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Overview

Notes

• Between 1914 and 1945, the United States engaged in two world wars and emerged as a modern nation and a major world power. »full text
• Many of the social and cultural changes of the interwar period centered around the sexual and psychological theories of Sigmund Freud, the social and racial writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, and the economic and political program of Karl Marx.  »full text
• Alongside these social changes, rapid advances in science and technology contributed to the rapid modernization of America, resulting in the birth of a mass popular culture and the sundering of empirical science from the artistic search for meaning. »full text
• The crisis point for the interwar period occurred during the 1930s, when international cultural, economic, and political tensions resulted in the Great Depression and World War II. »full text
• The literary aesthetic of “high modernism,” which represented the ways modernity was transforming traditional culture by experimenting with, adapting, and altering literary styles and forms, is best understood as an antagonism between popular and serious literature. »full text
• Though modernism began as a self-consciously international and apolitical aesthetic, many American modernists attempted to use the movement to promote national literary and political ambitions. »full text
• American drama matured during the interwar years thanks to experiments by playwrights reacting to Broadway and successful mixtures of various theatrical elements. »full text

Full Text

Between 1914 and 1945, the United States engaged in two world wars and emerged as a modern nation and a major world power. American involvement in World War I was brief (1917–19) and left many yearning for the isolation of previous years. Yet despite some exclusionary immigration measures in the 1920s after a “Red Scare” of suspicion about foreign control over labor union activities, progress toward a more mobile and international perspective seemed unstoppable. A generation of American expatriates enjoyed European life thanks to a newly favorable currency exchange rate. African American soldiers and officers returned from WWI determined to see their rights in the army continue at home. And those workers who could not travel were inspired by the international Communist movement to agitate for fairer pay and conditions. After the stock market crashed in 1929 and the United States sank into the Great Depression, social tensions threatened the country’s stability for a decade, until Americans were united by World War II. The dominant literary aesthetic of these years is known as “modernism,” a response to the contradictions and pressures of contemporary life. In the same way that the country struggled with rapid modernization, modernist authors struggled to put a current face on traditional literature and to translate American themes and preoccupations into an international style.

Many of the social and cultural changes of the interwar period centered around the sexual and psychological theories of Sigmund Freud, the social and racial writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, and the economic and political programs of Karl Marx. Freud, the inventor and chief practitioner of psychoanalysis, developed the idea of the “unconscious,” a repository of sexual desires and dreams. Freud’s theories helped some Americans break free from small-town, white, Protestant values in favor of increasingly permissive and tolerant attitudes toward the sexual freedoms and desires of women and acceptance of gay and lesbian individuals. African Americans, who migrated northward to fill factory vacancies during WWI, found a social theorist in Du Bois to describe their complex status in American society. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folks identified in the black psyche a “double consciousness” of blacks themselves as Americans and as the racial stereotypes accepted by whites. Through the NAACP and journals published in the black neighborhood of Harlem in New York, the “city within a city” to which thousands of blacks migrated, Du Bois and others argued for the intellectual and cultural achievements of African Americans within this urban setting. Marx’s economic theories were used to diagnose class inequalities as antagonism between owners and management (collectively known as “capital”) on the one side and labor on the other. His writings encouraged workers to reject the middle-class individualist ethos in favor of collective action to improve the lot of all workers. Marx’s ideas led directly to the Russian Revolution of 1917, which inspired communists around the world to act in concert to overthrow their own governments. Two infamous court cases from this period demonstrate the resistance to the social changes these theorists promoted. The trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1921 was thought by many to have been unfairly decided based on the defendants’ status as Italian immigrants and active anarchists. The conviction in Scottsboro, Alabama, of nine black men for the rape of two white women on dubious evidence convinced many writers that the southern justice system was fundamentally unfair to blacks.

Alongside these social changes, rapid advances in science and technology contributed to the modernization of America, resulting in the birth of a mass popular culture and the sundering of empirical science from the artistic search for meaning. The increased presence of new inventions like electric lighting and appliances, telephones, phonograph record players, motion pictures, and the radio combined to make person-to-person communication quicker and easier and to standardize American tastes in fashions and ideas. The automobile changed America more than any other invention by allowing new industries and jobs dependent on transportation, by causing a network of new roads and highways to spring up, and by dictating the birth and death of cities, suburbs, and towns based on proximity to those arteries. But while these technologies were breakthroughs in the ease and productivity of everyday life, the science underlying them seemed increasingly difficult and contrary to common sense. Einstein’s relativity theories, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and the discovery of both subatomic particles and the infiniteness of the universe threatened the traditional role of science as an explanation of felt human experience. As a result, scientists and artists became mistrustful of one another’s methods, and art began to rival science as a way of interpreting reality, especially in terms of subjective experience.

The crisis point for the interwar period occurred during the 1930s, when international cultural, economic, and political tensions resulted in the Great Depression and World War II. In Germany, Italy, and Spain fascist dictators rose to power and began to threaten their neighbors with aggressive rhetoric, military rearmament, and anti-Semitic genocide. In the United States, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal offered a pragmatic solution to the disastrous failure of free-market capitalism. Through social security, unemployment insurance, welfare support, and government creation of utility and public works jobs, the United States averted the revolution that had seemed inevitable. Even so, many writers were sympathetic to the Communist cause and the USSR as the answer to the U.S. crisis, mainly because the Soviets seemed to be the chief opponent of fascism. But the Russian dictator Stalin’s oppressive rule and nonaggression treaty with Hitler in 1939 soured many to Communism by the end of the decade.

The literary aesthetic of “high modernism,” which represented the ways modernity was transforming traditional culture by experimenting with, adapting, and altering literary styles and forms, is best understood as an antagonism between popular and serious literature. The antimodern sentiments of many modernists who thought of the present in terms of what had been lost did not keep them from disrespecting the literary styles of their predecessors to represent that loss. Modernist poetry and prose tended to be short, precise, subjective, and suggestive rather than exhaustively detailed with exterior descriptions, to include fragments and disjointed perspectives rather than cohesive or coherent patterns, to favor questions over pat explanations, and to reject artificial literary order and assurances of objective truth that they did not see in the real world. When works like T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land did include overarching patterns, they referred to classical or mythic narratives through allusion or foregrounded the self-reflexive search for meaning as a rationale to continue asking difficult questions. The modernist emphasis on individual experience over objective truth also meant incorporating elements of popular culture, which had not been thought literary enough for high art until then, mixing in colloquialisms and dialects without the aid of an interpretive narrator. The demands of modernist style meant a small readership but prestige and influence; modernists scorned the popular writers and desired their fame, but accused commercially successful writers, like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, of selling out. Occasionally, writers could blur the divide between middlebrow culture and serious high art, as in the case of Kay Boyle and Raymond Chandler.

Though modernism began as a self-consciously international and apolitical aesthetic, many American modernists attempted to use the movement to promote national literary and political ambitions. The United States had been introduced to the audacity of modernism through the Armory Show of Cubist paintings in 1913 in New York City and events like Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, both of which caused uproars, and indeed most major American proponents of modernism were permanent expatriates, like Gertrude Stein, Eliot, Ezra Pound, and H.D., or lived abroad for part of the period. But some writers employed modernist principles to write ambitious American works; Hart Crane’s The Bridge and William Carlos Williams’s Paterson were poetic examples, as was John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy in prose. Others, like Robert Frost, William Faulkner, and Willa Cather, brought modernism to bear on regional concerns, introducing an international style to a specific locale and idiom. When modernism was used for political ends, its effects were often subtle. The efforts of Harlem Renaissance writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston incorporated blues rhythms and folk culture into their texts, but focused on the vitality of black culture or upbeat assessments of racial justice rather than angry denunciations of the status quo. And modernists like Marianne Moore, H.D., Katherine Anne Porter, and Nella Larsen depicted women’s thoughts and experiences without explicitly advocating feminist positions.

A last major development was the maturity of American drama during the interwar years thanks to experiments by playwrights reacting to Broadway and successful mixtures of American theatrical elements. Broadway, the center of American theatrical activity in the late nineteenth century, had begun premiering shows and plays in New York City and then sending them to tour the rest of the United States. In reaction to these largely commercial and conservative ventures, Susan Glaspell and others formed the Provincetown Players in 1915 to premier small, experimental works. Smaller houses like Glaspell’s often showed changes before Broadway, as O’Neill with elements of German Expressionism, Maxwell Anderson with blank verse, George Kaufman with jokey domestic farces, and Rogers and Hammerstein with musical comedies. Many of these experiments incorporated earlier vaudevillian and burlesque songs and dances, as well as new formal and stylistic conventions. As many modernists realized the potential of plays to speak to a larger audience, drama moved into the literary mainstream.