The quotation marks in my title offer homage to John A. Kouwenhoven for a stimulating essay he published under that name more than twenty years ago. In it he brought under one intuitive umbrella such diverse Americana as the Manhattan skyline, the gridiron town plan, the skyscraper, jazz, the Constitution, Mark Twain's writing, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, assembly-line production, and chewing gum. What united them all, he felt, was their embodiment of process—the ongoing changingness that was the essence of America. Brilliant as the essay may be, it remains inspired journalism because Kouwenhoven had no method to propose except his own cultivated intuition. In this essay I shall speak of several of the same American phenomena but in a context intended to meet the need for a theory and a method to guide the complex business of making sense of American distinctiveness.

Modern society, it would seem, is a conspiracy against authentic existence. Freud thought this true of all civilization, but a generation of literary critics, historians, and social scientists are laying at the door of modern civilization responsibility for the pathologies of everyday life. The time scales vary greatly, some scholars insisting that the modern revolution in the conception of the self has taken centuries, while others see this process as having taken place within the last century, but the savants all seem to arrive at roughly the same conclusion, namely, that what characterizes modern American life in this century is an unconsummated search for authenticity. The social pathology of this search, those most critical of modernity conclude, is narcissism. Clearly, whatever form the argument takes and regardless of the willingness of the analyst to moralize on the basis of his or her analysis, authenticity is a “hot” subject.

Rhythm—the measured flow of motion—is an essential formative aspect of reality and of our experience, and ritual is among the principal cultural resources by which we grasp and participate in those rhythms and gain some purchase upon them and the energies they embody.

Victorian America was a society of infinite sexual complexity. It simultaneously spawned both the loose and vigorous sexuality of the frontier and the repression of Edith Wharton's New York. It elaborated a subtle and delicate world of same-sex love among women and men. It both condemned and was fascinated by male homosexuality, while refusing to define lesbianism as deviant. It supported a multitude of communal and religious attacks on the patriarchal family, from the sexual austerity of the Shakers, through the sexual pleasures of Fanny Wright's Nashoba and Oneida's communal family, to the polygamy of the Mormons. Thousands of Americans attended Victoria Woodhull's free-love rallies and sustained without much psychic disarray the shock of the Beecher-Tildon scandal. Pornography, venereal disease rates, prostitution, and widespread abortion point to a society actively engaged in the pursuit of real and fantasized sexual pleasures, both within and outside conjugal confines.

Although I am neither an Americanist nor an American I am a comparative symbologist, interested in processual as well as structural aspects of ritual, myth, and symbol. The two essays that precede abound in general theoretical statements, and I wish to address myself briefly to the issues raised by each author that have the widest comparative implications. Each essay is rich in ideas and data, and I regret that space permits only a condensed treatment.

When it comes to discussions about the term “melting pot” our minds seem to be made up. “The point about the melting pot…is that it did not happen,” Glazer and Moynihan conclude in their widely read study, significantly entitled Beyond the Melting Pot (1963). Michael Novak's book with the equally telling title The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (1972) agrees that the melting pot “did not exist,” although “meltingpot ideology” according to Novak “has dominated the social sciences for three decades.” Yet, as Philip Gleason has demonstrated, the term “melting-pot” has been met with rebuttals by conservatives and liberals alike, from the time it was popularized by Israel Zangwill's play The Melting-Pot (1908) to the present. Poetic advocates and sociological opponents of the term, however, shared a certain vagueness in defining the meaning of “melting pot” while embellishing and elaborating the imagery. Attempts to interpret the image in strict social terms range from “Americanization of newcomers” to “constant change and regeneration of Americans through ethnic interaction and/or intermarriage.” Isaac Berkson, Edward Saveth, Milton Gordon, and Andrew Greeley have drawn up elaborate models that distinguish the melting pot “concept” from such alternatives as “Americanization,” “Anglo-Conformity,” “Federation of Nationalities,” or “Cultural Pluralism.” Of course, the meaning of the image has also changed historically from the idealistic concern with an American national identity at the time of the American Revolution to the different practical versions of the melting pot during the period of the New Immigration. Apparently, the opposition to the melting pot is at least as old as the notion itself, and includes such luminaries as Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin. In 1785, for example, three years after Crèvecoeur first evoked the melting imagery in defining an American national character, a pseudonymous “Celadon”'s The Golden Age: or Future Glory of North-America mapped out the future United States as a confederation of nation-states and specifically listed “Nigrania” and “Savagenia”—a black and an Indian state—in the Southwest as well as the establishment of “a French, a Spanish, a Dutch, an Irish, &c. yea, a Jewish state.”

Washington, D.C., was unusual, unique. It was the one place in the America Henry James visited in 1904–5 where “men existed.” And to James, “that rich little fact became the key to everything.” Everywhere else men were at work, were in business, and had left “society”—“but a rough name,” he says, “for all the other so numerous relations with the world he lives in that are imputable to the civilized being”—had left all that to women. It was a “windfall” and she was quick to take advantage, but it was also, James knew, a trap. Predator she may seem, clutching here, “pouncing” elsewhere in the passage, but “her situation, under this retrospect, may affect the inner fibre of the critic himself as one of the most touching on record … she was to have been after all but the sport of fate.” The American Man goes off, off to work or into silence, may feign sleep or, as James also has it, sulk like Achilles, and women may have “turned away with so light a heart after watching the Man, the deep American Man, retire into his tent and let down the flap,” but they do not win: “The abdication of the Man proves ever (after the first flush of their triumph) as bad really for their function as for his.”

John Sloan (1871–1951) was an early twentieth-century realist painter who embraced the principles of socialism and placed his artistic talents at the service of those beliefs. Hence, his graphic contributions to the radical, socialist monthly The Masses, and his work as art editor, made it one of the most extraordinary publications of the pre-World War I period. But as a painter Sloan shied from political or social comment. Instead, the paintings celebrate the leisure moments of the working classes, particularly women, in such paintings as his Picnic Grounds of 1906–7 (Whitney Museum of American Art) and Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair of 1912 (Addison Gallery of American Art). Sloan himself later insisted that these paintings were done with “sympathy but no social consciousness”: “I was never interested in putting propaganda into my paintings, so it annoys me when art historians try to interpret my city life pictures as ‘socially conscious.’ I saw the everyday life of the people, and on the whole I picked out bits-of joy in human life for my subject matter.”

In a movie directed by Frank Capra toward the end of the Great Depression, an enterprising lady reporter with an eye for the photogenic persuades a down-and-out ballplayer to act the part of “John Doe,” “author” of her new syndicated front-page column, “I Protest!” The speeches that Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck) pays the handsome hobo (Gary Cooper) to front are, if slightly sentimental, always provocative and immediately successful. They inveigh against the petty self-interest that in the name of rugged individualism has weakened and corrupted the cause of the common citizen in this country; they plead for a new spirit of grass-roots cooperative activism. “Tear down the fences,” John Doe implores his small-town audiences. “You're the hope of the world!”

In the early 1930s, a significant number of American artists who were aligned, either practically or theoretically, with the Communist Party became supporters of the New Deal. Artist members of the John Reed Club, a Party-directed cultural organization, were enjoined to develop “revolutionary art” as a vehicle for the type of social change that had transformed tsarist Russia into the Soviet Union. Yet many of them found Roosevelt's “peaceful revolution” worthy of the highest accolade they could bestow on a subject: its inclusion as an affirmative theme in their work. In so viewing it, they ran counter to the Party's stated policy in opposition to socioeconomic reform—a policy that was later reversed to accommodate the New Deal and thus vindicate the artists's position. From its inception, the New Deal seemed to offer artists an attractive alternative to the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions predicted by Marx and promulgated by the Communists.

In a pioneering article on the “Documentary Approach to Photography” published in 1938, Beaumont Newhall cited two large-scale contemporary photodocumentations to exemplify what he saw as the commitment of “younger photographers” to “this materialistic approach [as] the basis for an esthetic of photography.” Both projects had been supported by the federal government since 1935, and both were massive in scope. One was the monumental survey of rural America conducted for the Farm Security Administration by a team of photographers directed by the economist Roy Emerson Stryker. The other was “Changing New York”—the “courageous and sweeping documentation of New York City” by a single artist, Berenice Abbott, aided by a small group of research and technical assistants provided by the Federal Art Project of the WPA.

More than half a century has passed since Charles A. Lindbergh's transatlantic flight to Paris, and we are less certain than ever how to judge its significance. The event remains so clouded by the aura of ballyhoo that even at this distance it seems to belong less to the history of aviation than to the triumph of that inflated rhetoric we have come to recognize and distrust as media hype. “Now is the most marvelous day that this old earth has ever known,” proclaimed the soon-to-be Chief Justice of the United States, Charles Evans Hughes, at a banquet for the young pilot, adding, “This is the happiest day, the happiest day of all days for America.” The official account of the flight prepared for the Boy Scouts of America called it “all things considered, the greatest feat undertaken by a single man.” A historian must back away from such eulogies, but not so far that he loses sight of their contribution to the essential character of the event.

When the Reverend Mr. Wilson confronts the little girl Pearl in The Scarlet Letter (Chapter 8), his mind is stymied by the fullness of her being, but his imagination responds to what she is and nostalgically recalls a religion and its sacramental art that could comprehend in her what baffles the Puritan and Ramistic approach of either/or: “Methinks I have seen just such figures, when the sun has been shining through a richly painted window, and tracing out the golden and crimson images across the floor. But that was in the old land.” It seems that ever since the Puritan logic of exclusion our major writers have longed for such an “imagined place” as the floor of the church in the old land,

Where finally the way the world feels

really means how things are,

in dear detail,

by ideal light all around us.

Hawthorne's tale of the Reverend Mr. Hooper is, by all accounts, one of his most puzzling. And, almost as certainly, Hooper himself represents Hawthorne's most difficult “case” of Puritan conscience. The more famous problem of the motivation and moral intention of Goodman Brown appears, by comparison, easy—and even a little melodramatic.

In 1882 Henry James wrote a review of Zola's Nana that criticized the French Naturalist because he lacked a sense of humor: “In the eyes of ‘naturalism’ enjoyment is a frivolous, a superficial, a contemptible sentiment.…. M. Zola disapproves greatly of wit; he thinks it is an impertinence in a novel, and he would probably disapprove of humor if he knew what it is.” And Zola, in “Naturalism in the Theatre,” was uncomplimentary about a leading playwright's comic scenes; he called Sardou a bad dramatist because “we never get anything except outrageously enlarged vaudeville skits, the comic force of which comes entirely from caricature.” Nevertheless, Zola suggested that a reader might “shudder or laugh” as long as the dramatist “disappears; … keeps his emotions to himself; … simply sets forth what he has seen.”

Histories and novels are old allies, but the alliance is now troubled. The historian C. Vann Woodward told a convention of historians a decade ago that “our kindship is actually much closer to novelists” than to social scientists. Both the novel and history, he pointed out, “sprang from a common parentage of story-telling” and “competed with each other to satisfy the demand for historical understanding.” Over the last two centuries, he maintained, “novelists have been becoming ever more deeply historically conscious.” In the same year in which Woodward's remarks were published another historian, Sigfried Kracauer, struck a different note. The pioneers of the modern novel, Joyce, Proust, and Woolf, he observed, “no longer care to render biographical developments and chronological sequences after the manner of the older novel; on the contrary, they resolutely decompose (fictitious) continuity over time.” Thus modern art has “radically challenged the artistic ideals from which the general historian draws his inspiration—from which he must draw it to establish his genre.” But Kracauer explicitly cautioned against confusing his observations with attempts to “question the faithfulness to reality of the general historian's accounts.” He only drew the conclusion that general, large-scale narrative history as a genre survives only because metaphysical and political interests invite the historian to look at the past “from above” as a whole, instead of looking at it “from below” in the form of analytical specialized histories.

The Difficulty of using popular culture as a way of understanding historical periods is no secret. Historians themselves have long been reluctant to study the impact of the mass media because it does not seem to yield the sorts of “hard” evidence presumably found in political debates, social legislation, state department memoranda, statistics on production and trade, tax records, or movements of population. All of these source materials persuade the historian that he can discover what people actually thought and did, whereas it seems almost impossible to detect what effects, if any, popular culture has had on the attitudes and behavior of its audience.

The Car and the TV set are icons of the polytheistic secular religion of Americans. The proof is in our behavior patterns: To be deprived of our car or our television set constitutes a near crisis in our daily life, not only in the radical restructuring of our time and our movements, but also in the marked psychological effects of such restructuring—feelings of loss, helplessness, in some cases even depression. (For purposes of comparison, consider the emotional effects of a temporary deprivation of railroad trains, for example, or live theater.)

The religious epic, which consistently dominated the annual list of top-grossing films throughout the 1950s, was spawned by the trying conditions that developed in the United States, and Hollywood in particular, during the aftermath of World War II. V-J Day sent the country on a short-lived spree from which it awoke with a hangover that was to last for years. If most anticipated the difficulties of finding jobs and housing, few foresaw the soaring inflation and crippling strikes that followed. To make matters worse, Soviet belligerence and the frightening spread of Communism soon intruded the prospect of another war and a possible nuclear holocaust. Mounting disagreement over appropriate solutions eroded belief that any would work. For many people, the best years of their lives, of which the war was once thought to have robbed them, began to appear as though they may well have been the best.

In the Nineteenth Century, it was common practice for popular novels to be adapted to the theater. In the absence of any distinguished playwrights in English between Sheridan and Shaw, the novel was the most flourishing middle-class literary entertainment, and the theater-going public found compensation for the dearth of original drama by seeing their favorite fictional characters on stage. Novels by Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Hawthorne, and Mark Twain were dramatized with varying degrees of success, together with plays from such popular favorites as Uncle Tom's Cabin, Under Two Flags, Ben-Hur, The Prisoner of Zenda, If I Were King, and Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.