Making It New: 1900–1945 311completely supplanted stability. In 1891, on July 4, a Muncie merchant had noted in
his diary that the town was “full of people” celebrating Independence Day; by con-
trast, some 29 years later, two observers found the streets deserted – all the town had
apparently left for the day and taken to the road. Some of those in authority might
occasionally denounce the Model-T Ford, as one judge memorably did, by describing
it as “a house of prostitution on wheels.” But one million models of the “Tin Lizzie”
were sold each year, and there were 26,500,000 vehicles on the road by 1929. Others
might lament, as that Muncie woman did, the passing of the old folkways. But those
ways were irrecoverable now: cars, along with radios, vacuum cleaners, record
players, and other consumer goods, had become the foundation stones of the new
economy – and the precipitants of a new consciousness. Listening to network radio
shows, seduced by the imagery of advertising and the cinema, encouraged to ride
out of familiar locations in search of the unfamiliar or for the sheer experience of
movement, Americans became part of a distinctively modern, discontinuous culture:
a culture that was, and is, not specifically tied down to any individual locality, state,
or region – or, indeed, to any particular nation.
Such changes in culture and consciousness were accelerated by the experience of
World War I. The United States emerged from involvement in global conflict with an
altered economic relationship with the rest of the world: from a debtor nation it had
been transformed into a creditor nation, with loans to Europe worth thirteen billion
dollars. For a while, under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson, it tried to assume the
status of a moral and cultural creditor as well: in 1918, while war was still being
waged, Wilson formulated his Fourteen Points, which outlined the need for a
peaceful world and provided a “guarantee” of continued peace through a “general
assembly of nations.” It was this League of Nations that was rejected by Congress in
1919, after which American foreign policy seemed to move decisively toward
isolationism. But while it is true that the United States did tend to withdraw from
active political involvement in world affairs – at least, involvement to the extent that
Wilson had hoped for – it was too deeply implicated now, economically and
culturally, in what happened outside its borders ever to recapture the isolation, the
sheer sense of apartness, that it had experienced in the previous century. Mass
immigration from Europe and elsewhere, a mass communication system, and a
system of culture that ultimately denied national boundaries – all these, among
other things, ensured that America was involved with the rest of the world regardless
of whether or not its political leaders wanted it to be.
The most immediate and obvious sign of this withering away of cultural bounda-
ries between the United States and the rest of the world, and in particular Europe,
was the expatriate movement. After World War I was over, hundreds of writers or
would-be writers invaded Europe in a literary migration that has had no equal either
before or since. A favorable rate of exchange was perhaps the immediate precipitant.
Other motivating factors included a possible desire to escape from provincialism
and puritanism and as one expatriate, Gertrude Stein, put it, to be “all alone with
English and myself.” But whatever the reason, these writers soon found themselves
involved with other European novelists and poets who shared their hunger for newGGray_c04.indd 311ray_c 04 .indd 311 8 8/1/2011 7:53:44 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 44 AM