The American Nation A History of the United States, Combined Volume (14th Edition)

656 Chapter 24 Postwar Society and Culture: Change and Adjustment

Alfred Kazin summed up Hemingway in a sentence:
“He brought a major art to a minor vision of life.”
Edith Wharton was of the New York aristocracy.
She was educated by tutors and governesses and never
went to college. To counteract what she called “the
creeping darkness of neurasthenia,” she traveled fre-
quently to Europe, eventually chose to live there, and
took up writing. After co-authoring a book on home
decoration, she wrote novels on marriage and manners
in some ways reminiscent of Henry James. In Paris at
the outset of the Great War, she threw herself into war-
related charities. But while the shock of the war jolted
Fitzgerald and Hemingway into the vanguard of innova-
tion, she retreated from the jangling energy of postwar
life and culture. “I am steeping myself in the nineteenth
century,” she explained to a friend, “like taking refuge in
a mighty temple.” The product of her retreat, The Age
of Innocence(1920), offered a penetrating portrait of an
unsettlingly serene if vanished world. The Nation
remarked that Wharton had described the wealthy of
old New York “as familiarly as if she loved them and as
lucidly as if she hated them.” Though the younger nov-
elists of the decade often dismissed her work as uninven-
tive and dowdy, and she theirs as unformed and thin, her
judgment has proven the more enduring.
Although neither was the equal of Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, or Wharton, two other writers of the 1920s
deserve mention: H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis.
Each reflected the distaste of intellectuals for the cli-
mate of the times. Mencken, a Baltimore newspaper-
man and founder of one of the great magazines of the
era, the American Mercury, was a thoroughgoing cynic.
He coined the word booboisieto define the complacent,
middle-class majority, and he fired superbly witty
broadsides at fundamentalists, prohibitionists, and
“Puritans.” “Puritanism,” he once said, “is the haunt-
ing fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
But Mencken was never indifferent to the many
aspects of American life that roused his contempt.
Politics at once fascinated and repelled him, and he
assailed the statesmen of his generation with magnifi-
cent impartiality:

[On Bryan]: “If the fellow was sincere, then so was

P. T. Barnum....Hewas, in fact, a charlatan, a

mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity.”

[On Wilson]: “The bogus Liberal.... A peda-

gogue thrown up to 1,000 diameters by a

magic lantern.”

[On Coolidge]: “A cheap and trashy fellow, defi-

cient in sense and almost devoid of any notion

of honor—in brief, a dreadful little cad.”

[On Hoover]: “Lord Hoover is no more than a

pious old woman, a fat Coolidge.”

Source: H. L. Mencken [On excerpt of Bryan Obituary Source: American

Mercury, October 1925, pp. 158–160.]

As these examples demonstrate, Mencken’s dia-

tribes, while amusing, were not profound. In per-

spective he seems more a professional iconoclast

than a constructive critic; like both Fitzgerald and

Hemingway, he was something of a perennial ado-

lescent. However, he consistently supported free-

dom of expression of every sort.

Sinclair Lewis was probably the most popular

American novelist of the 1920s. Like Fitzgerald, his first

major work brought him instant fame and notoriety—

and for the same reason. Main Street(1920) portrayed

the smug ignorance and bigotry of the American small

town so accurately that even Lewis’s victims recognized

themselves; his title became a symbol for provinciality

and middle-class meanness of spirit. In Babbitt(1922),

he created what many people considered the typical

businessman of the 1920s, gregarious, a “booster,”

blindly orthodox in his political and social opinions, a

slave to every cliché, and full of loud self-confidence,

but under the surface a bumbling, rather timid fellow

who would have liked to be better than he was but

dared not try. Lewis went on to dissect the medical pro-

fession in Arrowsmith(1925), religion in Elmer Gantry

(1927), and fascism in It Can’t Happen Here(1935).

Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Court Statementat

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The “New Negro”

The postwar reaction brought despair for many

blacks. Aside from the barbarities of the Klan, they

suffered from the postwar middle-class hostility to

labor (and from the persistent reluctance of organized

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Zora Neale Hurston, a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote

eighteen novels—many of which were made into movies.