American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  These and other social critics of individualism granted that their case was not new—that a generation earlier Fromm and Riesman, Whyte and Marcuse, and thinkers for many centuries before them had grappled with this phenomenon. But they claimed a special urgency in the age of Reagan. Much was being made in the press of the “yuppies”—the young, upwardly mobile professionals flooding into law offices, investment firms, and corporate executive suites who were reputed to be scrambling all over one another in a mad rush for personal success, which often meant merely higher salaries rather than work that was either intellectually rewarding or socially useful. But individualism in modern-day America included much more than self-promotion, the Bellah study found—it also embraced self-protection, as in the case of Sheila Larson, a young nurse who was interviewed. “Sheilaism”—that was her term and her faith, said Sheila. “I believe in God. I’m not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.”

  In explaining Sheilaism—“It’s just try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself”—Sheila personified another trend that had caught the critical intellectual eye. This was a narcissism that took the form, Christopher Lasch had written in 1978, not of self-love or egomania but of psyches so frail as to need propping up by those in touch with them. Or narcissists might need to manipulate their appearances and feelings, often expressed as the “management of personal impressions” in a way that brought success “in political and business organizations where performance now counts for less than ‘visibility,’ ‘momentum,’ and a winning record.” Thus the narcissist had become a kind of hollow man in a culture of image makers, promoters, advertisers, and passive consumers.

  As the age of Reagan approached its end, much of this criticism appeared to be penetrating and sophisticated. But it failed to offer significant alternatives to the institutions under attack or to clarify alternative sets of values. These failures were marked in the discourse over individualism.

  One could never know, listening to this discourse, that individualism was one of the most analyzed and debated as well as one of the most humane and spacious concepts in political and intellectual history. It had embraced the lofty principle of the dignity of man as an end in itself, as a core value; of the innate and supreme worth of the human being; and closely related values such as privacy, establishing a sphere of independence around the individual into which no unwelcome force could intrude; such as autonomy or self-direction; the right of individuals to act in response to their authentic wants and needs; such as self-development leading to the highest possible self-fulfillment of individuals, especially those with unique qualities of creativity; such as political individualism, serving as a basis for the principle of one man-one vote and an array of individual civil liberties of speech, press, and religion. And in contrast to other spacious and seminal doctrines, these tenets of individualism have existed with one another in mutual reinforcement rather than negation.

  The doctrine of individualism in its various forms had engaged the intellects of a host of the greatest thinkers of the West: Luther’s and Calvin’s claims on and for the individual conscience; Thomas Hobbes’s effort to abstract the individual mind even from the power of the state; Kant’s principle that the will of every rational being underlay universal law; Bentham’s dictum that each individual is to count for one and only one; Tocqueville’s concept of individualism as the natural product of democracy; Durkheim’s critical studies in the psychological and political anomie and isolation of individuals. Spongy and inflatable, the doctrine took on the intellectual and social shape of the nations in which it flourished: in France responding to the needs of socialists and revolutionaries; in Germany assuming a romantic and later a nationalist coloration; in England serving as a foundation for the emphasis on individual liberty in the writings of a series of thinkers, most notably John Stuart Mill.

  And in the United States? Rarely has a spacious doctrine shriveled into a rationale for class interests as dramatically as “rugged individualism” was reduced to satisfy the promotional needs of big business in the late nineteenth century. Atomistic individualism echoed through the next century in the writings of Ayn Rand and the hyperbole of some of Ronald Reagan’s speech writers; it also took on a softer edge in the oratory of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and even William Jennings Bryan, and in some thoughtful writing by Herbert Hoover. Late in the century, still largely held captive by the forces of the extreme and moderate right, the concept remained stripped of its more humane and generous dimensions.

  The conversion in the United States of one of the most human and noble of Western Enlightenment doctrines into hardly more than a slogan for naked class interest and selfish privatization, combined with the atomization of religious organization and the fragmentation and trivialization of teaching and learning, lay at the heart of the intellectual disarray in the 1970s and 1980s. But that disarray was part of wider phenomena.

  “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God,” Jimmy Carter had said in his July 1979 “malaise speech,” “too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.” Increasingly, however, the longing for meaning was superficially satisfied by the huge institutions whose images and messages flashed before the eyes and pounded the ears of Americans hour after hour, day after day. These were the film, television, entertainment, and professional sports industries. How these institutions shaped American social and political thought was centrally determined by the nature of their birth, growth, structure, and strategies of influence.

  Kinesis: The Southern Californians

  Legends sprouted about Hollywood even as the film colony was taking root. Filmmakers from the East had come here early in the century, it was said, to make better movies amid the perfect mix of air and wind and water. In fact, economics had largely shaped the rise of Hollywood from the start, as it did ever after. Some of the earliest moviemakers were fugitives from process servers dispatched by the eastern patent trust that sought to control film technology. Most were Jews, mainly from Eastern Europe, who had settled in New York and other eastern cities, had begun their rise from rags to riches in the rag business itself—clothes, gloves, furs, shoes—and then bought into penny arcades, nickelodeons, theater chains.

  Above all, these men were entrepreneurs. To them California, with its cheap land and labor, its predictably good weather, and its marvelous varieties of scenery nearby that would save transportation costs, was essentially a good investment. But they were enterprisers with flamboyance, even chutzpa. When the Czar was incarcerated by the Bolsheviks, Lewis J. Selznick had wired him that while the Czar’s police had mistreated him as a boy, he had no hard feelings and was prepared to offer the fallen monarch a good job in the film industry.

  Hollywood itself was, increasingly, a myth. The stars and directors soon spread out from the fabled movie kingdom to Bel Air and Beverly Hills; the studios moved still farther out. Forming a great crescent around Los Angeles, from Santa Barbara through the Ojai Valley to San Bernardino, Riverside, and Palm Springs, and rejoining the Pacific at San Diego, this southeastern slope of southern California did provide film directors with desert and ocean, snow-clad mountains and city scenes, along with authentic-looking country for movies shot in the “Wild West.” Economically southern California fit the movie industry like a glove, Carey McWilliams noted. Here was one industry that needed virtually no raw materials and had an enormous payroll. What could be more desirable, McWilliams asked, “than a monopolistic non-seasonal industry with 50,000,000 customers, an industry without soot or grime, without blast furnaces or dynamos, an industry
whose production shows peaks but few valleys?”

  Socially too the industry and the region nourished each other. Ceaseless migrations from south, west, and east had brought in thousands of potential actors, extras, and craftspeople—Mexicans and Spanish, Japanese and Chinese, drawling Texans, pious Iowans, drought-stricken Oklahomans. After the Russian Revolution, émigré White Russian aristocrats and their families and retinues had formed a colony in Hollywood. By the 1930s automobiles were a way of life in southern California, providing filmmakers with ample material and locations for wild chases, crashes, motels, eateries, general mayhem. Best of all, southern California loved the movie industry. At first the Los Angeles elite had snubbed the scruffy crowd of directors and actors who invaded Hollywood, but the 1915 success of D. W. Griffith’s Civil War epic, Birth of a Nation, pointed the industry toward its later image of patriotism and even respectability.

  The film industry blossomed in the southern California culture. In the 1920s and early 1930s Los Angeles was still an open-shop town, following years of fierce labor-industry strife that had culminated in the bombing of the anti-union Los Angeles Times and the disruption of the labor movement. For their labor-intensive industry the filmmakers found ample cheap manpower. There developed a symbiotic relationship between the volatile, rapidly expanding film industry and the city around it, with its rootless middle class, disorganized working class, and mainly nouveaux riches upper class. If southern Californians were heterogeneous in background, diverse in their immigrant cultures, fragmented in their social attitudes, Hollywood reflected its milieu in the themelessness and eclecticism of its productions. Films lacked intellectual and even ideological coherence except for the insipid icons of romance and violence. South Sea natives who had watched American movies, anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker noted, divided them into two types, “kiss-kiss” and “bang-bang.”

  Accustomed to more structured societies, visitors from abroad wrote of Hollywood flora and fauna with glee and malice. Los Angeles was the newest and strangest of all the American cities, J. B. Priestley observed, a “gaily-colored higgledy-piggledy of unending boulevards, vacant lots, oil derricks, cardboard bungalows, retired farmers, fortune-tellers, real estate dealers, film stars, false prophets, affluent pimps, women in pajamas turning on victrolas, radio men lunching on aspirin and Alka-Seltzer, Middle-Western grandmothers, Chinese grandfathers, Mexican uncles and Filipino cousins.” It reminded the British author T. H. White of Elizabethan London.

  It was above all the profusion of creeds, sects, and cults that gave the area its special flavor. The Krotona, Theosophy, and New Thought movements had their day. Swamis, yogis, faith healers, mind readers, spiritualists, graphologists practiced their arts. During the 1920s Aimee Semple McPherson, a resourceful showwoman, drew thousands to her Angelus Temple with her Foursquare Gospel of conversion, healing, resurrection, and redemption. After she apparently drowned in the Pacific surf and was melodramatically mourned, Aimee accomplished her own second coming by making a triumphal entrance into Los Angeles before ecstatic thousands. Press revelations that she had been trysting in a Carmel “love cottage” shook her idolaters only briefly: Aimee was like that. During the 1930s the Mighty I Am cult celebrated wealth, power, and sublimated sex. Mankind United simply promised Utopia—a sixteen-hour workweek, ample pensions, and “automated” homes.

  Southern California labor was as divided and turbulent as the various cults and “ham ’n’ eggs” causes. The Wagner Act helped union organizers pull in large numbers of new members, but it also left the AFL and CIO in California hostile and competitive. A large “self-help” cooperative movement, with especially aggressive leadership in Los Angeles County, operated separately from the trade unions. As usual the communists stood aside from the “bourgeois” organizations; much of the New Deal and even Upton Sinclair’s EPIC were “social fascism.” Some remarkable women leaders helped mobilize the California left. Dorothy Healey, brought up in a socialist colony and a member of the Young Communist League at the age of fourteen, was organizing cannery workers two years later. Miranda Smith, a black militant, and Luisa Moreno, a Guatemalan, aroused working-class self-consciousness. Unionists, blacks, students, Latinos, women activists, communists, rank-and-file Democrats, coalesced in 1938 long enough to put a progressive Democrat, Culbert L. Olson, into the governorship—the first of his party to occupy the office in forty years—but the coalition was not strong enough to keep Olson in office in 1942, when he yielded the governorship to Republican Earl Warren.

  One thread connected these causes, whether left or right—a flamboyant individualism that led the seekers to shop for their favorite cults and causes, quitting one for another in an endless Virginia reel. But this individualism rarely took the form of personal fulfillment and efficacy, for the faithful readily yielded their individualism to group arousals and pressures. Politically the region reflected these tendencies. California’s political parties had virtually disintegrated early in the century and nothing had sprung up to take their place. Voters crossed and recrossed electoral lines, supporting their favorite in the primary of one party and casually voting for someone of quite different political view in the general election. A nominally Democratic electorate often chose Republicans for President and governor. Upton Sinclair’s EPIC, Dr. Townsend’s pension scheme, Robert Noble’s $25-Every-Monday campaign, which was soon subverted and corrupted—these and countless lesser causes roiled California politics during the 1930s.

  In this political environment Richard Nixon spent his teens. Doubtless he was far more directly influenced by his family than by the rapidly changing southern California culture. His parents and siblings believed in old-fashioned Horatio Alger industriousness and individualism, not the values of Hollywood’s later plush years—the mother hardworking and moralistic, the father tightfisted, fearful of debt, ever cautious after a lifetime of drifting from job to job. Nixon did some acting, not in Hollywood but at Whittier College. He was interested enough in a business career to take a plunge in a frozen orange juice venture, which ended disastrously. He perfectly summarized, Garry Wills concluded, an older America made up of sacrifice and self-reliance. As a twelve-year-old he had told his mother that he wanted to be “an old-fashioned kind of lawyer—a lawyer who can’t be bought.”

  The film industry reached its apogee during the thirties and the war years. Inside huge, walled studio lots, beneath towering sets, tens of thousands of employees worked in the projection rooms, machine shops, dressmaking rooms, scenery-making docks, planing mills, executive offices. Anyone who went to the pictures or read movie magazines knew of the Big Five: M-G-M, Warner Bros., Paramount, RKO, 20th Century-Fox; Columbia, Universal, and United Artists were the “little three.” At the top were the producers, the directors, and the stars. Louis B. Mayer for a time was the highest-salaried business executive in the country. In 1941 motion-picture theaters outnumbered banks. Attendance reached an all-time high during the last year of the war.

  Stung by rising criticism of their films’ vulgarity and superficiality, especially during the New Deal years, the moguls boasted of the intellectual and artistic talent they had imported—notably authors F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Nathanael West, Bertolt Brecht, the composer Arnold Schoenberg, the conductor Leopold Stokowski. Few writers, however, boasted about working in Hollywood, except perhaps about the money they made. They saw their work reprocessed by directors, producers, other writers, and even the actors. Sometimes they saw no results at all; during a one-year contract, Faulkner worked on nine projects, only two of which were produced. Screenwriting, he complained, allowed for little individual creativity. William Saroyan stayed for a short time and left in disgust. Fitzgerald, nearing the end of his life, appeared to pose some of his own fantasies and self-delusions in his uncompleted novel, The Last Tycoon. West exacted a writer’s revenge with his novel The Day of the Locust, a kaleidoscopic view of Hollywood that struck his friend Budd Schulberg as a “puke-green phantasmagoria of life
in the lower depths of the house of horrors.” Schulberg himself, no migrant but the son of a major producer, wrought his own revenge with What Makes Sammy Run?—a savage portrait of a producer clawing his way to the top.

  If producers and writers often failed to engage with each other, so did actors and writers. Driving the newly introduced Clark Gable and William Faulkner through Palm Springs on a hunting expedition, Howard Hawks overheard Gable ask Faulkner who he thought were good writers. “Thomas Mann, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and myself,” Faulkner answered. “Oh, do you write, Mr. Faulkner?” Gable asked. “Yeah,” Faulkner said. “What do you do, Mr. Gable?” That was not a put-down, Hawks thought—he doubted that Gable had ever read a book or Faulkner had ever seen a movie.

  Like other industries, moviemaking remained vulnerable to new technologies. The advent of sound in the 1920s had brought major changes, especially for the acting corps. The rise of television after World War II seemed for a time to spell the doom of Hollywood. Annual movie-house admissions, at 4.5 billion in the mid-1940s, stabilized at about one billion two decades later. The Hollywood producers fought television by joining it. In 1956 the Screen Actors Guild found that about 35 percent of the earnings of its members came from television programs and 25 percent from motion pictures. The industry also turned to the production of 16-millimeter home movies, educational programs, color films.