[We have become] a nation of outsiders, a country in which the mainstream, however mythic, [has] lost its compelling energy and its magnetic attraction.
Peter Schraf, Harper’s (1970)
This book begins with two simple questions. Why did so many white middle-class people see themselves as outsiders in the second half of the twentieth century? And what effect did this vision have on American culture and society? Answering these questions requires tracing the history of a knot of desire, fantasy, and identification I call the romance of the outsider, the belief that people somehow marginal to society possess cultural resources and values missing among other Americans. To tell this story, I follow this romance at work in the novels, memoirs, musical recordings, photographs, films, cultural criticism, political organizing efforts, and other pieces of the expressive culture of the period, and examine how individuals used this romance, how it channeled their creativity and actions and produced new ways of thinking about history and the agency of individuals.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, the romance of the outsider began to appear among self-conscious white bohemians and in books, music, and movies made for white youth. It often started with longing, desire, what we might call love. In the 1953 film The Wild One, it sparkled in the way the small-town teenaged girl smiled in reaction to Marlon Brando’s bad boy character, the leader of a motorcycle gang in the city, who answered her question “What are you rebelling against?” by snarling, “Whaddaya got?” It danced in the voice of Sal Paradise, Beat writer Jack Kerouac’s fictionalized stand-in in his 1957 novel On the Road:
Atlilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night … I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a “white man” disillusioned.
It hit readers like a sledgehammer in Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay “The White Negro”:
And in the wedding of white and black it was the Negro who brought the cultural dowry … he kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks … the pleasures of the body … and in his music he gave voice to … his rage and the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his orgasm.
It animated campus journalist and Kerouac fan Tom Hayden’s description of hearing participants in the southern sit-in movement speak in 1960. These black and white activists “lived on a fuller level of feeling than any people I’d ever seen,” he wrote. “Here were the models of charismatic commitment I was seeking. I wanted to live like them.”1
Popular music—postwar jazz, rock and roll, and especially folk music— served as a key medium for this romance. It sang in New York City painter, photographer, and musician John Cohen’s account of meeting Roscoe Holcomb, a banjo player and impoverished former coal miner, in eastern Kentucky in 1959 and listening to him play a song he had written: “My hair stood up on end. I couldn’t tell whether I was hearing something ancient, like a Gregorian Chant, or something very contemporary and avant-garde. It was the most moving, touching, dynamic, powerful song I’d ever experienced.” It moved within a critic and fan’s description of the people who made folk music: “There are beautiful, relatively uncomplicated people living in the country close to the soil, who have their own identities, their own backgrounds. They know who they are, and they know what their culture is because they make it themselves … mostly in their singing.” It rang in music collector Larry Cohn’s description of hearing blues musician Son House sing in New York City in 1965: “I had never seen nor imagined that anyone could sing with such intensity and not drop dead on the spot. Because every song was a complete catharsis. I mean it was so emotional.” It danced through future musician Janis Joplin’s first encounter with the blues: “They were playing that fifties crap on the radio. It seemed so shallow, all oop-boop. It had nothing. Then I heard Leadbelly, and it was like a flash. It mattered to me.”2
By the mid-1960s, it was hard to imagine youth culture without this romance. It echoed through the hippie counterculture, into the back-to-the-land movement, and everywhere young Americans self-consciously created new communities. It flourished in the Jesus People movement, as hippies rebelled against not just the lifestyle but also the liberal religion of middle-class America and took up conservative forms of Christianity. And it thrived among young political conservatives who followed William F. Buckley in seeing themselves as rebels in an era dominated by liberalism. By the end of the seventies, it had even worked its way into fundamentalist and Pentecostal strands of Christianity, where rejuvenated believers used the romance of the outsider to transform their isolation and separatism into strengths, markers of difference reworked into sources of power.
White middle-class Americans imagined people living on the margins, without economic or political or social privilege, as possessing something vital, some essential quality that had somehow been lost from their own lives. They often found this depth of meaning and feeling in what they took to be the expressive culture of black people, but other outsiders served as well. However the margins and center were defined, the key imaginative act was the “discovery” of difference. These encounters with outsiders enabled some middle-class whites to cut themselves free of their own social origins and their own histories and in identifying with these others to imaginatively regain what they understood as previously lost values and feelings. They remade themselves. They became outsiders too. The romance of the outsider spread throughout American culture because it provided an imaginary resolution for an intractable mid-century cultural and political conflict, the contradiction between the desire for self-determination and autonomy and the desire for a grounded, morally and emotionally meaningful life. Politically supple, it registered people’s conflicting longings for affective, aesthetic, and social freedoms and yet also for social and historical connections.
By the end of the twentieth century, the romance of the outsider had become so pervasive that few scholars questioned how odd and uncanny it was, how historically unprecedented, to understand politically and economically enfranchised people as marginal and alienated. A critical mass of white middle-class Americans had developed alternative measures of the relationship of the individual to society, geographies mapped not with class, race, gender, and citizenship but according to less material measures of value like depth of feeling and belief. In the process, they changed the very meaning of ideas like authenticity and community. This book traces the history and consequences of this romance.3
Images of and stories about outsiders did not appear suddenly in the aftermath of World War II. The postwar white middle-class’s attraction to outsiders and rebels (their self-conscious cousins) was not new. It had deep roots in earlier oppositional modes and expressive traditions. Historical precedents fill entire genres of literature, for example, from picaresque fiction to Romantic poetry and travel writing. In the late 1820s and 1830s, white working-class interest in and identification with African Americans generated new forms of theater as white entertainers painted their faces black, danced, and sang. Minstrelsy, or “acting black,” wildly popular through the early twentieth century, powerfully shaped America’s emerging popular culture and future forms of white rebellion.4
In the late nineteenth century, interest in outsiders inspired “song catching,” or the study of Appalachian music and the collection of American Indian artifacts. It produced new fields of academic research, from anthropology and folklore studies to ethnomusicology. And it sparked new kinds of art. Fascination with outsiders was crucial to modernism as an artistic movement as visual artists in retreat from realism embraced “primitivism,” modes of representation imagined as belonging to people living “outside” Western culture. As America’s first self-conscious bohemias emerged, members took up the Romanticism that had inspired earlier European communities of artists, writers, and others fleeing the constraints of middle-class respectability. In the 1930s, the American left welded these ideas about outsiders together to create a cultural politics that positioned a culture of the folk, understood as a particularly American counterpart to the proletariat, against a commercialized and compromised popular culture.5
Equally as important as these secular sources, faith taught many middle-class Americans to see outsiders—people who opposed received wisdom and accepted behavior—as morally superior. In the Second Great Awakening, for example, believers followed itinerant preachers and joined upstart denominations in opposition to more established churches and learned to value their own individual, interior relationships with God. Across the nineteenth century, evangelical Christians increasingly focused on their inner lives and embraced what their critics saw as excessive emotional displays, rather than good works, as symbols of their salvation. Some believers formed utopian communities like the Shakers’ Hancock Village in Massachusetts and the Perfectionists’ Oneida Community in upstate New York to achieve godliness by self-consciously separating themselves from the fallen world. In the early twentieth century, some evangelical Christians followed yet another set of rebellious ministers and lay leaders into self-conscious opposition to a powerful and liberalizing Protestantism they believed had gone too far in accommodating modernity. Their answer, announced in a series of books called The Fundamentals, was to return to a Bible-centered faith, shun the larger world, and emphasize the difference and separateness of true believers. Across the twentieth century, conservative Christians cultivated their self-consciously oppositional culture and their own romance of the outsider.
After World War II, broad historical changes long under way—migration to cities and suburbs, the rise of white-collar corporate employment, the growth of government and corporate bureaucracies, and the changing nature of family life—continued to erode middle-class whites’ sense of control over their lives and their feelings of rootedness in place and community. The emergence of the cold war and the possibility of nuclear annihilation as well as African Americans’ growing demand for greater rights only increased middle-class white fears. Organic community (grounding in time and place and a web of human relationships) and individualism (white male self-determination disguised as a universal ideal) may have always been more myths than realities, but the existence and compatibility of these ideals lay at the core of middle-class whites’ conception of citizenship. Could they be reconciled? Could they survive?
What was new in this postwar period was the way historical trends coalesced to make the figure of the outsider seem like a solution to the conflict between these ideals. The rapid expansion of photographic journalism, television, radio, and leisure tourism put the lives of people who were not white or not middle-class or not American increasingly on display. Middle-class Americans after 1945 had easier and more varied access to people who seemed marginal, exotic, or primitive than they had possessed before this period. Life magazine, the television news, and the songs on rapidly diversifying radio stations enabled middle-class people to eavesdrop on and peer into other people’s lives, to hear their music and their stories, and to see where and how they lived, from the comfort and safety of their middle-class homes. In this context, people understood as outsiders seemed readily available as resources for white middle-class needs and desires.
The convergence of these historical trends spread a love for outsiders from self-consciously oppositional enclaves into the very unlikely arena of mass culture, the commercialized ideas, values, visions of the good life, and expressive forms that dominated the nation at mid-century. Mass culture, allegedly breeding conformity and destroying more authentic “folk” cultures, seemed to be part of the problem. But in this historical moment, beginning in the 1950s, it also seemed to become part of the solution, adeptly spreading knowledge of people not living middle-class suburban lives. Romanticizing outsiders enabled some middle-class whites to see themselves as different and alienated too. They learned to use mass culture—understood as the American way of life and as their culture—to critique mass culture. By the end of the twentieth century, the outsider romance had become an essential characteristic of white middle-class subjectivity.
At the level of imagination and identification, the romance of the outsider reconciled incompatible yearnings for self-determination and emotional and social connection in three related and often overlapping ways. First, middle-class whites often displaced these contradictions onto their fantasies of outsiders and remade themselves through identification with these marginal figures. Second, middle-class whites sometimes split conflicts between individual autonomy and social grounding into two different spaces. Separation from a space imagined as the arena of the dominant culture appeared, then, as an act of self-determination, and social connection became possible in a separate place imagined as existing on the margins. Third, middle-class whites sometimes dissolved the contradictions in ecstatic, mystical experiences that radically altered consciousness and intensified both emotional and physical sensations. Listening to or playing music, dancing, taking drugs, meditating, chanting, or praying, some participants experienced an alternative place without physically traveling at all, a space free of alienation. With increasing frequency across the half century after 1945, white middle-class Americans used these strategies to balance individual autonomy and social grounding at the symbolic level.
All of these ways of wielding the romance of the outsider worked within a left-to-right political continuum and an earnest-to-ironic emotional range. Yet observers have persisted in describing the process in dualistic terms, as either good or bad, as resisting or strengthening the political order. For many scholars who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, rebellion was subversive and transgressive and therefore good. In the work of Wini Breines, George Lipsitz, and other scholars, as well as sixties activists turned writers like Tom Hayden, Constance Curry, and Bill Ayers, outsiders and rebels created the spaces where political resistance emerged and left emancipatory politics began.6
Yet the romance of the outsider proved as useful in building the New Right as in building the New Left. William F. Buckley and others grasped this fact and used it to rebuild American conservatism. Always politically promiscuous, rebellion can work for any kind of oppositional politics, but it can also be an essential part of how a particular political and social order maintains its hegemony. Recent scholars, however, have erred too far in this direction, seeing the romance of the outsider and white middle-class love of rebellion as a new kind of opiate of the masses. For Leerom Medovoi, Thomas Frank, Sean McCann, and Michael Szalay, cultural rebellion works in the interests of U.S. capitalism and the nation-state, co-opting any radical potential that might lie within American popular culture. This book argues that just as the romance of the outsider is inherently neither right nor left, it is also neither completely separate from nor completely a tool of the U.S. political economy. Its power in fact derives from precisely this slipperiness, the fact that it can be simultaneously both inside and outside. Dancing between the established political and social categories, the outsider romance upends and redefines these social and political geographies even as it momentarily reconciles individual autonomy and the collective good.7
Part I, “Learning to Love Outsiders,” surveys historical movements, figures, novels, films, and songs through which middle-class whites learned to love outsiders and their use of that identification to fuel their own rebellion. Chapter 1, “Lost Children of Plenty: Growing Up as Rebellion,” begins with an examination of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the best-selling 1951 novel that simultaneously represented and also helped create the idea of white middle-class teenage alienation. Holden Caulfield managed to exist both inside and outside the privileged life he found so “phony” and became the first in a string of iconic and popular fictional rebels. Salinger’s novel offered one of the first important and widely read critiques of what critics increasingly called mass culture—commercialized forms of cultural expression that reached (or tried to reach) large audiences—from within mass culture. Yet the love for outsiders and rebellion on display in Catcher also redeemed mass culture, seemingly opening a space within for difference, opposition, and individualism. The chapter concludes with an exploration of the complicated ways in which white middle-class teenage girls and young women embraced the romance of the outsider and yet faced particular hardships when they tried to move beyond their love for male rebels and remake themselves as outsiders.
Chapter 2, “Rebel Music: Minstrelsy, Rock and Roll, and Beat Writing,” explores the emergence of the outsider romance in the white youth culture of the 1950s. “Black” sounds, from the music of Elvis Presley and the jazzy prose of Jack Kerouac to the bebop that formed the soundtrack for beatnik life, taught middle-class whites to love blackness. Young whites learned to use forms of expression understood as black as emotional and aesthetic resources for expressing their own needs and desires. Chapter 3, “Black as Folk: The Folk Music Revival, the Civil Rights Movement, and Bob Dylan,” traces how a surging interest in folk music taught white middle-class young people to love poor rural people, especially in the South, as “the folk.” The folk music revival played a crucial role in democratizing bohemian rebellion and spreading knowledge about and interest in leftist politics and the civil rights movement. For a moment in the mid-sixties, Bob Dylan embodied the fantasy that middle-class whites and poor blacks could create a new politics out of a shared sense of alienation from American society.
Chapter 4, “Rebels on the Right: Conservatives as Outsiders in Liberal America,” examines William F. Buckley, Young Americans for Freedom (the group of young conservatives he helped organize), the growth of libertarianism, and Hunter S. Thompson. In the 1950s, Buckley built a career as a conservative journalist, journal editor, and scholar by arguing that conservatives were the real outsiders in liberal America. Inspired by Buckley’s rebel persona and Ayn Rand’s libertarian novels, young middle-class whites created a conservative youth movement that challenged the New Left. By the end of the sixties, the libertarian-leaning, gun-loving, self-proclaimed Democrat Hunter S. Thompson made clear just how much white middle-class rebels on the right and left actually shared.
Part II, “Romance in Action,” traces the role of the romance of the outsider in postwar politics. Chapter 5, “The New White Negroes in Action: Students for a Democratic Society, the Economic Research and Action Project, and Freedom Summer,” examines white middle-class romanticism at work in New Left political organizing. SDS built its organization by linking politically minded white students outside the South with news of the black civil rights rebels within the region. By 1964, however, a faction of SDS’s leadership wanted to move the student organization into the kind of community organizing in the North that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was creating in the South. ERAP, which mostly floundered on its organizers’ romanticism, was the result. The chapter ends with an examination of the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project as a high point in the left’s mobilization of the romance of the outsider. Chapter 6, “Too Much Love: Black Power and the Search for Other Outsiders,” traces what happened when African Americans explicitly rejected white “love.” Many white activists retained their romanticism by shifting their fantasies to other outsiders, like the Vietnamese resistance fighters. Others responded to African Americans’ demand that they work in their own communities. Defining exactly what constituted their communities then became a form of activism, as white college students, white women, and white draftees organized to fight their own oppression. Still other white activists like the Weather faction of SDS and the White Panther Party took up a new romantic image of black militants and their revolutionary authenticity in place of the old image of blacks as the folk.
Chapter 7, “The Making of Christian Countercultures: God’s Outsiders from the Jesus People to Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority,” examines how the Jesus People movement and Christian fundamentalists in the 1970s and 1980s romanticized outsiders and acts of rebellion. In the 1970s, Jesus “freaks” braided together theologically conservative Christianity with countercultural attitudes toward music, dress, and emotional expression and built the basis for the explosion of mega-churches in the next decade. Many Christian fundamentalists, having chosen separatism from modern society since the Scopes trial, missed these cultural developments. At the end of the seventies, Jerry Falwell began to use the romance of the outsider to push these fundamental-ists to see their marginality as an asset. Most fundamentalists believed their moral authority grew out of their religious practices. Yet in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, oppressed outsiders possessed broad cultural authority. Falwell used the romance of the outsider to bring his oppressed “majority”—”Bible-believing Christians”—back into politics. Chapter 8, “Rescue: Christian Outsiders in Action in the Anti-Abortion Movement,” explores what happened when Randall Terry took this call for Christian rebellion all the way into civil disobedience. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Terry and his organization Operation Rescue positioned their work as the civil rights movement of the day and transformed the anti-abortion fight into the right’s mass protest movement.
In the present, the romance of the outsider continues to influence how middle-class whites understand the overlapping relationships between culture and politics, individuals and the larger society. Love of outsiders enables many middle-class whites to imagine these links as matters of individual choice in which history and social structures do not matter. In this way, white middle-class romanticism remakes individualism (with its elite, white, male privilege) for white middle-class men and, to a more limited degree, women, in an age in which it cannot work structurally but can work psychologically and emotionally. The outsider romance also shapes contemporary life by perpetuating inequalities under the guise of identification and love. Legitimating a destructive refusal to acknowledge limits and to discuss the tradeoffs necessary to make a good life for the most people, it reconstitutes privileges by rejecting them and creates agency out of the disavowal of power. At the level of social thought, white middle-class love for outsiders and rebellion makes the connection between culture and politics appear transparent and direct. Under this assumption, increasing people’s ability to represent themselves culturally—a kind of representational self-determination— increases their political power as well. In practice, however, political and cultural agency have proved to be not so clearly or easily linked.
Because the reconciliation of the contradiction between autonomy and connection is always threatening to come undone in the material world, love of outsiders mediates and undermines at the same time and generates an increasing obsession with authenticity. As the belief that people’s individual feelings and perceptions, their interior lives, are the most important gauges of reality and truth grows, however, the meaning of authenticity changes. Instead of a way of testing an artifact or person’s fidelity to some external material or historical standard, it has become an emotional measure, a fantasy that can reconcile contradictory desires and make the impossible seem true. As a result, we live in an age when illusions—the idea that black culture is more authentic and middle-class whites are outsiders—rule. The romance of the outsider perpetuates a disavowal of power that damages us all.