Creating the Modern Man: American Magazines and Consumer Culture, 1900-1950 (review)

The weaknesses of Tom Pendergast’s new study of magazines and masculinity in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century are easy to relate, as they are the weaknesses of much archival scholarship. Pendergast simply presents us with too much material, with too little of it subordinated to a focused argument. By contrast, Richard Ohmann’s monumental Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (1996) will remain a benchmark for specialists and nonspecialists alike because Ohmann subordinates his own impressive research to a single, compelling narrative. Ohmann’s argument that magazines, constructing their readers as commodities to be sold to advertisers, became the first modern form of mass culture is not only comprehensive but hard to forget. With a little editing, Creating the Modern Man could have aimed at a similar intellectual impact.

When Pendergast is on point, his work is driven by a major insight: that modern masculinity differs significantly depending on whether one considers magazines aimed at white or African American audiences. Pendergast’s account of masculinity in magazines like the Saturday Evening Post and Esquire looks pretty much like the story that figures from David Riesman to E. Anthony Rotundo have led us to expect: a Victorian productivist ethos gradually but definitively gives way to a modern emphasis on self-marketing, the body, and consumption.

As Pendergast notes, however, African American audiences were for a long time excluded from the national consumer marketplace that mediated this shift. As a result, black magazines became the setting for the victory not of consumerism but of W. E. B. DuBois’s vision of black modernity over Booker T. Washington’s. Realizing that “black masculinity must rest on something other than economic success” (109), DuBois and others writing for subsidized organs like the Crisis promoted a vision of black masculinity based upon the battle for basic citizenship rights. “Fighting, struggling, claiming what was due to [one] even when it meant trouble—these traits were to the DuBoisian Negro what self-control and hard work were to the Victorian white middle class” (174): the foundation of masculine identity.

This began to change, Pendergast informs us, when John Johnson, the founder of Ebony, discovered in the 1940s a way of promoting African American consumerism that was palatable both to black readers and to national advertisers. Yet the tension between rights-based masculinity and the version grounded in consumption arguably governs the representation of black masculinity in a range of subsequent texts. One thinks, for instance, of Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), where Bob Jones can afford to eat in fancy downtown hotels but can’t avoid the mistreatment brought on by his race, and of Gordon Parks’s Shaft (1971), whose masterful opening scene with Shaft strolling through traffic overturns Jones’s anxieties about public space, creating a sexy consumer icon in the process. By enabling such insights, Pendergast’s comparatist methodology compensates for the flaws in his study, leading us to ponder capitalist mass culture as a site of various groups’ uneven, but still shared, experience of modernity.