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Overview
Lynn Dumenil's The Modern Temper provides a unique perspective into the American Jazz Age.
When most of us take a backward glance at the 1920s, we may think of prohibition and the jazz age, of movies stars and flappers, of Harold Lloyd and Mary Pickford, of Lindbergh and Hoover--and of Black Friday, October 29, 1929, when the plunging stock market ushered in the great depression.
But the 1920s were much more. Lynn Dumenil brings a fresh interpretation to a dramatic, important, and misunderstood decade. As her lively work makes clear, changing values brought an end to the repressive Victorian era; urban liberalism emerged; the federal bureaucracy was expanded; pluralism became increasingly important to America's heterogeneous society; and different religious, ethnic, and cultural groups encountered the homogenizing force of a powerful mass-consumer culture. The Modern Temper brings these many developments into sharp focus.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429924009 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 06/30/1995 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 369 |
| File size: | 405 KB |
About the Author
Lynn Dumenil, professor of history at Occidental College, earned her Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880-1930. She lives in Venice, California
Read an Excerpt
The Modern Temper
American Culture and Society in the 1920s
By Lynn Dumenil
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 1995 Lynn DumenilAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-2400-9
CHAPTER 1
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE POWER
The 1920s have emerged as such a distinctive period in part because it was sandwiched between two major eras of reform, the progressive period and the New Deal. In comparison with what came before and after, the twenties seem an anomaly. Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt enjoy major reputations as dynamic liberal leaders, while the chief executives of the 1920s fare less well. Noted primarily for the corruption scandals that marred his administration, Warren G. Harding delivered speeches that gave "the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea." Calvin Coolidge, whose taciturnity earned him the label "Silent Cal," further contributed to the lackluster tone of politics. History has also been unkind to Herbert Hoover, whose capabilities were overshadowed by his difficulties in coping imaginatively with the Great Depression. Twenties politics seem not just stagnant but reactionary, a period in which many rejected reform and embraced big business and Babbittry.
Although the twenties did witness a reaction against social reform in a spirit of what Harding called the desire for "normalcy," the decade is not as distinct from the reform eras that framed it as might first be supposed. Many of the key political issues of the decade — if not their resolution — were the same ones that permeated the major reform eras. In particular, Americans in the 1920s grappled with a pivotal and persistent question: Given the traditions of localism, democracy, and voluntarism, where should power reside in the complex, industrial, and bureaucratic society that America had become?
This chapter explores the eclipse of reform in the 1920s as part of a broader examination of the political and economic organization of American life. During the progressive era many reformers reacted against the extraordinary power the private sector, especially corporations, had acquired. They struggled with their own ambivalence about a strong state to define a broader role for public — i.e., government — power in protecting the general welfare from being submerged by "special" interests. Despite the persistence of some reformers, in the 1920s the enthusiasm for social justice waned, and the dilemma of the relative influence of the private sector versus the public sector was resolved largely in favor of the former. The decade saw an expansion of private influence which signaled the emergence of interest group politics as a major force in the American polity. At the same time, mounting hostility to federal intervention in the economy and the lives of its citizens reflected a renewed antipathy to government power which continues to shape public discourse in our own time.
THE PROGRESSIVE BACKGROUND
Progressivism has proved a morass for decades of historians trying to delineate its characteristics and supporters. Conflicting interpretations make the complexity and diversity of the movement evident, and at least one historian called into question the utility of the term itself, arguing instead for "an obituary for the progressive movement." Most historians, however, have refused to bury progressivism. The middle-class social reformers, politicians, and intellectuals who were deeply engaged in reform efforts were convinced that they were part of a progressive movement. Its ethos grew out of the disorder that accompanied America's industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. Swollen cities, with inadequate services and graft-ridden political machines, had resulted in urban chaos. Political corruption seemed to flourish at all levels, from city boss to U.S. senator. The extreme wealth of the new corporate elite contrasted shockingly with widespread poverty. The problems faced by the victims of industrialization — the children of the poor, and working-class men and women — began to attract an outraged middle class. Sympathy and guilt mingled with fear as class conflict in the form of industrial unrest emerged as an unsettling phenomenon. Even more disturbing was the growth of the Socialist Party in the early twentieth century. Alarmed, most of the middle class viewed this as a serious challenge to a social and political order they wanted to improve, not radically transform.
Although progressives offered a variety of analyses of the root of American problems, one of the pivotal themes of the era was the pernicious influence of special interests and private power. The trusts, a vague term that referred to monopolistic corporations, usually headed the list of problems facing the republic. They wielded not only extraordinary economic power but political power too, as muckrakers' exposes of politicians in the pockets of corporations demonstrated. Political machines were another form of inappropriate private power, as were labor unions. At issue here was the belief that private, or special, interests could subvert the general, or public, interest. Above all, progressives envisioned a harmoniously functioning society in which the general interest would triumph.
Another important problem concerned the role of state power in protecting the general interest. Although it is an oversimplification to divide progressives into neat groups, it is possible to discern two major views of government power. One group, probably the largest, identified with Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom, which called upon government action to protect the victims of industrialization, with the ideal of restoring equality and individual autonomy. This group also invoked government power to break down the worst of the trusts and promote competition. These progressives embraced governmental solutions, although they did so with the greatest ambivalence. Drawing upon a long tradition of hostility to government power, theyworried that public power could be just as damaging to individual freedoms as private power.
Another element in progressivism, often associated with the New Nationalism of Theodore Roosevelt (1901-9), was far more accepting of the general trend toward organization and the consolidation of federal and state power. The nationalists felt that the benefits of scale and centralization could be the source of widespread prosperity. They had a strong belief in efficiency and experts. As Robert Wiebe has pointed out, many of the new middle class were themselves turning to more centralized, powerful voluntary associations to rationalize their professions and give them influence on public policy. As reformers, they sought to bring order to American society and adjust it to the exigencies of the modern world by promoting an activist state that would regulate corporations, direct the economy, and protect the interests of workers and consumers. Unlike the Wilsonians, they were far more sanguine about state power, viewing it as a necessary antidote to unharnessed private power.
Many progressive reforms indeed resulted in an expansion of government power and bureaucracy, but they also reflected the Wilsonian ambivalence toward state, especially federal, power. Often laws gave government agencies quite limited authority or inadequate enforcement procedures that considerably weakened their ability to regulate. Nonetheless, at the time progressives viewed their advances optimistically and pointed proudly to a wide range of legislation. Social justice or humanitarian laws spanned the range from milk codes, public health laws, workmen's compensation, and child labor laws, including a federal child labor law. In the cities, good government reformers campaigned to break the power of the machines. Other political reforms were the direct election of senators, initiative, referendum, and recall, and the use of the secret ballot. Women's suffrage also formed part of progressivism. Reformers touted all of these political innovations as vehicles for restoring democracy and limiting the ability of special interests to control politics. Finally, on the national level, Congress enacted numerous laws that at the time were promoted as progressive triumphs over corporate financial interests: in 1906, the Meat Inspection Act, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and the Hepburn Act, which regulated railroads; in 1913, the Federal Reserve Act to regulate banking, and the Sixteenth Amendment, which provided for a federal income tax. The 1914 Clayton Antitrust Act, which replaced the largely ineffective Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, was also hailed as a progressive victory. With the exception of the income tax, all these measures set up commissions, staffed by presumably neutral experts who would determine social needs without damaging the basis of prosperity.
For decades, historians took progressivism at its word and depicted the legislation that emerged as part of the effort to restore democracy and control the trusts. Now it is evident that the coalition of groups that supported the era's reforms did not always have the same agenda as self-described progressives. Revisionist historians have made it clear, for example, that much of the corporate legislation had the strong backing of some members of the business community who hoped to use the agency of the federal government for their own purposes. Urban and school reforms provide further evidence that progressivism was far more complex than its leaders' democratic rhetoric would suggest. Business elites often embraced a city manager system and political redistricting as a route to a more efficient city that could serve their needs more adequately. Similarly, they supported the drive to centralize public education. All of these reforms tended to limit the influence of workers, African Americans, immigrants, and the poor, who in the older system had a greater personal identification with their local city government representatives and school board members.
The efforts to minimize the voting influence of ethnic groups and workers in the cities indicate a social control aspect of progressivism that was evident in other reform sentiment as well. Prohibition, which was more controversial among progressives than other measures, nonetheless had strong support from both urban and rural progressives, who viewed it as a means of improving individual lives and industrial productivity. But prohibition, which entailed the coercive use of law to control behavior, also had very strong nativistic underpinnings. Not all progressivism was nativistic, but as both prohibition and the urban political and educational reforms indicate, there was a strong undercurrent throughout the movement to use the law to control and assimilate immigrants to American Protestant morality and standards.
Not surprisingly, ethnic and working-class voters had ambivalent responses to progressive legislation. They tended to oppose the nativistic and elitist trends in the movement, but nonetheless in many cities they comprised an important core of support for reform, especially social justice laws such as factory or tenement legislation. Farmers also sometimes constituted part of the progressive movement, especially in their support for laws limiting corporate power, or those directly affecting their own interests. Thus, undergirding the progressive movement lay an unstable coalition — businessmen, farmers, labor, immigrants, and the middle class — each with a different agenda that reflected its own concerns. The rubric of a general interest that pervaded progressive rhetoric proved elusive.
The contradictory strains within progressivism evident in nativism, elitism, the differing agendas of reforms' supporters, and diverging attitudes about government power also appeared in the way progressives responded to World War I. Many reformers were dismayed by the U.S. entry into the European conflict in 1917, although in the nationalistic climate of the time, relatively few voiced their opposition publicly. Some progressives, suspicious of the trusts, worried that the war would only serve the interests of corporate profiteers, while society paid in lives and money. Wilsonian progressives, always fearful of federal power, correctly anticipated that the war would unleash a nationalistic spirit which would undermine civil liberties and be inimical to reform. But other progressives, many in the Roosevelt New Nationalism camp, were far more optimistic about the potential of war for furthering reform. Seduced by the rhetoric of a war for democracy, they hoped that America's participation in the war effort would be a means of bringing American democracy to the world. On the domestic front, they expected that the wartime emergency would cause the federal government to expand its power in behalf of reform.
In 1918, as the war proceeded, Congress passed a war tax, which tentatively seemed to point the way to the use of taxation to redistribute income. After a massive transportation breakdown, the government also assumed control over the railroads, which encouraged progressives who viewed this as the entering wedge of government planning of the economy. Railroad workers benefited from federal administration of their industry. Moreover, the government's efforts to maintain price ceilings and control wages and hours of defense employees indicated the possibilities for government protection of working people.
But for the most part, war did not further the domestic reform agenda, in large measure because of the fear of extensive government power. This fear affected the operation of most of the war agencies set up to handle the problems of mobilization. Future President Herbert Hoover, as wartime food administrator, resisted coercing farmers or consumers and relied upon voluntarism to effect conservation and the production of food. The War Industries Board, the major agency charged with coordinating the production and distribution of war materiel, also had little coercive power. Instead, financier Bernard Baruch, its director after March 1918, used his personal influence and the threat of negative publicity to keep corporations in line with government need. This voluntaristic approach of wartime agencies led to a strong sense of government/business cooperation that tended to benefit the corporations. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith accurately described the war years as "massive informal cooperation between government and organized private enterprise."
Thus World War I, whatever hopes progressives had for it, served primarily to promote the organization of corporate power and to link it more closely to cooperation with government. The ideas evident among corporate leaders who had supported some progressive reforms gained substantial ground in the war years. Increasingly, government, as it expanded its influence, served as an instrument to help rationalize businesses and as a mediator between conflicting interest groups. In the process, the progressive idea of the general interest got buried under the weight of special interest power.
THE FATE OF REFORM
The war not only fell far short of progressive expectations; it was also among the factors that extinguished the widespread support for reform. The war disillusioned many progressives. The violation of civil liberties was a serious blow to men and women committed to liberalism, and the coercive nationalistic spirit that encouraged a search for traitors challenged progressives' belief in the rationality of human beings, as did ultimately the total war experience. Moreover, the way in which corporations seemed to benefit from war discouraged reformers who continued to mistrust special interests and insist that their power be curtailed. Finally, disappointment with the Peace of Paris, which did not meet with the lofty aspirations of Wilson's Fourteen Points, made it clear that war had not accomplished any progressive international aims.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Modern Temper by Lynn Dumenil. Copyright © 1995 Lynn Dumenil. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,INTRODUCTION,
I - PUBLIC AND PRIVATE POWER,
THE PROGRESSIVE BACKGROUND,
THE FATE OF REFORM,
ANTISTATISM,
PRIVATE POWER AND THE APOTHEOSIS OF BUSINESS,
THE NEW LOBBYING,
II - WORK AND CONSUMPTION,
THE BLUE-COLLAR WORLD OF WORK,
THE WHITE-COLLAR WORLD OF WORK,
CONSUMER CULTURE,
BLUE-COLLAR CONSUMPTION AND LEISURE,
WHITE-COLLAR CONSUMPTION AND LEISURE,
III - THE NEW WOMAN,
THE NEW WOMAN AND POLITICS,
THE NEW WOMAN AND WORK,
THE NEW WOMAN IN THE PRIVATE SPHERE,
IV - THE ACIDS OF MODERNITY : SECULAR AND SACRED INTERPRETATIONS,
INTELLECTUALS,
THE LOST GENERATION AND THE MODERNISTS,
THE SOUTHERN RENAISSANCE,
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE,
OTHER VOICES: PLURALISM AND MODERNITY,
RELIGION,
THE RISE OF A SECULAR SOCIETY,
TRADITIONAL FAITHS,
THE FUNDAMENTALIST CONTROVERSY,
MODERNIZING RELIGION: MODERNISTS AND BUSINESSMEN,
V - CONFORMITY AND COMMUNITY,
IMMIGRATION RESTRICTION AND NATIVISM THE DRIVE FOR RESTRICTION,
RACISM,
POLITICS AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM,
ANTI-SEMITISM,
RED SCARE,
PROHIBITION,
THE KU KLUX KLAN,
VI - PLURALISM AND COMMUNITY,
CATHOLICS, JEWS, AND JAPANESE,
DEFINING IDENTITY AND AMERICANISM,
CLAIMING AMERICANISM: THE INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSE,
AFRICAN AMERICANS,
THE "NEW NEGRO",
RADICAL "NEW NEGROES": A. PHILIP RANDOLPH AND MARCUS GARVEY,
EPILOGUE,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
ALSO BY LYNN DUMENIL,
BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY,
INDEX,
Notes,
Copyright Page,