Between the First World War and the 1950s, anthropologists and like-minded social scientists recast a number of perennial concerns: they democratized culture, recognized the existence of social classes on the American scene, rid the American character of its racialist associations, formulated new American values, and reconciled American culture and civilization.

As we have seen, culture in its anthropological sense was far broader, and less elitist, than humanistic culture. For Matthew Arnold, the pursuit of culture required self-discipline, a considerable length of time, and, in many cases, leisure. The culture concept, by contrast, made culture a birthright, conferring culture on groups into which people were either born or assimilated. By the 1950s, American culture was no longer confined to masterpieces but had come to be seen as a “complex whole” that included behavior and artifacts as well as aesthetic and intellectual pursuits. Anthropology offered an alternative to the then-prevailing conception of the humanities: the notion, as Edward Said put it, that “humanism was a special attainment that required the cultivating or reading of certain difficult texts and, in the process, the giving up of certain things, like amusement, pleasure, relevance to worldly circumstances, and so on.” The broad conception of culture that anthropologists popularized helped Americans answer the taunts of skeptics about the rarity of American masterpieces by emphasizing popular access to cultural institutions. As Americans increasingly conceived of culture as a complex whole, they began to think in terms of cultural forms, cultural crisis, cultural trend, cultural analysis, and culture context.