CULTURE AS HISTORY: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century

by Warren Susman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 5, 1985

A collection of 14 solid, workmanly papers (written over the last quarter-century) that doesn't quite open up the grand vistas promised in the substitle. Susman (History, Rutgers) does his best work within a relatively narrow compass. Thus he ably summarizes the hostile reactions to the Turner thesis by a broad gamut of intellectuals, including John Dewey, Waldo Frank, Lewis Mumford, Walter Weyl, and John Crowe Ransom--who put it most succinctly: ""The pioneering life is not the normal life, whatever some Americans might suppose."" Susman writes pointedly about the '30s: the prevailing sentimentalism of Saroyan, Odets, Sandburg, and MacLeish; the failure of the radical Left to create a viable popular mythology; the stress on ""participation and belonging,"" as seen in phenomena as disparate as the boom in spectator sports and the founding of Black Mountain College; the massive attempt to compensate for feelings of inferiority (Susman calls the '30s ""the Age of Adler"") and insecurity by cooperative role-playing and ""adjustment,"" a message inculcated on different levels by Karen Horney, Elton Mayo, Dale Carnegie, and even games like contract bridge (la Culbertson) and Monopoly; the contradictions of the 1939 World's Fair, the ""People's Fair"" whose high admission price (75›) and other elitist features made it a losing proposition. Some of Susman's essays would have benefited from a second look: he sweepingly declares that ""effective conservatism, in my sense"" doesn't exist in America today, without a word about the evangelicals or the Reagan revolution; he surveys Babe Ruth's career without checking out Robert Creamer's splendid biography. Moreover, his generalizing prefaces to the book's four subsections are needlessly vague; and there are unaccountable lapses (calling Kafka as ""Austrian author"" and denying all folk elements in Appalachian Spring). Not the ""classic in American cultural history"" that endorsers too kindly predict--but a strong and sometimes illuminating piece of scholarship.

Pub Date: Feb. 5, 1985

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985

Categories: NONFICTION