One of the goals of intellectual history is to try to access, as best we can, not simply the ideas but also the lived experiences of historical actors. The remarkable thing about the interwar period is that it is replete with commentators on American life who give us both in their work. Some were native born, and others arrived as exiles. Some welcomed the comforts of the technologies of the period, and others warned against their dangers. Some worked with prose, others with paint and photographs. But together they form a generation of articulate and incisive commentators who help us come in contact with the exciting but challenging moral worlds of interwar Americans.
In This Side of Paradise (1920), F. Scott Fitzgerald announced the postwar arrival of his “new generation . . . grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.”1 It was the period when the vanguard anthropologist Margaret Mead compared the homogenous Samoan society with the mainland’s stunted ability to grapple with its own pluralism: “[Americans] have many standards but we still believe that only one standard can be the right one.”2 This was the period in which African Americans responded to the vitriol and violence of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan with an equally intense fury harnessed by their verse. “I, too, sing America,” wrote Langston Hughes in 1923, co-opting Walt Whitman’s sanguine “I hear American singing” and tingeing it with acerbity and daring: “I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen [w]hen company comes. . . . Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table [w]hen company comes. Nobody’ll dare [s]ay to me, ‘Eat in the kitchen’. . . . They’ll see how beautiful I am [a]nd be ashamed.”3 This is the period of the stock market crash and Great Depression, as well as prescient observers who warned of the moral bankruptcy underwriting the buoyant optimism of the 1920s. In 1929, even before the crash gave Americans reason to question their values, Walter Lippmann lamented that the “acids of modernity” were corroding Americans’ moral compass.4 Words like these are portals to the past, enabling us to feel the inner sting of Americans’ consciences and to see postwar America through their eyes.
This period from the end of World War I to the end of World War II was marked by intellectual daring and profound antimodernism. The Roaring Twenties bellowed not only with new insights into human nature and experiments in modernist poetry, art, and literature but also with fears about loose sexual mores, racial mongrelization, and deicide. In the aftermath of victory in World War I, American thinkers from diverse backgrounds and viewpoints participated in a common, and by now long-standing, project of finding new terms and modes of expression for explaining America to itself. Whether condemning American commercialization, trying to understand the causes and implications of the Great Depression, or rethinking democratic foundations amidst the growing specter of totalitarianism in Europe, they examined America’s unfinished revolution for freedom and equality and provided new inspiration for finding unity in its diversity.
In the years after World War I, national and international economic and social developments pushed and pulled Americans in different, sometimes opposing, directions. On the one side were the forces of modernization—new scientific theories, new technologies for the home, and new ideas about family and sexuality—all making new ways of thinking, living, and loving possible. On the other side was the pull of tradition—religious revivals, the familiarity of one’s hometown in a period of migration and urbanization, and old fears and animosities—tugging at many Americans’ minds and hearts. But there was one thing both those looking to the future for confidence and those looking to the past for comfort had in common. They could agree that the flow of history into which they were inexorably pulled was producing profound transformations to their America as well as their sense of their place within it. Their world, whether they liked it or not, was quickly becoming very different from the one into which they were born.
The forces of modernization in American life were everywhere apparent. Extraordinary postwar economic growth, thanks to increased industrial production and corporate profitability, a rising per capita income, and a growing number of Americans getting comfortable buying goods and services on credit, brought seismic changes in daily life. Labor-saving devices such as electric refrigerators, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners allowed for more leisure time than ever before. The phonograph, the radio, and the “talkies” kept people entertained during that leisure time. Old cities were made new thanks to electrification, while a modern kind of living in something called “the suburbs” became available on the outskirts of those cities thanks to the automobile. New print technologies allowed for greater production of mass-marketed books and magazines, passing along new trends in fashion, culture, and thought. The period was also one of self-described “new”-ness, with the liberated “New Negro” and “New Woman” as modern social types ready to make larger claims on the public sphere. The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, giving women the right to vote, was an extraordinary breakthrough for feminists who sought equality with men. But the “New Woman” quickly became less associated with a female at the ballot box and more linked to the chopped-haired, painted-faced, kittenish flapper. With a cigarette in hand, this modern woman waved goodbye to traditional notions of femininity and propriety.
If the 1920s seemed to be a go-go decade, there were also many American observers who just wanted its modernizing forces to stop. The United States had won the war, but some Americans felt that victory culture brought with it decadence, profligacy, and too many strange foreigners with unfamiliar customs ill-fitting the sort of community they longed for. Warren G. Harding ran for president in 1920 promising “normalcy.” Given that he was the first politician to so use the word, he had all the latitude he wanted to define it rather vaguely as “a regular steady order of things. I mean normal procedure, the natural way, without excess.”5 Over the course of the 1920s, however, a series of events helped give the term more precision. Normalcy came to mean isolationism, with the United States backing away from the League of Nations. Normalcy came to mean antiradicalism, with the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 and labor unrest at home bringing on fears of communism and anarchism. For many old-stock white Protestants, normalcy also came to mean a belligerent nativism with tightened immigration laws (the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the National Origins Act of 1924), as well as growing membership in a bigger, badder Ku Klux Klan (KKK), which now lengthened its list of enemies to include Jews and Catholics in addition to African Americans. The quest for normalcy tracked with growing fears about “foreign thinkers” slipping into school curricula and polluting American students’ morality. The Scopes “Monkey” Trial helped yoke Darwinism to Satanism and helped give rise to fundamentalism, a new development that had profound consequences for Christianity in the twentieth-century United States. And now with the growing popularity of Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the dark inner workings of moderns’ minds and libidos, the Austrian psychiatrist joined Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche to form an unholy trinity of continental thinkers corrupting American thought.
The tug of war between modern and traditional forces proved most destabilizing, however, when they competed for supremacy within the mind of a single intellectual. A prime example is the growing faith in eugenics: the use of “advanced” sciences as apologias for racial and ethnic exclusion. Margaret Sanger, the sex educator who opened the first birth control clinic in the United States and advocated tirelessly for women’s rights to self-determination, represented the pinnacle of the modern, advanced woman. She was also an ethnic chauvinist—a stance perfectly in keeping with conventional prejudices of her day, though from the vantage point of today, a seemingly odd fit with her extremely unconventional ideas about sexuality. In Woman and the New Race (1920), she understood that “voluntary motherhood implies a new morality.” That in no way meant, however, that she wanted “foreigners who have come in hordes [and] have brought with them their ignorance of hygiene” to be free to make their own reproductive choices.6 In The Pivot of Civilization (1922), Sanger described “science [as] the ally” in limiting the procreation of the “unfit” and “feeble-minded.”7
Figure 6.1 Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color (1920) was one of the most influential works of racial forecasting in the 1920s. Stoddard’s text provided a “racial map of the globe,” showing how the population of the “colored” world outnumbered the “white” world two to one, and warned against immigration and miscegenation as the greatest threats to white Americans. University of Wisconsin–Madison, Special Collections
Sanger’s views of African Americans, Southern Europeans, and Asians were not as extreme as those of Lothrop Stoddard, a Harvard-trained American historian and prominent eugenicist and racial theorist. And yet it was his authoritative studies of the “colored” threat to the white race, most notably The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy (1920) and The Revolt against Civilization: The Menace of the Underman (1922), that recommended him as an ideal authority to serve on Sanger’s American Birth Control League’s national council and to publish articles in the Birth Control Review. Stoddard helped confirm in the minds of many Americans that “race is not an abstract theory; it is a concrete fact, which can be accurately determined by scientific tests.”8 Both Sanger and Stoddard represent the seamless intellectual extension of nineteenth-century scientific racism into interwar eugenic theory, as both used the authority of modern science to credentialize racial bigotry.
Ezra Pound moved to London in 1908 at the age of twenty-three, attracted to its intellectual energy and aesthetic experimentation. He lectured on medieval poetry, wrote criticism, served as the foreign editor for the Chicago-based Poetry magazine, and exchanged laughter and barbs with the Fabian Socialists George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, painter Wyndham Lewis, and philosopher Bertrand Russell. But the war dealt his enthusiasm a punishing blow. Pound recoiled in horror as he watched his generation of young men become psychologically and physically ravaged—if not killed—for a ruinous nationalism, for a grotesque conception of patriotism, and for politicians’ ambitions and businessmen’s greed. He captured his fury and heartache in his 1920 poem “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” lamenting that the best of his generation had died “for an old bitch gone in the teeth, [f]or a botched civilization.”9
Not long after Pound documented his devastation and disenchantment, a number of his fellow American writers and artists who shared his disillusionment fled to Europe to make new lives for themselves. No European country was wholly innocent or spared the ravages of war. Nevertheless, from their perspective, Europe was more cosmopolitan than their provincial America, and thus a better place to experiment with the way of life and ideas they needed for their work. The strong postwar American dollar enabled figures like Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Sylvia Beach to make a life among the new literary modernists of Europe while rejecting the persistent Victorianism of American culture.
Gertrude Stein, who had been living in Paris since 1903 but welcomed the postwar rush of American talent to her adopted homeland, referred to these American prodigals and pilgrims as a “lost generation.” She did not intend this as a hearty endorsement of intellectual vagabondage, but rather as a way of poking fun at their wild ways and youthfulness and to suggest, in a more serious sense, that they were searching for some existential anchors that they would never find. In her view, they were lost metaphysically. Hemingway was the first to grab on to this designation, seeing it as a fitting moniker for expatriate Americans’ intellectual restlessness and yearning. If they were homeless minds, then better to find temporary shelter among the ruins of Europe than in an American intellectual and cultural wasteland.
While a generation of young, white writers and artists welcomed being lost, that same generation of young, black writers and artists wanted nothing more than to find themselves in an America they could comfortably call “home.” Confronting persistent racism in the face of a revived KKK and in nineteenth-century evolutionary theories repurposed to support twentieth-century Jim Crow segregation and imperialism, a growing number of African American poets, playwrights, painters, and essayists went about fighting American prejudice by first finding themselves a history to connect them from the present to their American (and before that African) past. What became known as the Harlem (or Negro) Renaissance was an extraordinary flowering of black intellectual production in the 1920s and 1930s, which sought heightened racial consciousness and pride, as well as interracial unity.
There was no one theme, aesthetic, or voice that defined the movement, though Howard University philosopher Alain Locke’s The New Negro of 1925 gave it a mission and an identity. Locke was the first African American to win a Rhodes scholarship, and he studied with philosophers Josiah Royce and Horace Kallen, receiving his PhD from Harvard in 1918. He had made a name for himself through his “critical relativism,” where he took the pluralism undergirding pragmatism and extended it into his own form of radical racial and cultural theory. Those commitments can be seen in his introduction to the collection, where he takes on the “fiction” of racial essentialism behind the “much asserted rising tide of color” while recognizing that African Americans needed to come up with new intellectual and aesthetic terms for self-definition and self-determination. Fostering racial pride need not encourage racial absolutism or divisions. On the contrary, progressive race thinking, cognizant of the relativism of different cultures and groups, was a way to see the value and beauty of each of them, both comparatively and in and of themselves. Drawing on diasporic and Zionist discourses, Locke argued that worldwide persecution of black people, like Jewish people, was “making the Negro international,” and he described Harlem, the vibrant hub of African American artistic experimentation, as the “home of the Negro’s ‘Zionism.’ ”10
The Renaissance writers’ and artists’ ideas, aesthetics, and arguments did not move in lockstep with one another. Yet they all reveal a shared desire to devise their own measure of aesthetic and intellectual value through artistic experimentation and new terms for their black identity. For W. E. B. Du Bois, that meant dispensing with the question he posed in The Souls of Black Folk—“how does it feel to be a problem?”—and recognizing it as nothing more than a confession of white racial anxiety.11 In the years leading up to and during this florescence, Du Bois organized the first Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1919, helping to provide a diasporic focus to the movement; published Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (1920) and The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America (1924); and even experimented with fiction with his 1928 novel, Dark Princess: A Romance.
The ethnographer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston combined her personal experiences growing up in an all-black Florida town and her training with Alain Locke at Howard University and anthropologist Franz Boas at Barnard College to produce her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), which promoted pride in the customs and folkways of Southern rural blacks. The poetry of the movement likewise sought to find the beauty and particularity of African Americans’ experience. Roughly a century before the New Negro movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson affirmed in “The Poet” that “it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem.”12 It is hard to think of better examples of Emersonian poets than Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and James Weldon Johnson, who blended impassioned criticism and gorgeous lyricism in their verse.
While they looked to Africa to imagine their distant pasts, as well as to blacks in the diaspora to create a movement with global reach, the contributors to the Harlem Renaissance wanted, above all, to make America a place they could call “home.” Although it is difficult to trace the efficacy of their efforts in turning antiblack bigotry and fear into a durable racial solidarity and inclusion, it is much easier to see how, even with the barriers to freedom of Jim Crow, Renaissance artists and intellectuals reimagined their belonging in America.
Figure 6.2 As if in direct response to the collector of Africana Arthur Schomburg’s claim that “the American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future,” New Negro Renaissance artist Loïs Mailou Jones’s The Ascent of Ethiopia (1932) presents an allegory of American black experience, emerging from its African past, moving through slavery and liberation, and finding its fullest expression in the Harlem Renaissance. Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase, African American Art Acquisition Fund, matching funds from Suzanne and Richard Pieper, with additional support from Arthur and Dorothy Nelle Sanders, M 1993.19. Photographer: John R. Glembin. With permission of Loïs Mailou Jones Trust
The shock and devastation brought on by the stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent depression created an urgency to understand American life in the past, as well as its prospects for the future. Perhaps this helps explain why the phrase “the American dream” was popularized in 1930, a moment in history when Americans were haunted by their worst nightmares. It was James Truslow Adams’s The Epic of America (1931) that first promoted the notion of “the American dream” not only as a guiding vision through the centuries of American history but also as a universal aspiration: “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.”13 It is hard to believe that these words were written and, moreover, that they inspired such widespread fidelity during a period when a severe drought was scorching the earth and brutalizing farmers on the Great Plains, when six million Americans were unemployed, and when breadlines and food riots cropped up all over American cities. Aspirational histories like Adams’s were good for giving Depression-era Americans hope. But what they needed as well was the help of American thinkers.
Intellectuals found this opportunity to directly help their fellow Americans in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms. Roosevelt thought that nothing less than “bold, persistent experimentation” could work to repair a devastated economy and desperate society.14 He recruited a variety of economists, social scientists, and legal scholars to work as governmental advisers, believing that knowledge was the best weapon against economic and social disrepair. Almost no domain of American life was out of the reach of New Deal programs’ scientific investigation and administration. Though imperfect and uneven in their handling of Americans’ basic needs, the programs focused on everything from the unemployed, the sick, and the elderly to home loans, soil erosion, bank deposits, and rural electrification.
While the New Dealers believed all areas of social and economic concern should fall within their purview, there was, at least, one idea they wanted to see forever pushed to the margins of American thought: rugged individualism. According to Charles Beard, America’s foremost historian of the period, the exaltation of the antisocial, individualistic, “frontier” mentality described by Frederick Jackson Turner roughly forty years earlier had become dangerously passé. “The cold truth,” Beard averred, “is that the individualist creed of everybody for himself and the devil take the hindmost is principally responsible for the distress in which Western civilization finds itself. . . . Whatever merits the creed may have had in days of primitive agriculture and industry, it is not applicable in an age of technology, science, and rationalized economy.”15
The new optimism that intellectuals were not just dreamy-eyed perseverators but discerning and determined problem solvers turned up in the terminology of the period. “Brains Trust,” a term coined by a New York Times reporter who observed the increased role of academic intellectuals in important governmental roles, became one of the most notable phrases of the New Deal. The term initially referred to Raymond Moley, Rexford G. Tugwell, and Adolf Berle Jr., Columbia University professors who advised Roosevelt on economic policy and helped establish regulatory solutions to the country’s economic problems, but it came into wider use to describe the sudden bumper crop of professional intellectuals in political roles. Though their area of research expertise varied widely, they all shared a similar revulsion with abstractions and an insistence on the practical applications and verifiability of ideas and theories. According to Tugwell, an economist, “conceptualism is the particular bugbear of the social sciences,” adding that work of the social scientist “in the fields and factories” is akin to what the natural scientist does in the laboratory.16 Many of the New Deal reformers, who got their start in the pre–World War I progressive reform initiatives, carried with them their convictions that scientific inquiry and administration were crucial for remedying social problems. Frances Perkins, the secretary of labor and main visionary behind the minimum wage, Social Security, and universal health insurance, drew on her own experiences working at Hull House in Chicago.
The New Deal programs also exhibited an appreciation for what writers and artists could do to bind up the country’s wounds. The Works Progress Administration (later renamed the Work Projects Administration [WPA]) initiated a number of programs for unemployed art critics, teachers, librarians, folklorists, novelists, and playwrights to go into the American “field” and retrieve people’s ways of life, all in an effort to draw out the grit and goodness of the American “folk,” even in times of great distress. Many writers contributed to The American Guide series (1937–41) with essays on the culture, lifestyles, history, and geography of different states, balancing a romantic nationalism with a celebration of regional diversity and particularity. An even more extraordinary and visionary undertaking was the systematic effort to interview African American men and women who had been born into slavery and still lived to testify to this darker side of the American experience. In addition, a veritable army of artists was hired to help cultivate an aesthetic for the nation. Artists designed posters, painted murals on public buildings, installed statues in city centers, and taught community art classes, making the 1930s one of the most vibrant eras of public art in American history. Many WPA artists and art historians also helped with a massive project, the Index of American Design, which documented the crafts and decorative arts in America from the colonial period to 1900. This was no study in quaint antiquarianism, but a document produced by forward-looking modern artists searching for a usable past.
Despite garnering the support and appreciation of a majority of Americans, Roosevelt and his New Deal programs did inspire their fair share of outraged critics. The governor of Louisiana, Huey Long, made a national name for himself breaking his one-time support for Roosevelt and challenging his initiatives, which he saw as too subservient to the demands and desires of corporations and the wealthy. He offered instead his “Share Our Wealth” plan, which proposed to expropriate the wealth of the richest and redistribute it to the poor in the form of a $5,000 homestead and an annual income of $2,500. Roosevelt had an equally threatening enemy in the Michigan-based Catholic priest and radio personality Father Charles Coughlin, who ratcheted up the worry of his forty-five million largely white, working-class listeners into a full-scale panic with his anticommunist, anticapitalist, rabidly anti-Semitic diatribes, as he called for a “Christian front” to fight off these forces of evil. Because the hyperbole and hysteria of Long’s and Coughlin’s rhetoric exhibited more rancor and resentment than reasoned arguments, piecing together their logic is not easy. Nevertheless, they helped inspire sincere dread among their followers that the modern industrial state was horning in on their personal autonomy and trampling on precious liberties.
One of the most important events in twentieth-century American intellectual and cultural life was the massive immigration of German-speaking intellectuals, artists, and scientists fleeing Nazism in the 1930s and early 1940s. The refugees brought with them their erudition, training, and, in some cases, international reputations in the arts and sciences, and they had an enormous influence on American academic and cultural institutions. The refugee intellectuals included, among others, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Berthold Brecht, Arnold Schoenberg, Karen Horney, Walter Gropius, Franz Neumann, Ernst Cassirer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Eric Voegelin, Wilhelm Reich, Erik Erikson, Paul Tillich, and Fritz Lang. Reading this list of extraordinary talent makes it easy to see why Walter W. S. Cook, director of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, called Hitler his “best friend”: “[Hitler] shakes the tree and I collect the apples.”17
The bulk of the intellectuals arrived in America during the 1930s, a period marked by political isolationism, anti-immigrant nativism, and economic depression. Many were rejected by universities and colleges that closed ranks to keep out Jews and foreigners. But a number of savvy university administrators recognized that they could benefit from their fame and expertise, especially as many American academic institutions were still trying to establish themselves internationally. In addition, the new crop of highly trained social scientists was seen as a valuable research resource for the development and administration of New Deal programs. And last, and perhaps most important, the émigrés’ firsthand experience with Nazism gave them the insights and moral authority to comment on the consequences of European totalitarian regimes for Americans.
German refugee intellectuals understood profoundly the ramifications of living in a totalitarian state and became invaluable commentators on the regime they had fled. The political social scientist Franz Neumann’s Behemoth (1942) was one of the first efforts to examine the economic, political, and social structures of National Socialism, and it provided a Marxist analysis of Nazism that argued for the primacy of economic motivations. Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm explored the social and psychological origins of totalitarianism, arguing that Nazism represented a retreat from the psychic burden and alienation of individual freedom. Protestant theologian Paul Tillich examined the loss of religion as one of the causes for the modern anxiety that culminated in the Holocaust, while political thinker Hannah Arendt directed her attention to the nationalist and political sources of Nazism. And novelist Thomas Mann wrote his Joseph and His Brothers tetralogy under “the shadow of Hitler,” with the last volume, Joseph the Provider, about his new adopted homeland. It featured a Joseph influenced by Mann’s “personal acquaintance with Franklin Roosevelt” and his “view of Joseph’s administration in Egypt” bearing, as he put it, “traces of my impression of the New Deal.”18 The horrors of Nazi Germany, which were never exiled from his mind, became the setting for Mann’s modern adaptation of the Faust myth in his dark and haunting Doctor Faustus (1947).
Much of the social and political theory in postwar America would extend from the contributions of refugee scholars. In the ensuing years, the émigrés’ theories of mass society became widely read and popularized as Americans sought to comprehend the dynamics of Cold War geopolitics abroad and observed dangerous mass tendencies hiding behind atomistic individualism at home. Liberal sociologists in the 1950s and later a younger generation of counterculture critics in the 1960s discovered in the émigrés’ works valuable theories for analyzing the alienation and conformism caused by the dominance of corporate bureaucracies and suburbanization in postwar American life. Thus, the mass emigration of European intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s had dramatic long-term effects on the shaping of American thought in the postwar period.
The outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 had not snuck up on American intellectuals as the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 had done; nevertheless, it alarmed them deeply and pressed them to rethink their roles as policy experts, political analysts, and cultural critics. Many lent their support to President Roosevelt, who campaigned in 1939 for an unprecedented third term promising neutrality. And many continued their support as he and his administration began to realize that being a neutral “arsenal of democracy” was untenable. For the United States’ most prominent intellectuals, the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 snuffed out any ambiguity about America’s obligation to defend its citizens, protect its allies, and keep the world as safe for democracy as possible. It also clarified American intellectuals’ own responsibility to foster a collective commitment to democratic institutions and values.
Throughout the war, many Americans spoke in terms of the “public interest” and “democratic community” while too often overlooking or simply being blind to the ways in which their national institutions, like Jim Crow and Japanese internment camps, belied their inclusive rhetoric. But after the war was over, observers of American life recovered their temerity to call out the persistent gaps between America’s democratic rhetoric and its undemocratic practices and find new ways to close them.