This essay addresses some of the ambiguities of the western portrait project conducted by Richard Avedon (1923–2004) between 1978 and 1984, a project that resulted in both a major exhibition, initially mounted at the Anion Carter Museum of Western Art in Fort Worth, Texas, and the portfolio-sized book In the American West (1985). The book version, insofar as such a thing is possible, echoed between covers, in sequencing and scale, the design experience of the exhibition, with its large prints of the images, even though, according the person who supervised the photographic printing, Avedon's regular studio manager Rue-di Hofman, the reproductions in the book did not achieve quite the same “intensifying, clarifying” quality (his words) as the exhibition prints, which — at life size or slightly larger — were huge. All of the images were taken in the same way, with the subjects standing in front of a large sheet of white paper fixed to a wall, in natural light, and in the shade. The white-background technique is a precondition for several of the project's ambiguities. It means that the subjects of the resulting portraits are, in the perceptive words of one critic, “literally nowhere.”

Certainly, if they are from — or even of — the American West, they are not visually in the American West. Indeed, a question mark is raised over the project's referentiality in general. I stress “ambiguities” because the project really does touch upon problematic issues in a number of areas that seem, still, at the suspension of my labors, to elude firm resolution. These areas include both the obvious, such as photographic portraiture and the representation of the American West, and the less evident, such as public taste, corporate patronage, and, at the project's philosophical edge, ontology. I will seek to illuminate In the American West by situating it in several contexts — biographical, historical, geographic, aesthetic and, tentatively, philosophical — each of which should serve to bring out differing, and sometimes conflicting, aspects of the project.

“There's a Haynes-Cooper catalog in every farmer's kitchen,” remarks a Wisconsin woman in Fanny Herself, Edna Ferber's 1917 novel depicting the Chicago mail-order industry. “The Bible's in the parlor, but they keep the H.C. book in the room where they live.” Harry Crews, in his 1978 autobiography of his boyhood in Bacon County, Georgia, recalls a similar centrality accorded the secular “Big Book” or “Farmer's Bible” in his family's tenant-farmer shanty. The highest form of entertainment for him was to thumb through the Sears, Roebuck catalog with his black friend Willalee and make up fantasies about the models on the book's pages. Writes Crews, “Without that catalog our childhood would have been radically different. The federal government ought to strike a medal for Sears, Roebuck Company for sending all those catalogs to farming families, for bringing all that color and all that mystery and all that beauty into the lives of country people.”

By the early 1930s Edward Hopper was a major figure in the American art scene. As is well known, Hopper made no significant sales of paintings until the exhibition of his watercolors at the Rehn Gallery in 1924, by which time he was forty-four years old. However, his career takeoff in the late 1920s and early 1930s was certainly dramatic, and in 1933 Forbes Watson could describe him as a “collector's favorite.” In 1924 the standard price of Hopper's watercolors was $150, by 1925 it had risen to $200, and in 1928–29, $300–400 was the norm. In 1929 alone he sold at least fourteen drawings. Between 1924 and 1930 he also sold sixteen oils at prices ranging between $400 and $2,500 dollars. In the 1930s he was getting between $1,500 and $3,000 for an oil painting, and from 1934 to 1939 he sold several watercolors at $750 each. If, as Life reported in 1937, his receipts from sales did not usually come near $10,000 per year, he was still doing a lot better than most other artists in the Depression years.

It's remarkably simple, really.

Constructed in 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, generally referred to as the “Wall,” consists of two black granite wings, each almost 250 feet long, which meet at an obtuse angle that is submerged into the landscape of the National Mall, a green space between the Lincoln and Washington Memorials and some distance behind White House, in Washington, D.C. The form of the Wall, designed by Maya Ying Lin, is minimalist in nature, not only because it includes the right angles, hard edges, shiny surface, and repeated increments of Minimalism, but because even though it is a war memorial, unlike most, its only ornament and representation is the seemingly endless list of 58,226 names of American service men and women killed in Vietnam.

Since the 1920s, the discourse about American urban culture has suggested the appropriateness of organizing metropolitan life around territorial subcommunities in two distinctive ways, each of which yielded a distinctive period in the history of professional city and social welfare planning. During the first period, which persisted into the 1950s, the planners focused on the problem of forging a coherent sense of metropolitan community among cultural groups conceived of as separate but equal (or potentially equal). To achieve this goal, they emphasized the role of experts in analyzing the forces controlling urban culture and in devising schemes to segregate, assure the integrity of, and foster mutual understanding and respect among cultural groups whose characteristics stemmed from forces beyond the control of experts or group members. During the second period, which began in the 1950s and persists in our own time, planners abandoned cultural group determinism and the quest for a segregated yet coherent metropolitan community of separate but equal groups in homogeneous neighborhoods. Instead they decided they could control the future of the metropolis by persuading individuals to create heterogeneous neighborhoods through a process of “community action” in which neighborhood residents would define their culture (“lifestyles”) by participating in the design of the social and physical environment of the neighborhood of their choice. This new pattern of thinking about urban culture, which centered on “individualism” and neighborhood rather than groups and metropolitan community, involved a revolt against cultural group determinism, the notion that individuals carry an identity determined by the accident of their membership in the group with characteristics determined by the experience of a group in a social and physical environment created by “outsiders” and or impersonal “forces.”

And so Missouri has fallen, that great State! Certain of her children have joined the lynchers, and the smirch is upon the rest of us. That handful of her children have given us a character and labeled us with a name; and to the dwellers in the four quarters of the earth we are “lynchers,” now, and ever shall be. For the world will not stop and think – it never does, it is not its way; its way is to generalize from a single sample. It will not say “Those Missourians have been busy eighty years in building an honorable good name for themselves; these hundred lynchers down in the corner of the State are not real Missourians, they are bastards.” No, that truth will not enter its mind; it will generalize from the one or two misleading samples and say “The Missourians are lynchers.” It has no reflection, no logic, no sense of proportion. With it, figures go for nothing; to it, figures reveal nothing, it cannot reason upon them rationally; it is Brother J. J. infinitely multiplied; it would say, with him, that China is being swiftly and surely Christianized, since 9 Chinese Christians are being made every day; and it would fail, with him, to notice that the fact that 33,000 pagans are born there every day, damages the argument. It would J-J Missouri, and say “There are a hundred lynchers there, therefore the Missourians are lynchers;” the considerable fact that there are two and a half million Missourians who are not lynchers would not affect their verdict any more than it would affect Bro. J. J.'s.

Several months after Hawthorne's “Foot-prints on the Sea-shore” appeared in the January, 1838 Democratic Review, Elizabeth Peabody brought a copy to Emerson, who recorded in his journal the next day, “I complained that there was no inside to it.” Emerson's cool reaction notwithstanding, “Foot-prints,” along with a number of Hawthorne's other sketches and extended descriptions of nature, rewards much closer reading if we are interested in his complex aesthetic and philosophical responses to landscape. In fact, Hawthorne's depictions of nature reveal a particularly “inside” view, reflecting and inviting the meditative, contemplative response to nature articulated by Kant and embodied by the group of 19th-century American painters we now know as the luminists. His notebooks are filled with detailed descriptions of landscape, clouds, and light; some are almost specific enough to sound like painters' verbal sketches to be consulted later in the studio. While he frequently mentions Claude Lorrain and the picturesque tradition, his close attention to nature betrays a profound interest in elements that were to become the focus of the luminists in the 1850s and 1860s. Prolonged consideration of a landscape or seascape seems to lead Hawthorne significantly beyond the available, almost codified aesthetic of the picturesque to a way of representing nature and the individual's relationship to it that is more subjective, meditative, and open-ended. Hawthorne's later reactions to specific paintings, especially those of J. M. W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, also suggest strongly that he would have found a far closer match to his sensibilities in many of the canvases of the luminists, especially Martin Johnson Heade and John Frederick Kensett, than those of his more immediate contemporaries, Thomas Cole and the other Hudson River School painters.

The family of man was an important cultural event of the 1950s. This great photographic exhibition, which drew record crowds at the Museum of Modern Art and attracted over 9,000,000 people on its sixyear, world-wide tour, was the work of Edward Steichen, who saw the opportunity for a retrospective on the history of photography as well as a comment on the perils of modern-day society. The exhibition took on a life of its own. It surpassed in popularity even the optimistic prediction of Steichen and defied the bland skepticism of other departments within the Museum. Museum workers received their first bonus because of its success. Popular magazines and newspapers from all over the world saw in the exhibition a penetratingly simple statement about the first decade of the nuclear age, and millions of people became acquainted with a photographic language to which they had not been exposed before.

The final American withdrawal from Vietnam and the collapse of our client regime in Saigon marked a nodal point in American relations with East Asia. For years prior to our terminal disengagement, hawkish politicians and publicists had waxed eloquent about the bloodbath that was sure to occur when the northerners and their allies of the People's Revolutionary Government had achieved their victory. Although that sanguinary catastrophe did not occur, the presumption that it could have caused the American government to implement and execute a refugee program that brought over 125,000 Vietnamese to the United States. While it is far too early to draw up any detailed balance sheet on that refugee program, the reactions that it triggered in the United States provide a useful and convenient point of departure for a retrospective analysis of changing American attitudes toward all immigrants from Asia.

In february 1940, Howard University political scientist Ralph Bunche, acting in his capacity as chief research assistant to Gunnar Myrdal on the Carnegie Corporation's investigation of “the Negro problem” in America that resulted in the epochal study An American Dilemma (1944), interviewed U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Hugo Black on the subject of Southern race relations. Bunche included parts of the Black interview in “The Political Status of the Negro,” one of four lengthy manuscript memoranda he wrote for Myrdal's use. Although a few selections from the interview appeared in a condensation of the memorandum that was published posthumously, the full text remained in Bunche's papers and has never before been published. The full text is presented in the Appendix at the end of this essay. The dialogue between Bunche and Black, off the record and extremely candid, is extraordinary for the rare view it provides into the evolving attitudes on racial issues of two central figures in the debate over African-American civil rights during the 1940s and 1950s.

In a letter to Peter Collinson in 1753, Benjamin Franklin recounted his meeting with a “Transylvanian Tartar,” actually a Greek Orthodox priest, who had arrived in America in 1748 during a tour around the world. The “Tartar” asked Franklin why he thought the people of so many cultures—Tartars in Asia and Europe, Negroes in Africa, and Indians in the Americas—“continued a wandring [sic] careless Life, and refused to live in Cities, and to cultivate the arts they saw practiced by the civilized part of Mankind.” Before Franklin could respond, the “Tartar” offered his own explanation, beginning at the beginning, with Genesis and God's expulsion of Adam and his progeny from Eden. “God make man for Paradise,” Franklin quoted the “Tartar,” “he make him for to live lazy; man make God angry, God turn him out of Paradise, and bid him work; man no love work; he want to go to Paradise again, he want to live lazy; so all mankind love lazy.”

O Pioneers! begins with the wind, which is threatening to blow away Hanover, Nebraska, a little town serving homestead settlements. On their return to the Bergson homestead, Alexandra, her brother Emil, and their neighbor Carl Linstrum pass homesteads, whose sod houses, lowslung shelters made of the land itself, crouch in hollows to survive the elements, their very materials denoting their subjection to nature. “The great fact was the land itself,” “a wild thing that had its ugly moods; and no one knew when they were likely to come, or why,” only that “the land wanted … to preserve its own fierce strength.” Nature's unpredictable impulses to self-preservation “overwhelm[ed] the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its somber wastes.” In this novel, then, Willa Cather introduces the relation between nature and culture within the sublime tradition, in which the experience of nature discloses the limits of human faculties and threatens their health and continuance.

As originally planned, The Social Construction of Reality was to have been a collaboration among three sociologists and two philosophers and would presumably have been addressed to an audience composed of practitioners in both disciplines. As written, however, it is a work of “systematic theoretical reasoning” addressed to sociologists by sociologists. Although Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman may have anticipated a somewhat wider audience for their argument, they locate themselves and their theoretical position firmly within the history and discipline of sociology.

In different ways, James Agee and Lacy Wright questioned the importance and influence of public schooling. Learning continues beyond, and perhaps despite, formal school attendance. This seems like common sense. Schools can also be harmful and destructive to children and society. This, too, seems clear. The trend in recent decades, however, has been to extend the years of formal schooling, putting more and more emphasis on degrees and credentials as passports to the future. What this will mean to our children and grandchildren is hard to say. But how we got to this point is rather clear. Simply, schools have been the most visible manifestation of the continued development of age grading in American society since Independence, and age grading has been a vital component of what we broadly term “modernization.”

It is no secret that the American Studies movement finds itself methodologically fragmented and that definitions of its uniqueness and its relationship to other disciplines are a matter of debate within the profession. It is also no secret that attempts to move beyond the “nationalcharacter” and “myth-symbol-image” approaches have fallen short of consensus. Innovations and new directions in other disciplines include approaches and methods we have considered our province and frequently seem to move us in new directions that further fragment our movement.

In the two decades from 1860 to 1880 the eastern image of the American West changed drastically. Prior to 1860 that image had been based primarily upon the accounts of a few travelers and explorers. It was an image of generalities, distortions, and vague impressions in which imagination was a significant element. But with the coming of photography, the transcontinental railroad, and the surge of humanity that spilled westward following the Civil War, the image acquired a refinement in detail. Much of the West should have become commonplace.

It was alfred frankenstein, I believe, who first observed that the characteristic subjects of painters like William Sidney Mount and George Caleb Bingham were visual counterparts of that “American Adam in Eden” theme, which many historians of literature had identified as “the central myth in the American novel since 1830”. Man unspoiled, in a new relationship to nature, is their common concern. As David W. Noble has written in The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden:

The American novelist then, beginning with James Fenimore Cooper, cannot write within the traditional conventions of his European contemporaries. He is precluded by his nation's romantic self-image from being an analyst of social and individual comedy or tragedy. Our novelist must be a metaphysician and theologian. He must always begin with the question: is it possible that Americans are exempt from the human condition? Is it possible that men in the new world have escaped from the need to live within community, within a framework of institutions and traditions—have escaped even from the need to live within a mortal body, or a soul that is divided against itself? Can nature indeed redeem man, heal his spiritual division, and lift him above the constraints of social class?

Some time after the Civil War, writers of American etiquette books marked the rise of the city by introducing new sections on “etiquette in the street” and “conduct in a crowd.” No one should look to their texts and the accompanying illustrations for a faithfully detailed and documented history of 19th-century city life. The stiff, cutout figures that walk through city streets in these old line drawings represent a particular fantasy of social order, focused in the figure and type of the lady and gentleman. “Walk slowly, do not turn your head … and,” The Ladies' Book of Etiquette (1876) warned, “avoid any gesture or word that would attract attention.” That advice is illustrated, with punctilious care, in Gentleman Meeting a Lady, a line drawing in John Young's 1882 guide, Our Deportment (Figure 1). The gentleman and the lady make no apparent eye contact; they, in strict observance of propriety, look off and away from each other. Again, in Alice Emma Ives's Social Mirror (1886), the ladies who illustrate the way to give a gentleman “formal street recognition” grant it with averted eyes and unturned heads. Ives quite properly avoids the word “meet” (Figure 2).