Buffalo Bill in Bologna

As I write it is possible that there are, as a proportion of the male population, more young men in Norwich wearing New York Yankees baseball hats than in the Bronx. The only reciprocal vogue for Chelsea or Manchester United reproduction shirts in the United States is expatriate-led. The traffic flows westward across the Atlantic. What a Yankees logo means in Norwich is another matter. It may mean nothing, just another example of consumer goods which possess novelty value, but come without much cultural baggage. This is part of the problem of analysing the tidal surges of cultural goods across the world. Sales of tickets to American movies are always impressive, but, as with so many facets of mass culture, the product is ephemeral, making deep claims neither upon loyalties nor upon values. Rydell and Kroes surf the big waves, and tell some vivid stories, but one is always puzzled by how much significance to grant to the ‘Americanisation’ of the world. If the world was truly Americanised, after a century and a half of sustained cultural penetration, America might reasonably expect to have more friends among those drinking Starbucks latte and wearing Yankees baseball hats. Alas, it is not so. The cultural penetration has certainly contributed to American wealth, but it has come at a cost, feeding grave anxieties at American cultural imperialism. The authors of Buffalo Bill in Bologna succinctly describe the creation of mass culture in nineteenth-century America, and the way American cultural goods were exported across the world. It is a dizzying success story, built upon paradox and contradiction. American elites, always respectful of European high culture, remained resolutely hostile to the emerging consumer-led popular culture. American intellectuals, hurriedly discussed here, were no less fierce critics of mass culture. The enthusiasm of leftish intellectuals for mass culture since the 1960s falls outside the authors' time-frame. Americans are likely to encounter hostility to mass culture in its purest form in the polemics of conservatives (Hilton Kramer, Allan Bloom). The Upper West Side heirs of the cultural radicals discussed here have made their peace with mass culture. It just is not an issue capable of generating much friction today. The best things in this book are in effect set-piece portraits of the promoters, the snake-oil salesmen, hustlers and confidence men, who had the gift of the gab, and the shamelessness, to market mangy anachronisms such as ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody to enthralled European audiences. There is little effort to examine the cultural goods in detail, and only glancing attention is paid to the detail and complexity of its consumption. Rather, the story told by Rydell and Kroes is a quick-moving chapter in an as yet unwritten world history of opportunism and credulity

Advertising · Americanization · Business · Economic history · Media studies · Nothing · Political science · Population · Sociology · American Literature and Humor Studies · American Sports and Literature · Demography · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society

• Buffalo Bill and Patriotism

  K Baraniecka-Olszewska•East Central Europe•2020

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