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xv INTRODUCTION Mass Culture and American Political Traditions The images are familiar to millions of Americans: Tom Powers chasing power and money at all costs in Public Enemy; Stella Dallas suffering for her ambition; Tom Joad going off to fight for social justice in The Grapes of Wrath; the “fighting Sullivans” eagerly defending their nation in World War II; Stanley Kowalski beating his wife; Norma Rae rallying downtrodden mill workers; Tre Stiles dodging bullets in South Central Los Angeles in Boyz N the Hood. These are among the hundreds of proletarian protagonists deployed by Hollywood since the Great Depression to tell the story of working people and the lives they have lived. Such characters have appeared in thousands of movies that have collectively reproduced a tale of plebeian experience in America both fixated on the issue of human desire and complicated by it. Like many in the audience who watched these feature films, these characters and others who shared the screen with them invariably met a number of different destinies. Powers was killed for his crimes; Norma Rae gained justice and more selfcon fidence; Kowalski’s future was anyone’s guess. This book probes the way ordinary men and women have been depicted in feature films since the 1930s and argues that these images and the narratives in which they were portrayed resulted from a broad political discussion that was endemic to American mass culture. Specifically, it seeks to explore the relationship between one of the central forms of mass culture in twentieth-century America—the movies—and the tensions that emanated from powerful political traditions like liberalism and democracy that continually shaped American life over a long period. Preoccupied with the lot of the liberal individual, mass culture opened up for public discussion the rich and varied world of human emotions and private desires, and in so doing, it posed definite challenges to main- stream political movements and their ideological arsenals, which assumed that politics could be carried out in an orderly manner. Neither the left nor the right was comfortable with endorsing the full expression and pursuit of personal longings; both instead always favored some ideals and wants over others. Moral reformers continually sought to constrain the passions of individuals; social reformers under the New Deal, for instance, favored the collective goals of working men over the individual wants of women. Mass culture could often lend support to the methodical processes of mainstream politics, but it constantly undermined them as well. Its purposes were ultimately not about regulating or prioritizing human cravings but about imaging them or exploring where they might lead. The unpredictable relationship between mass culture and organized politics had particular relevancy for the history of the working class in twentieth-century America. Standard scholarly discussions about the fate of working people in America have been grounded in political tensions between the left and the right or between forces mobilized around labor and those around capital. Recently, students of culture and of workers have argued convincingly that older paradigms of a class struggle can no longer explain how political interests are articulated in a capitalist world and pursued “through individual and collective action, within and beyond orientations of class.” For instance, it is now well known that calculations based on race and gender can explain political mobilizations as much as class-based movements. And modern scholarship in many fields contains abundant references to the rise of a politics of individual rights in our time that is not sufficiently explained within the context of classbased paradigms.1 The move away from class-based perspectives constitutes both a shift from a structural view of politics and a greater recognition of the way power is contested on a cultural level. Discussion inevitably becomes more concerned with images and representations than with parties and organizations. To move away from the politics of class, in fact, is to embrace to a more significant extent the importance and power of cultural forms like narratives and symbols. Margaret Sommers, for instance, has pointed to the need to recognize the capacity of “narrativity” as a means by which individuals come to know their social worlds and determine who they might be within those worlds. Sommers calls upon scholars to look beyond the idea that common people act only from interests they may derive from their position within the class structure of society and to recognize that they live in a culture in which their identities xvi INTRODUCTION [18.218.127...

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