The Books of My Life: The Incorporation of America

Alan Trachtenberg, in his superb interdisciplinary synthesis, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, twenty-fifth anniversary edition, 2007 [1982], argues, in the the concluding chapter of his book, that two key or central symbols, are a microcosm of what need to know, in general, about the broad contours of Gilded Age America’s economy, politics, and culture. These two key symbols that express broader economic, political, and cultural aspects of the of the Gilded Age, according to Trachtenberg, are the company town of Pullman, Illinois near Chicago and Chicago’s 1893 White City.

Pullman was a planned community built by corporate capitalist George Pullman owner of the Pullman Palace Car Company, the company that made cars for America’s railroads. It was, as Trachtenberg notes, a planned community whose function was to provide a steady work, good morals, and peaceful environment for Pullman’s labourers. Pullman was a planned community of distinctive row houses with indoor plumbing, gas, libraries, and sewers. Pullman town was also an environment that was planned in such a way to assure that Pullman’s workers would be obedient toward their corporate benefactor, George Pullman, acquiesce to the knowledgeable guidance and cultural uplift of their corporate benefactor, George Pullman, cultural uplift that included instruction in the civilised arts of thrift, cleanliness, and happiness, thrift, cleanliness, and happiness in the way that George Pullman understood them. The company town of Pullman, in other words, was a paternalistic community meant to uplift “savage” workers and turn them into “civlised” and obedient employees.

>A second key symbol of the Gilded Age Trachtenberg explores is the White City. The White City, as Trachtenberg notes, was, like Pullman, a planned community, this one built, under the watchful eye of architect Daniel Burnham, for Chicago’s Columbian Exposition. The Columbian Exposition, which celebrated the 500^th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World, was one of a number of World’s Fairs that took place during the nineteenth century.

Trachtenberg argues that as was the case with Pullman's worker town, there are a number of meanings that one can tease out of the White City that tell us a lot economically, politically, culturally, demographically, and geographically about America's Gilded Age. On one level, Trachtenberg argues, the White City was a map of the past. The White City was built on land that was once marsh and sand dunes along the shore of Lake Michigan. The White City, in other words, was ordered out of the chaos of the wilderness just like, at least in the American imagination, America was in the 19th century.

On another level the White City was, according to Trachtenberg, a map of the present. The White City was a private enterprise created by the state, in this case the state of Illinois, and run by a board of directors whose goal it was to serve the interests of and reward its shareholders, just like the corporations that dominated American economic life in the Gilded Age. The spatial arrangement and spatial divisions of the White City were hierarchical, as was Gilded Age America. It was segmented or fragmented into classes, upper class, middle class, and lower class. The order of the White City in contrast to the disorder outside the White City told those who visited it in visual form that America’s corporate elite had brought corporate capitalist order out of pre-Gilded Age proprietary capitalist chaos. The Midway Plaisance, which stretched form the White City west along what are today 59th and 60th avenues, was, thanks to its carnivalesque atmosphere and its exoticism, marked off as quite different from the White City. The World’s Congress Auxiliary Building, which now houses the Chicago Institute of Art on Michigan Avenue at Adams Street in Grant Park north of the White City, and which was the site of a series of meetings on a variety of cultural topics including religion, was like the Plaissance, geographically and culturally or ideologically marked off from the White City core.

On still another level, Trachtenberg argues, the White city was a map of the future. The White City was constructed around iron and steel skeletons covered in staff, a substance that gave the illusion that the White City was built out of marble. The material culture of the White City was symmetrical and harmoniously laid out and it was monumental. Its buildings generally reflected the neoclassical style of the baroque era but the style of the White City’s buildings was not meant to symbolise nostalgia for a golden past. Instead the White City’s monumental architecture symbolised a utopian future for America and for the world. It was a future that, the White City told those who visited, corporate America would dominate. The Columbia pediment at the eastern entrance to the Machinery Hall, for instance, depicted Columbia at its centre, Honor was on Columbia’s left, Wealth was at Columbia’s feet along with inventors and two lions, symbols of brute force, subdued by human genius, by American genius. America, in the form of Columbia, the pediment clearly said to those who gazed upon it, represented the economic and political future of the world. The White City was divided into departments that included agricultural, mining, transportation, invention, art, and cultural departments. In the exhibit halls of the White City one found exhibits brought to the fair by corporations from all over the world, artworks, mechanical wonders, and examples of the homes of the future, including a model electric kitchen of the future. In between the monumental buildings of the White City were monuments, statues, canals, lagoons, plazas, and a wooded preserve. The White City was lit by 10,000 electrical light bulbs driven by two dynamos telling visitors that the future would be bright. All of these, the buildings, the built natural environment, the sculptures, the pediments, and the exhibits, the dynamos, and the cultural lectures, together, symbolised, in its material culture, human material progress, human spiritual progress, human evolution from savagery to civilisation, and the progressive human future to come.

The modern woman had a place in the White City. The Women’s Building, which was designed by a female architect, was guided by a Board of Lady Managers, and included exhibits on mothers as homemakers, cooks, and teachers. There were lectures on women’s history at the Congress. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for example, lectured on suffrage, Susan B. Anthony lectured on women and politics, and Jane Addams lectured on housework and factory work. These lectures were, however, marginalised since they were given in the World Congress Auxiliary Building rather than in the Women’s Building. The modern woman, the domestic displays in the Women’s Building argued, was a homemaker, a comforter for her harried husband, and a teacher to her children.

The meaning of the White City was not only, Trachtenberg argues, in what it clearly said but also in what it didn’t say. It was also in the White City’s silences, and in the White City’s exclusions, in other words. Blacks were excluded from the White City, save as menial labourers, and were denied permission by those who ran the White City to exhibit at the Exposition. The famous ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglas did speak at the Exposition but to a largely Black audience. America’s contemporary First Peoples were excluded but the “savage” Indians of America’s past and their “primitive” modes of life, their “primitive” customs”, and their “primitive” arts, representing lower levels of human evolution, were displayed in ethnology exhibits at the Exposition. The old world “customs” and “folklore” of Africans, Asians, and Muslims were displayed along the marginalised and exoticised Midway Plaisance. All of these "savages" were, in other words, the “others” of incorporated corporate America, “others” who would presumably be uplifted by the progress the White City promised or simply be marginalised by progress.

In its material culture the White City said, in its interpretations of the past, that chaos had been converted into order by an alliance of America’s economic and political elite. It said, in its representation of the present that incorporation or corporatisation in America had brought hierarchical order to mass chaos bringing wealth and culture to America in its wake. It told the world that America’s corporate elite had led the world to the cusp of a mechanical utopia. It told the world that in the future the bounty of consumer goods, of wealth, of harmonious order, of marvelous inventions, and of uplift could be everybody’s if they simply copied or replicated America’s economic, political, and cultural models. The monumental structure and technological and industrial exhibits of the White City said that America was ready and willing to take its place among the great powers of the world thanks to its corporate society. Soon, of course, the US would fight a war with Spain, a war from which America finally emerged, as the White City seemed to predict, with colonies in the Philippines and Cuba.

There were in the Gilded Age and there still are, as Trachtenberg notes, alternative visions of the future than that of the corporate elite who manufactured the White City. While the White City offered a monumental neoclassical and monumental future dominated by economic and political elite, architect Louis Sullivan advocated a national architectural style that was organic and represented, at least to Sullivan, democratic rather than corporate ideals. Sullivan’s skyscrapers, however, seemed to reflect the aspirations of the corporate elite they housed rather than any aspirations of a democratic society. Labour, which was not really present at the White City—those who laboured to build the White City were hidden and guarded during construction while the constructive power of labour was elided by the power of machines—also offered an alternative to the corporate culture of the White City. In 1894 unionised workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company went on strike against the company after their wages were cut by 30% to 40% while their rents in the company owned and run town where workers lived in were not cut. Eventually US Army troops and US marshals broke that strike. Farmers were not really present in the White City either. The Agriculture Building housed displays of weather stations and model farms, models of a corporate farming future, in other words. Farmers too offered an alternative to White City corporatism. Populism and its labour and farmer alliance together offered the model of another future, one that was associative rather than corporate, one that was grounded in the fellowship of farmers, workers, immigrants, and women, rather than corporate and hierarchical control. And while Sullivan’s and the Populist’s models were marginalised by corporate America they pop up now and again. They popped up, for instance, as Trachtenberg notes, in the Great Depression, in the 1930s, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

There you have it, the broad contours of the Gilded Age in a nutshell…corporate…mass capitalist…mechanised…hierarchical, economically, politically, culturally…oligarchic…ordered...spectacular in its consumption…citizens as passive spectators…paternalistic...women in the home…labour in the shadows…Blacks, largely excluded…corporate-politician-industrial-science alliance…racist...imperialist...utopian...America, Inc.

The Incorporation of America is one of the best social science books I have ever read. Trachtenberg is attentive to the economics and politics of the Gilded Age and how incorporation, segmentation, or modernity, call it what you will, was woven into the new cultural forms of the Gilded Age. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know how modern America came into being. I was a bit baffled by one thing, however, namely, Trachtenberg’s lack of acknowledgement of Max Weber’s theory of modernity, a perspective that places modern mass supposedly rational and efficient bureaucracies at the heart of the modern world. Weber’s approach to modernity is very similar to Trachtenberg’s exploration and analysis of the incorporation or corporatisation of America during the Gilded Age. The Incorporation of America has only a single reference to Weber’s, his exploration of the rise of the professional politician, something Trachtenberg sees as arising during the Gilded Age. Go figure?

The Books of My Life: Fear Itself

In Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Liveright, 2013) Ira Katznelson argues that fear, specifically four fears, were at the heart of the rise of the social liberal state in the United States. The first fear that fed into the rise of the social liberal state in the US, Katznelson argues, was the fear associated with the ravages of the Great Depression. This fear led many in America to fear that the free market laissez-faire ideologies and practises that had dominated America in the years before the Great Depression weren't up to the task of fixing American economic decline.

The second fear that led to the birth of the American social liberal state, argues Katznelson, was the fear of dictatorships of the right--Italy, Germany, and Japan--and of the dictatorships of the left, the Soviet Union of the 1930s. These dictatorships, Katznelson argues, seemed to many Americans to be the wave of the future thanks to their seeming ability to act quickly to solve the problems that faced them as a result of the Great Depression. The USSR, after all, seemed to have escaped the problems associated with the Great Depression entirely and its industrial growth far surpassed that of the “capitalist” West in the 1930s. The fascism, Nazism, and militarism of Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, and the military’s Japan, seemed to have pulled those countries out of the Great Depression and unemployment levels in each had plummeted, thanks primarily to military spending and wars or rumours of wars.

The third fear that played an important role in the birth of the American social liberal state, Katznelson argues, was the fear of the other. Many Americans, Katznelson argues, came to fear the dictators of both left and right and came to fear the threat such dictatorships supposedly posed to American “democracy”.

The final fear that played a leading role in giving birth to the American social liberal state, Katznelson argues, was the fear unleashed by America’s dropping of nuclear bombs on the largely civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. This fear was exacerbated, Katznelson notes, when the Soviets successfully developed and tested their own atomic bomb in 1949 and their own hydrogen bomb in 1952, the same year the US successfully tested their first H-bomb.

These fears—the fear of economic decline, the fear of dictatorships, and the fear of the atomic bomb--led, Katznelson argues, respectively to the emergence of the social liberal voluntary planning state, the World War II central planning state, and the procedural state and centrally planned security and warfare state during the New Deal, World War II, and the Cold War.

It was Dixiecrats or Southern Democrats. Katznelson argues, who played the central role in birthing the New Deal, the WWII centrally planned, and the Cold War national security and warfare states. Southern Democrat or Dixiecrat fear of the ravages of the Great Depression, led Southern populists to provide critical support for the “radical” legislation that created the New Deal state. The fear that the New Deal and the World War II central planning state would lead to the undermining of the Southern Jim Crow or White supremacist state in the South, led Dixiecrats to pull back their support for selective parts of the New Deal and World War II planning state, a pulling back that led to the rise of the fiscal procedural American state and the centrally planned national security and warfare state, a centrally planned national security and warfare state that Dixiecrats felt would help the South protect its Jim Crow “customs” and “traditions” and which is still with us today.

In the wake of World War II, argues Katznelson federal government central planning was replaced by fiscal planning in the US. The American fiscal planning state was and is, claims Katznelson, characterised by a weak public sphere and a strong private sphere. After WWII Democrats, North and South, may have occasionally cooperated to pass federal programmes, notes Katznelson, such as building hospitals and public housing for the poor, but these old style New Deal programmes were the exceptions rather than the rule. America instead was now a nation in which competition between varying interest groups dominated the American political landscape. Interest groups, like the unions and business organisations, organised, mobilsed, mobilised constituents, lobbied, propagandised, funded political candidates, influenced and staffed regulatory agencies, and created webs of influence, all in an effort to promote their own rather than any national interests. American political culture, in other words, was, not surprisingly in a society in which devotion to capitalism was once again akin to a devotion to a religion, organised like a market of competing civic, trade, and professional interests. This American market of interest groups was, however, and not surprisingly, dominated by business interest groups thanks, in part, to the successful post-World War II weakening of American labour as a countervailing force to business, and thanks to the fact that business and corporate interests in American interest group politics had and have more economic and political resources than anyone else. In 1950, for instance, 825 of America’s political lobbying groups were business groups. All of this led, in the post-WWII era, to a narrowing of American political culture to those supporting business and corporate interests and ideology and those trying to maintain the political traditions of the New Deal. It also led, somewhat ironically, the the decline of the Jim Crow state in the South because of its similarities to the dictatorships the US had fought in World War II and the Cold War.

According to Katznelson the centrally planned security and warfare state of the late 1940s, 1950s, and beyond was dominated by perpetual fears and never ending emergencies. It has led to an America in which limitations on dissent were put in place. It has led to an America in which some Americans were obsessed with treason. It has led to an America in which some Americans distrusted what other Americans were doing in private. It has led to an America in which many regarded the opposition of some to American militarism as a form of “un-Americanism”. It has led to an America in which conformity rather than individual expression was highly prized. It has led to an America dominated by a government-military-industrial-scientific-technological-paranoia complex. It has led to an America that some have argued undermined American “democracy”.
 
I highly recommend Katznelson’s important synthesis Fear Itself for anyone interested in the New Deal and post-New Deal periods of American history, in the state and in the American state in particular, in social liberalism, and in the rise of the industrial-military complex in the United States. Katznelson’s book rightly puts Congress, the state, and race at the heart of the New Deal and post-New Deal state that emerged in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II, a state that is still very much with us today, particularly in its national security and warfare form even though neoliberals have, since the 1970s, been chipping away at the procedural part of the modern American state ever since and may finally be, at least for the moment, diminishing it severely if not dismantling it thanks to the Trump presidency. Finally, I also recommend Katznelson's book to anyone trying to comprehend what is going on in the world as I type. After all, what is happening in Poland, in Hungary, in Russia, in Austria, in the UK, in the Philippines, in Brasil, and in the US, seems to have quite a bit of resonance with what was going on politically, economically, and culturally in the 1930s in the US, in Italy, and in Germany.

The Books of My Life: The Disappointed

I was a student of radical religious oriented social movements in New England and the Burned Over District of upstate New York and north eastern Ohio for many years. I was, in particular, a student of Mormonism, the group I ended up writing my dissertation on, and, if much less intensely, the Shakers and the Oneida Community.

My interest was not in these sects, denominations, or new religious movements, or even in religion per se. It was in the role ideology and meaning played and plays in the social and cultural construction of identity and community in new social and cultural movements. The study of new sects or new religious movements, the study of new meaning systems in other words, in 19th century America, seemed as good a place as any to explore the role ideology played in the social and cultural construction of identity and religion. It also seemed a great place to explore how meaning systems, like social movements in general, routinise and institutionalise over time becoming, in the process, less charismatic and more bureaucratic in form.

Given my interest in the new sects and new religious movements of 19th century New England and especially New York it was probably only a matter of time before I would get around to reading about another one of the many sects that arose in New England, New York, and the Midwest, Adventistism or Milleritism. The edited collection The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarians in the 19th Century, edited by Ronald Numbers and Jonathan Butler (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, second edition 1993), is a fascinating and enlightening collection of essays focusing on what we might call Primitive Adventism or Millerism from the 1810s to the 1860s. David Rowe's essay explores Primitive Adventist demographics showing, in the process, that the notion that millenarianism is the religion of the economically distressed is problematic when applied to nineteenth century Millerism. Wayne Judd's essay focuses on the father of Primitive Adventism, William Miller, the man who mathematically calculated when Jesus would come again in the 19th century. David Arthur's essay focuses on Primitive Adventism's Saint Paul, the evangelist, publicist, publisher, and spreading the word innovator, Joshua Himes. Louis Billington's essay explores the success of Adventist evangelists in Great Britain. Eric Anderson's essay explores Primitive Adventist hermeneutics of the apocalypse and its rereadings of earlier Adventist calculations relating to the end times. Ronald and Janet Numbers's essay explores the link between Milleritism and madness, something many contemporaries accused Primitive Adventists of bringing about. By looking at archival records from asylums in New England, upstate New York, and the Midwest, Numbers and Numbers find a more complex picture of the relationship between madness and Millerite millenialism than previously offered by apologists and polemicists. Ruth Alden Doan's essay focuses on the similarities between Primitive Adventism and mainstream evangelicalism. Mainstream evangelicalism was, Doan argues, modernising and liberalising at the time that Adventism arose and flourished and, as a result, modernising and liberalising evanglicalism emphasised the differences, particularly when it came to the millennium, between the two evanglical groups in order to establish clear boundary markers between the two movements. Michael Barkun's essay explores another somewhat similar process of boundary demarcation, in this case the one made by John Humphry Noyes's, the founder of the Oneida Community, to mark off his Oneida Perfectionist community from the Primitive Adventists so that Oneida Perfectionists would not be accused, as Primitive Adventists were accused of, of being mad. Lawrence Foster explores the similarities and differences between Millerism and Shakerism and focuses on one--there were more--Primitive Adventist who joined a Shaker community in Ohio after the great disappointment of 1843 and 1844, the disappointment that arose among Millerites after Jesus did not come again. Jonathan Butler's essay explores the transformation from boundless Primitive Adventism to consolidating Seventh Day Adventism, or, to use Weber's terminology, from charismatic sect to bureaucratic denomination.

Given my interest in Mormonism it should not be surprising that I tended to fixate on the similarities and differences between Mormons and Millerites as I read The Disappointed. The similarities first. Both social movements were apocalyptic and believed that Jesus was coming again soon. Both social movements were utopian in that they believed the kingdom of god would be established on earth. Both social movements were primitivist in that they sought to restore the true apostolic church to the world again. Both social movements were hybrid Hebraic/Christian restoration movements. Both social movements believed in continuing revelation and a god that acted in history. Both movements harvested the mission field of Great Britain relatively successfully. Both religious social movements had dietary reform aspects. Both social movements were attacked and "persecuted" by the vigilante mobs that were common in 19th century and 20th century America. The victimisation and martyrdom members and leaders of both social movements felt played an important role in the social and cultural construction of Primitive Mormonism and Primitive Adventism and Primitive Mormon and Primitive Adventist identities. As for differences both social movements differed in their conception of the second advent of Christ, the organisation of their apostolic churches, their visions of a utopian future, their Hebraic emphases, their emphasis on continuing revelation, and their dietary restrictions, pointing up the need to explore the role culture plays in social and cultural movements and the difference different culture brings to social and cultural movements.

I very much enjoyed my sojourn through The Disappointed. I recommend it to anyone interested in American history, particularly US 19th century history, meaning systems in general and the social and cultural construction of new meaning systems, in apocalypticism, in social movements, in theoretical approaches to social movements, and in American culture in general. After all, with respect to this last, one of the important building blocks of American culture has been religious and more specifically Protestant culture and ideology.

The Books of My Life: Joseph Smith (Bushman)

The name Richard Bushman really takes me back. Once upon a time I was in graduate school. In one seminar I took with Professor Barker-Benfield on some subject, probably history and gender since B-B fancied himself a specialist in that area, we students were supposed to read Bushman's recently published book The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992). I already knew some of Bushman's work. I had read his From Puritan to Yankee: Character and Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (New York: Norton, 1980) earlier and found its argument on the transformation of Puritanism interesting and its utlisation of economic and cultural theory to make the argument about the transformation of Puritan identity even more interesting.

In the seminar I quickly learned that B-B was not a fan of Bushman or his work. As I recall, B-B found Bushman's work too middle class, elite class wanna be. As someone born in England class, you see, was never very far from B-B's mind. I don't know whether B-B disliked Bushman for reasons other than class and class wannabeism: the fact that Bushman won a Bancroft Prize and he never did, the fact that Bushman held a distinguished professorship at a prestigious American research university that was a member of the elite Association of American Universities and he didn't, the fact that Bushman took a more social and cultural approach to psychology than his mentor Donald Meyer--whose work I find too reductionism--or the fact that Bushman was a Mormon believer and he was neither. What I do remember is that I thought B-B misinterpreted Bushman's book on American refinement. He saw it as a paean to the middle class and the civilising process. I, on the other hand, thought, still think, and stated in class, that the real heroes of the book were the dirt poor Smith family, the family of Mormon "prophet, seer, and revelator" Joseph Smith Junior. I still think B-B let his ideology get in the way of a valid analysis of Bushman's book. That, of course, has been and continues to be far too common occurence in intellectual and academic circles past and present.

Another thing I remember about B-B's graduate class was that there was a remarkably ignorant and moronic statement made in the class by one of the other graduate students in the seminar. The student, who will remain nameless because I have simply forgotten virtually everything about her, remarked, during one of our classroom discussions, that she found the Mormon sense of persecution irrelevant. I had and still have a number of problems with such a remarkable, not in a good way, jeremiad. First, such etic statements do not take culture seriously while culture, as social theory and social scientific analysis shows and has shown for a century at least, is important if not central to an understanding humans and human groups and, as a consequence, must be taken seriously, very seriously. As Max Weber and Clifford Geertz realised some time ago, you have to, in order to understand human groups and human social movements, go native. You have to go emic, in other words, to grasp the meanings that often motivate and underlie human actions. That this rather obvious methodology hasn't been understood and put into academic practise by one if not more academic wanna bes, not to mention many academics, tells you something about the dismal theoretical and methodological state of the discipline of history. This statement also ignores the fact that the persecution of Mormons was real, very real. Mormons were persecuted, discriminated against, faced mob violence, and even possible "extermination" in Missouri and Illinois. Such a statement ignores the fact that real violence against "others", such as the real violence aimed at Jews and others during the Holocaust, to chose one example, has had and continues to have an immense impact on human individuals and groups particularly on a cultural and ideological level. Just look at the continuing importance of the memory of the Shoah in contemporary Israel and the Jewish community worldwide and the use of the "holocaust" by some in the Jewish community in Israel and the US as a political weapon that Foucault would have found fascinating. The ignorance, moronicity, and  arrogance at the heart of such a dismissive statement shows that stupidity and anti-intellectualism are sadly not the monopoly of the populist masses but can also be found in the contemporary academy.

So why did all this spring to mind? Because I recently decided to take another spin through Richard Bushman's biography of the charismatic and patrimonial (in Weberian terms) founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith. Bushman's Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005) tries to walk the thin line between believing history and empirically grounded social scientific analysis if not entirely successfully. When push comes to shove, Bushman generally errs in the direction of a faithful interpretation of Smith's behaviour and actions and early Mormon history making Bushman's book more meaningful and valuable to the Mormon true believer than to the dispassionate social scientific analyst who seeks to understand Smith and early or primitive Mormonism in its broader cultural, economic, political, demographic, and geographic contexts better. Additionally, Bushman's book has a failing far too typical of so much historical work and historical biography of the past and the present; it sometimes becomes an exercise in kitchen sink trivial pursuit.

So what did I, a "gentile", a non-Mormon who spent the 1990s and the early and mid 2000s engaged in the study of Mormonism, learn and relearn from Bushman's biography of Smith. I learned that in what was still pretty much a traditional world, honour, something that was central to the traditional culture of honour at the time and in the past in traditional communities, mattered. Smith was embedded in a world of honour and honour mattered to him. Smith wanted to be respected and accepted in a world where gentility was a sign of status. He wanted others to recognise him as a gentlemen, if a "rough" gentleman. I relearned that Smith, was born into a family that had difficulty escaping poverty in a world that was changing thanks to the spread of merchant capitalism, sought financial security. I relearned that attacks on Smith and on Mormons generally were part and parcel of the vigilante violence that was far too common in 19th century America as attacks on Masonry, Catholics, Shakers, the Oneida Community, and Mormonism show. Needless to say, these vigilante attacks by "true Americans" on "others", whether for political, economic, or cultural reasons, continued into the 20th century and continues in the 21st century, making the study of American ethnocentrism and xenophobia a central part of any dispassionate and critical study of the United States. I relearned that Smith thought of himself as Abraham, as Isaac, as Jacob, as Moses, as the prophets, and as Jesus, and that he saw the Mormons as a figurative Israel made literally into the new Israel. Mormonism, after all, was and is a fascinating mixture of, as Smith perceived them, Tanakh Hebraicism and New Testament Christianity. I relearned that culture, particularly Smith's interpretation of the Bible filtered through the economic, political, and cultural present, was central to the construction of Mormonism and the creation of Mormons.

Given that Bushman's book tries to put the Mormon prophet and Primitive Mormonism into its ancient environment--a context that is problematic for those of us who are not believers--and its 19th century economic, political, cultural, geographical, and demographic ones, I can only recommend Bushman's biography to the Mormon faithful. It is likely to be and remain the standard work on the subject for 21st century believing intellectual Mormons for some time. I was, by the way, very annoyed by one aspect of the book. Bushman's footnotes cite only the last name of an author and a partial title of an author. This becomes a painful experience when one is looking for the footnote references in the bibliography where there are, for example, nine authors with the last name Anderson. Given this my award for the most difficult citation apparatus to manoeuvre through I have ever experienced goes to, moment of silence, Richard Bushman's Joseph Smith.

What a pity that Marvin Hill wasn't able to pursue his biography of Smith...

The Books of My Life: The Radical Right

In 1963 in an essay on the John Birch Society in the Daniel Bell edited collection The Radical Right: The New American Right Expanded and Updated (Garden City, NY: Anchor Doubleday, 1963), a revision and expansion of 1955s The New American Right (New York: Criterion), Alan Westin prophesies that this recent radical right group would be contained by business leaders, conservatives, and moderate and liberal figures in Republican Party. It is now 60 years later and the extreme right has not been contained like a domestic Soviet Union by business leaders, conservatives, or the Republican Party. Rather, the radical right has become, with the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency, at least in part, the mainstream of the post-1960s Republican Party.

So how did we get from there to here? I had avoided long reading The Radical Right given its post-1960s reputation. In the mid-and late 1960s The Radical Right fell into ideological disfavour in certain quarters within the social sciences and the humanities communities. Conflict theorists and social and cultural constructionists like myself found its championing of centrist democratic liberalism and its occasional stereotyping and caricaturing of the radical right (the Monkey Trial effect) as far too ideological raising questions about the validity of the analysis of the essays in this edited collection. Many obsessed with the working class and its supposed apocalyptic role in world history found its portrayal of populists as authoritarian and racist fascists and its linking of populists and the contemporary paranoid right problematic. Given the current political crisis in the US I decided, however, that it was time to take a look at the essays in The Radical Right.

I actually began reading The Radical Right in October of this year because I was interested in the answer to the question of how and why the radical or extremist right had been mainstreamed in American political culture. When I got to Westin’s essay on the John Birch Society, however, I discovered that pages 214 to 226 were missing in the print-on-demand copy of the book that I purchased from Amazon. Thanks to a used bookstore from whom I purchased a paperback copy of the book, however, I have been able to finally finish this edited collection and it gave me a lot to think about. The essays in the The Radical Right, most of them by some of the best and brightest centrist stars in the end of ideology firmament of the era such as Daniel Bell, Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Talcott Parsons, offer a largely unified perspective. Most of the essays argue that in the wake of World War II the economic interest politics that had dominated the US since industrialisation was replaced by status politics. For many of The Radical Rights's essayists, economic, political, and cultural forces, and the Cold War, in particular, created psychic status anxiety in many Americans and the resulting status anxiety about the Cold War and socio-economic positions in post World War II gave rise to movements like the anti-Communist crusade of the late 1940s and 1950s and the John Birch Society, which was also anti-Communist, and, importantly, a shill for free market capitalism and the notion that big American governments were tyrannical take awayers of "liberty".

The essays in The Radical Right, and particularly the most systematic essay in the collection Seymour Matin Lipset's 1955 article on the extremist right, argue, for the most part, that the anxieties released by changes afoot in post-World War II America, particularly economic and political changes, were not primarilly directed outward against the Soviet Union but were largely directed inward against supposed traitorous fifth columnists within the United States. Characterised by manicheanism and a conspiracy theory mania, the radical right found enemies everywhere within the US, fifth columnists and "traitors", who were, they raged, undermining the American way of life (read: The White Anglo Saxon Protestant way of life and the White way of life), be these "traitors" Republicans like Ike, who some Birchers saw as doing the communist will of his Soviet masters, or liberals, by which they meant New Deal and particularly East Coast and elite educated progressives, or members of the Communist Party in the US.

 

If a lot of this sounds frighteningly familiar, it should. This radical manichean, conspiracy theory, apocalyptic, raging, fear mongering, ahistorical, scapegoating, and hysteric right is still with us today and how. What is different, as I noted earlier, is that in the wake of the so-called Reagan Revolution, the Republican Party, which was once a regional Northern political party with an ideology centred around free soil and free labour, has been Dixiefornicated. The Republican Party, in other words, has, thanks to a number of factors including the rise of the Sunbelt, the tendency of many and particularly many Whites who move to the Sunbelt to conform to Sunbelt conservatism, neoliberalism with its small government polemics and its taxes as tyrannical mantras, the increased acceptance of the belief that progressive liberals are dangerous fifth columnists akin to "commies" before them, the revolt against the federal government control of large pockets of land in the American West, the movement of White evangelicals from the Dixiecrat Party to the Republican Party and their re-emergence into American politcal culture, and the kindler and gentler discourse the radical right used and uses, a rhetoric that wasn't overtly racist and anti-Semitic, morphed into the Dixiecrats and, as a result, the radical right has gone mainstream.

The Radical Right was an interesting read particularly in the context of the takeover of one of the US’s major political parties by the contemporary radical right between the 1960s and Trump. It raises a lot of interesting questions and issues worth pondering given the mainstreaming of the radical right. In particular I found Westin’s essay on the early history of the Birchers fascinating, Hyman's comparative analysis of the US and Britain interesting, Lipset's 1955 essay well argued, and Peter Vierick’s two essays on a conservatism that is flexible to the dynamics of history, interesting and intriguing. There were some things I disagreed with in the book. I don't think there has been a decline in White supremacist and anti-Semitic sentiments in the US. Rather I suspect that these have been submerged into a kindler and gentler discourse which those in the know could easily and readily decode. I appreciated The Radical Right's emphasis on social factors (class fractions, new business interests, education, region, political party) and social psychological factors (the authoritarian personality and the social construction of fear and anxiety) but would argue that these have been unfortunately emphasised at the expense of cultural explanations (many of the essays do touch on religion and, if too briefly, on ideology) for the rise of the extreme right in the US. I did not find the books occasional emphasis on a national character grounded in a national psychology particularly compelling. Still I highly recommend this collection particularly to anyone interested in American politics and the American political and ideological right.

The Books of My Life: Film Performance

In Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation (London: Wallflower, 2005) St. Anne's College, Oxford, film scholar Andrew Klevan explores film performance in relationship to position and perspective--the film performers relationship to the camera and their position within the shot-- location--the relationship of film performers to décor, furnishings, and objects within the screen frame--and plot--the relationship between film performer and the narrative development of a film--by analysing ten films from the "golden age of Hollywood".

To be honest, I am not sure what to make of this brief monograph. On the one hand it is a well written close analysis of sequences from ten golden era Hollywood films that yields interesting and sometimes insightful, if perhaps overinterpreted and not entirely compelling interpretations of film performances and film meanings. On the other hand, since the analysis is grounded solely in textual analysis (crystal ball textualism) and doesn't make use of archival materials, interviews with Hollywood performers and other craftspeople, including the producers and directors who made the films, it remains speculative, and ultimately can be seen as an example of one person's--one person embedded within academic and broader economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts-- response to what the sequences within ten films under the glare of the academic gaze, mean.

The Books of My Life: The Star System

The Star System: Hollywood's Production of Popular Identities (London: Wallflower, 2000) by Paul McDonald is the best short synthesis I have seen on the economics and symbolic economy of the Hollywood studio system and the Hollywood star system from its beginnings in the early 1900s, to its zenith in 1930s and 1940s, and finally to its transformation in the 1960s and 1970s. McDonald does an excellent job of introducing readers to the workings of the Hollywood studio system and its transformation in the wake of the US government's anti-trust suit against the Hollywood studios forcing them to divest of exhibition arms and practises in the United States in the post-World War II period. He also does an excellent job of exploring Hollywood's stars as forms of labour and capital in the vertically integrated Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s, as forms of labour and capital in the horizontally integrated world of corporate Hollywood in the wake of its divestment of its theatre chains, and as images and brands, forms of symbolic capital, in both eras.

I highly recommend McDonald's book to anyone interested in the economy and symbolic economy of Hollywood and in the Hollywood star system. I do have a few minor quibbles. There is no bibliographic entry for Janet Staiger or Richard Dyer though McDonald references the work of both on several occasions. The Staiger references have been subsumed under Judith Stacey while the Dyer reference is under Paul McDonald. Still, a great book.