Académique Documents
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Culture Documents
Henry F. May
The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 43, No. 3. (Dec., 1956), pp. 405-427.
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Shifting Perspectives on the 1920's
this simply. Yet it is easy enough to find all these beliefs stated very
positively in textbooks and even learned articles, with both the be-
haviorist dogmatism and the authoritarian implications full-blown.
Part of the confidence of these prophets rested on real and important
achievement by social scientists in the period, but those who had
actually contributed the most new knowledge were sometimes less
dogmatic than their colleagues. In Middletown, for instance, the
social science interpretation of the twenties is buried in a mass of
scrupulously collected facts, but it is there. At certain points in
describing the decline of labor unionism or the standardization of
leisure the authors seem to be deploring changes that have taken
place since 1890. Yet in their conclusion they trace the tensions of
Middletown to the lag of habits and institutions behind technolog-
ical progress. Individual child-training, religion, and the use of
patriotic symbols represent the past, while the future is represented
by whatever is thoroughly secular and collective, particularly in
the community's work life. The town has tended to meet its crises
by invoking tradition in defense of established institutions. Their
whole investigation, the Lynds conclude, suggests instead "the
possible utility of a deeper-cutting procedure that would involve
a re-examination of the institutions themselves." '
The typical economic thought of the twenties, while it avoided
Utopian extremes, shared with the other social sciences an un-
limited confidence in the present possibilities of fact-finding and
saw in the collection and use of statistics much of the promise and
meaning of the era. In his brilliant concluding summary of Recent
Economic Trends, Professor Wesley C. Mitchell, for instance,
found the main explanation for the progress of 1922-1928 in the
new application of intelligence to business, government, and trade-
union administration.'
The third contemporary interpretation of the period, that offered
by its literary intellectuals, differed sharply from the other two.
Completely repudiating the optimism of the businessmen, it agreed
with the social scientists only in its occasional praise of the liberated
intelligence. For the most part, as we are all continually reminded,
the writers and artists of the twenties saw their age as one of decline.
The most publicized group of pessimists was that typified by
7 Robert S. and Helen M. Lynd, Middletown (New York, 19291, 502.
8President's Conference on CTnempIoyment,Rpcent Economic Changes (New York,
1929), 862.
S H I F T I N G PERSPECTIVES ON T H E 1920's 409
Harold Steams and his colleagues of 1922, who, with their many
successors, left an enduring picture of a barren, neurotic, ~ a b b i t t -
ridden society. These critics have drawn a lot of patriotic fire, and
indeed some of them are sitting ducks. They were often, though
not always, facile, unorioinal, and ignorant. They seldom made
9
clear the standards by which they found American society so lack-
ing. Yet their lament is never altogether absurd or capricious. If
one studies the civilization they saw around them through its press,
one hardly finds it a model of ripeness or serenity. The fact re-
mains, for historians to deal with, that American civilization in the
twenties presented to many of its most sensitive and some of its
gifted members only an ugly and hostile face.
A more thoughtful and sadder group of writers than most of the
young Babbitt-beaters traced their own real malaise not to the in-
adequacies of America but to the breakdown of the entire Western
civilization. The New Humanists had long been deploring the
decline of literary and moral discipline. At the opposite extreme in
taste the up-to-date followers of Spengler agreed that decay im-
pended. Joseph Wood Krutch in 1929 described the failure first
of religion and then of the religion of science to give life meaning:
cc
Both our practical morality and our emotional lives are adjusted
.
to a world which no longer exists. . . There impends for the
human spirit either extinction or a readjustment more stupendous
than any made before." '
Many accepted this statement of the alternatives, and chose
according to their natures. Walter Lippmann, who had played
some part in the confident prewar attack on tradition and custom,
chose the duty of reconstruction and published, in 1929, his earnest
attempt to find a naturalist basis for traditional moral standards.''
On the other hand, T. S. Eliot painted a savage and devastating
picture of present civilization and left it to live in the world which
Krutch thought no longer existent. As Eliot assumed the stature of
a contemporary classic, his description of the Waste Land, the
world of Sweeney and Prufrock, and also his path away from it,
seriously influenced later conceptions of the period.
With the depression, the twenties shot into the past with extra-
ordinary suddenness. The conflicting pictures of the decade, rosy
and deep black, changed sharply, though none disappeared. Of
'Joseph W. Krutch, The Modern Temper (New York, 1929), 26.
them all, it was the New Era point of view, the interpretation of
the decade as the birth of a new and humane capitalism, that under-
standably suffered most. Ironically, the most plausible and heavily
documented version of this description, and one of the most in-
fluential later, appeared only in 1932 when Adolf A. Berle, Jr.,
and Gardiner C. Means described the separation of management
from ownership." At the time, however, the economic order of
the twenties was collapsing,. and its harassed defenders retreated
temporarily into the Republican last ditch.
The other optimistic vision of the decade, that of the social
scientists, depended less directly on prosperity and in the thirties
survived somewhat better, though it became difficult to see the
preceding period as the triumphant application of social intel-
ligence. I t is a startling example of the prestige of the social science
point of view in 1929 that a president should commission a group
of social scientists to make a complete and semi-official portrait of
a whole civilization. The fact that Recent SociaZ Trends was not
completed and published until 1932 probably accounts in part for
its excellence; it is the most informative document of the twenties
which we have and also a monument of the chastened social science
of the thirties. The committee that wrote this survey still believed,
as its chairman, Wesley Mitchell, had earlier, that much of the
meaning of the twenties lay in the harnessing of social intelligence
to collective tasks. Consciously and subtly, the various authors
documented the contradiction between the period's individualistic
slogans and its actual movement toward social and even govern-
mental contr01.'~ Yet they were conscious throughout- that all this
had ended in depression.
Like the authors of Middletown, the committee found its syn-
thetic principle in the doctrine that change proceeds at different
rates in different areas. Again like the Lynds, it assumed that
society's principal objective should be "the attainment of a situation
in which economic, governmental, moral and cultural arrangements
should not lag- too far behind the advance of basic changes," and
basic here means primarily techn~logical.'~~ccasionallyRecent
Social Trends displays, as for instance in its chapters on the child
11 Adolf A. Berle, Jr., and Gardiner C. Means, T h e Modern Corporation and
Private P r o p e ~ t y(New York, 1932).
12 President's Research Committee on Social Trends, Recent Social Trends (2 vols.,
New York, 1933). This is a main theme of Chapters 23 to 29, 11, 1168-1541.
1 3 Ibid., I, lxxiv.
SHIFTING PERSPECTIVES O N T H E 192WS 41 1
and on education, a surviving trace of the easy authoritarianism of
the preceding decade's social theorists, and occasional chapters
refer in the early optimistic manner to the hope of solving all social
problems through the new psychological knowledge." But in most
of this great work, and particularly in its brilliant introduction, the
authors left behind the social-science utopianism of the early
twenties. I t would take an increasingly powerful effort of social
intelligence to bring us into equilibrium. Moreover, this effort
must be a subtle one; the committee took pains to state that it was
"not unmindful of the fact that there are important elements in
human life not easily stated in terms of efficiency, mechanization,
institutions, rates of change or adaptations to change." l5 There-
fore, what was called for was not a ruthless rejection of tradition
but a re-examination leading to a restatement in terms of modem
life. Recent Social Trends is in places a work of art as well as of
social science, and it is one of the few books about the twenties that
point the way toward a comprehensive understanding of the period.
The view of the previous decade presented in the thirties by most
historians was far less subtle and complete. Instead of either a New
Era, a liberation, or a slow scientific adaptation, the twenties be-
came a deplorable interlude of reaction. This view, stated some-
times with qualifications and sometimes very baldly, has continued
to dominate academic historical writing- from the thirties almost
until the present.
Most of the historians who were publishing in the thirties had
received their training in the Progressive Era. Many had been
deeply influenced by Frederick Jackson Turner, and had tended to
look for their synthesis not to the decline of Europe but to the
expansion of America. Though the Turner doctrine can be turned
to pessimistic uses, Turner himself in the twenties prophesied that
social intelligence would find a substitute for the disappearing force
of free land.'" As this suggests, the outlook of John Dewey pervaded
much of historical writing as it did the work of social scientists.
Yet historians still tended to give most of their attention to poli-
tics. For these reasons, and because they shared the opinion of
their readers, historians usually found the meaning of American
l4Zbid., 11, 1185.
16 Zbid., I, lxxv.
16 See his statement of 1924, quoted in Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (Cam-
bridge, 1950), 258-59.
412 THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORICAL REVIEW
51 Chard Powers Smith, Yankees and God (New York, 1954), 451-59.
S H I F T I N G P E R S P E C T I V E S ON T H E 192VS 425
clearly stated value jud,ment, C. Wright Mills has documented
the rise of a regimented, rootless, and docile new middle class to the
arbitral position in American society.64 The increase of the white-
collar salariat and its implications extended before and after the
twenties but went especially fast in that period, as the authors of
Recent Social Trends, among others, pointed out. Samuel Lubell
and others have seen another social change - in the twenties, the be-
ginning of the coming-of-age of the new immigration." Drawing
together Lubell's interpretation and Mills, Richard Hofstadter
emphasizes the "Status Revolution" as a main event of the period
about the turn of the c e n t ~ r y . ~The
' Protestant upper middle class,
long a semi-aristocracy with a monopoly on advanced education,
had declined, and so had the independent farmers. In their places
other groups had grown and gained some power - the new middle
class, the ethnic minorities, and labor. All these processes of change
had, by the twenties, proceeded a long way, and all were continuing
and accelerating, with the partial exception of the rise of labor.
Surely this social upheaval, impossible to see clearly until our own
time, has considerable meaning for the intellectual history of the
twenties as for its politics, for the collapse, that is, of a long-frayed
moral and literary tradition.
The nearest we can come to summarizing or explaining the shift-
ing opinions of the twenties may well be to see the period in some
such terms as these, and to see it as a disintegration. There is cer-
tainly nothing original about such a conclusion, but perhaps we are
now in a position to give disintegration a fuller and more various
meaning. The twenties were a period in which common values and
common beliefs were replaced by separate and conflicting loyalties.
One or another of the standards arising from the age itself has been
used by each of its historians ever since. This is what has made their
judgments so conflicting, so emotional, so severally valid and col-
lectively confusing. It is equally true and equally partial to talk
about the rising standard of living and the falling standard of
political morality, the freshness and individuality of literature and
the menace of conformity, the exuberance of manufacturers or
social scientists and the despair of traditional philosophers. Some-
how, we must learn to write history that includes all these, and the
M C. Wright Mills, White Collar (New York, 1951).
56Samuel Lubell, The Future of American Politics (New York, 1953), 34-41.
6.9 Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York, 195S), 131-72.
426 THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORICAL REVIEW