Contending Viewpoints: Rethinking American Cultural Studies

During the 1930s, in scattered universities across the nation, pioneering professors were introducing a fresh way of looking at American society. After World War II my generation entered graduate school and inherited that initiative. While our scholarly conclusions reflected the Zeitgeist's leaning toward consensus and conformity, our curricular approach was disputatious and rebellious. Instead of viewing our society through the lens of a discipline like History or English, we proposed to view America as a culture of interrelated parts, each part affecting the others. Whatever the subject selected for study, we intended to examine it with any approaches that might prove illustrative. Subject and methodology were to combine in bold ways for a fresh synergy. Teaching and scholarship could draw at once upon the chronology of history, the process of the social sciences, the speculative insights of philosophy, or the aesthetics of the arts and literature. For example, a painting could be analyzed from both an aesthetic and historical perspective and related to a novel; a political event could be analyzed both as a psychological process and historically in terms of continuity and change while related to the poetry of protest. We intended to cross disciplinary boundaries of both subject and method and unite insular disciplines in a search for meaning. The emergence of departments of American Studies was a sharp break with tradition. That tradition insisted that graduate students take virtually all courses within one department. To stray from the confines of the department was to invite the sneer of "shallow." Our focus, then, was not limited to the subject matter of a department. Our prospect embraced the whole of American culture. Courses were drawn from departments with offerings relevant to that objective. Our focus was on a geographical area that corresponded to a culture to be understood by an interdisciplinary analysis. The adventure was enormously exciting. What we were cherishing as an intellectual adventure was becoming a marauder of students intimidating the educational establishment. Faculty in History and English departments, especially offering courses outside the American canon, felt threatened. Our motives were challenged. Were these wayward students who were absorbed in American literature (assuming there was such a thing in the 1940s worth studying) deserting the department of English to escape Latin and Old English? Were these upstarts rejecting the department of History to evade learning to read documents in German? Can area studies, whether it be American Studies or Russian Studies, qualify as a discipline to satisfy the revered Germanic demands of rigor, precision, and obedience to the rules of scholarship? Our rebellion was against a specialization that viewed learning through the needle-eyed narrowness of departments. Specialization was distorting the breadth of a liberal arts education. Truncated learning was graduating truncated scholars. Our intent was to integrate the parts of American culture, to put into play the functional interdependence of the social sciences and humanities and to do it by concentrating on one area. The result of our labors was less a celebration of diversity and more a search for a unifying national identity. We actually believed there was a national character-many still do! For the academic establishment, the culture concept may have been acceptable for anthropologists residing with stone age tribes. The culture concept imposed on literate civilizations was denounced as a barbarism bayoneting intellectual refinement. The word "culture" at mid-century pretty much meant the high culture of opera and old master paintings. Vulgar phrases like "upward mobility," "participant observer," and "cultural lag," mouthed by arriviste sociologists, were flame throwers at many tweedier-than-thou professors. In today's world of computer commands, at monthly meetings of the faculty, the old guard would have thundered: "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. …