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

Abstract

Wide ranging and engagingly written, A Nation of Outsiders is one of the most provocative works in post–World War II U.S. history published in recent years. Grace Elizabeth Hale traces “the romance of the outsider,” defined as “the belief that people somehow marginal to society possess cultural resources and values missing among other Americans” (p. 1). She claims that outsider romance played a central role in such historical developments as the rise of an expressionist youth subculture, the emergence of New Left activism, and New Right attacks on the liberal establishment. At the heart of the book is a critique of how middle-class whites exploited the culture of those less privileged, especially poor blacks, to gain a sense of personal authenticity. Hale finds that this dynamic characterized a wide range of phenomena including beat literature, rock and roll, the folk revival, and white youth participation in civil rights struggles. The romance of the outsider, according to Hale, served the psychological needs of whites seeking to escape middle-class conformity, but it failed to address real social inequalities. The self-conceptions of many sixties-era white leftists and their celebrators will surely be challenged by Hale's depiction of white civil rights supporters in Students for a Democratic Society and Freedom Summer as “white negroes in action” who “borrow[ed] from the old tradition of blackface minstrelsy” (pp. 163, 83). Hale's cynical and tendentious depiction of those young activists’ motives hardly accounts for any cultural appreciation or political solidarity with marginalized Americans by middle-class whites not driven by selfish pursuit of individual authenticity. At times, however, the narrative reveals more nuance by suggesting that some folk musicians and New Leftists recognized the dangers of romanticizing outsiders and rethought their initial romanticism once their involvements deepened.