A COUNTRY WITHOUT CHILDHOOD

My focus from the reading of this week basically chronicles around the redefinition and rediscovery of America from Inherited questions in the Portrait of America. In the early 1930s, group of writers, intellectuals, and concerned individuals tried to re-define, re-discover America and Americans, and to find out who and what America was because there was a general believe that America had no definite root (18-19). In other words, it was defined by the term cultural pluralism which basically means when smaller groups within a larger society maintain their unique cultural identities, and whose values and practices are accepted by the wider culture. America as a multi diverse society has no definite root and this is evident in Van Wyck Brooks, a romantic nationalist argument, that America had no past and no way of creating a national culture. He went on to say that “unlike any other race, we were founded by the full-grown, modern, self-conscious men”, and I suppose that the men Brooks was describing were Europeans. It is also very interesting to know that Brooks believed and regretted that America is without a childhood (21). To him, cultural and mythological development must start from childhood.

In my own understanding, whatever anyone learns from childhood especially culture and the tradition of the society stays with the person. However, he says that for America to be able to redefine itself and develop its own myths that would provide the basis for a living culture, it must be done from childhood. Brooks was not alone in this argument; Horatio Greenough was another fellow who supported Brook saying that “As Americans we have no childhood, half-fabulous, legendry wealth, no misty cloud-enveloped background” (21). This is an interesting quote especially the “no misty cloud-enveloped background” which I think should be discussed further in the classroom. But there was a counter argument from other romantic nationalists like Randolph Bourne and Constance Rourke who believed that even though America was not founded from childhood to be able to develop its own culture and myth, yet it could form its own culture from and among the different race and ethnic groups found in the country and thereby detaching themselves from the inherited culture of Europe. Bourne argued that America should devoid it self from the already assimilated high culture of Europe and strife to develop its own culture. Rourke on the other hand, posits that America is a country that posses a rich and abundant cultural tradition that they had failed to recognize, appreciate, and use (21).

However, to help answer the questions who and what is America as I mentioned earlier, and to found out whether America had root, culture and tradition or not, a research/study group called the Federal Writers Project (FWP) was established to help solved this puzzle. The FWP first of all offered new materials: ex-slave narratives, folklore and folk song, and the histories of the ordinary people. According to Jerrold Hirsch, the FWP national office was staffed by Americans with diverse backgrounds like the Jews, blacks, Italians, westerners, and southerners- representing a diverse nation (23). This representation gave birth to cosmopolitanism, cultural nationalism, cultural pluralism, romantic nationalism, and cultural radicalism. But the question is, how effective and to what extent was FWP’s effort in trying to redefine America?

There were so many bottle necks to this struggle of redefinition and rediscovery. According to John Lomax who was the first FWP folklore editor, claimed that, one of the ways to preserve American’s folklore and tradition was to reject modern life. In his own view, folklore was associated with the isolated life of rural communities. And so he regarded the “spread of machine civilization” as a destroyer of the culture (24). To him, the breakdown of isolated life style could expose members of folk cultures to other traditions and popular culture. This folklore and folk songs he heard and admired from African-Americans were “so unique, so pliable, that no other folk music in America approaches it” (25). But the truth of the matter is that Lomax, even though he enjoyed these songs and they aroused his emotions, yet he could not analyze them (very funny). However, Lenox, we are told that his nostalgia revealed a conservative romantic’s rejection of modernity (25). In other words, in a way, Lenox was right because tradition and modernity are two opposite things. Modernity in the real sense destroys tradition no doubt. Lenox to me couldn’t have been able to survive his preservation of this tradition because many people would have preferred modernity over tradition so to say (my emphasis).