Haunted by Mass Culture

A Philosophy of Mass Art, By Noël Carroll, Oxford University Press, 1998

Deep Surfaces: Mass Culture and History in Postmodern American Fiction, By Philip E. Simmons, University of Georgia Press, 1997

Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, and Edgar Allan Poe, By Jonathan Elmer, Stanford University Press, 1995

Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of the Gothic, By Mark Edmundson, Harvard University Press, 1997

One early autumn evening in 1934, the wreck of the steamship Morro Castle ran aground off the shore of Asbury Park, New Jersey. The Morro Castle was still smoldering from a disastrous fire that had killed 137 persons when, charred remains of the victims still on board, it broke loose from its tow-line and lodged in the sand an easy swim's distance from the public city beach. By the next day, crowds of sightseers numbering as many as a quarter of a million, spurred on by print and radio reports of the grounding and special excursion railroad fares from New York and Philadelphia, flocked to the seaside town to view the still-burning shipwreck. The atmosphere was festive around what one contemporary account called "the charnel ship":

Shouts would go up when a spurt of flame shot from the liner. Many seemed to share the opinion of a fat woman who, after sitting for hours on the damp sand, explained to the girl beside her, "Yeah, I'm tired all right, but I ain't going to see nothing like this for a long time." Boys with baskets of soda pop, hamburgers and pretzels pushed through the crowds. Salesmen hawked photographs of the ship, some of them realistically tinted red to indicate the fire. New York newspapers were in demand because of their excellent aërial pictures of the fire-scarred ship. (Walker 21-22)

The scene at the wreck of the Morro Castle was both a spontaneous public festival and a media event. Postcards were printed, souvenirs were sold, and radio broadcasts offered both firsthand accounts of the scene on board the wreck complete with lurid descriptions of charred corpses and coast-to-coast coverage of a lavish memorial service for the disaster victims. An enterprising mother tried to display her infant to best advantage in Coney Island's annual baby parade on a float representing the burned ship--this was deemed in poor taste by the judges, and the child was disqualified from the competition (Walker 23-27). Meanwhile, the city fathers of Asbury Park planned to "push Atlantic City off the map" by mooring the wreck permanently in place as a tourist attraction (Walker 26). The plan was only scrapped when the ship's cargo of uncured cowhides began to rot and inundated blocks of the city surrounding the beach with an ungodly stench. The ship was eventually towed away to a New York salvage yard.

For those familiar with this period of American history, this story of rubbernecking at a tragic accident elevated to the level of mass tourism has the ring of a familiar moral fable. Its picture of the carnivalesque pleasures of the urban masses is utterly in keeping with the worst fears of those who saw in mass culture the portent of the end of civil society. The scene at Asbury Park is of a piece, for example, with the brutal riot that ensues from a crowd gathered for a Hollywood movie premier in Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (1939), or with cultural critics' pronouncements of the day that the masses represented a dangerous political combination of numerical strength and passive manipulability. In the highbrow cultural imagination of this period, the "masses" were a potential army of zombies: headless, soulless sensation-seekers, free to be completely molded in their tastes and whims by the cynical purveyors of cultural and ideological goods--here represented by the press who covered the event in such sensational detail, the vendors of souvenirs who catered to...