THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 14, 1996 TAG: 9601120699
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines
Americans live in an uncharacteristically self-critical time that has rejected all of the old bromides: the U.S. of A. is a special land of opportunity; a woman's place is in the home; progress is inevitable.
Now we embrace the new bromides: the U.S. of A. exploits the poor; minorities and women have experienced victimization, not equality; progress is a myth.
The old: Communism doesn't work there. The new: Capitalism doesn't work here. And, over the past decade, scholars have dutifully climbed aboard the social bandwagon (always a float or two behind the line of march, as well as the line of fire), employing buzz words like ``diversity'' and ``multiculturalism'' in place of ``democracy'' and ``melting pot.''
In the intellectually oppressive era of Joseph McCarthy and the Loyalty Oath, academics and artists were afraid to be different; now we are scared brainless to be the same.
A book that compellingly if unsurprisingly presses prevailing buttons is Invisible America: Unearthing Our Hidden History (Henry Holt, 287 pp., $35), compiled and introduced by Mark P. Leone and Neil Asher Silberman. This compendium of brief essays on significant Americana by scores of scholars is at its best offering insights into things past that affect our present. It is at its worst moralizing about the meaning of it all.
One prefers the soapbox to the speaker upon it.
Soapbox: Robert W. Snyder of Rutgers University provides a lively look at turn-of-the-century vaudeville in New York City, where ``street-corner comedians from the Lower East Side met stage-door entrepreneurs'' and turned 19th century stagecraft into 20th century show business. From this urban spider sprang the theater circuit web that would nationalize performing American pop culture, creating stars such as Sophie Tucker, Eubie Blake and James Cagney. And out of the Keith and Orpheum chains came the subsequent structure and substance of film, radio and television.
``Vaudeville's heart and soul,'' Snyder notes, ``was the invigorating influence of outsiders trying to become insiders - Irish tenors, Jewish comics, black ragtime pianists. Its nerve system was the theater circuit, which embraced everything from tawdry small-time dumps to elegant big-time palaces. Vaudeville flowered from the 1880s until the 1930s, when it was finally killed off by the Depression and the overwhelming competition of sound motion pictures.''
Fascinating stuff, complete with provocative pictures of ethnic comedian Pat Rooney Sr., stark melodrama at the Bowery Theater and vamp Eva Tanguay, seductively draped across a tiger-skin rug.
But here comes the speaker, in the sepulchral introductory voice of the editors: ``Like patent medicine's pretended power to heal bodily afflictions and the Colonial Revival's sanctification of pilgrims, the bawdy jokes, ethnic humor and dastardly villains of late-nineteenth-century vaudeville diverted attention from the sources of modern social problems - and turned a handsome profit as well.''
Leone is an anthropology professor at the University of Maryland. Silberman is a contributing editor for Archaeology magazine. They can't be faulted for seeking meaning in history; but they pound the drum of their thesis - that America systematically absorbs its individuals and rebels into a callous capitalist machine - like Gene Krupa loose in a tom-tom factory. Everything becomes evidence for the same anti-independent American venality.
``Today,'' the editors intone, ``the contrast between the skylines of the glass-and-steel cities seen from the automobile and the crime and grit surrounding them illustrates one of the most painful incongruities of modern corporate society: that the unregulated operation of the market produces dramatic inequality even in a democratic society.''
It's not that they're wrong. It's just that this is not news. The service no longer requires the sermon, which has become shopworn.
By now, the American Dream has been effectively debunked. The belated chorus of voices raised in fashionable harangue against it has long since reached crescendo. It's a symptom of a country caught up in self-laceration instead of action.
At the Nauticus gift shop in Norfolk, I recently purchased a new reprint of Howard Pyle's wonderful Tales of Pirates and Buccaneers (Children's Classics, 207 pp., $12.99). Beneath the publishing information opposite the title page was the following editorial disclaimer: ``The stories and illustrations in this book were originally created a century ago, and much of the text is based on historical incidents and real persons. Any offense to modern sensibilities as may occur is unintentional and does not reflect the attitudes of the editor or publisher of this book.''
What really offends me is a contemporary political climate in which anybody feels behooved to apologize for Howard Pyle, or for Pat Rooney Sr., either, for that matter. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. by CNB