1. Criticism of mass culture was by no means practiced solely by the New York intellectuals. In the postwar period such criticism was widespread, and even included parts of the mass culture establishment criticizing itself—for example, Time and Mad magazines. Similarly, the Beats and the sixties counterculture were critical of mass culture, although they partook of it occasionally and manipulated it. In fact it is difficult to find any portion of American culture that did not criticize mass culture at some time or at some level.

2. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1961), p. 10.

3. Raymond Williams, Keywords (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 195-97, 238.

4. Gerald Graff, Professing Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 222.

5. Dwight Macdonald, Against the American Grain (New York: Random House, 1962), pp. 37-39, 32, 50.

6. Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon, 1959), pp. 260-63. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976), p. 124.

7. Bernard Rosenberg, in Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds., Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957), p. 5.

8. Greenberg, Art and Culture , pp. 32-33.

9. B. Rosenberg in Mass Culture , p. 12. See also Greenberg, Art and Culture , pp. 9, 29; Dwight Macdonald in Mass Culture , pp. 70ff.; Ernest van den Haag in Mass Culture , pp. 504-8.

10. Edward Shils, "Daydreams and Nightmares: Reflections on the Criticisms of Mass Culture," Sewanee Review 65:587-608, Fall 1957, pp. 590-93, 596, 598.

11. Shils, "Daydreams and Nightmares," p. 598.

12. Shils, "Daydreams and Nightmares," pp. 588-90, 600. Articles by Leo Lowenthal, Paul Lazarsfeld, and T. W. Adorno were reprinted in Mass Culture . Daniel Bell claimed that he was influenced by the Frankfurt group when they were at Columbia University; letter from Daniel Bell to the author, October 17, 1986.

13. Dwight Macdonald, letter to the editor, Sewanee Review 66:354-56, Spring 1958, p. 355.

14. Shils, "Daydreams and Nightmares," pp. 604-6. See also David Manning White in Mass Culture , pp. 13-15. Raymond Williams has argued that the term "folk" has been a weapon with which to discredit

contemporary popular culture, and therefore the British cultural studies movement refused "either to isolate the pre-industrial and pre-literate folk or to make categorical distinctions between different phases of internal and autonomous, sometimes communal, cultural production." Williams, Keywords , p. 137.

15. Shils, "Daydreams and Nightmares," pp. 590, 593, 606.

16. Kazin, AKJ, vol. 15, May 29, 1958. Also interview with Alfred Kazin, New York, June 6, 1985.

17. Macdonald, letter to the editor, Sewanee Review , pp. 354-55. See also Macdonald in Mass Culture , p. 69.

18. Lewis Coser, "Nightmares, Daydreams, and Prof. Shils," Dissent 5:268-73, Summer 1958, p. 271.

19. Coser, "Nightmares," pp. 271-72.

20. Interview with Bernard Rosenberg, Wellfleet, Mass., July 25, 1985; with Lewis Coser, Wellfleet, Mass., July 9, 1985; and with Nathan Glazer, Cambridge, Mass., May 21, 1985.

21. Herbert Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 45.

22. John O'Brian, Introduction to Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism , John O'Brian, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 1:xix, 253.

23. Contemporary Authors , vols. 1-4, first revision (Detroit: Gale Research, 1967), p. 393. O'Brian in Clement Greenberg , 1:xix-xx, 253-54.

24. O'Brian in Clement Greenberg , 1:xx. Greenberg, Art and Culture , p. 230.

25. O'Brian in Clement Greenberg , 1:xx-xxi. Greenberg, Art and Culture , pp. 232, 231. Letter from Clement Greenberg to Erle Loran, February 1, 1944, Erle Loran Papers, Archives of American Art—Smithsonian Institution. Letter from Clement Greenberg to the author, September 21, 1986.

26. Letter from Clement Greenberg to Erle Loran, February 1, 1944. Later Greenberg could not recall which article he referred to in his letter to Loran. Letter from Clement Greenberg to the author, September 21, 1986.

27. William Phillips, A Partisan View (New York: Stein and Day, 1983), pp. 65-66. William Barrett, The Truants (New York: Doubleday, 1982), p. 138.

28. Letters from Clement Greenberg to the author, November 8, 1986, and September 21, 1986.

29. Letter from Greenberg to Erle Loran, February 1, 1944.

30. O'Brian in Clement Greenberg , 1:xxi.

31. O'Brian in Clement Greenberg , 1:xviii-xix.

32. Quoted in James D. Herbert, "The Political Origins of Abstract-

Expressionist Art Criticism: The Early Theoretical and Critical Writings of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg," Stanford Honors Essay in Humanities , vol. 28 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985), pp. 4-5. Herbert makes a strong argument that Greenberg was influenced by Trotsky's artistic individualism.

33. Herbert, "Political Origins of Abstract-Expressionist Art Criticism," pp. 2-3, 6, 8.

34. Casey Blake, "Aesthetic Engineering," Democracy 1(4):37-50, October 1981, pp. 46, 41.

35. Letter from Daniel Bell to the author, April 24, 1987.

36. O'Brian in Clement Greenberg , 1:xxiii.

37. Barrett, The Truants , pp. 136, 143, 150. O'Brian in Clement Greenberg , 1:xxiv.

38. O'Brian in Clement Greenberg , 1:xxii.

39. Letter from Clement Greenberg to James Laughlin, December 9, 1954, in the Clement Greenberg Papers, on loan to the Archives of American Art—Smithsonian Institution. Used by permission of the Archives of American Art—Smithsonian Institution. See also H. Rosenberg, Tradition of the New , pp. 23-39. Greenberg confirmed that it was this essay of Rosenberg's at issue; letter from Clement Greenberg to the author, September 21, 1986.

40. Letter from Clement Greenberg to the author, November 8, 1986.

41. Greenberg said the de Kooning scuffle was at Dillon's rather than at the Cedar Tavern, where Abel placed it. Greenberg also said the incident was not as Abel related it—although he declined to give the circumstances. He reported that de Kooning was known as a prevaricator. Letter from Clement Greenberg to the author, September 21, 1986. Lionel Abel, The Intellectual Follies (New York: Norton, 1984), p. 212.

42. Barrett, The Truants , pp. 58, 41-42. Greenberg denied the Rosenberg story; letter from Clement Greenberg to the author, September 21, 1986.

43. O'Brian in Clement Greenberg , 1:xx. Herbert, "Political Origins of Abstract-Expressionist Art Criticism," p. 29. Letter from Irving Howe to Dwight Macdonald, August 1, 1946, DMP.

44. Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 101. Letter from Clement Greenberg to the author, November 8, 1986.

45. Podhoretz, Making It , pp. 129-30.

46. Greenberg, Art and Culture , p. 15.

47. Editors, "Our Country and Our Culture," Partisan Review 19(3):282-326, May-June 1952, p. 285.

48. Bernard Rosenberg in Culture for the Millions? Norman Jacobs, ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1961), p. 163; and "A Symposium on TV," Dissent 7:297-98, Summer 1960.

49. Edward Shils, "What Is a Liberal, Who Is a Conservative?" Commentary 62:95-97, September 1976, p. 96.

50. Daniel Bell said Shils was ''influential" to the group from "a distance," but "close enough at times" to be considered a "cousin." But he also cautioned that Shils's importance to the group should not be overrated. According to Bell, few of the New York intellectuals knew him. Shils did play a role in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, but he either ignored or was antagonistic toward most members of the New York group other than Irving Kristol. His real influence, Bell reported, was as an advisor to foundations and individuals—yet most people were afraid of Shils's sharp tongue and kept away from him. Daniel Bell, The Winding Passage (New York: Basic Books, 1980), p. 129; and letter from Daniel Bell to the author, October 9, 1986.

51. Steven Lukes, a sociologist at Oxford, describes Shils as "Parsons's collaborator and a structural functionalist to the bone." Steven Lukes, "The Theoretical Polemics of Anti-Ideology," American Journal of Sociology 84(1):186-90, July 1978, p. 186.

52. James D. Stolzman, "Edward Shils on Consensus: An Appreciation and Critique," British Journal of Sociology 25(1):3-14, March 1974, pp. 3-5.

53. Edward Shils, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). Also see Stolzman, "Edward Shils," pp. 5-8.

54. Lukes, "Theoretical Polemics," pp. 186-87.

55. Edward Shils, The Constitution of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. xxx, xxii.

56. Shils, "What Is a Liberal," pp. 95-96; Constitution of Society , pp. x, xx.

57. Abel, Intellectual Follies , p. 69. Bell, Winding Passage , p. 231.

58. Shils, Constitution of Society , pp. xxiii, xii, xiv, xxiv-xxv.

59. Phillips, A Partisan View , pp. 254-55.

60. Shils, "What Is a Liberal," p. 96. Bell, Winding Passage , p. xx.

61. Shils, Constitution of Society , p. xxix.

62. Macdonald, Against the American Grain , p. 34. In 1985 members of the New York group disagreed about whether their mass-culture criticism had been elitist or not. Nathan Glazer, Sidney Hook, and Alfred Kazin thought it had been elitist; Murray Hausknecht, Irving Howe, and Bernard Rosenberg thought it had not. Author's interviews with Nathan Glazer, Cambridge, Mass., May 21, 1985; Murray Hausknecht, New York, June 24, 1985; Sidney Hook, Wardsboro, Vt., July 15, 1985; Irving Howe, New York, June 6, 1985; Alfred Kazin, New York, June 6, 1985; and Bernard Rosenberg, Wellfleet, Mass., July 25, 1985.

63. Williams, Keywords , pp. 112, 114-15.

64. Interview with Sidney Hook, July 15, 1985.

65. By cultural pluralism I am not referring to ethnic pluralism and diversity, which the New York group always supported strongly, but rather aesthetic pluralism and diversity. Herbert Gans calls this a prolif-

eration of "taste cultures" in his Popular Culture and High Culture . Kenneth Roberts terms this arrangement "taste publics" in his "Culture, Leisure, Society—The Pluralist Scenario," in Tony Bennett et al., eds., Culture, Ideology and Social Process (London: Batsford, 1981), p. 272. Raymond Williams, in Keywords , p. 89, traces the concept of a plurality of "cultures'' within a national culture to the work of Johann Herder in the late eighteenth century.

66. William Phillips in Culture for the Millions? pp. 192-93.

67. Ernest van den Haag and Sidney Hook in Culture for the Millions? pp. 160-61, 165.

68. David Riesman in "Our Country and Our Culture," pp. 311-14. Herbert Gans was later influenced by Riesman, with whom he studied.

69. Hook in Culture for the Millions? p. 160.

70. Williams, Keywords , p. 96.

71. On the academic character of the younger intellectuals see Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals (New York: Basic Books, 1987).

72. Williams, Keywords , p. 90; Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 13.

73. Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken, 1975), p. 121; Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: NLB, 1980), p. 48; Marxism and Literature , pp. 136-38.

74. On Williams's contributions to the outlook of the young, see Michael Denning, "'The Special American Conditions': Marxism and American Studies," American Quarterly 38(3):356-80, bibliography issue 1986, p. 372; Richard A. Peterson, "Revitalizing the Culture Concept," Annual Review of Sociology 5:137-66, 1979, p. 137; Sherry B. Ortner, "Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties," Comparative Studies in Society and History 26(1):126-66, January 1984, p. 149; and Stuart Hall, "Cultural Studies and the Centre: Some Problematics and Problems," in Stuart Hall et al., Culture, Media, Language (London: Hutchinson, 1980), p. 19.

75. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1966). See also Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (New York: Vintage, 1977), and the interview with Herbert Gutman in Harry Abelove et al., Visions of History (New York: Pantheon, 1983), pp. 187-216.

76. Hall, "Cultural Studies," pp. 21, 40; on the relation between cultural studies and the New Left, see pp. 17, 25. For Hall's definition of culture, see Bennett et al., Culture, Ideology and Social Process , pp. 53-54.

77. See Giles Gunn, The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), chap. 3; Jonathan Arac, Critical Genealogies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989);

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); and Stuart Hall, "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms," in Bennett et al., Culture, Ideology and Social Process , pp. 19-37. On Geertz, see Gunn, chap. 5.

78. John Patrick Diggins, "Dusting Off the Old Values," New York Times Book Review , March 15, 1987, p. 11; Gunn, Culture of Criticism , p. 194. For an example of the movement of this postmodernist outlook into the discipline of history, see Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).

79. Susan Sontag, A Susan Sontag Reader (New York: Vintage, 1983), pp. 102-103, 98-99.

80. Sontag, Sontag Reader , p. 108.

81. In The Agony of the American Left (New York: Knopf, 1969), Lasch was critical of both the Old Left (chaps. 2 and 3) and the New Left (chap. 5).

82. Studies of the therapeutic culture include Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (New York: Harper, 1966); Tom Wolfe, "The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening" [1976], The Purple Decades (New York: Farrar Straus, 1982), pp. 265-93; Warren Susman, "Personality and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture" [1979], Culture as History (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 271-85; Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton, 1979), pp. 27-70; and Richard Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Culture of Consumption (New York: Pantheon, 1983).

83. For the antimodernist outlook see T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981); and Robert Brym, Intellectuals and Politics (London: Allen and Unwin, 1980), p. 19.

84. Lasch's antimodernist complaint against the New York group was seconded by his student Casey Blake, who criticized Clement Greenberg for moving from radicalism to modernism and for trying "to reconcile art with industrial society." Blake's criticism of Greenberg reveals a connection between hostility to the industrial modernization and organization of society, on one hand, and hostility to artistic modernism as an expression of that industrial rationalization, on the other. Casey Blake, "Aesthetic Engineering," pp. 46, 41.

85. Christopher Lasch, "Mass Culture Reconsidered," Democracy 1(4):7-22, October 1981, pp. 10, 12-13.

86. Lasch, "Mass Culture Reconsidered," pp. 11, 7.

87. Lasch, "Mass Culture Reconsidered," p. 11.

88. Henry Steele Commager, "On the Way to 1984," Saturday Review , April 15, 1967, p. 82.

89. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture , pp. 7, 55-56. Whether people are ascending or descending in status, as Richard Hofstadter

pointed out, individuals or groups can become anxious about their relation to the rest of the community.

90. Quoted by Dwight Macdonald in Mass Culture , p. 61. Quotes in the next paragraph are from p. 64.

91. John Clarke, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, and Brian Roberts, "Sub Cultures, Cultures and Class," in Bennett et al., Culture, Ideology and Social Process , pp. 76, 78.

92. For this argument, see Neil Jumonville, "In Their Own Hand," Boston Review 9(5):22-24, October 1984.