Frontispiece, AMELIA: OR THE FAITHLESS BRITON. AN ORIGINAL AMERICAN NOVEL (1798). A typical novel of the period, Amelia depicts an innocent woman who, seduced and abandoned by a British soldier who fathers her child, is finally redeemed by her father’s forgiveness. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
PERHAPS THE SIMPLEST, though not the most precise, way to begin telling the story of popular culture in the United States is to state that it did not exist until the nineteenth century. That is because (as I will be defining it in the next few pages) popular culture depends on the existence of a modern working class to use it, as well as to play a pivotal role in creating it. The phenomena we think of as “modern”—urbanization, mass migration, technological innovation, and other elements of the Industrial Revolution—reached a kind of critical mass in the three decades after 1800. The cultural explosion that resulted will be explored in some detail in the next chapter.
But popular culture was not the result of spontaneous combustion. It had clear lines of origin, and in retrospect we can see the various elements converging, and even taking a recognizable form, well before 1800. These converging lines will be the focus of this introductory chapter.
The cultural landscape of any civilization at any time is lush with artistic forms. For all this diversity, however, it is possible—at least in the West before the eighteenth century—to divide these cultures into two categories: elite and folk. Elite culture is official culture. It is the art produced for (and often by) the rich and powerful. Elite culture usually draws on the most valuable material resources available at any given time, as well as on the talents of individuals deemed most successful at producing artifacts for the enjoyment of the privileged. Elite culture is also often designed to demonstrate the authority of those who support it, authority not only to determine what beauty is but also to project political power—as in monumental sculptures to a ruler. In earlier times this was the art of the palace, the court, and its administrative apparatus. Elite culture is still a part of contemporary societies, often supported by corporations and the national state.
Folk culture, by contrast, is the culture of ordinary working people. It is intensely local, and it relies on readily available materials and on techniques that, in theory at least, can be practiced by almost anyone. Folk art is not concerned with projecting the power of the state. In some cases, it seems to acquiesce to the authority of a ruling class; in others, it subtly subverts that authority. Occasionally, folk art even challenges authority directly. In any case, folk culture derives from a different set of social, economic, and political interests than elite culture, interests that often conflict with it.
This is not to say that there is no interaction between the two, or that any particular artistic form is inherently either elite or folk. Indeed, some art—Italian opera, for example—migrates over a period of time from one camp to the other as works or forms lose their cachet and diffuse to the masses, or as elites develop an interest in folk arts, like shaker furniture, and appropriate them for their own use. The blurring of such lines might well lead one to question the value of the distinction at all. I make it, however, to highlight the very real differences in the creation, use, and meaning of art that are the result of people living in different material circumstances.
Essentially, popular culture is a modern offshoot of folk culture. Like folk culture—which continues to exist to this day in rich traditions of handicrafts and communal rituals that range from ethnic cuisines to community parades—popular culture relies on plentiful materials and common techniques and values. The difference is that popular culture is refracted (and magnified) through the prism of mass production. One historian more elegantly defined popular culture as the “folklore of industrial society.”1 “Industrial society” is used here as shorthand for a series of social changes that began appearing in Europe during the eighteenth century. Among other things, those changes include the processes I mentioned above: urbanization, mass migration, and the acceleration of technological change, no one of which is wholly extricable from any other, and all of which are central to the formation of popular culture (and make it different from folk culture). It is useful to artificially compartmentalize these processes for the sake of clarity.
Cities are a prerequisite for popular culture. This does not mean that popular culture is simply urban culture. In fact, popular culture represents a symbiosis between city and country; as rural people pour into cities, they bring their backgrounds with them, and as popular culture emerges from cities it diffuses into the countryside, where the whole process begins again. What cities have historically provided is a common ground where disparate groups of people can meet, and where there is sufficient population and capital for the creation of relatively complex organizations to produce and distribute popular cultural products. Such organizations can be found at least as far back the Middle Ages, when the growth of towns led to the formation of an urban artisan milieu. Most historians agree, however, that the Industrial Revolution represented a perceptible intensification of this process.
Immigration has also provided a seedbed for the creation of popular culture, especially in the United States. As world trade increased, some people began moving more freely across national borders, while slaves and impoverished rural folk were forced to move against their will. As with native-born populations moving from country to city, these people also brought their cultures with them. Yet close contact with other groups inevitably meant that their original cultures lost their “purity” (if they ever had it) as they combined with other cultures and created altogether new ones. In the United States, the general impact of these developments has been dramatic from the very beginning, and has played a decisive role in the history of U.S. popular culture.
Finally, there is the role of technological innovation. Until well into the nineteenth century, the innovation crucial for the development of popular culture was the refinement and proliferation of the printing press. The introduction of movable type, which allowed many copies of a single work to be reproduced mechanically, dates back to the fifteenth century, and one could plausibly date the birth of popular culture there. Yet the quantitative differences between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries in terms of the scale of the publishing industry, the relative freedom of the press from religious or state control, and the pace of modernization—which in the United States underwent a quantum leap over the space of a generation in the early nineteenth century—are so great as to be qualitative as well.2
But whatever its origins, popular culture emerged most clearly in England during the eighteenth century, triggering a “long revolution” whose effects are with us still.3 This revolution, which included developments ranging from the growth of a large reading public to the destruction of the medieval craft system in printing, was replicated elsewhere in the centuries that followed. The first traces of it began to appear in England’s American colonies toward the end of that century—that is to say, right around the time those colonies declared their political, if not quite cultural, independence.
GETTING THE WORD: THE ORIGINS OF A POPULAR AUDIENCE
In some respects, the constitutionally ratified United States of 1789 was not very different from the thirteen still-loyal colonies of 1776 or, for that matter, those of 1676 (the year a violent insurrection was crushed in Virginia). Compared to Europe in the intervening century, the colonies exhibited somewhat less class stratification, though tensions with Indians were sharp and immediate and the slave system of the south solidified. But compared to what came later, the colonies were overwhelmingly rural—and Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson hoped they would stay that way.
For most people on the Eastern seaboard between the settlement of Jamestown in 1607 and the ratification of the Constitution, cultural life was rooted in folkways. For sure, there was a cultural elite, personified by Jefferson himself. People like him experienced the official culture of Europe, and brought it here via imported books, paintings, and ideas. For the rest of the country, however, artistic production was vernacular and localized.
One good example of this is music. Both Anglo-Celtic and African arrivals brought their songs with them, singing and playing them as an accompaniment to work,