The electoral events of 1968 constitute a classical case of the vanity of political prediction. In 1964, in the wake of Mr Johnson's crowning mercy of November, political scientists were affirming the end of the Republican Party; the most that was to be looked for in the future was a one-and-a-half party system. In 1962 it was universally agreed amongst the politically sophisticated that Mr Nixon, by losing the California governor's race and, worse still, by publicly displaying his wounds and his chagrin, had wrecked all chances of a presidential nomination. In 1968, even after the New Hampshire primary, it was the conventional wisdom that Senator McCarthy's was, for all its gallantry, a children's crusade, of no serious significance for the course of American politics. Dis aliter visum. The two-party system fully reasserted itself, even in a three-party year; Mr Nixon easily won the nomination and, by a hair's breadth, the presidency; finally, Senator McCarthy, despite his failure to win either, decisively affected the course of American policy in Vietnam, was probably responsible in large degree for Mr Johnson's abdication and may, by his own autumnal aloofness, have tipped the electoral balance from Humphrey to Nixon.

Political scientists in the United States have in recent years become concerned with analysis of the rights and responsibilities of political opposition. This interest was initially stimulated by the much-quoted, and much-maligned, report of the Committee on Political Parties of the American Political Science Association in 1950 entitled Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System. It has been supplemented by the volume edited by Robert Dahl, Political Oppositions in Western Democracies. Academic rationale for this interest is reflected in the paradox posed by Dahl, who, having cited ‘ the right of an organized opposition to appeal for votes against the government in elections and parliament’ as being one of ‘the three great milestones in the development of democratic institutions’, is then obliged to admit that in the United States ‘it is never easy to distinguish “opposition” from “government”’, and that ‘it is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to identify the opposition’. Opposition in the United States political system is nonstructural because of the multiple access points for influence, and opportunities for preventing or inhibiting governmental action are numerous. No single institution illustrates this fact better than Congress. In speaking of Congress, commentators do not talk about ‘the opposition’. They may refer to ‘the minority party’ (and ‘the majority party’), yet even these terms cannot be used at times when the Senate and House are not controlled by the same party. Moreover, internal organizational and procedural patterns in the contemporary Congress allow many opportunities for minority coalitions to check executive policies favoured by a majority coalition in Congress, and such coalitions are often bipartisan.

The American expeditionary force against Santiago, which sailed from Tampa, Florida, on 14 June 1898, comprised some 800 officers and 16,000 men, plus a number of civilian clerks and stenographers, teamsters, packers and stevedores. The troops were honoured by the presence of eighty-nine newspaper correspondents, and eleven foreign military observers. The colourful exploits of the correspondents are well known, but the activities and opinions of the foreign attachés were by their very nature strictly confidential. Happily, the reports of the British military and naval representatives who accompanied the Santiago expedition have survived the intervening years, and when viewed in conjunction with the observations of the British military attaché with the Spanish forces in Cuba they shed interesting light on the conduct of the war.

Shortly before America's involvement in the First World War there appeared a series of works of social and cultural criticism remarkable for their range and sophistication. The familiar list includes Herbert Croly's The Promise of American Life (1909) and Progressive Democracy (1914), Walter Weyl's The New Democracy (1912), Walter Lippmann's Preface to Politics (1913) and Drift and Mastery (1914), Van Wyck Brooks's The Wine of the Puritans (1909), America's Coming of Age (1915), and H. G. Wells (1915), and Randolph Bourne's Youth and Life (1913), The Gary Schools (1916) and Education and Living (1917). The authors of these books were involved as well in the development of vehicles for social criticism such as The New Republic and The Seven Arts which continued and institutionalized the preoccupations of their books.

Though Mark Twain's phrase ‘the showiest kind of book-talk’ undoubtedly represents the apogee of the attacks on Cooper's diction in general, the grandiloquent speeches of Cooper's Indians had drawn the fire of the proponents of verisimilitude from the earliest. The North American Review, with The Last of the Mohicans before it, criticized the author's idealization of Indian speech and character (‘We should be glad to know, for example, in what tribe, or in what age of Indian history, such a civilized warrior as Uncas ever flourished?’). Nor, two years later, did the reviewing of one of Cooper's sea novels seem an inappropriate occasion for a fresh onslaught upon his Indians: ‘This bronze noble of nature, is then made to talk like Ossian for whole pages, and measure out hexameters, as though he had been practising for a poetic prize’. Adding weightily to the chorus, as the years succeeded, would be the Indian fighter Cass, who expressed ‘regret that [Cooper] did not cross the Allegany, instead of the Atlantic, and survey the red man in the forests and prairies’, as well as the author of The Oregon Trail and historian of the eighteenth century's struggle against the Five Nations: ‘We do not allude to his Indian characters, which it must be granted, are for the most part either superficially or falsely drawn; while the long conversations which he puts into their mouths, are as truthless as they are tiresome’.

The post-Pound, post-Carlos Williams movement in American verse, represented by such poets as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and Ed Dorn, has for the most part been received with a deadly critical hush, particularly in England. Apart from the timely special issue of Ian Hamilton's Review in 1964 on Black Mountain Poetry, together with some discreet championing by Eric Mottram and Donald Davie, attention to the New Verse has been largely confined to the off-campus underground scene. The Black Mountaineers are generally thought to be the exclusive province of the Fulcrum Press, Calder and Boyars, the International Times and a tiny circulating broadsheet published from Cambridge called The English Intelligencer. But this critical neglect is, I think, a symptom of a genuine distress in literature departments of universities about the nature of contemporary verse. On the one hand, we have acquired a sophisticated terminology for discussing most of the verbal objects we have learned to call poems: this terminology entails certain assumptions about the working of language itself–that, for instance, the semantic value of an utterance is housed entirely in the words that compose that utterance, that language is a collection of multiply-suggestive symbols, that the operation of language is rational, logical and continuous. On the other hand, we have been recently confronted with a body of verse which either defies, or comes off very badly from, our conventional terminology. Its most striking features have been a metrical, syntactical and logical discontinuity; an insistence that language works, not symbologically, but phenomenologically, as a happening in time and space; that the silence in which a poem occurs has as great a semantic value as the words which are imposed on that silence. Given this battery of opposed assumptions, it is hardly surprising that the case of the New American Poetry offers the unengaging spectacle of criticism and poetics confronting one another with at best a dubious silence, at worst, bared teeth.

This paper and the one that follows it were originally prepared for the 1968 Conference of the British Association for American Studies at Cambridge. They are companion pieces, and each was designed to outline initially an interdisciplinary approach to literary study and sociology, and then to follow this with an analysis of Stephen Crane's Maggie which does not make any claim necessarily to have achieved fulfilment of the precepts set out in the preface.

We all well know that American Studies offers a particularly fascinating and complex example of the difficulties and challenges involved in an interdisciplinary and area studies approach. There may, indeed, be an element of chance in the fact that this touches so sharply on the links that can be established between literature and other studies (literature and sociology, literature and history): the chance that literature was somehow in there from the beginning, in the early days of the subject, and has still held its place in the area-studies map. So, when Henry Nash Smith asked us once if American Studies could develop a method, he looked for his answer in the intervening ground between literary criticism and sociology; and though he found it hard to arrive at his desired method, he suggested that it would lie in some form of cultural anthropology. The divisions between the various disciplines–above all, the varying roles they allowed to consciousness in their interpretation of society and culture–seemed to him to pose profound problems. So, he said, a new method would have to come piecemeal, through a kind of principled opportunism; but he did assume that we could want to turn to works of literature, and the complex interactions between a writer and his environment that constitute a whole literary career, as an important centre of the study, a significant expression of the culture. The problems in fact are large, since in liberal-democratic society literature performs some of the most complex contours of art that have ever existed. But that very fact is part of the interest of the problem and, while Professor Smith's approach raises certain difficulties, on some of which the first part of the present argument turns, I am happy to take the issue raised–that literature can be seen as a social manifestation, that as a creative manifestation it does uniquely reveal central aspects of a culture–as a very important one.

In his introductory essay to The Stature of Theodore Dreiser, Alfred Kazin has noted that the legend that Sister Carrie had been suppressed by the publisher's wife became so dear to the hearts of the rising generation of the twentieth century that ‘Mrs Doubleday became a classic character, the Carrie Nation of the American liberal epos, her ax forever lifted against “the truth of American life”’. Equally dear to the hearts of the new generation of Americans was the belief that both the puritanical publishers and the equally puritanical reviewers tried to prevent the ‘immoral’ Sister Carrie from coming before the American public. That this belief is still widely held is testified to by the recent studies of Philip L. Gerber, W. A. Swanberg, and Yoshinobu Hakutani.