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Amid the gorgeous rolling scenery one passes on a drive into Ithaca, N.Y., PW hardly notices an empty county fairgrounds. But it comes to life when Michael Kammen describes it. For the Cornell historian, it is an endangered example of the best of what American culture has to offer. "Some time in the next month there will be a county fair there," he says. "There will be an interaction among people who may not see each other all that often. It may be an occasion for getting together; it may be an occasion for boy meets girl, maybe for the first time. There'll be serendipitous circumstances, a variety of games will be played. It will be very interactive, it will be very small-time -- a whole series of face-to-face relationships that are intensely participatory. It's the exact opposite of the privatization of culture that we can document with the coming of television in the late '40s."
We are sitting on the cantilevered deck overlooking Lake Cayuga at Kammen's magnificent hilltop home, El Nido, just outside Ithaca, that he and his wife, Carol, built after their two adult sons flew the coop in 1984. As Kammen gets to the nub of the argument of his new book, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century, it is one of the few times in a two-hour interview that the words don't come out in carefully squared-off paragraphs. Many of those paragraphs come almost verbatim from the book; he is a precise writer who knows what he thinks. He d sn't riff. Arrayed in his summer work clothes of shorts and a T-shirt, Kammen is a careful host. He proudly calls his work ethic "Calvinist." That discipline probably explains why American Culture, American Tastes, just out from Knopf (Forecasts, June 14), is his 19th book -- and how the 20th, Robert Gwathmey: The Life and Art of a Passionate Observer, a biography of the 20th-century social realist painter, will appear from the University of North Carolina Press in September.
The subjects might come as a surprise to readers who know him as a prominent historian of colonial America. To Kammen, however, they represent the natural progression of a restless mind. "Life is too short to devote an entire career to one period or one particular type of history," he explains.
Kammen was trained in the '60s by Harvard's great early Americanist Bernard Bailyn. "At some point, it must have been the early to mid-1970s" -- after, he is too modest to say, he won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization -- "I began to ask myself over and over, What difference did the story of what happened in 17th- and 18th-century America make to Americans living in the 19th and 20th centuries?" That led to the publication of seven studies, culminating, in 1991, with his dizzyingly ambitious survey Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (Knopf), on how Americans commemorate important events in their past.
His next project was The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of American Criticism, a biography of the first American critic to give popular culture serious consideration. The earliest American cultural critics, Kammen came to realize, were the Puritan divines; the next big shift came with the Civil War and the rise of philanthropies such as the United States Sanitary Commission (not to inspect the sewers but to ensure the purification of culture) and with such singular figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson. Roundabout the 1920s, though, their numbers began growing, their sense of vocation professionalized and American society began granting cultural critics authority to arbitrate the meaning of just about everything. "The New York Times did not always have someone assigned to cover rock concerts," Kammen says as a wind begins kicking up off Lake Cayuga. "They did not always have movie reviewers assigned to review Grade B movies, horror movies -- stuff that once upon a time would have been regarded as trash."
Cultural critics, in a word, are everywhere. "But there's a paradox," he continues. "Their authority has gradually diminished."
In American Culture, American Tastes, Kammen shows how even as cultural critics carried more sway, culture became increasingly democratic. The 1880s -- when a vaudeville price war shrunk the cost of a theater seat from a dollar to a dime, Hearst and Pulitzer battled for dominance of the penny press and the new trolley companies built amusement extravaganzas at the end of the line ("trolley parks" such as Coney Island) to fill their cars on the weekend -- inaugurated a heyday of lively, public and participatory commercialized popular culture. In vaudeville, praise was signalled by a shower of coins and the stamping of feet; disfavor by less welcome projectiles. In "silent" theaters, audiences "screamed, shouted, hissed, were incredibly, intensely involved," says Kammen.
Prosperity did this regime in, according to Kammen. Most entertainment in the age of TV d s not deserve to be called popular culture at all, he contends. It's mass culture -- to Kammen, an epithet as much as a technical term, signifying passivity, tractability and homogeneity. There was, and is, too much money involved. He cites the demagoguery of Frank Stanton, the CBS executive who in the 1950s, trooped before Congress over and over again to defend his medium against charges of corrupting youth. "He'd say, 'We are the true democrats, because we are giving the people what they want. We are not being arbiters of taste.' " Much like today, Kammen adds, "for a period of about six months the networks would invariably cool it. Certain programs would either be toned down or withdrawn -- and then six months later they would be back to business as usual."
Accounting For Taste
An opera buff, TV sports couch potato and bluegrass aficionado, Kammen d sn't mind that Americans now have the power to derive pleasure from a variety of cultural experiences. What bothers him is that, as the cultural authority of critics to instruct taste has subsided, the cultural power of corporations to shape it has grown alarmingly. By the 1980s, he writes, the very idea of cultural authority had been supplanted by the market -- so much so that the world of the Puritans was turned 180 degrees. In one California megachurch, Kammen reports, the pastors have affixed quotes on their office doorposts from management guru Peter Drucker: "What's our business? Who is our customer? What d s the customer consider value?"
Kammen knows that his view of mass culture will come in for criticism from the populists. "It's a subject where, more than any I've ever written about, everybody has an opinion. You write about the Glorious Revolution of 1689, there's maybe six other people who know something about it." (Not, he might add if he were a Seinfeld fan, that there's anything wrong with that -- but you finish a conversation with him suspecting that he most definitely is not.)
A thunderstorm is massing now, Cayuga's waters raised in menacing swells. We head inside and the host shows off El Nido, downstairs first, then the upstairs study where he writes out all his manuscripts by hand. There's not a right angle in the house, but the modern architecture blends well with the traditional furnishings. He has a marvelous collection of folk art and American painting that features several new acquisitions: canvases and prints by Robert Gwathmey, which he zestfully annotates one by one.
Kammen has been drawn to the artist's work ever since he stumbled upon one of Gwathmey's pieces in a Manhattan print shop while collecting images for Mystic Chords of Memory -- and since his family expanded to include an African daughter-in-law, whose traditional, three-day-long wedding to his son in Nigeria was one of the most moving experiences of his life. Searching out more of Gwathmey's paintings, he discovered that the underappreciated social realist master's body of work is unprecedented in its dignified and unsentimental portrayal of everyday African-American life in the 20th-century rural South, with a palette and technique suggesting African textile that led many to wrongly assume he was black. A sensitive champion of sharecroppers, Gwathmey was the apostate son of one of Virginia's most prominent old plantation families, a lifelong, passionate radical who embarked on a dramatic affair with his New York dealer. Kammen quickly realized he had another book project on his hands -- one which you can imagine Warren Beatty optioning.
He d s not make the connection explicit, but Gwathmey's art seems to offer an object lesson to back up the argument of American Culture, American Tastes. This is the kind of work that Kammen thinks is much harder to find now, because it feeds off a regional distinctiveness that has all but disappeared.
He extends the argument to the publishing industry. "Random House buys Knopf, someone else buys Random House, and now I guess it's Bertelsmann -- I can't even keep track anymore! -- and with this endless conglomeration, the autonomy of what you can publish diminishes."
In the late '60s, Kammen had written a single scholarly monograph when he approached a close friend from graduate school at Harvard -- Jane Garrett, who had in the meantime worked her way up from Alfred A. Knopf's personal assistant to editor -- with the idea of publishing a collection of documents on the origins of representative government in colonial America. Although it wasn't Knopf's usual bag, Garrett published it anyway. The book represented just the kind of personality-driven, money-losing idiosyncratic project that, before the age of conglomeration, the old houses could sponsor in order to cultivate a promising author. When Deputys and Libertyes came out, Kammen recalls, "Jane asked what I was working on for my own research. I said that I was trying to write an extended essay that would reinterpret the colonial period in American history." Knopf published it as People of Paradox, and it won the Pulitzer. "At that point, Alfred and his wife drove all the way up here from New York to visit upstate wineries and take us out for dinner, and [they] became our personal friends. And at that point, I sort of became a Knopf author."
Knopf has published six of Kammen's major studies, all without agent, option clause or haggling over advances. A connoisseur of all things visual, he especially cherishes the covers Chip Kidd designed for some of them; a scholar's scholar, he loves Knopf's practice of farming out proofs to two outside readers with expertise in the subject area of the book.
The age is long past when an editor at a big commercial firm could champion something so offbeat as a monograph on a neglected painter of primarily regional interest, and Kammen had to go elsewhere to publish the Gwathmey volume. So he turned to the University of North Carolina Press and their legendary history editor Lou Bateman. Bateman was able to find a subvention from the Wachovia Foundation that allowed them to publish Robert Gwathmey in paperback with 48 color plates and 57 half-tones for the incredible price of $24.95 (there is also a $49.95 cloth edition), just in time for Gwathmey's first retrospective. Co-curated by Kammen, it will include three oil paintings in Kammen's private collection, and will travel to five cities beginning in September. The project is a marriage of populism and refinement that delights Kammen.
"My feeling is that there are going to be a lot of people of humble means who nevertheless are going to fall in love with Gwathmey's art," reflects Kammen, a historian -- and now a cultural critic, too -- proud to have contributed his mite to correcting some of the baleful features of a very un-Calvinist world.
