MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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across the country. A hostile chorus of jeers, from the President
on down , greeted each new plea for help; hints of racism and
anti-Semitism added an ugly note to the tone of self-satisfaction;
New York became an object lesson in the old-fashioned Ameri–
can values of prudence, thrift, self-reliance. The city was casti–
gated as an alien graft on the national polity. Now its citizens
would be punished for living high on the hog-for their welfare
system, for their municipal hospitals and colleges and subways,
which few other cities enjoyed, and above all for their cleverness
and arrogance, their lordly airs of superiority.
Hostilities between the city and the nation did not begin in
1975 and weren't confined to differences over money and social
policy.
In
cultural matters the dominance of New York was
always perceived with bitterness or envy by the few who cared
about culture; indeed, New York 's cultural life was salient
evidence of the town's vaguely foreign character. The Broadway
theaters, with their royal families of actors and their link to
British stage traditions, were the presumed aristocracy of Ameri–
can culture, like the opera and the ballet. They were the big
leagues, which made farm teams and tryout towns out of Boston,
New Haven, and Philadelphia, and helped destroy their indige–
nous cultural life. The moguls of Hollywood, on the other hand,
were the
nouveau riche
plebeians, safely common in taste, who
made mass-produced artifacts out of little pieces of Broadway
and spread them democratically to every corner of the country.
But culture involves more than the production and con–
sumption of art; it also involves the production of ideas, includ–
ing the critical ideas through which art is received and assimi–
lated. The intellectual in New York who looked down on the
Broadway theater as a middlebrow institution was several times
estranged, first from the country at large as an egghead and a
New Yorker and then from our culture as well, which failed to
meet the highest-read: European-standards. Still, the Broad–
way theater embodied a level of taste and professionalism, a
standard of performance, against which the rest of the country
would grudgingly measure itself.
Understandably, the primacy of New York was always
greatest in the performing arts, even after the decline of Broad-
