The Politics of Cafe Society

Abstract

Cafe Society is above all founded upon publicity. Its members often seem to live for the exhibitionist mention of their doings and relations by social chroniclers and gossip columnists. . . . In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth. Not the gentleman's club, but the night club, not Newport in the afternoon but Manhattan at night; not the old family but the celebrity. -C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956 By any reckoning, Cafe Society, a New York City cabaret that opened in 1938, deserves a prominent place among twentieth-century American shrines to the politics of culture. A patron descending into the small basement on Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village might be met by a doorman wearing worn-out gloves and might be served by flip waiters clad in tails. To the left of the foyer, a simian-looking Adolf Hitler hung suspended from the ceiling along with papier-mache send-ups of wellknown Manhattan society icons. The club admitted customers and showcased talent regardless of race, tweaked high society, eliminated chorus lines and cigarette girls, treated its employees well, served good food, and offered pointed political satire. But the rise and fall of Cafe Society conjures up a subtext involving another kind of politics: of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) surveillance and break-ins, of plots to assassinate Hitler and sell the atomic bomb to the Soviets, of House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) hearings, blacklisting, and jailing for contempt of Congress. Historians working at the margins of cultural studies have been much concerned lately with delineating the boundaries of these two kinds of politics -cultural and traditional, or orthodox in their own lives as well as in those of the subjects they study.' Are teaching and scholarship a substitute for, a distraction from, or a com