No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920

...The result was not intended, Lears insists...

...Against the "evasive banality" of "official modern culture in industrial America," these antimodernists took 'up arms...

...D e s p i t e Lears's intrusive commentary and his anachronistic evaluations, No Place of Grace is an important and exciting book, perhaps the best study we have of late" nineteenth-century cultural history...

...Hayakawa, who is retiring in order to devote more time to his naps...

...Lears's conclusion is both obvious and correct: Whatever antimodernist thinkers intended or hoped, their movement did not cause most Americans to make their own furniture or pottery, to imitate the alleged innocence and childishness of medieval folk, to worship at the shrine of either Henry Adams's Virgin or his Dynamo, or to escape into Nirvana...

...After all, it is likely that a victorious Vidal would proceed to dissipate his energies in debates over tax cuts, anti-abortion legislation, and sub40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1982...

...what might have been " a n alternative to alienated labor" became "a revivifying hobby for the affluent' t--woodworking tools in every bourgeois garage...

...Similarly, other antimodernist movements "preserved an eloquent edge of prot e s t " even while they "promoted accommodation to new modes of cultural hegemony," so that, in the end, antimodernism "eased adjustment to a streamlined modern culture even as it sustained protest against that culture...

...and with the quest for Nirvana in the religions of the Orient...

...Lears argues that the antimodernist movement brought about a transformation of American Culture--but not the transformation that the antimodernists consciously hoped for or expected...

...with a search for form and meaningful ritual in Catholicism and Anglo-Catholicism...

...Matched against Jerry Brown and other beauties, Vidal will contend for the United States Senate Mitchell S. Ross is author of The Literary Politicians and An Invitation to Our Times...

...At a time when intellectual history in the United States seems moribund, work with such range, power, and enthusiasm is especially welcome...

...G. Stanley Hall's identification of _9 adolescence as a distinct period in human life...

...His intent is to "connect psychic with social change," to show "a link between Freud and Gramsci," but the two approaches are never fully integrated...

...No Place of Grace brilliantly depicts the severe cultural crisis of late nineteenthcentury America...

...But it was also not unpredictable, since antimodernists were psychologically ambivalent: " t h e y often idealized premodern thought (especially its 'unconscious' dimension)" but "they remained committed to nineteenthcentury values of autonomous achievement and conscious control...

...A biographical appendix listing sixtysix antimodernist leaders, with basic facts about their lives, leads to the judgment that they were mostly from " t h e better educated strata of the old-stock ruling class...

...During these decades, Lea~rs~writes, "many beneficiaries of modern culture began to feel they were its secret victims...

...with a renewed concern for childhood itself and wi~h David Herbert Donald is Chairman of the Graduate Program in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University...

...Under such circumstances, Hollander's calm pessimism has the paradoxical quality of being--at least intellectually--reassuring...

...with the revival of interest in physical fitness and military discipline as antidotes to racial and class impotence, an impulse best illustrated by the career of Theodore Roosevelt, with the awakened interest in medieval art and culture, as products o f " t h e childhood of the race...

...It is to be hoped that in future books Lears can discipline his energy with self-restraint and will come to recognize that the historian's task is to understand as well as to judge...

...I say this because the material he examines could easily have lent itself to more alarmist, if not directly' apocalyptic, treatment...

...Instead of examining~ for example, what advocates of physical fitness, the strenuous life, and militai'y discipline sought to accomplish,: he announces that Theodore Roose.velt's "cant anticipated Nixon's,~' which in turn led to " t h e 'nuclear superiority' cant of Reaganite Republicans" and of"George Will and other present-day militarists...

...THE SECOND AMERICAN REVOLUTION Gore Vidal / Random House / $15.00 Mitchell S. Ross Word comes from the great state of California that Gore Vidal, literary politician, has once again transmogrified into Gore Vidal, professional politician...

...L ears seeks the sources of antimodernism through a combination of psychoanalytical and Marxist analyses...

...Is this good news or bad for fans of Vidal's writing, among whom I count myself...

...What links American interest in Oriental religions, the "invention" of adolescence, the rise of militarism, an obsession with genealogy, and the revival of arts and crafts...

...No Place of Grace examines and judges numerous aspects of this antimodernist impulse, Lears deals with the arts and crafts movement, which followed the inspiration of John Ruskin and William Morris in rejecting the impersonal perfection of assembly-line products...

...Unhappy to find that the thinkers he has studied were not radicals like himself, Lears rushes to attack and ridicule them...

...Similarly, Lears labels G. Stanley Hall's studies of adolescence and his call for "healthy personality" as "fatuities," which "anticipated those of William Reich, Hugh Hefner, and the more deluded among the countercultural radicals of the 1960s...

...Although Lears repeatedly warns his reader--and perhaps himself--that "antimodern dissent was too complex to be fully explained by invoking class and cultural determinants," "in the end his Marxism wins Over his Freudianism and he concludes flatly that antimodernism reflected " a particular class and power position" "of its advocates...

...The shift from a Protestant to a therapeutic basis of capitalist cultural hegemony" was "an unforeseen, unintended result of the efforts of individual men to locate meaning amid cultural confusion...

...All, according to Jackson Lears, were part of the broad movement of antimodernism that surfaced in America during the 1880s and that by the 1920s had transformed American culture...

...Over this broad range of cultural and intellectual developments Lears, who teaches history at the University of Missouri, moves with knowledge and assurance...

...At first glance it would seem that we have here a source of sorrow...

...NO PLACE OF GRACE: ANTIMODERNISM AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE, 1880-1920 Jackson Lears / Pantheon Books / $18.50 David Herbert Donald What do Henry Adams, G. Stanley Hall, Ralph Adams Cram, Elbert Hubbard, Jane Addams, and Frank Norris have in common...

...If his book adds little that is new on any one of these developments, it juxtaposes and : connects: these movements in a fresh and illuminating way...

...Less obvious, and less justifiable, is Lears's judgment that the movement failed because antimodernists sought "moral reform within existing frameworks of bourgeois values and organized capitalism" and n0t--as he clearly would p r e f e r ~ " r o o t and branch institutional change...

...The arts and crafts movement, for instance, resulted in no change in the system of American mass-production...

...seat now occupied by S.I...

...Indeed, with the exception of Henry Adams, the antimodernists, in Lears's view, were much like the youthful protesters of the past decade, "whose 'revolution' was rapidly transformed into a consumer bonanza of stereos, designer jeans, and sex aids...

...They came to think that faith in progress was stultifying, that American culture was thin and impoverished, that dominant Protestantism was vague and unhelpful, and that nineteenth-century positivists' conceptions of reality were narrow...