Rethinking the Creation of Cultural Hierarchy in America

Abstract

The year 2013 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. The book was immediately, and wildly, influential among American cultural historians and students of American literature. I remember attending a national meeting shortly after it came out where participants reverentially invoked Levine's key terms and assumptions, as if they had discovered in the book's pages an explanation, deeply satisfying both ideologically and emotionally, for a phenomenon that had long been troubling them. In the years since 1988, Highbrow/Lowbrow has exhibited the staying power of a classic, a status certified by the book's appearance on countless syllabi and oral exam lists. Today it remains available in paperback and in a Kindle version, and I am told that a French edition was just recently published.Many of us have profited a great deal from Levine's study, and we lament his untimely death in 2006. Yet those of us who have been working in the history of the book and related areas have arrived at a point where we might profitably reassess the arguments of Highbrow/Lowbrow, instead of merely appropriating its framework. What have we learned over the last twenty-five years about cultural hierarchy in America? What perspectives might be useful for the future? I want to consider those questions by bringing to bear both the insights of other scholars who have written since 1988 and the results of my own research.The first third of Highbrow/Lowbrow directly concerns students of reception because it is about the changing position of Shakespeare in American culture. Levine begins by documenting not only the frequent performance of Shakespeare on the nineteenth-century American stage but also the travesties, soliloquies, afterpieces, and other theatrical presentations that often juxtaposed adaptations of Shakespearean drama and poetry to “magicians, dancers, singers, acrobats, minstrels, and comics.”1 Because “people cannot parody what is not familiar,” Levine concludes, Shakespeare was an integral part of popular culture during the early years of American history (4). For Levine, “popular” referred to “those creations of expressive culture that actually had a large audience” (31) rather than to the traditions produced by ordinary people, as historians such as Peter Burke and David Vincent have used the word.Filled with exuberant spectators unconstrained by genteel decorum, the theater itself was thoroughly democratic, housing under one roof, as Levine puts it, “a microcosm of American society” (25). But the situation was in flux. As early as the middle of the nineteenth century, separate theaters had emerged to serve more refined audiences as part of a growing “bifurcation” of “serious” and “popular” culture (68, 81). Eventually, Shakespearean drama as a popular possession was a casualty of this process, which Levine labels the “sacralization” of culture; Shakespeare became an “elite” author separated from ordinary people by an “unbridgeable gulf,” and his work receded to the rarefied realm of high art (79).The middle section of Highbrow/Lowbrow traces other forms of this process of sacralization under way at roughly the same time. Champions of symphonic music such as John Sullivan Dwight and Henry Lee Higginson articulated a vision of the classical concert as a vehicle for the transmission of art, as distinct from lighter fare, which was often segregated in separate “pops” performances. The opera house and the art museum furnish further examples wherein audiences learned, in Levine's words, to “approach the masters and their works with proper respect and proper seriousness, for aesthetic and spiritual elevation rather than mere entertainment” (146).In the last third of Highbrow/Lowbrow, Levine attempts to explain those developments, situating what he calls the fragmentation of culture into “high” and “low” in the context of the massive societal changes of the late nineteenth century, as immigration, urbanization, and industrialization proceeded apace. In a phrase that I have always found particularly resonant, he ascribes to figures such as Henry James and other white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants the perception that America had become a “new universe of strangers.” Their way of navigating this “unstable,” threatening environment was to insist on the value of discipline, self-control, and order (177). In consequence, Levine notes with dismay, the opportunity for democratically composed audiences to act “naturally” and to participate actively in cultural experiences gave way to passivity and stultifying propriety (179). Works of art and the institutions that supported them acquired the function of taming democracy, of diffusing “culture” to foster “civilization” (204). But more Americans, Levine observes, sought not to “proselytize among the people” but, rather, to make culture “an oasis of refuge from and a barrier against them” (207). Matthew Arnold's definition of culture as “the best that has been thought and known [or thought and said] in the world” became a widespread ideal, and along with it came hierarchies (best, worst, higher, lower, elite, popular) that Arnold's formulation buttressed (224). Although Levine is careful to state that the sacralization of culture was not “primarily a mechanism for social control,” he does not hesitate to single out “an elite group with a vested interest” in maintaining its authority as the party responsible for an increasingly hierarchical, fragmented culture (206, 227). From the late nineteenth century forward, theater and concert audiences had no choice but to encounter art on the terms that those elite individuals prescribed.In an epilogue, Levine indicates the extent to which recent developments had eradicated some of the distance between highbrow and lowbrow, citing, among other examples, the crossover repertoire of the Kronos Quartet and the efforts of Joseph Papp to bring Shakespeare to a large public. But, writing twenty-five years ago, he still finds the “sense that culture is something created by the few for the few, threatened by the many, and imperiled by democracy” remains both powerful and pervasive (252).There is much that is right about the picture Levine painted. It is undeniable that spectators grew quieter over the course of the nineteenth century, and that less raucousness was accompanied by less diversity, as when “wealthy elites banded together to build their own opera houses.”2 Whether or not the religious overtones of the term are helpful, it is likewise undeniable that a kind of sacralization took place, whereby the entr'acte jugglers, parodists, and minstrels became dissociated from an ostensibly pure Shakespeare, the opera grew isolated from other musical events, and classical European “masterpieces” came to occupy a status higher than the works of popular composers. It is equally true that the agents of sacralization—the founders of museums, orchestras, and concert halls—were members of the privileged classes, with the resources and social connections to launch such institutions.It is hard not to be captivated by Levine's democratic sympathies and even by the sense of loss that, he acknowledged, suffuses his book. Americans have a penchant for narratives of declension, after all, and Levine's depiction of unity giving way to fragmentation, of egalitarianism undermined, is squarely in that tradition. But can we set aside our attraction to Levine's politics and sensibility and dispassionately interrogate his premises?Let us start with the beginning of his story: the assumption that a shared public culture characterized American life in the early republic. If widespread familiarity with Shakespeare is the proof of this shared culture, it is worth noting, as Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan point out in Shakespeare in America, that the Shakespearean texts Americans read “often differed markedly” from the scripts that actors used in theaters, even when the actors were not engaged in performing excerpts or parodies.3 Moreover, printed texts adhered closely to British versions up to the mid-nineteenth century. In other words, to speak of Shakespeare as a popular possession ignores that not everyone owned the same thing, nor was that possession necessarily distinctively American.As for the theater audience as a microcosm of American society, the persistence of religious objections to theatrical performances meant that, at various times and places, a significant segment of the population did not participate in watching Shakespeare. An older work of local history records, for example, that Rochester, New York, was known as a poor theater town well into the 1840s as a result of the antipathy to the stage generated by adherents of the revivalist Charles Finney.4 Furthermore, although Levine was surely right that the theater gathered heterogeneous groups under a single roof (as in New York's Bowery Theater in the Jacksonian period), this was not a case of a diverse population bonded by common responses or shared values. As Richard Butsch has revealed, the rowdy Bowery b'hoys who occupied the pit and the gallery provoked antagonism from wealthier individuals seated in the boxes. In Butsch's words, “Audiences were neither homogeneous nor unanimous, but often divided along class lines…. The middle and upper classes demanded more restraint, and young workers seemed intent on refusing to cooperate.”5More generally, the premise that a unified American culture gave way to fragmentation does not hold up if we turn to the lessons furnished by scholars working in book history. The title of the second volume of A History of the Book in America, An Extensive Republic, signals the argument that Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley, the volume's editors, have posited throughout. In contrast to the idea that the years between 1790 and 1840 marked the rise of a national print culture, they emphasize that in that period the United States was “a decentralized polity,” extended throughout a vast geographical area, and comprising “diverse readers and communities, moving in no single direction and sustaining a host of interests, identities, and loyalties.”6 On the one hand, print culture was transatlantic and cosmopolitan thanks to the influx of British imports; on the other hand, it was intensely local, especially in the case of the country newspaper and, initially, the penny press. “In 1840,” Gross writes, “after a half century of growth, two-thirds of the nation's printing offices and three-fourths of all weekly newspapers were located in rural villages.” Similarly, “the production and distribution of books took place at multiple sites across the United States.” Although print had the capacity to unite audiences “across social divides,” it also operated to heighten sectional and party conflict, racial tension, and gender difference,7 promoting no “single mode of reading and writing”—just as the theater, to extrapolate from Gross's conclusion, arguably promoted no single experience of viewing a play because of the mix of people in attendance.8An Extensive Republic also alerts us to the presence of cultural hierarchy within the new nation by delineating the existence of a cosmopolitan elite indebted to “the international community of letters.” Although, as David Shields notes, the devotees of learned culture sought to foster a “‘general diffusion of learning,’” for the “benefit of all,” this democratic ideal coexisted with the recognition that progress depended on the creation of a small group of citizens dedicated to the pursuit of what was widely recognized as “the higher learning.”9 Hierarchical distinctions likewise undergirded Americans' aspirations to gentility, which dated as far back as the seventeenth century and intensified throughout the eighteenth century. Here the key source is Richard Bushman's The Refinement of America. Bushman recounts how “vernacular gentility,” which was a widely shared commitment to exhibiting accoutrements of refinement such as polite conversation, well-tended gardens, and tasteful home furnishings, became integral to the lives of a broadly defined middle class.10 For aspirants to respectability, the exuberant spectacles that Levine embraced were never permissible entertainments.In light of this recent scholarship, the idea of a democratic, nonhierarchical, unified culture in the early nineteenth century is problematic. Let us turn now to the other end of the chronological spectrum: the bifurcation between highbrow and lowbrow that Levine says was in place by 1900. Regarding Shakespeare in American life, Katherine West Scheil's account of women members of more than five hundred Shakespeare clubs that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries demonstrates that Shakespeare remained vital to ordinary people. Scheil argues that “women readers in large cities and small towns across America helped spread the idea that Shakespeare was for everyone, not just cultural elites in metropolitan areas.” Supplying a detailed examination of Shakespeare clubs in rural locales, she concludes that “Shakespeare became a marker for learning, self-improvement, civilization, and entertainment for a broad array of populations across the country—cowboys, miners, and housewives alike.”11Scheil's work suggests an alternative to a model of unity giving way to sacralization and fragmentation. Certainly sacralization was operating to enhance the longstanding regard for Shakespeare as art; Scheil's subjects approached Shakespeare as a genius, whose work offered them the opportunity to cultivate their “taste for all higher literature.” But a conception of Shakespeare as “edifying”—of high culture as uplifting because of its capacity to deepen moral perceptions and heighten aesthetic sensitivity—is not incompatible with democratic ideals if it is linked to processes of dissemination aimed at making art widely accessible. Scheil's “grassroots” readers, who benefitted from “the growing availability of Shakespeare's plays” in printed form and who often relied in rural areas on traveling libraries, signify that a process of desacralization—a movement in the direction of high to popular—was operating alongside sacralization.12 My own foray into the history of the Temple Shakespeare series, published in England and imported by E. P. Dutton for Americans, supplies a further example. The British publisher J. M. Dent had created these pocket-size Shakespeare editions in 1894 with an eye to their ease of use: they were to be “attractive” but “clear and purposeful,” with “a page which would show at a glance each act and scene” and no unbroken lines. That the books were to give to the purchaser the impression of “beauty” as well as “strength” fits the idea that art more than entertainment was for sale, but the aesthetic pleasure the Temple Shakespeare was presumed to supply was widely available. In 1899, the United States purchased 89,000 volumes and in 1906, 180,000 volumes, many of which found their way to schools and colleges. The tally for England and America over the first fifteen years of the series was 2.5 million volumes.13Further understanding of the competing processes of sacralization and desacralization and the entanglement of art and democracy emerges from Leslie Butler's Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform. The subjects of Butler's subtle, important book are the American Arnoldians, who appear in Highbrow/Lowbrow only as deplorable elitists. These figures include George William Curtis, a chief advocate of civil service reform and the author of the “Easy Chair” column in Harper's Monthly throughout the late nineteenth century; the poet and founding editor of the Atlantic Monthly James Russell Lowell; the Unitarian minister and reformer Thomas Wentworth Higginson; and the Harvard professor, Dante scholar, and contributor to the North American Review and the Nation Charles Eliot Norton. All four of those individuals come across in Highbrow/Lowbrow as abettors of cultural fragmentation and antagonists to democracy. Butler situates them instead in the context of Anglo-American liberalism, an activist ideology that challenged the status quo particularly with respect to racial inequality, political corruption, the subjugation of women, religious complacency, and rampant materialism. Strongly influenced by John Stuart Mill's commitments to what Butler identifies as “educative democracy,” the American liberals promoted the view that “popular government … encouraged the ‘moral and intellectual training’ of the people.”14 At the same time, democracy flourished when all citizens had the opportunity for “constant self-cultivation” through reading and discussion. In other words, for such individuals, the transformation of Shakespeare or opera into art was a prerequisite for, not a blow against, a democratic society. Whereas Levine reads Higginson's 1867 “A Plea for Culture” in the Atlantic Monthly as a symptom of the deepening divide between advocates of “high culture” and the ordinary people they ostensibly disdained, Butler characterizes Higginson's essay as a call for engagement with the task of creating “a broad, democratic appreciation of aesthetic matters.” Quoting Higginson, Butler writes that “a defensive retreat into exclusive ‘dens of culture’ was not an option; culture required instead both ‘strenuous effort’ and democratic commitment.”15Butler's large contribution consists of identifying the ways American Arnoldians functioned as mediators of cultural hierarchy. She does not shrink from the language of sacralization, although she explains that regarding art as sacred was a consequence of the loss of traditional faith that many Victorian intellectuals experienced and their embrace, instead, of the human capacity for transcendence. But, again, that process coexisted with its opposite in the sense that Norton, Curtis, Higginson, and their colleagues exercised what Arnold called “a passion for diffusing” by embarking on a “program of broad cultural elevation for millions of middle- and working-class readers across the Anglo-American world.”16 Thus the American Arnoldians were all prolific writers for periodicals that promulgated political opinion and aesthetic criticism. In that and in other ways, they mediated between the high culture they thought was the hope of democracy and the people they believed had the capacity for the richer life that art and literature afforded.Henry Lee Higginson, the founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, appears in a similar light in Joseph Horowitz's Moral Fire, a series of “musical portraits” from the late nineteenth century. Like his cousin Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Higginson possessed a strong democratic impulse and a commitment to civic engagement. He evinced those qualities in setting low ticket prices for his orchestra's performances and in founding the Harvard Union to foster “democratic camaraderie on campus.” Explicitly challenging the idea that the BSO reflected a drive for social control, Horowitz contends that Higginson's “sense of duty was driven by an egalitarian passion for music. No informed portrait of such a man could summarize him as a tyrannical monopolist, a ‘cultural policeman,’ or a ‘cultural capitalist.’”17 Horowitz acknowledges the snobbery and racism of the Boston music critic John Sullivan Dwight and seems to have missed Butler's rehabilitation of Norton and colleagues. In some ways, he is engaged in a mission to rescue Higginson from an otherwise intact, stereotypical genteel tradition, although even so there is an instructive message here: namely, that not all Boston Brahmins or “monied” New Yorkers (to use Sven Beckert's term) shared the same mentality.18 But Horowitz also contributes an important counterpoint to the association of sacralization with hushed reverence by reminding us, both in Moral Fire and in his other works, that “social control poorly align[s] with impassioned Wagnerites, or with rival operatic constituencies fighting for control of the Met, or with rush-ticketholders bolting up the staircases of Symphony Hall, or with the seashore trappings and intense reverence of Wagner nights at Coney Island.”19To see the ways in which mediators (publishers, editors, critics, civic leaders, and orchestra founders) could intervene both to popularize high culture and to mark it off as sacred undercuts the argument for an unbridgeable split between highbrow and lowbrow. Or, to put it another way, cultural hierarchy is always precarious, always contingent on the historical circumstances governing production, dissemination, and reception. We could read that very lesson into Levine's book, which we could credit with sensitizing us to see hierarchical distinctions as products of social factors. But Levine's scheme precludes much give and take or negotiation and lacks the awareness that mediators were continually staking out a place from which they reached out to the reading and listening public on terms more complicated than “social control” or “uplift.” David D. Hall, who wrote the only major negative review of Highbrow/Lowbrow when it came out, states the argument this way: “The making and remaking of culture seem too dynamic and elusive to permit control by an elite that was never really unified, while what is designated as democracy is … always marked by forms of high and low.” Rather, it was always the case that “high and low, the local and the metropolitan, converged on a middle ground where exchange occurred and where intermediaries flourished.” Along with sacralization and desacralization (both denoting the continual possibility of repositioning within cultural hierarchy), mediation and contingency are central terms in the lexicon that enables us to describe what Hall elsewhere called this “middling social and cultural space.”20Of course we might well expect the author of The Making of Middlebrow Culture to reject a picture in which the middle drops away and the two extremes of high and low rigidify. In my book, which came out in 1992, I took as my task the mapping of the middle ground that existed in the United States during the period between the two World Wars. I populated that ground with the mediators who served as Book-of-the-Month Club judges, book reviewers in newspaper book sections, hosts of literary radio programs, authors of popularizations of knowledge, and creators of the “Great Books” movement. In seeking to extend high culture to what the Book-of-the-Month Club referred to as the “average intelligent reader,” all these mediators served both democratic ideals and the priorities of a burgeoning consumer culture.21Sacralization, desacralization, mediation, and contingency are also visible in mid-twentieth century American musical culture, as the career of the preeminent American choral conductor of the twentieth century Robert Lawson Shaw so richly illustrates.22 Born in 1916, Shaw was the son of a pastor in the denomination known as the Disciples of Christ. He grew up in a household imbued with religion and, because his mother was a singer, with music. Rejecting the ministry, Shaw started his own musical career in 1938 as an agent of popular culture, serving as conductor of the glee club that was part of Fred Waring's band, the Pennsylvanians. Waring's group, which was on the radio and in the movies during the 1930s, was noted for its precision; Waring devised something he called a “tone-syllable technique” that emphasized all but “explosive” consonants and enjoined singers to concentrate on the “message and emotional import of each song.”23 There was also a cultural politics operating in Waring's performances, which is worth recovering. The tone-syllable device represented a decision to broaden the audience for choral music by offering average listeners comprehensible lyrics. Conductor Leopold Stokowski's objection that the technique privileged the enunciation of text over operatic or other, more appropriate (high-culture) musical effects serves to underline the essentially democratic nature of Waring's and Shaw's stance.24 Indeed, the principle that verbal meaning mattered and should be transmitted to as wide an audience as possible became foundational for Shaw's own subsequent career.During his first season conducting Waring's Glee Club, Shaw thus began to develop as a figure whose mediations extended in two directions: interpreting serious music in terms available to a broad public while approaching popular entertainment as an enterprise that could include classical compositions and rigorous performance standards. Eclecticism was Shaw's hallmark in 1939, the year Waring had the Glee Club sing Randall Thompson's “Tarantella” and other classical pieces on the Bromo-Quinine Radio Show. At the same time, the ensemble furnished a chorus for Billy Rose's Aquacade at the New York World's Fair.Two years later, Shaw acted on his persistent interest in sacred music by founding a community chorus called the “Collegiate Chorale” because it was initially based at Norman Vincent Peale's Marble Collegiate Church in New York City. In this venture, too, a cultural politics was at work. Assembling a racially and religiously diverse cohort of nearly two hundred singers, both amateur and professional, Shaw (influenced by the advent of World War II) saw the act of choral singing as an affirmation of liberal nationalism and democracy. One purpose of the Collegiate Chorale, he declared, was to replicate the “strains which go to make the American culture and the broader human culture,” and to “disclose” those “strains” to “American audiences.” As Shaw explained in July 1942: “You see, we're a sort of musical montage, / A melting pot that sings…. / If you're looking for democracy set to music / The Collegiate Chorale… that's us. / We're it.” At the same time, Shaw's high-culture affinities remained intact. Another purpose of the ensemble was to foster “the discovery and performance of worthy new American choral music.”25Although his commingled democratic and aesthetic commitments had a number of sources, including his ecumenical Protestant upbringing, for our purposes, Shaw's exposure to American literature as a reader is of particular interest. The strongest literary influence on him was Carl Sandburg, notably Sandburg's 1936 paean to democracy and universal humanity The People, Yes. Shaw tended to imitate Sandburg's free verse in his own writings, particularly in his missives to the Collegiate Chorale. Here he functioned as both mediator and disseminator of poetry, validating Sandburg by making apparent his admiration for the poet to his singers and by perpetuating Sandburg's style in his own hand. Indeed, his mediation could be relentless: his biographer reported that, one night in 1943, visitors to the Shaw household who admitted that they had not read The People, Yes were made to endure four hours of Shaw's reciting the text aloud. “‘Isn't this what I'm trying to say with the Chorale?,’ Shaw apparently implored his guests. ‘Getting Negro and White, Jew and Gentile, all singing together, all striving for the mighty harmony? Isn't that the first step toward solidarity?’”26In the mid-1940s, Shaw translated his democratic ideals into a plan for a nationwide network of workers' choruses, which he hoped would turn choral singing into “America's great art.”27 Although that project never materialized, it is worth noting how Shaw envisioned the chorus as occupying a position at the apex of the cultural hierarchy while simultaneously presuming wide participation. Similarly, through the Collegiate Chorale, Shaw aimed to communicate messages that could enrich the experiences of large numbers of singers and listeners, even as he strove to make the group the best amateur chorus in the country.Moreover, the eclecticism he had exhibited in the Waring Glee Club remained Shaw's signature when it came to his repertory selections for the chorale. There is no better counterexample to Levine's bifurcation of highbrow and lowbrow than Shaw's decision to program together works such as Harold Arlen's “Blues in the Night” (a popular tune), “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the contemporary classical composer William Schuman's cantata “A Free Song” (based on lines from Walt Whitman), Norman Dello Joio's “The Mystic Trumpeter” (also drawing on Whitman), Randall Thompson's “Alleluia,” and a number of “Negro spirituals.” These choices reflected both Shaw's interest in heightening Americans' awareness of their musical heritage and his determination to encourage new composition. They also confirmed Schuman's appraisal of the conductor's efforts in January 1943: “What Shaw has done with his Collegiate Chorale has larger implications than its own existence for both music and our way of life.” It demonstrated that “music can be a potent vehicle for affording people a democratic experience through art.”28Shaw's inclusion of the spirituals is especially noteworthy because that feature of the Chorale's repertory is a striking illustration of the contingent nature of cultural hierarchy, taking place as it did during the evolution of attention to the genre since the mid-nineteenth century, when Thomas Wentworth Higginson had identified spirituals as a significant part of American vernacular expression. In the 1920s and 1930s, African American music became equated with American folk music, as both commercial collectors and figures such as John and Alan Lomax and Shaw's hero, Carl Sandburg, broadened the latter category. At the same time, in a version of sacralization, Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, and Roland Hayes, whose solos achieved widespread dissemination through radio broadcasts, transformed spirituals into art by inserting popular music into the format of the concert (Hayes, for example, always sang spi