One Wants One's World-Class Cafeteria Trays

One way I can tell what I ought to write about is that a topic nags at me for a long time.  This example goes back five years, to Edmund White's 2018 book The Unpunished Vice (Bloomsbury).  In May 2019 I wrote about White's confusion of cultural absolutism with cultural relativism, his youthful infatuation with premodern Japanese culture. It would be tempting to call this confusion fashionable, if it weren't so widespread and enduring.

In that post I wrote that I intended to discuss some disparaging comments White made about the US educational system.  If five years seems like a long time for me to be bothered by them, notice that White was still fussing about something that had happened over sixty years earlier. 

I went to a Deweyite public grade school in Evanston outside Chicago, where no grades were handed out, only long written comments by teachers on how successfully a student was realizing his potential. That whole system of education was scrapped after the Russians launched Sputnik 1 in 1957; Americans feared they were falling behind in the Cold War. But in that happy pre-Sputnik era of "progressive" education, we were contentedly smearing finger paint, singing a cappella two hours every week, helped along by our teacher’s pitch pipe, and trying to identify Debussy’s Jeux or Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf in music appreciation class. Richard Howard, the poet, and Anne Hollander, the costume historian, had attended a similar public school in Cleveland. A poem of Howard’s starts with the line "That year we were Vikings."

Far from being the whole system of American education in those days, progressive schools were a tiny minority, and remained so.  If White hadn't been living in an upscale suburb, he wouldn't have attended a Deweyite school, even in Chicago.  His father was rich and his mother was a psychologist, both of which had something to do with his placement in such an environment.

As for Sputnik, it gave reactionaries another club with which to belabor American schools. But if they had been dominated by feel-good, academically vacuous trends (or if Deweyism had really been incompatible with academic success), it would have taken much longer than it did for the US to put its own satellite into space.  Explorer I was launched in January 1958, three months after Sputnik. The US had a large aerospace system in place already -- where did all the test pilots who went on to become astronauts come from? -- as Gerald Bracey among others explained:

Thus there were lots of reasons for the Russians to accomplish space flight ahead of the U.S.: Our neglect of ballistic missile development for 6 years after World War II; our too-many-cooks approach once we did get serious; the internecine rivalries among the services; the disregard of [rocket pioneer Robert] Goddard's achievements; and Eisenhower's thinking about long-range space policy.

None of these reasons had anything to do with what was happening in schools. It didn't matter. The scapegoating began almost immediately.*

I use Bracey here because he goes on to detail the scapegoating.  I'm old enough to remember the praise of the Soviet educational system that followed, including the five-part series in Life magazine comparing an American high school student, derided as lazy and aimless, to a driven, brilliant Soviet counterpart.  Bracey tracked down the American who, stung by the notoriety, went on to become a jet pilot, but couldn't find the Russian kid, who may not have even existed. I believe that the pro-Soviet trend expanded from the right-wing Life to such elite media as Reader's Digest; nowadays, of course, it's East Asian schools that are supposedly leaving our kids in the dust.

White's an excellent writer, and I've read most of his books, often with pleasure.  But he loves to gripe, inaccurately, about cultural relativism, political correctness, and feminists.  Sometimes he has an arguable point, but usually, as here, he's fantasizing.  

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* Gerald Bracey, Education Hell: Rhetoric vs. Reality (Educational Research Service, 2009), 37-38.

 

Highbrow Drag

Here's a funny tidbit that echoes what I hear about the supposed destructive cultural effects of TV and the Internet.  I'm reading Jaime Harker's Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America (Minnesota, 2013), which at one point describes the effects of cheap paperbacks on American literacy and literature.  Like the Internet, they were cheap, gaudy, ubiquitous (sold in drugstores and supermarkets), and indiscriminate -- one might even say promiscuous.  Certainly they fed my own promiscuous reading tendencies, back in the day.  Publishers put sleazy covers on everything, whether it was pulp genre fiction ground out under a pseudonym for a flat fee of a few hundred dollars -- Gore Vidal wrote three murder mysteries under the name Edgar Box when he needed some quick money in the 1950s -- or reprints of the Kinsey reports (Harker seems to think The Kinsey Report was the actual title of those volumes), Jean-Paul Sartre's novels, or recent literary fiction.

The 1950s, when this trend took off, were a period of anxiety about cultural values, and would-be highbrows were displeased about this.  Literature was supposed to be serious, dull, and ideally difficult to read.  It wasn't supposed to have covers with "the shoulder straps of women's dresses and brassieres ... always loose, slipping, or undone" (Harker, 36).  The flood of paperbacks included a lot of gay and lesbian fiction of varying degrees of quality, and since quantity mattered more than quality, the usual publishing censorship often slipped, like the bra straps of the women on their covers.

Cold War gay print culture was visible, lucrative, and influential, even if it wasn't celebratory.  It also contributed to a larger breakdown of cultural hierarchies in its leveling of literary reprints and paperback originals.  It was the threat this lack of distinction posted to Cold War cultural hierarchies that worried Cold Warriors like Malcolm Cowley, much more so than deviant sex.  Cowley's description of a paperback bookstore highlights his concern about discrimination in brow level: "It was rich, random, gaudy, vital, corrupt, and at the same time innocent: it put culture at the disposal of the plain man, even the poorest, for less than the price of a bar whiskey; it was impersonal, friendly, egalitarian, and it proclaimed as dogmas its lack of discrimination.  'Here we are,' the books in the big racks seemed to be saying, 'the mud and sapphires of our time, and for one or two pieces of silver you can take your pick of us."  Cowley's concern about cultural hierarchy echoes those of Cold War intellectuals: democratic access equals an utter "lack of discrimination," one that cultural critics saw as the biggest threat to American life.  As David Earle astutely notes, "What Cowley is doing in these pages is policing the cultural borders between elite literature and popular literature.  He is, as it were, protecting his own intellectual and professional stake in American culture and letters."

... A remarkable number of writers being canonized during the Cold War appeared in paperback reprints, including James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway [47].

There's a lot going on here, but for now I want to point out what I see as the parallel to concerns about the Internet today: there's this flood of material being thrown out there where just anybody can get at it, and there's no proper supervision to teach the lower orders what they should choose and what they should avoid.  It's not just about children: a lot of the worry is about adults who lack the moral fiber to discern good from bad.  This is nothing new, of course.  It goes back to the explosion of print in previous centuries, but even before the invention of printing books were burned -- probably in every country that had them -- to try to keep the unruly written word in bounds.

As always, who watches the watchers?  Literature was still an unquestioned boys' club during the Cold War, so Cowley's "plain man" should be read literally, even though women have always been big readers, and writers as well.  But the Woman Writer was as suspicious to the boys in this period who sought to be Truly Serious as the Homosexual Writer, the Jewish Writer, the Negro Writer.  I'll return to this later on.