Nostalgia for an idyllic antebellum South permeated both cultivated and vernacular arts in post-Reconstruction America. Bock's popular mode, along with his fictional persona and artificial dialect, contrasts with Bagby's high-minded autobiographical voice, but both the Northern purveyor of popular ballads and the Southern man of letters look back longingly to the same idealized past. While it is not surprising that writings of the fallen Southern aristocracy should resonate with nostalgia, the nostalgic voices of Northerners pretending to be former slaves are less comprehensible. Yet both men's memories of the Old South proved marketable.

The aftermath of civil strife, note some historians, can change perceptions of gender. Particularly for males, the effect of exhaustive internal wars and the ensuing collapse of the warrior ideal relegates the soldier/hero to a marginal iconological status. Linda L. Carroll has persuasively argued, for instance, that, following the Italian wars, one finds the “damaged” images of males in Renaissance art: bowed heads, display of stomach, presentation of buttocks. In fact, male weakness and “effeminacy” can, notes Linda Dowling, follow on the military collapse of any collective state. Arthur N. Gilbert argues, in contrast, that historically in wartime, male weakness in the form of “sodomites” was rigorously persecuted. From 1749 until 1792, for instance, there was only one execution for sodomy in France, while, during the Napoleonic Wars, the period of 1803–14, seven men were executed. Such analysis suggests that, in the aftermath of civil wars, cultural attitudes toward effeminate or homosexual men shifted from suppression or persecution during martial crisis to one of latitude and perhaps tolerance in periods following the breakdown of the military collective.

The aftermath of America's Civil War, the decades of the 1870s and 1880s, provides a testing ground to examine attitudes toward the soldier/hero and toward the effeminate male in a time of social and cultural disarray. At this time, an art “craze,” the Aesthetic Movement, captured popular culture. Aestheticism, seen in the eighteenth century as a “sensibility,” had, by the nineteenth century, an institutional base and a social reform ideology.

Although the idea may be hard for us to imagine fifty years later, especially given the historical weight of the subject, the first of the great postwar entertainment classics to come out of the American experience of World War II took shape initially as a set of comic short stories by Thomas Heggen about the backwater Pacific Navy. Gathered into a slim 1946 novel, the stories became the basis of a hit Broadway play of 1948; and that play in turn became the basis of an extraordinarily popular 1955 movie. The classic so described, of course, was Mr. Roberts, with the titular hero eventually so thoroughly identified with the actor playing him on stage and screen that by the end of the decade in question, a New York Times Reviewer would observe of the actor, Henry Fonda, “it now appears he is Mr. Roberts.”

Among the most intensely absorbed viewers of John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940) was Adolf Hitler, who knew almost nothing of the United States but who observed how degenerate the “Okies” had become. He believed that immigration had already mongrelized the general populace and, since even farmers of Anglo-Saxon stock had succumbed to racial disintegration, the Americans would be pushovers for the Wehrmacht. This particular movie-goer failed to notice the resilience and endurance also flickering on the screen; and it would be foolish to claim that his decision to declare war on the United States was based only upon a misinterpretation of The Grapes of Wrath (which he watched several times). But since no treaty obligation compelled the Third Reich to make war, after Pearl Harbor, upon an industrial power of which the Führer was so ignorant, any analysis of his motives must remain speculative. It may have been a mad urge for apocalyptic destructiveness (and self-destructiveness), springing from subterranean depths that the psychobiographer can fathom more readily than the military or diplomatic historian. Perhaps Hitler's miscalculation was not utterly irrational: with Holland's surrender in 1940, its place as the world's nineteenth largest army was ceded to the Americans.

As “the American century” comes to a close provocative jeremiads have become a growth industry in the United States, with just about every leading newspaper and numerous popular magazines, books, radio and television programmes depicting a nation in serious social and economic decline. A generalised sense of crisis emerges from the myriad causes of this perceived decline at home and abroad. Domestically, commentators feed ideological debates and moral panics about problems of crime, drugs, family values, ethno-racial balkanisation and multiculturalism. Externally, the uncertain endings of the Cold War and emergent economic leadership of Asiatic nations have encouraged requiems for the American Empire. These discourses of decline evidence a public paranoia about significant economic, political and social changes which have disrupted the coherence and cohesiveness of national myths and ideologies of Americanness. One notable feature of this paranoia is that it has led to a growing recognition of whiteness as a social category and more particularly of white male selfhood as a fragile and besieged identity. I want to comment on some general features of this paranoia as a signifier of whiteness and examine how it has been treated as an issue of representation in Hollywood film.

Ever since gangsters first appeared on the American screen (officially with D. W. Griffith's Musketeers of Pig Alley, in 1912) they have been involved in a prolonged battle with the forces of “legitimate” culture. Having fought their fights from the wrong side of the street gangsters have continually drawn attention to the line which separates legitimate from illegitimate Americans. This has raised problems in accounting for the gangster genre's significance. In stigmatizing the ethnic urban poor as criminal, the gangster genre betrays its origins in a nativist discourse which sought to cast “hyphenated” Americans as “un-American” and in need of “ Americanization. ” Yet, as perhaps the most powerful vehicle for the nationalization and popularization of ethnic urban American life, the gangster genre overturned many aspects of its iniquitous origin, playing an important part in the re-writing of American history from the perspective (and, as I shall demonstrate, quite literally in the voice) of the ethnic urban lower class.

This contradiction is characteristic of the dynamic and changing role American popular culture artifacts play in the mediation of the nation's history. Regardless of the poetic and ideological licence gangster fictions take with the very real socio-historical problems of the ethnic urban poor, the central conflict which informs these narratives remains the question of social, economic, and cultural exclusion.