316 Making It New: 1900–1945claimed they wanted to recover. At its worst here, fear of the new led not only to the
trial of someone teaching evolution, but to the Ku Klux Klan, which experienced a
startling growth in numbers after World War I. “When the Klan first appeared,” its
leader Hiram Wesley Evans declared in 1925, “those who maintained the old
standards did so only in the face of constant ridicule” and “the Nordic American”
was “a stranger in large parts of the land his fathers gave him.” So, he argued,
Americans had had to turn to organizations like the Klan, in the belief that nothing
else could save them other than “a return of power into the hands of the everyday,
not highly cultured, not overtly intellectualized, but entirely unspoiled and not
de-Americanized average citizen of the old stock.”
These nostalgic impulses that found convoluted, and sometimes corrupted,
expression in such things as the Scopes trial, Prohibition, or immigration quotas
also helped varieties of artistic traditionalism during this period. There was a new
interest in the recovery of the past among both writers and critics of many different
cultural groups. Observers of the cultural scene, like Van Wyck Brooks (1886–1963)
and Matthew Josephson (1899–1978), began constructing the idea of an American
literary tradition. And writers began imaginative exploration of what one of them,
Willa Cather, termed “the precious, the incommunicable past.” While Cather
explored the uses of the Western past, others such as John Crowe Ransom and Allen
Tate considered the uses of the Southern past; and still others, like Jean Toomer and
Mourning Dove, turned, respectively, to the African-American and Native American
past as an imaginative resource and a source of material. What these writers sought
was, inevitably, different. Cather was intrigued, for instance, by the power of memory,
and the grip the imagined past of the West, and America, has on the present. Other
Western writers turned to the Western past as a way of returning to the earth and
“the real.” Southern writers, like Ransom, Tate, and their colleagues in the Fugitive
and Agrarian movements, were drawn to the idea of a fundamentally rooted, tradi-
tional and rural society as a bulwark, a means of resistance to urban anonymity and
social change. Toomer and Mourning Dove were more inclined to find in the
folkways and art of the past a healing agency or a way of restoring their own people.
What all such writers had in common, however, was the belief that a return to and
recovery of the past was not only possible but imperative: that an act of remembrance
was vital to the restoration of personal and social health. This passage from Cather’s
novel My Ántonia (1918) captures something of that belief. The words are attributed
to Jim Burden, the narrator, but they clearly express Cather’s own views, and the
impulses that fired so many of these backward looking works into life:While I was in the very act of yearning towards the new forms ... brought up before
me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the
places and people of my own infinitesimal past. They stood out strengthened and sim-
plified now. They were all I had for answer to the new appeal.“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” observes a character in one of William
Faulkner’s novels: which is another way of expressing this obsession with yesterday,GGray_c04.indd 316ray_c 04 .indd 316 8 8/1/2011 7:53:45 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 45 AM