[Paleopsych] Hedgehog Review: Amy Henderson: From Barnum to Bling Bling

Premise Checker checker at panix.com
Sat Aug 20 20:29:52 UTC 2005


Amy Henderson: From Barnum to Bling Bling: The Changing Face of Celebrity 
Culture
THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW
http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/hh/henderson.html

[I am wildly enthusiastic about this publication and am reading all back issues 
at the rate of an essay a day. Back up the tree to find out more about the 
journal. One issue is neither online nor in print, and I'll go xerox it next 
month when we make our annual trip to Charlottesville.

[Each issue of Hedghog Review deals with a topic about deep cultural change. 
The writers, perceptive as they are, are almost uniformly 20th century 
leftists, and sometimes their articles are merely silly. No room at all for 
those who think genetic differences matter! I'll urge affirmative action for 
conservatives and sociobiologists for future issues. The problem with them is 
that they mostly want to infuse their "message" in everything they write. This 
is slowly changing.

[I do not know who or what a bling bling is and did not find out from the 
article.]

Summary from the "Magazine and Journal Reader" feature of the daily bulletin 
from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.8.12
http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/08/2005081201j.htm

    A glance at the current issue of The Hedgehog Review: Changing
    perceptions of heroes

    Americans used to embrace heroes, such as George Washington, on the
    basis of achievement and gentility, but they now choose celebrities,
    like the American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson, on account of
    personality, writes Amy Henderson, a historian at the Smithsonian
    Institution's National Portrait Gallery. The growth of the media,
    immigration, and urbanization at the beginning of the 20th century
    fueled the change, she writes.

    In the republic's early days, Americans mythologized national heroes
    as men of virtue, self-reliance, and achievement to compensate for the
    country's short history. Washington was one of those "Great Men on a
    Pedestal," Ms. Henderson writes. By the 1850s, authors and essayists
    such as James Fenimore Cooper and Ralph Waldo Emerson furthered that
    view by inventing the "American Adam," a hero admired for his
    innocence, individuality, and idealism, Ms. Henderson writes.

    But the communications revolution, combined with the growth of
    immigration and cities, replaced that character-driven definition of
    heroes with the personality-driven one of today. "The 'genteel
    tradition' that had been the core of America's mainstream culture
    dissolved in this new urban stew, replaced by a vernacular culture
    that rose from the streets," Ms. Henderson writes.

    Vaudeville, movies, magazines, newspapers, radio, and, now, cable
    television all helped form today's celebrity culture, where
    entertainers dominate. Today's stars appeal to niche audiences, not
    the public at large. There is also less of a barrier between "heroes"
    and everyday people, in part because of the rise of reality
    television. Instead of casting "reverential and upward-looking" gazes
    upon celebrities, Americans now view them from an "eye-to-eye" level
    -- a shift Ms. Henderson calls "an immense psychological sea change."

    The article, "From Barnum to 'Bling Bling': The Changing Face of
    Celebrity Culture," is available online at
    http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/hh/henderson.html

    --Jamie Schuman

---------------------

    Amy Henderson, a historian at the Smithsonians National Portrait
    Gallery, specializes in film, music, media history, and biography. Her
    books include Exhibiting Dilemmas: Issues of Representation at the
    Smithsonian; Red, Hot & Blue: A Smithsonian Salute to the American
    Musical; and On the Air: Pioneers of American Broadcasting. She has
    curated numerous exhibitions including: The TIME of Our Lives;
    Champions of American Sport; Opera: The Grand Interpreters; Hollywood
    Glamour Photographs; and Red, Hot & Blue.

    Showman P. T. Barnum set the stage for modern celebrity culture by
    opening the curtain on mass entertainment in the mid-nineteenth
    century. He dazzled in an era before technology could broadcast
    performancebefore the advent of the recording, radio, and motion
    picture industries; before the heyday of advertising; before the mass
    distribution of photography in rotogravure sections of the Sunday
    newspapers. Yet somehow he ignored these constraints and created such
    popular culture events as the establishment of the American Museum in
    New York in 1841, the introduction of General Tom Thumb shortly
    thereafter, the orchestration of Swedish songbird Jenny Linds
    celebrated 18511852 American tour, the organization of The Greatest
    Show on Earth (a traveling circus/menagerie/museum) in 1871, and the
    creation ten years later, with James Bailey, of the Barnum & Bailey
    Circus. His American Museum on Broadway in particular showcased
    Barnums love of humbug in such wildly diverse entertainments as
    industrious fleas, automatons, jugglers, ventriloquists, living
    statuary, tableaux, gypsies, albinos, giants, dwarfs, models of
    Niagara, American Indians. It was my monomania, he said in his
    autobiography, to make the Museum the town wonder and town talk. And
    this he did with astonishing ingenuity: my puffing was more
    persistent, my posters more glaring, my pictures more exaggerated, my
    flags more patriotic. It worked brilliantly.^1

    The bravado Barnum used to create his wondrous celebrities, illusions,
    and spectacles injected ballyhoo into the rarified air of Americas
    earlier devotion to Great Men on a Pedestal. Lacking millennia of
    history as a nation, Americans of the Revolutionary republic fashioned
    a mythic national character out of military heroes and eminent
    statesmen who embodied the ideals of virtue, self-reliance, and
    achievement.

    By mid-twentieth century, this heroic pedestal was claimed not by
    politicians and generals but by sports stars and movie legendsby
    personality rather than character.^2 This shift, reflecting the
    cultural changes wrought by the communications revolution of the late
    nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and by the rise of
    immigration and urbanization between the 1890s and 1920s, says a great
    deal about the nations continuing need for self-definition, and about
    the culture that contributed to the search for it. In his
    groundbreaking book The Image, Daniel Boorstin described this
    metamorphosis as one from traditional larger-than-life heroes known
    for their achievement to celebrity-personalities recognized for their
    well-knownness in a society enamored of pseudo-events.^3

    By the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the
    twenty-first, the changing face of fame existed squarely at eye level,
    lacking any pretense of pedestal altogether: postmodern
    pseudo-celebrity blips flooded the airwaves with reality television
    and Americans eagerly clawed their way to fame as Apprentices and
    American Idols. Yet flash and spectacle remain crucial components of
    celebrity, as exemplified today by bling blingthe diamond-studded,
    showy rapper style that has recently won approval by the Oxford
    English Dictionary.^4

From Revolutionary Hero to American Adam

    Heroes of the Revolutionary era were invoked to give the nation a
    sense of historical legitimacy. If, as Milton wrote, Fame is the spur
    that the clear spirit doth raise,^5 then it was a spur to industry and
    virtue. Above all others, George Washington stood as the great
    embodiment of national virtue, the symbol of the nations essential
    worthiness. Heroes of this era were gentlemen, scholars, and
    patriotstraditional representatives of such basic social institutions
    as the state, the military, and the churchand their lives served as
    examples.

    Literary historian R. W. B. Lewis has written that the heroic image
    contrived between 1820 and 1860 was that of an American Adam,^6 a
    figure of innocence and promise who was, as Emerson defined him, the
    simple genuine self against the whole world.^7 In an age optimistic
    about an indigenous culture-in-the-making, the nations novelists,
    poets, essayists, critics, historians, and preachers all entered into
    the discourse with gusto, seeking to construct not only a national
    narrative, but to create that epics protagonist. The Adamic hero,
    freed from the past and boasting such intrinsic characteristics as
    self-reliance, virtue, and achievement, would become the central
    figure in the quest for national legitimacy. James Fennimore Cooper
    notably invented Natty Bumppo, the selfless, stoic, and enduring hero
    who has been described as timeless and sturdily innocent, and the
    essential American soul.^8

    The conceptual distance separating Revolutionary heroes from their
    mid-nineteenth century counterparts was indiscernible. Core values
    remained, as Emerson demonstrated in extolling the democratic central
    man who was the source of all national vitality.^9 Elsewhere he
    depicted history in terms of representative men^10 --a sensibility
    that would not have been alien to earlier generations. It was only in
    the later nineteenth century, with the revolution in communications
    technology, the rise of a substantial monied class, and the emergence
    of a mass urban landscape, that the nations heroic vision evolved into
    a new stage. The Communications Revolution

    The look of fame itself changed with what Daniel Boorstin has termed
    the Graphic Revolution, the advent both of mechanical means of image
    reproduction and of the facility for mass diffusion of information.
    The emergence of photography and chromolithography in post-Civil War
    America led to an explosive growth in such mass publications as
    newspapers and magazines. The first truly mass urban newspapers
    appeared in the 1880s and were made possible by high-speed presses,
    the linotype, halftone photo reproduction, and the emergence of
    news-gathering organizations like the Associated Pressall of which
    made the daily newspaper the central supplier of national and world
    news. The circulation of daily papers increased 400% between 1870 and
    1900, partly as a result of technology and partly because of rising
    literacy rates and the growth of leisure time.^11

    The new magazines like McClures that appeared in the 1890s also played
    a role in enlarging the popular imagination, thereby redefining ideals
    of fame, success, and national heroism. At centurys end Americas
    most-admired figures were hero-inventors like Thomas Edison, Henry
    Ford, and Italian &eactute;migré Guglialmo Marconi. Financial wizards
    such as J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller (either
    captains of industry or robber barons, depending on your perspective)
    were idolized for fighting their way to Darwinian peaks of capitalist
    success/excess.

Immigration, the Melting Pot, and the New Urban Landscape

    But then the look of fame shifted again, turning full face in the
    twentieth century. The new eras heroes were activists who muckraked
    the old: figures such as Theodore Roosevelt rode the crest of change
    and attempted to change the cultural context, busting trusts and
    monopolies to leaven the social landscape while elevating the United
    States to a heightened role in the international order. Journalist
    William Allen White wrote in his autobiography that that decade which
    climaxed in 1912 was a time of tremendous change in our national life.
    The American people were melting down old heroes and recasting the
    mold in which heroes were made.^12 This sentiment was echoed in Israel
    Zangwills hit 1908 play, The Melting Pot, which depicted America as
    Gods Crucible, the great Melting-Pot, where all the races of Europe
    are melting and reforming.^13

    Between 1890 and the 1920s, twenty-three million new immigrants
    arrived on Americas shores. The genteel tradition that had been the
    core of Americas mainstream culture dissolved in this new urban stew,
    replaced by a vernacular culture that rose from the streets. The
    sounds and rhythms of this new culture were captured best by the
    rising entertainment industry: indeed, the most successful performing
    art of the time was vaudevilleliterally, the voice of the city.
    Magazines and newspapers trumpeted the phenomenon: one article in the
    late 1880s proclaimed: It is remarkable how much attention the stage
    and things pertaining to it are receiving nowadays from the magazines.
    Twenty years ago, it was argued, such a thing would have been thought
    indecorous, but drama now makes such a large part of the life of
    society that it has become a topic of conversation among all
    classes.^14 No longer indecorous, entertainment had become decidedly
    mainstream. Advertising the entertainment at his Opera House,
    vaudeville impresario Tony Pastor assured his patrons that his Temple
    of Amusement was in fact The Great Family Resort of the City where
    heads of families can bring their Ladies and children. Good order was
    observed at all times, and there were strict rules against peanut
    feasts and boisterous applause.^15 In the 1920s, cultural critic
    Gilbert Seldes rhapsodized about the lively artsincluding jazz,
    musicals, radio, and motion picturesthat were creating an American
    culture to match the countrys new immigrant, urban personality.
    Broadway flourished, and one of its leading lights, George Gershwin,
    composed staccato-paced, syncopated rhythms that helped define the
    Jazz Age. It was a highly visual culture as well. In 1915, poet Vachel
    Lindsay wrote of the increasingly hieroglyphic civilization that
    characterized the rise of American modernism.^16 Times Square and
    Broadways Great White Way were blanketed by extravagant displays of
    signs and blinking lights that bespoke what one chronicler called a
    staggering machine of desire.^17 And who would emerge as the dominant
    symbol of modernism? Media-generated celebrities whose popularity was
    achieved via the mass media of radio, recordings, and motion pictures.

The Emergence of Celebrity

    Celebrity became a measure of success in a culture preoccupied with
    personality. In biographical articles that appeared in The Saturday
    Evening Post and Colliers from 1901 to 1914, 74% of the subjects came
    from traditional fields such as politics, business, and the
    professions. But from 1922 until 1941, over half came from the world
    of entertainment: sports figures like Babe Ruth and Joe Louis, movie
    stars like Gloria Swanson and Charlie Chaplin.^18 The machinery
    providing mass information in the broadcasting, recording, and film
    industries created a ravenous market for celebrity culture:
    media-generated fame became a ragingand lastingpopular vogue.

    Celebrities were able to broach all cultural levels. Between 1906 and
    1920, Metropolitan Opera stars Enrico Caruso and Geraldine Farrar were
    the companys most successful box office draws. But their popularity
    transcended Golden Horseshoe audiences, as newspapers and periodicals
    fanned their fame and enormously lucrative sales placed their
    recordings in millions of households. Farrar even went to Hollywood in
    1915 to star in such Cecil B. DeMille spectaculars as a silent version
    of Carmen, and Joan the Woman.

    Motion pictures helped make celebrity culture a national pastime.
    Though early flickers and back-alley lantern shows were considered
    slightly sleazy, by the teens movies had achieved a middle-class
    respectability. Whereas early film actors remained anonymous, the
    public began to lobby for its box office favorites, and by 1915 there
    were such authentic stars as Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and
    Douglas Fairbanks.

    In the twenties and increasingly with the advent of talkies, movie
    celebrities came to represent the visual quintessence of glamour.
    Stars such as Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, and Greta Garbo glowed
    with glamourdraped in diamonds and wrapped in silk, feathers, and fur,
    they were silvered beings worshipped by what Norma Desmond in Sunset
    Boulevard would call all those little people out there in the dark. By
    the late 1920s, each of the major studios had its own portrait gallery
    where studio photographers created a style of portraiture that
    crystallized stardom. Armed with banks of lights, large format
    cameras, retouching pencils, but above all an aesthetic of glamour,
    they coaxed celluloid icons from mere flesh and blood.

    In the Depression, the American public responded exuberantly to this
    larger-than-life celebrity. Fan magazines like Photoplay documented
    star activities (or at least the studios version) with gushing stories
    about stars at homewhat they ate, what their beauty secrets were, what
    pets they pampered, what cars they drove, what they wore. Fabric
    stores sold patterns of favorite star dresses for at-home seamstresses
    to copy, as in the phenomenally successful dress Adrian designed for
    Joan Crawford in the 1932 movie Letty Lynton: in addition to countless
    Butterick patterns of this puffed-sleeve, cinched waist dress, over
    500,000 copies of the dress were sold at Macys alone!^19 And how many
    women peroxided their hair à la Harlow, or later adopted Veronica
    Lakes peekaboo look?

The Advent of the Broadcast Industry

    The advent of the broadcast industry in the 1920s marked another
    quantum leap in the cultivation of celebrity culture. While the film
    industry expanded in response to popular demand and the recording
    industry enjoyed a 600% sales increase between 1933 and 1938, radio
    became an everyday medium for mass culture. A household presence, an
    average radio in 1934 cost about $35, and 60% of all American
    households had at least one set.^20 And unlike records, radio was
    live: entertainment and information were available at the touch of the
    dial. Radio stars like Rudy Vallee, Jack Benny, Molly Goldberg, and
    Burns and Allen became virtual members of the family.

    While entertainers dominated the airwaves, broadcasting created
    political celebrities as well. Franklin D. Roosevelts election in 1932
    coincided with radios own coming of age, and he proved himself a
    master of this ubiquitous medium. Of FDRs fireside chats, a New York
    newspaper reporter noted that, while painting a verbal picture
    expansive enough for a museum mural, Roosevelt reduced it to the
    proportions of a miniature hanging cozily on the wall of a living
    room.^21

    Others thought that radio would purify politics. In 1928 Mississippi
    Senator Pat Harrison waxed that the venomous darts (of the demagogue)
    cannot pass through the airan optimism soon dispelled by the likes of
    Father Charles E. Coughlin, who won an enormous following in the 1930s
    by using radio to spread an increasingly proto-fascist brand of
    politics. ^22

    In its early decades, television vastly expanded broadcastings impact:
    the Army-McCarthy hearings, political conventions, and the 1960
    Kennedy-Nixon debates established televisions center stage
    significance. Radio and televisioneven before the advent of cable and
    24/7 coveragehad become the essential means for communicating
    political messages.

Contemporary Celebrity Culture

    Those two factorscable and 24/7 coveragehave transformed contemporary
    celebrity culture. Whereas earlier celebrity was broadly encompassing,
    encouraging general agreement at least in mainstream culture,
    contemporary celebrity is carefully niched, appealing not to wide
    swaths of society but to minute slivers. The consequences of this
    narrow-casting range from a fundamentally decentralized and
    trivialized culture of special interests to a society that is
    polarized on such national issues as red/blue politics and gay rights.

    Another consequence of contemporary celebrity harkens back to the
    ballyhoo of Barnum and his gleeful use of illusion and spectacle to
    make humbug out of reality. Boorstin found contemporary
    media-generated celebrity dependent on pseudo-events, and French
    sociologist Jean Baudrillard has argued that a culture dominated by
    simulacra is not capable of discriminating between reality and the
    illusion or simulation of reality. The popularity of reality
    television where participantsregardless of talentare convinced of
    their own celebrity clearly continues the tradition of humbug. Instead
    of Major Bowes gong, Simon tells them they are pitiful, or the Donald
    declaims, Youre fired! Do they believe in their fame fallibility? Of
    course not.

    Contemporary celebrity is eons from an age when heroes were placed on
    pedestals: today, rather than reverential and upward-looking, the
    perspective is eye-to-eyean immense psychological sea change. The
    disposable culture spawned by todays 24/7 media seems relentless,
    devouring anything in its path while leaving its audience permanently
    unsated. But the show will always go on: bling bling!
    [blackHR.gif]

    ^1 Quoted in Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (Boston:
    Little, Brown, 1973) 40, 5354.

    ^2 See Warren Susman, Personality and the Making of Twentieth Century
    Culture, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in
    the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984) 271¬85.

    ^3 Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America
    (New York: Atheneum, 1971) 57.

    ^4 See
    www.mtv.com/news/articles/1471629/20030430/bg.jhtml?headlines=true.

    ^5 John Milton, Lycidas, The New Oxford Book of English Verse,
    12501950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972) 294.

    ^6 R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago: The University of
    Chicago Press, 1955) 110.

    ^7 Lewis vi.

    ^8 Lewis 34.

    ^9 F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the
    Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941)

    ^10 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men (London: Dent, 1901).

    ^11 Boorstin 57 and passim.

    ^12 William Allen White, The Autobiography of William Allen White (New
    York: Macmillan, 1946) 428.

    ^13 Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot: A Drama in Four Parts (New York:
    Macmillan, 1908) 33.

    ^14 See Theatre Scrapbooks, 18771903 , vol. 3: article Concerning the
    Stage, c. 1890, University of Virginia Manuscript Room.

    ^15 Amy Henderson and Dwight Bowers, Red, Hot & Blue: A Smithsonian
    Salute to American Musicals (Washington: Smithsonian Press, 1996) 10.

    ^16 Vachel Lindsay, quoted in Susman xxvi.

    ^17 Quoted in William Leach, Brokers and the New Corporate Industrial
    Order, Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads
    of the World, ed. William R. Taylor (New York: Russell Sage
    Foundation, 1991) 99.

    ^18 Leo Lowenthal, Literature, Popular Culture, and Society (Englewood
    Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1961) 11014.

    ^19 Howard Gutner, Gowns by Adrian: The MGM Years 19281941 (New York:
    Abrams, 2001) 120.

    ^20 Cited in Amy Henderson, On the Air: Pioneers of American
    Broadcasting (Washington: Smithsonian Press, 1988) 22.

    ^21 Henderson, On the Air, 186.

    ^22 Henderson, On the Air, 188.


More information about the paleopsych mailing list