"A Broader North American Story"

"These disasters and dreams rippled across the North American continent, rending Mexico apart and stitching Canada together at the same time. The story of the mid-nineteenth century, which we Americans usually think of as a tale of our own country's fracture and eventual rebirth, is better understood as an entire remolding of North America writ large—and one in which the Civil War plays a far more continental, and even global, role than previously understood."

At The Bulwark, Casey Michel reviews Alan Taylor's American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850–1873.

"That Exposure Is One of the Foundational Tasks of Criticism"

"Macdonald thought that people were being tricked into buying this stuff by being told that they ought to like it, or that it was good for them. He thought that, like kitsch, Midcult was a marketing phenomenon. It was culture manufactured for the aspiring sophisticate.
"In the case of kitsch, no one was being fooled. Lowbrow culture was produced in order to make a profit, and it was bought in order to provide simple pleasure and diversion. No one pretended otherwise. What alarmed Macdonald was that in the case of Midcult everyone seemed to be fooled—not only the readers but the writers, the editors, the publishers, and the reviewers. They had all become convinced of their own high-mindedness. They believed that they were engaged in an uplifting enterprise of human betterment, even as they raked in the profits."

In a 2011 New Yorker article, Louis Menand writes about Dwight Macdonald's "commitment to exposing the self-promotion, self-satisfaction, and self-delusion that are always wrapped up in the business of making and appreciating art."

"As Much a Testament to the Exalted Claims Made for Culture in Midcentury America as It Is a Casualty of What Has Happened Since"

"These days, it’s hard to recognize that America. The wage stagnation that began in the late ’70s has since bestowed on us the kind of income inequality more typical of a third-world oligarchy. The real minimum wage is less than it was in 1968, and the richest 1 percent of Americans take home nearly 25 percent of the country’s income, as compared with the 9 percent they earned in 1974. All of which gives Macdonald’s complaint the feel of a time capsule, one that contains no foreshadowing of how quickly and completely everything would change. Macdonald failed to anticipate what would happen not only to art but also to its audience. The middlebrow flourished because the middle class was flourishing: this much he got right. Yet he wrote as if the middle class would necessarily continue to prosper, as if the profusion of 'money, leisure, and knowledge' could be taken for granted, when in fact he was bemoaning the cultural fallout from the Great Prosperity in the last days before its demise. Middlebrowism is still with us, of course, but its growth required a middle class that was upwardly mobile as well as a link, whether real or perceived, between culture and status. Macdonald’s Midcult shit list—which includes the likes of Saturday Review, The Reporter and the Book-of-the-Month Club—is a catalog of species that are either endangered or extinct."

Jennifer Szalai in The Nation revisits Dwight Macdonald's "Masscult and Midcult" in post-middle class America.

"Surrealism Reimagined as Disneyland"

"Macdonald—an anti-Communist Leftist who had been turning his energies from politics to culture in the 1950s—was worried about the place of the arts in a modern, democratic society. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to worry about. Macdonald was appalled by the cheapening of art and literature in a big, complex, contemporary culture, about the extent to which people were being fed—and, sometimes it seemed, force-fed—a preprocessed, easy-to-digest version of art, literature, theater, and music. This was what he called 'masscult,' which was 'at best a vulgarized reflection of High Culture and at worst a cultural nightmare.' Instead of Old Master paintings, people were getting Norman Rockwell. Instead of Bach and Mozart, they were getting the Boston Pops. And if that wasn’t bad enough, there was also midcult to contend with. Midcult was a newer idea, a mid-century variation on the phenomenon of mass culture. Midcult, Macdonald argued, 'pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them.'"

Jed Perl in The New Republic revisits Dwight Macdonald's 1961 essay "Masscult and Midcult."

Mid-Century Minds

In The New Republic, Damon Linker reviews Michael Kimmage's The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism, John Summers revisits Dwight Macdonald's Against the American Grain from 1962, and Tom Bissell reviews Elizabeth Fraterrigo's Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America.

An Everyman's Library

"And while most of the million sets of the Great Books that finally were sold may have served merely as 'colorful furniture' (in Hutchins's sardonic phrase), Mr. Beam notes that 'thousands of copies, perhaps tens of thousands, were actually read, and had an enormous impact on the lives of the men, women, and children who read them.' Earlier versions of the Great Books concept, less ponderous and expensive, may eventually have reached even more readers."

In The Wall Street Journal, Robert K. Landers reviews Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books (and mentions Dwight Macdonald's 1952 The New Yorker essay "The Book-of-the-Millennium Club").