Where Have All the Flower (or Socialist Folk Singers) Gone

First off, I want to comment on how much I enjoy the film Face in the Crowd. This has been my third or fourth time viewing it, and I'm surprised at how it never seems to grow stale. I'm also glad to get a chance to finally read the story from which it came. I've held a kind of ambivalent attitude towards Budd Schulberg's work. While part of me thinks it's great--What Makes Sammy Run?, On the Waterfront, A Face in the Crowd, etc.--part of me wonders if there are other factors, besides Schulberg, at work in what makes them great, especially his films: Kazan, Griffith, Brando, etc. There's also the fact that he named names to HUAC and was largely unapologetic about doing so.

One thing that makes me a little uneasy about the film is its use of a folk singer as the right wing demagogue par excellence. When I think about music associated with the right wing, folk music is not something that comes to mind. When I think of the latter, I envision Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and others who are usually associated with (often extreme) left wing politics. The only type of music similar enough to folk that could be considered somewhat right wing is country music. But even country musicians (at least some of them) often have political associations that could be interpreted as leftist--I'm thinking of Hank Williams Sr. song Hey Joe as a response to Mccarthyism. So I wonder if Schulberg's use of a folk singer as representative of the common man/woman is more of a fear on his part of the common masses. This is something Raymond Williams addresses in Culture and Society: a fear of allowing the masses (the unruly mob) their own means of self-determination. This is also at the heart of the debate of fictional representations of labor: do proletarian writers of whatever decade stand outside the workers as a pseudo-interested observer or are they attempting to rise with them. Perhaps the film and story, then, despite their many merits, suffer from from this potentially ungrounded fear on Schulberg's part.