Notes on Modern American Literature (1900-1945)
Henry Adams and the Disorientation of Modernity
Henry Adams's experience at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 left him questioning America's direction. He felt lost, a sentiment echoed after the Great Exposition in Paris in 1900, where he perceived a radical shift rendering old benchmarks obsolete. This "new universe," driven by machinery, was fundamentally different, demanding new modes of understanding. He foresaw a fragmented world replacing unity.
Adams termed this shift "the law of the multiverse," characterized by endless change and energy collisions, particularly pronounced in technologically advanced societies like America. He worried about the consequences, fearing either liberation or dehumanization for Americans caught in this "occult mechanism."
Ultimately, Adams believed accelerating technological change would alter consciousness, necessitating new educational and aesthetic frameworks to comprehend the "multiverse."
The Transformation of American Culture (1900-1945)
Material and Nonmaterial Shifts
Adams's predictions proved accurate. The explosive growth of industry led to unparalleled urbanization. From 1880 to 1910, major cities like New York and Chicago tripled in population, while entirely new cities emerged.
Smaller towns also transformed, gaining urban features such as paved streets, banks, cinemas, and factories. By 1920, the US Census indicated that the urban population outnumbered the rural, a shift likely occurring even earlier. The emergence of a technological culture saw the widespread adoption of the telephone (one for every ten citizens by 1915) and radio, imposing new imagery and norms.
The Rise of Corporate Capitalism and Altered Consciousness
America transitioned from entrepreneurial to corporate capitalism, shifting from the "business buccaneer" to the "business executive." This was accompanied by changes in beliefs and behaviors. The rise of new ideas challenged established American culture:
Darwinism challenged traditional religious and humanist views.
Marxism questioned liberal orthodoxies.
Freudianism undermined the concept of a unified self, introducing the idea of conflicting levels of the mind.
presented a new, multiple perspective on reality, contingent on the observer's position. There is no absolute "God's-eye view."
These theories, popularized and simplified, contributed to the growing sense of a multiverse.
The Automobile and Shifting Social Norms
The automobile symbolized a profound shift in American life. It was so significant that one woman in Muncie, Indiana, described how it altered a sense of community. Stability was replaced by mobility. People left their doorsteps for the road, symbolized in advertisements urging them to "Increase Your Weekend Touring Radius." Even though they were being urged to buy cars, mobility and freedom of movement was becoming more important than stability. In 1929, there were 26,500,000 vehicles on the road.
The Model-T Ford became both a symbol of freedom and a perceived source of societal decay. However, The motorcar became one of the precipatants of a new consciousness, along with radios, vacuum cleaners, record players, and other consumer goods. This was spurred on by advances in radio, advertising, and cinema.
Americans increasingly identified with a modern, discontinuous culture transcending locality and even national identity.
World War I and the Expatriate Movement
America emerged from World War I as a creditor nation, loaning billions to Europe. Under Woodrow Wilson, it briefly sought moral leadership through the Fourteen Points and the League of Nations. However, Congress rejected the League, moving towards isolationism.
Despite political withdrawal, economic and cultural ties with the world remained. Mass immigration and expanding mass communication systems eroded national boundaries, symbolized by the expatriate movement. Post-WWI, American writers flocked to Europe, drawn by favorable exchange rates and a desire for new ideas free from American provincialism.
They engaged with European movements like Symbolism, Surrealism, and Dadaism, integrating New World perspectives with Old World traditions, becoming involved in literary movements which disregarded nationalistic boundaries.
The Rise of Modernism
American writers participated in the international experiments of these movements, adding the resources of language with them from the New World, and enriched by their encounter with the Old.
Modernism, a major response to Adams's perceived "multiverse," was characterized by feelings of cultural exile and alienation, innovative and disjunctive forms, and a willingness to challenge traditional norms of syntax, form, and order. It aimed to achieve newer, more appropriate means of recognition to see things properly again. Ultimately modernism was an artistic way to recognize that things had altered beyond established means of recognition, form, and value.
Feminism and Shifting Gender Roles
Modernism intertwined with feminism and the emergence of the "new woman." The 19th Amendment in 1920 granted women the right to vote, while access to birth control allowed for greater control over their lives. Birth rates fell dramatically. Education and professional opportunities expanded, though often in lower-paying fields like social work and nursing.
Despite these advances, traditional beliefs persisted, limiting women's roles and sexuality. The Committee for the Suppression of Vice and Motion Picture Production Code reflected societal anxieties. The editors of The Little Review were fined for publishing part of James Joyce's Ulysses. So, American Culture was still quite conflicted, but gravitated toward the social forms of modernity and the artistic forms of modernism.
Cultural Conflicts and the Demand for Attention
American culture was a complex, often conflicting mix. Labor clashed with triumphant capitalism. Traditionalism fought new thought, exemplified by the Scopes trial over Darwinian evolution. Ethnic and immigrant groups demanded recognition, provoking immigration quotas in 1924. Native Americans endured cultural dislocation through forced relocation and the Allotment Act.
These diverse groups inspired writers to explore themes of exile, mixed identity, and cultural collision, often favoring social realism over literary experiment. This caused socialism to appear in many of those groups.
African-American Double Consciousness
W. E. B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), highlighted the "double-consciousness" of African-Americans, torn between their American and African identities. The question was if they should attempt absorption into a dominant culture, or assert a separate national identity.
This was intensified by the Great Migration and escalating racial violence. The Harlem Renaissance, or New Negro movement, saw black writers exploring diverse literary forms to express their mixed and conflicted experiences, grappling with the balance between politics and art, literary experiment and realism, and the relevance of their racial inheritance.
Optimism Versus Nostalgia and the Lindbergh Phenomenon
Caught between optimism for the future and nostalgia for the past, Americans like the expatriate writers, were compelled toward the horizons of tomorrow and drawn toward the golden landscapes of yesterday.
The flight of Charles Lindbergh across the Atlantic in 1927 reflected this dualism. He was both a symbol of the pioneer spirit (Spirit of St. Louis: the young, independent, and individualistic American, unaffected by public institutions and pressures) and technologically innovation. His achievement was seen as a miracle of technology, and what was possible with help from teamwork, organization, and commitment to the production economy. The technology of organization and the values of the past.
The era was marked by a conviction of newness, inspiring and frightening Americans. The drive for innovation in literature was countered by a yearning for a simpler, more stable age.
Warren Harding and the Prohibition
This yearning was reflected in Warren Harding's call for "not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normality; not resolution but restoration." The 18th Amendment, prohibiting alcohol sales, demonstrated a merging of progressive and nostalgic impulses, seeking both social reform and a return to fundamentalist values.
Fear of the new fueled nativism, seen in anti-immigrant sentiments and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, seeking a return of power of a De-Americanized average citizen of the old stock.
Artistic Traditionalism and the Recovery of the Past
These nostalgic impulses fostered artistic traditionalism. Writers and critics like Van Wyck Brooks and Matthew Josephson constructed the idea of an American literary tradition. Writers like Willa Cather explored the Western past, while others like John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate considered the Southern past, and writers like Jean Toomer and Mourning Dove turned to the African-American and Native American pasts as imaginative resource. Cather was intrigued by the power of memory and imagined past of the West and America has on the present. What they sought was different. What they all shared was the belief that restoration was vital to personal and social health.
The Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression
The Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Depression shattered American confidence. Per capita income plummeted, and unemployment soared. Evictions, breadlines, and soup kitchens became commonplace. Those in employment received wages as low as 20-30¢/hour. People were forced to wander the country in search of work, and were erecting shanty towns.
Hoover's response was inadequate due to his belief in "rugged individualism." He was defeated by Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.
The crisis was both economic and psychological, challenging the ingrained American belief in hard work, self-help, and progress. The lack of language to both confront the events led to paralysis for dealing with what had occurred. Even the