The Revolt Against the Masses. Fred Siegel
of American culture and politics. For the liberals, the war years had revealed that American society and democracy were themselves agents of repression. These sentiments deepened during the 1920s and have been an ongoing current in liberalism ever since.
In picking their fights with Prohibition and their Pecksniffian former hero Wilson, liberals encouraged the tolerance and appreciation of differences that would over time mature into what came to be called pluralism. “The root of liberalism,” as opposed to the Progressivism that preceded it, wrote Stearns, “is hatred of compulsion, for the liberal has respect for the individual and his conscience and reason which the employment of coercion necessarily destroys.” Although not always observed by liberals themselves—who were willing to put free speech, pluralism, and the resistance to regimentation aside in the 1930s—the call for an urbane temper would then and in the future be the mark of liberalism at its best.
The underside of this new sensibility was both an inverted moralism and a hauteur that have dogged political liberalism down to the present. “Something oppressed” the liberals, wrote literary critic Malcolm Cowley, “some force was preventing them from doing their best work.” Between 1920 and 1934, when Cowley wrote those words, that “something” oppressing liberals “was the stupidity of the crowd, it was hurry and haste, it was Mass Production, Babbittry, Our Business Civilization, or perhaps it was the machine.”
Woodrow Wilson had insisted that mass society, properly led, could produce an “autonomous life in every part yet a common life & purpose.” But, for Wilson’s critics, World War I had set fire to that optimism. The “sanctimonious swindle,” as they now described American involvement in WWI, produced a rolling wave of hostility to middle-class society, which they blamed for the bloodshed. In Greenwich Village, Floyd Dell described the fall from the heights of pre-war idealism: “Humanity seems to have climbed painfully up from the primeval slime and reached out its hands toward the stars in vain. Its arts and sciences . . . have provided it with the full means of self-destruction. . . . There are evidently flaws in our human nature which make our idealism a tragic joke.” America had failed the liberals, and they would never forgive it.
“Randolph Bourne Writing Novels” About Main Street
In the 1920s, D.H. Lawrence was following a well-trodden path in England and Europe when he wrote one of his most anthologized poems, “How Beastly the Bourgeois Is.” In it, Lawrence compares the middle class, “especially the male of the species,” to “a fungus, living on the remains of a bygone life/sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life than his own.” In the nineteenth century, English aesthetes such as John Ruskin and Oscar Wilde, German thinkers such as Adam Muller and Ferdinand Tönnies, who mourned the lost glory of the medieval world, and French litterateurs, most notably Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert, had made careers of flaying the bourgeoisie. Lawrence joined this European tradition in his hatred for the middle class as the bearer of reason, democracy, and capitalism. In the words of the great French historian of Communism François Furet, the middle class was “petty, ugly, miserly, laborious, stick-in-the-muds, while artists were great, beautiful, brilliant, and bohemian.” Flaubert, for his part, argued that politically, “the only rational thing . . . is a government of Mandarins,” and that “the whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.”
But it was only in the 1920s that this contempt for the bourgeoisie—and with it a hostility to America as the quintessentially middle-class, democratic, and capitalist nation—was brought to a wide readership on these shores by a new generation of writers, including Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and H.L. Mencken. Critiques of popular culture were nothing new in twentieth-century America. Americans pioneered popular culture because big-city entertainments had to appeal to uprooted people who came from a bewildering diversity of cultures ranging from rural America to the peasant backwaters of eastern and southern Europe. In the World War I era, the rise of illustrated newspapers, radio, and movies—media that appealed to the immigrant masses, assumed to be of a low IQ—produced a hard rain of criticism. Genteel traditionalists charged that popular recreations not only pandered to the most brutish instincts of America’s “primitive blockheads” and urban peasants, but also threatened to swamp high culture in a wave of brackish effusions. The Progressives of the early twentieth century blamed the corrupt capitalists for turning popular entertainment into a moral swamp in which business interests submerged the worthy folk cultures of earlier eras.
But while the Progressives had hoped to redeem America’s virtue, the mass-culture critics of the 1920s hoped to remake America in the image of Europe. The leading literary critic Van Wyck Brooks, who idealized Europe, decried the growing separation between highbrow and lowbrow cultures. A self-styled Socialist, Brooks yearned for an “organic” society and scorned the common man as a “simple moron” who needed the leadership of artists and writers.
For liberals, the great revelation of 1919 that they carried into the 1920s was that middle-class society at large, and not just the Bible Belters with their restrictive mores, was to blame for their subjugation. Their disdain for Main Street was matched by their contempt for the detritus of urban popular culture. Referring to most Americans as “the herd,” they saw the industrialism that raised standards of living as a pernicious “degradation” imposed by a country organized around the needs of the middle class. The new popular culture of Broadway shows, movies, baseball, and Coney Island were all “makeshifts of despair,” part of the proof that America was a “joyless” land. Brooks compared the United States to a “primeval monster” that was “relentlessly concentrated in the appetite of the moment” and that knew “nothing of its own vast, inert nerveless body, encrusted with parasites and half-indistinguishable from the slime in which it moves.”
In the 1920s, the first decade in which women could vote, what looked like freedom and progress to most white Americans was an affront to liberal intellectuals, who were cultivating their own alienation. Increasingly conscious of themselves as a group, liberal writers and intellectuals, though more widely read than at any time in the past, experienced the Twenties as a time when their art was stymied by American philistinism. The public mood of the decade was upbeat, buoyed by prosperity and also by the dramatic arrival of electricity, the automobile, and the radio, which brought classical and commercial music to the masses. To the intellectual coterie, this mood was a Calvary. The creative class was being crucified, asserted Mencken, by the inferior breeds of humanity who had presumptuously betrayed their proper role as peasants by crossing the Atlantic from Europe and breeding each other into New World idiocy.
“These writers,” wrote their chronicler Malcolm Cowley, “were united into one crusading army by their revolt” against the American tradition as they understood it. “In the exciting years 1919–1920,” wrote Cowley, “they seized power in the literary world . . . almost like the Bolsheviks in Russia.” Edmund Wilson concurred; he took pride in the belief that his generation of critics and writers had launched an unprecedented and continuous attack on their own culture. Edmund Wilson’s bitterness over President Wilson and World War I corroded like acid on the skin. Speaking of the war, which he had experienced firsthand as a medical-corps stretcher bearer, Wilson hissed: “I should be insincere to make it appear that the deaths of this ‘poor white trash’ of the South and the rest made me feel half so bitter as the mere conscription or enlistment of any of my friends.”
The cultural qualities associated with political liberalism were best expressed in the writings of Minnesota-born and Yale-educated Sinclair Lewis. “Shaped by the Herbert Croly age in American thinking,” Lewis was “Randolph Bourne writing novels,” explained the historian, novelist, and literary critic Bernard DeVoto. Lewis’s novels of his native Midwest were “stocked . . . with unforgettable symbols of business domination,” noted historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote. “They fixed the image of America, not just for the intellectuals of his own generation, but for the world in the next half century.”