RICHARD WOLLHEIM
which is certainly well on its way in this country, and which is
generally referred to as "Americanization." Now, significantly, it is
for this, for what he calls "the synthetic, Madison Avenue-con–
cocted way of life" that Potter reserves his deepest contempt. He
cannot deny that Americanization is likely to produce and diffuse
a higher standard of living than anything known in the past, but
this he dismisses not just as an advantage that is outweighed by
other disadvantages but something that is not really an advantage
at all. It ministers, he asserts, only to conditioned wants and
imposed choices- though he nowhere subjects these concepts to
the scrutiny they deserve. But for him the real trouble with
classless culture
is
not its content, but just its classlessness: its lack
of roots, its non-organic character. And from this we can recon–
struct why Potter would reject the universal diffusion of middle–
class culture: his argument would be that if this culture were
universalized, it would inevitably lose its class character, and
losing its class character it too would become synthetic and
lifeless.
So we arrive by elimination at the true solution: the recon–
stitution of working-class culture. The idea is one that is much
in the air, but it must be said that in
The Glittering Coffin
it
is
argued for even more perfunctorily than is usually the case. For
what is there--we have the right to ask- what is there in working–
class culture to be reconstituted?
It is tempting to assimilate the problem with which Potter
deals to another to which it bears a strong resemblance: that of
the children of immigrant groups in a new society. For we might
think that it is highly desirable that these children should benefit
from the kind of "race-less" education that a plural society
has
to
offer, and yet at the same time retain some of the distinctive cul–
tural features of their racial group. And the experiment of the
New World has shown how difficult this is for the non-privileged,
i.e., non-Anglo-Saxon, groups
to
achieve. It is the justifiable
boast of the Jew and the Negro that he can come up from the
bottom and yet retain his cultural peculiarities. Can the same be
said for the Pole, for the Greek, for the Chinese?
But the analogy is deceptive: for of course in the case of
those groups who cannot preserve their distinctive culture, we
