A History of American Literature

308 Making It New: 1900–1945

A History of American Literature, Second Edition. Richard Gray.

© 2012 Richard Gray. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Changing National Identities

Attending the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, Henry Adams had

found himself in a state of what he termed “helpless reflection.” “Chicago,” Adams

recalled in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, “asked in 1893 for the

first time the question of whether the American people knew where they were driv-

ing”; and “Adams answered, for one, that he did not know.” What was more, “he

decided that the American people probably knew no more than he did.” However, he

went on, both for his own sake and other people’s, he felt that he would try at least

to find out. And a crucial moment of discovery occurred seven years later, when

visiting the Great Exposition in Paris. Standing in the Gallery of Machines at the

Great Exposition, he felt, while looking at all the machinery whirring and humming

around him, that “in ... seven years man had translated himself into a new universe

which had no common scale of measurement with the old.” The old signs and scales,

the old means of production, had been demolished; and along with them, the old

modes of feeling too. “The child born in 1900,” Adams suggested,

would ... be born into a new world which would not be a unity but a multiple. Adams

tried to imagine it, and an education that would fit it. He found himself in a land where

no one had ever penetrated before; where order was an accidental relation obnoxious

to nature; artificial compulsion imposed on motion; against which every free energy of

the universe revolted; and which, being merely occasional, resolved back into anarchy

at last.

Instead of unity, there would be proliferation and change, what Adams christened

“the law of the multiverse”; in place of systems there were only “charts of energy

4

Making It New

The Emergence of Modern American

Literature, 1900–1945

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