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May/June 2008 Historically Speaking 41 Is There a Viable Populist Cultural History of the United States? David A. Horowitz Populism—a democratic faith in the wisdom and integrity of the common people—has served as the focus of several key syntheses of U.S. history. By exploring persistent grievances over the distribution of wealth, power, social status, or intellectual influence, historians such as Peter N. Carroll, Robert A. Goldberg, Michael Kazin, and Howard Zinn have provided vivid portraits of America's populist social movements and dissident political cultures. While I acknowledge the importance and value of these works, which focus on socio-political aspects of American history, I am more interested in how populism has figured in the expressive forms of American culture, particularly literature , painting, film, and popular music. Any chronicle of America's populist cultural legacy must begin with Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Stephen Foster. Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855) provided the nation's first work of vernacular verse. Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1 884) was the first novel to feature American dialogue. Building on the minstrels, the nation's foremost 1 9th-century entertainment form, Foster's parlor ballads and ditties laid the foundations for popular music and the use of African-American styles in expressive culture. Several of these innovations came together on the fabled Midway of the Chicago World's Fair of 1 893, where ragtime music, the Ferris Wheel, the forerunner of the motion picture camera, and the hootchykootchy dance each debuted. Not long after the Fair, multiethnic influences and curiosity about everyday life framed the enthusiastic reception of ragtime, blues, early jazz, vaudeville, musical theater, Western fiction, urban journalism, comic strips, photography, realist painting, and silent movies in the first two decades of the 20th century. Understandably, several of the Progressive era's literary figures fixated on the folkways of ordinary people. One was Chicago's George Ade. The son of a middle-class banker, Ade grew up in post-Civil War Indiana and graduated from Purdue University. Hired by a Chicago newspaper in the 1890s, he worked his way up to a column called "Stories of the Streets and of the Town." Artie (1896), Ade's first book of sketches, described a brash office boy given to fast talk and ambitious schemes for instant wealth. Another collection, Pink Marsh (1 897), offered musings from a shy African-American bootblack on topics ranging from boxing to love to cakewalks. In Doc' Home (1899), Ade presented an assortment of tall tales, observations, and characterizations from a talkative roomer in a cheap boarding house inhabited by shabby but genteel residents. The writer followed this up with Fables in Slang (1900) and In Babel: Stories of Chicago (1903), both of which described "nobodies ," ordinary people with human foibles who were Zora Neale Hurston. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten, 1940. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. gullible, trapped by circumstances beyond their control , or just cynical. O. Henry was New York City's counterpart to Ade. America's greatest short-story writer was born William Sydney Porter in 1862. His father was a selfeducated North Carolina physician and his mother came from the southern gentry. After clerking in a local drug store, Porter made his way to Texas, where he hired on as a sheep ranch hand, became an architectural draftsman in the state land office, and worked as an Austin bank teller. During the 1890s Porter sent sketches to Detroit and New York publications and edited an iconoclastic weekly called The Rolling Stone. A free spirit, he liked to "go bumming" with friends after work and mingle in the streets, shops, and cafes seeking story ideas. Porter's life at the bank ended in 1898 when he was convicted of embezzling less than $900 for unknowingly participating in a corrupt transaction initiated by superiors. After three years in federal prison he relocated to Pittsburgh, where he worked for a newspaper, lived in a rooming house, and consumed his nightly ten-cent sandwich, soup, and beer at a local saloon. Producing at least a story a week, he sold several character studies to national magazines. In 1902...

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