The Working Class in American Film: The Creation of Image and Cu ...

were chastised by passersby for burning bras in protest of centuries of patriarchy; and civil rights activists were met with an unprecedented rise in gun sales in white suburban neighborhoods. These protests played out in the streets as America struggled with rapid change. Almost forty years later, many of the faces have changed, but the anxiety that fueled a reaction to the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s is being expressed again. This time, however, the putative stimuli are health care reform and immigration, and this time the firearms are not being left at home.

As these real-life dramas played out on American streets and in American homes in the mid-1960s, they were reflected in the arts. Artists responded on canvas, in music, and in impromptu theatrical productions that entertained and informed passersby in Greenwich Village in New York, Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, and on the streets of other major cities across the nation. In time, Hollywood came to the party, even if it arrived fashionably late. Directors in and out of the studio system began producing films that reflected the anger and resentment on both sides of the cultural divide. During the period from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, the contest for dominance in the culture played out weekly on the big screen as the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal dominated the small screen. Hollywood produced films that praised counterculture values for one audience and countered that praise with films that privileged “traditional values” for another. Throughout the period one element remained constant, however—the working class generally found itself in the middle of these narratives.

This is a good time to define “traditionalism” as it is being used in relationship to the cultural and political struggles of the 1970s and now. Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson provide an excellent definition of the term in their essay “A New Counterculture is Emerging,” reprinted in Culture Wars: Opposing Viewpoints. They write, “Traditionalism is a culture of memory. Traditionals remember a vanished America and long for its restoration. They place their hopes in the recovery of small-town, religious America, a hazy nostalgic image corresponding to the years