American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century (review)

American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century. By Michael Kammen (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999) 320 pp. $30.00.

If social historians have exercised the right to throw in everything including the kitchen sink, cultural historians have given themselves license to appropriate the results and trace the consequences, by connecting disposable income and consumption patterns to the expression of taste and the cultivation of values. Once affiliated with the history of ideas, cultural history can now annex the studies of how class and status reflect reading, listening, and viewing habits. American Culture, American Tastes blends these two approaches to the past, claiming that technological transformation and the enlargement of an increasingly prosperous middle class are pivotal to grasping twentieth-century debates about "democratic distinction" in the United States.

Conservative critics who have traced the coarsening of the nation's sensibility doubt whether ideals of aesthetic excellence and moral seriousness can be squared with the imperatives of mass culture. Leftist critics have lamented the devitalization of popular culture when capitalism turns authentic artifacts into mere commodities. Kammen is reluctant to endorse either version of decline. Instead, he emphasizes the meaning of a historical shift: In the late nineteenth century, popular culture was participatory, localized, class-conscious, and various. Since World War II, mass culture has been passive, nationalized, standardized and, above all, televised.

Kammen's book is most useful in its conceptual distinctions--proposing, for example, that a proto--mass culture was created about a century ago to take advantage of inventions like the phonograph, radio, and movies. It enabled an emerging culture industry to imagine a market on as grand a scale as the automobile industry was achieving. But because nothing would alter the texture of national life like television, Kammen reserves the term mass culture for the last half-century; his case is persuasive.

Kammen draws a fine line between cultural power and cultural authority. When democratic vistas are wide, usurpers like private radio networks and movie studios can alter national habits and tastes. Has American culture become elevated or impoverished, sublime or sordid? Such an evaluation was once the responsibility of educated elites, whose descendants Kammen can barely locate and whose critical influence has evaporated. Hence, the story that he recounts concerns the collapse of cultural authority. Van Wyck Brooks' "high brow" can no longer instruct--much less shame--the "low brow," in part because democratization itself has eroded such categories and in part because mass culture itself has become inescapable in a way that popular culture never was.

Drawing upon a vast secondary literature, Kammen has sprinkled his text with curios from many genres and enterprises (from comic strips to public-opinion surveys), but he prefers to highlight scholarly and critical ideas about American culture than to examine closely its actual artifacts. Haphazard arrangement does not detract from a volume that is enlivened with insights worth debating and with generalizations worth pursuing.

Stephen J. Whitfield
Brandeis University

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