Popular Culture

POPULAR CULTURE. An important if little understood element of the Left experience in the United States during the last hundred years, popular culture can be defined, quite simply, as culture that is consumed by large numbers of people, “largeness” being relative to activity and milieu. The term itself has been used to describe everything from the cheap novels promoting the virtues of the work ethic that proliferated following the Civil War to the words, phrases, and jingles that enter common parlance via television commercials today. The term should be distinguished from folk culture, which refers specifically to non-literate culture that is laterally bartered by members of a preindustrial society, and from mass culture, which is a term of opprobrium used to describe cultural items that are tailored by an economic elite to sell the greatest number of units without regard to aesthetic sacrifice.

During the late nineteenth century, American socialist movements consolidated their power in immigrant communities by offering Left alternatives to the dominant Anglocentric culture. Quasi-religious forms, including martyrology, holiday feasting, liturgical music, and iconography assumed revolutionary identities in linguistically and religiously isolated communities struggling to maintain familiar customs against the pressures of hegemonic assimilation. The group or workers’ picnic, reputedly launched by German American freethinkers to circumvent blue laws that closed public houses on Sundays and thus further restricted the precious little free-time allowed by sixty-hour work weeks, brought together families, neighbors, and co-workers in an environment that allowed for beer drinking and general camaraderie, but also often included political speeches or even didactic theatrical pageants. The establishment of ethnic “social clubs” for entertainment, education, and the promotion of organized sports can be seen as institutionalizations of “picnic” culture. The social club phenomenon persisted among immigrant groups arriving in the twenty-first century.

By the turn of the century, radical immigrant movements increasingly expressed themselves in the press. Virtually every ethnic group of size developed at least one inexpensive, widely distributed organ that brought together Old World cultural themes with immediate political, social, and economic causes. Daily newspapers served not only as conduits for news and editorial opinion, but as the cultural patrons of local poets, cartoonists, and fiction writers. Many papers translated popular European and American novelists into the languages of their constituencies. In some ethnic subcultures, notably Italian but also Finnish and Bulgarian, the mockery of religious institutions and personalities provided a mirror alternative to official culture, and for that reason, catechisms offered a favored form of leftwing parody. Thanks to the density of New York’s Yiddish community and its politics, ethnic political activism survived into the radio age with the radio station WEVD (for “Eugene V. Debs”).

Mainstream commercial popular culture, which posed a threat to ethnic identity, appeared as a Janus-faced symbol to many immigrants. On the one hand, it contained characteristically racist and xenophobic references galore. But at the same time, the appreciation of popular songs, films, books, plays, and other works seemed essential to finding one’s place in the New World, and sometimes popular taste coincided with democratic aspirations. Charlie Chaplin, greatly loved by the immigrant masses, suggested the universal and progressive possibilities of the cinema and of popular culture in general.
Native-born American radicals of the nineteenth century took a more formal approach to popular culture, tending to focus their interests and energies on literary forms. Walt Whitman, in Democratic Vistas (1871), stressed the point that the existence of any democracy is absolutely dependent upon the vitality of its popular culture; that is, the medium by which ideas are circulated and discussed among the masses of citizens. But even Whitman used the term “divine literatus” to describe the ideal artist of such a culture. Abolitionists could proudly claim Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in this respect. Christian Utopian socialists, woman suffragists, and agrarian protest movements all produced popular and would-be popular literary works, as did leftish strains of spiritualism and temperance.

Native-born labor traditions, rooted in the republican prerogatives of the skilled worker, fostered the translation of popular songs into socialistic poems, which appeared widely in labor publications. James Whitcomb Riley, the “Hoosier Poet” whose rural dialect writing attracted a vast audience, brought the central themes of republican virtue together with piety in a lyric adopted for the 1900 presidential campaign of his intimate friend: “An’ there’s ‘Gene Debs, a man ‘at stans' /An’ jist holds up in his two hands/ The kindest heart that ever beat/ Betwixt here an’ the jedgment seat.”

But in neither the immigrant nor the native-born encounters with popular culture did the concept of culture as the locution of mass consciousness, the expression of a yearning for a better life, emerge on any theoretical or ideological basis. In Europe, quite the opposite was true. Such theoretical argumentation about the role of popular culture in revolutionary consciousness pervaded the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci and the theater of Bertolt Brecht. The writings of T. W Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and other members of the Frankfurt School group would bring these issues to bear in America only after World War II.

Direct leftist involvement in mainstream American popular culture reached its apogee during the Popular Front era of the mid- and late 1930s. During this period a wide variety of political progressives helped promote a genuine appreciation of African American folk as well as popular music, and of liberal and Left-leaning elements in film such as the Warner Brothers “social conscience” features about poverty. Even sports heroes such as Joe Louis were enshrined as Cincinnatus figures. A hostile reaction to the acceptance of these popular forms by highbrow Left intellectuals galvanized in the pages of the Partisan Review. The masses, according to this bookish analysis, needed to be uplifted to the great (i.e., European) works, not patronized with such capitalist consumer schlock as untutored music, Hollywood movies, and professional sports. Clement Greenberg’s 1940 essay “Avant-garde and Kitsch” rejected the American popular cultural imagination as a nightmare of degradation.

Twenty years later, the hostility toward popular culture in journals like the Partisan Review and Dissent reaffirmed that nothing essential had changed the minds of the now highly prestigious liberal-socialist intelligentsia. Among the popular arts, film alone had been allowed to graduate from “degradation” status into the arena of sympathetic discussion, largely because a new bête noire, television, had pushed it out of the cultural basement. Dwight Macdonald, who had insisted in 1953 that it was structurally impossible for Hollywood to produce a worthwhile film, actually became a prestigious film critic before the end of the decade. The gay film critic Parker Tyler, who shared Macdonald’s Trotskyist leanings, could be called the most notable if only partial exception to this condescending view: he loved hated popular culture simultaneously.

Hollywood, with its booming film industry even during the Great Depression years and its abundance of radicalized intellectuals, offered Communists and those sympathetic to antifascist themes a dynamic if always difficult role. Communist leaders themselves, centered in New York, suspected all popular culture of deceiving the masses and had few clear ideas about what film might do. They demanded, consequently, little more than financial contributions from their several hundred movie industry members. Left-wing writers, directors, and actors were left to devise their own methods through discussions among themselves on how to influence films to the degree that might be possible within the studio system. Until the middle 1930s, relatively few opportunities emerged, even though a handful of left-wingers had already written some of Hollywood’s classic crime, horror, and humor films. The rise of Hitler, the emergence of an antifascist climate, and the pressures of world war gave the Popular Front milieu increasing means to experiment within the limits of studio guidelines. Adding to the last years of intellectual ferment was the founding of the Hollywood Quarterly in 1946. Until its purging in 1949–1950, the journal served informally as the theoretical publication of the film industry’s Popular Front. The Hollywood Review (1953-1956) sought unsuccessfully to continue the discussion amidst the blacklist.

Across the full spectrum of genres, from “B” comedies and westerns to social realist noirs to children’s films to mediocre movies with the “big stars,” the influence of left-wing scriptwriters and directors was often buried in hack formulas or too subtle for easy detection. Nonetheless, dozens of writers, a few directors, and lyricists made notable contributions to films seen during their time at neighborhood theaters and widely available since on television or as video rentals. Leftists made contributions to more than nine hundred Hollywood films. A short list of socially-conscious films written from the Left, including those after the blacklist had been lifted, would certainly include Body and Soul, The Boy with Green Hair, Back to Bataan, Casablanca, The Children’s Hour, Coming Home, Crossfire, The Defiant Ones, The Front, Gentlemen’s Agreement, Give Us This Day, High Noon, Intruder in the Dust, Mister Smith Goes to Washington, The Molly Maguires. Midnight Cowboy, The Philadelphia Story, The Pride of the Marines, Serpico, and Watch On the Rhine. A short list of directors and their best-known work would include John Berry (He Ran All the Way and Claudine), Jules Dassin (Naked City and Never on Sunday), Joseph Losey (A Doll’s House and The Romantic Englishwoman), Abraham Polonsky (Force of Evil), and Martin Ritt (The Molly Maguires and Norma Rae). Party members could rightly claim, although they rarely did, that the small breakthroughs and later successes of films with black protagonists, like Odds Against Tomorrow and Sounder owed much to the quiet role of the Left.

The Party and its surrounding milieu could take considerable credit for the introduction to the public at large of Black artists and of African American cultural themes. Rarely, even at times of great optimism and openness, such as during the years immediately following World War II, did these personal engagements translate into extended theoretical explorations of popular culture. Sidney Finkelstein’s Jazz: A People’s Culture (1949), with its clumsy aesthetic formulae, marks what must pass for a high point of book-length Marxist theoretical discussion. The more sophisticated dialogue about popular, literature. theater, music and film took place in many places including mainstream liberal publications, but without Marxist labels.

Ironically, the popular culture explosion of the postwar era contained many elements that proved to be radical, albeit rarely recognized as they happened. Bebop, the jazz creation of an artistic black elite with significant Left participants, anticipated Rhythm and Blues in the specific sense that young people of every background could attach feelings to it. Rock ‘n Roll, at its best, extended the black-white youth rebellion whose importance to the civil rights movement remains little understood. Major league baseball was at long last racially integrated, after a generation of Leftwing drum-beating. Beat Generation poetry and fiction revived the Whitmanian dream of rediscovering, through the celebration of common experience, what Allen Ginsberg called “the lost America of love.” The satires of Mad Comics struck back at the mono-chromaticism of commercialized popular culture at large. All of these phenomena, occurring in a virtual vacuum of Left interpretation under the upturned noses of the highbrow intellectuals, contributed greatly to the education of the baby-boom generation, the social rebels and war resisters of the 1960s.

Not until the late 1960s, with the mammoth entertainment industrial complex now firmly established as a factor in the lives of virtually all Americans, did popular culture finally began to win recognition as a fertile field for interpretive study and academic publication. By that time, even avant-garde creative expression, such as non-narrative painting and film, guerrilla theater, acid-rock music, mimeo-press poetry, tapped popular cultural icons for subject matter. “Pop art,” as practiced by Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, for example, constituted not so much popular art as it was art that offered a critique of popular culture.

Blacklisting, which had been instituted during the birth of television and had a particularly traumatic effect on that medium’s development, was finally eclipsed during the early 1970s by the purchasing power of anti-war, antiracist, and pro-feminist baby boomers. Ring Lardner, Jr.’s script for the subtly antiwar film was adapted by Larry Gelbart for television into the form of the much maligned medium’s most maligned genre: situation comedy. M*A*S*H became one of TV’s greatest commercial successes. Norman Lear, a sitcom auteur whose didactic dramatic style smacked of Popular Front theater, dominated the ratings during the seventies with a string of politically liberal sitcoms, including All in the Family, Maude, and Good Times, several of them scripted by erstwhile victims of the Blacklist.

Rock and roll, whose very existence was a remarkable historical convergence of Black rhythm and blues with poor white southern music, carried an intrinsic progressive polity that peaked during the Vietnam War. The always explicit messages of sexual freedom were joined by calls for draft resistance, racial harmony, and ecological perseverance. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young offered a string of national hits including “Chicago,” “Ohio,” and “Woodstock,” that can be seen as a series of virtually instantaneous analytical responses to the immediate issues of the day. With the end of the draft and the war, the rock establishment rapidly ossified into a formulaic corporate entity. Even so, the emergence of reggae, of Bruce Springsteen, and to a lesser degree of punk and politicized Afro-pop, all rowed against the otherwise politically apathetic current of the post-Vietnam period, underlining the continuing vitality of rebellious culture during an increasingly conservative era.

Theoretical discussion of popular culture struggled to keep pace with the expansion of interpretive belletristic writing on the subject in widely-read venues like Rolling Stone or the Village Voice. Cultural Correspondence (1975-83), which described itself as the first journal of the Left created by people who enjoyed watching television, drew its name from the 1950s tabloid Correspondence, guided by the writings of C.L.R. James. Hegelian by intent, seeking to turn the Frankfort School theories upon their head, “CC” investigated electronics media but also comics, polka, and other past and present popular interests. Very much in the same spirit and with overlapping contributors, Free Spirits (1981), a projected annual series created for City Lights Books in collaboration collaboration with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, failed after a single number. Contemporary. self-produced “fanzines,” prolific in number and persistent in their enthusiasms, offered proof of amateur scholarship and wide enthusiasm for film and other subjects.

The margins of popular culture criticism to 1980 contained only a sprinkling of Althusserian or Frankfurtian abstractions. This situation altered during the 1980s-1990s with increasing academic activity, both teacher-scholars and interested students, in wide fields of popular culture. As the political children of the 1960s gained tenure in the professoriate, the academic legitimacy of popular culture study grew steadily. A handful of institutions, notably Bowling Green State University in Ohio, attempted to formalize popular culture study into a discipline. More generally, such work has been carried out within the subject areas of a dozen or more departments and programs, including American studies, semiotics, sociology, anthropology, and in some places, not excluding history or English. If analyses rooted in feminism arguably constituted the first radical strain of popular culture criticism to have a broad impact on academic thinking, Black Studies followed, then gender studies, then area studies around newer immigrant groups, Asian to Latino, and so on. Perhaps the rapidly growing field of comic art studies best demonstrates, in the twenty-first century, that the most despised popular culture forms of previous epochs can likely become the special devotions of the young scholar in particular, and likely to be reasoned in terms of race and gender rarely considered in these terms before.

The social media discussion of popular culture contained so many new, virtual publications with left sentiments of one kind or another that any attempt to account for them would be partial and quickly outdated. Emerging premier sites, like the Los Angeles Review of Books, disdained any literal politics yet made ample room for leftwing writers and reviews of leftwing books.

For film, television and, later, streaming audiences, the historical saga of the Left, viewed from an increasingly sympathetic standpoint burrowed its way increasingly into popular culture. This marked nearly a reversal from the 1930s-1940s during which Communists and near-Communists wrote or directed screenplays in which the specificity of the Left was rarely indicated, and which often seemed apolitical but contained humanistic messages.

The US enthusiasts of the Russian Revolution had hardly ever been seen as lovingly as in the epic Reds (1982). The recuperation of the Popular Front with a large degree of personal nostalgia flavored the Barbra Streisand vehicle The Way We Were (1973), destined for more popularity than other cinematic treatments: The Front (1976), I’m Not Rappaport (1990), Guilty By Suspicion (1990), Dash and Lilly (1999) and The Majestic (2001). Still others likewise captured the Popular Front sentiment in a variety of apparently unrelated films that offered cameo views of kindly and mostly Jewish leftwingers. This angle reached a high point with the comedy biopic Trumbo (2018), a look at the life and work of the once best-paid writer in Hollywood driven underground by the Blacklist.

The New Left, seen as early as Medium Cool (1969) about the Democratic convention in Chicago the previous year, found further resonance in The Return of the Secaucus 7 (1979), Running on Empty (1988), arguably The Big Lebowski (1995) and definitely also the latest version of The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020). African American revolutionaries of the 1960s found sympathy and more in Malcolm X (1992), Panther (1994), and One Night in Miami (2020).

In the way that American popular culture operates, perhaps the most dramatic event in popular culture in the second decade of the new century had been shaped in no small part by the influence of the historic Left: college and professional athletes’ responses to Black Lives Matter during the Summer of 2020. Years earlier, an outspoken progressive and supporter of the Cuban resolution, Colin Kaepernick, had laid down the challenge to his fellow athletes. Leftwing sports commentary on these events by veteran journalist and former NLF player Dave Zirin most especially reminded readers that a vitality and a resistance might be found in even the most unlikely places—if they were willing to look hard enough.

The history of the Left, in some ways, became part of a common history, no longer despised but most often viewed in a distaff fashion as trying and failing, or as legitimate causes lost. Both Judas and the Black Messiah (2020) The Good Lord Bird (2020), respectively the sagas of Black Panther Fred Hampton and Abolitionist John Brown, dramatized the inevitability of racial violence in America and the probability of betrayal. Screenwriters and actors expressed themselves as being part of the ongoing struggles through their presentations. Closer to the legacy of Malcolm X than African American Communists, these popular culture events signaled the mainstreaming of radical sentiment.

In the era when “popular culture” had only begun to be studied as an academic field, Popular Culture and High Culture (1974) by distinguished sociologist Herbert Gans insisted that people of all classes have aesthetic preferences and yearnings, a point not conceded by conservative critics from José Ortega y Gasset to Hilton Kramer. The general premise underpinning the entire enterprise of popular culture study and the self-conscious creation of films about the subject of popular culture leans toward the progressive side with ample room for the Left. That culture has been and can become more inclusive and democratic offers hope for a troubled world.

Buhle, Paul, ed. Popular Culture in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987

Lipstiz, George. A Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Marc, David. Demographic Vistas: Television in American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984.

Marc, David. Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture. London: Unwin and Hyman, 1989.

McGilligan, Patrick, and Paul Buhle, eds. Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

Tyler, Parker. The Hollywood Hallucination. New York: Creative Age Press, 1944.

Zirin, David. Welcome to the Terrordrome: The Pain, Politics and Promise of Sports. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2007.