Midcentury America Research Articles

R. Gordon Wasson and the Publicity Campaign to Introduce Magic Mushrooms to Mid-Century America

En mai 1957, une série d’articles parus dans le magazine Life et nombre de grands journaux nationaux annoncent la « découverte » de « champignons magiques » hallucinogènes par un couple d’aventuriers. Robert Gordon Wasson et Valentina Wasson racontent comment ils ont fait usage du champignon dans un village indigène, un récit qui intensifie le tourisme de la drogue au Mexique de même que les ventes par correspondance de peyotl, une substance psychédélique aux effets similaires. Pour le couple, le champignon magique procure une expérience transcendante qui n’est autre que le fondement pré-moderne de la religion globale. Rejetée par les universitaires, cette théorie suscite un très vif intérêt auprès des journalistes et du grand public. Pour faire connaître sa découverte, R. Gordon Wasson mène une campagne comprenant des tournées de conférences, des expositions muséales et de nombreux entretiens avec des journalistes. Cet article s’appuie sur les archives du couple, conservées à la Harvard University Herbaria, pour comprendre comment leur initiative a contribué à la prolifération de théories idiosyncratiques sur l’expérience des drogues psychédéliques.

REVIEW | Designed for Hi-Fi Living: The Vinyl LP in Midcentury America

Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017 ISBN: 9780262036238 (HB)

Imagining Racial Equality

Abstract Local 65 United Warehouse Workers Union (1933–1987), which became District 65 United Auto Workers, promoted photography with a camera club, and a member-edited newspaper New Voices, featuring photographs taken by members. This left-led, New York City distributive industry union began in 1933 on the Lower East Side, and it became the city’s second largest local. The union utilized photography to normalize the role of African American members within the union and to advance a civil rights and anti-racism agenda. This article includes photographs taken by member-photographers, and photo-reproductions of New Voices. New Voices’ photographs included African Americans in the everyday life of the union, challenged race-based labor segmentation, supported community struggles, and defied racial norms in midcentury America.

The ‘Jewish zealots of tobacco land’: the circuit riding rabbi project’s impact on small town Jews in North Carolina, 1950–1980

ABSTRACTRural North Carolina synagogues in mid-century America faced unique challenges. The North Carolina Association of Jewish Men’s Circuit Riding Rabbi Project, following the success of the circuit riding program of the American Methodists and the circuit riding Reform rabbis at the turn of the century, reimagined synagogue life in ways which sustained rural small town Jewish life. This program offered a uniquely southern solution to rural Jews and allowed its participants to pursue their own ideal of the American Dream.

Midcentury America through the Eyes and Ears of Popular Music

Midcentury America through the Eyes and Ears of Popular Music

American Counterculture Ideals Expressed through the Music of the 1960s

The 1960s era was one of the most divisive, turbulent periods in American history. In many ways, the decade was defined by the Counterculture Movement and by those who resisted the demands of a conformist society rooted in Cold War values. This historical study first contextualizes the emergence of the Counterculture Movement of the 1960s within the historical period of mid-century America. Next, the paper provides an analysis of the values of the Counterculture Movement expressed through music. Exploration of counterculture songs reveals that participants advocated the rejection of society through the expression of personal freedom, immediate gratification, anti-materialism, community, and free love. Furthermore, inquiry demonstrates that music was used as a vehicle to explain and promote the movement’s ideals. Ultimately, the study demonstrates the ways in which music of the Counterculture Movement reflected Americans’ broader questions of, and challenges to, the Cold War culture in the late- 1960s.

Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America by Will Norman

Reviewed by: Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury Americaby Will Norman Ian Afflerbach N orman, W ill. Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America. Hopkins Studies in Modernism, Douglas Mao, Series Editor. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2016. Pp. xii+ 263. Modernist studies and American Studies, remarks Will Norman, "rarely speak to each other" (15). Transatlantic Aliensoffers at once an origin story for this silence, an inventory for what these fields have to talk about, and a dialectical reading practice capable of mediating between the antithetical interpretive categories that constantly risk dividing the institutional and aesthetic history of modernism from the daily, material reality of postwar American culture. By focusing upon a group of European exiles who arrived in the United States and took on "complex engagement[s] with the emergence of a fully fledged mass culture" (2), Norman unsettles the "persistent misconception by which the United States at midcentury functions as modernism's banal other" (2). These transnational émigrés not only lived through, but indeed embodied, the "disorienting and uncanny juxtapositions" (2) constitutive of the 1940s and 1950s, when "reified categories of nation and cultural hierarchy" (2) were still being constructed. This moment, Norman rightly states, "is one of the most complex and least understood in modern US cultural history" (5) whose "radical instability" meant "it was far from clear what constituted a legitimate aesthetic regime and what didn't, whether an American crime novel could be considered high literature or a New Yorkercartoon be considered high art" (5). Norman's book dwells in the "repeated process of entanglement, improvisation, and compromise" (211) through which his transatlantic aliens navigated such tensions. His reading practice draws upon Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the cultural field, which emphasizes how artists and intellectuals must negotiate competing positions in a market for distinction. And yet, to this reader's relief, Norman does not belabour abstract sociological categories, but rather adopts a biographic narrative method that continuously emphasizes how negotiating the cultural field involves "restricted but necessary choices made by individuals in their lives and work" (11). His book provides a refreshingly grounded look at what it means for intellectuals to grapple with mass culture "in those moments when theory is wrenched from the abstract and returned to the historical grounds of everyday alienated life" (48), a process he simply and aptly calls "coping" (48). Norman's first chapter introduces "methodological models" for his book in the unlikely pairing of C.L.R. James and Theodor Adorno (16). James's revolutionary optimism about popular media has made him a heroic figure in American and post-colonial studies, while Adorno's abyssal cynicism about the culture industry has left him "sadly reified" as an elitist defender of European modernism (17). Yet Norman demonstrates how these antithetical positions emerged as reciprocal responses to a shared émigré experience of American mass culture. Norman first traces how [End Page 340]James's early writing was informed by a blend of nineteenth-century cultural criticism and sentimental Hollywood movies. Popular art forms such as film and radio, James came to believe, could channel the "violent desires" of the working class "into revolutionary praxis" (28), and eventually create a unified national culture. After introducing Adorno's far more cynical account of the culture industry, Norman turns to Minima Moralia. Reading this idiosyncratic, pseudo-self-help book in the tradition of the modernist novel, Norman emphasizes how Adorno's writing renders intellectual alienation in post-war American culture through "the fragility and pathos of its own subjectivity, the resolutely ethical underpinning of its insistence on remaining unhomed in America, and the freight of its estranging style" (48). For all their manifest differences, Norman concludes, James and Adorno "were interested more in criticizing the process by which culture was being stratified in the American 1940s than in the policing of the divisions themselves" (32). In this way, Norman maps the dialectical movement of his own book, which sustains an engagement with mass culture poised between undue optimism and bleak alienation, circumscribing the aesthetic and academic categories that typically install midcentury modernism and postwar American culture as antithetical domains. Chapter Two continues this project by repairing...

Behind the Scenes with Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Toni Frissell: Alternative Views of Fashion Photography in Mid-Century America

This essay explores the process and labour involved in creating fashion editorials. It is focused on the work of Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Toni Frissell, as case studies of photographers who worked at America’s two leading fashion magazines: Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. Images that show these women “backstage” form the basis of this analysis, to expose the images’ compositions and the teams of people involved in their creation. Both photographers worked at a key moment in American fashion, as designers such as Claire McCardell created a simple, interchangeable wardrobe of readymade clothes that catered to the increasingly active lives of middle-class women. They were significant to the “Modern Sportswear Aesthetic” that emerged during this period and which exploited Kodachrome’s rich tones to compose alluring images that showed sportswear as adaptable and fashionable. Frequently shot outside, or using carefully contrived sets, their imagery provides a case study for the ways fashion’s creative workers collaborated to construct convincing visions of sportswear’s emergent style. Drawing upon Bruno Latour’s theories of organization, this article examines these networks of people, working to varied briefs and deadlines to create each magazine issue. From contact sheets and shots of fashion editors and models, to glimpses of the photographers’ efforts to find the right angle, this essay uses Dahl-Wolfe and Frissell’s photobooks and archival materials, including memos between Bazaar Editor-in-Chief Carmel Snow and Frissell, to challenge the idea of the seamless fashion page and look at the professional work and negotiations necessary to create a successful image.

"The Fabulous Irishman": Lord Mayor Robert Briscoe's "Unusual Religious and National Combination" in Cold War America

"The Fabulous Irishman":Lord Mayor Robert Briscoe's "Unusual Religious and National Combination" in Cold War America Rachel Gordan (bio) Little remembered today, but much discussed at the time was the visit of the Jewish Lord Mayor Robert Briscoe of Dublin to the United States in the spring of 1957. Stranger-than-fiction, but also typifying what Cold War Americans wanted to believe was possible among their own Jewish citizens, Mayor Briscoe embodied an unexpected combination of religious and national loyalties. "The Lord Mayor," explained typical American newspaper coverage of Briscoe's visit, "embodies the unusual combination of a devout orthodox Jew and a zealous Irish patriot."1 The irony was that Briscoe was not American, proving that the freedom of opportunity and religion that Cold War Americans viewed as fundamental to their own purported exceptionalism, actually occurred to varying degrees in other countries—although often without the fanfare typical in the US context. Still, Briscoe's six-week American visit, the media's attention to it, and the television drama that Briscoe inspired, provide a view into Cold War American fears and desires around Jews, religious fealty, citizenship, and the particular way in which midcentury American discourses around religious freedom found a primary example in Jews, such as Briscoe, and their religion. At a time when a tri-faith image of postwar America as a country of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews was widely accepted, Briscoe's presence and popularity in the U.S. helped to affirm America's embrace of religious freedom—albeit a freedom constrained to just three religions, and even more crucially, although rarely made explicit, to those individuals understood as racially white. As Kevin Schultz's study of "tri-faith America" explains of the era's credo: "The ethnic, religious, and racial divisions that had been predominant in pre-World War II America no longer had a place in the defining traits of good Americanism. With enemies such as Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito, the ideal of tolerance was sacrosanct, and during the war years the kind of tolerance that was [End Page 401] lionized most was that between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews."2 This tri-faith ideal had practical results, Schultz points out, challenging the nation to rethink the distribution of power and who was deserving of social, political, and cultural recognition. In line with this rethinking of American society, Robert Briscoe prodded American observers to reconsider their stereotypes of clannish Jews, and he affirmed postwar Jewish allegiance to religion as an ideological core of their identity. Although Briscoe was an "Irish import," America's reception of him during his spring 1957 tour symbolized the unusual role that Jews played in serving as evidentiary proof of midcentury America's ideal of religious freedom.3 Briscoe would spend six weeks in North America. In that time, he became a celebrity, as newspapers around the country followed his tour and as a result of his television and radio appearances. In its coverage of Mayor Briscoe, the media all over the country broadcast an image of the Jewish mayor as embodying religious freedom—an American value freighted with political saliency during the Cold War, which according to President Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, was a battle between those who believed in the moral laws of the Judeo-Christian tradition and those who found value in materialist secularism. When quoted in the press, Briscoe's messages were about Ireland's religious freedom, but American embrace of Briscoe nonetheless symbolized America's attachment to these values. "Briscoe Says He's Live Evidence There 'Absolutely Is No Bigotry in Ireland'" ran one typical headline in the Los Angeles Times that connected Briscoe's celebrity with his embodiment of religious freedom.4 As Leo Braudy, a scholar of American culture notes, fame in Western society has long been associated with the ideal of freedom, because fame can be understood as the "social version of a love that absolves the loved one of fault, restoring integrity and wholeness." With fame, the celebrity is granted recognition and permission to be himself. "To be famous for yourself, for what you are without talent or premeditation, means you have come into your rightful inheritance...

From Power to Prejudice: The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury America by Leah N. Gordon

<i>From Power to Prejudice: The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury America</i> by Leah N. Gordon

Leah N. Gordon, From Power to Prejudice: The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury America

Leah N. Gordon, From Power to Prejudice: The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury America

The Empty Child: Dystopian Innocence and Samuel Delany’s Hogg

This essay examines Samuel Delany’s novel, Hogg to interrogate the figure of the innocent child and the role of the family in America, especially in mid-century America. The essay contends that the novel, narrated by the unnamed eleven-year-old protagonist who details both his polymorphously perverse sexual exploits as companion to the eponymous Hogg (outcast, murderer and rapist for hire) and acts also as chronicle of Hogg’s experiences over 72 hours, destabilizes the ideology of innocence that acts as a utopian foundation to America’s national understanding of itself as exceptional.

A "brutal, unprincipled, drunken, vice-ridden beast": Maternity in Shirley Jackson's The Bird's Nest

A "brutal, unprincipled, drunken, vice-ridden beast":Maternity in Shirley Jackson's The Bird's Nest Lynne Ann Evans (bio) Although shirley jackson wrote six novels and one hundred and ten short stories, and is considered "one of the most prominent female writers of the 1950s" (Murphy 3), scholarship on her work is limited. In part, critical reticence to discuss Jackson's work is attributed to the author's interest in domestic fiction, an interest that helped substantiate Betty Friedan's claim that Jackson's work encouraged paternalistic stereotypes of women (52–3). More recently, Eric Savoy suggests that feminist scholarship's apathy toward Jackson's work is due, in part, to the fact that her texts evince a "troubling" and "recurring preoccupation with poisonous mother-daughter relationships" (829). Jackson's relationship with her own mother, Ruth Franklin notes, was a "poisonous" one in which Jackson was subjected to Geraldine's "belittling … all her life" (120). Franklin sees this tumultuous relationship as having a direct impact on Jackson's characterizations of women in that Jackson seems to have used her fictional world as a way, at least in part, to acknowledge her mother's cruelty (350). Jackson certainly does return to "poisonous" mothers repeatedly in her work, and her 1954 novel, The Bird's Nest, is no exception. While the novel may speak to Jackson's ambivalent feelings toward her own mother, at the same time Bird's Nest does have a broader potential feminist value. Jackson's novel [End Page 25] offers a fictionalized enactment of Freud's theories of female development during the "golden age" of psychoanalysis in America (Genter 137), a time in which motherhood itself was the subject of intense cultural scrutiny. Although the feminist value of Bird's Nest is not untroubled, Jackson's reliance on an underlying Freudian script opens up a space through which Bird's Nest imagines a maternal power, a potentiality that Freud insistently tries to repress in his own writing. In postwar America, the subject position of mother, informed by a popularization of a psychoanalytically inflected individual psychology and its attendant focus on the child's well-being, was identified as "the primary source[ ] of neurotic behaviour" (152). Mothering in midcentury America, as is the case in Jackson's text, is identified as the origin of filial psychosis. However, crafted as a dramatization of psychoanalytic theories of female subjectivity, maternity in The Bird's Nest ultimately reveals that psychoanalytic discourse relating to mothers and daughters is bound up with cultural notions of monstrosity. The Bird's Nest, considered Jackson's "best book" by biographer Judy Oppenheimer (161), recounts the story of Elizabeth Richmond, a young woman who suffers from "disintegrated personality" (Jackson 51). Darryl Hattenhauer—one of only a handful of critics to explore Bird's Nest—notes that Jackson sets a gothic tone from the start (119), employing, Hattenhauer suggests, the structure of Elizabeth's workplace—a museum with "an odd, and disturbingly apparent, list to the west" (Jackson 1)—as a metaphor for Elizabeth's collapsing self (119). Jackson's gothic narrative also has a psychoanalytic context from its opening moments. Construction at Elizabeth's workplace created a "hole the height of the building, from the roof to the cellar" beside Elizabeth's desk (Jackson 2–3), and as young woman hangs up her coat, she feels "an almost irresistible temptation to hurl herself downward into the primeval sands upon which the museum presumably stood" (3). Over the course of Elizabeth's treatment by Dr Wright, a psychologist hired by Elizabeth's Aunt Morgen when the caregiver can no longer cope with her niece's erratic behaviour, Elizabeth comes to understand that she has three "cruel sisters" (215)—independent personalities that live, and battle for existence, within her own body. Wright believes that the disintegration of Elizabeth's personality began with the death of her mother (63), and Jackson's narrative thereby evinces the same psychoanalytically informed cultural fascination with the mother's role in the child's subjectivity that characterizes a great deal of post–World War II fictional constructions of maternity. While Elizabeth's experiences recall those of Miss Christine Beauchamp, the subject of a...

From Power to Prejudice: The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury America

From Power to Prejudice: The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury America

Easel Tapestries: The American Reception of the Marie Cuttoli Tapestries 1930s to 1950s

The story of textiles in mid-century America was enriched by differing opinions about their multi-dimensional role as objects of art, design, and handcraft, and by the revival of pictorial tapestry, especially French imports. This paper examines the Cuttoli Tapestry edition of French-produced tapestries, named after its éditeur, Marie Cuttoli (1879–1973), and explores how these tapestries emerged as a middle ground between painting, mural, and textile, bringing to the forefront recurring tensions between fine and applied art hierarchies, third-party producers, and the concept of reproduction. While these pictorial tapestries, which varied in size from medium to large scale, functioned much as easel paintings did, earning the name “easel tapestries,” they were decidedly different from easel paintings due to the materials, production processes, and resemblances to the original design. The Cuttoli project gave artists the opportunity to explore alternatives to painting and to reach new patrons and methods of display; through the marketing of limited editions, the tapestries remained luxury art objects, although never as celebrated or expensive as “the original.” This paper documents the complicated chronology and provenance of a seminal twentieth-century pictorial tapestry project by exploring how the Cuttoli Tapestries were perceived and understood by critics and patrons during their debut and subsequent display in pre- and postwar America.

Review: Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America, by Amy F. Ogata

Amy F. Ogata Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013, 320 pp., 16 color and 91 b/w illus. $87 (cloth), ISBN 9780816679607 In art, architecture, and design, creativity is often referred to as an abstract concept, an intangible idea. Usually mentioned in relation to nimble thought processes and innovative schemes, creativity is also connected with concrete objects displaying originality, resourcefulness, and ingenious design. “Admired as inventiveness, problem solving, insightfulness, originality, and discovery of personal potential, creativity encompasses a broad variety of meanings,” Amy F. Ogata writes (1). It is an “elastic term,” she adds, one that is “difficult to define and to measure with any precision” (193). Yet in Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America Ogata traces with conviction the important role played by this elusive concept and locates it within the physical world surrounding the postwar child. In the introductory chapter, “Constructing Creativity in Postwar America,” she asserts that creativity and the creative child were themselves constructs conjured by adults during the postwar period to help educate and shape the next generation, but also to appease and allay fears in a world burdened by the Cold War and to offer an outlet for hopes for a better, more positive future. The concept of creativity was used widely—literally consumed—in informational publications and in advertisements to sell ideas as well as objects. Most important, creativity indicated “flexibility,” the possibility of adaptation to any future environment. Creativity and related concepts, such as inventiveness and imagination, were used both as strategies in design thinking and as guiding principles in education. As Ogata notes, creativity and similar traits were …

From Power to Prejudice: The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury America

From Power to Prejudice: The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury America

Cowboys and kings: The coming of age film in 1990s Irish cinema

The article explores why in the 1990s many Irish filmmakers chose precisely a coming of age narrative to attempt to take the international box office by storm, and assesses some of the films that resulted from the attempt. First, it discusses the cultural roots and generic conventions of the Hollywood teen film, especially the rites of passage it has reified and its idealization of small-town, mid-century America. Second, it studies the economic and cultural reasons behind the (over)production of coming of age films in Ireland over the 1990s. Finally, we tackle how these films alternatively deviate from and rely on the conventions of the Hollywood coming of age film to meet investor demands and engage global audiences with Irish concerns.

Distinctly un-American: subliminal advertising and the Cold War

Purpose – This paper aims to describe the relationship between subliminal advertising and the Cold War to have a better understanding of the cultural dynamics of postwar America. Design/methodology/approach – This paper is a review of primary and secondary materials from the period 1957-1958, primarily popular and trade periodicals that capture the events as they took place. Findings – Subliminal advertising both reflected and shaped fears grounded in the Cold War cultural climate, and reveal other key insights related to the postwar psyche. Research limitations/implications – Political ideology is readily apparent within consumer culture, a prime example of the insights to be gained by viewing American culture through an interdisciplinary lens. Practical implications – Advertisers can effectively tap into consumers’ deeply seated emotions, but should tread carefully lest they be accused of “mind control”. Social implications – Subliminal advertising represented a seminal moment in postwar American history by exposing the hyper-paranoia of the times. Originality/value – A blow-by-blow account of the subliminal advertising craze and its relationship to the Cold War represents a deep dive into one of the more fascinating sites of mid-century America.

For Those “Who Could Not Bear to Look Directly at the Slaughter”: Morrison’s Home and the Novels of Faulkner and Woolf

Toni Morrison’s novel Home replaces nostalgia for midcentury America with reminders of McCarthyism and the Korean War. She wanted to, as she said, “take the scab off the ’50s.” In doing so, she returns to a critical time in her own life and the authors who preoccupied her during graduate work at Cornell: William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. Reading Faulkner, Woolf, and Morrison’s own master’s thesis alongside her recent novel draws out the critical slant of her fiction, as she uses the literature and history of an earlier era to lay bare the cultural cost of nostalgia.