professionals

• From 1890s focus is on “olios,” which would feature many popular songs

• Written by both black and white songwriters

• White theft of black culture

Destabilizing Gender: The Cushman Sisters in Romeo and Juliet (1846) and May Irwin and her black baby, ca. 1890

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp_v_dP8s-8 (Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet, 1899)

New Vaudeville Theatre, 1870

Theatre: High Art and Mass Culture

• Left: Florenz Ziegfeld• Conspicuous

consumption of feminine body

• Ziegfeld Follies• Low parades as high

(variety show with expensive packaging)

• Women (w/ exception of Fannie Brice) do not speak

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81Y0gtQ3biA

Publishing Revolutions: Dime Novels (1860s-1890s): fantasies of anti-establishment discourse

Popular Journals and Social Criticism

• McClure’s nationwide readership

• Specialized in “muckraking” journalism and efforts to promote progressive reform

• Exposes of poverty, abuses of big business

• 1880s half-tone process enables many photographs to appear in edition of newspaper or magazine

• 1887 flash photography

But the magazine wasn’t always so high-minded…

Gender, power, and ambivalence: 1910 and 1918

Women and the Marketing of Domestic Culture

Feminization of American Culture

• Were women merely passive consumers of American culture?

• Women as consumers and drivers of publishing industry• Women’s fiction (anon., C. Sedgwick, H.B. Stowe) often

depicts women working in cities: counterpoint to Horatio Alger

• Relationship between women and missionaries—feminine control of religious instruction

• Women authors of popular history with educational slant; early social and cultural histories

• See Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (1988)

The Best-Seller

• Sold 300,000 copies in first year

• Racial melodrama• Political and social

controversy• Adapted as popular

theatre in vaudeville, on show boats, and on Broadway

• Commodification of history and race

The Columbia Exposition• Created/funded by private corporation• Daniel Burnham chooses white, neo-classical plan for all

buildings and decor• Focus on American achievements in technology and culture

(focus on corporate creations)• ‘Ideal city’ built on reclaimed wilderness and swamp land• Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show on display at exposition– mass

marketing of Western history also frequently toured Europe• Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis presented at

Chi’s AHA meeting (new white national myth)• And as this was happening…US/European businessmen

take over Hawaii– the open door justification for capitalism and the triumph of white civilization

Columbia Exposition• “White City” designed by Daniel Burnham• 27.5 million people attend– Emphasis on US surpassing rest of

world– compare to Crystal Palace, 1851

Wild West Show, 1883-1916

The National Culture?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rU6a7S1YHLQ

Motion Pictures

• Working-class origins• Gradual consolidation of small nickelodeon businesses

into studios• Gradual trend toward stars and adaptations of best-selling

literary properties• Connection between popular literature, journalism,

advertising, different appeals to male/female spectatorship• By 1915 and Birth of a Nation, self-consciousness about

cinema as art and historical text• Critics divided; Seldes sees its potential as liveliest art• Attempts to censor westerns, early gangster films, and

boxing matches

Edison Kinetoscope

Although experiments with mps date to 1870s, the first peepshow viewer was exhibited by Thomas Edison at the Columbian Exposition in 1893

Projectors enter market in 1895

Spanish-American War first war ‘filmed’ (re-enactments mostly)

Mary Pickford:

behind the camera

Suffrage advocate, 1917

Reclaiming Blackness• Jack Johnson, first African

American heavyweight champion of the world 1908-1915

• Knocks out former British heavyweight Bob Fitzsimmons in 2 rounds, 1907

• Fight of the century, 4 July 1910: defeat of white James Jeffries

• Film of fight sparks race riots in 25 states; Theodore Roosevelt demands ban on interstate distribution fight films (upheld till 1940)

National Cultures and the ‘Great White Hope’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t-7SVbLjBw