A Time When Popular Culture Included the Fine Arts

FRANCE had the French Revolution. And soon after, France also had protracted historical arguments about the legacy of their popular revolt.

America, however, had the American Revolution. And ever since that less-than-earth-shattering rebellion--shot heard round the world, or no shot heard round the world--left-wing historians in America have spent their time trying to create a legacy worth fighting for. Charles Beard attempted to play up the American revolution as a popular struggle in his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution--which purported to find a self-interested wealthy class responsible for fashioning the Constitution, thus betraying the spirit of 1776.

Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America

By Lawrence W. Levine

Cambridge: Harvard University Press

$25.00

Over time, historians have found other, quieter "revolutions," with a noble legacy worthy of an intellectual defense. Recently, Eric Foner, in his account of the Reconstruction period, portrayed the time as a brief period of true emancipation for Blacks in America. He implicitly called for contemporary America to live up to the vision of racial equality of that time.

And now there is Berkeley History Professor Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, which tells, in impressive detail, the story of 19th-century America's unified culture--a time when upper and lower classes shared the same tastes, to their mutual benefit.

Within these treatments of the past, however, lay basic, nagging questions about historical purpose. Why do Levine's book and other works--which are uniformly critical of the state of American society today--even attempt to find a rosy past? Wouldn't their critiques of repugnant, self-perpetuating class divisions in America be enhanced by demonstrating that the American experiment was flawed from the start? Why acknowledge that there was a time--however brief--when America was able to right itself and lay down the roots of a just society?

Based on Levine's account, the answer, in part, seems to be that American cultural behavior was genuinely different in the early to mid-19th century. Urban workers did spend their free time listening to theater performances which included magic tricks, physical comedy and Shakespearean soliloquys. Bands larger than current ensembles but smaller than full-fledged orchestras would perform both classical music and popular ditties. In the case of Shakespeare, Levine cleverly demonstrates how well people knew the Bard's works by providing examples of the careful, complex parodies of Shakespeare's plays that were performed in the mid-19th century. The jokes evidence a public familiarity with Shakespeare that would send a frisson of joy through E.D. Hirsh and his many culturally literate disciples.

Levine further argues that the literacy derived from viewing the plays first hand--as opposed to reading entries in a dictionary--has greater meaning. In making this claim, Levine recognizes that he is going up against the prevailing theory that "popularized" versions of Shakespeare's plays, are

popular for all the wrong reasons: because of the afterpieces and the divertissements that surrounded his plays; because the people wanted to see great actors who in turn insisted on performing Shakespeare to demonstrate their abilities; because his plays were presented in altered, simplied versions; because of his bombast, crudities, and sexual allusions rather than his poetry or sophistication; because of almost anything other than his dramatic genius.

Levine instead suggests that these "popularized" plays "may be understood more meaningfully as having integrated [Shakespeare] into American culture." The Berkeley professor convincingly makes a similar case in the book that opera, the "fine" arts, like painting and sculpture, as well as "classical" music, once integrated American society, but now divide it.

YET, despite the historical interest of knowing that culture hasn't always been appreciated in America in the same uneven way, the detailed discussion of America's egalitarian cultural past serves a more crafty purpose. It provides the dramatic tension that keeps the work going. The more impressive 19th century culture is shown to be, the greater the wrong committed when cultural divisions were introduced into American society. Levine is understandably vague about this change in the audiences for cultural events. "There is no precise date, but everywhere in the United States during the final decades of the 19th century the same transformation was evidently taking place; Shakespeare was being divorced from the broader world of everyday culture." Vague or not, it is precisely this transformation--not the cultural history in and of itself--that is the subject of the book.

In a chapter entitled, "Order, Hierarchy and Culture," Levine argues that the ideas of "high-brow" and "low-brow" came out of a complicated mesh of modern changes: immigration, and the culturally isolated communities of the "hyphenated-Americans"; the rise of a corporate culture, which linked art appreciation to social status; and changing attitudes toward etiquette and art, which severely restricted the behavior of the audience in "high" artistic shows, and insisted that Shakespeare could share the stage with no other production.

Having shown the wrong that was committed (the destruction of a classless culture in America), and the causes (a hierarchical, money-conscious elite that sought to divide itself from the riff-raff), Levine is free to assess the damages:

If there is tragedy in this development, it is not only that millions of Americans were now separated from exposure to such creators as Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Verdi, whom they had enjoyed in various formats for much of the 19th century, but also that the rigid cultural categories, once they were in place, made it so difficult for so long for so many to understand the value and importance of the popular art forms that were all around them.

It is similar to the argument for free trade: once barriers to exchange go up, everyone loses. Some never experience Beethoven, some never experience Charlie Chaplin--and whether you think the trade-off is even or not, it's hard to see what's good about having any creative work rendered off-limits.

YET it is when Levine discusses in his epilogue the modern dilemma of stratified culture that he appears least historical and seems to be writing off-the-cuff. (Although a majority of the work was delivered by Levine at Harvard in his 1986 Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization, the rest of Highbrow/Lowbrow nonetheless adheres to a bookish, historical style.) In the epilogue, which includes the umpteenth rebuttal to the moral philosopher Allan Bloom, Levine effectively calls for an appreciation of all cultures.

But in his hope for finding a growing re-acceptance of "popular" culture--the underlying purpose of these histories which look back to a brief American utopia--Levine overstates his case. For example, he explicitly praises the New York Times for its Sunday "Arts and Leisure" section's broad definition of "art," failing to recognize the subtle discrimination that goes on in those pages. Namely, that rock, jazz and "popular" music are written about in the "Recordings" page, while "classical" music appears under the simple heading "Music." This is but one example of how cultural distincitons still exist, and Levine fails to hold his own on the familiar turf of the 1980s cultural landscape.

Not only does the brief 13-page epilogue not meet the historical standards Levine presents in the rest of the book, it leaves the reader with an uneasy feeling that the whole historical excursion has been designed to encourage you to feel greater cultural tolerance. No doubt this is a worthy goal. But it seems Levine is on firmer ground when he presents the details of an integrated culture, and the ugly process whereby culture was used to divide people. When he presumes to discuss our current cultural problems, his approach seems as flawed as reading a book through the lens of a telescope.