ABSTRACT
In the ragged and extended parenthesis embracing World War II and the Korean War, a major debate resurfaced among American intellectuals concerning the nature and politics of popular culture. The subject at issue was never well defined, and, as is usual in these matters, the antagonists kept answering questions no one was asking. “Popular” in this context referred to certain objects and practices consumed or engaged by all strata of the population. “Culture” referred to expressive artifacts-words, images, and objects that bore meanings. In fact, the debate centered pretty exclusively on popular entertainment-songs, films, stories. The growth of a popular culture-its history, meaning, and significance-was debated by an unlikely collection of disillusioned radicals who had turned from politics in the interregnum between the Nazi-Soviet pact and the Vietnam War, outraged conservatives who saw the popular arts as the great threat to tradition, and smug liberal intellectuals who, at last, following the second Great War, had achieved positions of power and influence. The leaders of the debate, at least as measured by their capacity to irritate, were Dwight MacDonald (1962), C. Wright Mills (1959), and Edward Shils (1959). MacDonald, in contrast to his political Trotskyism, led the conservative antipopulist and antibourgeois assault on popular culture in the name of the folk and the elite. Mills attacked the popular arts from the left, in the name of authentic democratic community and against the manipulation of political economics, and academic elites who controlled the system of industrial production in culture. Shils defended the center of liberal belief: taste was being neither debased nor exploited; artists were freer and better compensated and audiences better entertained; artistic creativity and intellectual productivity were as high as they had been in human history.
