310 Making It New: 1900–1945normalcy on the nation at large. In 1926 the National Broadcasting Company, and
the following year the Columbia Broadcasting Company, confirmed this trend
when they hooked together hundreds of local radio stations in two giant national
networks. So, along with the changes in the material landscape – as America evolved
from entrepreneurial to corporate capitalism, and from the ideal of the business
buccaneer to that of the business executive – came change in the nonmaterial sys-
tems of belief and behavior. Along with alterations in the national economy came
alterations in the national consciousness.
Some of these alterations in consciousness can be traced back to the new systems
of thought that encouraged, and in some case enabled, social change at the turn of
the century. Darwinism, for instance, with its new view of human nature and society,
was one of the first movements to threaten the nonmaterial fabric of American
culture, not only because it challenged the religious inheritance of places like New
England, the fundamentalist South, and the Catholic Southwest, but because it
called into question the humanist legacy of nineteenth-century intellectual America.
Marxism placed a large question over the liberal orthodoxies of mainstream
American culture. Freudianism helped to demolish the notion of unitary personality,
the solidarity of the social and moral self – what D. H. Lawrence scornfully referred
to as the old stable ego of character – and in its place substituted a duality, the idea
of two levels in the mind which might be not only discrete but at odds. In turn, the
relativity theory of Albert Einstein offered nothing less than a new view of reality,
since it implied a multiple perspective on the universe. There is no absolute view, the
theory suggested, no “God’s-eye view” of events in the universe. The relationships of
before and after, and simultaneous with, depend on the observer’s position in
relation to events; things are determined by the viewpoint of the spectator and our
knowledge of reality is inevitably contingent. Either as a matter of influence, or as
part of the intellectual currency of the time, theories of relativity or indeterminacy
such as these – or, for that matter, the ideas of Darwin, Marx, and Freud – had an
enormous impact. They contributed to a growing sense of what Adams had termed
the multiverse, even or especially among a larger public who know of such theories
only in popularized and probably simplified forms. But perhaps nothing symbolizes
the change in the direction of American thought, feeling, and energy in the early
decades of the twentieth century as something far more everyday and commonplace
than theories of relativity, evolution, class conflict, and the unconscious. And that is,
the automobile.
In 1925 a woman in Muncie, Indiana remembered that, as she put it, “in the
nineties we were all much more together.” “People brought chairs and cushions out
of the house and sat on the lawn evenings,” she recalled. “We put cushions on the
porch steps to take care of the unlimited overflow of neighbors that dropped by.
We’d sit out so all evening.” The citizens of Muncie were different now, she lamented:
assaulted by advertising urging them to buy cars and “Increase Your Weekend
Touring Radius.” “A man who works six days a week,” a banker was quoted as saying
in one such advertisement, “and spends the seventh on his own doorstep certainly
will not pick up the extra dimes in the great thoroughfares of life.” Mobility hadGGray_c04.indd 310ray_c 04 .indd 310 8 8/1/2011 7:53:44 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 44 AM