Mass Wasteland

Michael Kammen. American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the Twentieth Century. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. 322 pp. Illustrations. $30.00.

In the 1950s mass culture became a "problem." Mass-circulation magazines, comics, pulp fiction, movies, radio, and television were fundamentally transforming American life, and intellectuals, who had generally ignored or disdained mass culture, scrambled to understand the power of mass media and the appeal of popular entertainments. As Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White observed in their important anthology, Mass Culture (1957), academicians and students across several disciplines suddenly felt themselves "drawn into the vortex by a suction force none can resist." In response to burgeoning scholarly interest, Rosenberg and White assembled an array of influential writings on mass culture, ranging from the grim assessments of Frankfurt School theorists to the enthusiastic endorsement of Leslie Fiedler. Rosenberg, a sociologist who was pessimistic about the consequences of mass culture, doubted that scholars would soon resolve the "Great Debate" as to whether it was harmful or beneficial to its consumers and to American culture generally. Even forty years of wandering through the uncharted desert of American mass culture, he prophesied, would not deliver us into the Promised Land, where we would at last understand this vast and bewildering phenomenon. ¹

Some forty years later, as Michael Kammen's latest book suggests, the wilderness is no longer altogether uncharted, but considerable disagreement remains as to which direction the Promised Land lies. Kammen describes American Culture, American Tastes as "an extended essay about changing views of leisure and American preferences concerning its growing array of uses" (p. xiii). Kammen's book is both a history of the growth of commercial mass culture and, more interestingly, of critical debates over popular culture and mass culture in the United States over the past century. Despite decades of scholarship on mass culture, he contends, American scholars have too often been unable to think straight about popular entertainment. While he does not promise singlehandedly to eliminate our confusions about mass culture, he ventures that the book's historicization of the advent of mass culture will "supply it with some staying power" and help orient those who are lost amid "the confusing cultural traffic of our century" (p. xviii). Kammen recounts and joins the "Great Debate," but scarcely settles it.

Kammen observes that American scholars have often misunderstood mass culture in part because the "Great Debate" arose in the 1950s at the very moment that mass culture was overwhelming popular culture. Amid a seismic cultural shift, and lacking a body of serious scholarship on popular culture, many scholars were unable to get their bearings. As a consequence, scholars' habit of using the terms "mass" and "popular" interchangeably and loosely has bedeviled our understanding of American culture ever since. Kammen's effort to establish "definitional clarity" for these terms is generally clear, although not altogether novel. Popular culture, he writes, is indisputably commercial, but operates on a scale sufficiently small to allow for local differences. Mass culture, as the term suggests, is deliberately designed to appeal to a national audience. It is not merely commercial, but relentlessly commodifies virtually every aspect of our culture. Most important, popular culture is comparatively "participatory and interactive," while mass culture has "induced passivity and the privatization of culture" (p. 22). A county fair, with its mixture of carnival rides, homegrown exhibits, and fairgoers ambling about the grounds, epitomizes popular culture. The much-hyped "synergy" that enables the Disney corporation to inundate the United States, and much of the globe, with movies and product tie-ins may well be the current apogee of mass culture.

According to Kammen, many scholars of popular culture not only ought to define their terms more precisely, but are also in need of a history lesson. Too many practitioners of cultural studies, and even some historians, write with such disregard for historical context that the past century of American popular culture becomes a "continuous blur," as though an undifferentiated mass culture has endured since the late nineteenth...