An American Orthodoxy

Last week on Facebook, Andrew Hartman posted the following fbleg from a friend:

Dear academic friends: Please help! A friend of mine is seeking texts for a student (see his query below):  

Can you think of a good text in the modern American context that would help my student (and me) learn about the tension between orthodoxy and dissidence that is not so removed from her own experience and reading? I think TV and other tools of cultural, political, and intellectual homogenization create the impression that "we are one", that the counter-culture on the left and right are simply insane, whacko. What would represent orthodoxy or the mainstream? Barack Obama's autobiography? Something by Thomas Friedman? The counter narrative? Cornell West? Glen Beck? Maybe you can think of relevant films?

 I thought that this was an interesting, but poorly framed, query. As I wrote in response:

I don't think most people in this country feel they belong to a consensual center, beset by whackos, left and right. I think that view--which is, roughly, the Tom Friedman view--belongs to a neoliberal, self-understood "center" that represents a tiny minority of the public (though a big chunk of the policy elite). More people, I think, see themselves as representing some version of "real America" with whackos besetting them from only one side (left or right, depending on which real America we're talking about). I find it difficult to discover any kind of actual consensual "center" in American culture today...except for things that are to us as water is to fish (necessary but invisible), e.g. the English language and capitalism itself, i.e. stuff we take for granted, not things that appear in particular books or movies.

But, in fact, there is at least one thing that does form something like a consensual center to American culture today: an abiding faith in the military.  Americans disagree about what our military role should be in Afghanistan.  We are deeply divided about the proper level of military spending and even about our state of military readiness.   But the military remains far and away the most trusted institution in American life.

Since 1973, Gallup has conducted an annual survey of public confidence in fifteen key institutions. Since the mid-1980s, the most trusted institution has been the military.  In the most recent survey, taken about eleven months ago, 78% of those surveyed had "a great deal of" or "quite a lot of" confidence in the military. Sixteeen per cent had "some" confidence in the military. Only 3% had little or none. While confidence in most institutions is well below historical averages, confidence in the military is 11% higher than average.*

As we celebrate Memorial Day, I think this particular cultural orthodoxy bears some further consideration.

Message Seeks Medium: Babin, McLuhan, and Franciscans

I spent part of this past week working on a new book project in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara (not bad, I know).  I am writing on how a various orders of Franciscans (both men and women) used various forms of media to spread a somewhat common message.  My pithy way of describing this project is to say that I am studying the way a message searched for a medium.  Obviously a play on Marshall McLuhan's famous way of describing the new age of electronic communication, I adopted my description fully ignorant of how apt it actually is to describe by topic.

When I speak to people about Franciscan media, I usually get either a vacant nod or a question about what a Franciscan is.  In the photo above, the Franciscan in this instance is Karl Holsteidner, who at the time of the photo was a Franciscan priest who helped found and run Franciscan Communications in Los Angeles for almost 30 years.  Karl was not trained in the field he became an expert in, but he was and remains a committed Franciscan theologically.  The poster he holds in the photo hints at the role he played in media--he used television and the episodes he produced from the ground up to bring the message of St. Francis of Assisi to millions of viewers.  In this way, Karl and his associates in Franciscan Communications hoped to carry out the charge of their founder to preach the gospel and when necessary use words.

The Company We Keep

Before I was a regular blogger here -- before I had even left my first faltering comment as the far-more-mysterious-than-I-intended-to-be "LD" -- I started a personal blog about the process of becoming a historian.  My blogospheric venture was hardly unique.  Lots of PhD students blog -- it can be a way of finding your footing, getting your bearings, training your voice.  That's how it worked for me, anyhow.

The very first post I wrote on that blog was a meditation on the uncanny experience of reading the scholarship of a now-deceased historian named, delightfully, Rising Lake Morrow.  I considered how it is possible that I as a reader can be "in conversation" with this author.

I wrote:

The term "conversation," though, implies some degree of mutuality and perhaps intentionality.  So is it fair to apply it to my reading of Morrow?  After all, I can choose Morrow as a partner in dialogue; he cannot choose me.  Eighty years after his article was published, I doubt that he is around to make any more choices -- just as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison were unavailable for comment when Morrow drew upon their writings for his article of 1936.

But even when those men were writing for the exigencies of the present, they knew they were writing for the future too.  And when Morrow published his article about their thinking, he was writing not only for his contemporaries but also for the generations of scholars who he expected to succeed him, as scholars do.  In a way, then, Morrow did choose to converse with me.  As the writer to the Hebrews put it, "By faith he, though dead, yet speaketh."

This is the faith of scholarship:  believing that our work might speak not only to the questions of the moment but also to those questioners whose time is yet to come.  And upon this faith is built the secular ekklesia of the academy -- not the communion of saints, but the communion of sages.  We converse with each other, and with scholars of generations past, for the benefit not only of ourselves but for all the scholars who will follow us. We respond to living texts and dead authors, not to pass the time or fill the world with words, but to say something worth our own and others' time right now that might still have value later.

I have been thinking a great deal lately about the value of history, the value of being -- or becoming -- a historian.

Book Review: Seal on Horowitz's Consuming Pleasures

Review of Daniel Horowitz’s Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). ISBN: 9780812243956. 491 pages.

Reviewed by Andrew Seal
Yale University

The book under review is the third that Daniel Horowitz has published on consumer culture in the United States, and it both is and isn’t useful to think of it as part of a trilogy, along with The Morality of Spending: Attitudes Toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875-1940 (1985) and The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939-1979 (2004). One reason in favor of doing so is simply that it puts Horowitz’s efforts into perspective: Horowitz has produced an achievement in many ways on par with Richard Slotkin’s dense and sweeping trio chronicling the place of the West in the American imagination, one of the very few other instances of such sustained scholarly diligence.[1]

It is clear that Horowitz himself sees Consuming Pleasures as building on the arguments of the previous two works, providing a further development of “the subject I have been working on since the early 1970s, the story of how intellectuals have responded to affluence and consumer culture” (x). Consuming Pleasures advances this story by tracking a new development in this debate: the emergence of a “postmoralism” or an “anthropological outlook on culture” which superseded the “new moralism” of modernist disdain and paternalistic expertise (the subject of Anxieties of Affluence), the position which in its own day had supplanted the more traditional moralism of self-restraint and parsimony (The Morality of Spending).

Horowitz argues that, in the heady first flush of the postwar U.S. economic boom, and in the slowly reconstructing and still rationing European envy of that prosperity, the seeds were sown for what was at first, for figures like David Riesman, the early Marshall McLuhan, Roland Barthes, and Richard Hoggart, a hesitant détente between intellectuals and “popular culture.” That thaw then gradually became, for Tom Wolfe, Herbert Gans, Stuart Hall, and Susan Sontag, a more engaged if not fully appreciative approach to the study of “consumer culture.” Pluralist assessments of cultural validity and worth reluctantly edged out hierarchical standards and fixed canons, with critics locating newfound resources for bottom-up creativity and even individuality within what was previously considered the top-down and stultifying domains of mass culture. By 1972, Horowitz argues, cultural critics like Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown had begun not only to tinker with the distinctions between high and low culture, but to argue for the suspension of such segmentations altogether. Such critics emphasized the emancipatory or even utopian promise of consumption, identifying within it an entirely malleable system of communication, a realm of free play and self-creation.

Black Freedom Movement Course

As you may know, I've been on the job market this year. I spent these past two years at the University of Kentucky as a post-doctoral scholar, first in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Dean's Office and then in the History Department. Well, I have good news! I will be joining the Luther College faculty in the fall as a visiting assistant professor. I'm teaching three courses in the fall--an introductory seminar on Big Questions that all incoming freshmen have to take, African American History since the 17th century, and the Black Freedom Movement.

Today, I'd like to write about some of my ideas for the Black Freedom Movement course, particularly my idea to structure the course according to historiographical debates rather than primarily chronologically. There are so many historiographical choices I need to make, in addition to pedagogical ones. When do I start the course? If it is a Civil Rights Course, then maybe WWII (or if it is the Long Civil Rights Movement, 1930s-1970s). If it is a true Black Freedom Movement course, then I could start way back with abolitionists, slave revolts, the Haitian Revolution, or on-ship rebellions. The newly adopted course description helps me make some of these decisions (This year represents the first year that it will be called the Black Freedom Movement rather than the Civil Rights Movement).

AFRS 235 The Modern Black Freedom Movement in the United States

The debate over the timing, scope, and trajectory of the civil rights and black power movements in the United States has long been a contested subject among historians. Scholars are now challenging the traditional non-violent southern movement narrative by pointing to a broad range of regionally diverse black political struggles across the twentieth century. Researchers are also calling into question the notion that civil rights and black power were two distinct movements. Engaging in these conversations and covering such themes as class, region, gender, community formation, militancy, and grassroots activism, we will cover the mass protests of the thirties and forties, the direct action campaigns of the fifties and sixties, and black liberation struggles that stretched into the seventies. Through analysis of key texts in new civil rights and black power studies, speeches, music, film, television, oral histories, and photography, we will critically examine the movement’s objectives and results, raise questions about the contour of American democracy and racial politics in the late twentieth century, and explore what is distinct about the “post-civil rights era.”

Analysis or Synthesis?

During his tenure leading the American Historical Association, William Cronon has been using his "From the President" column, which appears monthly in Perspectives on History, to explore the various ways in which people seek to understand the past. He's been comparing and contrasting the habits of professional historians with other people who study the past, such as popular and amateur historians. Cronon's overarching objective, it seems to me, is to convince professional historians to make their scholarship more accessible to a larger public, without losing the scrupulous disciplinary standards which we've been conditioned to since our first graduate seminar. This is a laudable goal, even though, as Ben Alpers rightly pointed out a few months ago, in response to one of Cronon's editorials, "the story we tell ourselves about academic history appealing to a mass audience is to a very great extent a myth."

Cronon's latest column in this series, "Breaking Apart, Pulling Away," compares and contrasts analysis-driven history with synthesis-driven history. He introduces the subject as follows:

From Rome with Love III

by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

In the battle merely to survive physically, food and shelter are essential, clothing (except as shelter) optional. That seems relatively simple, especially since these basic needs have been with us since our infancy at the so-called dawn of civilization.

Each of us tries for survival now with the means available in the postmodern economy. But what is remarkable, in these individualized times, is when one of us tries for the survival of someone else as well. So when a whole group tries, even better, not only for other people's survival but for their flourishing, it is doubly, triply, quadruply remarkable. This is one of those rare times, with manipulation and murkiness abundant, when a distinctly un-fuzzy math can actually prevail. Just multiply by the number of people and you get the degree of remarkability.

By this measure, Italy deserves perhaps not to be romanticized, exactly, as we can allocate its rather substantial flaws. But I think it should be considered a prime candidate for re-romanticization. It stands for food--good food. And now many are trying to describe a particular definition of good in a conversation that has ramifications well beyond food itself.

Farm to Market: Can the Stanford Humanities PhD "Remain Relevant"?

Earlier this week, my Twitter feed lit up with news from the Farm -- tweeted and retweeted links (most to this Inside Higher Ed story) and lots of chatter about a proposal put forward by a group of senior faculty at Stanford to make significant changes to the structure and funding of humanities PhDs there.

You can download the four-page proposal here.  It is a provoking and thought-provoking document, and I would like to invite our readers to help me think through its implications.  Overall, I find its rationale problematic, but I would be glad to hear other views.  Indeed, I would be glad to know there is some other way.

The proposed changes outlined in the document include -- among other things -- requiring grad students to select an academic or non-academic career goal early in their studies, offering alternatives to the dissertation where appropriate to meet those goals, and drastically reducing the total time to degree to (ideally) five years.  "Currently," the report notes, "Stanford culture encourages students to take longer than five years with the help of prestigious dissertation fellowship competitions.  We believe that financial support should be structured as an incentive to finish earlier, not later."  The plan proposes to speed the time to degree by fully funding students during summers; it will also require departments to set benchmarks that students must achieve in order to remain in the PhD program. 

Notorious

[Note: This is the fourth USIH post in relation to "For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III." Please see the introduction to Ben Alpers' 2012 USIH blogathaon entry for more information. Click HERE to make a donation to the National Film Preservation Foundation.]

I inherited Hitchcock films through my father.  He gave them to me in a way that might sound familiar to others who grew-up in the general New York City area and who, in those pre-cable days, would flip between channels 9, 11, and 13 on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon or evening.  I would come across a black and white film and my father, reading a newspaper on the couch or fixing something on the coffee table, would reflexively, excitedly say, "oh, wait, I think that's..."  It would be To Catch a Thief or North by Northwest or even sometimes The Birds (pace Zizek!).  But the movie that my dad always implored me to watch was Notorious.  


I grew up remembering the ending before I understood there was a storyline between the two ridiculously attractive stars, Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant.  It was the ending, (you can see a shot of it is above) that would make its way into our conversation for the next few weeks.  My dad and I would find occasion (of course apropo of nothing) to say in terrible German-like accents: "Alex, will you come in please? I wish to talk to you."

Frames of Fear: The Lonely Voyeurism of Rear Window

by Tim Lacy

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[Note: This is the third USIH post in relation to "For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III." Please see the introduction to Ben Alpers' 2012 USIH blogathaon entry for more information. Click HERE to make a donation to the National Film Preservation Foundation.]
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My love and admiration for Hitchcock began with fuzzy UHF television reruns of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents (or "Hour," if you prefer). As a kid, watching the Hitchcock Hour at my grandparents' house, I admired the mystery and suspense of Hitchcock, as well as shows like The Twilight Zone. Each helped feed the impoverished imagination of a kid growing up in small-town, rural western Missouri. Later, during my adolescent and teenage years, I left Hitchcock behind for girls, science fiction, fantasy, and school concerns.

Courtesy of cable television (i.e. AMC) and the need for breaks from reading and drinking during graduate school, I rediscovered Hitchcock. This time I experienced his work in film. So, in between readings of Foucault, Thomas Kuhn, Peter Novick, and other graduate school standards, I worked my way through the Hitchcock film bibliography. Despite my graduate thinking about canons (via the great books idea), I wasn't concerned about screening only Hitchcock's "greatest hits" from the Fifties and Sixties---Psycho, Vertigo, Rear Window, The Birds, North by Northwest, etc. I also watched his lesser known and less acclaimed films from the Seventies, Forties, and Thirties. I never made it to the early Thirties or his silent films from the Twenties. But I did screen Sabotage, Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Suspicion, and Saboteur, among others. I recorded many of those AMC showings on VHS, and kept a log (yes, I'm a nerd like that) of my viewings in a copy of Donald Spoto's The Dark Side of Genius (Little, Brown, 1983; Da Capo, 1999). Indeed, it was probably the 1999 Hitchcock centennial that prompted AMC to review so many of his films precisely when I was grad student (1998-2006---with breaks). In any case, it worked out for me.

Plenary Sessions for 2012 USIH Conference

The 2012 S-USIH conference committee is pleased to announce the following plenary sessions:

1. Speech Rights: Legal History as Intellectual History

Recent controversial Supreme Court decisions, from Citizens United v. FEC (2010) to Brown v. Merchants of Entertainment (2011), have inspired impassioned discussion over contemporary interpretations of the free speech clause of the First Amendment. This plenary offers an historical look at the ideas that have shaped definitions of speech, speakers, and speech rights in U.S. history. Accordingly, it interrogates the intersections between speech rights law and intellectual history.

Participants:

Jack Balkin (Yale University)

Vincent Blasi (Columbia University)

Ronald Collins (University of Washington)

Catherine Ross (George Washington University)

2. The Most Commanding Theme of U.S. Intellectual History?

This session takes as its provocation a statement made by David Hollinger in Modern Intellectual History.  Hollinger argues that when American intellectual life is considered as part of the wider, trans-Atlantic West, “its most commanding theme is the accommodation of Protestant Christianity with the Enlightenment.” Participants are invited to respond to Hollinger’s claim in any way that they wish.  This should be an opportunity to engage in an interesting and wide-ranging conversation about the broad sweep of American intellectual history.

Participants:

Daniel Wickberg (University of Texas-Dallas)

Joan Shelley Rubin (University of Rochester)

Jennifer Burns (University of Virginia)

Jonathan Scott Holloway (Yale University)

The deadline for submission is now two weeks away.  The call for panels can be found here.

Black Tourists

[Sorry for the break in Alfred Hitchcock programming. Other than an encounter with "The Birds" in high school, I haven't seen much Hitchcock. I'm terribly uncultured, I know. I asked a film studies friend to pinch-hit for me, but she has other things to do, like an on-campus interview!]

I'm moving on from my Harlem chapter (which I've been blogging about for a while) to my chapter on black tourism. Alasdair Pettinger offers an interesting challenge to the idea of the chapter:

Yolande Du Bois

"In a recent anthology, one writer suggests that the very idea that Black people might actually travel for the sake of it is hard for some to accept: ‘Are you visiting relatives?’ ‘Do you work here?’ But then, as a contributor to the same collection half-answers, ‘former sharecroppers do not teach their children to travel for pleasure.’ And even if they learn some other way, their options still appear to be restricted, as a third author discovered when her travel piece was turned down by her editor. ‘With pity in his voice he blurted, ‘Black people don’t go to Iceland.’”

Some of the characteristics of black travelers that Pettinger, the editor of Always Elsewhere; Travels of the Black Atlantic, points out that are different from white travelers--there is not a built dichotomy between cosmopolitan "traveler" and local "native"; black travelers eagerly embrace the racial solidarity of "disaporic rendezvous"; black travelers tend not to romanticize world citizenship; home is not an uncontested space ("the expected contrast between the familiarity of home and the strangeness of abroad that underpins so much travel literature is often absent.”)

The Horror! Hitchcock through Zizek

[This is the second post in the USIH Blog's participation in For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III. See Ben's fantastic first contribution here. This year's blogathon, which runs through Friday, May 18, focuses on Alfred Hitchcock. Money is being raised for the National Film Preservation Foundation's The White Shadow Project, which will record Michael Mortilla's score to this 1924 silent that Hitchcock wrote and on which he worked as an Assistant Director, and will make the movie available for free streaming online. Those interested in donating can click this link or the thumbnail announcing the blogathon over in the right margin.  For the Love of Film III is being cohosted by Farran Nehme of The Self-Styled Siren, Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films, and Rod Heath of This Island Rod.]

What do horror films do? What makes them persistently popular? I came of age in the 80s with Freddy Krueger, the undead, knives-as-finger-nails antagonist in Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street film series. These films pivoted from the tried-and-true horror flick formula. Teenagers who behaved badly, those who imbibed in drugs and sex, died the first horrific deaths at the "hands" of Freddy, who worked as a sort of demonic guarantor of a traditional symbolic order--an order that was dying an equally horrific death. But even more, Freddy was the return of the repressed for the parents, who had long ago violated Biblical commandments in their futile efforts to protect the old order. So Freddy is a ghoulish representation of the corruption of both old and new orders. There's no going back to the old, which was sustained by an undercurrent of repression. But the new, the libertine, the transgressive, the antinomian, is nothing to celebrate. Freddy as such is the quintessential postmodern specter.

Michael Powell, Alfred Hitchcock, and Cinematic Reputation

Alfred Hitchcock's Self-Portrait
(from the opening title sequence of
Alfred Hitchcock Presents)

[This post kicks off the USIH Blog's participation in For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III.  This year's blogathon, which began yesterday, May 13, and runs through Friday, May 18, focuses on Alfred Hitchcock.  Money is being raised for the National Film Preservation Foundation's The White Shadow Project, which will record Michael Mortilla's score to this 1924 silent that Hitchcock wrote and on which he worked as an Assistant Director, and will make the movie available for free streaming online.  Those interested in donating can click this link or the thumbnail announcing the blogathon over in the right margin.  For the Love of Film III is being cohosted by Farran Nehme of The Self-Styled Siren, Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films, and Rod Heath of This Island Rod.]

I

In his two-volume autobiography, the magnificent A Life in Movies (1986) and the messier but still fascinating Million-Dollar Movie (1992), Michael Powell writes extensively about his fellow English-born director, Alfred Hitchcock.  Seven years his junior, Powell evinces great admiration for Hitchcock, calling him, along with Walt Disney and Charlie Chaplin, one of "three great artists [who] have saved the film business from going completely off the rails in my time" (ALIM, 183).  But despite his repeated praise for Hitchcock, Powell's feelings about him appear to be more complicated than he is willing to explicitly admit.

In ALIM, Powell reports a story from the time in the late 1920s when he  was working as the head of the stills department of British International Pictures, where Hitchcock had established himself as a director. Hitchcock took a shine to Powell and insisted that he personally take stills for his movies.  According to Powell, while completing The Manxman (1929), Hitchcock asked him to help improve the final act of the screenplay for Blackmail (1929), which would become Hitchcock's first sound movie:

When we came to the chase through the streets, I broached an idea that I had been maturing for a while. 

"Hitch! Don't let's do an ordinary chase through the streets like you did in The Lodger. Let's take it into some bizarre location that is entertaining in itself." 

"What do you mean? What do you think Michael means, Alma?"  Alma [Hitchcock's wife and screenwriting collaborator] looked encouragingly at me. 

I had been thinking of my visits to the British Museum Reading Room to see my grandfather, and the impression that had been made upon me by his bent figure, at his desk, dwarfed by the height of the shelves and topped by the glass dome over the whole vast room, and I went on: "Let's have him slip into the British Museum at night and get chased through rooms full of Egyptian mummies and Elgin Marbles, and climb higher to escape, and be cornered and then fall through the glass dome of the Reading Room and break his neck." 

Hitch, being a Londoner, had never been near the British Museum Reading Room, but he saw the possibilities of the idea, and so I think I can make a modest claim to being the inventor of the Hitchcock Climax, unveiled to the world through the chase in Blackmail, and which led us all on many a delightful dance from Tower Bridge to Mount Rushmore, from the Statue of Liberty to you name it. (ALIM, 193)

Powell says no more about this and immediately moves on to other matters (he would, in a sense, try his own hand at a Hitchcock Climax in his second collaboration with Emeric Pressburger, Contraband(1940)).  But this little anecdote is, I think, very telling.

From Rome with Love, II

By Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

When encountering something outside one's usual experience, one's first instinct is to draw comparisons and contrasts with what one knows. Trite and true, right?

It sounds so simple.

But of course there are deep philosophical and psychological questions about what makes us us and what makes them them--and ethical questions about whether it should. Layer onto this questions from theology, cognitive science, anthropology, and history, let alone art and literature, and we must ask, in more ways than one, who do we think we are?

When we take note of so-called cultural differences, is a generalization about our own or another culture ever accurate? Many recent reviews of Woody Allen's To Rome with Love (still haven't seen it) judge it replete with superficial stereotypes. Are works of cultural history or social criticism often that different, however careful they might try to be? Isn't the risk of over-simplifying--or, obversely, of over-complicating, more au courant in academia these days--a pitfall of generalizing at all, and thus of characterizing, portraying, or observing?