Say “Cultural Studies” and what comes to mind is abstract, ironic analysis, heavy with the jargon of initiates. But by the time Peter Bacon Hales at the pinnacle of his brooding tale has got Jimi Hendrix atop Mount Pisgah singing “All Along the Watchtower,” mere irony has been left way behind. Outside the Gates of Eden: The Dream of America from Hiroshima to Now reads our past three-score-and-ten years as a spiritual journey lodged somewhere between Genesis and Revelation. It’s a journey Hales recounts and recasts with a pathos not only biblical but, as he himself describes it, evangelical.
Outside the Gates of Eden: The Dream of America from Hiroshima to Now
University of Chicago Press
496 pages
$49.65
He doesn’t mean “evangelical” in any theological sense. Rather, Hales, the director emeritus of the American Studies Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has in mind a distinctive mode of apprehension and engagement, that of a self thrust outward and inward at once, keyed to “immersion, tactility, sensuality” but dedicated to a deep, sweeping redemption, both personal and social. It’s evangelicalism as virtue, as necessity; it’s America at its best, trying to become America. And it’s above all an America that has reached and over-reached and is now threatened, once more, with grand failure, stuck in its historic “dance between triumphalism and terror.”
A spiritual restlessness afflicts us, then, as we gaze with Hendrix from the watchtower into the Promised Land, a portentous wind howling, sharpening our senses, reclaiming our memories, memories of a calling to embody a new way before a watching, weary world. John Winthrop hovers over the entire book; Hales at its end brings him down, into the text. “We are a culture beset by the very fears” Winthrop etched at the end of his Arbella sermon, Hales suggests, fears of exile from this “good land,” the land we crossed a “vast sea to possess,” as Winthrop reminded his friends and companions. And so, threatened by that sea, “we reenact the myths and menaces of our histories,” says Hales. “We yearn for something.”
The conclusion of World War II could hardly have made for a stranger circumstance for this peculiar people, buoyed by a power that, paradoxically, threatened its existence. Hales launches his story with a series of set pieces that place the postwar rise of suburbia against the backdrop of Hiroshima, acres of tiny cape cods backlit by a brilliant, ominous mushroom cloud. We dealt with the disquieting scenery through the artful, willful invention of “the atomic sublime, in which terror is translated to beauty and danger is always at arm’s length.” But this was only art, politically useful art, finally unable to mask the unbearable, unbelievable truth: that we were now living on “a globe facing universal destruction by human technology.”
Still, construct narratives we did, sublime narratives born out of desperation and cunning and naivetÉ, born of the kind of innocence James Baldwin so enduringly exposed in his 1963 essay The Fire Next Time, where he describes, among other descendents of slave owners and slavery defenders, the “Cub Scout faces” of New York City’s policemen. “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime,” judged Baldwin, and Hales would seem to agree. His chapter on Miracle on 34th Street deftly takes up the 1947 film he calls the first of the “suburban idylls,” in which the dreams of an entire culture are carried by one jaded, war-weary little girl longing for a home beyond the city, beyond the landscape of catastrophe that had so decimated the world’s cities in the previous two decades. If in this story Kris Kringle is the efficient cause of a timely deliverance, he is backed up by a prime-moving wartime economy ready to translate its terrible efficiency into a consumer paradise. And so suburbs like Levittown became an updated “image of utopia for the postwar years.”
Yet here Hales is far from cynical. In fact, he tends toward the lyrical, inspired in part by the remarkable response he received when soliciting artifacts and testimonies from Levittown’s former residents. He discovers, for instance, that the residents of Levittown tended to stay put, recalling with fondness what Hales can only call “celebratory community” as they, relieved to be done with war and depression, acted out their republican ideals with gusto. Hales, a photographer as well as a historian, brilliantly takes us into a study of the Levittown landscape. Here the evidence for a kind of spatial democracy—he calls it “a socialism of children and dogs”—backs up the testimonies he gathers of genuine fraternity.
Paradise was not exactly found, though. Until 1954 Levittown excluded African Americans, and even six years after that prohibition fell only fifteen of its 15,000 families were black. More structurally, as the postwar economy motored on, homes were transformed by the constant pressure of technological invention and accretion, until suburbanites found themselves falling apart in ways that would prove hugely consequential. Beginning in 1950, Levittown houses came with televisions (when only nine percent of the U.S. population owned them). As the television colonized more and more space, that former queen of the rancher, the radio, transmuted from centerpiece to traveling companion, the creator and carrier of new, diverse subcultures, in precisely the way the television had become the forger of the new postwar monoculture.
And in the story as Hales tells it, that monoculture is the enemy—the “dominant consumer-consensus culture,” the creation in the main of the evolving corporate order, government and business working in tandem to manipulate the citizenry in world-historical fashion, as they together pursued survival in threatening times. Hales renders the efforts of what in 1961 Eisenhower deemed the military-industrial complex as tragicomic, especially the U.S. government’s ongoing efforts to increase nuclear strength while assuaging fear of imminent cataclysm. It’s not exactly farce Hales is writing; he sees ours as too much a collective quandary for that. But his sympathies are altogether with the counterculture that arose in the mid-Sixties through the world of radio, not television, in a way that (in his account) seems organic, an outgrowth of the natural order of things.
This notion of the organic emergence of the counterculture only partly reflects a kind of ontological commitment on Hales’ part; in another sense he sees it as a deeply historical, almost mythical movement. He notes that “never once” in these decades “did America waver in its conviction that it must take itself seriously, choose its mission properly, follow its path responsibly.” This was our calling, our identity, “the American myth, gift, and peril that all Americans shared, even those most marginalized and disenfranchised.” And so the counterculture (which Hales, far more lumper than splitter, treats as a monolith), guided by a “fundamental conservatism,” sought America’s redemption.
Most of America, of course, did not elect the counterculture’s vision of redemption—at least at first—but Hales downplays the extent to which this rejection was rooted in fundamental religious conflict. For Hales, the heroic “apostasy” of the counterculture wasn’t its “hedonism” so much as its refusal to believe the Cold War narrative of American virtue versus Soviet villainy, of our prosperity versus their poverty. The counterculture wished to recover a truer vision of prosperity, of democracy—”to seek some individual happiness, some harmony with the land given us, some concord with our neighbors, some connection to the larger forces of God or gods.”
They longed, these latter-day evangelicals, for “sacrality,” for nothing less than the “miraculous occupation of a divinely granted place of beauty and promise.” And yet, for all of Hales’ siding with the counterculture, his judgment is unbending: upon “retreating to utopia” these idealists experienced a “near endless string of disasters” as the shallowness of the broader culture played out in its own distinct ways among those who, innocently, believed themselves to be transcending it.
In Hales’ expansive narrative, Jimi Hendrix is the great gospel-singing preacher, seeking “a new language that liberated rather than limited human imagination and desire.” But it is Dylan who rises in this story as the seer of the age, he whose quiet and eerie “All Along the Watchtower” Hendrix reinvented with evangelical verve. Dylan’s stance was not so evangelical. His sense of the times had taken a dramatically dystopian turn following the assassination of Kennedy, and Hales is nowhere sharper than in his intricate interpretation of Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and John Wesley Harding (1968). On the former, Dylan revealed what the “death of American innocence” meant to the still innocent, most devastatingly in the album’s nearly 12-minute final song, “Desolation Row.” Here we see an “America without enabling myths,” a nation populated by “mythic figures” who have become, alas, “freaks,” subject to “a formalism of alienation, in which the conditions that created loss, marginalization, impotence, exile, and disenfranchisement became the raw material for a new culture.” What was this culture in formation? “Postmodern America stripped of progress and its corollary utopian promises.”
And so, as the Sixties dissipated, we continued our search for self-invention, now defined in part on the counterculture’s terms—evidence, Hales believes, of its at least partial triumph. You might suppose that Hales would be finishing his story on this note. But in his last, long chapter, he takes a surprising turn, leaving behind house plans, photographs, and song lyrics to zero in on Pong, Doom, and Fall Out, the computer-generated worlds that have in fact made “the virtual present a protean mash-up of Cold War dramas and a dynamic repository for the very symbols and myths that only seemed useful until the Cold War ended.” In games like Fall Out, nuclear disaster, tellingly, still creates the conditions for whatever adventure is left for us, while cozier worlds like The Sims promise suburban normalcy for those who yearn for stability amidst the roiling contingencies of this age. The digital revolution, Hales suggests, is nudging us toward a “posthuman identity.”
Meanwhile, what of the dream of America, and Americans themselves, we Winthrop-haunted souls on Desolation Row? Not surprisingly, Hales is of two minds—reflecting, one senses, his own conflicted soul. In “the seductions of the virtual” he senses danger, as we learn to “meld [ourselves] to the imperatives of the machine.” With “the collapse of the American narrative,” many, but especially young men, “began to game”—but not in a way that is “playful, joyous, or redemptive.” Rather, it’s a kind of gaming that takes our “radical individualism” and twists it toward “sociopathic survivalism.” It’s an allure Hales himself knows well, he confesses, mentioning briefly but poignantly his own battles with addiction to gaming. “The grail of the virtual world,” he warns, is “immersion in a seemingly infinite alternative realm from which you could not bear to escape”: a word in season if there ever was one.
Yet Hales, almost startlingly, does not, as this long, satisfying book achieves its conclusion, give up on the old idea of America as a haven and model, though his sense of our promise is far from the wan exceptionalist version of our politicians and punditry. “We are something more complicated,” he writes, more “tenuous and fragile”—and yet capable, he hopes, of rediscovering the landscape that will recall us again to a truer way.
However Winthrop may hover over Hales’ story, his own vision and hope are most decisively inspired by the classic Emersonian ideals: the spontaneous discovery of an inward connection to a greater reality; a harmonic convergence of self and society; above all, a religious confidence that The Self Knows, and that our true enemy is the enemy of the self. Will these ideals be enough to save us from the mighty surges of history Hales with such acuity uncovers? Many of us, still poised at that watchtower, listening to that howling wind, find ourselves looking for rescue from another direction.
Still: Read this book.
Eric Miller is professor of history and the humanities at Geneva College. He is the author of Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch (Eerdmans) and Glimpses of Another Land: Political Hopes, Spiritual Longing (Cascade).
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