In January 1969, just before his inauguration as president, Richard M. Nixon attended a concert in his honor at Constitution Hall. The program consisted entirely of works by American composers, including Howard Hanson, then the director of the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester. Hanson's choral work “Song of Democracy,” a setting of two excerpts from poems by Walt Whitman, was the last number of the evening. Here is New York Times music critic Harold Schonberg's commentary on the event, which featured the National Symphony Orchestra and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir:

Afterwards, Schonberg reported, Nixon left the presidential box to congratulate Hanson personally.Footnote ¹

One does not have to be familiar with Hanson's composition to discern in Schonberg's review his sense of superiority to Hanson, Mormons, Nixon, non-New Yorkers, and musical ignoramuses alike. (The imputation of “lust” to the upright singers from Utah might be regarded as particularly hostile.) Appearing six years after the publication of Richard Hofstadter's Anti-intellectualism in American Life, Schonberg's remarks read as an extension of Hofstadter's dismay at a public that affiliated artistic innovation (as opposed to Hanson's imitative low modernism) with subversion and effeminacy. And of course the physicality of the image of Nixon wielding his fist with that vapid grin on his face is a perfect representation of the anti-intellectual stance that, especially in retrospect, we associate with Nixon and his fellow concert-goer, Vice President-elect Spiro T. Agnew. No one can seriously argue that, to invoke Hofstadter's terms, Nixon valued the life of the mind or championed the “development of new trends in thought and art.”Footnote ²

Yet from a different angle of vision the anecdote about Hanson's “Song of Democracy” at Nixon's inaugural festivities suggests not anti-intellectualism but, rather, a kind of intellectual and cultural engagement. Nixon, after all, was listening intently, although exactly to what we cannot be sure. Instead of adopting Schonberg's dismissive posture, cultural and intellectual historians might profitably ask what an analysis of such moments can yield with respect to our grasp of American culture. This essay answers that question by suggesting that episodes like the Hanson performance can enrich scholarly discussion of three crucial matters: the role of mediation in the dissemination and reception of ideas and cultural forms, and especially the mediator's contribution to the creation of cultural hierarchy; the intellectual encounters of ordinary readers, listeners, and viewers; and the importance of the local as well as the global dimension of intellectual life. To investigate such topics through both the Hanson example and the others adduced below is to continue to attend to the now-old imperatives of the “new social history,” while setting as an agenda for the cultural and intellectual field the expanded study of what historians of the book have denominated the social history of culture and the lived experience of audiences.

MEDIATION

A few years ago, David D. Hall contended in these pages that the history of the book was not likely to offer “any grand refashioning of intellectual history,”Footnote ³ but (like me) he held out his hopes for smaller, solid gains. One of these is an ongoing appreciation for a concept that book history has brought to the fore—the assumption that no text reaches readers without undergoing multiple mediations. That premise has deepened understandings of the social sources of knowledge and the circulation of ideas. At present, students of mediation are still likely to identify themselves as literary critics; their subject tends to be the literary text and its distribution, through written language, in printed form. A recent useful study along those lines (although it does not actually employ “mediation” as an analytical category) is Evan Brier's A Novel Marketplace (2010), which charts the interventions of editors, publishers, and advertisers in both distancing the postwar novel from commercialism and using that distance to increase sales. The 1957 controversy surrounding John Ciardi's diatribe in the Saturday Review against Anne Morrow Lindbergh's poetry, an episode that I myself have explored, is an especially good illustration of the ways in which mediators can attempt to promulgate particular aesthetic standards and to reject others. Ciardi, imbued with the tenets of the New Criticism, excoriated Lindbergh for nonsensical imagery and other travesties of form; readers (well aware of Ciardi's social location as a professor and rightly sensitive to his misogyny) fought back on the grounds that the critic was overly didactic and unwilling to like a poem for its delicacy of emotion.Footnote ⁴ But the mediation of form and content also occurs in the neglected domain of music, as the Hanson example underscores. The activities of composers in interpreting literary texts and shaping the hierarchical position of their authors (their status as “high,” “middlebrow,” or “popular”) reveal the politics of culture no less than those of figures who have mediated words alone. At the same time, opening up our approach to mediation to include music extends the model to institutions and individuals who popularized various other, nonverbal musical styles.Footnote ⁵

Hanson, who was born in 1897 to Swedish Lutheran immigrants to Nebraska, affected the reception of Whitman's poetry both musically and ideologically. Space does not permit a full account of the background that Hanson brought to the practice musicians call “text-setting”; suffice it to say that Hanson believed in the attainability of the American dream, espoused anticommunism, disdained high modernism while championing contemporary American composers, and believed that exposure to music in the public schools and through agencies such as UNESCO had the power to foster nationwide “spiritual development” and international “brotherhood.” Thus in 1955, when the National Education Association sought a composer to create a choral work commemorating its hundredth anniversary, Hanson was perfectly situated politically as well as professionally to accept the invitation. Commissioning is itself a type of mediation that deserves mention at this point: James English has touched on related issues in The Economy of Prestige (2005) but the phenomenon has not received the scrutiny it merits. Commissions result from the intervention of a patron who often has a purpose and an audience in mind, and they require the assent of a composer willing to tailor his or her creativity to the occasion. Hanson had no problem accepting the NEA assignment, because both the organization and the task at hand were consonant with his outlook.Footnote ⁶

In choosing and setting the Whitman excerpts, Hanson functioned as reader, as composer—and as mediator. First, he omitted certain lines from Whitman's “An Old Man's Thought of School” (1874) that tied the text to the post-Civil War era, freeing for an interpretation in terms of Cold War anticommunism the poet's words about whether “good” or “evil” lay in the nation's future. He likewise selected for the second, and often separately published, section of “Song of Democracy” a text that lent itself even more readily to that interpretation: the “helmsman” must steer with a “wary eye” because the ship carries the “freight” of all humanity (“Venerable, priestly Asia sails this day with thee, / And royal, feudal Europe sails with thee”). Second, Hanson helped to invent a Cold War Whitman through neo-Romantic compositional strategies that sacralized the word “democracy,” notably by scoring an upwelling of the previously monotonal melody on the syllable “-moc-” and concluding the piece with a series of “Ahs.” Third and most important, perhaps, the cumulative effect of Hanson's cultural location and prior mediations enabled “Song of Democracy” to reach thousands of Americans (23,000 alone at its official premiere in Philadelphia in 1957) at sites that heightened its Cold War utility—Nixon's inauguration being only one.Footnote ⁷

Of course, setters of poetry are no more able to encumber their creations with fixed meanings than can poets themselves. But the history of Hanson's piece illuminates how composers are makers of meaning whose creation of new forms, as Roger Chartier has argued, constrains as well as liberates readers’ interpretative options. Cultural historians of the future might well pursue further that underinvestigated aspect of the history of both reading and music. In addition, a recent conference at the University of Sydney on the topic of “literary sociability” suggests that scholars interested in the conjunction between reading and community might consider the social setting of the choral performance. The role of the conductor, the musicians, and the audience in constituting a particular “interpretive community” (to use Stanley Fish's famous phrase) would need to be part of the story. If that sounds abstruse, consider the performance of “Song of Democracy” by the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington in 1991, an event that must have made the reputedly homophobic Hanson roll in his grave, but in which Whitman's own homosexual leanings became a bond between poet and performers, while permitting gay Americans to assert their patriotism and right to full citizenship.Footnote ⁸

CULTURAL HIERARCHY

Hanson's setting of Whitman likewise alerts us to the ways in which mediators operate to construct cultural hierarchy. Middlebrow literary criticism is undergoing re-examination in this light, as are the authors whom critics historically placed lower down the cultural scale (see Gordon Hutner's What America Read (2009)). The emergence, in Britain, of the “Middlebrow Network” for exchange of information is a signal development. So, too, is the recent publication by Palgrave Macmillan (2011) of a collection of essays entitled Middlebrow Literary Cultures that examines the multiple meanings of the term in both Britain and America between 1920 and 1960. The editors of the volume, Erica Brown and Mary Grover, rightly observe that the pejorative associations with what Virginia Woolf called fiction “betwixt and between” make it difficult (and even undesirable) to define “middlebrow” precisely; they focus instead on the “instability and historical contingency” of “middlebrow” as a cultural classification and zero in on “how the term was understood in particular contexts.” Whether “middlebrow” carries the implication of dumbing down (as I myself have used it in connection with certain popularizers such as Will DurantFootnote ⁹) or refers more neutrally to artifacts that occupy a middling position between high art and popular entertainment, three related characteristics stand out for virtually all the works that have incurred the “middlebrow” label: accessibility to nonspecialists, rejection of modernist experimentation (to widely varying degrees), and (in consequence) omission from the academic canon. Thanks to scholars represented in the Brown and Grover volume such as John Baxendale (writing on J. B. Priestley) and Kristin Bluemel (on disdain for the illustrated novel), the latter situation is beginning to change, and we stand to benefit from the new perspectives on the nature of sophistication, the tensions surrounding democratization, the construction of cultural identity, and the relationships between gender and literary value (among other issues) that the shift is producing.Footnote ¹⁰

Nevertheless, many scholars across disciplines, including musicology, still privilege high modernism as the subject most worthy of our attention. Hence the essays that Lawrence Kramer edited about settings of Whitman—the only book devoted to the subject—has the revealing title Walt Whitman and Modern Music (2000). Hanson barely appears. But then, his contribution to Whitman's place in the cultural hierarchy was to fix the poet as unmodern, or at least as accessible low-modern. That is, Hanson's decision to devise what he referred to as “a simple, direct setting” for Whitman's verse involved no challenge to the stance of the artist as alienated genius, no effort educate his listeners about complexity. Instead, Hanson's setting solidified the identification of what has been called Hanson's “conservative modernism” with amateurism, and helped to relegate both the style and the performers to a devalued middlebrow status. Furthermore, Hanson's sound and choice of texts reinforced the middling position of Whitman himself for a wide swath of American readers, just when academic critics were making a concerted attempt to move the poet up in the prevailing rankings of American authors.Footnote ¹¹

If the “Song of Democracy” example suggests that historians should bear in mind the contingencies affecting cultural hierarchy, it is important to recognize that some mediators intervened in the opposite direction from Hanson: that is, they strove not to enhance a potentially high-culture figure's accessibility, but rather to recast popular entertainment as art. Twentieth-century American music history furnishes a fine example of that revaluation in the forthcoming autobiography of the composer and critic Gunther Schuller. Schuller, born in 1925, began his career as a classically trained horn player, but even while playing in the Metropolitan Opera orchestra avidly pursued jazz. On a personal level, Schuller reveled in the club scene, eventually meeting his idol Duke Ellington. He also acted as a kind of informal impresario for African American jazz musicians, notably John Lewis, founder of the Modern Jazz Quartet. By the time he met Lewis, Schuller had concluded that jazz was equal in artistic merit to works in the classical tradition, and thus (to employ a key word in Schuller's lexicon) deserved to be taken as “seriously.” One of Schuller's ways of implementing that premise was to arrange for Lewis's group to appear in Carnegie Hall. Similarly, Schuller's involvement in editing the Jazz Review meant that he had a hand in conferring on jazz the same high-culture cachet that the “little magazine” bestowed on modernist poetry in the 1910s, and that periodicals such as the Paris Review perpetuated in the postwar period.

As a composer, moreover, Schuller began fusing the classical and jazz genres by arranging Ellington tunes and other jazz pieces for symphony concerts. Those activities culminated in the movement Schuller in 1957 labeled “Third Stream”: a fusion of jazz and classical conventions that merged tonality and atonality, composition and improvisation, stringed instruments and those typically associated with jazz ensembles. As president of the New England Conservatory of Music between 1967 and 1977, he established the first academic program in jazz studies and a “Third Stream” department.

It is true that, like the publishers whom Catherine Turner examines in Marketing Modernism (2003)—Alfred Knopf, Alfred Harcourt, and others who, in the advertising campaigns they oversaw, made modernist writers seem unintimidating—Schuller undertook some projects that can be seen as moving contemporary music in a downward direction from a coterie audience to a middlebrow one. In 1957, he started a weekly radio program with Nat Hentoff called The Scope of Jazz, which provided a comprehensive survey of the genre. Two years later, he began a classical radio show, Contemporary Music in Evolution, on which he aimed to identify the essential features of a given piece and to explore how modern atonality had developed since the nineteenth century. Listeners expressed to Schuller their thanks for teaching them that avant-garde music was not simply noise. In that respect, he fulfilled the role of educator about the “difficult” that Hanson abdicated in falling back on his low-modernist style as a vehicle for Whitman. Nevertheless, Schuller's writings, especially his landmarks Early Jazz (1968) and The Swing Era (1989), are not middlebrow popularizations in the vein of Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy (1926) but, rather, reflections of Schuller's determination to elevate jazz to the stature of serious art. Cultural and intellectual historians would do well to pay greater attention to mediations that (to steal the social historian's mantra) move “from the bottom up.”Footnote ¹²

GROUNDING RECEPTION

Another version of working “from the bottom up” involves grounding the study of reception by delving into ordinary people's lived experience of “thought and art.” That experience was, by the mid-twentieth century, often one of challenging mediators’ judgments rather than responding with gratitude or wholehearted assent. Such opposition occurred even as experts in fields such as psychology were, as Christopher Lasch showed in Haven in a Heartless World (1995), at least for a time the recipients of increasing deference. This subject would seem to be an engaging one for intellectual and cultural historians, given the proliferation of blogs and websites that implicitly remove special training as a prerequisite for aesthetic judgments. A spate of books about Oprah Winfrey—the best one is by Cecelia Konchar Farr (Reading Oprah, 2005)—notes that even as Winfrey's endorsements have sent new novels to the top of the best-seller list, her message (like Dr Spock's) was that readers should rely on their stock of personal memories and feelings as guides to literary interpretation. The trajectory to the current situation from Mortimer Adler's doctrinaire How to Read a Book (1940) is one that my own essays have been mapping. But in any event we can only recover the full consequences of mediation, including the appropriations and resistances of audiences, if we ensure that the intellectual and cultural histories we write sustain and enlarge our understanding of the broad public's values, anxieties, and beliefs.

Historians of reading have thus far done the most to investigate ordinary people's appropriation of print (the phrase denotes agency, in contrast to passivity or manipulation). Pioneering studies of reading in America may be sufficiently familiar to scholars looking ahead, but just in case their titles of those studies need reiterating, they include David D. Hall's Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment (1989); Janice A. Radway's Reading the Romance (1984) and A Feeling for Books (1997); Scott Casper's Constructing American Lives (1999); Elizabeth McHenry's Neglected Readers (2002); Mary Kelley's Learning to Stand and Speak (2006); Barbara Ryan and Amy M. Thomas's essay collection Reading Acts (2002); the archival investigations by Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, and the essays on reading in the five-volume A History of the Book in America (2000–10). Two new monographs warrant particular notice: Barbara Sicherman's Well-Read Lives (2010), an insightful account of the reading of educated women in the Progressive Era, and Barbara Hochman's imaginative study of the various ways readers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—black and white, northern and southern—have interpreted Uncle Tom's Cabin. It would obviously be good if scholars could branch out from the history of reading to include listeners and amateur performers, as well as theater- and museum-goers, although that evidence is even more difficult to recover than data about readers.

Such an investigation could pay off by making more palpable the texture of Americans’ emotional lives, especially the feelings cultural forms elicit in the course of performance. Alfred Kazin's wonderful memoir Starting Out in the Thirties (1965), in which Kazin recalls watching the Group Theatre's production of Clifford Odets's Awake and Sing in 1936, offers a glimpse of these possibilities. From Kazin's viewpoint, Odets's dialogue, “always real but never flat, brilliantly authentic like no other theater speech on Broadway, aroused the audience to such delight that one could feel it bounding back and uniting itself with the mind of the writer.” Kazin goes on to describes his hopes for emulating “that cunning anger and flowing truth”: “the writer would forget his specialness, his long loneliness, and as he spoke to that mass of faces turning on in the dark, the crowd would embrace him, thank him over and over for bringing their lives out into the light.” Although, to be sure, Kazin was not an average theatre-goer, the reaction he chronicles is about more than the alienation of the artist; “long loneliness” is the dominant motif of Kazin's memoir, and the promise of the theatre is ultimately that the “embrace” it holds for everyone will restore the sense of connection to others that was arguably a frequent casualty of the Great Depression.Footnote ¹³

Similarly, in a letter from 1969 to the composer Randall Thompson, the scholar C. E. Butterworth remarked of the second movement of Thompson's “Second Symphony” that it was “an absolute marvel of communication between composer and listener. It evokes a feeling of compassion, as when two people realize they understand each other or share something.” You “have the power,” he told Thompson, “to express for people things they have longed to express; to produce in the heart-strings (or some similar vital, inner-structure [sic]) the feeling that this man is a kindred-soul.”Footnote ¹⁴

David Hall has rightly observed that instances of reader response are “not easily converted into general arguments.” Moreover, all historians of reading face problems of sampling whenever they turn to primary sources. Because accounts of reading experiences are relatively scarce, scholars tend to draw conclusions based on whatever they can find, within fairly arbitrary categories: the records of a single institution, the archives of a particular region, every diary in a given collection. However persuasive the patterns those procedures generate, they also produce the uncomfortable awareness that contrary evidence might be just around the corner—if only one had more documents or a broader purview. I faced this problem in my Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (2007). (The worry about sampling increases in proportion to the amount of material one is able muster—early modernists being grateful to discover anything at all.) Ultimately it makes sense to concede that one must necessarily be impressionistic rather than scientific. Yet the impressionistic is better than nothing, and better than cold data. The more artifacts of real reception (as opposed to responses hypothesized from reception theory), the greater chance we have of constructing “general arguments.” Kazin's and Butterworth's comments are tantalizing incentives to find other firsthand accounts of the ways in which literature and music can be agents of sociability and community as well as sources of self-knowledge.Footnote ¹⁵

REHABILITATING THE LOCAL

In addition, recovering the history of ordinary Americans’ engagement with “thought and art” has the virtue of illuminating the intersection of the transnational or the global with the culture of localities. The burgeoning of scholarship on the “Atlantic world” has been one of the most exciting and salutary developments of the last two decades. For historians of the United States, the lure of the global might be understood as a further chapter in the tension between provincialism and cosmopolitanism that has permeated American culture since the days of John Singleton Copley's abandonment of Boston for London. With their penchant for asking “so what?,” Americanists are likewise quick to regard the local as mere antiquarianism, perhaps because our own cosmopolitan aspirations are the flip side of the deracination endemic to a profession populated by individuals who, thanks to the vicissitudes of the job market, rarely teach where they grew up.

For their part, literary scholars have been especially taken of late with the cosmopolitan ideal, explored in such works as Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters (1999), the English version of which appeared in 2004. Casanova postulates the existence of a literary world “relatively independent of the everyday world and its political divisions.” Rejecting the critical practice of close reading, she attempts to unmask what she understands as “literary domination,” a phenomenon that entails a variety of mediations but that results in the “depoliticization” of literature and the creation of a “literary space” that determines “its own laws of operation.” As the Australian scholar Philip Mead has remarked, Casonova's insights into the nature of translation are especially useful: Casanova argues, Mead reminds us, that the “powerfully value-adding process of translation is usually one in which the ‘consecrating’ nation reduces foreign works of literature to its own categories of perception, which it mistakes for universal norms.” Yet Mead has countered by demonstrating how the Australian novelist Kim Scott has inflected his documentary research and his writing with a commitment to the rights and welfare of Aboriginal people and to “cultural retrieval” on behalf of those people: an authorial stance that sustains the novel's local and political dimensions.Footnote ¹⁶

One might add to Mead's critique the observation that the laudable effort to historicize the practice of literary criticism by focusing on its global consequences says nothing about the access to print that regional publishing firms and distribution networks provided aspiring authors and ordinary readers. Moreover, notwithstanding the transnational influences on reception—as well as on production and dissemination—that the “Song of Democracy” example epitomizes (the fear of communism that gave it its power), a look at any given performance of the Hanson piece speaks to the point that people experience culture (in both the anthropological and aesthetic senses) through the prism of what Clifford Geertz called “local knowledge.” A newspaper article about a community chorus in suburban Los Angeles that sang Hanson's work in 1965 makes clear the mediations of locality: “We have Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Mormons and even some agnostics,” the conductor commented, noting that the group consisted of “local doctors, lawyers, mechanics and housewives.” Singing in a chorus that ostensibly personified the absence of class, religious, and gender barriers in the United States made Whitman a different poet from the figure he became in the hands of a lone reader (or, for that matter, the Gay Men's Chorus); these local circumstances yoked “Song of Democracy” to the ideology of tolerance that Americans promoted so vigorously as the civil rights and antiwar movements heated up.Footnote ¹⁷

In The Clerk's Tale, Thomas Augst has made an analogous point about the situations of the young men who frequented the New York Mercantile Library or encountered Ralph Waldo Emerson on the lecture circuit. Benjamin Tilton, eager for advice about how to cope with the “despondency” he experienced as he dealt with the instabilities of the white-collar job market, heard (as opposed to read) Emerson as a moral authority who, “within the community of the lecture hall,” taught a particular “way of valuing knowledge” that would enable him to build the “character” required for success. Augst remarks that “an Emerson lecture was knowledge of the moment,” like music, “to which it was often compared.” But music itself furnishes additional illustrations of the importance of the local surroundings (as well as the transnational contexts) in which individuals build their acquaintance with artistic and intellectual production. Schuller's memoir describes his encounters with jazz musicians who were invisible to all but the denizens of the club scene in Chicago and Cincinnati during the late 1940s. Because of the mediating factor of race, years would elapse between Schuller's introduction to the music of the African American vocalist Joe Williams, for example, and the latter's transformation into “the great Joe Williams.”Footnote ¹⁸

For residents of Rochester, New York in the mid-twentieth century, “local knowledge” of music took the form of a particular understanding of the classical repertory and the practices one should employ to listen to it. In 1929, George Eastman conceived of a plan to underwrite the Rochester Civic Orchestra by raising funds from three sources: the Eastman Kodak Company and other corporate sponsors, the city's Board of Education, and ten thousand local residents. As the name implies, the idea behind the orchestra was to bring musicians “intimately into contact with the city's inhabitants in their own neighborhoods,” principally through performances for both children and adults in school buildings. The concerts were also broadcast to 25,000 children in other schools and to home listeners. In addition, a separate concert series went out over the NBC Blue Network to national audiences. The first Sunday program for the general public, held at West High School on 6 October 1929 under the direction of Eugene Goosens, consisted entirely of short pieces by European composers (with the exception, perhaps, of some unidentified songs); it included the “Largo” from Dvořak's “New World Symphony,” Massenet's “Ballet-Suite: ‘le Cid,’” Elgar's “Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1,” a Saint-Saens aria, and a Strauss waltz. Thus the music was determinedly transnational (perhaps even suggesting an impulse by the organizers to promote international understanding), while the neighborhood setting and the effort to foster pride in Rochester as a cultural center lent going to the concert a distinctly local meaning. Just as attending a neighborhood movie theater in this period reinforced a sense of ethnic community while creating a feeling of belonging to the larger entity of the nation, so these concerts arguably made classical music a personal possession—a characteristic of one's home—as they cemented the assumption that becoming a cultured American required familiarity with European composers (or, as one observer of the Rochester series put it in 1941, “the world's immortal composers”).Footnote ¹⁹

More important, to the extent that teachers and students followed the prescriptions in the notebooks distributed to each class before the school concerts, young people learned to listen in locally specific ways. That is, the organizers of the Civic Orchestra events programmed light classics—short, accessible pieces that entailed recognizable rhythms and melodies—and furnished “information” so that after the concerts pupils would remember their “new musical friends.” As with Hanson's compositional decisions in “Song of Democracy,” this effort, which continued at least into the 1960s, featured rejection of modernist atonality in favor of memorable tunes, and, at least in the extant 1943–4 concert schedule, a complete disregard for jazz, let alone jazz as art. Instead, the text of the 1943–4 notebook emphasizes translating sound into visual images or into actions: Tchaikovsky's “Scherzo Pizzicato” seems “as if people were running on their tiptoes”; Rossini's “William Tell Overture” (as the composer intended) “gives us four pictures” of Switzerland; Percy Grainger's “Shepherd's Hey” is “like throwing a musical football from one part of the orchestra to another.” There is a decided bias toward narrative (music that tells a story), which then comes to stand for classical music as a whole, as well as, in the 1943–4 season, a preference for composers whose countries require liberation by the Allies. The point is that local educators inculcated listening practices that other educators, in other places, might not have embraced. Or, as Geertz phrased it in delineating the dialectic between the “locally imagined” and “a language of general coherence” governing legal systems, “other marketplaces, other Anschauungen [sense perceptions].”Footnote ²⁰

The diary of another figure from Rochester, Elizabeth Tinker Sibley (1816–1903) makes it possible to witness the same dialectic shaping reception in the visual arts. Elizabeth Sibley, the wife of Hiram Sibley, president of Western Union, kept a detailed record of her intellectual (as well as her quotidian) pursuits between 1850 and 1852. In 1850, she saw a drawing of Hiram Powers's Greek Slave at Rochester's concert hall; she heard Park Benjamin lecture on “Modern Society” and Horace Mann speak about England. The governor of New York, whose lecture echoed the language Thomas Augst's subjects absorbed from Emerson by describing “character” as “the young man's capital,” made a forceful impression on her. But the most striking encounter in her diary concerns her visit to a traveling exhibition of two paintings, Adam and Eve and Paradise Lost, by the French artist Claude-Marie Dubufe. (Although Sibley describes the works as originals, they may have been replicas.) “I was never more charmed,” she wrote of “the noble manly look of Adam, with eyes upturned to heaven unwilling to offend Eve, yet still more to offend the Almighty.” Sibley found the depiction of the “Expulsion” especially moving, with its images of “Adam black with terror . . . disobedience written upon both.” Never, she concluded, “was good and evil brought so forcibly before me, the first picture all was calm and quieting, beautiful in the extreme, the other, blackness, darkness, and Death. I shall never regret, but ever remember this picture with pleasure.”

Sibley's remark that the paintings were “from Milton's Paradise Lost,” as well as the importation and display of works by a French artist, are tangible indications of the transnational milieu Sibley inhabited, both as a reader and as a viewer. Yet her comment upon her initial visit to the exhibition space provides a terrific metaphor for the contribution of local conditions to lived experience: discovering that “the light however was not good, we concluded to return again in the morning.” The metaphorical “light” by which she regarded Dubufe's paintings was her own deep religiosity: Sibley prayed at home when she was lonely, set aside a day to commune with her departed loved ones, and spent Good Friday thinking of the pain and love of her “Blessed Saviour.” But the chief source of “light” was St Paul's Church, the religious institution attended by Episcopalians prominent in Rochester society then and now. Sibley repeatedly employed her diary to summarize the sermons by which she tried to live. The day after she went to see the paintings a third time, she heard “the Doctor” reinforce her conviction that the God who had punished Adam and Eve was present, watchful, and ready to punish sinners again: reporting that the minister expounded on the verse “And as he reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgements to come, Felix Trembled [sic]” (Acts, 24:25), Sibley observed that the congregation “listened with almost breathless attention.” She noted, “One thing was certain[,] that whilst the Doctor reasoned . . . I fancied many a one trembled before him.” The local conditions of St Paul's, by reinforcing Sibley's understandings of “good and evil,” sin and salvation, the certainty of final judgment, thus mediated her sense of self and her response to the Dubufe paintings from abroad. It is worth adding that Hiram Sibley later amassed the first major art collection in Rochester and that the daughter and grandson of Elizabeth and Hiram became the founders of the city's current art museum, while remaining members of St Paul's.Footnote ²¹

* * *

Apply more fully the analytical framework of mediation, develop greater sensitivity to reception among ordinary people, and rehabilitate the local alongside the global: this charge to future scholars should make it impossible simply to repeat ourselves. Like the best extant work in the history of the book, such an agenda shakes up categories, challenges chronologies, and reorients perspectives. Can we, for instance, talk about “middle-class taste” when we see the Rochester Civic Orchestra's insistence on light classics as the foundation for music education and Schuller's advocacy of jazz (and twelve-tone music) articulated at the same time? Can we still hold out for the preeminence of high modernism when we perceive the workings of cultural hierarchy as exemplified by Hanson's use of Whitman? Eclectic listening and viewing, like eclectic reading, supplant any unitary, class-based pronouncements. Of course historians of print culture have also taught us that readers remake texts, so there is every prospect that scholars of the future will continue to appropriate and reinterpret the canonical intellectuals (Whitman and Emerson among them) who have already generated so many commentaries. This is a good thing. Yet American intellectual and cultural history will most thrive when it extends beyond a history of American intellectuals to become a history of intellectual life in America—even if that means acknowledging that Nixon's grin is no less worthy of our attention than William James's thoughtful countenance.