In mid-twentieth century America, as more and more people graduated from high school and college, an array of means were devised to meet their demand for continued ”self-improvement” of the brain.
This was the heyday of what author Alex Beam calls “salubrious intellectual diversions finding favor with the middle class.”
Middlebrow favorites: Newsweeklies, Saturday Review and Playhouse 90
From coast-to-coast, there were magazines (Time, Newsweek, and the Saturday Review of Literature, among others), the Book of the Month Club, cultural coverage in newspapers and on television, classy programs such as the arts review Omnibus and Playhouse 90, which featured original plays.
Beam, a columnist for the Boston Globe, revives a term of that period, “middlebrow,” to characterize this material in A Great Idea at the Time (coming this fall from PublicAffairs), a gimlet-eyed history of the Great Books of Western Civilization series that began at the University of Chicago and became a substantial marketing and commercial enterprise.
Not a derogatory term
As Beam deploys it, “middlebrow” is not a derogatory term like, say, “mediocre.” It describes the space between belles’ letters and pulp, where so many Americans found themselves when it came to taste and an interest about the world around them.
Coincidentally to his narrative about the Great Books program, Beam also is providing a framework for understanding what is happening across the country to metropolitan newspapers that were, until recently, flourishing and a significant national asset. They offered book reviews and also pieces by music, movie, theater, and arts critics.
Daily wisdom from "university of life"
They carried daily and weekly opinion and explanatory articles by professors and local experts on issues of the day. They ran stories on science, nature, and similar subjects. And whether or not they had their own correspondents around the globe, they had space allotted for foreign news.
Newspapers have always covered politics, crime, and sports, but the great metro papers of the post–World War II era became for readers a daily encounter with the “university of life” that they seemed to want and understood that they needed.
More clearly definited high and low ends
Among newspapers, at least, this dominance of the middlebrow is being replaced by more clearly defined categories of high- and low-end information.
The upper tier dailies —the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post—are gradually adjusting to the requirements of technology and revenue, and will remain serious providers of all kinds of news.
But the newspapers that served most big cities—Philadelphia, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and on and on—are being irreversibly downsized, and in the case of the Tribune newspapers, aggressively reinvented in a desperate effort to reclaim audiences that, while still large, are smaller than they were.
Most expendable
What turns out to be most expendable to proprietors possessed by the demands of diminished profit are those middlebrow areas of “intellectual” enhancement, such as culture, international news, and the weekly “perspective” sections. The middlebrow is still admirably served by public radio, public television, and some of the cable channel programming.
Among national papers, USA Today, once criticized by purists for its color and graphics, is now closest to the old metro model and, designed for travelers, it fills an important niche. Its “Life” section is increasingly “populist” in its coverage (celebrities galore) but still expansive in its selection of subjects compared to its local counterparts.
Arts victims of shrinking news holes
Overall, the metro-based arts critics and other arbiters of society are being downgraded to freelance status or disappearing altogether from shrinking news holes, and how they will be replaced is still unclear.
The Internet has emerged as the place where information increasingly resides. (Even the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica, the owner of the Great Books series at its peak, is being replaced by Wikipedia, despite its limitations.)
Optimists believe that a natural demand for cultural, foreign, and other special interest news will eventually lead news organizations to create Web sites with business models yet to be determined. Pessimists are convinced that the good times for middlebrow material are over and that there is an inexorable pull towards the low end of the popular spectrum, an information abyss. I favor the former view.
New business models for news-gathering
A great deal of thought is going into finding new business models for newsgathering at confabs of journalists and their civic-minded supporters who recognize that the deterioration of reporting on so many fronts is a real blow to society.
As yet, no one has devised a solution, although there is one perhaps in the system that funds public radio, a combination of sponsorship, philanthropy, and membership, using digital delivery instead of the cumbersome accoutrements of the printed page.
The middle class and its expectation of meaningful news about a range of subjects aren’t going away, and our system, for all its flaws, tends to provide what the public, or some portion of it, demands. The future won’t be same as the past seventy-five years or so. But one way or another, the middlebrow will rise again.
Moderator: Peter Osnos is also founder and editor-at-large of PublicAffairs Books and executive director of the Caravan Project. Reproduced with permission from a regular Osnos column called The Platform. Please note that I added "and midcult" to Peter’s original headline. Here’s a quick definition of midcult. – D.R.
The subtitle should have read, Every Negative Fact and Innuendo I Could Dredge Up
Although he was not particularly unkind to me in the book, I found virtually every page to be a smart-alecky and snide diatribe of the worst order against the Great Books, Adler, Hutchins, et al. Plus the book is replete with errors of commission and omission.
As an effective antidote, I prescribe Robert Hutchins’ pithy essay, The Great Conversation.
If the Great Books crusade is as bleak as Beam purports, then happily, not many will read his invective book.
Max Weismann,
President and co-founder with Mortimer Adler, Center for the Study of The Great Ideas
Chairman, The Great Books Academy