Introduction
A working class hero is something to be. (John Lennon)
On 27 July 1976, John Lennon emerged from the crowd of reporters on the steps of the federal courthouse in New York City triumphantly clutching the green card that symbolised his victory over the Nixon Administration and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in the legal battle over his immigration status. He said the following: ‘I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all the kids out there, my fans, who wrote all their senators, and their petitions and all the rest of it. They were working behind the scenes for five years with no pay, no nothing actually, just a smile’.Footnote 1 This was the second time that popular music fans had helped John Lennon win his legal case against the US government. The first occurred in 1964.
Lennon's struggle with the INS in the early 1970s is well known, thanks in part to the documentary film by David Leaf and John Scheinfeld, The U.S. vs. John Lennon. Less well known is the fact that the INS had brought a case against Lennon once before, in 1964. In that year, the INS and the U.S. Department of Labor acted at the behest of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) – the union that represents professional musicians in the US – to prevent the Beatles from returning to the US after their debut tour in January and February. This essay is about the first episode, which was a struggle between the AFM and fans of the Beatles in 1964. In it I seek to add empirical knowledge to the history of popular music through an examination of this particular episode, and to participate in theoretical debates relating to the role of culture in economic and political conflicts.
The events that constituted the AFM's attempt to have the Beatles banned have historical significance beyond the internal history of the Beatles – which is in and of itself important – because the 1964 episode foreshadowed the clash between the American counter-culture and the American labour union bureaucracy – the AFL-CIO – in the late 1960s, and also because it represented a turning point in the history of the AFM itself.Footnote 2 The AFM's legal dispute with the Beatles was the pinnacle of a struggle over the status and meaning of rock and roll music within the union, a struggle which spanned almost twenty years and which contributed to the union's long-term decline that began in the late 1960s. In 1942 the AFM was able to wage a successful general strike on the entire recording industry in the US. Today, however, the union would not even attempt a general strike as it would have no hope of matching the magnitude of the 1942 walkout.
My interpretation of this particular case seeks to add to our knowledge of how cultural issues that emerged within the popular music industry eventually entered into an arena of conflict between the AFM and fans of the Beatles. I also argue that the conflict between Beatles’ fans and the AFM in 1964 contained cultural disputes that characterised the broader conflict between the cultures of two generations, represented by the leadership of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy on the one side, and the counter-culture on the other. In the eyes of the counter-culture and the New Left, the labour union bureaucracy in the United States had become, by the late 1960s, part of the Establishment, and the emphasis on cultural problems that was the focus of the New Left's criticisms of the American labour movement was partially foreshadowed by the conflict between Beatles’ fans and the AFM in 1964.Footnote 3 My interpretation challenges the view that union decline in the US can be attributed exclusively to changing economic structures and globalisation. On the contrary, cultural issues must be given serious attention in any analysis that seeks to understand the fate of the labour movement.
In terms of theoretical approach to this historical event, my essay focuses on how culture is a site for political conflict, emphasising the epistemological point of view of Raymond Williams (1980) and Louis Althusser (Reference Althusser and Brewster1971) – especially the appropriation of Althusser and Williams by the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies – that culture is a relatively independent variable in the mode of production.Footnote 4 The approach to culture in Althusser's and Williams’ perspective is useful in explaining and revealing how cultural problems are embedded in economic issues, and in particular I find their approaches useful in explaining how it came to be that Beatles’ fans clashed with the union, but also more generally how the AFM acted against its own economic interests by refusing to aggressively organise rock and roll musicians into their union over a decade before the clash with the Beatles.
The following essay is divided into two parts and a conclusion. The first two parts consist of a narrative of the main events surrounding the ban on the Beatles and the social context within which the attempted ban occurred. The conclusion is a theoretical reflection on the episode, which seeks to explain how and why the events unfolded in the way in which they did.
Part 1. The British are coming!
On 4 April 1964, Bonnie Wilkins, a teenage rock and roll enthusiast from Scottsdale, Arizona, wrote a letter to Herman Kenin, then President of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM). Attached to the letter was a petition containing hundreds of signatures from other teenagers in the Scottsdale area. On behalf of her peers she wrote:
Dear Mr. Kenin,
We have discovered that you are trying to keep those fabulous, wonderful, tremendous Beatles out of the United States. We have never heard of anything so shocking in all our lives. We don't know much about this cultural exchange bit, but since you don't think they are culture, why don't you go mess up the affairs of someone else. You really have a lot of nerve, trying to keep them out of the United States, but if you can brainwash the authorities into doing it, you can just say good-bye to us teenagers – we're all moving to England. And to think that all this time we thought that America was a free country … sometimes we wonder.
Sincerely,
Bonnie Wilkins.Footnote 5
The phenomenon called ‘Beatlemania’ had, by the time Ms Wilkins wrote her letter to the AFM, already swept across the United States following the extraordinarily popular and financially lucrative debut tour of the Beatles in January and February of 1964. Shortly after that tour, word began to spread – via a syndicated newspaper article – that the American Musicians’ Union was lobbying the U.S. Government to impose a ban on the Beatles to prevent future tours of the US, prompting Beatles’ fans like Bonnie Wilkins to write letters to President Kenin and the AFM in protest of any such prohibition. In fact, once the story broke, letters poured in to not only Kenin and the AFM, but to the offices of the U.S. Secretary of Labor and the President of the United States himself, Lyndon B. Johnson, pleading with the authorities not to prevent the Beatles from touring again in the US later that year.
The AFM found itself at the centre of a firestorm of controversy regarding the Beatles, a controversy that foreshadowed and later formed part of the culture wars of the 1960s that pitted the counter-culture against the labour union bureaucracy in America.Footnote 6 At first glance, it seems ironic that a labour union would act against a rock and roll band, since the origins of rock and roll stem from American working-class culture, and John Lennon, the leader of the Beatles, considered himself a ‘working-class hero’, the song title of a track that appears on his album, Plastic Ono Band from 1970. Lennon famously said, ‘being born working class it was natural … [for me] to fear the establishment, and to fight it’.Footnote 7 How could it come to be that a labour union would come into conflict with the fans of a rock and roll band? As I explain below, in the eyes of Beatles fans, the AFM had become part of the ‘Establishment’.
The ‘cultural exchange bit’ that Ms Wilkins refers to in her letter was an arrangement crafted between the AFM and the British Musicians’ Union (BMU) in March of 1964, which was designed to regulate the movement of professional musicians between the two countries.Footnote 8 In that arrangement, both unions agreed to allow the free exchange of musicians between the two countries who were considered ‘uniquely talented’ or who were thought to possess, and be of, ‘culture’. Any musician deemed to be highly valuable to the culture of society was allowed to move about freely between the US and the UK. On the other hand, rock and roll musicians, all of whom were deemed culturally non-valuable by the two unions, were restricted to very limited touring and commercial performances outside of their home country. Performances by rock and roll bands were not considered ‘culture’, because the prevailing belief among the AFM leadership was that virtually anyone could perform rock and roll music since it didn't require any special, or unique, talent.
According to the agreement, if a rock and roll band like the Beatles were to come and play in the US, the BMU would be obligated to accept a rock and roll band – or any band not deemed as a ‘cultural exchange’ – from the US, as a fair exchange or one-for-one trade: one job for one job. The agreement was ostensibly about protecting jobs in both locations by not over-supplying the labour market with unexceptional or mediocre musicians. The leadership of the AFM was accustomed to regulating the supply of professional musicians within the United States, since historically one of the main jobs of the AFM was to organise and regulate the flow of professional musicians between their locals while some of their members were on tour and as others were looking for new jobs in new places. The agreement with the BMU was set up to extend those regulating functions beyond the borders of the US. The regulation of the movement and placement of workers in different geographical locations was a primary function of all the labour unions of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which chartered the AFM in 1896. In short, the 1964 arrangement was not out of the ordinary for AFM business, but things were about to become quite extraordinary indeed.
The agreement also included a distinction between ‘commercial’ engagements and ‘cultural’ engagements, where it was understood that ‘cultural’ performances made relatively little money and that there would be relatively little competition among musicians for those engagements. Whereas, in the ‘commercial’ venues there could be, potentially, significant competition for jobs among musicians, and it was the role of the two unions to protect the jobs of their members through regulating the potential competition. Within the economic discourse of jobs, however, was another discourse having to do with high and low culture, and this became the focus of controversy between the AFM and Beatles’ fans in 1964.
Indeed, the agreement presupposed such classifications. The musicians who were classified as ‘unique’ were jazz and classical musicians, and these classifications are set against popular music in a vertical conceptual scheme that codes music as high or low culture, where popular culture is on the bottom. Within the union, most of the active members at that time were trained in the classical and jazz genres. Rock and roll musicians, on the other hand, had virtually no voice in the union, even though some of the most influential musicians who inspired the development of rock and roll, like Muddy Waters, were members of the AFM. Muddy was a member of local 208 in Chicago, which was the so-called ‘colored’ local in Chicago.Footnote 9 The Secretary Treasurer of local 208 referred to rock and roll music as ‘toilet music’.Footnote 10 In fact, the very words ‘rock and roll’ did not even appear in the AFM's newspaper until 1969.Footnote 11 Jazz and classical musicians, on the other hand, regularly graced the cover of their paper, the International Musician. Footnote 12
While Kenin was working out the details of the arrangement with the BMU, he was also lobbying the U.S. Secretary of Labor, Willard Wirtz, to place an embargo on rock and roll musicians coming from the UK – the musicians referred to collectively as the ‘British Invasion’ bands. Kenin was requesting that Wirtz mobilise the Department of Labor's resources to help enforce the rules of the musicians’ unions’ arrangement by closing the borders to rock and roll bands until they could be properly screened. Kenin claimed that any of the available musicians in America could perform the same music that the bands of the British Invasion played with little difference, and that therefore the Beatles and their cohort need not visit the US again that year, since they might take jobs away from American musicians.Footnote 13 Kenin and the AFM leadership could not have anticipated that union's use of the term ‘culture’, and the labelling of rock and roll as a music that lacked ‘culture’ would generate controversy, since there was no historical precedent.Footnote 14
The cultural controversy over rock and roll in the US seemed to have ended with the Payola scandal in 1958.Footnote 15 During the Congressional hearings on the practice of payola, there was significant debate about the cultural status of rock and roll, but young rock and roll fans did not address their point of view to the federal government until the Beatles controversy in 1964. Thus, what began as a labour market problem for the AFM turned into a broader cultural conflict between rock and roll fans and the AFM.Footnote 16
Letters condemning the musicians’ union came from all over the US. Patsy Johnson of Mississippi wrote, ‘I read an article in our paper that Herman Kenin, the President of the American Federation of Musicians is complaining to you about the “surprise” invasion of the Beatles … Mr. Kenin is going to do all he can to keep the Beatles out of America, while we are going to do all we can to get them back’.Footnote 17 Janet Mitchell from San Diego, CA, wrote:
Dear Mr. Wirtz,
In the April 4 San Diego Tribune was an article stating that the Department of Labor ‘must approve the entry of aliens seeking work in the U.S.’ The paper also said ‘such admission is refused if qualified Americans are available for the work sought by such foreigners.’ According to the newspaper this immigration clearance was issued because Mr. Kenin, president of the American Federation of Musicians, protested the February visit of the Beatles … Please sir, what is the exact story on this? How will you determine whether there are qualified Americans when the Beatles request readmission? If you ask me or any other teen-age girl (and there's a lot of us) there is no one who even comes near to their [the Beatles] talent, and we mean it! Could you please tell us how this is going to affect the August visit of the Beatles? We're looking forward to it, so please don't disappoint us. Thank you for taking the time to read this letter,
Sincerely yours,
Janet MitchellFootnote 18
Most of the letters coming into the offices of Kenin and Wirtz were from Beatles’ fans who were against the impending ban, but there were also people on the other side of the issue, people who were glad to hear the news of the prohibition on the Beatles, and they wrote to Kenin supporting his position. Unlike the letters from Beatles’ fans that argued for the cultural uniqueness and special talent of the Beatles, these letters presented the issue as a labour market problem, concerned that foreign workers might take jobs away from American citizens. Barbara Lea of Manhattan wrote to Secretary of Labor Wirtz saying, ‘I have read that a new rule placing an embargo of sorts on foreign talent has just taken effect. This is good news to professional entertainers who are often out of work in their own country’.Footnote 19 Wirtz responded to Ms Lea that, ‘we are hopeful that the arrangements which we have made with the Immigration and Naturalization Service will result in improved employment opportunities for talented entertainers in this country’.Footnote 20
Kenin's appeal to the INS and the U.S. Labor Department followed the precedent set by the Actors’ Union the year before, in April of 1963, when the president of the Actors’ Equity Association in the US, Angus Duncan, had written to Secretary Wirtz to complain about the increasing number of British actors coming to the US in search of work.Footnote 21 Duncan requested that Wirtz and the Department of Labor help the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) enforce the particular subsection of the Immigration and Naturalization Act that was designed to govern the number of foreign workers coming to the US. In Section 101(a) (15) H of the Act, foreign workers seeking work in the US are supposed to be separated by the INS into two categories: ‘H (i)’ and ‘H (ii)’. The difference between the two categories turns on the question of merit and talent. Workers of ‘distinguished merit and ability’ fall under the category H (i), whereas workers who ‘have no unique talents’ fall under the category H (ii). ‘Aliens’ who seek work under category H (ii) face many more restrictions than those entering the US under H (i) – the logic being that only under conditions of severe labour shortage will the US allow the relative free flow of H (ii) workers in and out of the US, whereas H (i) workers faced many fewer restrictions because they have much less impact on the labour market. Until 1964, it had been the job of the INS to make the determinations about the status of foreign performers and entertainers seeking temporary employment in the US, and they decided whether or not an entertainer possessed ‘distinguished merit’ and ‘unique talents’. According to Actor's Equity, however, both the INS and the Department of Labor had been too inconsistent and haphazard in their enforcement of the law. From Duncan's point of view the INS needed to aggressively enforce the H (ii) code as a means to screen out the foreign actors that were in the US ‘illegally’.
Almost a year after Duncan's first appeal, Wirtz wrote back to the Actors’ Union, saying that he agreed with Duncan's assessment of the problem, and furthermore that the Department of Labor would indeed take a more active role in restricting the number of ‘non-talented’, or ‘H (ii)’ foreign performers and entertainers seeking temporary employment in the United States. The timing of Wirtz's statement was advantageous for Kenin because the change in the Department of Labor's policy, which was announced by Wirtz in March, came almost immediately after the Beatles’ inaugural tour in February of 1964. Since the Beatles were allowed entry into the States without the proper screening, Kenin asked the INS and the Department of Labor to keep them out the next time they applied for work in the US, because in Kenin's view, the Beatles were an H (ii) case: ‘no unique talents’. Thus, soon after the Beatles left the US, Kenin sent the following letter to Secretary Wirtz:
Dear Mr. Secretary,
If it be true, as I am informed, that the Department hopes shortly to extend its permit scrutiny of imported labour to include actors and other performing artists, we ask most urgently that its expertise extend to musicians coming to the United States to fill commercial engagements.
As you know, the American Federation of Musicians has not attempted restraints against those instrumental artists or combinations that qualify clearly as cultural exchanges. The other category – instrumentalists fulfilling stage, ballroom and TV engagements for strictly mass audience commercial entrepreneurs – is cutting deeply into the employment opportunities for American musicians who, unhappily, constitute one of the most consistently unemployed groups in the entire labour spectrum. The influx from England recently … has grown out of all reasonable proportion. In too many instances we have not been able to obtain the protections we deserve and demand from the Immigration Service.
I most sincerely hope that the Department of Labor will indeed extend its expertise into the field of musicians. It this be the intention, please advise me what our procedures should be in communicating our recommendations to the Department for its determination.
Thanking you for your attention to this rather pressing matter, I am,
Sincerely,
Herman Kenin, President
American Federation of Musicians, AFLFootnote 22
Wirtz agreed with Kenin's assessment, and the Department of Labor set up regional offices in New York, Los Angeles, Nashville and a few other locations to deal specifically with the issue of foreign musicians seeking temporary work in the United States. It was the task of the staff in these offices to determine whether or not musicians coming to perform in the states were ‘uniquely talented’. The office staff in each location consulted the local branch of the Musicians’ Union to help determine whether or not foreign musicians had special talent.Footnote 23 If the musicians applying for temporary work in the US were not labelled ‘uniquely talented’, then the management of those of bands would have to arrange to have an American band tour the UK in exchange, as outlined in the original arrangement constructed by the AFM and the BMU in March of 1964.
Outlined in Kenin's letter to Wirtz is a clear distinction between what he refers to as the difference between an ‘exchange of culture’ and ‘mass entertainment’. Some engagements – according to Kenin – are ‘clearly’ cultural, and others are clearly not culture. The coding of ‘mass’ entertainment as not culture is embedded in a context signifying issues having mainly to do with the labour market, but nonetheless ‘mass’ entertainment is posed – although as a subtext – as a cultural distinction. In the letter above, Kenin does not speak disparagingly of mass culture in general or rock and roll in particular, but in public statements he made to the press a few weeks later, he did. Here I seek to point out how in his letter there are two overlapping issues, and economic one and a cultural one. In Kenin's framing of the issue – both in his letters to Secretary Wirtz and in his statements to the press – there exists a discourse within a discourse. The discourse on culture that coded rock and roll as not culture did not emerge fully from the economic discourse until Kenin spoke to the press about the arrangement later that month.
The AFM has always had a policy that when any musician performs at a commercial venue, prevailing wages must be paid to those musicians. So, part of the complexity in the Beatles case is rooted historically in the distinction made by the union between venues where musicians play in a commercial context, versus venues where musicians play in a non-commercial venue, which could be either a government venue, like the Marine Corps. marching band, or an ‘artistic’ venue in which there is no commercial or profit-making organisation involved. The distinction between commercial and non-commercial venues has an important economic function, which is to ensure that if there is any money being made by a public performance of music, then the musicians performing the music should get a fair share of the proceeds. The role of the union is twofold: on the one hand, to make sure musicians get paid when the venue is commercial, and on the other to regulate competition among musicians to maintain an equitable distribution of jobs. Thus, the AFM framed the Beatles issue as a case of commercial interests. But the subtext of culture vs non-culture, which was part of the discursive frame that emphasised jobs and wage rates, rose to the surface when Kenin attacked the Beatles in the press in early April.Footnote 24 In those statements, the previously submerged discourse that coded rock and roll as lacking culture became the focus of conflict.
Part 2. The conflict over the term ‘culture’
The controversy over the Beatles was initially made public in March when Variety published an article headlined, ‘Irate AFM flips lid over invasion of “Rocking Redcoats” sans culture’.Footnote 25 The article has an alarming tone and portrayed the Beatles as a renewed threat posed by rock and roll against the American music industry, as well as conservative standards of culture. Variety had waged an earlier campaign against rock and roll in the 1950s, because of its alleged ‘dirty lyrics’.Footnote 26 According to the 1964 article, ‘there's a strong possibility that the AFM will make some moves with the U.S. State Department and the British MU to block unrestricted entry of the British rockers whose cultural stature is viewed very dubiously’. The Variety article, as alarming as it sounded, was not by itself the catalyst of a controversy, since it appealed to a relatively small audience of readers within or close to the industry. However, by April things had changed dramatically; on 2 April 1964, the same week that the Beatles held the top five slots on the Billboard charts, the U.S. Department of Labor issued a press release that described changes in the department's policy on foreign entertainers.
Victor Riesel, a syndicated columnist, covered the press conference. His article, titled ‘Keeping Out the Beatles’, was reproduced in newspapers all across the country, and it was this article that teenagers like Bonnie Wilkins and others had read and responded to in the thousands. Riesel's piece reads like a tabloid article, with the opening lines exclaiming, ‘’tis the final conflict. Let each stand in his place. At my side is a man of awesome courage … this fellow is Herman Kenin, president of the American Federation of Musicians … Kenin just doesn't believe the Beatles are culture. He is not much impressed by “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah … I Wanna Hold Your Hand”’.Footnote 27 Riesel's sensationalistic coverage gave the impression that the Beatles might never return, and soon thereafter letters from Beatles’ fans began arriving at the offices of Kenin, Wirtz and President Johnson.
Beatles’ fans who wrote to Wirtz and Kenin focused in on two particular comments made by Kenin that appeared in Riesel's article, comments that emphasised the cultural dimension of the problem. In the first, Kenin says, ‘The Beatles are not immortal to us … We don't consider them unique. They are musicians and only sing incidentally. We can go to Yonkers or Tennessee and pick up four kids who can do this kind of stuff. Guitars are now on the ascendancy in this country (emphasis mine)’.Footnote 28 Kenin betrayed his age and ‘squareness’ with the last comment on guitars, since guitars and rock and roll were on the ‘ascendancy’ well before 1964. His claim that anybody in the states could reproduce the musical experience of a Beatles concert was ridiculous, but the view of the AFM leadership in 1964 was that rock and roll was a fad, and more ‘entertainment’ than music. From an interview I conducted with officers from local 47 in Los Angeles, it is clear that the attitude of AFM members on the rock and roll problem was framed in terms of a craft union consciousness. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, rock and roll performers were not considered legitimate musicians, because they lacked ‘skill’ and ‘craft’. The President of local 47 said, ‘the attitude [at that time] was, rock and country players weren't “real” musicians, because there was no schooling behind it. We saw rock and roll as a fad’.Footnote 29 The craft union consciousness of the AFM that framed the performance of music as ‘skilled’ or ‘unskilled’ was buttressed by a discourse that bifurcated music into high and low culture, and the AFM deployed both discourses when it intervened in the public discussions on matters of taste.
Kenin's comments on the Beatles were consistent with the AFM's historical position on culture and popular music since the union's annual convention in 1901, where the union made it a policy to intervene in American society on matters of musical taste. In 1901 the AFM publicly attacked ragtime as lowbrow music, and between 1901 and 1964 the union would consistently present a highbrow position on culture whenever the AFM intervened in public matters on a variety of issues, including appearances before Congress on the cultural politics of the Cold War, and on matters of juvenile delinquency and popular music.Footnote 30
In the second controversial passage from Riesel's article, Kenin positions the union unequivocally as anti-rock and roll. He says:
Of course we have a cultural exchange with other countries, but this [rock and roll] is not culture. They [the Beatles] are no Rubinsteins or Heifetzes. Artists are welcome. But as for the Beatles, if they do get back into the country, they're going to have to leave their instruments at home … They [the Beatles] were here before we realized what happened, but it won't happen again (emphasis mine).Footnote 31
In this passage, Kenin's harsh words about the Beatles turned on the question of culture as much as the perceived problem in the labour market, and these particular words were the focus of Beatles’ fans who mobilised resistance to the proposed prohibition. In this passage we see how the submerged discourse on culture came to the fore. What makes it possible to claim that the music of the Beatles – and rock and roll more generally – is not culture?
Nearly all of the letters from concerned Beatles’ fans challenged the Musicians’ Union's use of the term ‘culture’. Beatles’ fans rejected the union's notion that rock and roll music lacked ‘culture’, and many astute teens raised the issue on a philosophical level by questioning the very meaning of the word ‘culture’. The Musicians’ Union was framed by the Beatles’ fans as a reactionary institution based on the way in which teenage rock and roll fans focused on the struggle over how to define ‘culture’. The AFM had made use of the term culture as a means to refer to refined aesthetic taste that was embodied by the music in the classical tradition. Hence, Kenin claims that the Beatles are not culture because they are ‘no Rubinsteins or Heifetzes’. On the other hand, teenagers were adopting a more relativistic notion of culture, similar to an anthropological or sociological definition of culture. Paula Victor, a teenager from Rochester, New York wrote to Wirtz that the labour agreement regarding the Beatles was grounded upon serious mistakes in the reasoning about the content of the very concept ‘culture’. She writes,
Sir:
The undersigned and I respectfully wish to disagree with Mr. Kenin's reasoning and should like to submit our own reasons for doing so.
Because the decision seems to rest on the question of what is culture, we have tried to get an idea of what culture is. Briefly, we feel that culture consists of all those activities, which express the personality of an age. With this definition in mind, we feel that what the Beatles do is a cultural activity. Without any disrespect to musicians [AFM] and their cultural function, we think that the art form the Beatles perform is a combination of instrument playing and singing. We particularly feel that their performance is not interchangeable with any other group of its kind.
We should like to add that most of us consider ourselves moderately well rounded and are able to appreciate a wide variety of cultural expressions.
On the basis of our above remarks, we respectfully submit our request to readmit the Beatles without restriction.
Very Sincerely,
Paula Victor
(Age 14)Footnote 32
The emphasis on ‘activities of an age’ sums up nicely the impending cultural conflict between the labour movement and the counter-culture during the 1960s. Miss Victor, and teenagers like her, made an important intervention in the culture wars over rock and roll because she shifted the definition of culture from one grounded in the hierarchical divide between the high art of the elite, and the popular art of the masses to a relativistic and inclusive concept of culture. She also uses the term ‘art’ to describe performances by the Beatles. ‘Culture’, as Beatles’ fans understood it, was not about ranking musical expression from high to low, nor was it about whether someone possessed refined taste, whatever that may be. Rather, in a sociological manner, ‘culture’ was understood to be a collection of activities that expressed ‘the personality of an age’. Paula Victor also positioned herself as a ‘well rounded’ consumer of culture, insinuating that to be a ‘cultured’ person, one must have an open mind to all sorts of music. Debbie Otto, a rock and roll enthusiast from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, also questioned the use of the term ‘culture’, when she wrote, ‘President of AFM, Mr. Kenin says they [Beatles] aren't culture. What is culture? Who's to say what culture is? Not you or I’.Footnote 33 Other young rock and roll fans tried to use relativism in a diplomatic approach. Christine Smith, from Haneoije Falls, New York, wrote to Wirtz that, ‘I enjoy some professional music. Strains from ‘Camelot’, ‘The Sound of Music’, ‘South Pacific’, and concerts by Leonard Bernstein are great to me. However I enjoy some other kinds of music too, and the Beatles provide that so well’.Footnote 34
Young Beatles’ fans were mobilising against the proposed prohibition within the larger political climate of national social unrest that surrounded the Civil Rights Movement and the student movement, which emerged out of the free speech movement at the Berkeley campus of the University of California. Dissent and civil disobedience were widely covered by the media at the time, as was evident in the way in which young rock and roll fans responded to the Beatles controversy. Pamela Moe, a teenager from Springfield, Massachusetts, predicted ‘boycotts, riots, and Beatles-Rights marches’ if the AFM went through with the ban on the Beatles.Footnote 35 Priscilla H. Aspinwall from Skaneateles, New York, vowed ‘WE WILL PROTEST!’Footnote 36
Some letters by concerned Beatles’ fans were sent to the President of the United States himself, Lyndon B. Johnson. Debbie Carey of Philadelphia wrote:
URGENT!!
Dear Mr. President,
In a newspaper recently there was an article saying that if the Beatles come in August the Musicians’ Union won't allow them to bring their instruments. It also stated that they needed government approval. Will you please give that approval? I know your daughters like them, although you may not, please do it for the teen-agers of America! … Please tell the Union to disregard that statement! About 50 million teens will love you for it. Mr. Johnson you can't allow them [the Musicians’ Union] to keep them [the Beatles] or their instruments out of America, please, please do something …
Love,
Debbie Carey
P.S. Do you like them? (answer quick)Footnote 37
Ms Carey's letter reveals that teenagers coming of age in the 1960s were aware of their power as a collective force in American politics: ‘50 million teens’. Another example of this phenomenon can be seen in a letter Kenin received from three teenagers from Dayton, Ohio. That letter reads:
Dear Mr. Kenin,
In reference to a recent article in the Dayton Daily News, in which you state that the Beatles are not culture, we would like to know what you mean. In the opinion of many Dayton teenagers we get the idea that you are trying to culturize [sic] American teenagers. However, we would like to inform you that American teenagers have been keen on the idea of Pop music for the last thirty years and we don't think that you are going to change them. In the article it indicated that you intend to keep the Beatles out of America, unless there is a reciprocal exchange for the performance of American musicians in Britain … In our opinion, we feel that if U.S. musicians, which you claim to be unemployed, were any good, they would not need the government to help them … In addition, we do not think adults have a right to stop the younger generation from enjoying what it loves and wants: the BEATLES!!!! Please give us a chance to enjoy something we love! Please don't ask us to Hold Your Hand in this action … Sir, you have a big fight ahead of you: for we who have stood amongst the screamers, the twisters and the jumpers know what a fight it will be. Hell hath no fury like a Beatle-nik spurned!
Respectfully,
Cindy Westendorf and Linda Hausfeld and Carol Herbert
Beatle fans, and – PROUD OF IT!!!!!!
P.S. We think the BEATLES are fabmost, really gear, and not swelling about the bounce like some groups. If you would like to acquire the meaning of this last sentence, go buy yourself a BEATLE book!!!!!!Footnote 38
We know, in hindsight, that the Beatles were allowed to tour the US again due to the efforts of their manager, Brian Epstein, to make touring arrangements that satisfied the terms outlined in the INS mandate. Other rock and roll bands from the British invasion era were not so fortunate, however, including the Kinks and the Fortunes. In 1966, the Kinks were banned from touring the US for more than four years, and the Fortunes were unable to make their scheduled appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1965.Footnote 39 According to David Carr, the keyboardist for the Fortunes, ‘they hung us up because they had to swap us for the Sir Douglas Quintet and another group – they always wanted two groups in England for every one that played here – and while they were dickering, the Sullivan gig came and went. Maybe it wouldn't have made any difference in our career, but you always wonder. It certainly didn't do the Beatles any harm’.Footnote 40
Conclusion and analysis
It would be wrong to reduce the complexity of the issue to simply a ‘good guys’ (Beatles fans) and ‘bad guys’ (AFM) episode. The conflict over culture between the Beatles’ fans and the leadership of the AFM can be understood, in part, as a matter of two sides emphasising different issues in the manner of incommensurable paradigms. The union and the Beatles’ fans were looking at the issue from different perspectives, one primarily economic and the other cultural. From the point of view of Beatles’ fans, what may have seemed to be elitism on the part of the AFM leadership stems, in part, from the AFM's craft union consciousness, which is a common phenomenon among all of the craft unions that date back to the founding of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The role of the craft union is to restrict membership to the union in order to maintain high demand for skilled labour in the given area, which in this case was music performance. The main way craft unions maintain a tight labour market is to restrict membership to the union and monopolise access to training for the particular skill necessary to join whichever particular craft labour union.Footnote 41 The AFM's attitude about rock and roll music at the time of the Beatles ban was that rock and roll was ‘entertainment’, not music, and that rock and roll musicians were rarely ‘skilled’ enough to be members in the union in the first place.Footnote 42
On the other hand, the struggle with the Beatles’ fans was not simply a case of incommensurability either, because Kenin himself spoke very disparagingly of the Beatles. Intertwined with the craft union consciousness of the AFM leadership was also a perspective on culture that not only alienated Beatles’ fans, but actually split the union's rank and file, a problem that goes all the way back to the founding of the AFM in 1896 when the union rank and file was split between musicians who did not consider themselves ‘workers’ and those who did. Older musicians, who at the time of the founding of the AFM argued against joining, believed it was degrading to belong to a labour union because they believed unions were for manual workers, not for ‘artists’ like themselves. In short, the high/low cultural divide has been a problem throughout the history of the AFM.Footnote 43 So, although it is understandable that Kenin would ask for government help in protecting the jobs of his members, ultimately the attack on the culture of rock and roll had the opposite effect: it contributed to public controversy for the union and had a contributing role in the impending decline of the union's influence in the music industry because the union failed to aggressively organise rock and roll musicians and include them in the leadership structure of the union. The negative representation of the Beatles as ‘not culture’ was part of a larger perspective that framed all of rock and roll as unworthy of equal treatment within the union membership structure.
It is useful here to consider the cultural conflict between rock and roll fans and the AFM from the points of view of F.R. Leavis and Raymond Williams. The issue of ‘mass’ culture was a significant topic for debate among cultural critics in the twentieth century, including Leavis, who argued that the creation of a ‘mass’ aesthetic, indeed of an industry of culture, led inevitably toward the standardisation and degradation of art and culture more generally.Footnote 44 Leavis coined the term ‘technological-Benthamite’ to describe how he viewed the degrading effects that technology and industrialisation in capitalist society were having on art and culture. The mass production of cultural objects resulted in what he called a ‘levelling down’. ‘When we consider, for instance’, writes Leavis, ‘the processes of mass-production and standardisation in the form of the Press, it becomes obviously of sinister significance that they should be accompanied by a process of levelling down’ (Leavis Reference Leavis1961, p. 147). While it is not my contention that the AFM leadership was reading Leavis, their attitude toward the negative effects of mass production was similar to that of Leavis. The issue with the AFM was not the technology of mass production in the Press, but rather in recording: namely the phonograph record. The AFM lost tens of thousands of members at the hands of recording technologies that made ‘talkie’ movies possible as well as the disc jockey on radio. The displacement of live musicians in movie houses and in the studios of radio stations devastated the AFM. Still, the AFM was able to fight back, and after their victory in the 1942 strike, the AFM successfully negotiated a contract with the major record labels that included the creation of a fund to be used to support unemployed members of the AFM, who presumably lost their jobs as a result of the application of records.Footnote 45 The money was raised from record sales through a royalty payment formula that required the record companies to pay into the fund out of their sales revenue. The cultural dimension to the issue of recording technology is that the AFM developed an anti-record aesthetic. Partly as a means to try to save jobs, but also partly as an aesthetic preference, the AFM campaigned for live music during the 1930s and 1940s, developing a public relations strategy that created a public presence for the AFM, where the union advertised widely on the superiority of live music over recorded music.Footnote 46
Rock and roll, on the other hand, developed as a record culture. Indeed, rock and roll emerged with the perfection of the mass production of records, especially the 45 r.p.m. single. The record not only had an impact on the culture of rock and roll consumers, but also on that of working-class kids who aspired to play rock and roll and who lacked the financial means to pay for music lessons. Records made it possible for working-class youth – like John Lennon – to teach themselves how to play music. Many rock and roll musicians became skilled at their craft without learning how to read music.Footnote 47 On the other hand, reading music was, from the point of view of the AFM, the essence of the ‘craft’ of the professional musician. In fact, the AFM required potential members to pass a music reading test – an audition – as part of the process for gaining access to union membership. Many rock and roll bands were excluded from the AFM on the basis of failing the audition, one of the more infamous cases being the Beach Boys who were initially refused membership to the AFM because they failed their audition.Footnote 48 In short, the AFM's position was over-determined by two factors: a craft union job-consciousness and a Leavisite perspective on the degrading tendency of mass-produced culture which together shaped an anti-record aesthetic within the culture of the AFM. These aspects helped to frame the AFM's point of view on the controversy that followed the arrival of the British Invasion of rock and roll bands in 1964.
Beatles’ fans, on the other hand, developed a point of view on culture similar in many ways to that of Raymond Williams. For Williams, the division between high- and lowbrow culture is not an issue of ‘levelling down’, as it was for Leavis, but instead the very idea of the ‘masses’ is seen as a device used by elites to justify their dominance over society. Beatles’ fans certainly understood their struggle with the AFM in these terms. Kenin's disparaging remarks that the Beatles were not ‘culture’ was viewed by Beatles’ fans as the principal terrain of the struggle. The AFM's position can be understood as an expression of what Williams (Reference Williams2005) referred to as the ‘effective dominant culture’. The Beatles’ fans, on the other hand, were creating what Williams referred to as an ‘emergent culture’, where new practices, meanings and values develop outside or in conflict with the dominant culture. From a perspective like Williams’, rock and roll culture does not represent a ‘degradation’ of culture, or a levelling down, but an emergent counter-culture.
I find Williams’ perspective is also quite useful for my analysis because in his later works he developed a theoretical model that emphasised the relative autonomy of culture in a given social formation or mode of production. In other words, I follow Williams’ argument that culture is already embedded in the economic rather than distinct from it, as if culture were of a separate ontological order, in the Cartesian sense. Williams, of course, was very critical of orthodox Marxist positions that tend to subordinate questions of culture – what is understood as the ‘superstructure’ – to material conditions – generally understood in the orthodoxy as the economic base of society. Williams’ contribution, in my view, not only corrects the theoretical mistakes of one-dimensional Marxist orthodoxy, but it also contributes to the framing of empirical research.
Cultural issues were present – although submerged – within the AFM's discourse of job scarcity during the 1964 episode. The conflict with Beatles’ fans brought the cultural problem to the surface. Rock and roll became the dominant popular music in America as early as the mid 1950s, and it would have been in their economic interests of the Musicians’ Union to actively organise rock and roll musicians into the union and give them an equal voice, but, for reasons having to do with their conservative view on ‘culture’, they did not. On the contrary, the union marginalised rock and roll musicians within their organisation. The attempt to ban the Beatles was their last major conflict with rock and roll. Finally, in 1969, the AFM printed the words ‘rock and roll’ in their newspaper. By then, however, the damage had been done.
