THE POSSIBILITY OF MEANING IN
AMERICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES
by Adam Watson
In Lawrence W. Levine's book of essays, The Unpredictable Past:
Explorations in American Cultural History (Oxford University Press, New
York: 1993), the terms "American," "cultural" and
"history" become redefined. For far too long, all of these words have
brought up an image of white, well-to-do European worshipers, sitting high
above the din of the rest of us. While they are certainly an important and
pervasive part of our past, by leaving out other voices the American choir of
experience has been incomplete. Levine reveals the alternative side of
The essay "The Concept of the New Negro and the Realties of Black
Culture" debunks the myth that black protest is a new phenomenon.
Historians (mostly white) have been guilty of telling blacks what they were,
instead of honestly exploring their past (86-87). Levine presents the once-common
theme that blacks perceived themselves as passive and inferior, with no culture
of their own, "infantilized" by whites, mere "reactors . . .
rather than . . . actors" in American life (88-89). Historians often
viewed the civil rights movement of the 1950's as new, as opposed to a part of
a continual struggle. Factually, this is simply not true. Even during
Reconstruction, blacks protested the segregation of horse cars in several
southern cities, including
Norman Mason, a black trumpet player, said music was important because it allowed blacks to vent their "suppressed desires" (96). According to singer Henry Townsend, "It gives you relief - it kinda helps somehow" (100). Critic John Lomax saw only light-heartedness in black lyrics (97). Professor Newman I. White believed blacks were "charitably inclined toward the white man" (98). Yet the discontent in the lyrics seems obvious to modern eyes. A few vivid examples will suffice to prove it. "I never have and never will / Pick no more cotton in Robinsonville, / Tell me how long will I have to wait, / Can I get you now or must I hesitate?" (96) The "[w]hite man" is sure to "bring a nigger out behin'"; he takes all the money and leaves "nothin' for nigger" (97); he can kill a black man and "they hardly carry it to court," but if the reverse is true, "they hang him like a goat" (98). How would blacks like to address the situation? "Well, if I had my weight in lime, / I'd whip my captain until I went stone-blind" (103). Blacks were not meek creatures who suddenly discovered their worth in the 1950's. Instead, they were always human, justifiably angry, and completely aware of the unfairness of their situation. As Levine shows, prejudice can taint the "facts" of history.
Another essay, "Jazz and American Culture," also shows prejudice
in the early condemnation of jazz, now recognized as part of the
"culture," but previously held in contempt by American critics.
However, jazz didn't become part of American culture,
it was always "an integral vibrant part"of
it (188). The problem it faced was overcoming the common argument of highbrows:
what is considered popular to the masses (meaning, lower classes) cannot be
culture (173-174). To the elite, the only cultured forms of music, art and
drama came from
After World War II, jazz gained popularity among blacks and whites,
seeking the "cultural freedom" of the music and "the ability to
be and express themselves" (182). A jazz musician was the creator of
the song, and was in effect a spontaneous composer. Mezz
Mezzrow remarked "[T]o us
. . . a guy composed as he played" (187). Their music defied labels
and easy categorization; repeatedly, jazz musicians stressed how important it
was to identify their pieces as only music, nothing else (186-187). Perhaps due
to this accessibility, it became a world phenomenon, circling the globe in less
than half a century. As early as the 1930's, jazz was already recognized,
according to Constant Lambert (an Englishman!), as the first music to
"bridge the gap between highbrow and lowbrow successfully" (186). The
genteel class was chagrined. Of all the American arts to first bring admiration
from
The last essay I will discuss is "The Historian and the Icon: Photography and the History of the American People in the 1930's and 1940's." Levine shows how it is important to be a wise consumer of historical products. His focus is on the photographers of two government agencies - the Resettlement Administration (RA) and Farm Security Administration (FSA) - who documented the lives of the "common man," usually rural, during the Great Depression.
Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" (1936) is a powerful example of how a photograph can move the viewer. The mother is pensive, and the children hide their faces, as if in shame. Pare Lorentz comments, "Never are they vicious, never depraved, never responsible for their own misery. And this, of course, was intentional" (262, my italics). Lange took five other pictures, but she chose not to use them. Why? First, we must understand that there is an agenda behind the scenes. Levine points out that "the very existence of other images [not part of] the victimization model" is troubling to some critics (262). The people of the Depression are supposed to suffer; therefore, we need to show them suffering, and anything else is a lie. It does not matter if facts from the decade support other points of view, such as many industrial workers willing to be unemployed to strike against their supervisors in 1936 and 1937, or that millions of Americans enjoyed (and somehow, afforded) going to the movies (266). So it should come as no surprise that other pictures of the "Migrant Mother," showing a more hopeful or peaceful family (with the daughters' faces shown), were suppressed. They were not the only ones. Another photo of Lange's, showing a "robust mother and son" smiling, surrounded by "clean, well-fed and neatly dressed" children was criticized for "weakening the effect of abject poverty" (262). Photographer Walker Evans, as part of a planned book project with James Agee in 1941, took several pictures of the Burroughs family. Floyd, the patriarch of the family, requested a picture of the entire family, posed proudly, "his arms thrown confidently around the shoulders of his smiling wife and sister-in-law . . ." but the picture was never used for the book (267). Instead, more pictures that fit the "victimization model" were used, such as the "shot of an unshaven, tired, anxious Floyd Burroughs in a tattered work shirt" (267). Such editing was careful and conscious. Roy Stryker, one of the supervisors of the various photographic assignments, made it perfectly clear what he wanted. "Take for us some good slum pictures . . . [d]o not forget that we need some of the rural slum type of thing, as well as the urban," he wrote to Lange in 1936 (286). "You are nothing but camera fodder to me," he wrote Jack Delano in 1940 (287). The FSA and RA were not looking for the transcendent truth of art through photography, and Stryker did not "give a damn about a photographer's soul" (287). He needed propaganda to force the government to continue working on uplifting the economy. In fairness, the government under President Hoover needed the prodding. In June 1930, he truly believed "[t]he depression is over," "nobody is actually starving," and people are selling apples on street corners not due to unemployment but because they had "left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples" (265).
It is not the means to an end that is necessarily objectionable here.
Photography is a wonderful way to show our humanity; the great photographers of
the depression era showed a side of