Jackson Lears Research Articles

Psyche and Ethos: Moral Life after Psychology

For decades, Anderson has been pressing critical theorists and literary scholars to acknowledge the inescapably normative dimensions of their work. Through careful attention to rhetorical styles, she has persuasively argued that epistemological positions and social theories are tethered to “characterological” judgments—to implicit endorsements of ethos. Meanwhile, critical discourse has warmed to the claims of lived experience (the “turn to ethics,” the interest in “affect”), but the “ethical” has remained a negative movement, either as the critique of social and discursive structures or as clearing space for the “other”—and “affect” has been construed as the pleasure and self-care that enable resistance to the pressure of these structures. The questions that galvanize ethical criticism (What is wrong with the way things are?) and theories of affect (How can I survive?) continue to evade the deeper one that Anderson sees as basic to any theorizing: How should I live?The lesson of Anderson's The Way We Argue Now is that ethics without ethos is shallow. In Psyche and Ethos, the lesson is that psychology without morality is benumbed. Though Anderson is characteristically judicious in her reconstruction of the arguments she opposes, there are several rhetorical targets in these lectures. The first is contemporary cognitive science, which pictures moral thinking as either the “belated” rationalization of decisions really made by “automatic” psychological processes or as a mechanism for eliminating “cognitive dissonance.” Anderson shows how these pictures assume an abstracted, “punctual” model of moral experience; their “deflationary” zeal ironically depends on an untenable ideal of moral voluntarism that is then speciously “debunked.” By contrast, novels are able to explore the temporal dimension of moral consciousness, especially through their representation of what she calls “moral rumination,” a concept further developed in her recent contribution to Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies. Anderson shows, moreover, that narrative fictions like The Winter's Tale, Middlemarch, and The Beast in the Jungle understand “belatedness” not as evidence for the superficiality of morality but as a distinct mode of moral recognition that can unfold only across time.Anderson worries that the new “eudaimonic” literary criticism, which explores “enabling moods,” unwittingly perpetuates the moral confusion of empirical psychology and “privileg[es] psychological over moral desiderata,” even as certain “psychological states” are “presented as morally desirable.” This contradiction is another iteration of one she has been confronting throughout her career: the strange incapacity of critical discourse either to recognize or to avow the normative claims—the elaboration of an ethos as good or valuable—with which it is nonetheless saturated. Still, the contradiction has been a defining feature of modern “therapeutic culture” (a formulation she employs): the neutral, functionalist descriptions of empirical psychology ostensibly bracket morality, yet some descriptions are inevitably coded as “better” or “worse,” and they are consistently harnessed to fully moral evaluations. It is rare to hear a literary theorist of Anderson's provenance reanimate, if indirectly, the criticism that Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch, and Jackson Lears directed toward “therapeutic culture,” which has largely been forgotten or vulgarized by right-wing pundits. In essence, however, her plea is similar to theirs: she wants us to acknowledge that the moral life is integral to the “healthy” life; and she wants critics to stop dismissing it as epiphenomenal to either psychology or politics. She sees the novel, and the humanities more broadly, as the preeminent cultural vehicles for “clarifying” the moral life.

Vaudeville and the Making of Modern Entertainment, 1890-1925

Vaudeville and the Making of Modern Entertainment, 1890-1925

Vaudeville and the Making of Modern Entertainment, 1890-1925

Vaudeville and the Making of Modern Entertainment, 1890-1925

“The Vanished Power of the Usual Reign”: Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace, and the Struggle for Hegemony in History

Abstract This reappraisal essay on Jackson Lears’s No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (1981) considers the book’s substantial but diffuse influence among historians by examining it against the background of, and in conversation with, the new social history. The success of this subfield in the 1970s and—while morphing into cultural history—the 1980s created professional as well as theoretical problems for practitioners of “old fashioned” history, especially for intellectual historians. Especially confounding was the question of how to theorize the transmission of ideas from intellectual or cultural elites to the rest of society. “History from the bottom up” had posited far more cultural and intellectual autonomy for the subaltern classes than intellectual historians could grant without fundamental changes in method as well as choices of what to write about. No Place of Grace cut through this problem with an array of new theoretical and rhetorical moves, elevating the concept of cultural hegemony to an essential role in the further analysis of elite transmission of ideas. This essay ends by considering the effects of this conceptual breakthrough, including the costs of focusing on subtler forms of domination over the raw effects of physical force and material inequality.

Bicycles and Juvenile Masculinity During World War I

Bicycles and Juvenile Masculinity During World War I Robert J. Turpin (bio) Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, the bicycle was extremely popular. By 1900, however, sales in the United States experienced a dramatic fall. After coming to terms with the fact that the “Golden Age” of the bicycle was over, members of the bicycle industry undertook concerted efforts to recover sales. Those attempts included cooperative advertising and marketing efforts that might broaden the bicycle’s appeal beyond upper- and middle-class men. At first, the industry turned to “society women.” Women had actually taken to the bicycle a few decades earlier, but the industry had yet to concentrate advertising and marketing on females. Even after more attention was devoted to female riders in advertisements, there seemed to be little success in regaining women’s enthusiasm. This is evident in how short-lived that campaign would be in comparison with the industry’s next campaign—one that focused on a younger demographic. This essay focuses on the bicycle industry’s pursuit of juvenile consumers in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. It examines how anxieties aroused by World War I presented an opportunity to promote bicycles as beneficial for the nation. Attempts to exploit concerns about the nation’s fitness were so successful that the industry continued appeals to juveniles’ health, individualism, and patriotism well after the war was over. The connections the industry drew between these virtues and juveniles (specifically boys) left an indelible mark upon American ideals of mobility and masculinity. As a product of one of the first industries to base its marketing strategies on the emerging child consumer, the campaign to link bicycles with boys offered an example of how significant juvenile consumers had become. The strategies the industry employed to [End Page 51] capture the interest of juveniles reveal the social and cultural ideals that guided children’s entrance into American consumer society. Richard Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears have argued that the genesis of American consumerism sprang from the preoccupations of white elite adults (1983, x). It would not take long, however, before American children also embraced values of consumerism. Steven Mintz shows that manufacturers soon marketed toys directly to children, but this development occurred earlier than he suggests. Whereas Mintz locates it in the late 1920s (2004, 217), Lisa Jacobson provides evidence that the targeting of child consumers began as early as 1911. By that time, children’s magazines such as American Boy “were trumpeting the untapped potential of the boy market and the dynamic salesmanship of the boy consumer in the advertising press. … During the interwar years … the child consumer became the focus of … advertising campaigns for everything from breakfast cereal and toys to big-ticket items such as radios and automobiles” (Jacobson 2004, 16–17). Such attempts to appeal directly to children were rife among marketing strategies of the bicycle industry even before the United States entered World War I. Jacobson acknowledges that the 1920s were a “major turning point in the field” as even the advertising trade itself, not just children’s magazines, “s[a]ng the praises of the child consumer” (28). The bicycle industry followed a similar path, at first experimenting with children’s advertisements in the first half of the 1910s. By the 1920s, it was poised to go all in. Jacobson argues that general marketing to boys marked a “privileging of boy culture” in a manner that offered psychic rewards to advertisers and that more overt appeals to boys’ consumer appetites demonstrated “advertisers’ new assessment of boy culture” (105, 123). This essay complicates her argument by contending that, at least for bicycle marketing, boys were also targeted because they were convenient. Not only were boys thought to be enterprising consumers who actively influenced their peers, thereby increasing sales, they also provided an opportunity for broadening appeals without reimaging the product. Therefore, the values promoted in bicycle marketing did not change from 1880 to 1920 but the demographic it targeted did. The success of those marketing tactics, which were largely based around masculine ideals, also demonstrate that rather than being a time for frivolity, boyhood had become an important stage of life in which...

Early American Literature as a Networked Field: Mary Rowlandson, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie

Early American Literature as a Networked FieldMary Rowlandson, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie Wai Chee Dimock (bio) In thinking about Early American Literature at fifty, and looking forward to the fifty years ahead, one concept that I’d like to propose is that of a “networked field.” I hope I’m not simply being trendy, taking a word that describes the online phenomenology of the present moment and projecting it backward to an early period. “Network” is a current term, but one with heuristic implications extending beyond the twenty-first century, and with enough critical oomph to give us a push in a new direction, in ways that might help broaden the scope of the early American field and put it on a more experimental footing. user-generated input Among other things, the concept of “network” gives us a chance to do something other than the work of traditional historical scholarship: the work of channeling a past presumed to be empirically observable, verifiable, and recoverable. “Positivism” is the name offered by its detractors, highlighting the indebtedness of history as an academic discipline to the nineteenth-century philosophy of August Comte, with its twofold faith in the empirical method as a guarantor of objectivity and in the social world as a field of knowledge that can be investigated in this way. The most common assumption among historians, Jackson Lears says, is “that the facts about the past are ‘out there,’ that the historian’s primary task is to collect them” (58). What makes this fact gathering not haphazard, not an exercise in futility, is a second assumption, that the past is stable, unchanging, and interference free, an object that will stay fixed, transferring its information to the historian when properly approached. [End Page 103] This is the rallying cry and legitimizing ground for history as a disciplinary formation. Two practices follow, as critically summarized by R. G. Collingwood: (1) Each fact was to be regarded as a thing capable of being ascertained by a separate act of cognition or process of research, and thus the total field of the historically knowable was cut up into a infinity of minute facts each to be separately considered. (2) Each fact was to be thought of not only as independent of all the rest but as independent of the knower, so that all subjective elements (as they were called) in the historian’s point of view had to be eliminated. (131) Objectified in this way, historical inquiry simply becomes a linear flow of data, the movement of facts from one point to another point, a movement apparently conducted in a vacuum, or at least a transparent medium. It is guaranteed to happen, but will happen only in one direction, from the point of origin to the point of reception: direct, unimpeded, and uncomplicated by the latter. The historian and the circumstances under which he or she writes are simply not a factor here: never a filter, a screen, a barrier, and perhaps not even a conduit. Mediation is not a problem, for the simple reason that it is not recognized to exist. A network is nothing if not mediation. A linear flow of data is almost impossible here, in this densely populated and crisscrossing landscape, where pathways are routed through multiple sites, interactive at every point, so that the nodes of transfer are also the nodes where data are modified, compounded, added to. User-generated input is what drives these networks, an intervening force that changes not only the overall shapes of the working ensembles but also their distribution of agency, giving rise to common net phenomena such as percolating, cascading, viral spreading, and so on (Barrat, Barthelemy, and Vespignani; Watts). Remixing and repurposing follow as a result, but without homogenizing the field, and without collapsing the initial distances among the participating terms. Rather, heterogeneity, what the network starts out with, remains its energizing force and its ongoing basis for association. User-generated input is especially interesting as it bears on our conception of history. What are the effects on the past when it is thrown into a dynamic field of this sort, with feedback loops often coming from odd angles and unexpected quarters...

The Commodification of Aesthetic Feeling: Race, Sexuality, and the 1920s Stage Model

Feminist Studies 40, no. 1. © 2014 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 65 Elspeth H. Brown The Commodification of Aesthetic Feeling: Race, Sexuality, and the 1920s Stage Model In the transition to a consumer economy in the early twentieth century in the United States, the production of desire became central to the distribution of goods. Cultural and business historians ranging from Jackson Lears to Davarian Baldwin have charted the US transition in this period to what William Leach memorably termed the “land of desire” and have identified the cultural intermediaries—art directors , beauty entrepreneurs, advertising executives—who brokered manufacturers ’ pursuit of expanding markets.1 There has been less research, however, on the new forms of labor that emerged in the United States in the concurrent transition to a mass production economy, an economy that relied as much on the distribution and consumption of goods as on 1. See T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Davarian Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); and William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon , 1993). For cultural intermediaries, see also Pierre Bourdieu, “Cultural Goodwill,” in his Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (London: Routledge, 1984), 318–71; and Keith Negus, “The Work of Cultural Intermediaries and the Enduring Distance Between Production and Consumption ,” Cultural Studies,16, no. 4 (2002): 501–15. 66 Elspeth H. Brown their manufacture.2 The work of copy editors, window dressers, and art directors were forms of labor that required the production of specific emotional states in their audiences, commercialized feelings that were a necessary prelude to sales. Scholars working within the vein of sociology and political economy of globalization, particularly Michael Hardt and Sara Ahmed, have termed this work “affective labor”: a form of work that, Hardt argues, has recently assumed a dominant position within labor markets in a global capitalist economy.3 Yet, as is the case with so many aspects of globalization, capitalism’s dependence on affective labor is not a recent phenomenon. The shift to a mass production economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries necessitated the elaboration of new forms of labor required to expand existing markets and build new ones. This article explores one aspect of affective (and, therefore, corporeal ) labor that was a new phenomenon in the early twentieth century, but now is seemingly ubiquitous: that of the commercial model. Modeling is the quintessential occupation of a modern consumer economy, where goods and services are bought and sold through the medium of advertising and marketing; the history of modeling in the United States is deeply imbricated with the maturation of these industries in the wake of World War I. Models, whether performing live or through representational distance, as in photographic modeling, produce sales through the immaterial labor of posing for the lens or appearing with commodities in a real-time setting. Through the medium of their bodies, models coproduce public feelings whose dominant meanings are shaped by a commercial “common sense” that is naturalized by the other affective laborers of modern consumer culture: art directors, copy editors, magazine 2. Notable exceptions include Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen , Managers and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Stephen J. Ross, Working Class Hollywood: Silent Cinema and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); and the emergent scholarship on the labor economy of Wal-Mart, such as Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); and Nelson Lichtenstein, Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Remade American Business, Transformed the Global Economy, and Put Politics in Every Store (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009). 3. Michael Hardt, “Affective Labor,” Boundary 2, vol. 26, no. 2 (1999): 89-100; Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004): 117–39. Elspeth H. Brown 67 publishers...

The Road to Wellnessville

Although Philippe Ariès’s claims that death has been replaced by illness as our main obsession, I argue that illness is being replaced by wellness, an approach to living that encourages preemptive behavior. I review various critiques of “survivalism,” a view that both insists on our vulnerability and welcomes professional intervention in personal life. The resulting sense of anxiety, critics maintain, extends even to the “minutiae of human behavior,” including diet and fitness. I follow Jackson Lears in tracing these therapeutic commitments to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and examine a novel set in that period: T. C. Boyle’s The Road to Wellville , a satire about the perils of healthy living. I conclude by adapting Michael Sandel’s arguments against genetic enhancement to the issue of health.

Teasing Out Clues, Not Kooks

Teasing Out Clues, Not Kooks

Into the Ether

In 1983, Lewis Hyde published The Gift, a meditation on gift economies where art and ideas escaped the indignity of a market value. As a poet, he wanted to show that "the commerce of the creative spirit" could not flourish as pure commodity exchange. His advice on how an artist might feed herself under capitalism was thin, but as historian Jackson Lears noted, "[I]t is unfair to upbraid him for the unavoidable banality of his advice. What he has done is to freshen stale thinking about consumer culture by reminding us that the focus for criticism should not be material goods but the attitudes people bring to their exchange." Our public life in enriched, Hyde argued, by the gift relationships inherent in producing art, sharing research, or giving blood. Some kinds of value are lost on the auction block.

The Consumer Culture Research Landscape

This introductory article for the special issue of The Journal of American Culture serves two functions. First it briefly sketches the current status and historical background of cultural research. And second, it introduces the reader to the individual scholarly research articles that appear herein. Current Developments in Consumer Culture The scholarly study of culture is expanding at an explosive rate. In this brief introduction to this development, we stress some of the post-2000 highlights. They include, in chronological order, the start of a new scholarly journal, the Journal of Consumer Culture (2001); the publication of Lizabeth Cohen's landmark tome, A Consumers' Republic, the appearance of a seminal article in the March 2005 issue of the Journal of Consumer (Consumer Culture Theory: Twenty Years of Research by Eric Arnould and Craig Thompson); and the first international conference on culture theory, held at the University of Notre Dame in August 2006. These various milestones point to two observations about the direction of current research on culture: 1. Researchers are going beyond the traditional culture discipline of marketing (the home discipline of Russell Belk and John Sherry, the two organizers of the Notre Dame conference) to include such disciplines as sociology (the home discipline of George Ritzer, the editor of the Journal of Consumer Culture), as well as other social science and humanities disciplines, such as anthropology, economics, and history. Historians, in particular, have contributed significantly to our understanding of culture, and among the seminal figures here are Daniel Boorstin, Lizabeth Cohen, Gary Cross, Richard Fox, Daniel Horowitz, Jackson Lears, and Susan Strasser. 2. Researchers and their foci are becoming increasingly international. For example, scholars who made presentations at the Notre Dame conference have their origins in about a dozen countries representing several continents. The nations that were represented included India, Australia, France, Mexico, Canada, and Turkey. These research studies should permit useful cross-cultural comparisons. Also helping the international movement is the global perspective being assumed by the Journal of Consumer Culture. Historical Developments in Consumer Culture Research: Definitional Issues The historical shift from an economy dominated by production to one strongly influenced by consumption has led to the use of the term society or culture by many scholars to describe the latter circumstance. However, there is little agreement as to what these terms mean. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, in an influential edited 1983 volume (The Culture of Consumption), identify some of the dimensions of the definitional problems and pose some key questions about historical origins in the introduction to their book. Some observers of all stripes have agreed on the importance of consumption in twentiethcentury American culture. But they have expended so much energy praising or blaming it that they have generally begged the most basic questions. Exactly what is a culture? It is not enough to point to the abundance of televisions and automobiles, to call it a culture of leisure instead of work, since obviously still work-assuming they can find a job. It will not do to view it as an elite conspiracy in which advertisers defraud the people by drowning them in a sea of glittering goods. The are not that passive; they have been active consumers, preferring some commodities to others. They have also been more than consumers; they have pursued other goals in their leisure besides consumption. When and how did a culture arise in the United States? What were the processes by which a nineteenth-century producer ethic-a value system based on work, sacrifice and saving-evolved into a dominant twentiethcentury consumer ethic? …

RICHARD M. FRIED. The Man Everybody Knew: Bruce Barton and the Making of Modern America. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. 2005. Pp. xv, 286. $27.50

Bruce Barton at last has not only a biography, but a solid one that carefully explains him in several important contexts. Although best known in American history survey texts and lectures as the author of the 1920s bestseller, The Man Nobody Knows (1925), Barton achieved distinction in business, politics, and religion, as well as writing. He should be placed in the front ranks of American modernists. Though not an intellectual, Barton influenced minds with his advertising skill. As Richard M. Fried notes, the British observer of America Alistair Cooke said it best when he called Barton the “Moses of advertising” (p. 224). The description would have delighted Barton. Barton did not invent modern advertising, but he was perhaps its best practitioner. He built on the already established promotion of brand names and institutional advertising to include full-service features for clients from producing motion pictures to designing delivery trucks. Through his powerhouse Madison Avenue firm he made clients like General Motors and General Electric household names. He helped transform advertising from nineteenth-century patent medicine hucksterism into a sophisticated profession that promised happiness to consumers. He aided in the transition from a puritanical producer ethic to a more therapeutic consumer one by linking advertising, which increasingly relied on psychological manipulation, with traditional values. Barton insisted that advertising provided a service, and he lived long enough to practice his craft successfully in print, radio, and television. Fried concludes that while Barton improved the image of advertising, his work still had a connection with “illusion, suggestion, and magic” (p. 86). Borrowing from Jackson Lears, he suggests that consumerism perhaps replaced some of the mystery and magic lost in the transition from medieval culture to the modern age.

MICHAEL D. CLARK. The American Discovery of Tradition, 1865-1942. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2005. Pp. ix, 268. $44.95

As intellectual historians continue to examine historical consciousness in post-Civil War U.S. culture, Michael D. Clark's book provides a high standard of erudition, eloquence, and complexity regarding the surprising staying power of the past within American modernity. The study opens by distinguishing tradition from its allied concepts. “Antimodernism,” T. J. Jackson Lears's term for the fin de siècle reflex against bourgeois reason and refinement, is both broader than tradition and more concerned with reclaiming intense authentic experience than with calibrating the present with preestablished beliefs and processes; heritage, far more than tradition, involves a therapeutic effort to recreate the past in celebration and confirmation of a certain individual or group identity; and custom transmits workaday types of behavior or practice. Tradition, by sociologist Edward A. Ross's definition, is a “way of thinking or believing.” Tradition, for Clark, turns on a psychology, a state of mind open to enriching life with active appreciation of the past.

Ruling America: a history of wealth and power in a democracy

Introduction Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle 1. The Dilemmas of Ruling Elites in Revolutionary America Gary J. Kornblith and John M. Murrin 2. The Slave Power in the United States, 1783-1865 Adam Rothman 3. Merchants and Manufacturers in the Antebellum North Sven Beckert 4. Gilded Age Gospels David Nasaw 5. The Abortive Rule of Big Money Alan Dawley 6. The Managerial Revitalization of the Rich Jackson Lears 7. The Foreign Policy Establishment Godfrey Hodgson 8. Conservative Elites and the Counterrevolution against the New Deal Michael Lind Coda: Democracy in America Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle Notes Acknowledgments Contributors Index

Fighting for Manhood: Rocky and Turn-of-the-Century Antimodernism

Fighting for Manhood:Rocky and Turn-of-the-Century Antimodernism Clay Motley (bio) Sylvester Stallone's Rocky, winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1976, not only began one of Hollywood's most lucrative and recognizable film "franchises;" it began a battle of interpretation over the film's meaning. The iconic rise of the underdog from south Philadelphia, serendipitously plucked out of obscurity to fight the heavyweight champion of the world, clearly meant something to the packed, electrified theatres cheering Rocky on as if he were a real fighter. As Rocky's legacy grew to become one of the most recognizable films of all time, the importance of understanding its significance equally increased. Critics curious over the surprise success of Rocky conjectured that it was simply a fairytale of the American Dream or sentimental Bicentennial pap; or perhaps it was an important statement about the neglected American working class, or a sign of growing "ethnic" American pride; maybe it was a dangerously racist film, or a portend of a vigorous and violent "New Right." Regardless of individual interpretations, critics of the film then and now agree that Rocky, for better or worse, somehow caught the zeitgeist—was a film for and of a precarious moment in American society that spoke passionately to a large segment of the population. While we are correct to view Rocky as imbedded within a particular cultural and historical context—that of 1970s America and the coming Bicentennial—profitable insight into Rocky's significance is had by looking nearly one hundred years earlier, to another tumultuous time in American history and culture, to the late nineteenth century. It is through the context of the end of the nineteenth century that we can better understand the tensions, hopes, and fears of the 1970s, and thus can gain a valuable lens through which to understand Rocky's massive cultural appeal and significance. Rocky Balboa's rise from inner-city failure to fighting Apollo Creed to a draw was obviously an injection of much-needed Bicentennial optimism in the midst of one of America's most troubled decades: what is less obvious is Rocky's significance as an antimodernist force. Jackson Lears, when writing of the late nineteenth century, terms "antimodernism" a quest for "authentic experience," for "self-control and autonomous achievement" in the face of modern society's "cultural strain, moral confusion, and anomie" (xix). As will be detailed below, the America of the 1970s and that of the 1890s were both cultures intensely questioning themselves, particularly as to how they felt their present reality was curiously "unreal" as it increasingly drifted away from traditional economic, political, gender, and moral "norms." In the face of such unsettling modernizing forces, both cultures—and particularly the men of those cultures—sought "authentic" experiences that would reaffirm their own and their nation's sense of greatness. Thus, Rocky is an example of Americans seeking what was "genuine," "manly" and "true" in a society perceiving itself as losing its original purpose, toughness, and authenticity. Of course, the parallels between the 1970s and the late nineteenth century only go so far: in many ways, the society that produced Studio 54 and protested the war in Vietnam could not be more different than the Victorians who rallied around "Remember the Maine" all the way to San Juan Hill. However, by looking at major historical and cultural similarities between the two periods, particularly the economic and social disruptions that endangered American men's sense of autonomy and power, we can see that the 1890s and 1970s have much more in common culturally than a superficial glance would suggest. In fact, both societies were searching for a transcendent sense of identity in the midst of modernity-inspired confusion. Particularly, both societies looked to what was considered an earlier, more essential and violent manhood that would invigorate both themselves and their "listless" nation. These antimodernist sentiments explain the significance of Rocky Balboa, the out-of-shape loser, drifter in an urban underworld, who is steeled by passing successfully through a time of crisis, and is reborn a winner. Rocky's trajectory from a symbol of urban decay to a prototypical "self-made man" mirrored many...

Gambling and Grace, Profit and Providence

In a classic scene of a green young man's initiation into the urban underworld, the narrator of James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an ExColored Man finds himself in a gaming house within hours of arriving in New York City, and not long after that, becomes fully ensnared in the rites of the craps table. Whether it was my companion's suggestion or some latent daredevil strain in my blood which suddenly sprang into activity I do not know; but with a thrill of excitement which went through my whole body I threw a twenty-dollar bill on the table and said in a trembling voice: 'I fate you.' To fate means to challenge the dice thrower in the hopes of seizing control of the game, and the Ex-Colored Man's daring is swiftly rewarded. companion and all my friends shouted to me to follow up my luck. The fever was on me. I seized the dice. My hands were so hot that the bits of bone felt like pieces of ice. I shouted as loudly as I could: 'Shoot it all!' but the blood was tingling so about my ears that I could not hear my own voice. I was soon 'fated.' I threw the dice-seven-I had won. 'Shoot it all!' I cried again.1 Where Johnson sees depravity (with this taste of victory as a gateway, his protagonist falls into a year-long downward spiral of gambling away his meager income), Jackson Lears sees far more exalted. To Lears, the impulse to shoot it all, to taunt fate with one's last dollar, connects gambling to the spiritual yearning for grace. In Something for Nothing, he overturns the conventional wisdom on gambling as vice in order to suss out the laudable challenge that it poses to a society fueled largely by profit and productivity. To Lears, the salient characteristic of the gambler is his blithe indifference to material gain. The gambler may seek for nothing, but both of those terms turn out to be more complex than first they appear. The is money itself, for the gambler's insouciance comes from his willingness to reduce money to mere counters in a game (pp. 8, 327). And the something is far more than money-that is nothing less than

Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape (review)

Reviewed by: Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape Mark S. Foster (bio) Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape. By Catherine Gudis. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Pp. 333. $90/$22. In recent years gifted scholars, including Jackson Lears and Pamela Laird, have vastly expanded historical knowledge of American advertising, and there are numerous books on marketing products outdoors. When first opening Buyways, I did not expect to learn much new. But this inspired book was a revelation, packed with fresh information and penetrating analysis. Catherine Gudis analyzes outdoor advertising from the Civil War to the present. In the nineteenth century, "bill posting" was chaotic, totally unregulated, and marked by incessant conflicts in which workers regularly tore down and replaced rivals' posters before the paste was dry. Gudis recounts that overenthusiastic advertisers even slapped posters on corpses of dead horses while they were still warm! Late-nineteenth-century cities were slathered with paper billboards featuring written text. With the advent of the auto, and with Americans moving faster, advertisers began attracting consumers with visual symbols and logos more than with text. Although there were early opponents of outdoor advertising, the [End Page 857] industry attempted self-regulation, and it enhanced its image by patriotic postings during World War I. Between the wars it became firmly entrenched. Gudis highlights the key role played by outdoor advertising in "promoting and commercializing a traditional theme in American mythology: the promise of social, geographical, physical, economic, and even spiritual mobility" (p. 64) With improved highways and higher automobile speeds, advertisers simplified and streamlined messages. Unlike appeals in magazines, roadside messages had to inform motorists instantaneously. Gudis presents an illuminating analysis of the differences between outdoor and print media. She also describes ingenious three-dimensional outdoor displays of products and outdoor sign parks, where viewers were encouraged to linger and products were displayed behind glass. Gudis astutely traces connections between outdoor advertising, the emergence of strip development, and urban sprawl. Emerging opposition to outdoor advertising entailed gender conflict: "The soldiers of the 'billboard war' pitted the beauty of nature against the beast of commerce, and usually women against men" (p. 163). There was major conflict over who owned "public space," the area between private property and the eyes of potential consumers in automobiles. Female reformers learned that soft-sell opposition and reliance on public opinion and popular pressure worked better than legal confrontations with outdoor advertisers, but Gudis notes that Ladybird Johnson's much-heralded "Highway Beautification Act" of 1965 was basically a sellout to outdoor advertising lobbyists. Gudis concludes with a brief examination of recent trends, including the use of irony, the emergence of enormous signs, and the parallels between outdoor advertising and the information superhighway. Buyways is a superb book. Gudis mined primary sources and made excellent use of previous scholarship. Space limitations prevent me from mentioning more than a handful of the insights that permeate her graceful, persuasive writing. Finding flaws seems like nit-picking, but nevertheless there are some. When tracing the changing use of visual imagery, Gudis discusses the manipulative power of film in the 1930s and what advertisers learned from it. Specific examples would have been useful here. In several places, this reader would like to have been exposed to more numbers regarding the growth of outdoor advertising vis-à-vis other media, and some economic analysis of the profitability of the industry. These minor caveats reflect more the preferences of the reviewer than substantive flaws. Physically the book is beautifully crafted, as befits its subject, and Gudis has made a welcome and highly significant scholarly contribution. Mark S. Foster Dr. Foster is professor of history at the University of Colorado at Denver. His ten books include From Streetcar to Superhighway: American City Planners and Urban Transportation 1900–1940 (1981) and A Nation on Wheels: the Automobile in American Culture Since 1945 (2002). Copyright © 2004 The Society for the History of Technology

Review of Myths American Lives By by Richard T. Hughes and Something for Nothing: Luck in America by Jackson Lears

Review of Myths American Lives By by Richard T. Hughes and Something for Nothing: Luck in America by Jackson Lears

Nixon in Nixonland

cultural historian T. J. Jackson Lears claimed most profound radicalism is often the most profound conservatism.1 This statement, which was made in Lears' 1981 study of American antimodernists, describes the many Americans who consistently supported Richard Nixon beginning early in his career. They were, in fact, neither dinner table debaters nor passive spectators. Nixon's people, instead, were citizens who were radicalized by their political ideology to labor intensely for their anointed candidate's election. Beginning with Nixon's first foray into politics in 1946, these men and women voted for him, organized themselves into effective groups that campaigned on his behalf, sought out and encouraged pro-Nixon voters, and raised money for him.

"There Is Not Much Thrill about a Physiological Sin"

"There Is Not Much Thrill about a Physiological Sin"