Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [42]
[6]When I lived in Harkness Memorial Quadrangle some thirty years ago, I noticed a number of cracks in the tiny-paned windows of my room that had been patched with picturesquely wavy strips of lead. Since the place had just been built, I thought this peculiar. Later I found that after the windows had been installed, a special gang of artisans had visited them; one craftsman had delicately cracked every tenth or twentieth pane with a little hammer and another had then repaired the cracks. In a few days, the windows of Harkness had gone through an evolution that in backward places like Oxford had taken centuries. I wonder what they do in Harkness when a window is broken by accident.
[7]An episode in my six years at Fortune is to the point here. In 1931–1932 I was active on a literary magazine (along with two friends who in 1938 were to become, with me, editors of Partisan Review: F.W. Dupee and George L.K. Morris) which had a circulation of about 600. Thinking Luce would be pleased, and interested, by this evidence of cultural enterprise on the part of one of his writers, I sent him up an issue of The Miscellany, as it was dismally called. His reaction was that I had betrayed Time, Inc. “But Henry,” I said—in those days, long before Sports Illustrated or even Life, manners were still pastorally simple at Time, Inc., and Luce was merely primus inter pares—“But Henry, you can’t expect Fortune to be my only interest. I give it a good day’s work from nine to five, that’s what you pay me for, and it’s my business what I do in my spare time.” This argument affected Luce much as his cynical colleague’s did Norman Rockwell. With his usual earnestness—he was and I’m sure is a decent and honorable man, not at all the ogre the liberal press portrays—Luce expounded quite a different philosophy: Fortune was not just a job, it was a vocation worthy of a man’s whole effort, and pay and time schedules weren’t the point at all. “Why, the very name Fortune was thought up by so-and-so [one of my fellow editors] late one night on the West Side subway between the Seventy-second and the Seventy-ninth street stations [Luce was a Time man always]. This is a twenty-four-hour profession, you never know when you may get an idea for us, and if you’re all the time thinking about some damn little magazine...” “But Henry...” It was an impasse, since I looked on Fortune as a means and he as an end, nor had it been resolved when I left the magazine four years later.
[8]From “Trans-National America.” Of course the immigrants were not all “huddled masses.” Many, especially the Jews, were quite aware of the inferior quality of American cultural life. In The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902), Hutchins Hapgood quotes a Jewish immigrant: “In Russia, a few men, really cultivated and intellectual, give the tone and everybody follows them. But in America the public gives the tone and the literary man simply expresses the public. So that really intellectual Americans do not express as good ideas as less intellectual Russians. The Russians all imitate the best. The Americans imitate what the mass of the people want.” A succinct definition of Masscult.
[9]It’s not done, of course, as consciously as this suggests. The editors of the Saturday Review or Harper’s or The Atlantic would be honestly indignant at this description of their activities, as would John Steinbeck, J.P. Marquand, Pearl Buck, Irwin Shaw, Herman Wouk, John Hersey and others of that remarkably large group of Midcult novelists we have developed. One of the nice things about Zane Grey was that it seems never to have occurred to him that his books had anything to do with literature.
[10]An interesting Midcult document is the editorial The New York Times ran August 24, 1960, the day after the death of Oscar Hammerstein 2nd:
...The theatre has lost a man who stood for all that is decent in life....The concern for racial respect in South Pacific, the sympathy and respect