#112, December 7, 2006
The New World of American Studies
Borrowing from Amy Kaplan, I want to begin by giving you a short vignette about Perry Miller, who was one of the leading lights in American history and almost a virtual dean of American Studies even before he published Errand into the Wilderness in 1956.[1] In the 1920s, after finishing his undergraduate work and not knowing what to do with his life he had taken an oil tanker to Africa and was unloading drums of oil on some docks on the Congo River when he had an epiphany. This flash of inspiration was the sense that he was now in a wilderness, like the Puritans had been when they arrived in America, and that, like them, he had been Òleft alone with America.Ó This epiphany resulted in him charting out a course in his mind through graduate school and towards his career as one of the premier scholars from the end of the 1930s until about 1960 of what he called the American character.
There are several aspects to this story of interest to us, one of which I will return to later, namely what is left out of this story of Perry Miller in Africa and the Puritans in the American colonies. Another aspect of this story that is noticeable is the importance of the perspective from the outside. This is the inspiration that comes from being outside looking in, or being in an alien place contemplating what one knows, but from a new and different perspective. Or, in a somewhat different context it is being in a position where you are no longer of something so that you can assess it and yourself anew.
In this case, Perry Miller was in an alien land and it enabled him to think of American history in new ways. What was perhaps important to him was that he was seeing a land that was completely different from the land with which he was familiar and his response to this situation was to begin to think about how white settlers had viewed the new world – a land totally alien to them. Perry Miller, in a way, had been able to step outside his environment so that he could reflect on his society and its past as if he were for a moment an outsider. And it is that outsiderÕs perspective that I will want to return to at the end of this talk, because I think that some of the most significant scholars of American society have been outsiders bringing a different perspective to the United States, and the future of American Studies, in my opinion, lies in the possibility of engaging with such interpretations and creating a dialogue about the American experience – what its boundaries might be, what its different aspects might be, how these have changed over time, and whether indeed it is justified to talk about American experience in the singular.
The last point that emerges from our little vignette about Perry Miller is the sense that he promoted that there might actually be something that can be called an American character. I want to spend most of my time today talking about this notion of the American character, before returning to a few remarks about the future of American Studies. For, there is an assumption in Perry MillerÕs work that the American character can be reduced to a particular type. I find this notion to be a troubling one, though it is all too easy to fall into the habit of talking in this way. For example, it is one of the methods used by advertisers to sell products – here you can think of the Marlboro Man, from the old days before smoking became so unpopular in the United States, the cowboy sitting atop is steed taking a long drag on his cigarette. The President of the United States has also played this card, such as when in difficult moments of his presidency he acted as the Wild West sheriff, looking straight at the TV camera and saying that he wanted Bin Ladin ÒDead or Alive.Ó This bravado, which got him some points with the American electorate at the time because he was showing himself to be the tough American male, obviously had as many negatives attached to it as his other tough guy comment did, i.e., that he didnÕt care about the insurgents in Iraq and that his response to them was just, Òbring it on.Ó Having just seen his party lose so resoundingly in this monthÕs mid-term elections he must regret these kinds of comments. Bin Ladin has never been caught, and the Iraqi insurgents have brought misery and suffering not just to American troops and their families – they have completely undermined the American project of rebuilding Iraq as a model Middle-eastern democracy. So these characteristics are supposed to be American in some way, but in actuality they donÕt really represent American people and if there is such a thing as American character it cannot be reduced so easily to the pioneer spirit or frontier machismo.
So what is American about the American character? Is there really such a thing? Perhaps it should be stated somewhat differently: What would make an Englishman and a German living outside Philadelphia, a French woman and a Portuguese man living in Rhode Island, an African American and Hispanic living in Atlanta, Georgia, a person of Chinese or Japanese descent living in California, or a person of Mexican descent living in Texas all American? Could all of these people ever be defined simply as a single entity, as American? The answer, in rational terms, is no, because there would be so many cultural identities warring with each other, and any single description of American-ness would tend to privilege one group or several groups over the rest.
The United States, after all, was (and still is) considered the land of the immigrants, with the symbol of the Statue of Liberty welcoming the worldÕs destitute and huddled masses to American shores. But if this is so, how could it possibly be the case that a single American identity could be created? And yet, in spite of the obvious problems with the idea of American identity, there are times when Americans seem to come together around certain notions that are considered to be American. There is a cyclical aspect to this; sometimes, there seems to be some coherence to the notion of American-ness, or it is accentuated without much contradiction from those who might dissent from inclusion within it, while at other times there seems to be more fragmentation and less willingness to accept certain fundamental aspects attributed to an American character. The question is, then, what kinds of things might make all of the diverse people who make up American society act more in unison, and make them believe that they share a particular identity? And, at what times do these things occur?
So I want to give a few examples when and where this might take place.
The Frontier
One of the reasons for Americans to feel that they share an identity may come from their similar experiences. An example of this is the frontier – which Perry Miller had developed in Errand in the Wilderness. He was not the first to focus on this by any means. A very influential study by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 attributed to the frontier the uniqueness of Americans. Essentially, Turner argued that American experience had differed from experiences in Europe because of the expanding frontier, allowing for mobility of Americans, so that instead of them being trapped in a certain social class they were able to rise out of their condition and make a new world for themselves. This was a form of what came to be frequently referred to as the American Dream. While there were many problems with the so-called Turner Thesis, which I wonÕt go into now, there was a degree to which the availability of land – which Turner described as ÒfreeÓ, but which was really inhabited by American Indians – allowed for some mobility, and the prosperity derived from it defused some class antagonisms. The fact, though, that Turner began his work by noting that the Census Bureau had announced that the 1890 census marked the closing of the frontier (in other words, that there was no more free land available), and that his reading of his paper at the Chicago Exposition of 1893 coincided with one of the biggest economic crashes in American history, followed by incredible class conflict, shows the degree to which belief in shared American character was subject to change.
Shared
Prosperity
A variant on this notion of the frontier experience was shared prosperity. The clearest case of this was in the 1950s with the very rapid suburbanization that occurred in the aftermath of World War II. While not everyone did in fact share this experience, the exodus from the cities was such and the growth of suburban tracts was so great that it seemed as though this defined what it meant to be an American. He -- the American – was supposed to be a man who went to work, who came back home at the end of the day to be greeted by his wife holding a Martini, shaken not stirred – no thatÕs James Bond – and two children throwing a baseball in the yard, and so forth. The suburb became central to much popular culture from the move of Lucy and Dezi Arnez from Brooklyn to a California Suburb in the show ÒI Love Lucy,Ó to the famed kitchen debates between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union, when Nixon claimed that the superiority of American culture could be shown merely by looking at the American woman in her kitchen.
The growing suburbanization of American society led many intellectuals, such as W.W. Rostow (an important advisor to President Kennedy) to believe that this form of living was the definition of modernity itself and that Americans needed to export this along with their values. This became central to the notion of modernization that shaped much of American foreign policy up through the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the 1960s. The idea was that, just as American immigrants had come to the United States and had lost their distinctive cultures, moving into suburbs that made them all seem very similar, other countries would go through this transformation also. One of the key aspects of the approach to Vietnam was the sense that the war could be won by development, by bringing about a social revolution and moving the Vietnamese from their traditional ways to become consumers, like Americans.
It was at times like this when there seemed to be an expansion of the economic pie that there was considerable possibility for improvement in conditions for African Americans in the United States. The Civil Rights movement coincided with this economic growth, and, at least in its early years, protest was couched in terms of the desire for African Americans to be given the perquisites of American society, in other words access to the American Dream, and leaders of the movement, like Martin Luther King, Jr. endeavored to paint themselves as fundamentally American and as respectable as other American middle-class citizens. However, once African Americans started to try and move into these middle-class neighborhoods and pushed for more than just political rights, then the generosity of white Americans seemed to wane, and the movement became more and more radical out of frustration about the slowness of change.
So there was a generosity, both global and domestic, that many Americans felt now defined them, more so than the gun-toting cowboy could do. Of course, as soon as the prosperity ended and there were threats to the standard of living in the United States then people began to worry about African American advances, and improvements for others that might take away from their own advancement.
Recession and
Depression
The other side of the coin of this process was those periods of economic recession and depression, when Americans sometimes came together, as in the New Deal, in a sense that they were all sharing the same experience, and those who werenÕt – the social elites – were somehow un-American. This Populist sentiment went back to the 1870s when mid-western farmers protested against the eastern capitalists. These mid-western farmers saw themselves as the true Americans, just as during the 1930s the hard working industrial laborer saw himself and his unions (I use the male pronoun deliberately because they were endeavoring to keep women out of the workforce) as the true Americans, while they divided the corporate capitalists into those who would work with them and those who would not, the latter being distinctly un-American.
Relative Isolation
Relative isolation is also something that has fostered a sense of identity among Americans. This was particularly clear at the end of World War I, when Americans withdrew from the League of Nations and became politically isolationist (except with regard to Latin America), and when they cut off immigration. What did this do? On the one hand it allowed for increased amalgamation of peoples. If each ethnic group was not being replenished by new immigrants that could keep the communities vital and in touch with their national and more localized (but foreign) cultures, then the chances that people would move beyond their ethnic group and marry people of other backgrounds increased. Where twenty years previously Irish, Italian, Russian Jewish, and German populations would not interact very much, except with hostility, now they were creating a new population that saw itself as fundamentally American, for want of a better way of describing themselves.
And this had a significant cultural impact as well. If you think of the sports Americans played during this period, the most important ones were baseball, American football, and basketball. These sports could become entrenched in the 1920s, because immigrants were not bringing into the country their own games – particularly soccer. Many people argued that baseball became the American game because it reflected the American spirit. But this was just part of the promotion that those connected to the game used to help them make profits from people who they wanted to fill their stadiumsÕ bleachers. The sport became national because people wanted to watch professional sports, at a time when other games were not available to them.
Clearly, since 1965 and the passage of an Immigration law that loosened the quotas that were established in 1924, much has changed. Now you can see very strong communities being continually revitalized by influxes of new migrants, and, in addition, you see that the suburbs that were once thought to be characterized by a bland American sameness, now are the locations where ethnic consciousness is most pervasive and most pronounced. Also, each sport has its own coverage on television, with soccer or football actually having more participants than baseball and American football, and each ethnic group has its own language TV shows and radio programs.
Warfare with other Nations
During periods of war, Americans frequently come together. Gary Gerstle has written an excellent work on American nationalism – The American Crucible – which, among other things, describes how World War II helped to bring different ethnic Americans together in ethnically, though not racially diverse army units. All wars have had this impact to some extent, either in the attempt (as during World War I) to compensate for the fragmented nature of the country through propaganda, or in the natural commitment of different people to the nation's cause. When the wars start going badly, however, they have a great deal of potential to create disharmony and disunity (as during Vietnam), particularly when they have a differential impact of the country's various population groups. The wars can be listed thus:
– Mexican War – think Whitman.
– American Indians – think Custer
– – Spanish American War, 1898 – think Kipling
– Wars with Germany and Japan – think Wilsonian Americanization campaigns; German desperation to demonstrate loyalty in WWII; and suspicion of Japanese and internment camps.
– Cold War against Communism – think McCarthyism at home and the squashing of dissent
– The latest variant is the War on Terror
Perceived Threat
from within
Another force leading to a greater sense of a uniform identity is the result of a perceived threat from within. Often the threat was considered to be immigrants and the traditions that they might bring to the country. Would these immigrants fail to assimilate? Would they refuse to speak English? Would they threaten Republican political traditions? These were all questions that native-born Americans asked and in some ways the questions implied that there was a particular culture for the immigrants to assimilate into, that English was or ought to be the language of all Americans, and that particular political traditions that werenÕt corrupted in some way were always the norm – if it werenÕt for the presence of immigrants, that is. Of course, all these things werenÕt true, but the point about identity is that it is always more about perception than reality.
But this immigrant threat accounts for the intense racism against Chinese and Japanese in California, leading to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, as well as on-going anti-Catholic sentiment among Protestants, and pressures placed on German language newspapers in Americanization campaigns.
Other threats can come in the form of those people who might be agents for other countries – again often considered to be part of the immigrant population. McCarthyism was very powerful in this regard. At a time when conformity was at its height, Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed that there were people located in government positions who were working for the Soviet Union. Again it was not really based on any reality – McCarthy made up his figures – and the United States was never really threatened in any way, but these ideas still had considerable purchase. Indeed, McCarthy deployed the mid-western, populist notion that the eastern intellectuals were somehow un-American and so, of course, they must be working for the Soviets.
I want to give you one last example of how these internal threats might play out and shape American identity formation, and this comes from the events surrounding what is known as the ÒBlack Sox Scandal.Ó You may well be familiar with the phrase that Òsomething is as American as baseball, Mom, and Apple Pie.Ó I am not quite sure why apple pie was considered American, nor why Mom was either – I had both of those growing up in England – but this phrase emerged in suburban America of the 1950s, when the Mom was a stay-at-home mother and was supposed always to be there making apple pie for the kids, whereas other heartless nations had Moms that just didnÕt care apparently. I jest and digress at the same time!
Anyway, it is true that baseball was invented in America (a departure from the English game of rounders), but its ÒAmerican-nessÓ is still a somewhat invented tradition. Indeed around the year 1900 promoters of the game like Albert Spalding wanted to suggest that an American game must have truly American roots, so they invented a story that a hero from the Battle of Gettysburg, one Abner Doubleday, had invented the game in his youth. By the First World War, the sport had become big but it could not be said that its position was cemented in the consciousness of all Americans. It was also a sport that, like much of American culture, was rife with corruption. The World Series of 1913 had almost definitely been thrown by one team for money without their being much complaint from anyone, or at least without a vigorous attempt by journalists to unearth the truth of the matter.
What happened in 1919, however, became a story that fundamentally established the game as American, a position it has only recently begun to lose, as people no longer identify with the sport to the same extent. The ÒBlack SoxÓ events, therefore, were much like a tragic drama, providing a moral lesson that could be used to undermine any who might be likely to threaten the sportÕs hold on American culture. Here is the cast of characters:
á Charles ÒRomanÓ Comiskey – the capitalist – who was underpaying and exploiting his player/workers while reaping huge profits.
á The downtrodden, exploited workers, in other words, the players who Comiskey owned – and ownership is the appropriate word here.
á The Crooks – described as men tied to the Jewish and Irish underworld. The very powerful Arnold Rothstein and his assistant Abe Attell, Joseph Sullivan from Irish Boston, and Bill Burns and Billy Maharg.
The story was that the White Sox deliberately lost the series in exchange for money from these gamblers, and intrepid journalists – latter-day Muckrakers – discovered the story and sold it as the game being sullied by a foreign, and frequently mentioned, Jewish element.
The reason that it had such purchase on the popular imagination was that the events coincided with a period of strikes and labor unrest unrivaled in American history. Workers had come back from the First World War and wanted to have more rights and a better standard of living. The Bolshevik revolution was an inspiration to many, and the Department of Justice was busily trying to track down foreign elements that they believed were tied to Soviet Communism. Indeed the revelations about the Black Sox scandal came out when Americans were at the height of the ÒRed ScareÓ, when the rights of American citizens and immigrants were put aside in the belief that the country was under threat.
Many changes occurred as a result of this scandal. A Judge named Kenesaw Mountain Landis was appointed to be the Commissioner of baseball and he was given absolute authority by the baseball owners to do whatever he felt necessary to protect baseball. He was chosen by them mainly because he had made his name during and immediately after the war for sentencing German Americans and Communists to exceedingly harsh prison sentences – decisions that were often so outrageous that they were overturned (more frequently than the decisions of any other judge) by a higher court. Once in power as Commissioner of baseball, he banned the eight players involved from ever playing baseball again.
In addition, as a result of these events baseball was given an exemption from the nationÕs Anti-Trust laws. These laws had been passed to ensure that big corporations didnÕt grow to such an extent that they could act against the interests of the people, by charging too much for their commodity and undermining competition. But in the wake of the Black Sox scandal, Congress passed the exemption that allowed Judge Landis to do anything he pleased within the realm of baseball. The consequence of this was that baseball players remained at the mercy of the owners and continued to be severely underpaid given the growing profits of the sport. And Landis did this through a particularly American method. He was a Southerner and a racist and he ensured that African American players, like the great Rube Foster and a host of other black athletes would never get a chance to play baseball in the major leagues during his lifetime. What he was saying to the white players was what Southern white landowners said to their poor white neighbors – you may be poor, but at least you are not black.
What we see from this episode, therefore, is that something that is considered as American as baseball was not naturally acclaimed as such. It had to be promoted into this position and safeguarded in its position of primacy in American culture, when other alternative developments in might easily have occurred. Once those safeguards were lifted, baseball would no longer be identified as the quintessential manifestation of American culture.
What then does this foregoing discussion tell us about the study of American Identity, and why is the time ripe for looking at the United States and American culture from new perspectives – especially from the perspectives of people coming from the outside?
The kind of culture that I described emerging in the 1920s around baseball, sustained as it was by the limitation of immigration in 1924, continued until the 1960s. While the civil rights movement was carried out within the logic of this culture, it very quickly began to challenge it, particularly as that culture was one that was so clearly founded on the accentuation of whiteness, and a whiteness devoid of any ethnicity – something that was very evident in Hollywood movies, where all stars had to appear to be WASP in their style (in other words, White Anglo-Saxon and Protestant).
But a reaction to this was likely to occur in time. Many people actually resented the seeming blandness of American culture, and the new generation coming up through colleges in the early 1960s often expressed their dissent from their elders in terms of their ethnicity. This gave rise to the counter-culture, and in the 1960s these changes were reflected in the Academy with the emergence of Social History, which, by focusing on the experiences of immigrants and working classes, endeavored to challenge the singular assumptions of American culture.
In this context, American Studies went through a period when it endeavored to celebrate difference. The problem with this, however, was that it tended to reify and essentialize ethnic culture – reducing each cultural group to certain essences that were romanticized and seen as unchanging. What Social historians tended to miss was the way in which different cultural groups would accentuate certain things in order to advance in American society, so that there was a premium for example on establishing a male-centered family (like those found in American suburbs), and so aspects of traditional culture and the experiences of those going through the crucible of migration that didnÕt fit with this were often ignored. Social historians, therefore, overlooked the fact that while Americans were frequently trying to hold onto their ethnic traditions, and while they also recognized the diversity of American backgrounds, they often tended to overlook the fact that people from these divergent backgrounds emphasized the same kinds of things in order to advance themselves in American society.
Moreover, accentuating ethnicity led down the road of identity politics, which stressed particular identities, even while those identities were being questioned in the fact that people were intermarrying and ethnic purity was very much on the decline. For a period in the 1970s and 1980s the more the break down of ethnicity occurred the greater the emphasis that was placed on ethnicity – leading to what one scholar called the Ethnic MythÉ(Steinberg).
To conclude this discussion of identity, then, it is clearly the case that trying to promote singular notions of American character or identity as well as a multiplicity of American forms of identity are both fraught with difficulties. To avoid falling into this trap it is often necessary to step outside the boundaries of oneÕs background and oneÕs understanding of oneÕs own history in order to see things anew.
So, returning to Perry MillerÕs assumptions about American Character, we can say that Miller posed some interesting questions about American identity that led down some interesting avenues of inquiry, even though his particular description of what that character and identity might have been like was narrow and formulaic.
But let us also return to Perry Miller in the Congo, because I think it is important that Miller was outside of the United States when he was able to reflect on its nature and detect a new way of looking at it. And indeed as I mentioned at the outset, some of the great studies of the United States have come from people like Alexis de Tocqueville and Lord Bryce (the two most frequently cited examples), who came from the outside and examined the country from perspectives that hadnÕt really been recognized by Americans themselves.
Moreover, if we are to be innovative and to explore new territory in American Studies, then we need to be international in our focus. I am not so much talking about international relations here, though that might be a component of a new approach. International relations would focus on how the United States interacts with other states, and large parts of the story, like globalization, which has an impact on all countries and societies, and the movement of ideas and people across boundaries, might be lost in the process of discussing state interactions. Societies might be reified in this process, and the connections, cultural and familial, that extend over the boundaries of different states might be missed.
I am suggesting instead that we need to become involved in a debate or conversation about American Studies, one that is constantly interrogating the boundaries of what it means to be American (spatially, ideologically, culturally, in terms of representation, and so forth). This debate should not just be among Americans in the American Academy. It needs to engage students and scholars from around the world, who can bring to a college and a program their perspectives about the United States and other societies in the western hemisphere.
That is why at my college we would like to incorporate students from China, and especially the excellent students and faculty of UIBE, in our endeavors to establish a unique American Studies Masters program. American Studies programs of the past have tended to want to take what is American as a given and teach students how to imbibe and impart its spirit. In the future, we should reach for an understanding of ÒAmericanÓ that sees it as something that is contested and debated, and as something that both has global influences and is changed by the world in which the United States is located.
In doing this we are not adding the world onto American Studies – this is not literally a new world of American Studies – the world has been there all along. When Miller was unloading his oil drums in the 1920s, he was not in a wilderness as he imagined. He was at the center of imperialism bringing oil to the Congo so that he could help the process of extraction of minerals and wealth for the benefit of Euro-American powers. Similarly, the people that he described being in a wilderness in the New World were interacting with people who had their own complex societies. The so-called Òfree landÓ that Frederick Jackson Turner claimed was lying in wait for the Europeans, was in no way empty, and it was only free because the Europeans stole it from the people who were inhabiting that land.
In the story of Perry Miller there is a silencing of the contestation that occurred in the formation of American character and an erasure of both Africans and American Indians in this process. So even while he was thousands of miles from the United States taking a new look at it, he was still tied to assumptions that he had inculcated while he was growing up in the United States. It is such assumptions that we hope your graduate students will participate in exploring, and where necessary contesting.