Why? Crime fiction has long flourished in periods of social and political friction, when we hunger for both justice and escape. But it feels especially intriguing now. Today, the genre once dominated by white male detectives features more main characters from all genders, ethnicities, races, classes, and abilities. Its stories pursue—and even deepen—skepticism of America’s traditional congratulatory self-image. Crime novels, with their corrupt politicians and police officers, often sow mistrust of the nation’s habitual heroes. And while the genre has long championed maverick individualism as a model for success, it increasingly centers on community—a focus that seems newly relevant in the midst of national failure.

The classically American genre known as hard-boiled crime fiction was born during the 1920s, a time of rampant political corruption, white nationalism, and massive income inequality. The United States had recently emerged—victorious but traumatized—from World War I and the flu epidemic that took 670,000 American lives. The hero of so many of these stories, a maverick who set his own rules, followed his own ethics, and outsmarted the police, attracted readers by the thousands.

From Race Williams to the Continental Op to Sam Spade, hard-boiled private detectives also lined up with a common political current of the time, namely the dedication to “rugged individualism,” a phrase coined by Herbert Hoover in 1928 to describe a profoundly American mode of living. Hard-boiled detectives practiced self-sufficiency in every arena—mental, emotional, ethical, and existential. They didn’t emulate others, or yearn for the past, or try to be different.

Over the past century, maverick fictional private detectives have responded—directly or indirectly—to what was going on in politics. In many cases, they furnished the words and actions that Americans wanted from their elected officials, or would have liked to embody. During the Depression, Dashiell Hammett’s overworked but steady Continental Op was a model of resilience and humility. During World War II, Philip Marlowe, master of social critique and the clever one-liner, showed that European cultural eminence needed lowbrow American toughness in order to survive. During the Cold War, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, quick with a gun and fearless with revenge, embodied tough-talking anti-communism. In essence, the hard-boiled had become a wishful American self-portrait.

The one exception to hard-boiled detective dominance came during the Civil Rights era, which failed to produce a signature hero. The genre’s individualistic nature no longer seemed to meet the moment. The social justice movements of the ’60s evolved through the power of collective civil disobedience, with even the most iconic leaders connected to, rather than separated from, the masses. Individuals as such weren’t leading the way in forging new paths or departing from majority-established norms. Instead, multitudes were doing this, they were doing it together, and they were doing it for others.

More importantly, though, the genre’s racial politics were exposed as wrongheaded. As Shirley Chisholm put it, “‘Liberty and justice for all’ were beautiful words, but the ugly fact was that liberty and justice were only for white males.” Hard-boiled crime fiction had long made it seem that individualism was a choice—a decision not to conform—and that that choice in and of itself granted toughness and social power. “I don’t belong to any order,” says Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams in his debut appearance in the 1923 short story, “Knights of the Open Palm.” “It would be mighty bad in my line.” But of course, only white men—members of a social group at once powerful and invisible—had the luxury of full self-determination. It’s no accident that the “order” Williams casually decided not to join was the Ku Klux Klan.

For men like Race Williams, living as full individuals under the law and in the eyes of society was a given. For the women and African Americans marching during the 1960s, it was the goal. To pretend that individualism was simply there for the taking, as hard-boiled fiction often did, was an untenable and even perverse proposition.

The Civil Rights era was the end of the road, or at least the end of an unobstructed road, for a certain sort of fictional detective. The idea of an irreverent but exemplary white guy outsmarting the establishment could be reasonably appealing (to white audiences) when the establishment was simply moribund or incompetent or outdated. The hard-boiled detective couldn’t deny that he had coasted on that establishment’s racism and sexism. It was true, too, that he had worked, sometimes actively and sometimes with studied indolence, to keep individualism a white man’s prerogative. But grappling with all this would dismantle the easy confidence and entitlement that was also his main attraction.

In the 1970s, white male characters in crime fiction dealt with a changing social landscape in several ways. Some went for complete anachronism or denial—such as Mickey Spillane, whose Dogeron Kelly novel The Erection Set featured actress Sherri Malinou, the author’s second wife, posing naked on the cover. Some, like Robert Parker’s Spenser, surrounded themselves with women and people of color, but often used these characters as inscrutable accessories (“Hawk was as impassive and hard as an obsidian carving”), while nonetheless guarding center stage for themselves.

Only with the arrival of the ’80s did readers begin to see numerous fictional detectives from underrepresented communities. What the nation lacked in political representation, it made up for in fictional private detectives. There were female detectives (Kinsey Millhone, V I Warshawksi, Sharon McCone, Tess Monaghan), detectives of color (Easy Rawlins, Blanche White, Ivan Monk, Elouise Norton, Pete Fernandez, Charlotte Justice, Jack Yu), and queer detectives (Roxane Weary, Bobbi Logan). It was good to see characters surmounting racism and sexism, but in the real world, these forces remained exhaustingly consistent.

Crime fiction has never really shown us ways for populations to beat systems of crushing discrimination. The present historical reckoning, fueled by pandemic and protest, thus offers a chance for the genre to do more. Can the next generation of detectives overcome the intrinsic limits of their own individualism and show the rest of us how to surmount the white male supremacist system?

Undergirding the entire genre is an understanding that those who guard money and power, hurting others in the process, are suspect. This is a basic premise that has driven crime fiction from Edgar Allen Poe to Scooby Do to Jessica Jones—and, fortuitously, it’s the same premise driving social justice movements today.

Some of the most popular detective novels of the last two years (Kristen Lepionka’s Once You Go This Far and Stephen Mack Jones’s Lives Laid Away, to name only two examples) turn a sharp eye on systemic and institutional injustices. They build on the many fictional detectives, especially those created by women and writers of color, who have been speaking truth to power and focusing on collaboration for decades.

Individualism in crime fiction—as in business and politics—has often meant standing in the foreground, solving the problem, and taking the credit. It is harder and much less intuitive to put out unsung effort for the good of others. It runs against instinct and in some sense against national personality. What is more, it runs against the rules of narrative; most stories need a hero.

But the idea of justice resting on the shoulders of one man is an anachronism, and a destructively egocentric one. The civil rights protests of 2020 have illuminated (again) the power of collective action. They have also demonstrated that treating individualism as a limited commodity—as the hard-boiled did for decades—is a dead end. Individualism is an abundant force. Rather than isolating one person or group at the top of the pile, it can galvanize each of us to claim our power and stand up for ourselves and others. Fiction, and real life, show how we beat corrupt systems together.

The post Crime Fiction Is Ready to Meet the Moment  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What’s striking about these demands is that the responsibilities and obligations of American consumers are understood to be stories about individual accountability. Whether it is the government asking consumers to eschew a low price for the sake of patriotism, or economists calling on them to manage debt at the same time that they unleash their desires, demands made on consumers are imposed at the personal level. Each citizen must hold the reins of protection and growth in his or her own hands, making choices that apparently resonate on the national level.

Given the widespread belief in the invisible hand of the marketplace, such a personal touch seems out of place. Yet the logic behind the importance of the individual consumer is so deeply rooted that it’s hardly surprising to find it persists. It’s a formulation that goes back to 18th-century efforts to understand the creation and preservation of wealth.

Take, for example, one 1767 diatribe written by a frustrated New York linen draper. Infuriated by the poor state of his local economy—excessive imports had left the colony constantly in debt and drained of all hard currency—the merchant published a pamphlet that was intended to act as an object lesson in the arts of economizing. He painted a picture of an industrious farmer from Staten Island, busily bringing to market all the “beef, pork, corn, butter, cheese and wool” he could spare. Having earned a thousand pounds through his sales, he went on to buy the makings of a good party, bringing home “rum, sugar, wine, cloth, silk, muslin and tea.” But this farmer never spent more than he earned. As a result, he prospered.

When his son succeeded to the estate, the parable took a darker turn. The young man’s desire to be fashionable led to overspending on pricey imports. Claret, madeira, linen, chintz, and damask—all of which could have been substituted with items made at home—led to the young man’s ruin. His farm was sold, his “body shut up in prison.” The lesson from such a tale was clear, the linen purveyor suggested: “The conduct of a single Farmer and a Province in this respect differ no more than greater and less.” In other words, a healthy economy comes simply from responsible housekeeping.

Such morality tales were not the purview of protectionists alone. Free-trade enthusiasts likewise sought to justify their ideology with counter-parables about economically righteous behavior. In 1776, when the Scottish economist Adam Smith sought to persuade readers that restrictions on imports were unhelpful, he turned to the example of the “prudent master of a family” to make his case. Why would such a sensible man seek to manufacture shoes or clothes for himself, Smith argued, when it clearly made sense for him to seek out those items from cobblers and tailors who could make them faster and cheaper than any member of his own household? Leaping from the household to the nation, Smith continued: “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarcely be folly in that of a great kingdom. If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them.”

Regardless of ideology, such parables shared a basic didactic device: They erased differences between an individual’s personal economy and the nation’s political economy. Collapsing the distinctions between household and country made it easier to imagine that the judgments and actions of a single consumer could have a direct bearing on the health of the nation’s economy. Both authors—the linen merchant, and Smith—went on to argue that economic policy could structure and influence the creation of wealth. Still, the cornerstone of national wealth remained an individual’s actions. The role of policy was obscured by the familiar metaphor of the consumer at home.

In America, such parables about personal habits and individual accountability had special resonance. Even before Smith’s prognostications were rolling off the press, Americans had confronted the question of how far their actions as individual consumers might take them and their nascent nation. By boycotting English woolens and donning homespun and in refusing to drink East India Company tea, colonial consumers challenged the might of the British empire. By 1776, Americans had learned powerful lessons about their importance as individuals. Their everyday household decisions had helped birth a nation.

In the wake of the Revolution this form of patriotism lost some appeal. Still, the idea that each individual might make the choices that would create national wealth did not disappear. Faced with an enormous national debt and seeking ways to raise urgently-needed revenue, politicians turned back to the consumer. Members of the First Congress in 1789 passed a new tariff: Each time Americans bought a foreign luxury, they would pay a price to the nation for doing so.

Once again, personal economy sat at the heart of political economy. Praising the new tariff in 1789, The Connecticut Courant editorialized: “It teaches us to economize not by forbidding us to be extravagant but by making us pay for it if we are so.” For those who were wealthy, it was possible to shop and contribute to the nation’s coffers. For those who were poor or dependent, the only virtuous course of action was to abstain from the world of foreign luxury goods altogether.

This formulation led to a notion that economic liberties in the form of consumer choice should be reserved for the rich and powerful, rather than the poor and vulnerable. In addition, the idea that consumers as individuals had such a direct impact on the nation’s economic health gave rise to the virulent surveillance of less-wealthy consumers whose actions seemed not only to undermine their own solvency but that of the nation, too.

During the Panic of 1857, for instance, retailers scrambled to unload unwanted stock by reducing prices, closing down lines of credit, and selling cheap for cash. Since most Americans, rich and poor, depended on credit to survive, such an action could have provoked widespread condemnation. But it was not the frantic retailers who came in for criticism; instead, it was a “horde” of female shoppers that caught satirists’ attention. In a piece in Harper’s Weekly, women were described as a “spending animal” whose heart was “a bargain” and whose soul was “an immense reduction.” These shallow shoppers were not just criticized for their unbridled spending: They were accused of obliterating “republican values” too.

Even as the nation succumbed to cataclysmic Civil War, citizens continued to monitor each other and make judgments. In the Union, where a new and stringent tariff became law, Northern shoppers found they could defend their personal purchases as contributing to the nation’s coffers. In this way, President Abraham Lincoln’s government helped to enshrine consumption at the heart of America’s political economy, as a civic force for good. But even as the Republican Party helped transform shopping from liability into liberty for everyday Americans, the central idea that individual shoppers bore a personal responsibility to keep the nation solvent remained intact.

As modern-day accounts of consumer behavior show, Americans have not shaken off the lingering belief that the national economy is simply the household economy writ large. With the U.S. financial collapse in 2008, both media and government were quick to scrutinize the actions of the individual consumer. Overspending and irresponsible borrowing (rather than irresponsible lending, for example) were easier to understand. As Time magazine noted in a list of 25 people most to blame for the subprime crisis, consumers deserved some blame: “we enjoyed living beyond our means…no wonder we hoped it would never end.” As had been the case throughout America’s history, government looked to individuals to make right the nation’s economic predicament. Using the language of household economics, it was easy to lay the blame on the shoulders of individuals. Tales of personal fiscal irresponsibility offered a “common sense” solution to the problem; stories of structural failures did not.

The homespun vision of the nation as household enshrines the consumer as the agent of America’s fortune or failure. But such a vision is, of course, a fiction. Though individual citizens may be in charge of their own households, they are not in charge of the American household writ large. The citizen-consumer is at the mercy of national economic policy, not the other way around. Nonetheless, as with all homespun philosophies, it’s a myth that is hard to dispel. Perhaps that is not surprising. It’s a story as old as the nation itself.

The post Why Americans Think Managing the National Budget Is Like Balancing the Family Checkbook appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Cody’s tear made its television debut in 1971 at the close of a public service advertisement for the anti-litter organization Keep America Beautiful. Appearing in languid motion on TV over and over again during the 1970s, the tear also circulated in other media, stilled on billboards and print ads, forever fixing the image of Iron Eyes Cody as the Crying Indian. The ad won many prizes and is still ranked as one of the best commercials of all time. By the mid-1970s, an Advertising Council official noted, “TV stations have continually asked for replacement films” of the commercial, “because they have literally worn out the originals from the constant showings.” For many Americans, the Crying Indian became the quintessential symbol of environmental idealism. But a closer examination of the ad reveals that neither the tear nor the sentiment was what it seemed to be.

The campaign was based on many duplicities. The first of them was that Iron Eyes Cody was actually born Espera De Corti—an Italian-American who played Indian in both his life and on screen. The commercial’s impact hinged on the emotional authenticity of the Crying Indian’s tear. In promoting this symbol, Keep American Beautiful (KAB) was trying to piggyback on the counterculture’s embrace of Indian-ness as a more authentic identity than commercial culture.

The second duplicity was that KAB was composed of leading beverage and packaging corporations. Not only were they the very essence of what the counterculture was against; they were also staunchly opposed to many environmental initiatives.

KAB was founded in 1953 by the American Can Company and the Owens-Illinois Glass Company, who were later joined by the likes of Coca-Cola and the Dixie Cup Company. During the 1960s, KAB anti-litter campaigns featured Susan Spotless, a white girl who wore a spotless white dress and pointed her accusatory finger at pieces of trash heedlessly dropped by her parents. The campaign used the wagging finger of a child to condemn individuals for being bad parents, irresponsible citizens, and unpatriotic Americans. But by 1971, Susan Spotless no longer captured the zeitgeist of the burgeoning environmental movement and rising concerns about pollution.

The shift from KAB’s bland admonishments about litter to the Crying Indian did not represent an embrace of ecological values but instead indicated industry’s fear of them. In the time leading up to the first Earth Day in 1970, environmental demonstrations across the United States focused on the issue of throwaway containers. All these protests held industry—not consumers—responsible for the proliferation of disposable items that depleted natural resources and created a solid waste crisis. Enter the Crying Indian, a new public relations effort that incorporated ecological values but deflected attention from beverage and packaging industry practices.

KAB practiced a sly form of propaganda. Since the corporations behind the campaign never publicized their involvement, audiences assumed that KAB was a disinterested party. The Crying Indian provided the guilt-inducing tear KAB needed to propagandize without seeming propagandistic and countered the claims of a political movement without seeming political. At the moment the tear appears, the narrator, in a baritone voice, intones: “People start pollution. People can stop it.” By making individual viewers feel guilty and responsible for the polluted environment, the ad deflected the question of responsibility away from corporations and placed it entirely in the realm of individual action, concealing the role of industry in polluting the landscape.

When the ad debuted, KAB enjoyed the support of mainstream environmental groups, including the National Audubon Society and the Sierra Club. But these organizations soon resigned from its advisory council over an important environmental debate of the 1970s: efforts to pass “bottle bills,” legislation that would require soft drink and beer producers to sell, as they had until quite recently, their beverages in reusable containers. The shift to the throwaway was responsible, in part, for the rising levels of litter that KAB publicized, but also, as environmentalists emphasized, for the mining of vast quantities of natural resources, the production of various kinds of pollution, and the generation of tremendous amounts of solid waste. The KAB leadership lined up against the bottle bills, going so far, in one case, as to label supporters of such legislation as “Communists.”

We can still see the impact of the Crying Indian campaign today in mainstream portrayals of environmentalism that prioritize the personal over the political. The answer to pollution, as KAB would have it, had nothing to do with power, politics, or production decisions; it was simply a matter of how individuals acted in their daily lives. Ever since the first Earth Day, the mainstream media have repeatedly turned big systemic problems into questions of individual responsibility. Too often, individual actions like recycling and green consumerism have provided Americans with a therapeutic dose of environmental hope that fails to address our underlying issues.

Iron Eyes Cody (right) at a Keep America Beautiful awards ceremony with Leland C. Barbeur, president of the Fayetteville, N.C., County Youth Council, and Miss Teenage America Cathy Durden, in Washington, D.C. on Dec. 5, 1975. Photo courtesy of Associated Press.

But there is a final way that the commercial distorted reality. In the ad, the time-traveling Indian paddled his canoe out of the distant past, appearing as a visual relic of indigenous people who had supposedly vanished from the continent. He was presented as an anachronism who did not belong in the picture.

One of the commercial’s striking ironies is that Iron Eyes Cody became the Crying Indian at the same moment that actual Indians occupied Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, the very same body of water in which the actor paddled his canoe. For almost two years, from late 1969 through mid-1971, a period that overlapped with both the filming and release of the Crying Indian commercial, indigenous activists demanded that the U.S. government cede control of the abandoned island. They presented themselves not as past-tense Indians, but as coeval citizens laying claim to the land. The Alcatraz activists sought to challenge the legacies of colonialism and contest contemporary injustices—to address, in other words, the realities of native lives erased by the anachronistic Indians who typically populate Hollywood film. By contrast, the Crying Indian appears completely powerless. In the commercial, all he can do is lament the land his people lost.

In recent years, the large-scale organizing and protests against the Keystone XL Pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and other fossil fuel development projects all represent a powerful rejection of the Crying Indian. While the Crying Indian appeared as a ghost from the past who erased the presence of actual Indians from the landscape, these activists have visibly proposed structural solutions for the environment while demanding indigenous land rights. Moving beyond individual-driven messages, they cast off static symbols of the past to envision a just and sustainable future.

The post The “Crying Indian” Ad That Fooled the Environmental Movement appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This ideological impulse—which I and others call “voluntarism”—is a cultural trait that helps explain why the United States remains different from comparable wealthy, Western nations. Broadly speaking, voluntarism is not another term for American individualism, although it entails individualism. Voluntarism is the way Americans reconcile individualism and community. And we can feel the weight of American voluntarism in our approaches to public issues, not only in charter schools, but in debates about issues like Obamacare and gay marriage as well.

Other Western nations, by contrast, consider healthcare a civil right of citizens and a moral obligation of government. American tradition, however, treats healthcare as an individual’s personal responsibility, or at least as a personal responsibility exercised through voluntary association, as in workplace health insurance. When the debate around gay marriage shifted from a discussion of God, gender, sex, and propriety to a debate over individual rights, tolerance, and the personal freedom of Americans to choose their partners, the struggle for marriage equality became easier.

American voluntarism makes it hard for social-democratic reformers to persuade their fellow citizens to accept the types of ambitious state-run initiatives common in most Western democracies, such as universal healthcare, free preschools, and guaranteed labor rights. Conversely, the spirit of American voluntarism makes it harder for non-Americans to understand our public policies, which are often caricatured as being nakedly Darwinian.

That American society was notably different—exceptional was the term—from other Western societies was a staple for much of 20th-century social science. Researchers have offered up lists of hows and whys, trying to distill the difference. I joined the enterprise when I started researching my 2010 book, Made in America, and the evidence spoke to the centrality of voluntarism in understanding American culture and its so-called exceptionalism.

Observers have for generations described Americans as deeply individualistic. But, as I argued in Made in America, individualism is too simple a description. Certainly, deeply instilled in American culture is the assumption that we are each a “sovereign” individual: the belief that each person is, deep down, a unique character, distinct and separate from everyone else, that ultimately each person determines his or his own fate, and that individuals ought to be self-reliant.

From the perspective of world history, this notion of the sovereign individual is odd. Most cultures at most times treated individuals as organic parts of their family, lineage, and tribe. That is why, for example, collective punishment—you took our goat, so my family will take your cousin’s sheep—is widely accepted around the globe, even today, after centuries of Westernization. An example I like to use in teaching is marriage: In most places, in most times, marriage has been in principle primarily about connecting families and lineages. Parents sensibly married off youths to appropriate partners. My students, many of them only a generation or two from that Old World, instead take it for granted that marriage is about two young, not fully mature individuals freely choosing one another based on their individual emotions—a weird notion, indeed. Individual sovereignty is a broadly Western assumption, and Americans are the most Western of Westerners.

Individualism, however, is a severely incomplete description of the American character, ignoring America’s strong communal dimension. Just as Alexis de Toqueville and other observers wrote in the 19th century of Americans’ individualism, they also described intensive community activity: neighborly assistance like barn raising; joint endeavors like militias and tending of commons; and clubs from sewing circles to lecture societies. In contrast to churches that were outposts of a central ecclesiastical authority such as Roman Catholicism and the established Protestant denominations (for examples, the Church of England and the Lutheran Church of Norway), the dominant American form was a grassroots Protestant church. This was a voluntary association of individuals who found others with common religious yearnings, pooled their resources, and hired a minister.

The many secular versions of this communalism in America—Rotary clubs, blood drives, online Kickstarter-type philanthropy projects, walks against diseases, beach cleanup weekends, you name it—belie the caricature of Americans as selfish individualists. Critically, such associations are ones individuals have voluntarily chosen; they are not tribes, castes, clans, manors, or ethnicities into which people are born and in which they die. Nor are these distinctively American types of associations sponsored or organized by the state.

American voluntarism is the merging of our individualistic and communal strains, the worldview that individuals forge their distinct fates with like-minded people in groups that they have individually, freely chosen to join and are individually free to leave. People attain their personal ends through community, but through voluntary community. And thus they are both sovereign individuals and community citizens.

My favorite expression of this view is a statement from 1905 by Alma A. Rogers, a local writer in Portland, Oregon, who celebrated simultaneously women’s individuation and women’s community activity: “Woman has at last made the fateful discovery that she is an individual, not an adjunct. Therefore, she thrills to the pulse of organization; and lo! The woman’s club is born.” Another revealing expression is the 1960s-era slogan, “America: Love it or Leave It.” It captured the idea that people are not forced to be American, but as long as they choose to be, they are expected to be committed to the voluntary association that is America. The key to the American community, in other words, are the acts of opting in and every day choosing to stay in. That is why collective action through the state is anathema to so many Americans—it seems to usurp individual agency and responsibility, alone or in community.

Over the years, of course, Americans often compromised this voluntarism for practical reasons. Social Security is a paternalistic government mandate that people accepted during a great crisis, although it was cloaked in the language of “insurance” rather than welfare. But for the most part, such policies remain tough sells. Many observers on the left hoped that the Great Recession would trigger social-democratic breakthroughs. But Obamacare is, in historical perspective, a small step in that direction, a complex and limited extension of government subsidies for private health insurance rather than a full-on establishment of a universal entitlement. Some research suggests that Americans have actually moved against government initiatives in the wake of the financial crisis.

Americans will continue to argue about the proper boundary between our individual spheres and the sphere of our government. But, even in these disagreements, there is a common mindset, shared by right and left, that Americans should get to choose the nature of their participation in the nation. Thirty years ago this month, New York Governor Mario Cuomo delivered a speech at the Democratic National Convention in which he tried to replace or moderate that voluntaristic motif with another kind of imagery,

the idea of family, mutuality, the sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all, feeling one another’s pain, sharing one another’s blessings … . We believe we must be the family of America, recognizing that at the heart of the matter we are bound one to another …

It was a rhetorically powerful moment, but a losing political strategy. Today, perhaps more than ever, Americans don’t tend to think of the nation as a “family” to which we are “bound,” but rather as a club that we have joined.

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