Commonplaces of a Lost Culture
Common people in Longfellow’s time aspired to fine culture even if they were of economically modest background and had little schooling. The common person’s change today to a mere passive consumer of mass-media, popular culture with a low focus, actual lowbrow culture, came about according to a definite plan, as shown by the indisputable, documented history of educational philosopher Thomas Dewey and his colleague William Kirkpatrick.
A vibrant, personal culture was animated among the 19th century common people who were customers of Longfellow’s poetry. The cultural context of their lives is as lost to us today as are the lives of everyday people who once occupied what are now ancient ruins. Instead of projecting our assumptions onto this work in the absence of sound historical understanding, there needs to be more detailed consideration about the cultural context little understood today of the common people who received this work more than a century past.
Longfellow became moderately wealthy as, in today’s terms, America’s first cultural superstar. Longfellow never claimed to be an elite artist. His poetry was not distinctly in the heights, but ventured firmly into the middlebrow.
Popular Music Pamphlet Books Prior to Radio (1923)
Middlebrow is able to be defined as “the practice of modest-scale culture under the influence of fine-art, high culture”, the practice of fine-arts in miniature. In a time, prior to radio (1923), when very many homes had a piano which would typically be played by a fully, musically-literate amateur, and when sheet-music sales ran into the millions of copies, many homes had inexpensive music publications, pamphlet-like, soft-cover song magazines, that were avidly sung to by family members and friends. They were collections of samples of more extensive sheet music that the pamphlet publishers would offer for sale; these price-discounted, introductory magazines were subsidized by the dedicated sheet-music they sampled, on the expectation of further sales, especially if a group like a church or school could be expected to buy in quantity.
These casual songbooks were organized into topical groups like, Patriotic; Hymns–often by major classical composers, at the point where highbrow and middlebrow meet, in the home–; Minstrel; Irish & Scottish; German; Italian, Bohemian (Czech) and “Spanish” (both European and New World). This popular, active culture in music had its poetic equivalent, in the audience for Longfellow’s “The Three Kings” poem, published in his collection Keramos and Other Poems.
But during the early 20th century, a plan was slowly developed, and ultimately, successfully implemented during the 1930s, to bring about a cultural revolution, through the vulnerable under-belly of primary education, the denaturing of a vital cultural current among the common people which is unimagined today, by a disciple of American “pragmatist” philosopher William James, John Dewey. He worked with his colleague William Kirkpatrick at Columbia Teacher’s college from about 1910 to about 1940, to revolutionize educational theory, deliberately reducing the quality of educational content for conformance with ideological theory, establishing the artificial and false branch of study educationism which was uninformed by actual classroom pedagogy experience, without practical observation of the real-time effects of this impoverishment on actual teachers and students in classrooms. (Dewey’s experimental Lincoln School proved a resounding failure; and near the end of his life, Dewey acknowledged how mistaken had been his promotion of “whole-word” early primary reading instruction.)
Before this time, ordinary, common people often with little formal, institutional education, commonly only a few grades in school, were nevertheless possessed of a surprisingly high average culture level, based on primary education that looked for its model to the Christian acceptance of the classics of Western civilization. (Enthusiasm for cultural classics is easily acquired by children coming up in a home environment in which family and friends are already reciting the great works, either reading aloud to rapt audiences from popular classics, reciting poetry or everyone singing songs. It doesn’t require acceptance in a graduate program.) The common people’s reception of Longfellow’s poetry occurred within this context.
Translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Anthony Esolen, makes mention of a Manitoba wheat farmer in the time before the mechanization of agriculture, who would recite daily, from memory, John Milton’s poem Paradise Lost as he performed his manual farm labor. People of the most modest economic-class would nearly universally, cleave to the best in fine culture. In a book portraying New York of the period 1906-1916, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, children of a desperately poor family suffered stunted growth because of extremely poor nutrition. But after their modest nightly repast, they would customarily read aloud from the Bible and the whole of Shakespeare, repeatedly from cover to cover over the course of a decade.
The Fabian Society – A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
John Dewey was an original signatory to the Secular Humanist Manifesto who sought to propagate socialism in an America that was too cultured and prosperous to accept it. (“Making the West stink” against prosperity and culture would be the program of the Frankfurt School and Herbert Marcuse’s New Left, to fabulous success among the remnant ruins of culture in the halls of academia.) In the absence of belief in God, denizens of the elite pseudo-intellectual layer of which Dewey was a member, sought to radically deprecate the fine, middlebrow culture of the common people in favor of an artificial egalitarianism of the lowest common denominator, to culturally homogenize the common people, to render them more easily governable, able to be regulated in the intimate details of their lives by their supposed, social superiors from the intelligentsia.
This goal of cultural deconstruction was successfully accomplished by eliminating traditional primary training in higher literature; by ridiculing the discipline of rote memorization–Repetitio est mater studiorum; by interrupting training in traditional, decodable phonics-based early literacy instruction in favor of a list of 250 fundamental words which must be memorized as pictograms, called whole-word reading–“I don’t remember that” is the common refrain among children unable to decode phonics upon encountering a new word; and by moving away from structured training in the virtually complete, long-established curriculum of mathematics already 99% worked out between the time of Archimedes and the 19th century German mathematical genius Gauss, so that students would be left to their own devices to “discover” math in a “child-centered” educational context.
In the time before the 1930s, when the works of middlebrow artists like Longfellow, and the 1,000 works of good literature were eclipsed by the “Dick and Jane” readers–Oh, Father. Oh, Mother. See Jane play.–Longfellow’s fans would have commonly, directly recited his poetry aloud in live readings. People didn’t passively consume Longfellow’s work as spectators, they didn’t sit alone in their rooms silently reading the poems, they actively incorporated them into their own highly social culture, making them truly their own, practicing poetry in the persuasive art of elocution, to enunciate the poetic rhythms as if they themselves had improvised them, in the same age-old pattern as was practiced in the educational curricula of many, many cultures widely separated in geography and by era, structured around fine-art, traditional poetry, from the time of the epic, Homeric poems–the commercial culture economy of 19th century America notwithstanding. A culture-restorationist, John Senior, estimates that the common people would know how to sing about 200 songs, in the period immediately preceding the invention and deployment of radio beginning in 1923. See “When Harmony Was King“.