DWIGHT MACDONALU
perfecting monopolies and other practical affairs. Pioneers, 0
Pioneers! 'And the tired pioneer preferred Harold Bell Wright
to Henry James.
x
..
We ·are now in a more sophisticated period. The West
has been won, the immigrants melted down, the factories and
railroads built to such effect that since 1929 the problem has
been consumption rather than production. The work week has
shrunk, real wages have risen, and never in history have so
many people attained such a high standard of living as in
this
country since 1945. College enrollment this fall
is
over four
million, three times what it was in 1929. Money, leisure, and
knowledge, the prerequisites for culture, are more plentiful
and
more evenly distributed than ever before.
In these more advanced times, the danger to High Culture
is not so much from Masscult as from a peculiar hybrid bred
from the latter's unnatural intercourse · with the former; A
whole middle culture has come into existence and it threatens
to absorb both its parents. This intermediate form-let us call
it . Midcult-has the essential qualities of Masscult-the
formula, the built-in reaction, the lack of any standard except
popblarity-but it decently covers them with a cultural fig–
leaf. In Masscult the trick is plain-to please the crowd by any
uieans. But Midcult has it both ways: it pretends to respect
the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them
down and vulgarizes them.
2
... The enemy outside the walls is easy to distinguish. It
is
its
· 2. It's not done, of course, as consciously as this suggests. The editon
of
The Saturday Review
or
Harper's
or
The Atlantic
would be honestly
indignant at this description of their activities, as would John Stein–
beck,
J.
P. Marquand, Pearl Buck, Irwin Shaw, Herman Wouk, John
Hersey and othen of that remarkably large group
of
Midcult noveliau
. we have developed. One of the nice things about Zane Grey was that
it seems never to have occurred to him that his
boob
had
anythinr
to do with literature.
