The Making of Modern America

E. NAGESWARA RAO
Kakatiya University, Warangal

The ninteen-twenties are described as the “gaudiest spree in history,” “ten-year-old weekend party,” “era of wonderful nonsense,” and “jazz age.” But these attractive phrases somehow fail to convey the full significance of what happened in America in that eventful period. The events of this decade are important because they changed the character, content, and complexion of American society radically. What was an agricultural, rural society with a strong religious bias was transformed into an industrial, urban society with secular ideals. The ’Twenties were thus a transitional epoch when the United States stepped out of the old into the new. It was also the period in which America’s search for national identity had almost ended and America emerged as a leader and pace-setter for the modern world. It is in this historic decade which is rather neatly marked off by two great events, the end of the First World War and the Great Crash, that the foundations of a mass society and of the modern United States were firmly laid.

The ’Twenties were an Age of Mass Consumption. The story of the automobile is a dramatic example of how mass production, made possible by technology, led to mass employment, mass market, and mass consumption. This economically beneficial chain reaction was made possible by Henry Ford whose wonderful insight enabled him to produce a car “for the multitude,” the famous Model T. Through standardization, division of labour, and a moving assembly line, Ford had revolutionized the automobile industry and had brought the car within the reach of the average American family. Mass production had enabled him to keep the price of the car low, and the low price in its turn created a mass market for his Model T. This miracle in transportation contributed in a substantial measure to the modernization of the U. S. A. The introduction of new concepts like installment selling, used-car trade-in, the closed-body, and the annual model helped General Motors beat Ford within a short time. National advertising stressing brand loyalty, hire-purchase facilities, and the chain stores aided the growth of mass consumption even in fields other than the automobile industry.

The old Protestant ethic of work was now challenged by the new ethic of consumption and leisure because the structural changes in American society inevitably led Americans to new habits and values. As families became smaller owing to the pressures of urbanization, the personal relations within the family also changed. The family started cracking up and the home which was sacred to the rural family now became something of a “service station” to the city-dwellers. The American woman’s burdens of child-bearing and house-keeping were lightened by the mass-produced contraceptives, electrical appliances, and canned foods. With her transplantation from a rural to an urban setting, she discarded the puritanical ideas of sex. From a sex-object, she became a partner in sexual pleasures. Women won the voting right in 1919 and several other improvements in their legal status in subsequent years. The distance travelled by the American woman in her quest for liberation from a repressive sexual morality may be understood from the fact that a few decades earlier the use of contraceptives was illegal in States like Connecticut and that the U. S. Congress had restricted the interstate movement of contraceptives and birth-control information. Thus the ’Twenties inaugurated the Women’s Liberation Movement which continues today in many other directions.

Urbanization also made education a mass enterprise. However, the emphasis was shifted from rote practice, religious bias, and authoritarian methods to free inquiry, secular ideals, and informal classroom. Vocational training had replaced classical learning. Thanks to the influence of John Dewey, the need for training students in civic responsibilities and exploiting their individual potentialities was recognized in the reorganization of American education. The modern American University with its strong bias for science and the scientific method had also evolved by the ’Twenties. Academic freedom was also recognized as vital for free inquiry at the universities.

Entertainment assumed a mass dimension with the popularity of spectator sports like college football and professional baseball. The tabloid press entertained through muck-raking, comic comic strips, crime stories, and crossword puzzles. The movies provided inexpensive entertainment and vicarious pleasure for large numbers of people. The radio with the national networks could reach millions of Americans across the country and thus it became a means of mass entertainment.

In the creative arts, the ’Twenties witnessed “aesthetic resurgence” of an unprecedented nature. In the mid-nineteenth century which saw the first Renaissance in American letters, the writers were isolated from European artistic developments and also from their own audiences at home. The artists of the ’Twenties reached larger numbers of people, denounced Puritanism, destroyed the Genteel Tradition, repudiated the accepted social values, and rejected the established artistic concepts. They revolutionized art in the U.S.A. Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot in poetry, Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway in fiction, and Eugene O’Neill in drama, among many others, sought fresh material and a new rhetoric to make it new. American music was revitalized by the introduction of a jazz idiom. The Flapper Generation was disenchanted with the values and mores of its elders and sought unconventional ways of living much like the Hippies and the Women Libbers of recent times.

The Age of Affluence was also an Age of Anxiety because the decade’s changes were quite unsettling. The older Americans feared aliens, minorities, modernity, cities, secularism, and science in the ’Twenties. The war generated hatred of the Germans; after the war there was the Red Scare of 1919. New immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were considered inferior by the British and Nordic immigrants who had come earlier to the U. S. racial and religious minorities such as Indians, Negroes, Jews, and Catholics were despised. The older generation with its Puritan outlook and rural ground was alarmed by the growth of cities and the ways of the youth. Even science was taboo for the fundamentalists who believed it to be anti-religious. The famous Scopes trial in Dayton, Tenn., in 1925 highlighted the clash between the old and the new, revelation and reason, religion and science. (John Scopes, a public school teacher, was fined for teaching Darwin’s theory.) It may appear incredible that in a land known for its scientific successes and technological triumphs, it was only in 1969 that the California State Board of Education finally approved the teaching of Darwin’s Theory as one among manny theories of evolution. Paradoxically, the Flat Earth Society functions in a country whose astronauts and satellites orbited the earth so many times in the past few years.

The puritanical attitudes forced the Nineteenth Amendment which enacted an ineffective Prohibition Law. Speak-easies and bootleggers flourished; crime syndicates and gangsters increased; Al Capone became the leader of the Chicago underworld. The trial and conviction of the Italian anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti, like the Scopes trial, once again underscored the clash between bigotry and individual freedom. But this clash of ideas is itself an evidence for the pluralistic structure of American society. A nation of immigrants from all over the world has to be very tolerant if it has to survive as an entity. Ethnic, religious, and cultural pluralism far from weakening American society, has strengthened it. Cross-fertalization of races, cultures, and ideas has enriched the American nation. The new trends in that society were clearly seen in the forthright speeches of Clarence Darrow who was much admired by the progressive, younger generation.

A mass society’s ills are also bound to be massive. When the Great Crash came in 1929 there were mass unemployment and mass malnutrition. Most Americans faced these hard times with stoic fortitude. The gaudiest spectacle in American history had abruptly and ended with the depression. Some of the conservative attitudes and prejudices which triumphed earlier were buried in the debris of economic collapse. H. L. Mencken’s writings of the period expose in a devastating manner the fads and fetishes of Middle America, of fundamentalism, of prohibition, and of bigotry. But America has had the inner vitality to emerge again like the legendary Phoenix shedding some of its burdensome feathers. In spite of its inner contradictions and internal corruption, the U. S. A. has enormous material and moral resources, and it is still the Land of Promise and Opportunity. The American dream may yet become a reality in the third century of the founding of the U.S.A.