 Introduction: America Leads the World
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The image of the Americans as the "people of plenty" is with us still, as allıning in a slum in Manila or Buenos Aires as ever it was in a Romanian village.
What the history of our popular culture tells above all is how many of om fantasies have been sold to the rest of the world by Americans; how much people all over the world have all been influenced, in the details of their daily lives, by the United States; how, if the rest of the world has not been colonized by the United States in the 20th century, it has all, certainly, been Coca-Colonized:
"If the United States abolished its diplomatic and consular services, kept its ships in harbor and its tourists at home, and retired from the worlds' markets, its citizens, its problems, its towns and countryside, its roads, motor cars, counting houses and saloons would still be familiar in the uttermost corners of the world... The film is to America what the flag was once to Britain.
By its means Uncle Sam may hope some day, if he is not checked in time, to Americanize the world." What the New York Morning Post said of the movies in 1923 has become only more true since, as the instruments of Americanization have become more and more effective.
In the 1960s media theorist Marshall McLuhan proclaimed that electronic communications had turned the world into a "Global Village", in which "our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us".
McLuhan argued that the electronic media were more "organic" than mechanical forms such as print; thus the new media could become quite literally, "the extensions of Man." His writings enjoyed an enormous vogue at the time of their publication, and he contributed a collection of slogans by which the media would be discussed and categorized - "the medium is the message"; "Culture is our Business", "hot" media, such as film or radio, that concentrated attention on a single sense, against "coId" media like television that he elaimed required more participation on the part of the consumer.
But McLuhan' s theories were only another version of the popular excitement which has accompanied every new development in communications' technology in this century. In McLuhan's media fantasy, "We are certainly coming within conceivable range of a world automatically controlled to apoint where we could say, 'We can program twenty more hours of TV in South Africa next week to cool down the tribal temperature raised by radio last week'." What was missing from this monstrous scenario was any suggestion about who might be doing the controlling. McLuhan's mythology ignored the historical forces that actually shaped the world's media institutions.
American popular culture has formed so many of our contemporary images of "civilization" in part because the United States has been the great economic power of the century, and in part because the characteristic forms of each new medium of popular eulture have first been fixed in America, and then copied elsewhere. If popular culture in its modem form was invented in any one place, it was at the turn of the century in the great cities of the United States, and above all in New York.
 The forms by which a mass population would talk to itself, and what it would talk about, were tested and refined in the newspaper print rooms of Park Row, where Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst fought circulation battles for tabloid newspaper readers; in the primitive film studios in the Bronx where Edison, Vitagraph and Bioscope were learning how to mass-produce movies; in the piano rooms of Tin Pan Alley where songs for the city were being mass-produced; in the advertising offices of Madison Avenue, where the stylish agencies dreamed up ways to spend other people's money. All of them unconsciously modeled their mode of working on the tailoring sweatshops of the Lower East Side of New York.
A similar phenomenon might have been witnessed in Paris five years earlier, for the cinema, the mass-circulation daily newspaper, the press and advertising agencies and the fashion houses were already there. But popular culture needed not only the body heat of a metropolis and the blood of capitalism, but the oxygen of American democracy to bring it to life. Workers there could choose how to spend their leisure; American laborers campaigned for "eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, and eight hours for what we will". Leisure was a social leveler, and popular culture has always, on its surface, been an enemy of class distinction.
In 1898 the New York Tribune explained why relatively poor garment workers spent all their money on fashionable clothes: "In the matter of dress, it is natural that the East Side should be strictly up to date, for it does not furnish clothes for the rest of the town.
This was the great American cultural promise, a "democracy of surfaces" brought into being through the mass production and distribution of images. The realities of the distribution of economic and political power within the culture could thus be disguised, to the satisfaction of capitalist and worker alike.
Mass fashion aliowed everyone to appear upwardly mobile. In the "democracy of goods", the best things in life appeared available to all at reasonable prices. The American city was a world of strangers, where the individual needed to construct an impressive appearance and to disguise him- or herself: for the immigrant masses, an old culture was being discarded and a culture of novelty adopted. Immigrants were the first customers and the first proprietors of the nickelodeons. Their involvement in the new leisure industries came about in part because conventional business activities were seldom open to them, in part because the entertainment industries required little capital, and in part because, as new citizens of a New World, they were well placed to develop new forms of expression and commerce.
American popular culture has been so successful above all because it has been able to absorb and assimilate forms and material from anywhere, and yet reproduce them as specificaliy "American". One advertiser claimed in 1929 that his profession was bringing about "the growth of a national homogeneity in our people". He came close to describing what was at the same time the great boon and the great vice of American popular culture. By acting as the means through which the enormously varied cultural traditions that immigrants brought with them were assimilated into American life, it worked to level differences between ethnic groups and social classes.
At the turn of the century American popular music began to borrow rhythms and dances from black and other ethnic groups. In doing so, it awarded these socialiy inferior musical forms a degree of legitimacy they had previously been denied, and in the process also provided one of the few means of genuine upward mobility for this group of the American poor. One of its other effects was to help spread what psychologist William James called "The Gospel of Relaxation" among the white American middle-class. Danced to ragtime rhythms, the "Burmy Hug" and "Grizzly Bear" brought a new sensuality to middle-class life, and eventually made it respectable. That process has continued ever since.
The "homogeneity" that advertisers sought, the cultural equivalent of the Melting Pot of different nationalities that America described itself as being, was a diluted version of each of its mixed ethnic origins. Many of its critics argued that it was not only homogeneous, and acceptable to everyone, but also homogenized, watered-down and blended until it had no taste, no life, no soul. In the 1940s young whites took up another black dance form, the jitterbug.
But for ali their increased abandon, they still looked inhibited to black writer Malcolm X: "The white people danced as though somebody had trained them, as though somebody had wound them up. But those Negroes - nobody in the world could have choreographed the way they did whatever they felt."
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Introduction
