American culture is as brilliant, stimulating and creative as it has ever been.
That statement goes against the talk of decline that is heard regularly among journalists and philosophers, especially on the Right. Yet it’s not American culture that has failed. It’s our cultural gatekeepers.
America used to have people who served as conduits between the masses and culture. In a fascinating 2016 article, James Rosen noted that conservative founding father William F. Buckley appeared on The Tonight Show over a dozen times. Rosen observed that “today, the regular presence on the leading late-night TV shows of someone like Buckley, an aristocratic intellectual given to speaking in whole paragraphs, even other languages — he began one ‘Tonight’ appearance with several sentences in Spanish — would seem, in a lineup dominated by actors and pop stars, glaringly out of place. Back then, however, Buckley fit right in, and we were, as a nation, richer for it.”
Rosen celebrates the America that was “a Warholian conflation of High and Low that placed entertainers, athletes, politicians, novelists, intellectuals, psychics and oddballs on the same TV couch.”
That America is gone, but just because the couches now have Kardashians instead of conductors doesn’t mean America’s culture has faded.
One of my favorite artists is the jazz singer Kurt Elling, whose album Nightmoves is a stirring American masterpiece that is inspired by everyone from John Coltrane to Walt Whitman. Next week, I am going to the theater to see Heroes of the Fourth Turning, an acclaimed play about Catholic conservatives attempting to negotiate the modern world. Great novelists abound, including Marlon James, whose work A Brief History of Seven Killings about the attempted assassination of singer Bob Marley, is staggering. Comic book writer Tom King’s The Human Target is one of the best series in years. Composer Philip Glass is 85 and continues to produce astounding music. American TV, from Game of Thrones to Hellraiser, is the best it’s been in years. I mean, compare the TV shows from the 1970s to what we have now. Stranger Things is slightly better than, say, Starsky & Hutch.
America has always been hungry for the arts. In an illuminating piece for Commentary, social historian Fred Siegel explored how the American masses embraced the highbrow in the 1950s. Americans at the time “were sampling the greatest works of Western civilization for the first time.” The book Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America revealed that “twenty years ago, you couldn’t sell Beethoven out of New York. Today we sell Palestrina, Monteverdi, Gabrieli, and Renaissance and Baroque music in large quantities.” There was a 250% growth in the number of local symphony orchestras between 1940 and 1955.
In 1955, writes Siegel, “15 million people paid to attend major league baseball games and 35 million paid to attend classical music concerts. The New York Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday afternoon radio broadcast drew a listenership of 15 million out of an overall population of 165 million.”
Siegel notes that there were gatekeepers to get this great art to the people: “NBC spent $500,000 in 1956 to present a three-hour version of Shakespeare’s ‘Richard III’ starring Laurence Olivier. The broadcast drew 50 million viewers; as many as 25 million watched all three hours.” Siegel observes that “on March 16, 1956, a Sunday chosen at random, the viewer could have seen a discussion of the life and times of Toulouse-Lautrec by three prominent art critics, an interview with theologian Paul Tillich, an adaptation of Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s Hook, a documentary on mental illness with Dr. William Menninger, and a 90-minute performance of The Taming of the Shrew.” Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, a National Book Award winner, sold a million copies in paperback in the early 1950s.
John F. Kennedy famously supported the arts. “The life of the arts,” he said, “far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose.” American culture is not in decline. That is obvious to anyone who steps outside for a few hours. We just need another Johnny Carson.
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Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of the book The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
