Patricia Bradley's Making American Culture presents a history of popular cultural arts from the crucible of early twentieth-century immigration up until the end of the First World War, focussing in short chapters on popular, commercial and avant-garde forms such as vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley songs, silent movies, advertising art and dance as well as on the wider social and intellectual milieu from which the artists came. Scouring debates in magazines, books and newspapers of the time as well as key secondary histories, Bradley shows that the period of early modernism in America was one of conscious cultural and identity creation for Americans, who were trying to map and understand their nationhood via a variety of cultural avenues. The tension between fear of change and palpable enthusiasm for the new structured this modernity for them as much as it did for their European contemporaries, but Bradley contends that the works forged can be better understood as a unique response to an American social context rather than as the impact of intellectual movements. That context comes from the way that, rather than rejecting popular culture, “American middle classes came to adopt some version of the cheap amusements.” In this way, she states, pace earlier popular-culture theorists Warren Susman and Lawrence Levine, “American popular culture became the ideology of shared nationality” that merged diverse class and race values into a more solid American identity (10).

Bradley admits that from our current perspective (meaning, I think, from the knowledge of the intense racial hatred that also patterned American multiculturalism in this period), this may now seem unduly optimistic. A wellspring for those hopes was the middle-class embracement of the commercial impulse behind cultural development or what she calls the “entrepreneurial model” (13). This, however, has its pitfalls as a mode of analysis and shows us that the contemporary report might not always be the ideal informer of cultural values; entrepreneurship might account for the financial investment in and wide dissemination of popular products but not necessarily for their widespread appeal, reception or racial/sexual expressions or for the artistry behind the product. While this “merge to the middle” is an interesting prism through which to view the development of certain aspects of American culture (as opposed to a focus on high versus low, avant-garde versus working-class forms), it glosses over the exploitative and contradictory ideology of Progressive era cultural optimism.

While there is a tendency in many of the chapters to flit from one popular performer or artist to another, without really alighting on one for long enough to see a particular pattern or theory emerge, what does become clear is the huge contribution that immigrants and African Americans made to the development of such national popular and commercial culture as well as to extending the definitions of American identity. Pursuing this further in a chapter on middle-class censorship, Bradley shows that efforts to reform and police commercial entertainment were bound up with the racist and gender values of the era that continued to “refine” the base product.

Bradley then moves away from a class analysis to one that maps the emergence of bohemian artistic sensibilities. Chapter 6, on Isadora Duncan, explores how Duncan's art emerged as a result of her distaste for both formal ballet and popular dance during a time when her “Grecian ideal” was well placed to be understood as a popular model for American culture and uplift, showing that such bourgeois cultural products developed out of intellectual responses to modernity that often both rejected and embraced the popular. Her chapter on avant-garde artistic communities, especially those of Greenwich Village before the First World War, shows a diversity and engagement with popular culture that often embraced commercial modernity, a theme she extends in chapter 8, “Modern Art Meets Modern Marketing: The Armory Show,” where she looks at the efforts to sell the idea of modern art to Americans. Bradley culminates with a chapter on Eugene O'Neill, on the wartime cultural engagement and with a very brief look at the beginning of radio.

Though perhaps too wide-ranging, it is a clearly written book that aims to show how artists and entertainers moved “from the margins to the beloved centre of American life” (170). As such it would make a useful addition to American culture reading lists as well as being a useful broad map for those new to the territory of popular and avant-garde culture in the period.