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“Will Shade with His Tub Bass, Memphis, 1960,” one of jazz photographer William Claxton’s photographs of the jazz scene in the 1950s and 1960s.

THE ART OF DEMOCRACY was written as an introductory history of the U.S. experience with popular culture, an experience that shares important parallels with other societies, but one that has had a unique trajectory and global influence. There has long been a need for this kind of book for the scholar, student, and general reader.

One reason for this need is that popular culture has only recently been considered a subject for serious scholarly inquiry. For most of the twentieth century, it has been denigrated by intellectuals of all ideological stripes as either meaningless escapism or a dangerous narcotic.¹ While such views are not altogether lacking in validity—one need not defend popular culture by arguing for its universal excellence—they seriously underestimate the complexity and relevance of those arts most passionately embraced by ordinary working people and their families. The escapist argument, for example, begs questions of where people escape from, where they escape to, the varied choices they make in their means of escape, and what those choices reveal about them and the world in which they live. The narcotic argument, by contrast, overlooks the often desperate uncertainty that marks the products peddled by corporate culture lords to a presumably gullible public, as reports of any recent box-office flop will attest. But if the study of popular culture is surrounded by a great deal of uncertainty, even mystery, it also affords valuable clues—about collective fears, hopes, and debates.

Indeed, even if one assumes the worst about popular culture, the attention and affection it receives merit explanation, which is why labor historians were among the first to explore the popular arts in any detail. So were more theoretically minded writers keenly attuned to the gaps in the visions of preceding generations of intellectuals. At its best, such work testified to the democratic spirit that has animated U.S. scholarship since the 1960s.

This book grew out my own first-hand experiences with popular culture and my frustration with the burgeoning literature I read to enhance my understanding of it (if the problem had once been scarcity, it now seems to be one of dizzying abundance). My irritation was not so much that this literature was boring or lacked insight; often the opposite was true. But much of it was fragmented into discrete media or time periods, riddled with obscure jargon, or governed by theoretical concerns that overshadowed the materials being analyzed. Again, much of this literature was—and remains—valuable, and this is especially true of professional scholarship since the 1980s. My goal here has been to synthesize that scholarship and put a simple analytical frame around it.

The book was written to proceed in a loosely chronological fashion, although it need not be read that way. Actually, my hope is that in addition to providing a coherent narrative, it will serve as a reference that can be consulted after (or instead of) being read from cover to cover. To facilitate additional study, I have included brief bibliographic essays for each chapter. Some of these sources, of course, were used in more than one chapter, and when appropriate are cited in each. More specific sources are cited in the notes, which I have tried to streamline for the sake of brevity and readability.

The focus of the book will be on mass-produced texts (a term that encompasses novels and periodicals, as well as plays, films, television shows, and other media) intended for large audiences to enjoy in their spare time. This textual approach allows me to narrow an otherwise unmanageably large field of study. At the same time, I know—as should any reader—that popular culture can be defined more broadly to include festivals, rituals, handicrafts, and other cultural practices. (I consider these to fall within the realm of folk culture, which will be discussed in Chapter 1.) Perhaps the most obvious omission from the book is sports, a highly visible aspect of everyday life notable for its ability to cross class and racial lines. But sports is a world unto itself, divided by particular games and amateur, professional, and scholastic sectors that would be too unwieldy to survey. And so while I may not cover all areas of popular culture, I invite the reader to draw parallels between what I do discuss here and what I do not. Indeed, the patterns I describe and their implications may ultimately be more important than any specific material covered.

Even those media discussed here are treated in an abbreviated way. To deal with them comprehensively would lead to progressively larger and more unwieldy chapters as new forms are introduced and older ones diversify, defeating my overriding goal of writing a streamlined one-volume history. Instead, I have chosen to focus on those forms (and genres, or distinct styles within forms, like jazz in music or Westerns in literature or film) that are crucial to a particular period. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for example, literary forms, especially the novel, were of decisive importance. In the middle of the nineteenth century, theater and minstrel shows reflected important changes in popular culture specifically and in U.S. society generally. Movies transformed virtually all the popular arts at the turn of the twentieth century; computers did the same in the transition to the twenty-first. Such stories and the commonalities between them are the building blocks for the chapters that follow.

Another organizational (and ideological) strategy is demographic. Although this is an elusive and imprecise matter, I tried to keep my attention on working-class people and the issues, artists, and documents that have mattered most to them. So, for example, I have done relatively little with magazines (a largely middle-class affair), except in the case of those (like dime novels) whose working-class orientation was clear.

A bottom-up approach to cultural history also has important racial ramifications. Despite their status as members of an oppressed minority, African Americans have invented, elaborated, or inspired more popular culture than any other racial or ethnic group in the nation’s history. Their achievements figure prominently in the stories that follow.

A question that often looms over assessments of cultural phenomena in a society is whether those phenomena reflect or shape historical forces. Was the emergence of rock & roll a spur to the nascent Civil Rights movement or a sign that a movement with roots in the 1940s (or earlier) was having a discernible effect? Empirically, the question is impossible to answer. I’m inclined to think, however, that ideas do have consequences, and that popular culture has at least potential power to change hearts, minds, and behavior. Here, then, is one more reason to explore it. Indeed, even if one concludes that ideas are not the engine of history, the study of popular culture can be usefully employed as a pulse-taking measure.

Four recurrent ideas provide the thematic glue for the book. The first is this: that new forms of popular culture are almost always resisted by elites. From the proliferation of novels read by white women in the late eighteenth century to the proliferation of rap songs listened to by black men in the late twentieth century, there have been consistent—and strikingly similar—criticisms of those who make and use such forms. The argument that popular culture expresses the brazen excesses of urban life, seduces and corrupts young people who need to be quarantined from it, and functions as an enervating substitute for more “serious” forms of culture is made again and again in a variety of contexts (most recently in presidential elections). The repetition is unwitting but suggests class, racial, gender, and other ideological interests that are often a smokescreen for the more frankly political interests in some way threatened by popular culture. Such concerns should not be dismissed out of hand; to say that popular culture cannot have potentially negative effects also denies its potentially positive effects and thus negates its power altogether. Of course, some popular culture is repellent and even dangerous, and I will note it as such as this history unfolds. At the same time, it seems to me that far too much energy has been expended on moralistic judgments at the expense of an attempt to understand why particular works and forms command the allegiances they do.

The second theme of the book is that new cultural forms often move up the cultural ladder over time. That novels went from being the most despised form of western culture to the most exalted in the space of a century—a transformation often overlooked by readers, writers, and critics alike—suggests a kind of collective amnesia that can be dispelled only by looking to history. In the twentieth century alone, immigrant-oriented “movies” became intensively studied “films”; jazz changed from a mass cultural phenomenon to a modernist avocation of aficionados; and the perception of television shifted from a wasteland to a fertile field of social meanings. Such developments can be explained as an elite co-optation of working-class forms, as a belated recognition of the artistic power of culture rooted in working-class concerns, or both. In any case, a historical perspective helps remind us that no form of culture is the sole province of any group of people, and that signs of migration from one constituency to another can provide valuable indications of other shifts taking place within U.S. society. These shifts also demonstrate that aesthetic values are rooted more in historical circumstances than in transcendent objective values, and that cultural hierarchies are never pure or invulnerable to change.

A third theme relates to a particularistic/universal dialectic in popular culture. As the succeeding chapters will suggest, different forms and texts originated in highly specific milieux: white working-class politics in the Jacksonian era, African- American communities in the aftermath of slavery, leisure practices in rural communities on the cusp of industrialization, and so on. These settings gave each new kind of popular culture a very distinctive flavor. At the same time, almost by definition, the most resonant popular culture becomes emblematic of the society as a whole, connecting disparate and even hostile constituencies. Perhaps the best example of this is the minstrel show, a hugely popular white cultural form that grew out of a peculiar fascination with pre-Civil War slave life. In the twentieth century, U.S. movies, which have been the product of a singular array of social, political, and economic conditions, are often nevertheless seen as having universal appeal—which in some narrow sense they probably do. But the passage of time (and the waning of U.S. imperial power) will also no doubt make increasingly clear how historically rooted—and limited—they have been.

The last and perhaps most important theme I wish to present to readers is what I call the “hardware/software” metaphor, a term that evokes the crucial role of technology in popular culture in general and the centrality of computers in contemporary U.S. society in particular. Repeatedly, I have found, new cultural forms are generated and changed by elites with access to capital and technical know-how, resources quickly funneled into commercial purposes. Printing presses, movie projectors, recording equipment, and other forms of “hardware” are usually introduced at the top of the U.S. economic structure and diffuse downward as part of an often mad scramble for private profit. But after an initial melee, it becomes increasingly apparent that the economic—and, especially, cultural—viability of these forms actually depends on content, or “software”: the particular books, movies, and records that win large audiences. This is important because ordinary working people are the key to those large audiences—they are what makes popular culture truly popular. Perhaps even more important is that unlike the labor market, residential patterns, local government, and other sites of everyday life, popular culture affords a unique degree of economic, social, and even political access for those otherwise marginalized in U.S. society. The success of “damned female scribblers” (as an envious Nathaniel Hawthorne called popular women novelists), African-American musicians, and ethnic stage and screen performers testifies to an unusual degree of diversity, mobility, and ferment in a divided populace.

This, ultimately, is why I decided to title the book “The Art of Democracy.” Certainly, there is plenty about U.S. culture that is less than altogether democratic (its ruthlessly exploitative commercial structure, its tendency to dominate cultural discourse abroad) and plenty that illustrates the worst aspects of democracy (mindless pandering, compromise to the point of diluting real change). For these reasons, a title like “The Art of Democracy” can be read as bitterly ironic, and such a reading is one whose partial legitimacy I cannot deny.

In the final analysis, however, I find myself focusing on how full the bottle is, not how empty. In terms of enriching everyday life, opening windows on alternative ways of life, and providing intellectual and emotional experiences that offer incalculable surplus value beyond a material plane, popular culture has enriched countless lives. It has also been an exceptionally effective means of describing what one scholar has called the “hurts of history.”² Despite disenfranchisement, discrimination, and the most basic denials of the pursuit of happiness, popular culture has given a voice to the oppressed and generated dialogues that have been heard all around the world. This book seeks to preserve its best aspects and to furnish a truly usable past for the popular culture of the future.