! Wednesday, November 18, 1970 THE MICHIGAN DAILY Pages Five * Wednesday, November 1 8, 1970 THE MICHIGAN DAILY Page Five A ride in the rumble seat Robert Sklar, editor, T H E PLASTIC AGE: 1917-1930, George Braziller, $7.50. First offic Stat had Eigh By SUSAN M. EDWARDS came After the tension of World of th War I, the United States w i t h- ary drew into itself, seeking "norm- ence alcy" in a period of internal dis- tran ruption and corruption in gov- radi ernment. The nation legalized Ame prohibition, then spent its ener- Th gies openly flouting the law with by t casual defiance. While Al Ca- tory, pone terrorized Chicago, hooded dogr Klansmen practiced violent bigotry against Negroes, J e w s , and Catholics in the South. It was a period of Babbitts a n d isolationists, of speakeasies and the Charleston, / and of John Held's coon-coated collegian and his flapper. Its heroes were Ru- dolph Valentino and Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth and Char- les Lindbergh, and, on the dis- taff side, Lillian Gish and Gloria Swanson. The automobile and the motion picture joined to rapidly transform traditional patterns of American life. This volume, the seventh in Braziller's The American Culture series. is a collection of essays printed, introduced, and annot- ated by U. of M. associate pro- fessor of history, Robert Sklar. The various volumes comprising this series examine the fabric of American life from 1600 to 1945, in an attempt "to restore to his- torical study the texture of life Wor as it was lived, without sacrific- hold ing theoretical rigor or inform- Skla ed scholarship." Gen To reflect the changing char- was acted of American life raw data ican (i.e. sociological studies, maga- exe zine articles, excerpts from bio- trol graphies, etc.) are employed to and present history as it happened. mic Anyone who has ever struggled the through hundreds of dusty per- ing iodicals can appreciate the im- ado mensity of the task. amor The, editor's premise, an al- spO most universal one, is that t h e fre nng t World War destroyed the cial culture of the U n i t e d es, a genteel culture which dominated it since the .teenth Century. In its wake e the cultural renaissance he Twenties. A brilliant liter- culture leaped into exist- while popular culture was sformed by the automobile, o, and the movies, uniting rica as never before. he Genteel Tradition w a s, his time in American his- , an orthodoxy without a ma. Yet up to and including The rewards were quite tangible ones: upward mobility, respect- ability, social acceptance, com- fort, and security. However, by the beginning of the Twentieth Century, American society w a s rapidly changing. Expanded ur- ban and industrial centers were challenging the validity of the genteel order. American writers who considered themselves cul- tural nationalists, such as Ezra Pound, Van Wyck Brooks, H. L. Mencken, were concerned with developing a new culture where social, ethnic, regional, Id War I it had a strangle on the American public. As r notes in his introduction: teel culture, in a word, s the instrument the Amer- rn middle classes devised to rt some form of social con- over those below t h e m d above them on the econo- ladder. ; . The basic trick, most subtle and challeng- was getting people to pt the desired manners and rals as if they had been ntaneously generated and ely accepted from within. -The Public Enemy, 1931 and political differences could express themselves. In o t h e r words, their belief in a culture united by diversity ran counter to the genteel middle-class em- phasis on tradition and uniform- ity. It took a world war to shat- ter their idealistic expectations. World War I constituted one of the most massive doses of uniformity in this country's his- tory. Dissident intellectuals, Socialists, pro-German elements, even German art and artists, were silenced with wild fervor. Karl Muck, a German-born Swiss citizen and conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, unintentionally incurred the wrath of the 100% Americans by not playing "The Star- Spangled Banner" at a Balti- more concert in 1917. "No one ever asked me," Muck publicly declared and spent seventeen months in prison as a result. Thus cultural leaders (even Wilson himself, who sanctioned the Muck affair) debased their values by linking them with eth- nic and religious prejudice for political opportunism. Embodying the mood of grow- ing disillusionment- with Anglo- Saxon America, The Plastic Age presents Randolph Bourne and Van Wyck Brooks in class- ic statements regarding Amer- ican Culture. Bourne, a hunch- back with a "peculiarly a c u t e mechanism for suffering," op- posed World War I and soon found his writings suppressed. He died at thirty-two shortly af- ter the conflict ended, pro- phesying a "fatal backwash and backfire" upon creative and de- mocratic values in this country.. The American traditions which he had counted on for ideas and for continuity had failed him. Viewed from an historical per- spective, his essay, "The War and the Intellectuals," sounds curiously modern in its c o n- demnation of war. Striving fo r continuity, Bourne had to ex- pand his sympathies to the breaking point, while pulling the past and present into some sort of interpretative order. He ask- ed himself: Are not our intellectuals equally fatuous when they tell us that our war of all wars is stainless and thrillingly achieving for good? There is work to be done to prevent this war of ours from passing into popular mythol- ogy as a holy crusade. What shall we do with leaders who tell us that we go to war in moral spotlessness, or w h o make 'democracy' synonymous with a republican form of gov- ernment? There is work to be done in still shouting that all the revolutionary by-pro- ducts will not justify the war, or make war anything else than the noxious complex of all the evils that afflict men. Bourne also quickly pointed out that the same men who felt little responsibility for labor wars and the oppressed masses had a large fund of idle emotional capital in the struggle for free- dom abroad, the task of mak- ing the United States fit for peace was abandoned in favor of a feverish concern for t h e management of a war. As Bourne's writings were suppres- sed, the foundations of cultural optimism were destroyed. Van Wyck Brooks similarly re- coiled from the pseudo-culture around him. In "The Culture of Industrialism," he declared that the young artists of America, with with no sense of a collective spiritual life to work for, were becoming a race of Hamlets; he called for a Whitman to reaf- firm a humanity which was old- er than Puritanism. Brooks at- tacked America's middle-class Genteel Tradition for failing to create an American aesthetic and for preventing the forma- tion of a democratic culture. Robert her hair and the women of the world followed. Fashions, in be- havior as well as in dress, were now dictated by Hollywood, in- stead of by Paris. Following a type of prescriptive formula, the Lillian Gishes gave way to the Clara Bowes. The big change in American mores from 1917 to 1930 might conceivably be chart- ed in terms of what happened Sklar chapters) to women per se than to any other topic. It soon became unmistakably clear that a large portion of American society (besides wo- men) would cease to abide by the previous dictates and con- straints of genteel culture. It was no secret that the Eighteen- th Amendment was primarily di- rected against t h e notorious drinking habits of immigrant workingmen. Indeed, no cultur- al crisis was more severe in Anglo-Saxon America than the ordeal of coercion and rejection suffered by idealistic immigrants at the hands of 2nd to nth gen- eration Americans (excluding Indians) during the war. Such hostility resulted in the enact- ment of a quota system in 1924. Both radio and the movies forg- ed common bonds of informa- tion and values. Beginningwith D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation in 1915, film was re- cognized as both an artistic and an emotionally-engrossing med- ium. The motion pictures gave Americans a common fund of experience, making them more alike than ever before. In Sk- lar's words: The movies gave to America in the Twenties what genteel culture was no longer capable of providing - manners and morals, heroes and heroines . . . [They] learned to build on the hollow shells of genteel convention not to offer false reassurance, but to create art. Thus, in the Twenties, a mass culture was forged by amalga- mating the cultures of those who created the new media and all those who responded to them. What is particularly remark- able, in view of the rampant prejudices of the times, is the fact that it was immigrants and their children - the Mayers and the Thalbergs of Holly- wood - who were shaping this culture. While reading The Plastic Age, I often found myself shouting for more Sklar; indeed, the ob- servations which he provides in his brief notes were often more enticing than the essays which they prefaced. But this seems to substantiate the scholar's prob- E b 0 0 k s lem of finding first-class c o n- temporary insight into a period. For instance, in the cases of films and automobiles, the bulk of current documentation is pri- marily concerned with technical or commercial aspects. Little was produced at the time on aesthetic effects, The historian, therefore, is faced with a r ea 1 dilemma which Sklar resolv- ed in many cases by turning to sociological studies, in m o s t instances, classic ones. These studies play a double role for not only do they offer contem- porary data but they reflect the Twenties' own fascination with research and field studies. The period of 1917 to 1930, then, was ,a period full of restless vi-s tality, burgeoning in a field where all of the old rules seem- ed to be gone. Old familiar cer- tainties and hopes, drifted off like mist as new ones were formulated. Society, seeming to sense that things would never be the same again, galloped through these last years in a paroxysm of activity. of A merica Eve Merriam, THE NIXON POEMS, Atheneum, $2.95, paper. Robert Sward, HORGBOR- TOM STRINGBOTTOM I AM YOURS YOU ARE HISTORY, Swallow, $5.00. By ROBERT C. WHITE In the perspective of main currents of American literature, Eve Merriam and Robert Sward have a great deal more in com- mon with Walt Whitman than the traditional schoolroom poets such as Longfellow, Whittier, or Field. In the poetry of both Merriam and Sward, the rmeter grows as freely so to speak, as the "leaves of grass" and there is hardly a n y self-consciousness about edifyingmodels of the classics. But then, again, they are similarly a long shot from Whitman. While unabashedly singing of America; they sing a bitter tune with few allusions to the wonders of transatlantic cables or magnificent new rail- roads spanning the continent. Where, for Whitman, once glowed the "gorgeous clouds of the sunset," Robert Sward sees the sun as "a bore, The sun is feeble, Not hot enough, Not fun enough." Or Eve Merriam com- ments cynically on the decep- tion of a spring day'. April, I'm loving you. Make six copies and keep the original in the top file drawer. Whitman, the transcendental- ist, could sing a song of human- ity "and of these one and all," weave the song of himself. Rob- ert Sward warns that he is do- ing something else. Now, I am not writing poems. I am writing You, America. I am writing the big; fat, Ugly American novel. I am distractible. I have a seven-and-ahalf-inch penis, And bizarre sexual tastes. What will you do about that When I am reborn, And am your President? The language of both poets is iconoclastic and blunt. And al- though both focus more on For the Student Body: DENlIM FLARES America the wasteland than America the beautiful, there is an essential difference between the- two stemming from the method of their perceptions. Both rely heavily on the camera technique of journalistic ima- A new building has gone up with no spaces for windows. Traveling with Sward, on the other hand, requires a step to the rear of the bus where the images slowly filter through a myriad of sensory impressions. And the bus, in this case, is no Grayhound express but rather, one feels, a dilapidated vehicle colored with dry-glow paints. Sward, in fact, describes his long, choric poem as "a record- ing from other countries and from the context of America it- self of fantasy, song, and apo- calypse . . . ." His traveling companions, on the journey which begins in Mexico in 1965 and ends four years later in New Hampshire, are all Prank- stemrs of the grotesque. Among them areOrphan Annie, Dick Tracy, Mamie Eisenhower, Mi- notaur, waterskiers, etc.-all of them, in Sward's words, "inno- cent and horrendous, in a grop- ing and violent evolutionary state." Ultimately, when one disem- barks, then, he is left with en- tirely different feelings depend- ing on whether he has been riding with; Eve Merriam or Robert Sward. Eve Merriam has taken a quick jaunt into the American country and returned hurridly to relate the shock of her impressions. Robert Sward is still travelling, and the reader is hauntingly pulled with him. Today's Writers . . Susan Edwards, a graduate, student in Museum Practice, will be interning next semester at the Henry Ford Museum. Robert White, a regular re- viewer and a Tyrolian sheep- dog breeder, reports that he is now experimenting with a new hairless variety. The pioneer law of self-preserva- tion was blamed for making the nation dynamic materially and static spiritually; posses- sive instincts have preempted a "national fabric of spiritual ex- perience," pigeon-holing it f o r "practical purposes." His so- lution was the creation of a na- tional culture built on the bed- rock of everyday experience, rather than enforced from above. In other words, a replace- ment of the outmoded, oppres- sive Genteel Tradition by pop- ular culture. Strangely enough, at a time when the Genteel Tradition was reaching out "to legalize prev- iously informal control o v e r culture," it had lost its force, introducing The Plastic Age, a period of enormous diversity, and vitality. As the Genteel Tmradition succumbed, people were freed from its constrict- ing bonds of conformity. N e w modes of dress ,entertainment, and sexual freedom seemed to reintroduce individuality. But did they? Or was it just another type of conformity in a differ- ent guise? Irene Castle bobbed -Ladies Home Journal, Feb., 1930 to women. They entered the era with long hair and long skirts; they left it with the Castle bob and short skirts. The Gibson Girl had become a flapper! By the mid-twenties so ,many wo- men were wearing their h a i r short that moralists were won- dering about the possible harm- ful effects of the "free and easy atmosphere" of that traditional masculine sanctuary, the bar- ber shop. Sklar, sensing the im- portance of this dramatic lib- eration of women in the Twen- ties devotes more space (t h r e e W on't a e ON Student I LIVE IT UP! ( $upplies at FOLLETTS Just Spend It Madly GRADUATE ASSEMBLY STATED MEETING TONITE 7:30, West Conference Room RACKHA M Agenda Includes: 1. Judiciary Board 2. Rcckham Executive Board Representation 3. Student =Relations Committee -ALL WELCOME--- Dine with Us and Dance to the Music of MY FRIENDS WEDNESDAY THRU SATURDAY 0 0 r gery, but Miss Merriam shoots with an Instamatic where Sward relies on the panoramic effects of cinema. To travel with Miss Merriam is to view the American land- scape in quick, split-second takes. For example, "Fashion Note in Wartime." U Open: 319-S. 4th Ave. Mon. thru Fri 761-3548 11 a.m.-2 a.m. V Sat. & Sun. { Sp.m.-2 a.m. Mon. ihru Thurs., no minimum charge .-:" . ., :" ........4:}}G Mi;4::.........E ns ati:.""v :..:::a"# h."": .xU :::".:: : n::::}:."".%"": :"S::."rr:%v"n: