The Formation of Mass Culture Part I:
“Incorporation”
Making of the Modern World
Week 19
Culture Industries?
• Formation of national culture post 1865
• Tension between middleclass and workingclass cultures (folk to mass)
• Racial appropriation and exclusion
• Interlocking roles of advertising, publishing,
theatre
• Reliance on female artists and consumers;
performance of gender
• Motion pictures and working-class
entertainment
• Resistance to cultural hegemony?
Origins of the Modern Mass Media
• Early inventions:
• Newspapers – 17th century,
widespread after c. 1750
• Photography – from 1838,
dry plates in 1870s, flash
1890s
• Phonograph - from 1876,
widespread after c. 1895
• Motion Picture –1890s,
feature films after 1912
• Major shifts in western society
19th and early 20th centuries:
• Industrialization, urbanization,
immigration
•
rise of middle class
• Consumer economies
• Leisure time
• Cultural hierarchies: high art
and mass culture
High Art, Popular, and Mass
Culture
• Culture as adjective, 1870• Transformation of low European culture (Opera,
Shakespeare, etc.) into “high” art for wealthy
American elites
• Culture becomes ‘incorporated’ when small group
dictates standards
• Educating and spiritually uplifting aspects of culture;
search for “great” literature, art
• Key historical events and figures repackaged as
bedrock of national culture: potential ambivalence of
text and audience
• Appropriation and exclusion of aberrant cultures:
canonicity
• Potential of popular/workingclass culture vs. capitalist
mass culture (1920-)
Is popular culture an alternative/form of
resistance to hegemony or an acceleration
of the dominant ideology?
• Hobsbawm’s “optimism”: “The cultural revolution of the latest twentieth
century can thus best be understood as the triumph of the individual over
society, or rather, the breaking of the threads which in the past had woven
human beings into social textures.”
• Williams’ faith in the ordinariness of culture and a ‘painless’ Marxist
cultural criticism: “Culture includes the organization of production, the
structure of the family, the structure of institutions which express or govern
social relationships, the characteristic forms through which members of the
society communicate.”
• Frankfurt School traditionally sees only cultural productions’ manipulation
of audiences and complicity rather than agency and capacity for critique
(unlike variants of classic Marx): however, globalization may prove
Althusser right: one cannot escape ideology: “ideology has no history”
• Traditional Marxist cultural criticism inadequate in handling questions of
race and gender
Birth of Discourse: Advertising
Mass Culture
• Right: early Coca Cola ad
ca 1886
• 1838-1900: First
department stores
revolutionize retail
marketing
• 1872: Montgomery Ward
Establishes Mail-Order
Business
• 1893: Columbian
Exposition
• 1894: Kellogg's Corn
Flakes Launch the Dry
Cereal Industry
• In US: post Civil War
technology boom; birth of
modern corporations
Integration of folk cultures
• German immigrants create Tin Pan Alley and
New York music industry; promote Af-Am ragtime
(1893)
• Blackface mistrelsy and vaudeville (1880s): white
cultural theft
• Ramona novel: social protest becomes tourism
• Amusement parks like Coney Island (1895) and
World’s Fairs (Chi, 1893) spaces for workingclass audiences
• Mass-produced dime novels for working class
• “women’s literature” dominates publishing
industry
• Baseball (1845); first Natl League 1876;
Spaulding turns it corporate
Blackface and cultural
appropriation
• Right: “Coon” song by black
song writer Ernest Hogan c
1890
• Early 19thC minstrel shows
focus on plantation life but
prettify slavery
• Conservative discourses
make fun of women’s suffrage
and professionals
• From 1890s focus is on
“olios,” which would feature
many popular songs
• Written by both black and
white songwriters
• White theft of black culture
Ramona…Cultural Theft and
Tourism
 Followed Jackson’s history of mistreatment of
California Indians
 Sold over 15,000 copies before her death in 1885
 Over 300 printings; second most widely read novel
of the 19th century
 Never out of print
 Opening of Southern Pacific Railway shortly after
publication
 Towns and missions claim to be authentic
Ramona locations
 Branding of Ramona products begins in 19th C
 Ramona pageant in Hemet, est. 1923-
Destabilizing Gender: The Cushman
Sisters in Romeo and Juliet (1846) and
May Irwin and her black baby, ca. 1890
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp_v_dP8s-8 (Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet, 1899)
New Vaudeville Theatre, 1870
Theatre: High Art and Mass Culture
• Left: Florenz Ziegfeld
• Conspicuous
consumption of feminine
body
• Ziegfeld Follies
• Low parades as high
(variety show with
expensive packaging)
• Women (w/ exception of
Fannie Brice) do not
speak
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81Y0gtQ3biA
Publishing Revolutions: Dime Novels (1860s1890s): fantasies of anti-establishment discourse
Popular Journals and Social Criticism
• McClure’s nationwide
readership
• Specialized in
“muckraking” journalism
and efforts to promote
progressive reform
• Exposes of poverty,
abuses of big business
• 1880s half-tone process
enables many
photographs to appear in
edition of newspaper or
magazine
• 1887 flash photography
Women and the Marketing of
Domestic Culture
• Women
working: in
1890s
600,000
saleswomen
worked in
cities; by
1900 8.6
million
women
worked
outside
homes
Feminization of American Culture
• Were women merely passive consumers of American
culture?
• Women as consumers and drivers of publishing industry
• Women’s fiction (anon., C. Sedgwick, H.B. Stowe) often
depicts women working in cities: counterpoint to Horatio
Alger
• Relationship between women and missionaries—
feminine control of religious instruction
• Women authors of popular history with educational slant;
early social and cultural histories
• See Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture
(1988)
The Best-Seller
• Sold 300,000 copies
in first year
• Racial melodrama
• Political and social
controversy
• Adapted as popular
theatre in vaudeville,
on show boats, and
on Broadway
• Commodification of
history and race
American to National League
• Cincinnati first pro team 1869– 400 smaller
teams from 1860s
• American Assn more working-class– river
cities, lower prices for tickets, alcohol allowed
at games–
• National League 1876/Am League 1901
(formerly Western League): bidding war
• Emphasis moves from players to clubs–
restriction of movement and growth of
contracts
Spaulding
•
•
•
•
•
•
1874 sporting goods store opens
Instrumental in formation of National League
1877 glove always used for his pitching
Recruits for Chicago
Around the world tour 1888-89
Mills commission to establish Americanness
of baseball
• 1911 authored first history of baseball
Moses Walker
• Oberlin and U Michigan
• 1884 Major League Debut
• 1887 International League votes to
ban black players
• 1889 American Assn and National
League ban black men from playing
(unofficial)
• 1891 out of professional baseball
The Columbia Exposition
• Created/funded by private corporation
• Daniel Burnham chooses white, neo-classical plan for all
buildings and decor
• Focus on American achievements in technology and
culture (focus on corporate creations)
• ‘Ideal city’ built on reclaimed wilderness and swamp land
• Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show on display at exposition–
mass marketing of Western history also frequently
toured Europe
• Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis presented at
Chi’s AHA meeting (new white national myth)
• And as this was happening…US/European businessmen
take over Hawaii– the open door justification for
capitalism and the triumph of white civilization
Columbia Exposition
• “White City” designed by Daniel Burnham
• 27.5 million people attend– Emphasis on US surpassing rest of
world– compare to Crystal Palace, 1851
The National Culture: 18831916
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rU6a7S1YHLQ
Motion Pictures
• Working-class origins
• Gradual consolidation of small nickelodeon businesses
into studios
• Gradual trend toward stars and adaptations of bestselling literary properties
• Connection between popular literature, journalism,
advertising, different appeals to male/female
spectatorship
• By 1915 and Birth of a Nation, self-consciousness about
cinema as art and historical text
• Critics divided; Seldes sees its potential as liveliest art
• Attempts to censor westerns, early gangster films, and
boxing matches
Edison Kinetoscope
Although experiments with mps
date to 1870s, the first peepshow
viewer was exhibited by Thomas
Edison at the Columbian Exposition
in 1893
Projectors enter market in 1895
Spanish-American War first war
‘filmed’ (re-enactments mostly)
Suffrage
advocate,
1917
Mary
Pickford:
behind the
camera
Reclaiming Blackness
• Jack Johnson, first African
American heavyweight
champion of the world 19081915
• Knocks out former British
heavyweight Bob Fitzsimmons
in 2 rounds, 1907
• Fight of the century, 4 July
1910: defeat of white James
Jeffries
• Film of fight sparks race riots in
25 states; Theodore Roosevelt
demands ban on interstate
distribution fight films (upheld
till 1940)
National Cultures and the ‘Great
White Hope’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t-7SVbLjBw