In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

CHAPTER NINE When Americans Disagreed:Cultural Fragmentation and Conflict AS THE twentieth century drew to a close, learned observers worried that Americans were splintering apart on cultural issues. Books with titles such as CultureWars,The Disuniting of America, Postethnic America, and We’re All Multiculturalists Now described a people divided by ancestry, lifestyles, and moral values. Many election postmortems of 2000 and 2004 claimed that voters cast their ballots more in accord with moral stances than with their economic interests. Although these claims were overblown—in 2004 the issue of terrorism certainly mattered most—they reflected a long-term concern about cultural disintegration. Other learned observers responded to these warnings by reassuring readers that Americans still formed One Nation, After All or “One Nation, Slightly Divisible.” But division was the dominant motif among the pundits—and among average Americans too. Survey respondents expressed worry about ethnic diversity, and most rejected the suggestion that government should subsidize expressions of such diversity. In the mid-1990s over 60 percent of respondents agreed that “Americans are greatly divided when it comes to the most important values.”1 This turn-of-the-twenty-first-century worry about fragmentation recalled similar anxieties a century earlier.Wise men then warned that immigrants were adulteratingAmerican culture (recall the sneering at Italians reported in chapter 1); labor and management fought no-holds-barred around the country; white vigilantes used lynching to maintain control in the rural South; guardians of morality and cosmopolitan literati decried one another over what was permissible in literature;“drys” and “wets” campaigned vigor- ously on alcohol regulation and enforcement; and religion seemed to many to be in a death struggle with science.2 Yet, about halfway between these two periods of what seemed to be outof -control pluralism, pundits worried about the opposite—too little diversity . In midcentury, books such as The Organization Man,The Lonely Crowd,Escape from Freedom, and The End of Ideology described a uniform, gray-toned, mass society. Comedians joked about men returning from work and entering the wrong home because the new suburban tract houses were all alike. Time concluded that“either through fear,passivity,or conviction,[youth] are ready to conform”; a NewYorkTimes columnist described young adults of the 1950s as a cohort with “few interests, not much spirit and, in general, seemingly content to cut its coat according to the cloth”; and the president of Yale admonished graduating seniors to “once and for all live down your reputation as the silent generation.” Only about a dozen years later, of course, university presidents were routed from their wood-paneled offices by an anything-but-silent, anything-but-gray-toned generation.3 So the question we pose is this: Did average Americans over the twentieth century become more or less “divided . . . [on] the most important values ?” Or did divisions widen and narrow in different eras? Because the best evidence on this question comes from poll data and reliable polling largely began afterWorldWar II, we must focus our question on the second half of the century.We can, however, occasionally peer back into the decades before 1950. There were good reasons in the 1950s, the years of the conformity scare, to suppose that cultural distinctions were fading—and good reasons to fear uniformity, given the recent specters of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Large corporate and governmental bureaucracies, universal schooling, brand marketing, and network media seemed to be moldingAmericans into similar, culturally homogeneous atoms of a mass society—an analysis that developed into the “organizational thesis” among historians.4 Virtually all Americans heard the same explicit and implicit messages about what was normal—even if “normal” changed over the years. (On 1950s television, married couples like the Ricardos and Nelsons had separate beds; on 1990s television, shows such as Friends and Sex in the City featured unmarried women casually discussing their sexual escapades. In both eras, the entire nation looked on.) Another apparent impetus to homogeneity was the convergence in important domains such as the life span and the life cycle, family size, standards of living (at least until the 1970s), and secondary education , all of which we have covered in this book. Shared hardships, such as the Great Depression and the deprivations of wartime, and shared enemies (duringWorldWar II and the cold war) also bred commonality. Gallup polls from the KoreanWar era suggest that most Americans saw national unity as a key to winning.5 When Americans Disagreed 213 [18.224.64.226] Project MUSE (2024-04-19...

Share