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ACHIEVING THE AMERICAN SOUL
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AndrewHartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015)
Kevin M.Schultz, Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties (New York: Norton, 2015)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 October 2016
Extract
In 1963—as good a date as any to serve as a pivot between “fifties” and “sixties” America—James Baldwin remarked, “The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace.” It was a bracing declaration, a bit gentler than Malcolm X's designation of Negroes as “victims of Americanism” and perhaps by now, as historians focus ever greater attention on the nationally constitutive role of slavery and white supremacy, almost a commonplace. Yet Baldwin's idea remains challenging to plumb and to fully inhabit. For at that moment, which both Kevin Schultz and Andrew Hartman suggest was preoccupied with “the very question of America and its meaning,” Baldwin's little book, The Fire Next Time, upended the whole debate. He was no black nationalist and, notwithstanding his expatriate life in France, no “emigrationist,” for he believed that blacks in the United States were, socially and culturally, wholly of, if not in, this country; and yet, given the deep corruption in the national past, there was no “meaning” to return to, reclaim, realize, or vindicate as a promise of black freedom. The verb Baldwin chose, in a determinedly existentialist vein, was to “achieve our country”—to create a viable moral meaning for national identity where none as yet existed. If Schultz's subjects, William F. Buckley Jr, and Norman Mailer, were “vying for the soul of the nation” and Hartman's warriors fighting “for the soul of America,” they were—in Baldwin's perspective—chasing a chimera. Such a thing wasn't there; it was yet to come, if at all.
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References
1 Baldwin, James, The Fire Next Time (New York, 1963), 36 Google Scholar.
2 Hartman, Andrew, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago, 2015), 10 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 141, emphasis added.
4 Schultz, Kevin M., Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties (New York, 2015), 4 Google Scholar.
5 Ibid., 22, 48–53, emphasis added.
6 Hartman, A War for the Soul of America, 5, emphasis added.
7 Schultz, Buckley and Mailer, 11. Schultz's first chapter, “The Nature of Man,” suggests a common preoccupation of the magazine editor and the novelist that fits well with the thesis of Greif, Mark, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973 (Princeton, 2015)Google Scholar.
8 Hartman, A War for the Soul of America, 4, emphasis added, 9–38.
9 Schultz, Buckley and Mailer, 207. On Mailer's imagined bond with Kennedy see Mailer's November 1960 Esquire essay “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” treated in ibid., 90–92.
10 Quoted in ibid., 331.
11 Hartman, A War for the Soul of America, 51.
12 See Robert Bork, quoted in Hartman, A War for the Soul of America, 155.
13 For a critique see Bell, Daniel, “The New Class: A Muddled Concept,” in Bruce-Briggs, B., ed. The New Class? (New Brunswick, Transaction, 1979), 169–90Google Scholar.
14 Hartman, A War for the Soul of America, 101.
15 Ibid., 79, emphasis added.
16 For telling interpretations of that trend see Hollinger, David, After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton, 2013)Google Scholar; Schäfer, Axel R., Countercultural Conservatives: American Evangelicalism from the Postwar Revival to the New Christian Right (Madison, 2011)Google Scholar; Schäfer, Axel R., Piety and Public Funding: Evangelicals and the State in Modern America (Philadelphia, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 Hartman, A War for the Soul of America, 85.
18 Ibid., 146, 237.
19 Ibid., 231–2, 203.
20 On the “acids of modernity” see ibid., 4, 71. For Talcott Parsons's use of Whitehead's fallacy to challenge a common moralistic critique of capitalism see Brick, Howard Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca, 2006), 131 Google Scholar.
21 Hartman, A War for the Soul of America, 10, 197, 151.
22 Ibid., 252.
23 Davison Hunter, James, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York, 1991), 220 Google Scholar.
24 Hartman, A War for the Soul of America, 199, 285.
25 Ibid., 285–90.
26 Cowie, Jefferson, The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton, 2016)Google Scholar.
27 On Rudolf Flesch's Why Johnny Can't Read see Jamie Cohen-Cole, “Psychology, Phonics, and Politics,” paper delivered at Social Science, Ideology, and Public Policy in the United States, 1960s to the Present conference, University of Toronto, 17–19 Oct. 2014.
28 Talcott Parsons, thinking of his own experience of the 1920s, made “fundamentalist reaction” a generic concept in analyzing the discontents of modernization. See Parsons, Talcott, Essays in Sociological Theory, rev. edn (New York, 1954), 119–23Google Scholar, 137–8. Even an up-to-date college textbook such as Faragher, John Mack, Mari Jo Buhle, Daniel Czitrom, and Susan H. Armitage, Out of Many: A History of the American People, 3rd edn (Saddle River, 2000), 692 Google Scholar, classes Prohibition, immigration restriction, the Klan, and religious fundamentalism as “resistance to modernity” rooted primarily in the antiurban sentiments of “rural and small-town America,” thus disregarding upper-class nativism, big-business anticommunism, and the Klan in the cities.
29 Schultz, Buckley and Mailer, 4, 228; Hartman, A War for the Soul of America, 225, 223.
30 Hartman, A War for the Soul of America, 276.
31 Hofstadter quoted in Kohn, Hans, American Nationalism: An Interpretive Essay (New York, 1956), 13 Google Scholar.