If Frontier Films seemed an impossibility to Paul Strand in the 1930s, it seemed even more so to the cultural imagination of the subsequent decades. As a result, the production company now is scarcely known, even to film historians, and has only begun, like farleft dance and theater, to emerge from obscurity. It is striking that Richard Pells's and William Stott's recent studies of radical art and thought and of documentary form in the 1930s do not mention Frontier Films. Early film histories, with some exceptions, ignored Frontier, and it is only in the last several years that documentary-film historians Erik Barnouw, Richard Barsam, and Lewis Jacobs have given the organization equal time if by no means intensive investigation.

This essay on the middlebrow popularization of the role and influence of psychiatric ideas in the United States suggests that the world view variously described as the secular social gospel, progressivism, or (after about 1930) liberalism can best be understood in terms of the great influence that society's popularized medical models have had upon it. That is, liberal or progressive thinkers came to conceive of society as “a patient etherized upon a table,” an organism subject to illness but able to benefit from therapy as prescribed by trained experts. The popularization of psychiatric models also offered norms of health for the individual and (often by implication) for the group based upon the degree of adjustment to a reality external to the individual and subsuming smooth interpersonal relations and a variety of social norms. The most concrete institutional expression of this popular medical model of human nature and society was the network of local, state, and national societies for mental hygiene, and I have therefore used “mental hygiene” as a shorthand term for the concepts under discussion. However, it should be obvious that the fit between ideal-typical concepts and institutions is never perfect and that there is always a mix of ideas and motives among the individuals who constitute an institution at any one time. The concern here is with ideas and their diffusion, rather than with the close evolution of institutions or the development and effectiveness of therapeutic techniques. Furthermore, while this study is written from a viewpoint somewhat critical of the popular effects of a hygienic mentality, it should not be read as imputing either conscious self-interest or “bad faith” to the advocates of popular psychiatry, who appear to have been sincere, energetic individuals convinced that the diffusion of their own beliefs would have enormous social benefit. One of the regrettable tendencies of recent revisionist history has been a vulgar imputation of a conscious selfseeking or promotion of class interests to reformers and other actors who sought to change their environment—apparently from a Utopian view of what constitutes true sincerity and disinterestedness that finds only contamination in the mixed motives and unintended consequences of action in bourgeois society. A tragic or ironic view of history, obviously, avoids this naive faith and anger by assuming that consequences are rarely exact reflections of intentions, that action is as hazardous and morally ambiguous as it is necessary.

Since the mid-1960s and the waning of the symbol-myth-image school, American culture studies has been adrift intellectually. It has first of all lacked a grounding center—at least of the culture if not always of the social structure—gave energy and direction to Americanist symbol-myth-image studies during their heyday in the decade and a half after 1950. Lacking such a consensus since then, American culture studies have also been uprooted from the holistic rhetoric of the interdisciplinary that gave impetus to teaching and scholarship in the movement during past years. We still hear exhortations to “see the culture whole,” or to “integrate all of American experience.” But such injunctions seem out of place now, when the culture itself appears not as all of a piece, but as divided—rent with strains and gaps which make it look like not a single thing but as several. American Studies has not faced up to the intellectual consequences of this change. A brief review of the past should indicate why.

It was alfred frankenstein, I believe, who first observed that the characteristic subjects of painters like William Sidney Mount and George Caleb Bingham were visual counterparts of that “American Adam in Eden” theme, which many historians of literature had identified as “the central myth in the American novel since 1830”. Man unspoiled, in a new relationship to nature, is their common concern. As David W. Noble has written in The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden:

The American novelist then, beginning with James Fenimore Cooper, cannot write within the traditional conventions of his European contemporaries. He is precluded by his nation's romantic self-image from being an analyst of social and individual comedy or tragedy. Our novelist must be a metaphysician and theologian. He must always begin with the question: is it possible that Americans are exempt from the human condition? Is it possible that men in the new world have escaped from the need to live within community, within a framework of institutions and traditions—have escaped even from the need to live within a mortal body, or a soul that is divided against itself? Can nature indeed redeem man, heal his spiritual division, and lift him above the constraints of social class?

We live in a time and a culture that have become deeply obsessed with clandestinity and conspiracy. The extent to which “the torment of secrecy”—as Edward Shils called it—has pervaded our national life was recently dramatized by the revelations of the Watergate investigations; but this was, of course, only the climax of a series of developments in American culture, which had their roots in the aftermath of World War II. That conflict thrust America into a new global position where our power over other countries and our potential vulnerability to their economic and military strengths and weaknesses came to seem more important than ever. Intensified by the fear of atomic weapons and the cold war, both our political leaders and the man on the street became deeply concerned about the threat of secret conspiracies at home and abroad. While such obsessions have often appeared in the aftermath of wars—both the Civil War and World War I left a deep legacy of suspicion and suspension of due process in the attempt to counter secret conspiracies—it was only after World War II that Americans institutionalized clandestinity on a large and permanent scale. Our generation has harvested the first fruits of that major cultural change.

Surprisingly, two of the most influential theorists of American literature have been a French sociologist and a transplanted English poet: Alexis de Tocqueville and W. H. Auden. In teaching American literature and intellectual history, especially in respect to the political novel, I have found myself engaged in a critical dialogue with their closely associated views. Permit me to explain by beginning with a small piece of autobiography.

The 1960s were one of those decades that occur two or three times a century and have a profound transformative effect on a society by compelling it to either reaffirm its values or reorient itself in a different direction. Our country has done both in response to the questions raised during those tumultuous years. Domestically, it has reaffirmed the basic value of equality, and given it a prominence it has not enjoyed in a century. In foreign policy a reorientation has occurred, and although we are not quite sure of what kind, America no longer glibly views itself as the annointed leader of the “free world” with the right—the duty—to spread the “American Way of Life.”

The overall interpretation of American history has fallen upon hard times. Once upon a time, so the story of American historywriting goes, there existed a complete model of the United States' past that explained as it described the dynamics of American history over the centuries. Not only did the progressive or conflict school of historians assent to a paradigm of moral and methodological assumptions, but its practitioners also possessed a model of American society that was applicable to the whole of the United States' past as well as to its parts. The succeeding counterprogressive or consensus historians, by transmuting the realities of their predecessors into the realm of myth and paradox, questioned their easy correlation of class position and ideation, but they failed to develop an explicit model of the workings of American society that would describe let alone explain the dynamics of its history. New Left historians challenged the static nature as well as the moral judgments of consensus history by stressing, once again, the relationship of power and interests to cultural hegemony and the possibilities of social action from the masses, but the dynamics of conflict they reintroduced into American history too often failed to meet the new standards of rigorous explanation considered so important by the practitioners of the so-called new histories. The new economic, political, and social historians' insistence upon explicit methodology and the statistical analysis of correlation and variability destroys old models more than it advances new ones to explain parts of American history, let alone all of it. Thus, at this point in the history of American historiography, we have lost any overall approach to the framework of American history as we have gained sharper tools to achieve its testing and verification.