Highbrow Culture
I normally don’t read books from beginning to end, but in an effort to change my life, I picked up Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America by Lawrence W. Levine and spent some lovely leisure time on the San Bernardino Metrolink train and other such amusements to read it.
The chief claim of the book is that there was a transformation in the 19th century from when Shakespeare and opera and other forms of “culture” were once shared by the masses to when they were the reserve of the elite. It was not uncommon to find anyone and everyone packed into a hall, from the East Coast to the Frontier West, reciting their favorite monologues from memory.
Over time, a class structure developed, wherein the upper classes embraced English culture and the lower classes held onto an American patriotism and democratic zeal. Because of the intensity of Shakespeare as a cultural arena, this division exploded into violence.
The most extreme moment in American theater history came in the form of the 1849 Astor Place Riot in Manhattan, when at least 22 people died after a mob fought the New York police and the state militia. It was the manifestation of a battle represented by the feud between two British and American Shakespearean actors, William Charles MacReady and Edwin Forrest. After MacReady was forced off stage and urged to return to Britain, well-heeled backers urged him to stay. Coming on stage as MacBeth, circumstances went out of control, and the riot began.
This marked a critical point in a kind of cultural segregation in American society that extended into a division between Shakespeare, opera, the Smithsonian and Central Park as the domain of the upper class, who sacralized them into institutions that only a select few could have access to. The sacralization process was one where the wealthy and the intellectuals who were willing to be supported by them, often representing an old stock of American (even in 1849, many of the working class rioters were Irish), separated into their own institutions, free of government interference to whatever degree possible.
They decreed that only full symphonies from Wagner and Tchaikovsky could be performed without any intervening folk tunes like in the old days, or showmanship. (The Boston Pops could handle the stuff for the riffraff.) They decreed that the Smithsonian would be a private place to develop art, not to expose it to the public, who might let their children defecate in corners, etc. They decreed that nobody can move a leaf in Olmsted’s Central Park. They decreed that Shakespeare must be performed in the original, in the brilliance of the Bard alone, not adapted for modern consumption as it often was. And in sacralizing these things, they made a myth that there was never any other way to perform these works or display this art; this became the highbrow, a term borrowed from a racist science to describe the physical appearance of Northern Europeans, as opposed to lowbrow, a description of Southern Europeans.
They also were willing to let the masses into these things, so as to justify their station in society, with the idea that they could be cultured and educated over time. But they had to obey the rules — no drama, no passion. Interestingly, Levine notes, American cultural authorities so intensely created their own myths that they exceeded their European models in zealousness.
New arenas where all could intermingle were created: sports is the biggest highlight. But it never again could be culture.
Much of what became pop culture spent time poking fun at “culture,” a term which itself became synonymous with “highbrow.” These restrictive forces placed genuine cultural giants in difficult positions: Mark Twain with his humor and John Philip Sousa with his marches using folk tunes were victims to an almost Anti-Americanism among the upper class. The new vanguards of culture were free to develop in the basements of America: jazz, vaudeville, film.
The book ends with a view of a new eclecticism that emerged in late 20th century America, as though to rectify the rigid categorizations of these genres, wherein modern art could draw upon a wider variety of forces.
Cultural authority, Levine exposes, is an authority like any other. It dictates what is worthy art, and disparages what is not, on terms that are thoughtful but still arbitrary and even capricious in nature.
While this book is laser-focused on America, it points to a phenomenon of wealth creation, wherein the constructed identities that keep one within the inner circles require a certain kind of education to fit into, which is a moving and flexible target because of a constant need for new gates. I think about how the language of inclusiveness itself became a form of class gatekeeping after seeing how strictly it was deployed at upper middle class jobs as a fascinating irony, and how the “anti-woke” movement itself is almost an Astor Place style rebellion from that. In other words, it doesn’t matter what the merit of the cultural markers are as markers, it matters that they are being used as such.
These developments directly parallel the evolution of khazones in the Ashkenazi Jewish world. In the 19th century, cantorial singing and choirs was a touring act, much like the touring Shakespearean actors and opera singers, who could find a waiting audience at even the most far-flung mining town. A good shaliach tzibur (prayer leader) was “entertainment” enough. Everyone knew the songs and the nusach, could sing along, but the singer who could bring melodramatic pathos, as was the style at the time, could please everyone.
While the greatest cantors trained operatically, it was fundamentally their intense pathos, building on folk traditions, that brought the American Jews storming shuls when Rosenblatt or Sirota were in town. The decline of khazones was the decline of passion, the elevation of cantorial arts into “culture.” This is where 60s folk artists were able to make their mark. Jews, by becoming richer, did not necessarily become “highborn” in a Jewish sense. (Notice that you may find Jews who are that way as Americans, yet are flatly not in Jewish tastes.)
My friend Chloe Resler has been researching extensively into why it was the case that in Denver, local talented performers could never get the same billing as the visiting New York crowd. My first thought as I studied with her was that New York had a reputation that delighted the newspapers, and local artists didn’t. But looking back at it, that was too simplistic an explanation. If you look at the repertoire of the local singers, you could see that it drew from the older style of mixing popular songs with art. But the Yiddishist societies were interested in a less populist kind of fare, to distinguish themselves.
It seems that the fastest way to kill an art form, culture or even language, is by engraving it into stone and demarcating it as sacred. I am interested to see what happens when we plunge headfirst against these myths, and spare ourselves from the pretensions that assert themselves.
