Ordinary People

Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940–1960. By Judith E. Smith. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 444 pages. $39.50 (cloth).

In the United States the concept of ethnicity has generally been understood in terms of difference. It can be invoked to measure the troubling distance of others or oneself from a generic American mainstream or, for those who find proximity to the mainstream uncomfortable or unexciting, to promote one's desirable separation from it. It can function as a code for class, and the term assimilation has typically pointed to economic as well as ethnic transformation; both are features of the process, or project, of becoming "white." Visions of Belonging analyzes the will to make ethnic, working-class, and, less evenly, racial differences disappear in the crucible of family stories of the 1940s and 1950s. Judith Smith argues that dozens of popular texts imagined and prompted audiences to imagine that previously non-mainstream characters could, for the first time, routinely count as representative Americans, as "typical" and "normal" as the bland, babbitty, "'average American'" (1) hired to greet visitors to the New York World's Fair in 1940. The impulse to universalize, to disregard particularities of experience in the name of discovering shared experience, whether on the part of authors, the culture industry, critics, or audiences, was fundamental to understanding the representations of white ethnics in these works. The impulse sometimes operated on behalf of African Americans but often at their expense. Few recent books in American studies approach the topic of universalism or cosmopolitanism by paying close, respectful attention to the terms in which writers, texts, and critics of the past expressed their commitment to them.¹ I learned the most from Visions of Belonging where it works through the often fascinating attempts to insist on human similarity and connection rather than where it deals with the differences that were ignored.

Smith organizes Visions of Belonging around three categories of narratives. First, she discusses nostalgic "looking back stories," A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Mama's Bank Account, to claim that these tales of Irish, German, and Norwegian Americans promoted an "ethnic cosmopolitanism" (4) in which working-class and ethnic families moved into the realm of the ordinary. "Trading places stories," including the passing novels Focus and Gentlemen's Agreement and the miscegenation novel Strange Fruit, used characters that could be seen as representative to explore the permeability of racial and sexual boundaries and to resist discrimination. Finally, according to Smith, "everyman stories" such as Marty and A Raisin in the Sun created their own exemplary characters, in the wake of Death of a Salesman, to dramatize the limits of postwar prosperity and domestic fulfillment.

Such characters were normalized in part through the cultural pervasiveness of these stories, which Smith examines in novels, film, radio, television, and drama, with a level of detail that the obvious breadth of the study belies. World War II fostered these new treatments of ethnicity, race, and the working class as popular front ideals of inclusion and fairness gained patriotic as well as cultural authority in the fight against fascism and racism at home during and after the war and lingering into the period of anticommunist rage. Visions thus not only builds on the connections between social movements and mass culture elaborated by Michael Denning, but it also joins other studies that have reconceptualized the 1950s as a period of contradiction and conflict rather than "consensus placidity."²

Smith provides a social and cultural history of these stories within a changing media environment. Extensive and often enthralling accounts of their production, along with biographies that focus on political and artistic affiliations, illuminate the relevance and potential impact of these family stories during a time of social transformation. Smith traces the permutations of these stories—from story to novel, play, film, and television program, in the case of Kathryn Forbes's Mama's Bank Account, for example—monitoring the differences that the various media, as well as the changing political climate in...