Making It New: 1900–1945 315worlds into words. There was, of course, no settled answer to any of these aspects of
the question; the writers of this time found multiple means for giving voice to the
New Negro. And in their differences with each other, just as much as in their distances
from white writers, they revealed just how much American literature continued to
resist a monolithic reading – even the one supplied by modernism.
Nor was double consciousness the monopoly of African-Americans or those who
became known during this period, at the height of resistance to mass immigration,
as “hyphenated Americans.” Dualism of a different kind was a characteristic feature
of the dominant culture in America as, caught between optimism and nostalgia,
celebration of the new and regret for the old, many Americans found themselves
compelled toward the horizons of tomorrow but also drawn toward the golden
landscapes of yesterday. The flight of Charles Lindbergh across the Atlantic in 1927,
for instance, provoked quite different responses. On the one hand, Lindbergh
became in the popular mind the living embodiment of the pioneer spirit, the “Spirit
of St. Louis,” the young, independent, and individualistic American, unaffected by
public institutions and pressures. On the other, his achievement was also seen as a
witness to the miracle of technology, what was possible with the help of teamwork,
organization, and commitment to the production economy. The same groups or
individuals could and did respond to Lindbergh’s achievement as an anticipation of
future technological miracles and as an affirmation of the values of the past.
Committed to the power, leisure, and wealth of the new, urban world, they could
nevertheless feel irresistibly drawn toward what they saw as the simpler, purer values
of the old. “We live in a new creation,” one politician of the time observed. “Literally,
the old things have passed away and all things have become new.” The conviction of
newness and uniqueness mattered to Americans of this period, profoundly affecting
their thought and language; and while part of them was inspired by it, an equal part
was clearly frightened. The compulsions that led, in literature, to the innovation and
experiment of modernism were countered by an impulse to look back with yearning
to times that seemed simpler, morally more certain and socially more stable – to the
quietude and contentment of a more pastoral age.
This yearning or nostalgia for apparently simpler and better times assumed many
forms. In 1920 the newly elected president, Warren Harding, caught some of it when
he told his fellow Americans that theirs was a period for “not heroics but healing; not
nostrums but normality; not resolution but restoration.” In the same year, the
passing of the 18th Amendment prohibiting the sale of alcohol showed how the
progressive and nostalgic impulses could sometimes work together to support each
other. Some of those advocating this amendment, certainly, were progressives who
believed that it was as legitimate to preserve a person from the consumption of
alcohol as it was to protect him or her against unhealthy or dangerous factory
conditions. But many came from rural, Protestant districts and wanted to enshrine
fundamentalist beliefs in law: for them, it was a symbolic reform, which gave
institutional legitimacy to the norms and values of the old America. “The Old
America,” as one Southern newspaper of the time put it, “the America of Jackson
and of Lincoln,” was also what those who objected to the influx of immigrantsGGray_c04.indd 315ray_c 04 .indd 315 8 8/1/2011 7:53:45 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 45 AM