Cultural mutation, which is the successive modification of a cultural item one feature at a time until it is something very different, however still recognizable, is a way to understand what is happening in a number of emotionally charged issues from race relations to epidemiology even though social scientists do not usually treat culture as something subject to spontaneous or creative change or as having much of an impact on social structure.
Culture is usually regarded by anthropologists as the continuing way of life of a people, embracing customs, laws and beliefs, and so very stable and self-perpetuating and arising for unknown reasons, while sociologists emphasize the way culture reinforces the social structure that exists because it is transmitted by institutions that are answerable to the structure, as when television transmits what its advertisers will approve of, social media proving themselves maverick in that opinions therein percolate up from the people, and so it is understandable to think government and other institutions of culture, such as the press, want to see the social media controlled so that they do not promulgate alternative opinions. Culture is also taken to be a bridge or the medium through which change takes place in that culture diffuses innovations across a population, as when it spreads knowledge of vaccination, even though it is not responsible for original ideas. These theories are contrary to the perspective of humanists, which sees culture as the source of new ideas, whether in science, as when Darwin and Newton invent new perspectives because of their own ruminations while building on precedent thinkers, Darwin a mutation on Malthus and Lyell, while Newton was contemplating Copernicus and Galileo-- and vaccination was, after all, invented by a particular doctor in England on the basis of his observation of cows and the lack of smallpox among cow maids. Ingenuity and insight count. The humanist perspective can be applied to current events and in that light a cultural mutation takes place when an image or idea is gradually altered by having only one of its features changed at a time so that it bears a family resemblance to what is already familiar but where there is a change in its meaning or connotations. Culture is alive in that such changes are going on all the time. It is difficult to recognize how a culture is changing because so many mutations are in process at any one time.
Gov. Ralph Nordham of Virginia was caught lying a while back for denying that a photo of him in blackface that appeared in his medical school yearbook was really of him. I thought he was lying at the time of his press conference and not just because he contradicted what he had said just a few hours before, which was that he took responsibility for the photo of him in blackface. What clued me in to his lie was the inappropriateness of the emotions he was expressing at his press conference. He said that he had nothing to do with the photo appearing there, it wasn’t him in the photograph, and he apologized for the fact that it was there and asked forgiveness. So what was he asking forgiveness for? If his story were true, then he would have expressed outrage that the photo had been put on his yearbook page without his permission and wanted an apology from the medical school for that having taken place. The issue should of been that he had been besmirched unfairly, not whether he was the person in the picture. Maybe it is just that in parts of Virginia as late as the mid-Eighties the idea of blackface was not yet verboten but survived as a symbol of being transgressive, which is what it had been since Stephen Foster’s time, when minstrel shows made up of white entertainers in blackface performed ditties and patter and dances so as to emulate what was then taken to be the happy, carefree lives of slaves, however contrary that was to the facts, southern slave owners never having done a study to find out if their slaves were happy but just presuming so because it fit into their ideology that slavery was a necessary part of social structure rather than an abomination that had to be extirpated from American life. The slave owners were willing to fight a great civil war rather than give up on that premise.
So when did blackface become not a symbol of emotional liberation but a representation of racial hatred? That was, as best I can figure out, between 1943 and 1945, which is not so very long ago. Prior to and close to that time, Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Fred Astaire, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland had all appeared in blackface. And then there was a major change. There were black soldiers marching off to war, as well as a “Harlem” number inserted in wartime musicals to indicate that there was a separate but not quite equal culture of Negroes in American society. And then that self same Judy Garland appeared in a non singing role in Vincente Minnelli's 1945 “The Clock” which may be the best depiction I know of concerning just how unsettling it was to live through World War II, not at all presented as a comedy, the way other World War II pictures about life on the homefront made the material easier to handle, as in “The More the Merrier” in 1943 which showed people crowded together in apartments in wartime Washington, but love coming to the rescue. Garland, for her part, is a harried worker in New York who shepherds around a Dennis Morgan so naive and clueless one wonders how he qualified for military service, falls in love with him, and goes through the problems of finding a way to marry him while he is on a weekend pass before separating from him at the same Grand Central Station where she met him two or three days before, she then, as he had at the beginning of the movie, swept up by the crowds.
There are a number of military people going through Grand Central, as would be expected with so many people in uniform. Minnelli pauses to give his audience a look at a black soldier and his family tenderly taking part from one another. There is a message there. If you were a soldier, you were a human being, not a symbol of transgressive feeling. Minnelli, through this cultural moment, was portraying a transformation occasioned by the war that made the integration of baseball two years later and of the armed forces four years later all but inevitable. It was in keeping with the sentiments surrounding the 1949 “Lost Boundaries” which showed a black man who had passed as a white doctor in a small town having to face up to his heritage because he is not allowed to take up his commission as a naval officer because of his race. There is something wrong with that. The ability to fight for one’s country, as Japanese Americans also learned, is predicate for becoming recognized as a full scale citizen. “Gentleman’s Agreement”, which lambasts anti-Semitism in 1947, has as its Jewish figure a John Garfield who had been an officer overseas. So the war changed racial relations in America, but it took the push of popular culture to make that understood, which is to say an experience with which white audiences could identify, and so blackface has been bad ever since even if not, as I say, in parts of Virginia well into the Eighties.
Here is another cultural mutation, this time not based on a cultural artifact, which is what blackface was. Instead, smoking cigarettes was a social practice which came and went over the course of one hundred years and was used, over that time, to give meaning to cultural creations because of the changing nature of the social meaning of smoking. Smoking provided the opening and key dramatic moment in Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth”, which was published in 1905. Lily Bart, the novel’s protagonist, is at first come upon at a moment of consternation. It will become clear that she is anxious because her plan to catch a rich man has not yet succeeded and she is getting a bit old for this game, however much she is able to hang on to the fringes of high society by doing errands for women who think well of her because of her social graces. She runs into Lawrence Selden, an old acquaintance whom she asks for a cigarette, which she knows is unseamly for an upstanding woman to do but thinks this lack of etiquette will not be significant because he is not an important part of her life, and smoking a cigarette, however coarse, is no big deal anyway. Later on, however, when her chances of remaining in society are ever more remote, she thinks of Selden as her potential rescuer, someone whom she might even care for. Wharton leaves it to the reader to judge whether that encounter over a cigarette had poisoned the possibility of Lily and forming a respectable relationship rather than constituting a moment of shared intimacy that could build into a respectable relationship. Is she doomed by that cigarette?
Smoking, however, is altered in its perception. It is a way for women as well as men to show off their sophistication. Both sexes master the etiquette of asking for and lighting cigarettes and puffing away in a charming manner. Everyone engages in the camaraderie of a shared smoke. That may reach its highpoint in “Now, Voyager”, from 1942, where, famously, Paul Henreid lights two cigarettes in his mouth and gives one of them to Bette Davis, the woman who had been the awkward and neurotic child, now knowing how to handle herself-- more or less. The cigarette was the sign of romance and sexiness rather than the kibosh on such feelings.
The tables get turned once again in the wake of the Surgeon General’s report on smoking and cancer in 1964. Smoking is a health menace rather than a source of romance. Stanley Kubrick, in his very carefully worked out future for “2001”, released in 1968, has no smoking and not even ashtrays at a meeting, something unheard of when he made the movie. What happened instead were documentaries about the death from cancer of the man who had portrayed himself as the Marlboro Man, a cigarette smoking cowboy. And today it is jarring to hear the commercials for the mild and pleasurable Chesterfield cigarettes that were interspersed in Thirties broadcasts of band music. It is jarring but does not have the emotional significance as present day or near present day instances of blackface.
It is conventional enough for literary critics and intellectual historians to attend to cultural mutations that take place in larger forms. So the idea that the novel evolves from the newspaper report over the course of a few hundred years into the gargantuan “Ulysses” is often told. The same is true of the evolution of the idea of the Messiah as simply whoever will be the new king in a politically free Israel into the very human figure of the Jesus of the Gospels who also is the pagan god resurrected from the dead to the abstract figure who is just one part of the Trinity. Less well known are the popular and smaller scale transformations of what is nowadays called a “trope”, as that happens with jury trials, where there are continuing features but also modifications where each one moves the story of that trope along. There was the Scopes Trial, which pitted two civilizations against one another, these personified by the opposing lawyers, Clarence Darrow clinching his case by examining William Jennings Bryan in the witness chair, even if that was not reflected in the jury verdict. There is the case tried by Atticus Finch, known to every present day school child, which is also a clash of civilizations, the defendant also convicted, where attention is deflected from injustice done to the nobility of the lawyer, and so the South somehow excused for its misdeeds. Then there is “Twelve Angry Men”, apparently the most often performed of the plays used by high schools around the country, where the issue is less how the jurors pick apart the prosecution case than it is the flawed characters of the jurors. Then there is what is so far the neatest turn on the trope, the O.J. trial, which turns the jury trial from deep, wrenching and profound, into farce, putting on full display a flamboyant cast of defense lawyers who rip to shreds the prosecution case by pointing to such things as the inadequacies of police labs and to the presence on the crime scene, and in charge of important evidence, of a racially biased cop, Marcia Clarke and Christopher Darnton trying to keep the occasion serious, the whole enterprise brought to its comic close by a jury which hurries out a non-guilty verdict, indicating their contempt for the whole process.
So jury trials that are all still grand are not all the same thing; they loosen one or another bond of what we understand a jury trial to be even as they are all--the big ones, that is-- about the clash of civilizations, which in O. J.’s case, meant the war between the races and also between Hollywood life and the life of the middle class regular people who made up the prosecution team. The stuff of grand opera, except that it had already been done by Gilbert and Sullivan in “Trial By Jury”.
So what is the object of your attention, the trope you care about, that also evolves over time?