CULTURE AS HISTORY

by Warren Susman

Bringing together for the first time the best of twenty-five years of unique critical work, Warren Susman takes Us on a startling tour through the conflicts and events which have transformed the social, political, and cultural face of America in this century. Probing a rich panoply of images from the mass media and advertising, testing prevalent intellectual and economic theories, linking the revolutions in communications and technology to the rise of a new pantheon of popular heroes, Susman documents and analyzes the process through which the older, Puritan-republican, producer-capitalist culture has given way to the leisure-oriented, consumer society we now inhabit the culture of abundance.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Sociology, Grad School, American History, Cultural, American

321 pages, Hardcover

First published February 12, 1985

Reviews

[Dan Gorman · Rating 3 out of 5]

America transitioned from a Puritan culture to a culture of abundance and conspicuous consumption. This transition reached its apotheosis in the 1920s–30s. New technologies (particularly mass communications), the creation of a bureaucratic state after the Civil War, the availability and mass production of new goods, photography that shaped public tastes, and advertising that glamorized consumption fueled this transition. Susman notes that an electrified world of consumers did not negate Americans’ interest in magic, the occult, fantasy stories, or play. Indeed, Progressives were interested in giving people outlets for self-expression, while many advocates of consumer culture thought they were ushering in a utopian world, although their capitalist methods diverged from the socialist utopias of the nineteenth and early twentieth century imagination. On a historiographic level, Susman pushes his reader to use words and language to tease out the dialectical tensions in American culture, and to engage with self-reflective dialogue with other historians.

Lots of cool ideas and pithy quotes in here, but Susman's thematic structure and tangential writing style make it difficult to take away the major ideas of his chapters. This book gives you a method for studying culture and a few big claims, but the individual chapters are sometimes baffling.

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, which I read first as an undergrad and which then struck me as the snooziest of snoozers, has since become central to my work in American studies/cultural studies. The current version of the book is print-on-demand and looks it; the photographs suffer greatly, appearing to have been reproduced on a circa-1989 Xerox machine. It's also overpriced and rendered in a terrible typeface.

That being said, the essays contained herein, which at this point probably warrant a new introduction from someone who knew something about the late (and mostly forgotten) Rutgers prof Susman, are pretty fantastic. His chapter on the inherent conservatism of reform, "re-form," always being "re-formed" is in keeping with the mostly neutral (in the context of Susman's consensus liberalism, that is) tone of the book (for material on conservativism and socialism, look elsewhere, to Wiebe or Kolko or Hofstadter or ???; the same goes for the essays on Puritanism and the progressive historians, stick to Hofstadter and Perry Miller). But then you get to these powerhouse pieces: the prosopography of Barton/Ford/Ruth, the People's Fair of '39, the essays on personality and on communications. He takes a bit of a long time to get to his main points (clearly this was never a man who wrote for a popular audience, even if he didn't have the same scorn for pop culture that, say, Adorno evidenced when he ripped into jazz music), but reasonably sharp undergrads will follow him to his big conclusions, which are actually surprisingly great and have aged very well. The problem with Susman, of course, is that he died before *doing* much of the work for which he had offered preliminary sketches, and so he is best known to us through this volume of essays, which is what it is and what it is happens to be a book that is, as noted earlier, available only in "print on demand" form.

But hey, take a risk and assign it if you're teaching a US history survey or an upper-level cultural history course. They might dislike it as much as I once did, preferring Adorno and Benjamin (the latter holds up, while the former reveals himself as an elitist crabapple) because Euros are always better, and then it might change their lives.

[T.R. Ormond · Rating 3 out of 5]

I only had time to read the final chapter, "'Personality' and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture." I wish I had time to read more, but thems the breaks!

This essay came up so frequently in all my reading that I decided I had to look at it. Essentially Susman argues that "personality" emerged at the expense of "character" in the late 19th century. This coincided with and was a result of American society's transformation from a producing economy to a consuming economy. The age of character dealt with the conflict between the individual and society by sublimating the self's needs in a higher cause: markers of character include duty, honor, productivity, work, integrity, etc. The age of personality resolved the conflict between individual and society by insisting on a performative self that sought self-fulfillment, self-expression and self-gratification. Consumerism and leisure time are the tools of the personality driven self. The aim of the personality driven self is "to be liked" by others by being fascinating, special, charismatic, attractive, despite distinguishing him/herself as being distinct. (it is pretty easy to see how this all devolves into narcissistic personality disorder, but on a grand social scale).

It is safe to say that we still navigate ourselves through society by means of personality. Even this review is a form of performance. The book I have read, a form of consumption.

Oh boy...

With all that said, I think Susman is a little too quick to paint personality in such dismissive tones. True, it has problematic elements, but it also have positive aspects which he seems to ignore.

For example, the individual might pursue a form of self-improvement/self-development that runs counter to society's priorities. This need not be anti-social. It could simply be something not on society's radar. It would make that person better, but not necessarily well-liked.

I think another problem is that Susman seems to think that character ended. It hasn't. Perhaps it plays second fiddle on the social scale, but certainly those individuals who follow the path of character can do quite well, even now.

A more interesting question might be how class, race and gender impact people's choices around pursing character or personality.

[Demarri Dosunmu · Rating 3 out of 5]

fun

[Kaufmak · Rating 4 out of 5]

Without Susman, there is no Kaufmak. It is because of this book, specifically the essays concerning the culture of the 1930s that my dissertation went from a look at folk music in Chicago to an examination of Alcoholics Anonymous. I literally had a eureka moment in the shower, thinking about the 1930s as a more conservative time than is usually thought, that the movement to become a part of various organizations, the Communist Party among them, was less about changing the political/social/economic system as it was about wanting to be a part of something greater than ones self. That isn't to say that radicalism didn't have its moment in the sun during the era, but when we look at the enduring institutions (like AA) the focus on the traditional, the institutions that recall an earlier time have sustained and even thrived. At our core, the United States is a fairly conservative place, even at our most radical times.

The rest of the essays in the book are interesting to varying degrees, with Susman's signature piece, "The Usable Past" probably having the greatest effect on my teaching. It is a very strong consideration of how we find different heroes from the past, disregard others as the current situation dictates. Susman pays particular attention to the myth and legend of the Pilgrims and the mutations the story has gone through over the centuries. I think Susman would find the lionization of Ronald Reagan particularly interesting, especially considering the place he holds in the GOP, yet his policies and actions would have branded him RINO among many within the Republican Party.

[Jim Manis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Considering current events and issues with memory (I’m thinking of a leading news anchor who claims to have “misremembered his war experience), I found the following passage, found on pages 268-9 of the book to be prescient; Susman relates,

Years ago, I did a study of the American expatriates in France. Long before it was in vogue, I decided to do what is today known as oral history. As I began to interview Americans who lived in France between the wars, I soon discovered that frequently they knew less about their lives than I did from reading other sources. I came to realize that often they were not telling me what had happened to them. What hey now called their own memory was actually a recollection of what had appeared in the media about American expatriates. They had read all the autobiographies of others, all the many articles, had seen some of the shows and movies, had taken in the various journalistic accounts. They remembered being in places and with people when I knew from indisputable sources that they had arrived in France only later and had never been there when the others they claimed as comrades were. Finally, I had to surrender my oral historical effort; it was causing me more work rather than less. But I was both too young and too ignorant to see what I really had uncovered: the nature and function of a myth that had been created by the media, a myth so powerful that even bright people (or perhaps especially bright and imaginative people, who after all had shared, at least in a spiritual sense, the mythic expatriate experience or perhaps the expatriate travel-fantasy) believed it true for themselves.

Note that the book was published in 2003.

[Nate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Never trust a historian to write history, says Nietzsche. Those who cannot act with power are seldom able to chart its course. However, Susman proves to be a rare exception to this rule. This book concerns a History of Culture in the age of communication and bureaucratic reorganization (~1850-1980).

At the outset we are given tools with which to wield history as an ideological weapon and shown that this is its purpose. The artist must reorganize the past to fuel the spectacular dreams of the future. Susman is not an artist, but a man with questions. We follow his pursuit of "what happened" through his cultural analysis, rather than meaningless policy details. History is dates and facts? Or is it the birth and death of a spirit?

[Julien Gorbach · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the seminal books that made popular culture a central concern of American historians.

[Elizabeth · Rating 1 out of 5]

borrowed from library, 1 Feb. 2014

[Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

I gained a better understanding of our political system and how fragil it can be.