America Reflected: Language, Satire, Film, and the National Mind. Peter C. Rollins
“nature’s nation.” In his short, colorful book, John William Ward sketched the portrait of a hero who promised to bring the frontier’s natural virtue and egalitarian spirit to Washington—it is a cliché, today, but was an innovative marketing concept in 1828. Ward documented Andrew Jackson’s charismatic influence with news stories, cartoons, and popular songs like “The Hunters of Kentucky.” Both books used the concept of “myth” to indicate a cluster of values combining intellectual content and emotional power. While not uncritical of potential excesses, both scholars presumed that human beings are myth-making creatures.
In the last years of graduate study, I attended meetings of the American Studies Association and the Popular Culture Association where senior scholars Daniel Boorstin, Russel Nye, and Ray Browne invited acolytes to march with them to the newest scholarly frontier, the study of popular culture. As I moved forward in trace of these pioneers, I retained the lesson from the Brownson project: studies of culture should bundle elements of politics, history, and epistemology. America Reflected maps the weigh stations along the trail of my own intellectual pilgrimage. Stopping points included Will Rogers, satirist; Benjamin Lee Whorf, anthropological linguist; America’s wars and war eras; as well Harriet Beecher Stowe, novelist; Frederick Henry Hedge, Unitarian minister; Amy Lowell, poet; John James Audubon, naturalist; and a host of films and filmmakers—a diverse group of people and movements, but all touchstones of our national culture. Two—Lowell and Hedge—were from Brookline, Massachusetts and of special interest in my search for what we now call “roots.”
Will Rogers in the 1920s and 1930s
As part of my duties at Oklahoma State University, some happy years were devoted to editing and interpreting the journalistic and film efforts of the state’s favorite son. The Writings of Will Rogers (21 vols.) revealed the enduring impact of the cowboy and frontier myths. Americans experienced ambivalence as they moved from “nature’s nation” status to a more complex identity associated with machines, cities, and mass media.
A Satirical Voice from America’s Past
Rogers addressed the psychological tensions of this evolving national audience: his readers felt guilty about deserting their small town values, parents, and friends, even as they accepted the benefits of an industrial civilization. As a cowboy who rode a 20th-century bronco, the airplane, Will Rogers showed that the best of 19th-century culture could thrive in the era of mass production, mass marketing, and—alas—”bunk” (Chapter 4). That he should die in 1935 at the age of 55 in an airplane crash at Point Barrow, Alaska—the most northerly point of the American continent and the last genuine frontier—seemed as symbolically appropriate as it was poignant.
America Reflected begins by tracing the evolution of Will Rogers as a symbolic man, journalist, and film image (Chapter 1). He wrote “daily telegrams” from 1926 until his death; these insightful capsules were carried on the first page of newspapers across the land. Longer was his experience with weekly articles—which allowed him to study public persons and major issues of the day from 1922 to 1935. Beginning in 1920, the Newspaper Enterprise Association engaged Rogers to report on the Republican and Democratic presidential nominating conventions. The Saturday Evening Post (hereafter SEP) dispatched Rogers on world tours to check out how ordinary people were faring in a troubled world. As part of a 1926 European jaunt, Rogers sent home humorous “open letters” to President Calvin Coolidge (Chapter 3). Showing a better sense of humor than what one might expect from a taciturn Vermonter, Coolidge returned the compliment by inviting Rogers to brief him at the White House upon the Oklahoman’s return. Will Rogers was a favorite writer for the SEP because the editor, George Horace Lorimer, although a wealthy Philadelphian, shared many values with his Midwestern correspondent (Chapters 2 and 5). However, there were significant differences in their world views, differences which reveal Rogers’ greater generosity of spirit. In silent and sound motion pictures based on regional novels—some which had been serialized in the SEP previous to book publication and then later screen adaptation—Will Rogers represented middle west values in action. The novels and scripts prepared for the films sometimes included Nativist animadversions against Irish and Italian immigrants, Jews, and African Americans, but, when the cameras started rolling, Rogers exercised his privilege as a star to deviate from these unworthy portrayals; indeed, he usually found a way to collaborate with the minority and underdog characters in the films to overcome the Establishment figures. This cooperation was especially noteworthy in the rural communities brought to life by such films as Dr. Bull (1933) and In Old Kentucky (1935)—two Twentieth Century-Fox productions which also reflected the world view of director John Ford.
As my interest in making motion pictures blossomed, opportunities emerged from regular research visits to the Will Rogers Memorial in Claremore, Oklahoma—where thousands of photographs, sound recordings, and paper documents boisterously invited visual treatment. With the help of Patrick Griffin and R.C. Raack, I produced an “historian-made film” for which all film archive research, interviews, and the editing were directed by trained scholars. Entitled Will Rogers’ 1920s: A Cowboy’s Guide to the Times (1976), the resulting historical compilation explored the ways in which the Oklahoman interpreted the major issues and personalities of the silent era (Chapter 6). One major goal was to replace overbearing and didactic narration with music and montage—in other words, to communicate cinematically rather than by an illustrated lecture. The film which resulted from this project won a host of awards and was shown on public television in Oklahoma as well as nationally on The Discovery Channel. Rather than dwell on the tragic 1935 demise of the cowboy philosopher, the film evoked his special place in the 1920s as both a spokesman and cultural symbol. The Council for International Exhibition (CINE) presented this study with a Golden Eagle, the highest award in the United States for a non-theatrical film. (It is currently shown daily at the Will Rogers Memorial and Museum.)
Benjamin Lee Whorf: Brownson Redux?
Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) is a prominent figure in the history of linguistics and communications; as English as a Second Language (ESL) becomes an established component of the university curriculum, Whorf has found a new academic niche. In 2009, two philosophers, writing in the journal Philosophy Compass, announced that recent empirical studies had brought Whorf back into focus in a virtual revival of linguistic relativity studies (Reines and Prinz). Like the Orestes Brownson of my senior thesis at Harvard, Whorf was fascinated with studies in perception. At the same time, he shared with Will Rogers concerns about industrial development; indeed, he admired the Native Americans of the Southwest for their cultural resistance to the technological thinking of the American mainstream. (Much has been written, by the way, about the Cherokee perspective which informed the satire of Will Rogers.)
Whorf Found Patternment Even in the Monosyllabic Word
A graduate of MIT (1918) in chemical engineering, Whorf was fascinated by the “new physics” of the day which he saw as releasing humanity from the positivism of the 19th century. He lamented the polemical conflict between soi-disant proponents of science and fundamentalist defenders of religion during the Scopes trial, interpreting the debate to be symptomatic of the broader unrest of the 1920s and 1930s and clear evidence of popular misunderstanding of the implications of the work of Max Planck and Albert Einstein (Chapter 7). (In this regard, he joined such British writers as Arthur Eddington (1882-1944) and Sir James Jeans (1877-1946) whose names appear on Whorf’s reading lists for this period.) It is my contention that the consistent goal of his work in Native American studies was to prove the appropriateness of different ways of “knowing”—both the scientific method (dominant for Western languages) and the way of spiritual intuition (dominant for Native American tongues). During his mature years as a thinker, Whorf argued that a proper study of the linkages among language, mind, and reality would resolve apparent antinomies. In this approach, he was in the New England tradition of Emerson, Thoreau, and other Transcendentalists—including Orestes A. Brownson, at least in one phase of the mercurial reformer’s epistemological pilgrimage toward Catholicism and conservatism.
Whorf’s name is often associated with that of his teacher, linguist