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The Social Critics and the End of American Innocence: 1907–1921

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Paul F. Bourke
Paul F. Bourke
Affiliation:
Flinders University of South Australia
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Extract

Shortly before America's involvement in the First World War there appeared a series of works of social and cultural criticism remarkable for their range and sophistication. The familiar list includes Herbert Croly's The Promise of American Life (1909) and Progressive Democracy (1914), Walter Weyl's The New Democracy (1912), Walter Lippmann's Preface to Politics (1913) and Drift and Mastery (1914), Van Wyck Brooks's The Wine of the Puritans (1909), America's Coming of Age (1915), and H. G. Wells (1915), and Randolph Bourne's Youth and Life (1913), The Gary Schools (1916) and Education and Living (1917). The authors of these books were involved as well in the development of vehicles for social criticism such as The New Republic and The Seven Arts which continued and institutionalized the preoccupations of their books.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , July 1969 , pp. 57 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1969

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References

page 57 note 1 Forcey, Charles, The Crossroads of Liberalism (New York, 1961)Google Scholar. Forcey cites and discusses other works which have raised the question of Croly's influence on Roosevelt. For other treatments of the social critics as Progressives writing books rather than working in politics or reform institutions, see Mowry, George, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1958)Google Scholar; Link, Arthur, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era (New York, 1954)Google Scholar and Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform (New York, 1955)Google Scholar.

page 58 note 1 Goldman, Eric, Rendezvous with Destiny (New York, 1952), p. 244Google Scholar.

page 58 note 2 Kazin, Alfred, On Native Grounds (New York, 1942), pp. 142, 144, 145Google Scholar.

page 59 note 1 May, Henry, The End of American Innocence (New York, 1959) Part 1Google Scholar. For an approach somewhat similar to May's see Aaron, Daniel, Writers on the Left (New York, 1961)Google Scholar. The above paragraphs are not intended as a full-scale analysis of the historiography of the intellectual history of the period; they are concerned only to illustrate the force of May's restatement of the problem raised by the intellectual ferment of the prewar years. In any wider discussion of the literature, important works such as Noble, David, The Paradox of Progressive Thought (Minneapolis, 1958)Google Scholar, and White, Morton, Social Thought in America (New York, 1949)Google Scholar, which do not bear specifically on the explanatory question, would have to be included. Such a discussion would also include, of course, Lasch, Christopher, The New Radicalism in America 1889–1963 (New York, 1965)Google Scholar, which stands now as the essential argument to be explored for understanding many aspects of the period. Lasch's book does not speak distinctively, however, to the problem raised by May: what to make of the impressive body of evidence pointing towards the few years before 1917 as a period of significant change in the history of American values in this century. Lasch's argument can be read as offering implicit qualification to May's case by emphasizing that crucial social shifts producing ‘the new radicalism’ can be detected at least a generation before the war. This could remain true without conflicting with May's proposal that significant alterations in conceptual language occurred around the end of the first decade of this century. The argument of my essay does return briefly to some issues raised in Lasch's richly suggestive book but these require detailed elaboration in another context. The questions posed by May for intellectual historians remain no less pressing.

page 60 note 1 See Houghton, Walter, The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven, 1957)Google Scholar. For the reference to W. D. Howells, see May, , The End of American Innocence, p. 8Google Scholar and in general Part 1.

page 60 note 2 May, , The End of American Innocence, p. xGoogle Scholar.

page 61 note 1 It should be emphasized that what follows is an exploration of only two related points raised by May: the autobiographical evidence for the character of the prewar years and the nature of the social criticism of the period. There is no attempt here to explore those parts of May's remarkably inclusive work which concern creative writing and art.

page 61 note 2 Dodge, Mabel, Movers and Shakers (New York, 1936)Google Scholar. Steffens, Lincoln, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (New York, 1931)Google Scholar. Brooks, Van Wyck, Scenes and Portraits (New York, 1954)Google Scholar. Freeman, Joseph, An American Testament (New York, 1936)Google Scholar. Dell, Floyd, Homecoming (New York, 1933)Google Scholar. Hapgood, Hutchins, A Victorian in the Modern World (New York, 1939)Google Scholar. Eastman, Max, Enjoyment of Living (New York, 1939)Google Scholar. Stearns, Harold, The Street I Know (New York, 1935)Google Scholar. Untermeyer, Louis, From Another World (New York, 1939)Google Scholar. Gregory, Alyse, The Day is Gone (New York, 1948)Google Scholar. Ample testimony to the impact of this literature is offered by Kazin, , On Native Grounds, p. 134Google Scholar: ‘Who does not know the now routine legend in which the world of 1910–1917 is Washington Square turned Arcadia, in which the barriers are always down, the magazines always promising, the workers always marching, geniuses sprouting in every Village bed-room, Isadora Duncan always dancing—that world of which John Reed was the Byronic hero, Mabel Dodge the hostess, Randolph Bourne the martyr, Van Wyck Brooks the oracle? No other generation in America ever seemed to have so radiant a youth, or has remembered it in so many winsome autobiographies written at forty’. The gently sceptical tone of this passage is, curiously enough, generally absent from Kazin's account of these years which is largely in terms of the legend.

page 62 note 1 Dodge, , Movers and Shakers, p. 39Google Scholar.

page 62 note 2 Dell, , Homecoming, p. 218Google Scholar. Dell's litany of achievements not only shaped later assessments, it also offered considerable assistance to his contemporaries when they came to write their own memoirs. Compare Freeman, , An American Testament, p. 37Google Scholar, which reproduces Dell's account almost verbatim adding a few new symptoms of ‘the new spirit’ for good measure. The habit of inferring a new Zeitgeist from evidence of creative ferment has stuck.

page 62 note 3 For recent reference to Mrs Dodge's salon, see the works already cited by May, Kazin, Aaron, Goldman and Forcey. See also Hicks, Granville, The Making of a Revolutionary (New York, 1936)Google Scholar, and Gilbert, James B., Writers and Partisans (New York, 1968)Google Scholar. Mrs Dodge's own account occupies a good deal of Movers and Shakers.

page 63 note 1 Dodge, , Movers and Shakers, p. 83Google Scholar.

page 63 note 2 Ibid. pp. 89–90.

page 64 note 1 Dodge, , Movers and Shakers, pp. 92–3Google Scholar.

page 64 note 2 Ibid. pp. 486–7. Compare also the assessments which each generation offered of the other in Hutchins Hapgood to Mabel Dodge, n.d. 1913 and Walter Lippmann to Mabel Dodge, n.d. 1913 in Mabel Dodge Papers, Yale University Library.

page 64 note 3 See Hapgood, A Victorian in the Modern World, and particularly his revolutionary manifesto quoted in Dodge, , Movers and Shakers, pp. 52–3Google Scholar: ‘I am accused of having an unreasoning and unreasonable interest in all things that are generally condemned by the community such as cubist art, the I.W.W., the turkey trot, criminals, Mrs Pankhurst, Mayor Gaynor, etc. Letters come with varying degrees of passion saying that I am a revolutionist, a skulking member of the Socialist Party, an anarchist, an immoral person, an undesirable citizen. Let me take the simple statement which really covers all the rest that I merely defend and exalt what is generally condemned. Perhaps the easiest way of replying is to admit that this criticism is in part true.’

page 65 note 1 See, for example, the address of Herbert Croly delivered shortly before the first appearance of The New Republic in November 1914 in which he asks this question and answers it in the course of outlining the intentions of the new journal. The address is in the Willard Straight Papers, Cornell University Library. I am indebted to David Levy of the University of Oklahoma for drawing it to my attention.

page 66 note 1 See the estimates of some key figures in this group offered by Lippmann, , ‘An Open Mind: William James’, Everybody's Magazine, 23 (1910), 800–1Google Scholar and ‘The Hope of Democracy’, The New Republic, 7 (1916), 231Google Scholar. Bourne, Randolph, ‘John Dewey's Philosophy’, The New Republic, 2 (1914), 145–6Google Scholar. Frequent references to others listed here occur in the writings of the younger men.

page 66 note 2 Although May in fact claims relatively little for this shift he makes no attempt to reconcile the fact of clear intellectual affiliation between the two generations and the belief in the novelty of their enterprise expressed by the younger men. May, , The End of American Innocence, pp. 140–166, 219Google Scholar.

page 66 note 3 Forcey, , Crossroads of Liberalism, pp. 111, 166–7Google Scholar, has an excellent discussion of Lippmann's use of Freud, Ross and Ward. See also Lasch, The New Radicalism, for illuminating points on Lippmann's reading of Freud. That Lippmann had little need to appeal to Freud for many of his judgments is clear from a characteristic passage such as this which merely summons Freud (incorrectly) as further evidence of the validity of James's ‘Moral equivalents’ theory: ‘When Fercy Mackaye pleads for pageants in which the people themselves participate, he offers an opportunity for expressing some of the lusts of the city in the form of an art. The Freudian school of psychologists calls this ‘sublimation’. They have brought forward a wealth of material which gives us every reason to believe that the theory of “moral equivalents” is soundly based….’ Lippmann, , Preface to Politics, p. 51Google Scholar.

page 67 note 1 There has been little work on the university as a social institution. The best suggestions are contained in such works as Hofstadter, Richard and Metzger, Walter, The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (New York, 1955)Google Scholar; Rudolph, Frederick, The American College and University (New York, 1961)Google Scholar; Curti, Merle and Carstensen, Vernon, The University of Wisconsin (Madison, 1949)Google Scholar; Veysey, Lawrence, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago, 1965)Google Scholar, and Wilson, R. Jackson, In Quest of Community, 1860–1920 (New York, 1968)Google Scholar.

page 68 note 1 William James, ‘The Social Value of the College Bred’, originally an address delivered to a meeting of the Association of American Alamnae at Radcliffe College, 7 November 1907 and first published in McClure's Magazine in February 1908. It was reprinted in James, , Memories and Studies (London, 1911)Google Scholar. Quotations are from this last source, p. 319.

page 68 note 2 James, , Memories and Studies, 323–4Google Scholar.

page 69 note 1 James, , Memories and Studies, p. 324Google Scholar.

page 69 note 2 Walter Lippmann to Lincoln Steffens, 18 05 1910, Lincoln Steffens Papers, Columbia University LibraryGoogle Scholar.

page 70 note 1 Steffens, , The Autobiography, p. 169Google Scholar. Forcey, Crossroads of Liberalism has the most convenient summary of the careers of Croly and Weyl.

page 71 note 1 Bourne, Randolph, ‘For Radicals’, in Youth and Life (New York, 1913), p. 308Google Scholar.

page 72 note 1 Stearns, Harold, ‘Where are our Intellectuals’, in America and the Young Intellectuals (New York, 1921), pp. 46–7Google Scholar.