Making It New: 1900–1945 309collisions.” Such alterations, Adams believed, would affect all cultures, but
particularly those strongly committed to the new “anarchical” forces – and, above
all, a “twenty-million-horse-power-society” like America. Just because the American
had embraced the “occult mechanism” of the new age so fiercely, he or she would
be especially susceptible to the consequences – whatever, as it turned out, those
consequences might be. The American might become part of a new evolutionary
cycle or part of a new, radically dehumanizing system; he or she might become “the
child of new forces,” energetic and liberating, or might equally be transformed into
“the chance sport of nature,” reduced to one more helpless atom in a random
universe. Adams was not sure, although on the whole his patrician habits of thought
inclined him toward the latter, gloomier series of possibilities. However, one thing
he was perfectly certain about, the process of accelerating technological change
would lead to an alteration of consciousness, vitally affecting every American’s
structure of perception, the way they thought about themselves and the world –
and new forms of education, new epistemological and aesthetic structures would
be needed to grasp the conditions of contemporary life, to register and at least try
to understand the “multiverse.”
Henry Adams’s apocalyptic prophecies about the direction of American history
have proved only too accurate. The material culture (which is to say, towns, facto-
ries, and so on) radically altered over the first half of the twentieth century; and, at
almost the same time, the nonmaterial culture (that is, belief, customs, and institu-
tions) altered too, in ways that were quite unprecedented and far-reaching. By the
second decade of the twentieth century, the United States had become the most
powerful industrialized nation in the world, outstripping Britain and Germany in
terms of industrial production. Accompanying this growth of industry, there was a
rapid expansion of urban centers. The ten largest cities in the United States in
1910 – New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston, Cleveland, Baltimore,
Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Buffalo – had experienced an almost threefold increase in
population in the previous thirty years; while, over the same period, new cities like
Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Seattle had sprung into existence. Perhaps the main
agencies for disseminating urban lifestyles, however, were the smaller cities. In the
last decade of the nineteenth century and the first one or two of the twentieth,
thousands of quiet little townships with their few services for the surrounding
farming population were transformed into small urban centers, each with its own
paved streets, bank, cinema, department store, hospital, shops, factories, and ware-
houses. There was a radical alteration in the material landscape as more and more
people crowded into the towns – the national census indicated that by 1920 the
urban population exceeded the rural population – and it is quite likely that this
change of balance had in fact occurred five or six years earlier. America was no
longer a nation of happy farmers, even if it had ever been; and, regardless of where
they lived, Americans found themselves a part of the emergent technological cul-
ture. The telephone ceased to be a curiosity and became a commonplace: by 1915,
the ratio of telephones to population was one to ten. And the radio, along with
other agencies of mass communication, began imposing its own imagery of the newGGray_c04.indd 309ray_c 04 .indd 309 8 8/1/2011 7:53:44 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 44 AM