The American Essay in the American Century

4. New York, New York: The Arrival of the Colyumnists

102 he carnage and dislocations of the First World War shook, and perhaps ended, the Progressive dream of a country being led forward by trained and rational experts. At the same time, the arrival of airplanes, the Model T, motion pictures, and radio accelerated an already rapid rate of modernization to a speed that, to many Americans, felt breakneck. New York, where the soldiers had shipped out and then demobilized, was the center of this change. It had become the capital of the modern world and of mass culture—a focus for those who feared modernization and those who felt drawn to it. The city for its part, especially Greenwich Village, saw itself at odds with the small-town Middle American culture associated with the old middle class. During the 1920s, however, New York’s colyumnists, as they called themselves, stepped into the breach and began to mediate between Manhattan and the rest of the country. Through syndication, writers like Franklin Pierce Adams, Heywood Broun, Don Marquis, and Christopher Morley developed nationwide readerships. These new essayists benefited from the simultaneous emergence of a cadre of cultural critics, entrepreneurs, publishers, editors, and impresarios who celebrated their work. In the midtwenties a series of important articles by Canby, Carl Van Doren, Stuart Pratt Sherman, and Burton Rascoe identified the colyumnists as real writers who were helping revitalize the American essay. P 4 New york, New york The Arrival of the Colyumnists T 103 New york, New york l E Av I N G t H E A C A d E M y, b E C o M I N G M I d d l E b row Middlebrow culture grew out of a deep dissatisfaction with specialization. The tension between specialists and generalists manifested itself within the university in the uneasy marriage of the arts and sciences, but beyond the academy other Americans were also concerned about the problem of “overspecialization ” and the rise of “technocracy.” Americans worried that too many decisions were being left to the experts, that specialization narrowed us as a people, and that our search for the “new” was leading us to forget the past. Most wanted to be successful and practical, but not if it also meant being boring, standardized, and soulless. They appreciated the time-saving devices that science provided them, but wondered where the time had gone. Liberal arts advocates resisted the new emphasis on science, technology, and specialization within the university, and some of them left the academy in search of a larger audience. Stuart Pratt Sherman, writing in the Nation in 1908, assailed the “pseudo-scientific specialists” for driving from the university the very students who had “real taste and literary power,” though he also cautioned that “we need more generalizers” but “not flimsy generalizers .” That same year John Erskine called for college English departments to drop the historical-philological approach and its cultivation of professors as experts in esoteric specialties and subspecialties. He proposed instead that English instructors teach a wide range of “great books” in small discussion groups where the instructors were “not to lecture or in any way behave like professors.”1 Trends, however, were against them. Within most university English departments, the philologists won out. In his 1936 memoir of college life during the late Victorian era, Canby recalled that the period between 1870 and 1910 marked “the triumph of applied science” and “the defeat of the classics in American education.” It was the time of what Gerald Graff has called the “failure of the generalists.”2 At the time of the war, Canby began to consider whether general education might best take place outside the university. In 1918, while still a young professor at Yale, he was invited to a Cambridge University symposium, “The America of Today.” There he argued that the future of American culture might lie in the “slowly mounting level of the vast bourgeois literature that fills not excellently, but certainly not discreditably our books and magazines.” Two years later, in a collection titled Everyday Americans, he decided that America’s “destiny will be among the middle class.” And this new day felt imminent. “Economic conditions,” he wrote, pointed toward the “triumph of the bourgeoisie,” for America seemed “to be entering a period when a vastly 104 The American Essay in the American Century greater number of men and women will have reasonable security of moderate income.” This would mean, he...