The Nineteen-Twenties
THE NINETEEN-TWENTIES MANY people will go on smoking their pipes in solid comfort unmindful of what the culture and books of the last decade have been. Nor will worry about the thirties now safely...
...But we believe it would be a serious error to stake much hope in our time upon a segregated aristocracy...
...That the battle thus outlined was the great social conflict of the decade might, one thinks, be proved from literature...
...the literature of attack upon the professor, starring various youthful geniuses with somewhat unstable morals...
...Everybody mistrusted promises of what government control of industry might really produce, realizing as they did that Uncle Joe Cannon was the most experienced business man in Congress...
...When Volsteadism hove into view, Greenwich Village became a national institution...
...One cannot say that any of the issues thus fostered in the twenties are headed for any variety of solution in the thirties...
...Even those who think this wrong may be led, if they think the matter over, to concede it desirable...
...Perhaps it might restore to our souls the refreshing and salutary habit of simplicity...
...That is all we can do...
...It was identified with the W. C. T. U., with Brahminism, and more generally with the established order...
...Few things could have been more completely out of place in the twenties...
...and the rise of the institution of football, which certainly carried higher education into arenas wherein it had never fought before...
...Opposed to this, however, was a constant if quite helpless plea for freedom...
...This revolutionary philosophy may be called, in turn, the chief source of the anti-religious science which partially inundated the past ten years...
...And that much would be gained...
...The new decade's tone will be vastly different, but no less interesting...
...If we can accept Mr...
...Behind pleas for governmental paternalism there stood, for instance, the awakened civic conscience, fed on doctrine which Thornstein Veblen and others had brought more or less straight from Jaures and Kautsky, and suddenly aware of that drift toward industrialism which was a new phenomenon in the nation's life...
...Wilson and lives on in such phenomena as Chicago's fear of King George...
...In economics the thing began with the income tax legislation, which for the first time brought the federal government into direct contact with the individual citizen...
...The first was a drift toward nationalization of the American enterprise...
...It is in the main a sound digest of the worthwhile books in which mankind has recorded its experience...
...Regarding prohibition, nothing need be said...
...Prosperity was the only one of the nationalization doctrines which occasioned no revolt...
...America needs something to follow, steadily and enthusiastically...
...Collins feels...
...and who, sometimes quite unconsciously, yearn for the especial gifts of the Holy Ghost...
...It grew steadily more evident that all of us wanted to be prosperous- even the very considerable number of us who weren't...
...Norman Foerster published a treatise on the American scholar-of which more at another time...
...Burnett's fiction as remotely representative of the present, it begins to seem as if America is willing to look at the facts without any effort to interpret them...
...The hope lies in the rekindled star of humanism, chief inhabitants of which are Doctors Babbitt and More...
...Three results may be noted, with some pleasure and profit: the popularity of Mr...
...But in the end-which was almost precisely the very end of the twenties-that same prosperity rose up and destroyed itself...
...And we wonder if Professor Babbitt will really get it out of its chair...
...Mencken's Smart Set and American Mercury as addenda to the list of required readings...
...The twenties cannot as yet be thoroughly diagnosed...
...Here the novelist's art appears to join hands with the hobby of "research," which is so much more interested in finding out Langland's spelling than in wondering about the fantasies of Baroque...
...Not merely the crusading mentality of Stuart Sherman, but the august reason of Professor Babbitt...
...There an analysis of the literary effort of the past decade leads to the conclusion that numberless uproars and rebellions-the works of Mencken, Dreiser, Huneker, Brooks, Waldo Frank inter aliis-were caused by romantic neuralgias in disguise...
...Suddenly morals hove into the limelight, enunciating the fallacy that prohibition was a constitutional enactment...
...If one has a vision of sanctity, Thomas a Kempis's scorn of human dialectic is surely an advantage...
...For better or for worse, the western world must hereafter give all its debating at least a parliamentary cast...
...It then moved on toward paternalism, massing pleas for labor legislation that were finally tested by government operation of the railroads during war time...
...Bring on your bootlegger and your boxer, but please leave out even their subconscious states...
...Finally the unification of all mundane interests in "prosperity" -an entity underwritten by the national authority- evoked a harmony comparable with nothing save the modern organ which can intertwine its own majestic bass with mimicries of the lute, the trombone and the mocking-bird...
...An essential part of the prosperity wave was quest of the university degree...
...America did not kick vigorously at the draft law, but its rebellion against the army unsaddled Mr...
...Why, by the way, has Senator Brookhart never studied the terrain beneath the bleachers after a college football game...
...In the long run they are perhaps the sages of their time...
...Nor will worry about the thirties now safely introduced spoil for them as much as a single puff...
...Next in order was the draft law, which bowled over Daniel Webster's notion of constitutionality and sent every determined antagonist either into Leavenworth or (with milder eventuality) into the Republican party...
...and if one be of the earth earthy, the virtues of the pumpkin's attitude toward existence are obvious...
...Intelligence...
...Neither thought nor literature nor economics can be discussed without thought of the needs and the urges which stir within the great mass of men...
...And so we are led once again to affirm the importance of the Church...
...Our faith in his star is still not untroubled with doubt...
...But if they are examined a little carefully they will reveal two major social tendencies which in the end seem to have got into something very like a clinch...
...who enjoy taking the intellectual temperature of American society...
...But the rebellious litterateurs who were not infrequently given to doubting immortality or quoting bits of Harnack had at least a few adamantine convictions, one of which was beer...
...The plea for jolly good ale and old may have been thoroughly justified, but it did more than any other thing to produce the flapper, the music and literature of Harlem, the epics of Scott Fitzgerald and the generously distributed acid of the Spoon River Anthology...
...All things considered, the bequest in moral and spiritual lassitude is pretty vast...
...If carried far enough it could cleanse us of sundry ill-digested theories and nostrums...
...And possibly it is not utterly useless to observe that just as the decade was about to close the Carnegie Foundation issued its illustrious report while Dr...
...Humanism, in the generally accepted sense, certainly has a genuine opportunity...
...Yet even this is a return to order...
...We shall agree with him with moderation...
...Never before in all history has King Demos so victoriously stormed the defenses of Academe...
...The income tax occasioned relatively little worry, because the innately rebellious had no personal reasons for thinking about it...
...It is no slight task which an editorial in the January Bookman sets for itself...
...Marx needed a mechanistic universe, and his followers have more or less firmly sworn by a mechanistic universe...
...and rather more important," Mr...
...What follows is written for the in-betweens-the unhappy who ruminate upon the drift of ideas and the antics of the creative artist...
...The most important experiment to which intelligence generally was being submitted in America must be studied in college history...
Vol. 11 • February 1930 • No. 14
