Chapter 26: The Age of Anxiety

Uncertainty in Modern Thought

Modern Philosophy

• Before 1914 most people still believed in Enlightenment ideals of progress, reason, and individual rights.

• At the turn of the century supporters of these philosophies had some cause for optimism.

• Nevertheless, in the late nineteenth century a small group of serious thinkers mounted a determined attack on these optimistic beliefs.

• The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche(1844–1900) was particularly influential, though not until after his death.

• Nietzsche questioned the conventional values of Western society.

• He believed that reason, progress, and respectability were outworn social and psychological constructs that suffocated self-realization and excellence.

• Nietzsche painted a dark world, perhaps foreshadowing his own loss of sanity in 1889.

• Little read during his active years, Nietzsche’s works attracted growing attention in the early twentieth century.

• Artists and writers experimented with his ideas, which were fundamental to the rise of the philosophy of existentialism in the 1920s.

• The growing dissatisfaction with established ideas before 1914 was apparent in other important thinkers as well.

• In the 1890s French philosophy professor Henri Bergson (1859–1941), for one, argued that immediate experience and intuition were as important as rational and scientific thinking for understanding reality

• Logical positivism was truly revolutionary.

• Adherents of this worldview argued that what we know about human life must be based on rational facts and direct observation.

• In his pugnacious Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Essay on Logical Philosophy), published in 1922, Wittgenstein argued that philosophy is only the logical clarification of thoughts and that therefore it should concentrate on the study of language, which expresses thoughts.

• On the continent, others looked for answers in existentialism.

• This new philosophy loosely united highly diverse and even contradictory thinkers in a search for usable moral values in a world of anxiety and uncertainty.

• Most existential thinkers in the twentieth century were atheists.

• At the same time, existentialists recognized that human beings must act in the world.

• Existentialism had important precedents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the philosophy really came of age in France during and immediately after World War II.

The Revival of Christianity

• Though philosophers such as Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Sartre all argued that religion had little to teach people in the modern age, the decades after the First World War witnessed a tenacious revival of Christian thought. Christianity— and religion in general— had been on the defensive in intellectual circles since the Enlightenment.

• Especially after World War I, a number of thinkers and theologians began to revitalize the fundamental beliefs of Christianity.

• In the 1920s the Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968) propounded similar ideas. In brilliant and influential writings, Barth argued that human beings were imperfect, sinful creatures whose reason and will are hopelessly flawed.

• Among Catholics, the leading existential Christian was Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973).

• Born into a cultivated French family, Marcel found in the Catholic Church an answer to what he called the postwar “broken world.”

• After 1914 religion became much more meaningful to intellectuals than it had been before the war.

• Between about 1920 and 1950, in addition to Marcel and Maritain, poets T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, novelists Evelyn Waugh and Aldous Huxley, historian Arnold Toynbee, writer C. S. Lewis, psychoanalyst Karl Stern, and physicist Max Planck were all either converted to a faith or became attracted to religion for the first time.

The New Physics

• Ever since the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, scientific advances and their implications had greatly influenced the beliefs of thinking people.

• An important first step came at the end of the nineteenth century with the discovery that atoms were not like hard, permanent little billiard balls.

• They were actually composed of many far-smaller, fast-moving particles, such as electrons and protons.

• In 1905 the German-Jewish genius Albert Einstein (1879–1955) went further than the Curies and Planck in undermining Newtonian physics.

• His theory of special relativity postulated that time and space are relative to the viewpoint of the observer and that only the speed of light is constant for all frames of reference in the universe.

• In addition, Einstein’s theory stated that matter and energy are interchangeable and that even a particle of matter contains enormous levels of potential energy.

• The 1920s opened the “heroic age of physics,” in the apt words of Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937), one of its leading pioneers.

• Although few nonscientists truly understood the revolution in physics, its implications, as presented by newspapers and popular writers, were disturbing to millions of men and women in the 1920s and 1930s.

• Like modern philosophy, physics no longer provided comforting truths about natural laws or optimistic answers about humanity’s place in an understandable world.

Freudian Psychology

• With physics presenting an uncertain universe so unrelated to ordinary human experience, questions regarding the power and potential of the rational human mind assumed special significance.

• Before Freud, poets and mystics had probed the unconscious and irrational aspects of human behavior.

• Freud described three structures of the self— the id, the ego, and the superego— that were basically at war with one another.

• For Freud, the healthy individual possessed a strong ego that effectively balanced the id and superego.

• Neurosis, or mental illness, resulted when the three structures were out of balance.

• Yet Freud, like Nietzsche, believed that the mechanisms of rational thinking and traditional moral values could be too strong.

• In his book Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud argued that civilization was possible only when individuals renounced their irrational instincts in order to live peaceably in groups.

• Freudian psychology and clinical psychiatry had become an international movement by 1910, but only after 1919 did they receive more attention, especially in northern Europe and the United States, where Freud’s ideas attained immense popularity after the Second World War.

Modernism in Architecture, Art, Literature, and Music

Architecture and Design

• Already in the late nineteenth century, architects inspired by modernism had begun to transform the physical framework of urban society.

• Promoters of modern architecture argued that buildings and living spaces in general should be ordered according to a new principle: functionalism

• Le Corbusier’s polemical work Towards a New Architecture, published in 1923, laid out guidelines meant to revolutionize building design.

• In Europe, architectural leadership centered in German-speaking countries until Hitler took power in 1933.

• In 1911 twenty-eight-year-old Walter Gropius (1883–1969) broke sharply with the past in his design of the Fagus shoe factory at Alfeld, Germany— a clean, light, elegant building of glass and iron.

• In 1919 Gropius merged the schools of fine and applied arts at Weimar into a single interdisciplinary school, the Bauhaus

• Another leading modern architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969), followed Gropius as director of the Bauhaus in 1930.

New Artistic Movements

• In the decades surrounding the First World War, the visual arts also experienced radical change and experimentation.

• Berlin, Munich, Moscow, Vienna, New York, and especially Paris became famous for their radical artistic undergrounds.

• One of the earliest modernist movements was impressionism, which blossomed in Paris in the 1870s.

• French artists such as Claude Monet (1840–1926) and Edgar Degas (1834–1917) and the American Mary Cassatt (1844–1926), who settled in Paris in 1875, tried to portray their sensory “impressions” in their work.

• In the next decades an astonishing array of new artistic movements emerged one after another.

• Postimpressionists and expressionists, such as Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), built on impressionist motifs of color and light but added a deep psychological element to their pictures, reflecting the attempt to search within the self and reveal (or “express”) deep inner feelings on the canvas.

• After 1900 avant-garde artists increasingly challenged the art world status quo.

• The shock of World War I encouraged further radicalization.

• In 1916 a group of artists and intellectuals in exile in Zurich, Switzerland, championed a new movement they called Dadaism, which attacked all the familiar standards of art and delighted in outrageous behavior.

• During the mid-1920s some Dadaists were attracted to surrealism.

• Surrealists such as Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) were deeply influenced by Freudian psychology and portrayed images of the unconscious in their art.

• By the 1920s art and culture had become increasingly politicized.

• After World War II, New York greatly benefited from this transfusion of talent and replaced Paris and Berlin as the global capital of modern art.

Twentieth-Century Literature

• In the decades that followed the First World War, Western literature was deeply influenced by the general intellectual climate of pessimism and alienation and the turn toward radical experimentation sweeping through the other arts.

• Some novelists used the stream-of-consciousness technique, relying on internal monologues to explore the human psyche.

• The most famous and perhaps most experimental stream-of-consciousness novel is Ulysses (1922) by Irish novelist James Joyce (1882–1941)

• As creative writers turned their attention from society to the individual and from realism to psychological relativity, they rejected the idea of progress.

• With its biblical references, images of a ruined and wasted natural world, and general human incomprehension, Eliot (1888–1965) expressed the widespread despair that followed the First World War.

Modern Music

• Developments in modern music paralleled those in painting and fiction.

• Composers and performers expressed the emotional intensity and shock of the age in radically experimental forms.

• After the First World War, when irrationality and violence had seemed to pervade human experience, modernism flourished in opera and ballet.

• Some composers turned their backs on longestablished musical conventions.

• Just as abstract painters arranged lines and color but did not draw identifiable objects, so modern composers arranged sounds without creating recognizable harmonies.

• Only after the Second World War did it begin to win acceptance.

An Emerging Consumer Society

Mass Culture

• The emerging consumer society of the 1920s is a good example of the way technological developments can lead to widespread social change.

• Contemporaries viewed the new mass culture as a distinctly modern aspect of everyday life.

• It seemed that consumer goods themselves were modernizing society by changing so many ingrained habits.

• Critics had good reason to worry. Mass-produced goods had a profound impact on the lives of ordinary people.

• Commercialized mass entertainment likewise prospered and began to dominate the way people spent their leisure time.

• Department stores epitomized the emergence of consumer society.

• The emergence of modern consumer culture both undermined and reinforced existing social differences.

• The changes in women’s lives were particularly striking.

• The new household items transformed how women performed housework.

• Contemporaries spoke repeatedly about the arrival of the “modern girl,” a surprisingly independent female who could vote and held a job, spent her salary on the latest fashions, applied makeup and smoked cigarettes, and used her sex appeal to charm any number of young men.

• Despite such enthusiasm, the modern girl was in some ways a stereotype, a product of marketing campaigns dedicated to selling goods to the masses.

• The emerging consumer culture generated a chorus of complaint from cultural critics of all stripes

• Despite such criticism— which continued after World War II— consumer society was here to stay.

• Ordinary people enjoyed the pleasures of mass consumption, and individual identities were tied ever more closely to modern mass-produced goods.

The Appeal of Cinema

• Cinema first emerged in the United States around 1880, driven in part by the inventions of Thomas Edison.

• By 1910 American directors and business people had set up “movie factories,” at first in the New York area and then in Los Angeles.

• Cinema became a true mass medium in the 1920s, the golden age of silent film.

• The United States was again a world leader, but European nations also established important national studios.

• Film making became big business on an international scale.

• Studios competed to place their movies on foreign screens, and European theater owners were sometimes forced to book whole blocks of American films to get the few pictures they really wanted.

• Motion pictures would remain the central entertainment of the masses until after the Second World War.

• As these numbers suggest, motion pictures could be powerful tools of indoctrination, especially in countries with dictatorial regimes.

The Arrival of Radio

• Like film, radio became a full-blown mass medium in the 1920s.

• Experimental radio sets were first available in the 1880s; the work of Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937) around 1900 and the development of the vacuum tube in 1904 made possible primitive transmissions of speech and music.

• Every major country quickly established national broadcasting networks.

• In the United States such networks were privately owned and were financed by advertising, but in Europe the typical pattern was direct control by the government.

• Like the movies, radio was well suited for political propaganda and manipulation.

• Dictators such as Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini controlled the airwaves and could reach enormous national audiences with their dramatic speeches

The Search for Peace and Political Stability

Germany and the Western Powers

• Germany was the key to lasting stability.

• Yet to Germans of all political parties, the Treaty of Versailles represented a harsh dictated peace, to be revised or repudiated as soon as possible.

• Immediately after the war, the French wanted to stress the harsh elements in the Treaty of Versailles.

• The British soon felt differently. Before the war Germany had been Great Britain’s second-best market in the world; after the war a healthy, prosperous Germany appeared to be essential to the British economy.

• British politicians were also suspicious of both France’s army— the largest in Europe, and authorized at Versailles to occupy the German Rhineland until 1935— and France’s expansive foreign policy.

• While French and British leaders drifted in different directions, the Allied commission created to determine German reparations completed its work.

• The British were willing to accept a moratorium, but the French were not.

• Led by their tough-minded prime minister, Raymond Poincaré (1860–1934), they decided they had to either call Germany’s bluff or see the entire peace settlement dissolve to France’s great disadvantage.

• Strengthened by a wave of German patriotism, the German government ordered the people of the Ruhr to stop working and offer passive resistance to the occupation.

• By the summer of 1923 France and Germany were engaged in a great test of wills.

• In August 1923, as the mark lost value and unrest spread throughout Germany, Gustav Stresemann(1878–1929) assumed leadership of the government. Stresemann tried compromise.

• The British, and even the Americans, were willing to help.

• The first step was to reach an agreement on the reparations question.

Hope in Foreign Affairs

• In 1924 an international committee of financial experts headed by American banker Charles G. Dawes met to re-examine reparations from a broad perspective.

• The resulting Dawes Plan (1924) was accepted by France, Germany, and Britain. Germany’s yearly reparations were reduced and linked to the level of German economic output.

• This circular flow of international payments was complicated and risky, but for a while it worked.

• With continual inflows of American capital, the German republic experienced a shaky economic recovery.

• A political settlement accompanied the economic accords.

• In 1925 the leaders of Europe signed a number of agreements at Locarno, Switzerland.

• Germany and France solemnly pledged to accept their common border, and both Britain and Italy agreed to fight either France or Germany if one invaded the other.

• Other developments suggested possibilities for international peace.

• In 1926 Germany joined the League of Nations, and in 1928 fifteen countries signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, initiated by French prime minister Aristide Briand and U.S. secretary of state Frank B. Kellogg.

Hope in Democratic Government

• Domestic politics also offered reason to hope. During the occupation of the Ruhr and the great inflation, republican government in Germany had appeared on the verge of collapse.

• Sharp political divisions remained, however.

• Throughout the 1920s Hitler’s Nazi Party attracted support from fanatical anti-Semites, ultranationalists, and disgruntled ex-servicemen.

• The situation in France was similar to that in Germany. Communists and Socialists battled for workers’ support.

• After 1924 the democratically elected government rested mainly in the hands of coalitions of moderates, with business interests well represented.

• France’s great accomplishment was the rapid rebuilding of its war-torn northeastern region.

• Britain, too, faced challenges after 1920. The great problem was unemployment.

• Relative social harmony was accompanied by the rise of the Labour Party as a determined champion of the working class and of greater social equality.

• The British Conservatives showed the same compromising spirit on social issues.

The Great Depression, 1929-1930

• This fragile optimism was short-lived. Beginning in 1929, a massive economic downturn struck the entire world with ever-greater intensity.

• Recovery was slow and uneven, and contemporaries labeled the economic crisis the Great Depression, to emphasize its severity and duration.

The Economic Crisis

• Though economic activity was already declining moderately in many countries by early 1929, the crash of the stock market in the United States in October of that year initiated a worldwide crisis.

• This stock market boom— or “bubble” in today’s language— was built on borrowed money.

• Many wealthy investors, speculators, and people of modest means bought stocks by paying only a small fraction of the total purchase price and borrowing the remainder from their stockbrokers.

• The consequences were swift and severe.

• Stripped of wealth and confidence, battered investors and their fellow citizens started buying fewer goods.

• The financial panic triggered an international financial crisis.

• Throughout the 1920s American bankers and investors had lent large amounts of capital to many countries.

• The financial crisis led to a general crisis of production: between 1929 and 1933 world output of goods fell by an estimated 38 percent.

• Although opinions differ, two factors probably best explain the relentless slide to the bottom from 1929 to early 1933.

• The second factor was poor national economic policy in almost every country.

• Governments generally cut their budgets when they should have raised spending and accepted large deficits in order to stimulate their economies.

Mass Unemployment

• The lack of large-scale government spending contributed to the rise of mass unemployment.

• Mass unemployment created great social problems.

• Poverty increased dramatically, although in most countries unemployed workers generally received some kind of meager unemployment benefits or public aid that prevented starvation.

• Only strong government action could deal with mass unemployment, a social powder keg preparing to explode.

The New Deal in the United States

• The Great Depression and the government response to it marked a major turning point in American history.

• President Herbert Hoover (r. 1929–1933) and his administration initially reacted to the stock market crash and economic decline with dogged optimism but limited action.

• In these dire circumstances, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (r. 1933–1945) won a landslide presidential victory in 1932 with grand but vague promises of a “New Deal for the forgotten man.”

• In the United States, innovative federal programs promoted agricultural recovery, a top priority.

• The most ambitious attempt to control and plan the economy was the National Recovery Administration (NRA).

• Roosevelt and his advisers then attacked the key problem of mass unemployment.

• In 1935 the U.S. government also established a national social security system with old-age pensions and unemployment benefits.

• Programs like the WPA were part of the New Deal’s fundamental commitment to use the federal government to provide relief welfare for all Americans.

• Despite undeniable accomplishments in social reform, the New Deal was only partly successful in responding to the Great Depression.

The Scandinavian Response to the Depression

• Of all the Western democracies, the Scandinavian countries under Social Democratic leadership responded most successfully to the challenge of the Great Depression.

• When the economic crisis struck in 1929, socialist governments in Scandinavia built on this pattern of cooperative social action.

• Sweden in particular pioneered in the use of large-scale deficits to finance public works and thereby maintain production and employment.

• Some observers saw Scandinavia’s welfare socialism as an appealing middle way between sick capitalism and cruel communism or fascism.

Recovery and Reform in Britain and France

• In Britain, MacDonald’s Labour government and then, after 1931, the Conservative-dominated coalition government followed orthodox economic theory.

• This good but by no means brilliant performance reflected the gradual reorientation of the British economy.

• Because France was relatively less industrialized and thus more isolated from the world economy, the Great Depression came to it late.

• As before 1914, the French parliament was made up of many political parties that could never cooperate for long.

• In 1933, for example, five coalition cabinets formed and fell in rapid succession.

• The French had lost the underlying unity that had made government instability bearable before 1914, however.

• Frightened by the growing strength of the Fascists at home and abroad, the Communists, Socialists, and Radicals formed an alliance— the Popular Front— for the national elections of May 1936.

• In the next few months, Blum’s Popular Front government made the first and only real attempt to deal with the social and economic problems of the 1930s in France.

• Inspired by Roosevelt’s New Deal, it encouraged the union movement and launched a far-reaching program of social reform, complete with paid vacations and a forty-hour workweek.

• Political dissension in France was encouraged by the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), during which authoritarian Fascist rebels overthrew the democratically elected republican government.

• An anxious and divided France drifted aimlessly once again, preoccupied by Hitler and German rearmament.