The Rise and Fall of the American Monoculture

"I LOVE LUCY." "Star Wars." "Thriller." It doesn’t get more American than that.All nations are held together by culture, but the U.S. is unique for the power of its pop culture. Our music, television shows and movies are a multitrillion-dollar business and the first way that billions of people around the world get to know us.For most of the 20th century, they were also the glue that held the country together. In a sprawling nation founded on the precept of individual liberty and populated primarily by immigrants from around the world, there was hardly one American experience. Maids in Boston, factory workers in Chicago and farmers in California lived much different lives despite being part of the same country.Cinemas, radios, television sets and records changed all that. Americans might do different things during the workday, but at night and on weekends, we were watching and listening to the same things—things made in America, primarily for Americans, by the first modern celebrities.It was the birth of the monoculture—a word that captures the historically unique power of American entertainment in the 20th century. An estimated 200 million tickets were sold for “Gone With the Wind,” which came out in 1939, when the population of the U.S. was 130 million. The “Amos ’n’ Andy” radio show was so popular that movie theaters scheduled around it and piped the audio in on their speakers. In 1983, more than 100 million people watched the finale of “M*A*S*H.”Americans could count on the fact that their neighbors, their coworkers, or the stranger they sat next to on a plane knew the same pop culture as them and quite possibly had an interesting opinion about it. We talked about the stuff we had watched and listened to at work, on dates and at family reunions. The monoculture was a unifying force when politics, race, and geographic and generational divides kept threatening to tear us apart.