American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  613 [“It is irresponsible”]: quoted in Haskell, p. 58.

  [“I saw President Ford bump his head”]: quoted in Parenti, p. 15.

  [TV and opinion formation]: Janowitz, ch. 9 passim; Ronald E. Frank and Marshall G. Greenbury, The Public’s Use of Television (Sage Publications, 1980); Joshua Meyrowitz, Na Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (Oxford University Press, 1985); Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet, The People’s Choice, 2nd ed. (Columbia University Press, 1948), ch. 16 and passim; Elihu Katz and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications (Free Press, 1955).

  [TV and political cynicism]: Michael J. Robinson, “Public Affairs Television and the Growth of Political Malaise: The Case of ‘The Selling of the Pentagon,’ ” American Political Science. Review, vol. 70, no. 2 (June 1976), pp. 409-32; Burns, Peltason, and Cronin, p. 247 (table).

  614 [Political bias in the media]: Burns, Peltason, and Cronin, pp. 253-55 and sources cited therein; Michael J. Robinson, “Just How Liberal Is the News? 1980 Revisited,” Public Opinion, vol. 6, no. 1 (February-March 1983), pp. 55-60; Nick Thimmesch, ed., A Liberal Media Elite? (American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1985); Sally Bedell Smith, “Conservatism Finds Its TV Voice,” New York Times, May 19, 1985, sect. 2, p. 32; Parenti, ch. 6 and passim; Broder, ch. 9; Ranney, ch. 2; Peter Stoler, The War Against the Press: Politics, Pressure and Intimidation in the 80s (Dodd, Mead, 1986), chs. 8, 12 and passim.

  [Decline of mass-circulation magazines]: Loudon Wainwright, The Great American Magazine: An Inside History of Life (Knopf, 1986), esp. chs. 15, 20; James K. Classman, “One Life to Live” (review of Wainwright), New Republic, vol. 196, no. 6 (February 9, 1987), pp. 36-40; Otto Friedrich, Decline and Fall (Harper, 1970), ch. 23.

  [Specialized and alternative periodicals]: Abe Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press (Pantheon, 1985); Robert K. Glessing, The Underground Press in America (Indiana University Press, 1970); David Owen, “The Fifth Estate,” Atlantic, vol. 256, no. 1 (July 1985), pp. 80-85; see also Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century (University of Illinois Press, 1964), ch. 13.

  [Decline of independent local newspapers]: see Philip Weiss, “Invasion of the Gannettoids,” New Republic, vol. 196, no. 5 (February 2, 1987), pp. 18-22.

  The New Yorkers

  615 [State of black literature]: see Nathan A. Scott, Jr., “Black Literature,” in Daniel Hoff man, ed., Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979), ch. 7; C. W. E. Bigsby, The Second Black Renaissance: Essays in Black Literature (Greenwood Press, 1980); Herbert Hill, ed., Anger, and Beyond: The Negro Writer in the United States (Harper, 1966); Mari Evans, ed., Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation (Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984).

  [State of southern literature]: see Lewis P. Simpson, “Southern Fiction,” in Hoffman, ch. 4; Louis D. Rubin, Jr., et al., eds., The History of Southern Literature (Louisiana State University Press, 1985), parts 3-4; Rubin and Robert D. Jacobs, eds., Southern Renascence: The Literature of the Modern South (Johns Hopkins Press, 1953); Richard Gray, The Literature of Memory: Modern Writers of the American South (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).

  [“Terrible loss of moral energy”]: Doctorow, “It’s a Cold War Out There, Class of ’83,” Nation, vol. 237, no. 1 (July 2, 1983), pp. 6-7, quoted at pp. 6, 7; see also Doctorow, “Living in the House of Fiction,” ibid., vol. 226, no. 15 (April 22, 1978), pp. 459-60, 462.

  615 [Bellow on “publicity intellectuals”]: Mark Christhilf, “Saul Bellow and the American Intellectual Community,” Modern Age, vol. 28, no. 1 (Winter 1984), pp. 55-67, esp. pp. 59-61. 615-16 [“Million-dollar advances”]: Kazin, “American Writing Now,” New Republic, vol. 183, no. 16 (October 18, 1980), pp. 27-30, quoted at p. 28.

  616 [Kostelanetz on the literary marketplace]: Kostelanetz, The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in America (Sheed & Ward, 1974), passim; see also Joan Simpson Burns, The Awkward Embrace: The Creative Artist and the Institution in America (Knopf, 1975), esp. ch. 22; led Solotaroff, “The Literary-Industrial Complex,” New Republic, vol. 196, no. 23 (June 8, 1987), pp. 28-45.

  [Aldridge on the modern novel]: Aldridge, “The State of the Novel,” Commentary, vol. 64, no. 4 (October 1977), pp. 44-52, esp. pp. 45-47, quoted at p. 46; see also Warner Berthoff, “The Novel in a Time of Troubles,” in Berthoff, Fictions and Events (E. P. Dutton, 1971), pp. 102-17; Philip Roth, “Writing American Fiction” (1960), in Roth, Reading Myself and Others (Farrar, Straus & Giroux,1975), pp. 117-35; Janet Groth, “Fiction vs. anti-fiction revisited,” Commonweal, vol. 106, no. 9 (May 11, 1979), pp. 269-71; Joseph Epstein, “A Conspiracy of Silence,” Harper’s, vol. 255, no. 1530 (November 1977), pp. 77-92.

  [New York intellectuals]: Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (Oxford University Press, 1986); Bernard Rosenberg and Ernest Goldstein, eds., Creators and Disturbers: Reminiscences by Jewish Intellectuals of New York (Columbia University Press, 1982); Kostelanetz; James B. Gilbert, Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America (Wiley, 1968); Irving Howe, “The New York Intellectuals,” in Howe, Decline of the New (Harcourt, 1970), pp. 211-68; Richard H. King, “Up from Radicalism,” American Jewish History, vol. 75, no. 1 (September 1985), pp. 61-85. [“Gutter-worldliness”]: Frank Kermode, “A Herd of Independent Minds” (review of Bloom), New York Times Book Review, April 27, 1986, pp. 12-13, Howe quoted at p. 12.

  617 [Kostelanetz on “literary mob”]: Kostelanetz, p. 75 and part 1 passim.

  [PEN Congress]: Rhoda Koenig, “At Play in the Fields of the Word,” New York, vol. 19, no. 5 (February 3, 1986), pp. 40-47; Edward Rothstein, “Lead Me Not into PEN Station,” Ne?? Republic, vol. 194, no. 8 (February 24, 1986), pp. 20-23; “A Rampancy of Writers,” Time, vol. 127, no. 2 (January 13, 1986), p. 22; “Independent States of Mind,” ibid., vol. 127, no. 4 (January 27, 1986), pp. 74-77; “Mightier Than the Sword,” Newsweek, vol. 107, no. 4 (January 27, 1986), pp. 60-61; see also William H. Gass, “East vs. West in Lithuania: Rising Tempers at a Writers’ Meeting,” New York Times Book Review, February 2, 1986, pp. 3, 29, 31.

  [“Your Administration”]; text of letter in Nation, vol. 242, no. 4 (February 1, 1986), p. 117; see also Maria Margaronis and Elizabeth Pochoda, “Bad Manners & Bad Faith,” ibid., pp. 116-19; Koenig, pp. 40-4 1; “Independent States,” pp. 74-75; Walter Goodman, “Shultz Faces Critics in Speech Opening 48th PEN Assembly,” New York Times, January 13, 1986, pp. 1, C11.

  [“Most ideologically right-wing”]: Doctorow, “Why Invite Shultz?,” New York Times, January 11, 1986, p. 23.

  [“Catatonic left”]: quoted in “Mightier Than the Sword,” p. 60.

  [Shultz’s address]: excerpts in New York Times, January 19, 1986, sect. 4, p. 6.

  618 [“With you all the way”]: quoted in Koenig, p. 41.

  [“First thing I get”]: quoted in New York Times, January 14, 1986, p. G12.

  [“Even if you say”]: quoted in Koenig, p. 42.

  [“In the eyes of foreigners”]: quoted in Walter Goodman, “Norman Mailer Offers a PEN Post-mortem,” New York Times, January 27, 1986, p. C24.

  [Mailer on Congress “friendships and feuds”]: ibid.

  [Women’s protest]: Paley quoted in Koenig, p. 47; Mailer and Jong in “Independent States,” p. 77; Macdonald in “Mightier Than the Sword,” p. 61; Edwin McDowell, “Women at PEN Caucus Demand a Greater Role,” New York Times, January 17, 1986, p. C26; McDowell, “PEN Congress Ends with a Protest,” ibid., January 18, 1986, p. 11.

  618 [“Failure of the ruling ideologies”]: excerpts from remarks in New York Times, January 19, 1986, sect. 4, p. 6.

  [“Ring of romantic anarchism”]: quoted in “Independent St
ates,” p. 77; see also Amos Oz, “A Writer’s Guide,” New Republic, vol. 194, no. 8 (February 24, 1986), p. 28.

  618-19 [“Fully clawed”]: Ozick, “Literature Lost,” New York Times, January 22, 1986, p. A23; see also Ozick, “Innovation and Redemption: What Literature Means,” in Ozick, Art & Ardor (Knopf, 1983), pp. 238-48.

  619 [Bellow-Grass debate]: Bellow quoted in “Independent States,” p. 77; Koenig, pp. 44-45; see also Leon Wieseltier, “A Fable,” New Republic, vol. 194, no. 8 (February 24, 1986), pp. 26-29; Günter Grass, “The Artist’s Freedom of Opinion in Our Society,” in Grass, On Writing and Politics, 1967-1983, Ralph Manheim, trans. (Harcourt, 1985), pp. 127-36.

  [“Censorship in the U.S.A. ”]: “Mightier Than the Sword,” p. 61; New York Times, January 16, 1986, p. G17; see also Eli M. Oboler, ed., Censorship and Education (H. W. Wilson Co., 1981).

  [Updike on postal service]: quoted in “Independent States,” p. 75; see also Updike, “One Writer’s Testimony,” National Review, vol. 30, no. 21 (May 26, 1978), p. 641.

  620 [Jameson “thinness” of American life]: James, The American Scene (Scribner, 1946), pp. 44, 54, and passim; see also James, Hawthorne (Harper, 1880), pp. 41-43.

  [“Absence of a desire”]: Bellow, “The Writer as Moralist,” Atlantic, vol. 211, no. 3 (March 1963), pp. 58-62, quoted at p. 62; see also Bellow, “Where Do We Go from Here: The Future of Fiction,” in Irving Mallow, ed., Saul Bellow and the Critics (New York University Press, 1967), pp. 211-20; Bellow, “The Nobel Lecture,” American Scholar, vol. 46, no. 3 (1977), pp. 316-25; Bellow, “Literature in the Age of Technology,” in Technology and the Frontiers of Knowledge (Doubleday, 1975), pp. 3-22.

  [Foreign authors on contemporary American willing]: quoted in “Where’s the New Faulkner?,” U.S. News & World Report, vol. 100, no. 3 (January 27, 1986), p. 65; see also Aleksandr Mulyarchik, “The New American Literature,” World Press Review, vol. 30, no. 4 (April 1983), p. 51; Edward Hoagland, “Americans Exclude the Globe,” New York Times, January 11, 1986, p. 23.

  621 [“Independent, self-generating”]: John Russell, The Meanings of Modern Art (Harper, 1981), p. 291.

  [Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American art]: ibid., pp. 291-96; Meyer Schapiro, Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (George Braziller, 1982), pp. 135-78; Arthur Frank Wertheim, The New York Little Renaissance: Iconoclasm, Modernism, and Nationalism in American Culture, 1908-1917 (New York University Press, 1976); Peter Selz, Art in Our Times: A Pictorial History, 1890-1980 (Harry N. Abrams, 1981), chs. 1-3 passim; Peter Conrad, The Art of the City: Views and Versions of New York (Oxford University Press, 1984).

  [Abstract Expressionism]: Harry F. Gaugh, “Reappraising the New York School,” in Sam Hunter, ed., An American Renaissance: Painting and Sculpture since 1940 (Abbeville Press, 1986), pp. 27-61; Charles Harrison, “Abstract Expressionism,” in Nikos Stangos, ed., Concepts of Modern Art, 2nd. ed. (Harper, 1981), pp. 169-211; Maurice Tuchman, ed., New York School: The First Generation (New York Graphic Society, 1972); Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (Praeger, 1970); Russell, pp. 302-27 passim; see also Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (Oxford University Press, 1972), chs. 10, 11.

  [Russell on Frankenthaler]: Russell, p. 357.

  [“Drowning Girl”]: reproduced in ibid., p. 348.

  [“New, Newer, Newest”]: John Simon, “New, Newer, Newest,” New York Times, September 21, 1969, sect. 2, pp. 1, 7; see also Burns, Awkward Embrace, ch. 13 passim.

  [“Most difficult, embattled”]: Suzi Gablik, “Minimalism,” in Stangos, pp. 244-55, quoted at p. 248; see also Hal Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” in Howard Singerman, ed., Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art, 1945-1986 (Abbeville Press, 1986), pp. 162-83.

  622 [Merging of High and Mass Culture]: Herbert J. Gans, “American Popular Culture and High Culture in a Changing Glass Structure,” in Judith H. Balfe and Margaret Jane Wyszomirski, eds., Art, Ideology, and Politics (Praeger, 1985), pp. 40-57, quoted at p. 49; Dwight Macdonald, “A Theory of Mass Culture,” in Bernard Rosenberg and David M. White, eds., Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (Free Press, 1957), pp. 59-73; Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, John O’Brian, ed. (University of Chicago Press, 1986), vol. 1, pp. 5-22; “Culture and the Present Moment: A Round-Table Discussion,” Commentary, vol. 58, no. 6 (December 1974), pp. 31-50; Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” in Sontag, Against lnterpretation and Other Essays (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), pp. 275-92.

  622 [Hughes on Kramer]: Robert Hughes, “Kramer vs. Kramer” (review of Hilton Kramer, The Revenge of the Philistines: Art and Culture 1972-1984 [Free Press, 1985]: New Republic, vol. 194, no. 15 (April 14, 1986), pp. 28-33, quoted at p. 32.

  [“Free-market capitalism”]: ibid., p. 32; see also Kramer, “Postmodern: Art and Culture in the 1980s,” in Kramer, pp. 1-11.

  [Free market in art]: John Bernard Myers, “The Art Biz,” New York Review of Books, vol. 30, no. 15 (October 13, 1983), pp. 32-34, quoted at p. 32; see also Steven W. Naifeh, Culture Making: Money, Success, and the New York Art World (Princeton University Undergraduate Studies in History: 2, 1976); Harold Rosenberg, Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations (Macmillan, 1975), ch. 26; Laura de Coppet and Alan Jones, The Art Dealers (Clarkson N. Potter, 1984).

  [“Radically wrong”]: Russell, p. 381. [“Two Women” sale]: Myers, p. 32.

  [Artists and politics]: Corinne Robins, The Pluralistic Era: American Art,*1968-1981 (Harper, 1984), ch. 3; Balfe and Wyszomirski: Hilton Kramer, “Turning Back the Clock: Art and Politics in 1984,” in Kramer, pp. 386-94; Paul Von Blum, The Art of Social Conscience (Universe Books, 1976), ch. 9.

  622-3 [New York Art Strike]: Robins, pp. 2-3, 39.

  623 [Kennedy’s proposed legislation for the resale of art]: see “U.S. Bill on Artists’ Rights Is Debated,” New York Times, November 19, 1986, p. C33; see also Franklin Feldman, “Reflections on Art and the Law: Old Concepts. New Values,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 131, no. 2 (June 1987), pp. 141-47.

  [Sontag on “art today”]: Susan Sontag, “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” in Sontag, pp. 293-304, quoted at p. 290.

  [Attacks on tradition, 1960s-1980s]: Gregory Baltcock and Robert Nickas, eds., The Art of Performance (E. P. Dutton, 1984); Robert Smith, “Conceptual Art,” in Stangos, pp. 256-70; Edward Lucie-Smith, “Pop Art,” in ibid., pp. 225-38: Lucy Lippard et al.. Pop Art (Oxford University Press, 1966); Carla Gottlieb, Beyond Modern Art (E. P. Dutton, 1976); Robins, esp. chs. 2, 4, 8; Robert C. Morgan, “Beyond Formalism: Language Models, Conceptual Art, and Environmental Art,” in Hunter, pp. 147-75; Machineworks: Vito Accona, Alice Aycock, Dennis Oppenheim, catalogue (Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1981); Moira Roth, ed., The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art, 1970-1980 (Astro Artz, 1983); see also Arthur C. Danlo, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Harvard University Press, 1981).

  [Influence of Duchamp]: John Tancock, “The Influence of Marcel Duchamp,” in Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp (Museum of Modern Art, 1973), pp. 159-78; Rosenberg, ch. 1; Calvin Tomkins, The World of Marcel Duchamp, 1887 (Time Inc., 1966), chs. 7-8.

  [Neo-Expressiomsm]: 1985 Whitney Biennial Exhibition, catalogue (Whitney Museum of Modern Art, 1985); Arthur C. Danto, “Julian Schnabel,” in Danto, The State of the Art (Prentice-Hall, 1987), pp. 43-47; Howard N. Fox, Avant-Garde in the Eighties, catalogue (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1987); Kim Levin, “Appropriating the Past: Neo-Expressionism, Neo-Primitivism, and the Revival of Abstraction,” in Hunter, pp. 215-53; John Russell, “American Art Gains New Energies,” New York Times, August 19, 1984, sect. 2, pp. 1, 18; Kramer, pp. 366-86.

  [Postindustrial technologies and art]: John G. Hanhardt, ed., Video Culture (Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1986); Cynthia Goodman, Digital Visions: Computers an
d Art (Harry N. Abrams, 1987); see also J. David Bolter, Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age (University of North Carolina Press, 1984).

  [“When anything is allowed”]: Danto, “Approaching the End of Art,” in Danto, State of the Art, pp. 202-18, quoted at p. 204.

  624 [Structuralism and Deconstruction]: see Jonathan D. Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Cornell University Press, 1981); Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (Cornell University Press, 1982); Vincent B. Leitch, Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction (Columbia University Press, 1983.)

  [Postmodernism]: Charles Newman, “The Post-Modern Aura: The Act of Fiction in an Age of Inflation,” Salmagundi, nos. 63-64 (Spring-Summer 1984), pp. 3-199; Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, trans. (University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Bay Press, 1983); Kramer, “Postmodern”; Heinrich Klotz, ed., Postmodern Visions (Abbeville Press, 1985); Charles Jencks, The Language of Past-Modern Architecture, 4th ed. (Rizzoli, 1984).

  [Broadway in the 1970s-1980s]: Barbara Gelb, “O’Neill’s ‘Iceman’ Sprang from the Ashes of His Youth,” New York Times, September 29, 1985, sect. 2, pp. 1, 4; Mel Gussow, “Arthur Miller: Stirred by Memory,” ibid., February 1, 1987, sect. 2, pp. 1, 30; D. J. R. Bruckner, “Playwrights Rediscover the Uses of Politics,” ibid., September 22, 1985, sect. 2, p. 3.

  [Advances in the technology of music]: Irwin Shainman, “Those Golden Sounds of Yesteryear Have Gone High-Tech,” Berkshire Eagle, December 27, 1986, p. B4.

  The Conservative Mall

  [AEI celebration]: Sidney Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power (Times Books, 1986), pp. 32-34, quoted at pp. 32, 33.

  625 [Dinner at Delmonico’s]: James MacGregor Burns, The Workshop of Democracy (Knopf, 1985), pp. 161-62, and sources cited therein.

  [Fifty-year conservative eclipse]: see Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Cycles of American History (Houghton Mifflin, 1986), ch. 2; Michael W. Miles, The Odyssey of the American Right (Oxford University Press, 1980).