Modernism and Mainstream

Culture and Its Discontents, 1919-1929

Modernism and Normalcy

• Modernism—reflected both a loss of confidence in and loss of certainty about Western Civilization

• WWI and Relativity gave experiential and empirical basis for doubt

• Mainstream America desires to preserve its privileges and dominant perceptions

Forces of Reaction

• Nativism

• The 2d KKK

• Fundamentalism

• Prohibition

Nativism

• 1921 and 1924 Immigration Act—preserve Northern European dominance

• Madison Grant, Passing of the Great Race (1916)

• Sacco and Vanzetti—Immigrants are a source of violence and bad politics

2d Klan

• 100% Americanism

• Controlled governorships in Indiana, Illinois, and Colorado

• Perhaps as many as 4 million members nationwide

• Madge Oberholtzer and D. C. Stephenson

1926 KKK Parade in D. C.

Fundamentalism

• Inerrant scripture, virgin birth, vicarious atonement, bodily resurrection, second coming

• Fear of modernism corrupting biblical faith came to focus on Evolution

• 1925 Scopes Trial

Darrow and Bryan at Dayton

Prohibition

• 18th Amendment—function of anti-liquor crusade plus anti-Germanism of WWI

• Mass evasion

• Organized crime – “Scarface” Al Capone

Al Capone

Elements of the Modern Temper

• Jazz

• New Morality—Freudian psychology in the popular understanding

• Flappers and the “New Woman”

• Companionate Marriage

Louis Armstrong

Miss Yonkers, 1924

Margaret Sanger and Reproductive Freedom

• Published The Woman Rebel in violation of the Comstock Laws in 1914

• Opened family planning clinic in Brooklyn in 1916

• Founded American Birth Control League in 1921, which became Planned Parenthood in 1942

• Later advocated Eugenics

Margaret Sanger (1883-1966)

Women’s Rights

• Suffrage Movement achieves 19th Amendment in 1919

• NWSA becomes League of Women voters

• Alice Paul advocates ERA but it died in 1978

• Women continue to enter the work force (10 million by 1930)

Alice Paul (1885-1977)

African Americans

• Black Migration to Northern cities continues

• Harlem Renaissance—Alain Locke• UNIA and Marcus Garvey• NAACP and formation of Legal Defense

Fund• Oscar DePriest elected to Congress from

Chicago

Claude McKay “If We Must Die”If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

Making their mock at our accursed lot.If we must die, O let us nobly die,

So that our precious blood may not be shedIn vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!

What though before us lies the open grave?Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Main Street Culture

• Model T

• Charles Lindbergh “Spirit of St. Louis”

• Spectator Sports—George Lewis “Tex” Rikard; Harold “Red” Grange, Jack Dempsey, George Herman “Babe” Ruth.

Modernists Assumptions

• Einstein’s theory of relativity (visual proof in 1919 eclipse)

• Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty

• If reality depends upon where your stand and view or how fast you’re moving, what is real and what is true?

Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg

Three who made Modernism

• Darwin—man is an animal

• Freud—who is a product of irrational and unconscious desires

• Einstein—whose perceptions are relative to position and speed

Literature and Art Respond

• T. S. Eliot and James Joyce revolt against form and convention—after all form and convention are constructed and they’re not physically real

• Picasso—cubism asks what’s the true perspective and presents them all at once while reducing things to essential shapes

• Armory Show--1913

Belles Lettres

• Ernest Hemingway

• F. Scott Fitzgerald

• William Faulkner

• Gertrude Stein “Lost Generation”

• Zane Grey/Carl Sandburg