Chapter Nineteen—
Relativism, Equality, and Popular Culture

Herbert J. Gans

To understand society, we study people's relationships, but we also study their lives. If we want to understand sociology's place in society, we must look at ourselves in the same way—and precisely because we are supposed to be detached social scientists. Sociologists are also people, and when we try to be value-free, knowledge about the values from which we are seeking to free ourselves becomes absolutely necessary.

Although I wish this were a volume of biographical studies, I suspect that no one is yet ready to pay for biographical research among sociologists; autobiographical accounts are therefore a useful precursor. Having myself been trained in the era of detached social science and impersonal scientists, I found it difficult at first to write about myself and could only begin by turning the assignment into a research project, a self-study. This essay attempts to determine how and why I got interested in the analysis of American popular culture and, since I am also a policy-oriented researcher, why I developed the cultural policies I have advocated. My data are largely based on recall, although having kept almost all my student term papers, I was able to refer to them, including a brief autobiographical report I had to write at age twenty, in 1947.

In my 1974 book Popular Culture and High Culture I argued that people's artistic and entertainment activities and preferences are sufficiently influenced by class that they can be analyzed as if they were aspects of class cultures, which I called taste cultures but which have long been known as brow levels in the vernacular. To this basically empirical theme I added a critical analysis that proposed that the expert

practitioners of high culture seek to make the aesthetic standards of their own culture universal. In so doing, they condemn competing cultures, notably commercial popular culture, as emotionally and otherwise harmful and, without any convincing evidence, argue either that high culture is beneficial or popular culture dangerous. Moreover, they want people to convert to high-culture standards without supplying them with the income and educational prerequisites already obtained by the present high-culture audience.

My analysis reflected at least three value and policy positions—all of them essentially "populist." One is cultural relativism, that all taste cultures are equally valid as long as people choose the cultural activities and artifacts they think good. A second is equality, that all people are entitled to the same freedom of cultural choice. The third might be labeled antiexpert, insofar as I am critical of professionals and scholars who use their expertise—as well as their credibility and prestige as experts—in behalf of value judgments that overtly or covertly further their own interests. Although the book was published in 1974, I had prepared article-length versions earlier, and several of its basic ideas, including the ones summarized here, had already appeared in preliminary form in a paper written in 1950 for David Riesman's graduate seminar in popular culture at the University of Chicago. By focusing mainly, but not completely, on that paper, I can limit the length of this autobiographical account to my first twenty-three years.

I began my self-study with two hypotheses, which I will discuss further at the end of the essay. One is that having been born in Germany, my interest in American popular culture may have been in part a function of my own acculturation as a first-generation ethnic of Jewish origin; the other is that my espousal of cultural relativism and equality—as well as my interest in using social-science research for developing policy—was connected to changes and inconsistencies in class and status that came with my being an immigrant. I used these hypotheses mostly to help me structure my recall and to put boundaries on my self-study. This procedure can be questioned on methodological grounds, but autobiography cannot be science. I should add two other initial hypotheses: one, that more basic marginalities unrelated to ethnicity or class encouraged me to become an observer of society and a sociologist, and two, that being better at writing than talking about my ideas helped make me a writer of sociological studies. The latter two hypotheses are probably virtual axioms that are true for many sociologists, especially those who do qualitative analysis.

I

I was born in 1927 as the first child of a bourgeois Jewish family in Cologne, Germany. We were comfortable but not rich. My father ran a small family business that had been founded by his father, who had moved to the city from Herlinghausen, a Westphalian village, and from a centuries-old family cattle dealership. My mother came from a family of affluent small-town merchants and bankers in the Hanover area, though her father had been an eye doctor. Both my parents were Gymnasium graduates, and my mother had a year of junior college; my father had hoped to attend the university in Cologne but had to join the family firm instead. My mother's ancestors had broken with Orthodoxy earlier than my father's, but both my parents were nonreligious, acculturated, and unconnected to the formal and informal Jewish communities in Cologne.

My parents' social life was limited to a handful of relatives and family friends, and my own therefore almost entirely to their children. Athletically inept and shy, I soon found myself more comfortable with books than with these children or school friends. When I was old enough to read books, I spent a lot of spare time in my parents' library and now remember most vividly that I enjoyed reading both fiction and adventure (including James Fenimore Cooper, in German translation) and nonfiction (for example, books by archaeologists excavating in Egypt and especially the books of Sven Hedin, the first Westerner to explore Tibet). I think that by age nine or ten I wanted to be an explorer. I was too young for, and my parents were not much interested in, German high culture, and German popular culture was sparse. The creative output of the Weimar era was banned in 1933, and when German filmmakers began to make mostly Nazi propaganda films, we no longer went to the movies. Beyond that, I recall only the brothers Grimm and the "Max and Moritz" cartoons, which described how the minor mischiefs of young boys and girls inevitably ended in death, loss of limbs, or other forms of mutilation. Tibet was both less dangerous and more interesting.

By 1937 my parents had decided to leave Germany and applied for an American visa, but the number of applicants was huge and the quota small. Early in 1939 we therefore went to England, where my uncle and his mother had moved in the mid-1930s. Because one of my mother's aunts was a close friend of a high-ranking Sears Roebuck executive in Chicago, the latter gave us an affidavit, a crucial prerequisite to the visa,

which enabled us to enter the United States, still visaless but under a special wartime exemption from the immigration law.^[1] In September 1940 we arrived in Chicago, moving into a rooming house in Woodlawn, then a predominantly Irish low-rent area.

America was still in the throes of the Depression, and although our life in Nazi Germany and wartime England had already been austere, it now became even more so; my father worked as a Fuller Brush salesman, my mother as a domestic. Our downward mobility was surely harder on them than on me, although we were so happy to have escaped from Germany—even before we knew of the Holocaust—that our economic problems were bearable. Besides, the drive to regain bourgeois status began at once. I am not even sure that I even felt a decline in fortune. Compared to my mostly working-class fellow students, I was so well educated in English and already sufficiently interested in writing that a few weeks after I was enrolled in the eighth grade of the neighborhood school, I was made editor of the school newspaper.

My parents wanted nothing more to do with Germany or things German, and we spoke English at home. I knew precious little German culture anyway, but now I also discovered American popular culture. I still remember spending a lot of time in the basement of our rooming house reading a year's worth of Sunday Chicago Tribune comics in newspapers that had been stored there by a frugal landlady.

I must have been starved for adventurous and humorous popular culture because I also became a fan of radio serials like "Captain Midnight" and "Jack Armstrong" and of comedians like Jack Benny. When I had the money, I spent Saturdays at the local triple-feature movie theater, where I caught up on American Westerns. In addition I became a sports fan and especially admired athletes whose prowess was said to be based on brains, such as Chicago Bears quarterback Sid Luckman, and Ted Lyons, the aging knuckleball pitcher of the Chicago White Sox.

My unqualified enthusiasm for popular culture seems not to have lasted very long because in 1942, as a sophomore at Hyde Park High School, I was writing long essays, some of which were critical of the mass media. Later I submitted short features on the same theme to the high-school newspaper. I also wrote a couple of pretentious pieces urging my fellow students to enjoy the good music I was learning about in music appreciation class, by Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov in particular. I was also still a sports fan, became sports editor of the high-school newspaper in my junior year, and contributed to a Chicago Daily News readers' column on the sports pages.

Meanwhile, both my parents had obtained easier, better-paying, and more secure jobs as their spoken English and the Chicago economy improved. We moved into our own apartment, first in a basement that flooded with every storm and then into a much better one in South-moor, a small buffer area between poor Woodlawn and middle-class South Shore. And I gave up an afternoon newspaper route for a better job as a bookrunner in the University of Chicago library stacks.

Although I was as shy as ever, I was now on the margins of a clique, mostly the ambitious children of Jewish shopkeepers in the area. I paid little attention to my poor fellow students unless they were varsity athletes but was conscious of the affluent Jewish youngsters from Hyde Park and South Shore who dominated student life. While my clique wrote the school publications, the affluent students were active in fraternities and sororities, organizing Saturday-night dances for which they were able to hire nationally known bands. I imagine some of my cultural criticism was directed against them, although I do not remember any strong feelings of resentment.

In 1944, my senior year, I edited the high-school newspaper and began to think seriously about becoming a journalist, although my father thought I should play it safe and learn business skills and my mother was sure I would become a teacher. Lloyd Lewis, a Daily News editor, persuaded me to study liberal arts instead of journalism. Unable to afford Oberlin, then an "in" college for Chicagoans with writing ambitions, I applied to the University of Chicago. With the help of a half scholarship I had enough money the first year, which having begun in January I had to finish in record time because in August 1945 I was drafted. After fourteen months in the Army of the United States, first as a typist, then as an editor of an army base newspaper, I returned to the university in the fall of 1946. Thanks to the GI bill, some scholarship aid, and part-time work, I was able to stay until I received my M.A. in June 1950.

My socialization in the German and American class structures was accompanied by a very different set of experiences in the Jewish community. My parents had not wanted me to go to a Jewish school, but in 1933, when I started school, Nazi law required it, and I spent my first years in a secular Jewish public school. In 1937 my parents sent me to a strictly Orthodox Gymnasium because it taught English. This it did superbly, but I bitterly disliked the religious classes and teachers. However, in England I suddenly turned to prayer for a while, perhaps as a way of coping with that immigration. By the fall of 1939 World War II

had begun, and all German-Jewish men, including my father, were interned by the British, who suspected that the Nazis had hidden spies among the refugees. Moreover, my fellow students could not distinguish between German Jews and Nazis, beating me up a couple of times. My religiosity ended after we arrived in America, but I was also back in a predominantly Jewish milieu, for Hyde Park High School was in effect another secular Jewish school.

In the summer of 1943, needing to earn some money, I went to a Jewish summer work camp which provided wartime "stoop labor" to Chicago-area truck farmers. There I met a young and immensely charismatic Jewish youth worker, Samuel Kaminker, who believed in reading Hebrew and American poetry rather than prayers at Sabbath services. I was sufficiently interested in his essentially nontheistic conception of Judaism, radical at the time, to take some courses later at the College of Jewish Studies, searching for what I described in my 1947 autobiographical paper as "a rational Jewish religion for myself."

Kaminker was also an admirer of the Israeli kibbutz, ran the camp on a modified kibbutz basis, and started me thinking about spending my life in an egalitarian community of farm workers in which no one had to struggle to make a living. That vision stayed with me for the rest of my student days, and just before I received my M.A. I joined a small group of budding sociologists who planned to go to Israel and carry out participant-observation research at a kibbutz—as a way, I think, of trying to see whether we wanted to become permanent members of a collective. Even so, my interest in equality extended beyond the kibbutz because, after reading R. H. Tawney in social-science courses and hearing him lecture at Chicago in 1948, I seriously considered studying with him at the London School of Economics. However, I never made it to Israel as a researcher or to London as a student.

II

My arrival at the University of Chicago in January 1945 produced a new set of marginalities, which had little to do with class, ethnicity, or religion but were more traumatic. One was the normal undergraduate experience of discovering my naïveté. Although I had been a top student at a top Chicago high school, where I had hung out with a quasi-intellectual clique, I was an utter provincial. My new fellow students were smarter and more sophisticated; many were combat veterans, four to five years older than I and many more years wiser in the ways of the

world. I thought they were wiser in all respects, proper students with their own apartments, whereas I was socially immature, had to live at home and commute, and worked on the side to help pay the rent. Whatever inferiority feelings I had in high school were now magnified.

A second trauma was intellectual. In the 1940s the high-school curriculum did not include any social sciences or humanities, and even social studies had not yet been invented. There was only civics and American history, which was just more civics but about the past. All course materials at the university except in the natural sciences were brand new to me, and I had never even heard of Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Hume, or Karl Marx. Old assumptions and certainties were therefore shattered quickly and often.

A third and related trauma was political. Once the war veterans arrived, the campus was rife with political discussion and action, involving groups and ideas of which I had never heard. I was wooed by Socialists, Stalinists, Trotskyites, and others who stimulated my interest in politics but also overwhelmed me, so I joined nothing. By the 1948 presidential election I had begun to make up my mind, however, for I said no to the Progressive party and worked for Socialist party candidates Norman Thomas and Maynard Krueger.

The one early source of certainty at Chicago was my field of studies. Having spent the first college year in survey courses in the natural sciences, the humanities, philosophy, and the social sciences and having taken a graduate social-science course in my second year, I knew where I wanted to spend the three years of study toward the M.A. In my 1947 autobiographical term paper, written in the first semester of graduate school, I reported that I was majoring in social science "but confused by too many interests: writing, sociological research, teaching, educational administration, social work (youth groups) and . . . Jewish religion and community life."^[2]

Sociology was already my favorite subject because it seemed closest to some of what I had already been writing about America and to the kind of feature journalism that interested me. It was also sometimes less abstract than the other social sciences. Although I did my share of reading—and even tried to write—abstract theory, I was always more comfortable with what later became known as grounded and middle-range theory, one reason to gravitate toward fieldwork. However, I also read some John Dewey and believed in the unity of the social sciences. In addition, I did not like some of the required first courses in sociology

and therefore entered the divisional master's program in the social sciences, headed by Earl Johnson, a sociologist who advocated many of Dewey's values. Johnson's program gave me the chance to take graduate work in all the social sciences, which provided a fine background for my electives, almost all of which were in sociology.

Earl Johnson also taught that the social sciences existed to help improve society, and thus he supported and strengthened my predispositions toward what is today called social policy.^[3] Still, those feelings were not strong enough to get in the way of what I was learning elsewhere about the virtues of detached research and how to do it. In any case, the relative ease with which I settled on my fields of interest reduced my earlier intellectual flounderings. Another source of reduced uncertainty was my discovery of cultural relativism. Because all beginning students in the social sciences were required to take two survey courses (which covered sociology, anthropology, social psychology, and "human development"), I heard lectures from all the Chicago social anthropologists and read the other major American and British ones. More important, I discovered Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia, and was very excited by his concept of relationism as well as his emphasis on the idea that all knowledge was a function of the knower's perspective. Most of my papers that year were Mannheimian in one or another way, and his relationism provided a criterion by which to compare diverse ideas—or cultures—without having to choose between them. Later, when I began to do fieldwork in Park Forest, Illinois, Mannheim's notion of perspective proved useful, although I was surprised by how many perspectives toward the same event were possible even in a small, fairly homogeneous community. However, I also learned that for some issues, including high culture and popular culture, it is not always necessary to elevate one perspective above all others.

Two other authors helped me to develop my relationist position. One was W. Lloyd Warner, also one of my teachers, whose lectures and Yankee City books made the notion of class more meaningful to me at the time than readings in Marx, Weber, and even the Lynds. Warner also started me thinking about class and the mass media, and then about class culture, because of his lectures on what he called symbol systems. Since he taught that different classes looked at society from different perspectives, a culturally relativist approach to class made sense to me, although Warner himself clearly preferred the higher classes. The other author was Robert K. Merton, whose essay "Manifest and Latent Func-

tions," which I first read in early 1950, made an enormous impression because, among other things, it enabled me to see that cultural patterns disliked by one group can be functional for another.^[4]

My preoccupation with cultural relativism and relationism also helped, I now suspect, to nurture what I earlier called my antiexpert position. Although I was trying to become an expert myself and was spending most of my time listening to or reading experts, I had always disliked those whose expertise manifested itself in the exercise of absolute and autocratic authority. My early rebelliousness against Orthodox Jewish teachers in the Cologne Gymnasium was followed by similar reactions in Chicago to a number of rabbis I met during my activities in the organized Jewish community. As the editor of the school newspaper at Hyde Park High School, I had bitter but unsuccessful struggles with the supervising teacher and the principal, who censored every criticism of the school and the school system. Later I waged a less vocal campaign against Aristotle and Plato, who were the much-assigned experts in every college course at Chicago while Robert Maynard Hutchins was chancellor.^[5]

In graduate courses at Chicago from 1947 to 1949 I studied other subjects as well. I learned to become a novice fieldworker in Everett Hughes's course, and took Louis Wirth's course on the sociology of knowledge only to discover that by then he was much less interested in teaching relationism than in improving race relations. I learned economic history—and I think a good deal of what is now called social history too—from Sylvia Thrupp, and was taught content analysis and communication theory by Barney Berelson and Douglas Waples. In fact I took as many communications courses as possible in the social sciences because, whenever possible, I was trying to connect sociology with communications and the mass media. In Avery Leiserson's course on public opinion and in other political-science courses I tried to figure out how the governed communicate with the governors, a subject that continues to fascinate me today but then helped lead to my M.A. thesis on political participation and to an interest in audience-feedback processes in mass-media organizations.^[6] For Sylvia Thrupp I wrote a paper on the merchant writers of early seventeenth-century England, part of a larger and convoluted attempt to determine the functions of writers and symbol systems in social change. At one point I even studied the invention of the typewriter, and one of my early topics for the master's thesis was acculturation in the Yiddish theater.^[7]

At that time I was not formally interested in popular culture—I am

not sure I even knew the term. I tried to keep up with movies, best-selling books, and "Hit Parade" songs, but my interest was not scholarly and, besides, my own tastes were changing. I had been persuaded somehow that a successful graduate student had to be able to play tennis, which I could never master, and to appreciate chamber music, especially the Beethoven quartets, which was far easier for me and much more enjoyable. I also shifted from Hollywood movies to foreign "art" films and went to some of the Broadway plays that toured in Chicago.

If my interest in popular culture was latent, it quickly turned manifest in 1949, for two reasons. One was the appearance of an article in the February 1949 issue of Harper's Magazine by Russell Lynes, entitled "Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow," a light but comprehensive survey of four "brow levels" and their cultural preferences and peccadilloes. Lynes described these levels with an implicit class terminology, although he was concurrently arguing that stratification by taste was replacing that based on wealth and education.^[8] Lynes's analysis was often acute, but he was more interested in expressing his low opinion of all brow levels. However, the article crystallized a lot of disconnected thinking I had done about culture, class, and symbol systems, and I had no difficulty in jettisoning Lynes's tone and values and adapting the brow levels to Warnerian class culture.^[9]

The other reason for thinking about popular culture was David Riesman's return to campus from Yale University, where he had been working on The Lonely Crowd . I had already corresponded with him about my plans for studying political participation for my M.A. thesis, and in the process he sent draft chapters of the book to me for comment, chapters which were filled with observations about popular culture. Dave was then, as now, one of the few professors I have ever met who treats students with intellectual respect, and once he arrived in Chicago, we engaged in frequent discussions about popular culture. Partly because he lacked time and, I think, inclination to keep up systematically with the mass media himself, he often interviewed his students about popular novels, movies, radio programs, and popular culture in general, and I learned an immense amount by keeping Dave au courant . His other important contribution was his insistence that studying popular culture was not only a legitimate but also a highly desirable scholarly endeavor. In those days American sociology was still close to its Germanic and American-Protestant origins, even at the University of Chicago, and popular culture was simply not a fit topic for study before Riesman returned from Yale.

One of Riesman's first graduate courses at Chicago was his seminar on popular culture. I took it in the spring of 1950, writing a paper called "The Metaphysics of Popular Culture." Of metaphysics there was nary a word, but in it I began to translate Lynes's approach into a more sociological one, developing the notion of leisure cultures and discussing how to assign people to them. I was apparently a total relativist then, for I suggested that the several cultures were functional for the creators and audiences in each and proposed the "complete equality [of cultures] from the point of view of social science research."

I also commented critically and at length about the different value judgments of some seminar members, who used the study of popular culture as a way of scorning disliked or less prestigious cultures and people. Above all I came out against an anonymous member of an unspecified elite I called the literary critic, who represented past aristocracies and the present humanities in advocating high culture and attacking popular culture. Although I observed that high culture was equivalent to the German Kultur, the literary critics I had in mind were writers like José Ortega y Gasset, Russell Kirk, and socialist Dwight Macdonald. I was then already bothered that some socialists were culturally as elitist as the conservatives—and later I said so in the second paper I ever published on popular culture.^[10] My literary-critic figure was the autocratic expert who defended universal standards that fed particularist self-interests, resembling in some ways the high-school officials, rabbis, and student Stalinists I had encountered in earlier years.

III

The study design for my research on political participation called for a community with clearly visible boundaries, and Riesman suggested I speak with Martin Meyerson, a member of the University of Chicago's planning faculty, who was also involved, with his wife Margy, in community research related to the Lonely Crowd study. Meyerson told me about Park Forest, a new town south of Chicago, which proved a fine site for my thesis fieldwork. He also got me interested in urban sociology and city-planning issues. Although I still wanted to write, I had by then decided that I preferred writing as a sociologist to writing as a journalist. At that point I had neither the money nor the inclination to study for a Ph.D., however, and after I received my M.A. in June 1950 I worked first for Margy Meyerson and then for Martin, obtaining a marvelous basic education in city planning from them in the process.

By 1953 Martin Meyerson was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, and he invited me to work on a study applying social-science ideas and analyses in planning and at the same time enroll for a Ph.D. in city planning.^[11] Because of my interest in popular culture, my part of the research was a study of leisure behavior and recreation planning, which became my dissertation and in the process enabled me to keep my intellectual fingers involved in popular culture. In 1957, the summer after I finished my Ph.D. and before I took a job on the project studying the West End of Boston, I researched the popularity of American movies in Britain. This study turned into an opportunity to test empirically my ideas about popular culture and class. I discovered that British movies were then made by Oxbridge graduates mainly for the upper middle-class audience, and that the other 80 percent of the country's inhabitants, who were still working-class, went to imported American movies, which seemed virtually classless to them and in effect upheld many working-class values.^[12]

In 1959, I began to develop the paper I had written for the Riesman seminar, and in the several longer versions that culminated in the 1974 book I began with a fuller historical critique in which the original literary critic was replaced by names both on the right and the left.^[13] I also elaborated the idea of leisure cultures, later called taste cultures, and attempted to describe the cultural preferences and aesthetic standards shared by each culture. Moreover, I began to move from value judgments and general policy ideas to more concrete policy proposals, which I labeled subcultural programming and which essentially involved government aid to cultures that could not make it on their own in the marketplace, particularly those of the poor, folk, and ethnic and racial groups, but also high culture.

In the first longer version, written as I was studying the Levittowners and working on the first draft of The Urban Villagers, I drew on my fieldwork among working-class Italian-Americans to qualify my original relativism. Although I defended people's right to choose the culture they thought good, I also began to realize that being richer and better educated, upper middle-class people had a better life—and surely more cultural choice—than poor and working-class people. Consequently, I wrote diffidently that "it seems likely that the so-called 'higher' [leisure cultures] are, in the long run, more satisfying and desirable for their publics than the 'lower' ones for theirs."^[14] I added emphatically, however, that the first step in readying people for the higher cultures had to be more income and education. My paper for the Riesman seminar had

been apolitical, like its writer, but my stay in the West End had politicized me, first about urban renewal but then about other issues too.

By 1972, when I was writing Popular Culture and High Culture, I had played some minor roles in the War on Poverty, had written a good deal about poverty and antipoverty planning, and had just prepared for publication a collection of my essays about equality. As a result of the events of the 1960s and my own writing, I began to suggest that economic and political equality were far more important than culture, arguing that "a good life can be lived at all levels of taste and that overall taste level of a society is not as significant a criterion for the goodness of that society as the welfare of its members."^[15] I was still being indirect and overly polite, but then as now, I think policies to reduce unemployment and poverty are absolutely essential, and until effective ones have been implemented, cultural policies are of minor importance.

Just as ideas and observations from my Boston and Levittown studies crept into the book on popular culture, themes from that work have also appeared in my other books. The literary experts whose judgments feathered their own nests I encountered again among the planners who decided that low-rent neighborhoods were harmful slums that needed to be torn down and replaced by middle-class housing, and among "poverticians" who decided that the poor suffered from a malady called the culture of poverty, which required behavioral therapies administered by other poverticians rather than jobs and income grants for the poor themselves.^[16] I found another breed of the selfsame experts in my study of Levittown, for the critics who accused the Levittowners and other lower middle-class suburbanites of conformity, homogeneity, and various other alleged pathologies were blaming them for failing to support the higher taste cultures that were then exclusively urban.^[17] The suburban critique also condemned the residential and other communal preferences of the lower taste cultures, once more using quasi-medical terms to legitimize the cultural attack. A somewhat later version of the same critique was employed against television entertainment, particularly violent programming, and although serious moral objections can be raised about television violence, I am not yet convinced by the now voluminous research literature that it is a significant cause of violence in the real world, even among children.^[18]

Taste culture also plays a role in how people use the news media and what kind of news media and news they select as well as prefer, just as their position in American society influences the extent to which they find

national news necessary or useful. I did not pursue this analysis in my book on the national news media because it was mainly a study of news organizations and because I could not find the audience data to back up my hunches. Even so, having retained my old interest in how the governed communicate with the governors, I devoted a chapter of the book to how national news organizations deal with audience feedback.^[19]

The mostly indirect relationship of journalists to the news audience, and my fieldwork at the national news organizations, later made me start to think about how Americans connect themselves to their national society. That question then turned into a study of American individualism and society, on which I worked for several years until its completion in 1987 and publication in 1988. The study also tried to make explicit some populist ideas I had first begun to think about in graduate school, and to figure out whether a populist sociology is desirable and possible.^[20] In my research I encountered latter-day versions of my 1950 literary critic because some current writers about individualism, for example those who charge young people with being a me-generation or diagnose them as suffering from narcissism, are offering new versions of some of the old charges of the high-culture critics.^[21] These writers are unhappy with the "lower orders" for seeking the material comforts and self-realization that affluent income groups and the higher-taste cultures with which the critics are affiliated have already achieved. Once again, people are being attacked with medical terminology for not living like the critics or following their cultural prescriptions.

IV

In summary, I want to suggest which background and other factors seem to have influenced my work on popular culture and my advocacy of cultural relativism and equality. I began with two hypotheses, one relating to ethnicity and religion, the other to class, but both are limited in what they explain.

That I was born in Germany and am technically a first-generation ethnic undergoing acculturation and assimilation may help to explain why almost all my empirical work has been involved in trying to figure out what has been happening in America, and why I have done virtually no research in or about other societies. Perhaps being an immigrant encouraged my specific interest in American popular culture, but so did the sparsity and harshness of German popular culture for children, made sparser yet by my growing up under the Nazis. In fact I did not

arrive in the United States with much of an old-country culture. German culture had no prescriptions or leads for being an adolescent, and there were few German or German-Jewish cultural patterns that my parents wanted me to retain. They did not always understand or like the American teenage ways I developed, but given our poverty, wartime conditions, and my shyness, I did not develop many. Further, we did not belong to an ethnic community that sought to uphold old-country ways; the small German-Jewish refugee community in Chicago interested neither my parents nor me. I think the only host society to which I ever wanted to acculturate and into which I wanted to assimilate was neither society nor host, but sociology—that is, what we still call the discipline . (This I think I have done, although only to the Everett Hughes–David Riesman branch of "Chicago Sociology." I continue to be a participant-observer and essayist in a discipline whose dominant research tradition is highly quantitative. Once more I am a member of a minority, albeit by choice.)

The critique of Kultur that was part of my earliest writing on popular culture was not a rejection of my German origins, for, as I noted earlier, the major targets of the critique were Wasps. Moreover, many of the leading figures in German high culture were themselves Jews, almost all of whom also became American immigrants.^[22] Perhaps my unhappiness with autocratic authority and later with self-interested expertise was a reaction against Germany and my conventionally strict German upbringing. However, my identification of the literary critic as the enemy in my 1950 term paper may have been connected to the fact that when I was a graduate student the kind of sociological analysis in which I was most interested was being done by essayists, novelists, and scholars from literature and the humanities. They still dominated American intellectual life, saw no need for sociology, and did not want to lose their virtual monopoly on writing about America, particularly for the general reader. They also dominated the serious general magazines for which I most wanted to write. Coming from the humanities, they were expected to express feelings and judgments about society—and no one cared if these also served their own interests.

If ethnicity is a major variable in my background, religion is surely more important, for being a Jew and a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany had to shape my ideas even if I was fortunate not to suffer personally in significant ways at the hands of the Nazis. Most of the relatives I lost in the Holocaust were old people I had never met or had met once as a small child, and by the time the full scope of the Holocaust began to

be revealed, in the late 1940s, I was so American that I reacted no differently from most other American Jews at the time. My brief period of religiosity when I was about twelve years old may not have had an effect, but something kept me tied to, and in conflict with, the Jewish religious community all through my adolescence. I do not remember now what I was looking for in my rational Judaism, but perhaps it was a forerunner of my later interest in social policy and equality. For a while, and from a distance, the kibbutz may have been the manifestation of my rational religion, but I soon realized that what made me want to be a sociologist and writer would probably make me a poor kibbutznik . Further, I was too much of an American and too little a Zionist to want to live in Israel.

My involvement with Judaism as a religion was eventually sublimated and ended by research, for I think now that I undertook a study of the Jews of Park Forest in 1949 partly to demonstrate the obtuseness and shortsightedness of the Jewish experts who did not want to understand the Jews who moved to the suburbs, and who thought that sermons against acculturation and heavier doses of traditional Jewish education would bring back their own good old days.^[23] However, the ingenious ways in which the young Jewish couples I studied in Park Forest, and later in Levittown, organized their communities sans experts were also fascinating to watch—and since the arguments about what was to be done were always held in public, fieldwork in the Jewish community was always far more lively than elsewhere.^[24]

The roles that class and status changes and inconsistencies played in my early life and work are the most difficult to untangle. I would have to begin, of course, with my family's indirect tie to a high Sears Roebuck executive, without which there would have been no affidavit and no chance to come to America. I cannot imagine that I could have been an academic sociologist in England even if I had been pulled in the same career directions there. I suppose that coming to America without any money but with a good education, and arriving at a time when my own and my family's desire was to be upwardly mobile and pursue an American version of our past bourgeois life, evoked my interest in studying class, although I think Lloyd Warner's analyses of and anecdotes about Newburyport were also persuasive.

If my encounters with the American class and status hierarchies of the 1940s encouraged my endorsement of cultural relativism and my interest in equality, I cannot now picture the process by which that happened. Other advocates of cultural relativism and equality have been upwardly

mobile, of course, but upwardly mobile people have also looked down on and oppressed poor people who were not mobile. My early interest in the kibbutz as a place where job security was guaranteed and materialism appeared to be absent may have been a response to my parents' initial occupational hardships and a just-reviving consumer culture in America that seemed strange to a European and wrong in wartime.

I do not remember feeling any kinship with, and sympathy for, the underdog in those early years, either among the poor whites of Woodlawn who were our neighbors or among the much poorer blacks my father's employer was exploiting. Nor did the social science I learned at Chicago encourage such empathy, for it was largely apolitical and often indirectly supportive of the status quo. The realities of poverty and racial segregation really only hit home in the fall of 1957, when I began to live in the West End of Boston, met some of the poor residents of that working-class area, and saw how urban renewal would force additional West Enders into poverty or deprive them in other ways. I am still surprised, however, how unaware I remained earlier of the poor whites with whom I lived in Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood, even as I was reading and admiring the egalitarian writings of R. H. Tawney and advocates of the kibbutz.

I imagine that my interest in equality and relativism was also a way of coming to terms with the feelings of marginality and inferiority that I experienced in high school and college and with the shyness that had already placed me on the social margins in Cologne. Surely yet other factors are relevant that a psychoanalyst can best fathom. I must add one more consideration: my two marriages have both been to women who were more emphatically and actively egalitarian than I. Since 1967 I have been married to Louise Gruner, a Legal Services lawyer who was helping poor people directly while I was lecturing and writing.^[25]

Ultimately the personal needs and inclinations with which one enters a scholarly discipline are impulses that must be brought out and developed by the intellectual training one receives. Thus I must implicate and credit the people with whom I studied, especially at the universities of Chicago and Pennsylvania. The teachers (and authors) who are most responsible are mentioned by name in the text and notes of this essay, but many others are not named, some of them fellow students rather than faculty.^[26] Then there are those people whom I did not even know but who helped to shape the intellectually and otherwise stimulating period from 1945 to 1950 at the University of Chicago. Surely I am also explained as a product of those particular 1940s.