M'A; SS'C U LTAN 0 -M
10
C U L T
691
·-What. we emphatically do not want is. that these
dis~inctive
:qualities ' sqould b¢' washed out into a tasteless, colorless fluid of
unifonnity. Already we have far too much of this insipidity-masses
of people who are cultural half-breeds, neither assimilated Anglo–
Saxons nor nationals of another ' culture. . . . Our cities are filled
wi~h
these half-Qreeds .who. retain their foreign names but have lost
the foreign savor. This does not mean that . . . they have been
really
A~eiicariized.
It means that, letting slip from them what–
e'vernattve 'cuiture they had, they have substituted for it only the
:rfiost' ru'dinlentary American-the American culture of the cheap
n'ewspaPer, 'the movies, the popular song, the ubiquitous auto–
mobile....
. Just so 'surely as we tend to disintegrate these nuclei of nation–
alistic' culture ' do we tend to create hordes of men and women
without a spiritual 'country, cultural outlaws without taste, without
standards but those of the mob. We sentence them to live on the
mostrudiInentary planes of American life.
1
J3o\l.rne's fears -were
re~ized.
The very nature of mass industry
and of its offshoot, Masscult, made a pluralistic culture
impos–
sible. The melting pot produced merely "the tasteless, color–
less fluid of uniformity." This much can be said for the
dominant
Angl~Saxon
Americans: they didn't ask the
immi–
grants to accept anything they themselves were unwilling to
accept. One ,recalls Matthew Josephson's vignette of Henry
Clay Frick sitting on ,a Renaissance chair under a Rembrandt
reading
The .saturday
evening
Post.
They were preoccupied
W:i,th building railroads, settling the West, expanding industry,
1.
From "Trans-National America," reprinted in
The HistoTY of
4
LiteTary Rddiciil
(S. A. Russell, 1956). Of course the immigrants were
not all "huddled masses." Many, especially the Jews, were quite aware
. of the ' 'iriferiol: quality of American cultural life. In
The SpiTit of
·the 'Ghetto
(1902) ,.Hutchins Hapgood quotes a Jewish immigrant: "In
". Russia,. a ' few .. men, really cultivated and intellectual, give the tone and
everybody .follows th.em. But in America the public gives the tone and
',,: :: :the literary man simp,ly expresses the public. So that really intellectual
. <
Americans
do..
not express as good ideas as less intellectual Russians.
.:The Rus'sians
-all
mutate the best. The Americans imitate ' what the
mass of the people want." A succinct definition of Masscult. -
