A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America

America's Romance With The Outsider

It is rare to find a scholarly book that captures both a broad history and the landmarks of one's own life. As a child of post WWII America, I found this book told me a good deal about the era in which I have lived. It brought back memories. The book is also about a subject -- the American outsider -- that I have thought about for a long time. I learned a great deal from this book by Grace Elizabeth Hale, "A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America" (2011), even if I might not have discussed the issue myself in precisely her way. Hale is Associate Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Virginia. She has written an earlier book, "Making Whiteness: the Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890 -- 1940". Her new book on outsiders also has as a major theme the manner in which white middle-class Americans have perceived African Americans. The book is published by Oxford University Press.

In her new book, Hale examines what Hale describes as the "history of a knot of desire, fantasy, and identification" that constitutes the romance of the outsider, the "belief that people somehow marginal to society possess cultural resources and values missing among other Americans." (p. 1) She traces the large role of the outsider in 19th Century America through Thoreau, bohemia, and, in particular, ministrely as practiced by both African Americans and whites. The focus remains, however, on America after WW II.

Hale argues that American life following the war was dominated by the image of the outsider and she explores why this was the case. She finds Americans became fascinated with the outsider as a result of their dissatisfaction with centrism -- what they came to find as the materialism, boredom and lack of deeply felt commitments in middle class suburban life. Americans took to and identified with the figure of the outsider or rebel, whom they frequently, but not always, identified with African Americans in the South. By identifying with the outsider, Hale maintains, Americans pursued two not fully consistent ends: first, they pursued what they viewed as their own independence and individual autonomy. Second, Americans, in their fascination with outsiders, wanted connectedness and value, a sense of sharing with others. Developing these two goals is critical to the exploration of the outsider that Hale undertakes in her detailed modern history.

A strength of Hale's book is her exploration of the role of the outsider on both the left and right of America's political spectrum. The relationship between the fascination with outsiders and leftist politics is not hard to find. But Hale shows that some modern American conservatives, especially William F. Buckley, also positioned themselves, accurately enough, as outsiders in that they were opposing the liberal consensus developing in the 1950s. Later day conservatives and members of the religious right, including Jerry Falwell, also portrayed their movement in terms of outsiders, conservative, evangelical Christians, looking for their voice. Other religious outsiders, such as the Jesus People of the late 1960s -- early 1970s, appear for the most part apolitical. Hale links outsiders of the left and right to show their commonalities. She perceptively concludes that the fascination with outsiders is neither left nor right but rather involves a rejection of centrism and conformity.

In the first part of her study, "Learning to Love Outsiders" Hale examines the source of Americans' fascination with outsiders in the books, movies, and music of the 1950s. Among the best sections of her book are the early, nuanced discussions of Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" and Kerouac's "On the Road". Both these books, which carefully read will each bear several competing interpretations, played large roles in stating and developing the alienation of young Americans from the worlds of their parents. Hale discusses early rock and roll with Elvis Presley and the strong influence of African American rhythm and blues and the perceived influence of African American sensuality. The largest part of her discussion concerns Bob Dylan and the growth of American folk music with its search for authenticity. In the "authenticity" romance, in which practitioners largely misinterpreted earlier popular music and turned it to their own image, many people saw authenticity and sincerity as values above all others. Furthermore, they internalized the concept of authenticity to make it solely a matter of feelings and the heart rather than following a relationship to other people based upon considerations such as nationality, religion, gender, or occupation. The search for an internalized "authenticity" dominates the fascination with outsiders who are thought to have more of it than the people in the center.

In the second part of the book, Hale discusses the role of the outsider as it played out in the variations of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and the 1960s. She discusses how the black power movement rejected middle class American imaginations of the outsider and how these imaginations then transferred, in many instances, to other causes. Hale offers what I thought was a sympathetic look at the Jesus people and their attempts to return to God, as they perceived God, and a far less sympathetic look at Jerry Falwell and at abortion opponents who coopted the peaceful disobedience techniques utilized by the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s to pursue their disagreement with legalized abortion.

Throughout the book and in a too-brief concluding chapter, Hale tries to assess the strengths and weaknesses of American's view of the outsider. The concept of the outsider has become so broad that, except for extreme cases, it is now difficult to distinguish it from the mainstream. Hale finds that the focus on outsiders creates a largely imaginary portrayal of the outsider figure and frequently works to avoid focusing upon and addressing hard, concrete issues. But she also finds that the outsider myth works "because it denies at the imaginary level the contradictions between the human fantasy of absolute individual autonomy and the human need for grounding in historical and contemporary social connections." It also is important, for Hale, because it encourages the middle class and those in authority to put aside and disavow the economic and political power they have in favor of other goals. She concludes that the time has come to develop "a new romance" in the loose tradition of the outsider. (p.. 308)

The book is carefully, thoughtfully, and on the whole even-handedly written. It is dense and well-documented. Although there is no bibliography, the detailed and substantive endnotes refer to a large range of important source material. In reading this book, I was reminded of some of the preoccupations, good and bad, of my life, and was able to understand them more fully. This book is valuable in its understanding of American life in the mid-20th Century.

Robin Friedman