Self-Exposure

Human-Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890-1940

Charles L. Ponce de Leon

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780807862216
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Journalisme

Few features of contemporary American culture are as widely lamented as the public's obsession with celebrity--and the trivializing effect this obsession has on what appears as news. Nevertheless, America's "culture of celebrity" remains misunderstood, particularly when critics discuss its historical roots. In this pathbreaking book, Charles Ponce de Leon provides a new interpretation of the emergence of celebrity. Focusing on the development of human-interest journalism about prominent public figures, he illuminates the ways in which new forms of press coverage gradually undermined the belief that famous people were "great, " instead encouraging the public to regard them as complex, interesting, even flawed individuals and offering readers seemingly intimate glimpses of the "real" selves that were presumed to lie behind the calculated, self-promotional fronts that celebrities displayed in public. But human-interest journalism about celebrities did more than simply offer celebrities a new means of gaining publicity or provide readers with the "inside dope, " says Ponce de Leon. In chapters devoted to celebrities from the realms of business, politics, entertainment, and sports, he shows how authors of celebrity journalism used their writings to weigh in on subjects as wide-ranging as social class, race relations, gender roles, democracy, political reform, self-expression, material success, competition, and the work ethic, offering the public a new lens through which to view these issues.

Chapter 1: Becoming Visible

Fame and Celebrity in the Modern Age

Published in 1959 to considerable fanfare, Earl Blackwell’s and Cleveland Amory’s International Celebrity Register, a massive volume offering readers capsule biographies of 2,200 public figures, arrived on the American cultural scene with an aura of importance that was not uncommon among works published during the 1950s. This was a time when authors, publishers, and most Americans were acutely conscious of living amid new circumstances, in a society that was the quintessence of the modern. And what could be more modern than this new reference work, bringing together figures from a variety of backgrounds and occupations under a new rubric, which made a mockery of the old distinctions of lineage and class that had marked its precursor, the notoriously elitist Social Register?

As Blackwell and Amory noted, the Celebrity Register covered “a multitude of fields” and included baseball players as well as businessmen, starlets as well as scientists, comedians as well as Supreme Court justices. What united these disparate figures was not accomplishment “in the sense of true or lasting worth” but rather visibility. All of them, to one degree or another, had seen their activities publicized, and this treatment, in turn, had lifted them into the company of other celebrities. “We think we have a better yardstick than the Social Register, or Who’s Who, or any such book,” Blackwell and Amory asserted in a triumphalist tone that echoed the confidence and democratic spirit of the era. Rather than argue over the merits of achievements in widely divergent fields, a course that over the years had penalized entertainers, athletes, and other figures whose work was not considered serious, Black-well and Amory had identified a new means of comparison: “all you have to do,” they suggested, “is weigh … press clippings.”¹

Yet for some commentators this seemingly logical innovation was another sign that American culture had reached a new level of banality. Not long after the appearance of the Celebrity Register, the historian Daniel J. Boorstin delivered a searing indictment of the culture of celebrity and the “big names” who dominated the media and the public’s consciousness, an indictment that pointed to Blackwell’s and Amory’s reference book as a prime example of a widespread tendency to embrace the vacuous and the ephemeral. “The celebrity,” Boorstin argued, “is a person who is known for his well-knownness.” His fame bore no relation to achievements; manufactured by press agents adept at exploiting the conventions of newsgathering, often it was not even deserved. Yet there he stood, ensconced in a pantheon in which the starlet Anita Ekberg appeared alongside President Eisenhower, the subject of television interviews, magazine profiles, and regular items in syndicated gossip columns, his face instantly recognizable, his name a household word.

According to Boorstin, the celebrity was a “human pseudo-event,” one of countless pseudo-events that clamored for the public’s attention. Bearing an ambiguous relationship to reality, pseudo-events were conceived to be newsworthy and thus attract the press. Their rise was attributable to what Boorstin called the “Graphic Revolution”: the spread of new technologies—printing, telegraphy, photography, moving pictures, television—that allowed for the preservation, transmission, and widespread diffusion of information and images. The application of these technologies to newsgathering, Boorstin contended, had increased public demand for such information and images; the demand exceeded the supply of legitimate events, resulting in the manufacture of contrived events that were more interesting to the public. The public appeal of pseudo-events had further encouraged the press and the publicity industries to rely on them. By the middle of the twentieth century they had crowded out legitimate events and assumed center stage in public discourse.

Even worse, the rise of pseudo-events and the new culture of celebrity posed a dire threat to heroism. Boorstin conceded that acts of heroism remained common in modern America, and that some of the men and women responsible for them occasionally gained public recognition for their deeds. But these heroes were now dwarfed by celebrities. “All older forms of greatness now survive only in the shadow of this new form,” he noted ruefully. And when an authentic hero—Boorstin’s example was the aviator Charles Lindbergh—appeared on the scene, he was inexorably drawn into the maw of the celebrity-making machinery and reduced to the trivialized stature of less deserving figures. The well-knownness of the celebrity, in short, was a condition fostered by the mass media, which cheapened the substantive achievements of people deserving fame by placing them alongside people whose fame was undeserved, a process made possible by the media’s propensity for focusing the spotlight not on achievements but on “personalities.”²

Recognizing the pivotal role played by the media is the essential starting point for any analysis of celebrity. What distinguishes celebrities from the anonymous masses is visibility, a kind of visibility made possible by the media and shaped by journalistic conventions that make celebrities seem at once extraordinary and real: complex, interesting “human beings” whose unique talents and gifts are accompanied by traits that are commonplace and familiar to ordinary people.³ Viewed from this angle, as a peculiar state to which some people are elevated by the media, celebrity is more easily understood as a historical phenomenon. It appears not as some degraded product of technological innovation and its mind-numbing effects on the public, but as a modern, mass-mediated incarnation of a much older and venerable concept. The appropriate distinction is not between celebrity and heroism, as Boorstin would have it, but between celebrity and its premodern antecedent, fame.

This is the conclusion of Leo Braudy’s magisterial history of fame from antiquity to the present, The Frenzy of Renown. For Braudy, celebrity represents the most recent stage of a sweeping “democratization of fame” that began with the development of printing and the spread of literacy, and accelerated when the new technologies of Boorstin’s Graphic Revolution were introduced. But as even Boorstin recognized, not just technology was at work here. The emergence of celebrity was inspired even more by the social, economic, and political transformations that have remade the world since the sixteenth century, and by new values and beliefs that were integral to this process of “modernization.” Thus celebrity is fame not just democratized but modernized—a fame informed by values that have fundamentally altered the ways we think about individuals and the social order.⁴

Fame, Braudy reminds us, was rare and highly valued. People did not become famous overnight; in most cases, it took many years, sometimes even generations, for a person to achieve wide renown. Fame was also reserved for those who performed, or were said to have performed, heroic or miraculous deeds, and was transmitted through folklore. These tales, embellished and revised over the years, stressed the qualities that made famous people extraordinary and enabled them to perform their feats, qualities that lifted them far above the common rung of humanity and brought them close to the realm of the divine. Indeed, fame was intimately related to hagiography, a mode of literature that was overtly religious or supernatural in inspiration. It was their connection to the supernatural that made the famous “great.”

But as Braudy also reminds us, from the outset fame was vulnerable to a kind of corruption that is widely associated with celebrity. Vain and ambitious leaders like Alexander the Great built elaborate monuments to their achievements to ensure that their fame extended into posterity. Other rulers had scribes write flattering official biographies, or commissioned artists to produce portraits and sculptures depicting them in a heroic, often exaggerated light. Around the sixteenth century such self-promotion was greatly facilitated by the development of new media. Printing and engraving allowed biographies and images of the famous and soon-to-be famous to reach a wider audience than in the past, an audience that would continue to grow with the expansion of literacy and the invention of technologies of mass reproduction. Portraits, statues, and manuscripts had been the property of elites or confined to locales that precluded their viewing by a large number of people. Public monuments had reached a wider audience, but one composed primarily of persons who lived nearby. Printing and engraving changed all of this, creating new modes of communication that enabled those seeking fame to spread their names and countenances across vast expanses of space. Quickly recognizing the utility of these new media, rulers such as Elizabeth I and Louis XIV directed their scribes and artists to create materials expressly designed to be disseminated among their subjects. At stake here, as Louis XIV revealed when he addressed an assembly of writers commissioned to be his official historians, was something quite valuable—“the most precious thing in the world to me”—the persona that would be visible to his subjects and remembered over time.⁵

By the seventeenth century these efforts were inspired not just by vanity but by the desire of elites to bolster their rule. They were especially important for monarchical regimes committed to economic modernization. As many nobles and aristocrats discovered, campaigns devised to centralize authority, encourage new forms of economic activity, raise more revenue from their subjects, and exploit new opportunities abroad often produced unanticipated consequences. Groups who had been content and deferential became angry when new policies affected them adversely. And in many countries new classes emerged, eager for a share of power and determined to use any means—including mobilizing the common folk—to acquire it. The result, as historians of the early modern period have noted, was an upsurge in protest and political activity among groups previously noted for their quiescence. It is therefore not surprising that many monarchial regimes eagerly embraced the self-promotional opportunities afforded by the new media of printing and engraving, for they appeared as a tool for managing conflicts and regaining the loyalty of newly restive groups. For example, by shrewdly manipulating these new cultural forms, Elizabeth I fashioned a persona that allowed her to embody a unified, imperial England, a strategy that was widely imitated, with varying degrees of success, by nobles on the Continent.⁶

These new media could also be used by the opposition, however. By the mid-eighteenth century a vast underground literature attacking the prerogatives and pretensions of monarchs, aristocrats, and the church had emerged, particularly in France, where one of the regimes most strongly committed to modernization refused to share power with an increasingly assertive bourgeoisie. This literature, as the historian Robert Darnton has shown, included not only the writings of the philosophes but also vitriolic diatribes and exposés like The Private Life of Louis XV. Written in a style that “anticipated the gossip columnists of the yellow press,” these chroniques scandaleuses revealed the corrupt and decadent behavior of the nobility and its lackeys, information allegedly gathered through an elaborate network of snoops and gossips. The authors of these books and pamphlets were aware of the role that imagery and symbolism had come to play in buttressing the nobility’s authority. And so rather than address substantive issues that divided the regime and its critics, they expressed their contempt for it by “desanctifying its symbols, destroying the myths that gave it legitimacy in the eyes of the public, and perpetuating the countermyth of degenerate despotism.”⁷

The appearance of this literature marked a watershed in the democratization of fame and the emergence of celebrity. Rulers had always been the subjects of gossip that circulated by word of mouth among their subjects—gossip that no doubt contradicted the hagiographic imagery and stories promulgated by their hired flacks. Yet the gossip had circulated informally, and it had never been visible to the same degree as official representations of the regime.⁸ It is likely, however, that the strains created by the new policies of modernization increased the quantity and virulence of orally transmitted gossip and, with the development of printing, transformed it into a genuinely subversive force. Thus the chroniques scandaleuses gave new form and a potent political edge to a discourse—unflattering gossip—that had long existed under the ancien régime and may well have been as old as antiquity. Now in print and mobilized for political and commercial ends, this subterranean counterpoint to the hagiographic discourse of fame achieved a new level of visibility and made the public images of elites increasingly contested.

By the late eighteenth century printed gossip challenging the official personas of elites had spread beyond France to other nations on the Continent, in England, and in the fledgling United States. Such material was part of a proliferation of broadsheets, pamphlets, newspapers, and books, most of them unremarkable in every way. Yet combined they came to constitute the outlines of what Jürgen Habermas has called the “bourgeois public sphere,” a realm apart from the state where individuals—at this point only propertied, educated men—could express their views and debate issues of common concern. Though rooted in new institutions and physical spaces like voluntary associations, debating societies, and coffeehouses, the public sphere was essentially a discursive space, linked by new forms of printed material, where all sorts of claims and arguments were made and contested. By the mid-nineteenth century public spheres had developed within virtually every Western nation-state, and over the course of the nineteenth century, as literacy rates increased and communications technology improved, these national public spheres came to influence one another and coalesced into a larger, overlapping sphere of transatlantic dimensions.⁹

As Habermas’s critics have noted, from the start the exclusivity of the bourgeois public sphere was assailed by a host of counterpublics, composed of women, peasants, workers, and peoples of color, demanding inclusion and forcing bourgeois men to address issues that they would have preferred to ignore. Thus the bourgeois public sphere was never the only the public sphere, and during the course of the nineteenth century, as it grew in order to accommodate these counterpublics, it assumed a different shape, becoming a site of conflict and negotiation between dominant groups and the often discontented groups that they presumed to lead. Moreover, from the start the public sphere was a realm tainted by the pursuit of private interests, despite conventions that seemed to prohibit this. Celebrated as an arena where rational discussion prevailed, the public sphere was equally open to polemics, propaganda, and self-promotion—much of it crafted to arouse an emotional response, be it sympathy, contempt, or outrage. The public sphere was as accessible to the muckraking authors of the chroniques scandaleuses as it was to the philosophes. And in the nineteenth century, as it was enlarged and influenced by commercial values, the public sphere became even more strongly dominated by material that was self-promotional, sensational, or produced for a specific effect.¹⁰

The emergence of public spheres within large cities and nation-states, and the gradual linking of those spheres to a larger transatlantic sphere, had a tremendous effect on the ways in which individuals fashioned their public personas. Now the subjects or potential subjects of widely disseminated printed exposés, traditional elites redoubled their efforts to exploit the opportunities for publicity created by the public sphere, so as to regain legitimacy and secure a place in a society increasingly dominated by bourgeois values. This was particularly true in nations like the United States and England, where democratic currents were stronger than on the Continent and the upper classes were more likely to be subjected to criticism. In the early nineteenth century, for example, many members of the educated gentry in the United States sought to advertise their commitment to democracy and “producer” values, a trend that inspired Theodore Sedgwick, the son of an archconservative Federalist, to attack the ideal of leisure that had long shaped the lives of men in his circle. “[T]o live without some regular employment,” Sedgwick proclaimed, “is not reputable.” Sedgwick was not alone in expressing such views. Beginning in the 1790s they were common among educated, well-to-do American men, especially those who identified with Jeffersonian values but even, after 1810, among men like Sedgwick and the rising Massachusetts politician Daniel Webster, whose political views were far more conservative.¹¹

The public sphere’s influence on ambitious men from humble backgrounds was even greater. The new avenues for visibility that it offered were ideally suited to individuals eager to promote themselves or build support for causes to which they were devoted, ranging from republicanism to phrenology. And to gain visibility it was not always necessary to write material for publication. As commoners discovered, visibility could be acquired through other means, such as by striking the right poses at public events or making an impression on the streets. Benjamin Franklin was one of the early masters of this peculiar new game: his skill was integral to his rise to prominence in eighteenth-century Philadelphia, and he later employed it quite successfully while serving as a diplomat in Europe. Eager to distinguish the United States from the Old World, Franklin created a sensation by dressing in animal skins at public functions and allowing himself to become an icon of republican simplicity—even while, behind the scenes, he immersed himself in sybaritic pleasures provided by his aristocratic hosts. These public appearances, as we shall see, became all the more important as the mass-circulation press expanded its coverage of urban life and made it possible for individuals to enhance their visibility by becoming the subjects of reportage. In short, the development of the public sphere created a new sort of visibility that was inextricably tied to self-promotion and the advancement of causes—a visibility largely mediated through the press. Within the public sphere individuals became “public figures,” a category that owed more to their visibility and ability to attract publicity than to their achievements or pedigree.¹²

For most commoners, gaining visibility was only the beginning. It was equally important for them to ensure that they were linked to the right values—“modern” values that distinguished them from representatives of the old regime. For example, many merchants and entrepreneurs joined churches and voluntary associations that advertised their dedication to the work ethic and the values of worldly asceticism. Franklin’s Junto, a literary club that he and other young men-on-the-make established in the 1720s, was an important antecedent of these groups, which proliferated in the nineteenth century. Other ambitious men wrapped themselves in the mantle of republicanism. Reject...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Self-Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism and The Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890–1940
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Becoming Visible
• Chapter 2: The Rise of Celebrity Journalism
• Chapter 3: Exposure or Publicity?
• Chapter 4: True Success
• Chapter 5: From Parasites to Public Servants
• Chapter 6: Practical Idealism
• Chapter 7: There’s No Business Like Show Business
• Chapter 8: Heroes and Pretenders
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index