American mass culture as an imperial showcase! Poster depicting Buffalo Bill's Wild West Congress of Rough Riders. 1899. Library of Congress.
- Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes’ Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869-1922 is a welcome study of the ways that mass culture spread throughout the United States and impacted the rest of the world. Published in 2005, the work arrived at a time when transnational history had been the watchword of historians for some time, and this book takes into consideration the recent calls for a historiographical approach that incorporates the global into our nation-based histories. Rydell and Kroes look at nationalism with a critical eye and note that the United States was hardly united for much of its early history, especially leading up to the Civil War era. They examine mass culture because it served as a unifier for disparate parts of America. The regions were finally physically united by railroads, and the telegraph, postal service, newspapers, and radio helped disseminate information and new forms of entertainment.
Moreover, the mass culture that helped solidify the American polity then spread across the Atlantic and permeated the often rigid cultural quarters of Europe. In Rethinking American History in a Global Age, Thomas Bender makes an appeal for a less nation-centered analysis that incorporates a global perspective. Bender does not argue that historians should merely study American foreign relations in greater numbers. Instead, “The point is that we must understand every dimension of American life as entangled in other histories. Other histories are implicated in American history, and the Untied States in implicated in other histories” (Bender, Rethinking American History, 6). Rydell and Kroes do a good job of showing how other histories are implicated in American history through mass culture, though maybe the focus on the “Americanization” of the world is overstated and reaffirms the typical exceptionalist narrative.
P.T. Barnum's American Museum, New York City. 1855. Library of Congress.
Buffalo Bill in Bologna was an extremely fun and informative read. The first chapter discusses the origins of mass culture by focusing on Vaudeville theater, traveling circuses, “Wild West” shows, popular books, photography, and department stores. Kroes and Rydell’s discussion of P.T. Barnum’s American Museum shows explains Barnum’s rise to fame and fortune through his popular “freak” shows. What was notable about his particular brand of entertainment was his uncanny eye for public relations and understanding his audience. The authors quote David Boorstin as writing that Barnum’s chief discovery “was not how easy it was to deceive the public, but rather, how much the public enjoyed being deceived” (21). As I read the rest of the book, I was struck by how apt this description is when applied to other forms of mass culture until the present. Mass culture is predicated on the faster spread of ideas, more immediate access to information and entertainment; but at the end of the day, people usually privilege entertainment over all else. Maybe this is how Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and the yellow journalism leading up to the Spanish-American war could capture the nation’s attention and pave the way to imperialism.
Subsequent chapters focus on world’s fairs to show the expansion of America’s “cultural frontiers” at home and abroad. Mass culture was not without its detractors, of course. Numerous American intellectuals during the World War I era and Europeans decried mass culture as a scourge on higher cultural and artistic forms and “dehumanizing.”
Rydell and Kroes argue that mass culture promoted “dreams of empire and consumerism” (72). I was reminded of Paul Kramer’s essay on imperialism in the American Historical Review when reading this book because the authors pay special attention to the ways in which American mass culture reified imperial ideology. From circuses to other forms of entertainment, mass culture shaped dominant views of race, civilization, and imperialism. The authors use Edward Said’s term “orientalism” to discuss the ways that mass culture featured displays of Middle Easterners to characterize them as the “other.” For example, refer to the image of Buffalo Bill’s “Congress of Rough Riders” that depicted the “Arabs” from “Soudan.” Similarly, Native Americans, Filipinos, blacks, and European immigrants were also caricatured or portrayed as uncivilized. A key tenet of Said’s thesis is that these cultural or even scholarly depictions of the “other” hold real power because they often encourage imperial action.
Despite the hold of mass culture on the American public and the rest of the world, the authors show that mass culture was not merely imbibed by the public and all its messages passively received. The debates that are present within these book’s chapters and the diverse reactions to mass culture show that producers of these forms did not always hold all the power, but also encountered mass culture’s limits.