Political Conservatism

 Warren G. Harding (1921 –

1923)
 The 29th president of the
United States
 Died in office
 Republican who endorsed
conservative values in
politics and economics
 tended to favor big business
in domestic policy and
isolationism in foreign policy
 President Warren G. Harding
called “normalcy … a regular
steady order of things.”
Political Conservatism
 Many Americans of the 1920s
endorsed conservative values in
politics and economics
 Under presidents Harding and
Calvin Coolidge, tariffs reached new
highs, income taxes fell for people
who were most well off, and the
Supreme Court upset progressive
measures, such as the minimum
wage and federal child labor laws
 Both Harding and Coolidge tended
to favor business.
 “The business of America is
business,” Coolidge declared. “This
is a business country, and it wants
a business government.” Calvin Coolidge (1923-
1929)
 Political Conservatism
 Republican presidents shared isolationist inclinations in foreign
policy; the United States never joined the League of Nations.
 Harding and Coolidge also endorsed pacifist policies:
 1921 Harding organized the Washington Conference, a
pioneering effort to reduce arms and avoid an expensive
naval arms race.
 Attended by the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Italy, and
other countries
 the conference proposed destruction of ships and a
moratorium on new construction.
 In 1928, under Coolidge, the United States and France
cosponsored the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which renounced
aggression and called for the end of war.
 Useless in practice. However, it helped to establish the
20th-century concept of war as an outlaw act by an
aggressor state on a victim state.
Political Conservatism
 1924 the U.S. Congress passed the National
Origins Act, which limited immigration into the
country
 Protests against unrestricted immigration came from
organized labor, which feared the loss of jobs to
newcomers, and from patriotic organizations, which
feared foreign radicalism
 set an annual quota on immigration and limited the
number of newcomers from each country to the
proportion of people of that national origin in the
1890 population
 discriminated against the most recent newcomers,
southern and eastern Europeans, and excluded Asian
immigrants almost entirely. Latin American
immigration, however, was unlimited.
Political Conservatism
 Radical political activism waned, dimmed by the Red
Scare of 1919
 Social criticism appeared in literary magazines such
as The Masses; in newspapers such as the Baltimore
Sun, where journalist H. L. Mencken published biting
commentary; and in popular fiction such as Sinclair
Lewis’s novel Babbitt (1922), an assault on provincial
values.
 Some intellectuals fled the United States and settled
in Paris.
 Progressivism faded (most enduring vestige - the
post-suffrage women’s movement).
Political Conflicts
 split between urban and rural, modern and
traditional, radical and reactionary
 Nativist, anti-radical sentiments: the
Sacco-Vanzetti Case [Nicola Sacco and
Bartolomeo Vanzetti (arrested in 1920;
executed in 1927; their names cleared in
1977)]
 revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s:
targeted Catholics, Jews, and immigrants,
as well as African Americans; thrived in the
Midwest and Far West, as well as in the
South
Political Conflicts
 religious fundamentalism: 1925 John T. Scopes (a
Tennessee schoolteacher) tried for breaking a state law
that prohibited the teaching of the theory of evolution in
schools
 courtroom battle between traditionalism and
modernism. Scopes was convicted, although the
verdict was later reversed on technical grounds
 battle over Prohibition:
 “Drys” favored Prohibition and “wets” opposed it
 The 18th Amendment enforced by The Volstead Act
(1919)
 organized crime entered the liquor business; rival
gangs and networks of speakeasies induced a crime
wave.
 By the end of the 1920s, Prohibition was discredited,
and it was repealed in 1933.
Political Conflicts
 the conflict between “wets” and “drys” played a role in
the presidential election of 1928.
 the Democratic candidate, Al Smith, governor of New
York - a “wet”; represented urban, immigrant
constituencies
 Republican Herbert Hoover - engineer from Iowa, a
“dry”; represented rural, traditional constituencies
 Hoover envisioned a rational economic order in which
corporate leaders acted for the public good; promised
voters “a chicken for every pot and a car in every
garage”; won the elections before the Great
Depression.
The Great Depression (1929 – 1930s)

 Crash on the stock market

 shattered the economy: fortunes vanished in days;
consumers stopped buying, businesses retrenched,
banks cut off credit, and a downward spiral began;
unemployment reached 25% in 1933
 Credit / loans – impossible to pay (particularly the
farmers + the Dust Bowl)
 Hoover: the Government should not interfere; relied on
private measures to solve it
 spoke out against the New Deal (Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
plan based on Government’s interference; won the 1932
presidential election)
The Great Depression (1929 – 1930s)

 Vocabulary: “Hoover blankets”

(newspapers), “Hoover flags” (empty
pockets), Hoovervilles (shantytowns)
 Franklin D. Roosevelt (1932-1945)
 The New Deal (see Lecture on
Progressivism)
Post- WWI American Intellectuals
 Disillusion with the war, not with the whole of American
thought and tradition.
 One year after the Armistice (1918) The New Republic,
the unofficial voice of the liberal intellectuals in this
period, published John Dewey’s “The Discrediting of
Idealism”:
 he acknowledges his being among the gullible “who
swallowed the cant [hypocritical cliché] of
idealism as a sugar coating for the bitter core of
violence and greed.”
 Naïve optimism and “fine phrases” led Americans to
the assumption that ideals would be served by victory,
while blinding them to such realities as the secret &
cynical treaties among the other Allies (which rushed
the war)
 reviving idealism by associating it with non-
military forces like commerce, industry, science
Post- WWI American Intellectuals
 Targets of disillusion:
 absurdity of using a war to end all wars, of instituting
freedom with force (quickly apparent after 1918).
Dewey’s essay the following year: only the first in a
long line of condemnations of America’s intervention
in the European conflict
 E.G.: Revisionist histories:
 Harry Elmer Barnes’ Genesis of the World War
(1926): Germany was not the solely
responsible.
 Sidney B. Fay’s Origins of the World War (1928):
Allied propaganda had distorted the facts.
 Internationalism: bitterness and pride. They vowed
never again to commit their ideals and energies
to foreign causes. E.g.: the rejection of the Treaty
of Versailles, including the League of Nations.
 Post- WWI American Intellectuals
 concern for the future of the Western World;
frame of mind encouraged by Oswald Spengler’s
The Decline of the West (1918) [American
edition: 1926]
 Western civilization was doomed by the
rhythm of cultures to decline and perish just
as had ancient Greece and Rome
 In the U.S. the end of 3 centuries of frontier
provided an additional reason for uneasiness; the
advent of an urban-industrial civilization and the
loss of pioneer vitality meant decline rather than
progress: Henry Adams (1838-1918) - The
Education of Henry Adams (1907/1918):
Post- WWI American Intellectuals
 modern world might be accelerating
toward destruction rather than perfection
 evolution might bring retrogression ( “The

Dynamo and the Virgin”).

 the postwar mood made the Adams’s

book a bestseller.
 Freudian theory: death instinct & assumption
of the unhappiness of the civilized man
[Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)]
Post- WWI American Intellectuals
 Expatriation or “exile”
 Malcolm Cowley in Exile’s Return (1934): the exiles were
nostalgic, full of the wish to recapture some
remembered America
 The Russian Revolution of 1917: some intellectuals
envied a country that apparently had not gone wrong;
many American intellectuals transferred their hopes for
the common man to the red flag
 Relief and optimism
 relief that the weaknesses of the old order were
finally exposed. This offered some hope that
reconstruction and a better America are possible.
“The war had been a needed catharsis” (Nash 43).
 Post- WWI American Intellectuals
 Harold Stearns edited Civilization in the United States
(1922):
 Wrongly perceived as a document of American
intellectuals’ despair and alienation
 Preface - “constructive criticism”:
 Hope lay in the rebelliousness of the young intellectuals.
The war had opened their eyes: showed them the frail
foundations of the older generation’s beliefs.
 One found value, however, in the past in writers like
Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Henry David Thoreau
 The American intellectuals of the 1920s believed they
were vital enough to produce cultural greatness.
 Post- WWI American Intellectuals
 One could surpass the limitations of
utilitarianism and gentility
 Experience was the solution; in Paris the
American writers experienced otherness
and in otherness they could contemplate
and live more truly their Americanness
 Goal: an American intellectual
renaissance.
 Post- WWI American Intellectuals -
A New Perception of Human Nature
The Leopold-Loeb Case

•June 1, 1924: cold-blooded, unreasonable (no

apparent motive), brutal murder (two highly
intelligent, highly educated, millionaire family young
men kill a 14-year boy) shocks the American public:
alert them to the possibility that the traditional
understanding of human nature (as controlled by some
superior ethical instance) no guarantee of socially
acceptable behavior
•Europe: discussion of the mind as a physiological
mechanism, depleted of religious sense or romantic
aura, was well advanced
•e.g. Jean Martin Charcot [1825-1893], French
neurologist, considered the father of clinical
neurology. He specialized in the study of hysteria
Post- WWI American Intellectuals -
A New Perception of Human Nature
 Most famous of his students: Sigmund Freud
 William James (1842-1910) published
Principles of Psychology (1890):
 Building on the insights of Charles Darwin (On
the Origin of Species-1859).
 A naturalistic [based on nature, anatomy] and
functionalistic [practical, utilitarian]
interpretation of mental processes.
 The mind: a physical organ. No innate ethical
controlling guide to human behavior.
 Post- WWI American Intellectuals -
A New Perception of Human Nature
 this entirely biological conception of human
nature - serious blow to the old dualistic
view of the mind as distinct from the body
 E.g. functionalists: no basis for the
Transcendentalist basic assumption that each
man contained a “spark of divinity”.
 Shortly before World War I psychology
began to have considerable impact on the
way American intellectuals conceived of
human nature.
Post- WWI American Intellectuals -
A New Perception of Human Nature
 Determinants of human behavior:
 Ancient, inherited instincts.

 The endocrine glands.

 Heredity

 The Environment (Behaviorism):

title coming from the book Behavior:

An Introduction to Comparative
Psychology (1914) and Behaviorism
(1925) by John B. Watson.
Post- WWI American Intellectuals -
A New Perception of Human Nature
 Watson was inspired by Pavlov’s
results and applied them to human
beings
 developed the idea of the hollow man /
lacked the capacity for self-direction
 Man responds to external stimuli as a
dog salivates at the sound of the bell
announcing food
 mechanistic conception of the mind.
 Post- WWI American Intellectuals -
A New Perception of Human Nature
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Superego
 impact on American intellectual
history of the 1920s comparable
to Darwin’s in the late 19th
century Ego

 Unlike behaviorism: minds not

hollow
 core of Freud’s theory: the libido
strongly influenced thought and Id
behavior
 continuous conflict between the
ego and the id over the direction
of the individual
Libido
 with the aid of ideals and ethics
(the superego), reason attempted
to control the destructive energy
of the unconscious.
Post- WWI American Intellectuals -
A New Perception of Human Nature
 The Leopold-Loeb case illustrated this theory;
Clarence Darrow, the defense lawyer of the two
murderers used the testimony of prominent
psychiatrists focusing the trial on the mental condition
of the murderers: the unconscious impulses that
determined the actions (Darrow called them
“emotions’).
 The vogue of Freudian psychology in the United
States began in 1909 when Freud came to lecture at
Clark University at the invitation of its president, the
eminent educational psychologist G. Stanley Hall.
1909 pioneers of
the growing
psychoanalytic
movement
assembled at Clark
University to hear
lectures by
Sigmund Freud.
The group
included, top row,
left to right, A. A.
Brill, Ernest
Jones, Sandor
Ferenczi, and
bottom row,
Freud, Clark
University
President C.
Stanley Hall, and
Swiss
psychiatrist Carl
G. Jung. The visit,
the only one Freud
made to the United
States, broadened
the influence and
popularity of
psychoanalysis.