Media and the Rise  of Celebrity Culture

Amy Henderson

Heroes of the Revolutionary era were meant to give the nation a sense of historical legitimacy: if, as Milton wrote, “Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise,” then it was a spur to virtue.  Above all other figures of the Revolutionary generation, George Washington stood as the great embodiment of national virtue, the symbol of the fledgling nation’s essential worthiness.  Heroes of this era were gentlemen, scholars, and patriots—traditional representatives of such basic social institutions as the state, the military, and the church—and their lives served as examples.  As one contemporary magazine declared, “The biography of illustrious men furnishes the most instructive history of the times in which they lived. . . .” 

As the Revolutionary generation died out,  a  new assemblage of heroes was sought.  Washington Irving wrote that Americans “want something to rally round; some brilliant light to allure them from afar. . . .  They want something to attract and concentrate their affections. . .”  Literary historian R.W.B. Lewis has written that the heroic image contrived between 1820 and 1860 was that of an “American Adam,” a figure of innocence and promise who was, as Emerson said, “the simple genuine self against the whole world.” In an age filled, as Lewis argues, with an optimism about a new culture in the making, the country’s novelists, poets, essayists, critics, historians, and preachers all entered into the discourse with gusto, seeking to construct not  only  a  national narrative, but to create that epic’s protagonist.  The Adamic hero, freed from the past and boasting such intrinsic characteristics as self-reliance, virtue, and industry, would become the central figure in the quest for national legitimacy. 

The conceptual distance separating Revolutionary heroes from their mid-nineteenth century counterparts was small.  In 1865 Emerson eulogized Lincoln as a “plain man of the people” who “did not offend by superiority” and who had “a strong sense of duty”; elsewhere he depicted history in terms of its “representative men”—neither of which sensibility would have been alien to prior generations.  It was only in the later nineteenth century, with the revolution in communications technology and the creation of a mass urban landscape, that our heroic vision was altered.  The face of fame itself changed with what Daniel Boorstin has termed the “Graphic Revolution,” the advent, that is, both of mechanical means of image reproduction and of facilities for mass dispersion of information.  The emergence of photography and chromolithography eventuated in an explosive growth of mass publications—magazines and newspapers—in post-Civil War America.  The first truly mass urban newspapers appeared in the 1880s, and were made possible by high-speed presses, the linotype, halftone photo reproduction, and the emergence of news-gathering organizations such as the Associated Press—all of which made the daily newspaper the central supplier of national and world news.   The circulation of daily papers increased 400% between 1870 and 1900—partly as a result of technology, and partly because of rising literacy rates and the growth of recreational and leisure time. 

The new magazines such as “McClure’s” that appeared in the 1890s also played a role in enlarging the popular imagination, thereby redefining ideals of fame, success, and national heroism.   At century’s end, America’s most-admired figures were hero-inventors such as Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Italian emigre Guglialmo Marconi; commercial success also anointed such financial giants as J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, so-called “captains of industry” who were idolized for fighting their way to Darwinian peaks of capitalism. 

But then the look of fame shifted again, turning full face into the twentieth century.  The new era’s heroes were people who muckraked the old: figures such as Theodore Roosevelt rode the crest of change and intimated some ability to reshape the cultural context.  In 1905 the “American Magazine” stated that “The old standards are passing.  The old gods are dying in the world of greedy finance.”  Journalist William Allen White wrote in his autobiography that “That decade which climaxed in 1912 was a time of tremendous change in our national life. . . . The American people were melting down old heroes and recasting the mold in which heroes were made.” 

It was more than recasting old metal:  new alloys were created that entirely reconfigured the heroic mold.  Between 1890 and the 1920s, twenty-three million people immigrated here from Eastern Europe and southern Italy, landing mostly in eastcoast cities.  The “genteel tradition” that had been the sinew of American mainstream culture and its heroes dissolved in this mass new urban stew, and a vernacular culture, drawing on the new mass idiom, was put into place.  In many instances, this new culture was rooted in the entertainment industry. 

Almost as soon as mass publications had appeared in the 1870s and ’80s, the American public evinced a particular fascination for entertainers, demanding articles about them in magazines and newspapers.  In one newspaper article written in the late 1880s, a journalist gave vent to the incipient phenomenon of the matinee idol: “It is remarkable how much attention the stage and things pertaining to it are receiving nowadays from the magazines.”  Twenty years ago, he argued, such a thing would have been thought “indecorous,” but the drama “now makes such a large part of the life of society that it has become a topic of conversation among all classes, furnishing an endless gossip to the trivial, and intellectual interest to the serious.” Indeed, magazines specializing in illustrated articles about leading actors found a ravenous audience, often featuring stories about such favorites as the Barrymores or any number of Ziegfeld Follies girls.  The early decades of this century saw the heyday of Broadway’s “Great White Way” (so-named in 1901 by O.J. Gude, a designer of advertising displays); in the peak season of 1927-1928, Broadway boasted 254 productions.  This vibrant theatrical scene fed an ever growing demand for more publicity about the stars.  And in a wonderful coincidence of technological inventiveness, by the late 1920s stars were available to their public not only live on stage, but on the air and moving across the silver screen. 

The rise of a celebrity-based culture in this century can in part be attributed to America’s change-over from a producing to a consuming society.  It also has to do with the shift in our cultural perspective that occurred in the late nineteenth century, when, as Lawrence W. Levine has argued in his discussions on “highbrow/lowbrow” culture, upper and middle class Americans felt threatened by “a new universe of strangers” who bristled with “anarchic change” and the specter of social fragmentation.  To overcome these fears, the culture tilted inward, away from “character” toward “personality,” and to self-realization rather than selfless public virtue.  The advent of a consumer society, as Warren Susman argued in his essay on “‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth Century Culture,” produced a culture of personality as a response to change in the social order: “there rapidly developed another vision of self, another vision of self-development and mastery, another method of the presentation of self in society.” Personality became a means to distinguish our individual selves from the mass.  In “Culture and Communications,” Susman argues that by the 1930s man had replaced the eighteenth century vision of “God as a god of design.  In a world increasingly out of order . . . man as designer was called upon to find some new order in the world.” 

In a culture preoccupied with personality, “celebrity” became a measure of success.  But even more important to the rise of celebrity, and what in fact facilitated this rise, was the centralization of the entertainment industry in New York between 1900 and 1929.  For all kinds of entertainment—opera and operetta, vaudeville and variety, contemporary and classical theater, recordings, radio, and film—New York emerged as the central market in these decades.  Star personality-celebrities fueled this energetic commercial culture, and in fact became that culture’s icons, packaged and promoted by tangential industries that grew up around the entertainment industry.  New “brokers,” such as theatrical agents and public relations flacks, by the late 1920s had constructed what one witness called a “staggering machine of desire” that centered on celebrity.  As William Leach has recently argued in an essay on “Brokers and the New Corporate, Industrial Order,” a network of institutional circuitry emerged between 1890 and 1929, at the heart of which “was a new group of brokers who facilitated the movement and distribution of images, information, and money central to both economic and cultural formation.” And the focus of this new order was the celebrity. 

One way to measure America’s shift away from a hero-oriented stance to an embrace of celebrity was, as Leo Lowen-thal argued in Radio Research, 1942-1943, to survey the biographical articles that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers between 1901 and 1941: in the years from 1901-1914, 74 percent of the subjects came from traditional fields such as politics, business, and the professions.  But after 1922 over half came from the world of entertainment: sports figures like Joe Louis and Babe Ruth, and movie stars such as Gloria Swanson and Charlie Chaplin.  The machinery providing mass information—the new broker network and the  flourishing print,  broadcasting, recording, and film industries—created a ravenous market for celebrity culture.  Media-generated fame became a raging popular vogue. 

Celebrities were able to broach all cultural levels.  Between 1906 and 1920, Metropolitan Opera stars Enrico Caruso and Geraldine Farrar were the most successful box office draws at the opera.  But their popularity transcended Golden Horseshoe audiences, as newspapers and periodicals  fanned their fame and enormously lucrative sales placed their recordings in millions of households.  Farrar even went to Hollywood in 1915, cajoled West by Cecil B. DeMille to appear in such of his early “spectaculars”  as “Joan the Woman.” 

Indeed, as the entertainment industry—or at least the increasingly popular film industry—moved West, celebrity culture became a national pasttime.  If early “flickers” and back alley lantern shows had had a sleazy reputation, from 1908 to 1915 the movies had developed into a middle class entertainment.  The rise of such stars as Chaplin—and the clever import of such highbrow divas as Farrar—brought films a mainstream legitimacy.  And, as had happened in New York with the entertainment industry, a vast range of media paraphernalia came into being to support the star system in Hollywood—press agents, advertisers, and fan magazines such as “Photoplay.” It was almost as if the new brokers of consumerism had only used New York for practice. 

In the 1920s and ’30s, Hollywood celebrities came to represent the quintessence of glamour.  Packaging star imagery became a major component of the Hollywood dream machine: the enduring images of the stars, rather than their evanescent shadows on the silver screen, were the portraits made by each studio for publicity purposes.  By the late 1920s, each of the major studios had its own portrait gallery; here studio photographers created a style of portraiture that crystallized stardom.  Armed with banks of lights, large format cameras, retouching pencils, but above all with an aesthetic of glamour, they coaxed celluloid icons from mere flesh and blood.  Even in the depressed economy of the 1930s, the American public responded exuberantly to this larger-than-life celebrity.  While Broadway’s finances floundered in the 1930s, Hollywood flourished, with some eighty million people a week attending “the pictures.” 

The advent of the broadcast industry in the 1920s marked another quantum leap in the cultivation of celebrity culture.  While the film industry expanded in response to popular demand, and while the recording industry enjoyed a 600% increase in sales between 1933 and 1938, it was radio that became the archetypal medium for mass culture.  Unlike movies, radio was a household presence: in 1934 an average radio cost about $35, and 60% of all American household  had at least one set.   And, unlike records, radio was live: entertainment and information were there at the touch of the dial.  Radio stars such as Rudy Vallee, Jack Benny, and Burns and Allen became not just celebrities, but virtual members of the family. 

And while entertainers dominated the airwaves, broadcasting created political celebrities as well.  Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election in 1932 coincided with radio’s own coming of age, and he mastered the medium within weeks of assuming office.  A New York newspaper reporter noted, “While painting a verbal picture expansive enough for a museum mural, Roosevelt reduced it to the proportions of a miniature hanging cozily on the wall of a living room.” 

Others thought that radio would “purify politics.” A poet waxed that “The venomous darts/of the demagogue cannot pass through radio’s airwaves”—an optimism soon dispelled by the likes of Father Charles E. Coughlin, who won an enormous following in the 1930s by using radio to spread an increasingly proto-fascist brand of politics. 

Television, early in its flickering life, provided a similar arena when it broadcast the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings.  For thirty-six days the camera mercilessly deconstructed Sen. Joseph Mc-Carthy—who, ironically, had first achieved celebrity (or “well-knownness”) by manipulating the media.  Day after day, television broadcast McCarthy’s slow dissolve.  One housewife told a reporter that, as the days of televised hearings wore on, “I just started to know more about him . . . and I became afraid of such a man, that the power he had was terrible.” Here was more than political spectacle: here was the media showing that it could create or destroy with equanimity. 

As radio and television have come to be the essential means for communicating the political message, the media itself has become what historian Alan Brinkley has called “the central arbiter of political reality,” conferring or rescinding legitimacy—and celebrity—by the very power of the microphone’s resonance or the camera’s eye.  But what if the camera lies?  What if, as Boorstin argued in The Image, media-created “pseudo-events” only blurred the distinction between fact and fiction? 

To what extent has the media-generated celebrity culture contributed to what French sociologist Jean Baudrillard has characterized as a culture dominated by “simulacra”—that is, by images with no real reference to the real world? Are we then left, in this image dominated culture, to a world that is itself but a giant simulation of reality? 

In a recent “Calvin and Hobbes” comic vignette, Calvin and his tiger friend were sledding down a hill when Calvin opines that he wishes their venture were being televised: “In my opinion, television validates existence.” If the cameras were there to record their ride, it “would become a part of mass consciousness,” because on TV, “the event is determined by the image, not its substance.”  Indeed, “with  some strong visuals, our sled ride could conceivably make us cultural icons!” 

The celebrity culture of this century is a far remove from  more heroic days, when Thomas Carlyle wrote that “The history of mankind is the history of its great men: the important thing is to find these out . . . clean the dirt from them . . . and place them on their proper pedestals.”  Today, instead of heroes for the ages, we live in a disposable culture where, as Andy Warhol proclaimed, we each have a chance at our own fifteen minutes of celebrity fame.  We are told that the American attention span hovers around 9.8 seconds—the length of the average television “sound bite” during the 1988 presidential campaign.  So, as we search for  new celebrities in this decade that closes out the millennium, who is to say if the  next  face of fame resembles nothing so much as a hologram, its image embedded in a three dimensional laser bath?  Mutatis mutandis. 

Lawrence W. Levine,  Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America  (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).

R. W. B. Lewis,  The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955). 

Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds., Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America  (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1957). 

Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).

Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century  (New York: Pantheon, 1984). 

William R. Taylor, ed., Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World  (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1992). 

Amy Henderson is a historian at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.