Round Table on Murphy's The New Era: Final Entry--Murphy Replies

 By Paul Murphy

When anyone begins a review of your book by suggesting it is “likable and usable,” you had better start worrying, and if the reviewer isJames Livingston, start sweating.  It did not take for the other shoe to drop, although the shoe drops from a very peculiar direction.  Livingston emits a heartfelt cri de coeur.  The book may be “good, even brilliant,” but it remains merely a work of history, an attempt to “reproduce” the past, which is, in Livingston’s eyes, an obsolete and now meaningless preoccupation.  “This shit doesn’t matter anymore!”—truly a bracing line to encounter near the end of a book review.  I am indebted to all of the participants in this USIH roundtable on my book.  It is good to have Livingston as a reviewer; he is a corrective to the positive reviews by Lynn Dumenil and Kristoffer Shieldshttp://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com/2012/06/round-table-on-murphys-new-era-entry-2.html, whom I am sure are overly generous.  They praise the book as a clear and straightforward account of American intellectual and cultural life in the 1920s, precisely the qualities Livingston finds so hopeless.  He raises the question, “What is the point of this book?,” which is a good one.  The book is a text for students priced at$80.00.  Not for the casual buyer, to say the least.  It does seem wrong to force such a traditional work of History on students if, as Livingston would have it, our goal should be to “get over it.”  So what?  Who cares?  Exactly.  It is a question I often asked myself. 

Livingston finds the book merely descriptive; it does not explain anything and imports the present concerns of the author into its description of past actors.  The book has no answers to the reviewer’s questions about the 1920s.  It contains, he notes with exasperation, “just fair and balanced reporting” (in the Fox News sense of “fair and balanced,” I presume):  “How is that even possible unless the author aspires to be the writer of a textbook, or unless he assumes that the distance between the college boys and the proles—sorry, the gap between intellectuals and the masses—can’t be crossed?”   (I am not sure what is impossible—that students would be able to decide for themselves whether the Harlem Renaissance was a failure or success?)  Livingston’s comment recalled for me a recent review-essay of three new books on late twentieth-century American cultural and intellectual life by Neil Jumonville, including Livingston’s new book (The World Turned Inside Out:  American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century, a more dazzling exercise in cultural analysis by far) as well as Colin Harrison’s American Culture in the 1990s and Daniel T. Rodgers’s Age of Fracture. [1]  Jumonville classifies Harrison and Livingston’s books as “textbooks” and Rodgers’s as a “regular work of history.”  Later in the review, he allows that Livingston’s book is “too spirited to be kept inside the usual flat narrative corral that most textbooks inhabit.  The reader will find the story bucking its way over the fence before long and into the spot on the bookshelf where the regular books reside” (156).  Well, Livingston does buck a lot, so perhaps this is fair.  I suspect, however, that Livingston is unhappy to have been promoted by Jumonville to the status of a “regular.” 

As it is, I am happy to be classed among the Irregulars.  I’ll stick in my corral; put me on the shelf with the other sad-sack textbook writers, near the floor and behind the waste basket.  I am reminded of another review:  I have a friend who paged through my book and merrily declared (approvingly I guess) that the book didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know.  I have been hardened by years of teaching, and so I took it as a compliment.  The book is a textbook; it does purport to report some of the highlights of American intellectual and cultural life in the 1920s in a way useful for undergraduate and graduate students and maybe for the professor looking to compose a lecture.  If it provides an “imaginative framework for understanding the intellectual life of the 1920s,” as Dumenil suggests, or suggests perspectives that are “illuminating and thought-provoking,” as Shields declares, I’ll take the compliments, for I hoped it might do so.  It excludes too much.  Shields is right to highlight my failure to discuss Legal Realism in the 1920s.  That, and an almost complete omission of the economic thought of the time, are glaring and embarrassing omissions, driven, in part, by the dictates of space.  As Shields notes, my chosen framework—the self-discovery and self-definition of intellectuals as a distinctive class who were defined not only by their well-known alienation from their country but also by a relentless effort to use culture to move the nation closer to their ideals—may well encompass the Legal Realists in any case.  Dumenil quite fairly suggests that parts of the book do not always hang together; there are distinct chapters, about mass culture, for example, that lack the “connective tissue” needed to meld them into the larger argument about the gap-consciousness of the “strange new 20th-century stratum of purposefully superfluous individuals” (Livingston’s wonderful description of intellectuals).  The 1920s were vast—the task of fashioning a history of the period’s cultural and intellectual life, of selecting and ordering data, was challenging. One colleague suggested to me that I could use Peter Gay’s essay, Weimar Culture:  The Outsider as Insider (1968) as a model (a daunting one to be sure), but I opted for impurity, combining elements of an interpretative essay with the framework of a comprehensive text.  The results are sometimes ungainly and choppy. 

Livingston presents several provocative critiques of the work.  My definition of modernism is flawed because it presumes the intellectuals’ self-created categories of “intellectuals” and “masses” to be historically valid, when they were not.  Social classes were new at this time, he argues.  This may be so, but it was the intellectuals’ self-conception that I wanted to report.  Can I explain why twentieth-century, self-defined modernists alighted on this particular framework?  Perhaps not.  But they explained it to themselves in terms of the onrushing force of industrialization and commercial culture.  (Yes, the Southern Agrarians were haunted by the same demons as the cosmopolitan New York Intellectuals, and this is why they converged in the 1940s and 1950s, if not earlier.  Malcolm Cowley was best friends with Allen Tate and his crew and wrote parts of Exile’s Return in Tennessee.  They were all conservatives, just as they were all radicals.  The New Yorkers were Marxists; the southerners antimodernists.)  Livingston highlights technology, which I supposedly make a deus ex machine, in another example of my slipshod journalism.  Yet, I (and they, I think) focused on industrialization:  The modernist critics of the 1920s knew they were being industrialized, meaning efficient production was becoming the watchword and, yes, humanistic values risked replacement by imperatives to profit, standardization, and the rest.  Livingston has me presenting Mumford and his generation of critics as anti-technological, which they were not, he argues.  This may be the case, but my point was that they were distressed by the larger socioeconomic and cultural process of industrialization.  Likewise, Livingston presents the Harlem Renaissance as a great success because black intellectuals embraced mass culture.  True—of some, at least.  There were a lot of fights about this.  Yet, as George Hutchinson points out, the Renaissance intellectuals were embedded in the broader white critical discourse of their time.  They had time for Brooks, Mencken, and all the other Young Intellectuals, and the hybridized Renaissance was a result of this collaboration (a cultural movement “in black and white”). 

The focus on technology is a bit of a red herring. Livingston wants to find me obsolete, along with all of my pedantic, Irregular colleagues who write textbooks and not the “regular” books that should be attended to in our profession.  I give space to an irrelevant species of critic who, in Livingston’s view, failed because not embracing the “possibilities of modern technology,” as the successful leaders of the Harlem Renaissance did (even though, in fact, the Renaissance writers wrote poems and books and critical essays published in our soon-to-be obsolete codex form as well as the little magazines). 

There are, I think, some presentist anxieties coursing through Livingston’s review, which are absent from Dumenil and Shields.  Shields writes, “Our hope as historians is that by better understanding these gaps [the divisions caused by gender, region, race, etc.] and the intellectual and artistic responses to them, we can gain access to a better understanding of the cultural conflicts and evolutions of the decade.  This may in turn help us better understand the social and political clashes of the 20th century.”  Livingston writes:  “Isn’t it clear by now that finely wrought books like Paul Murphy’s are monuments to a comically Nietzschean will to believe—mere vestiges of the urge to make sense in the Present and of the Future by citation of the Past?”  They must have interesting seminars in the Rutgers University History Department!

I appreciate Shields’s suggestion of an alternate path into mid-twentieth-century modernism—and perhaps one that works better than my gap-consciousness—in the liberal modernists’ desperate focus on authenticity as the hoped-for basis of a renewed authority they knew they lacked but wanted to regain.  This is a good idea, and as I re-read portions of the book, references to authenticity began to jump out at me.

I fear that Livingston finds himself in the same boat.  After all, is he not he urging us to “get real” and quit being self-infatuated professors who simply tell students what happened in the past, as if that was relevant?  I think he may be in the gap.  He frets that the academic professor is irrelevant and, really beside the point.  There is more than a little Santayana here.  The gap between the intellectuals and the masses (“masses” is perhaps a poor term for all the rest of the people out there, existing nebulously in the intellectuals’ imagination of their audience), still exists, and Livingston yearns to bridge it.  His tone is postmodernist, but the anxieties seem much the same as those held by the 1920s generation of modernists and their mid-century epigones.  Academia became a redoubt for intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s and remained so for a period of time, even for those employed in the emerging multiversities of the 1960s. As Livingston believes, the left seized the “commanding heights of higher education.” [2]  Now that is changing:  Industrialization is hitting the K-12 profession very hard now, as the forces of privatization grow more powerful and public commitment to funding education falters.  The rising waters are lapping at the shores of Academia.  We are about to be industrialized.  I agree with Shields.  As we fight the creative destruction wrought by “massive open online courses” and the like (Ted Babbitt, it should be noted, son of George F., was, like David Brooks and many others featured in the New York Times a fan of “home-study courses,” promulgated in his case by the Shortcut Educational Publishing Co. of Sandpit, Iowa [3]), it will repay us to “mind the gap.”

Livingston challenges me on the claim that, after 1920, “culture became the essential terrain of social and political action.” [4]  I made the same statement in a conference paper, and I remember Andrew Hartman asking me the connection between such a claim and the late twentieth-century phenomenon of the “culture wars,” which he is studying.  Livingston wants an explanation as to why this was the case.  Intellectuals at this time, Livingston argues, were not for or against things; the past is not a “sporting event.”  Yet, there were fights in the 1920s, big ones.  Many were “against” the New Humanists, the conservatives of the day.  To liberal modernists, the Humanists represented a profound threat to their own critical project, which was to wield culture as a tool against industrialization in all its manifestations.  Humanists wanted to control culture, too, but represented values the modernists bitterly opposed.  Why did the modernists of that era worry these issues?  Culture seemed the best tool they had to change society. 

If I could change one thing in the book now, it would be to clarify this point.  In the book, I spend much time reporting on the emerging anthropological notion of culture. [5]  The liberal modernists to whom I devote so much attention seem implicated in this new view.  I think this is an erroneous assumption.  One delight in reading Warren Susman’s work on the 1920s and 1930s is his profound and complex focus on the obsessions of this generation of intellectuals with culture, with communications technology, and with their relationship to both.  We all should re-read Susman. [6]  He had a better understanding of intellectuals’ conception of culture in the 1920s and 1930s (and it was his own, too, I think).  Since the 1960s, we have conceived culture as a source of empowerment, a resource available to the oppressed to resist the authority of the elite (and the source of that elite’s subtle hegemonic powers).  Culture is that which must be respected, for it validates personal identity—a complex system of symbols patterning behavior that somehow allows for personal agency by the mechanism of choice among its multifarious elements.  To mid-century modernist intellectuals, culture was a tool of a different sort, not merely a surrogate for contested moral values nor the anthropologists’ patterning of ideas and behaviors that define a society.  You did culture when you used ideas and images and symbols (images and symbols and myths were favorite words of academics of Susman’s generation and the social critics they studied) as levers to move the country in a different direction.  Culture was something intellectuals and artists used, and, in order to believe it effective, they had to assume that everyone was potentially under its influence.  There was a (potential) national mind, or “frame of reference”; better, the aim of intellectuals was precisely to create and impose such a thing.

We no longer think this way.  The “culture wars” of our times have been about the repudiation of such notions of homogeneity in the name of diversity and pluralism.  Perhaps there is a solution to Livingston’s dilemma in Susman’s analysis, however.  (Susman seems to me as much a hero of my book as Lewis Mumford.)  To Susman, writing history was doing culture.  History is part of culture, and historians inevitably create new forms of culture as they create their histories; history as culture and culture as history. [7]  As Susman famously noted, Walt Disney was as influential a force in history as FDR; the director of movie westerns, John Ford, was probably the most influential historian in the country. [8]  They certainly had wider platforms than a textbook, but Susman was not one to dismiss the cultural significance of any text, even the Irregular ones consigned to the bottom shelf.  Textbooks, given that we force our students to read them, may even be more influential than many others…and more revealing.

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Notes

[1] Neil Jumonville, “Learn This Forward but Understand It Backward,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 73:1 (Jan. 2012), 146-62.  The books under review are Colin Harrison, American Culture in the 1990s (Edinburgh University Press, 2010); James Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out:  American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010); and Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture  (Harvard University Press, 2011).  

[2] Livingston, World Turned Inside Out, xv.

[3] Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt(1922; reprint, Bantam, 1998), 79-80.

[4] Paul V. Murphy, The New Era:  American Thought and Culture in the 1920s (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 10.

[5] This is a topic that has since received exhaustive analysis in John S. Gilkeson, Anthropologists and the Rediscovery of America, 1886-1965 (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

[6] Warren I. Susman, Culture as History:  The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York:  Pantheon, 1984).

[7] See Susman, Culture as History, xii-xiii, 3, 17-18, 185.

[8] Susman, Culture as History, 103, 197; Warren I. Susman, “Film and History:  Artifact and Experience,” Film & History, 15:2 (May 1985), 31.

Round Table on Murphy's The New Era: Entry 3--James Livingston

Review of Paul V. Murphy’s The New Era: American Thought and Culture in the 1920s (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2012) ISBN: 9780742549258.  267 pages.

Reviewed by James Livingston

Rutgers University

This is a likable and usable book if you want to turn political slogans into periodizing devices—“Normalcy,” “New Era,” “New Deal,” “Cold War,” “Old Left,” “Third Way,” and so forth, as if journalism really is the First Draft of History, or rather, as if your task as an historian is to reproduce the past.  Or if you think undergraduates will read this book just because you’ve assigned it.  Otherwise you might have some objections to the project as such, and that project is History as we know it—as we do it. 

I will offer my objections in the form of questions.

Begin with the premise.  What is the point of this book?  What audience outside of USIH will pay attention, and why?  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve written a book for the same series—I don’t have any answers, my book is far less readable, less enjoyable, and less important than this one.  But I think it’s time we started asking the questions.  They are miniatures or components of the question we’re addressing when we contemplate the bleak future of the university, or, for that matter, the death of The Professor, the learned, solemn sidekick of the modern slapstick individual.  The Professor is of course the guy who explains shit after you experience it, or, as the straight man, while you’re at it.

 

Then, the very idea of modernism.  “However, modernism was, first and foremost, an internal discussion among artists and writers about their own precarious social status, which resulted from a loss of a vital connection between themselves and the masses.” Hello?  Modernism was what?  OK, there was that “fragile bridge” between the new working class and the new middle class before the Great War, but both parties to the bargain were just that—new.  You might want to argue that modernism was the intellectuals’ way of coming to terms with exile, but then you’d have to explain the phenomenon of intellectuals, this strange new 20^th-century stratum of purposefully superfluous individuals, and you’d have to locate their country of origin, the place they fled or the people that expelled them.  You’d have to address Pound, Eliot, Yeats, and Stein, then explain why William Carlos Williams stayed home.

And speaking of gaps between the intellectuals and the masses, let Paul Murphy introduce you to technology as the deus ex machina we all recognize as a magic trick: “in a larger sense, the battle was over what force would shape change—industrial and technological progress or culture.”  Really?  Technology is not itself a social and cultural artifact?  Historians still get to ask questions as mystifying as this: “Would the nation be defined by purely industrial and commercial imperatives or humanistic ones?”  The favorite metaphor of writers, artists, and intellectuals in the 1920s (and after) was “the machine”—it regulates Middletown, among other landmarks of that decade.  But these writer, artists, and intellectuals weren’t for or against: this was not a sporting event, regardless of how much we would like to read contemporary intellectual contests into the circumstances of a formative moment from the past.  You can’t have it both ways, saying on the one hand that we’re still speaking their language and on the other that they didn’t quite get it.  Well, OK, you can, but sooner or later readers will notice the autobiographical—or is it Oedipal?—integument.

How can you say that “after the 1920s, culture became the essential terrain of social and political action” if you’re not willing to ask why—and then venture an explanation?  The intellectuals of that decade certainly did, Lewis Mumford and W.E.B. Du Bois among them, but their explanations were derived from studies of the political economy of their own time.  Like the young Herbert Marcuse, they didn’t think that technological progress was the enemy of artistic achievement; they thought instead that such progress would liberate us from necessary labor, and thus free us from what mutilated every imagination.  But however you define culture, for then or for now—them or us—you’d better be prepared to understand what they did.

Also, the Harlem Renaissance.  Are we still willing to “explain” its failure rather than interrogate the assumption that it did fail—because those rarified uptown intellectuals never connected to the masses inside or outside Manhattan?  Or are we now with Houston A. Baker, Jr., Ann Douglas, Cheryl Wall, and George Hutchinson, thus willing to say that, Randolph Bourne notwithstanding, the promise of American life was fulfilled in Harlem in the 1920s and 30s, not postponed by the Great War?  There’s no answer in this book, just fair and balanced reporting.  How is that even possible unless the author aspires to be the writer of a textbook, or unless he assumes that the distance between the college boys and the proles—sorry, the gap between intellectuals and the masses—can’t be crossed?     

And while we’re at it, now that we’re experiencing something, what about the huge differences between Mumford, the hero of the book, and almost everybody else (apart of course from Van Wyck Brooks, the mentor)?  Of course it’s true that Mumford, Brooks, and the “Young Americans”—Waldo Frank, Harold Stearns, Paul Rosenfeld, Floyd Dell, among many others—sought an “organic” linkage to a usable past that would enable an inhabitable future, and that in doing so they were trying to ground their criticisms of the present in a cultural tradition, as Warren Susman and Martin Sklar convincingly argued long ago.  Who didn’t seek this grounding then?  Who doesn’t now?

The sorry fact is that Mumford’s usable past, not to mention those conjured by Brooks, Frank, and Dell, had more in common with the Agrarians—and with T. S. Eliot’s notion of civilization—than with the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, who, by and large, embraced the possibilities of modern technology (oops) and, as a result, were better able to discover and appreciate their “roots” in antebellum America—and that would be the historical moment of slavery’s apogee—than the young intellectuals who gathered around the little magazines.  Mumford couldn’t find anything worth admiring in American culture after 1860, and so, like Alan Tate, William Yandell Elliott, Robert Penn Warren, and other luminaries of the very Old School convened at Vanderbilt, he valorized the 1850s, the “Golden Day” when Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville created the terms of literary debate.

So what?  Why object to such a good, even brilliant book?  Who cares?  I’ll play The Professor, you go ahead and play along, answer at will, and get as angry as you want. 

This shit doesn’t matter anymore!  Isn’t it clear by now that finely wrought books like Paul Murphy’s are monuments to a comically Nietzschean will to believe—mere vestiges of the urge to make sense in the Present and of the Future by citation of the Past?  Aren’t these books just oddly-shaped things that are soon to be placed in dioramas, alongside frogs and other endangered amphibians?  Or will they always exist as the material evidence of a deeper urge to get tenure—live forever and all that—which, as we all well know, is already a thing of the Past (not the urge, the thing itself)? 

What follows?  I don’t know, that’s not in my script, no matter how many times we’ve congratulated ourselves, as professional historians, for saying that the Future can’t be navigated without some map of the Past.  What a joke!  For now, I know that the congratulations are not yet in order, and that the joke is on us.  For too long, we have been merely reproducing the Past, as if we were well-educated preservationists with the right quotation.  It’s time we learned how to get over it, and told our fellow citizens why we did.

Round Table on Murphy's The New Era: Entry 2--Kristoffer Shields

Review of Paul V. Murphy’s The New Era: American Thought and Culture in the 1920s (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2012). ISBN: 9780742549258. 267 pages.

Reviewed by Kristoffer Shields, PhD Candidate
Rutgers University

Mind the Gap


Too often in the high school and university U.S. History surveys of the past, the 1920s was taught as a “gap” decade: the gap between WWI and the Great Depression, between the Progressives and the New Deal, between the Volstead Act and the end of Prohibition. The time period merited little more than a chapter in a textbook, usually titled “The Jazz Age,” “The Roaring Twenties,” or, coincidentally (or perhaps not so coincidentally), “The New Era.” Thankfully, more recent historians, picking up on the work of William Leuchtenberg (particularly in his 1958 book The Perils of Prosperity), have largely corrected this. These historians, led by Lynn Dumenil, present the 1920s as a significant turning point in American thought and culture and “work…with the premise that the decade of the 1920s illuminates fundamental issues of the 20^th century.”[1] Paul Murphy clearly agrees and continues this project in his comprehensive and engaging new look at the intellectuals and intellectualism of the ‘20s, The New Era: American Thought and Culture in the 1920s.

In fact, Murphy in a sense brings the era full circle, assigning a whole new meaning to the term “gap decade.” He presents a framework that understands the decade as defined, in fact, by cultural gaps. Murphy recognizes and acknowledges the regional, class, gender, racial, and country/city gaps that existed, but he focuses on a different cultural gap—that between the growing mass culture and the intellectuals and artists attempting to guide, shape, and explain it. He describes a type of intellectual crisis, in which social commentators and elites struggled to come to terms with their changing roles in a rapidly changing cultural landscape. Murphy writes, “However, first and foremost, modernism was an internal discussion among artists and writers about their own precarious social statuses, which resulted from a loss of a vital connection between themselves and the masses” (5). In particular, many of the intellectuals and artists Murphy discusses were concerned about the deleterious effects they saw in the growth of mass culture. “It was this hearty embrace of a commercialized mass culture, with its often cheap character and the seemingly crude and superficial pleasures it provided, that troubled intellectuals and widened the gap between them and the mass public” (12).


It is too simple to simply say that these elites were horrified by mass culture, though; they were also drawn to it. This was in part for practical reasons: “While modernist impulses set many American intellectuals and artists in the 1920s apart from society, the aspiration to become arbiters of cultural change promoted connection” (7). Many of these intellectuals displayed a clear desire to understand the new culture and connect with it. The gap mattered to them not just because they needed to bridge it but also because they wanted to understand it. To them, that was the key to shaping future cultural change. These intellectuals, particularly modernist liberals in Murphy’s account, refused to cede control of culture and instead fought to find ways to direct or at least impact it. Our hope as historians is that by better understanding these gaps and the intellectual and artistic responses to them, we can gain access to a better understanding of the cultural conflicts and evolutions of the decade. This may in turn help us better understand the social and political clashes of the 20th century. “After the 1920s,” Murphy writes, “culture became the essential terrain of social and political action” (10). Ultimately, Murphy is describing a battle to control culture, fought amongst conservatives, progressives, and modernist liberal intellectuals, a “battle…over what force would shape change—industrial and technological progress or culture” (10). Put another way, this is the battle over the gap and it is the battle that would define the intellectual decade.

It is difficult to do justice to the breadth of Murphy’s research and analysis in a short review such as this. He begins by analyzing the need for intellectuals to understand and conceptualize the changes they were experiencing and describes the growth of cultural anthropology to provide that service. He then discusses the ambivalent relationship between intellectuals and the mass culture in more detail. He focuses here on the difficulties intellectuals faced, distrusting what they saw as the conformist nature of mass culture and yet still recognizing its power. Murphy writes, “Attuned to the immense power of culture, eager to repudiate the role of moral guardians, and avid proponents of personal freedom, they were profoundly distressed when the choices audiences made failed to reflect their own values or advance their aspirations for America” (71). There were many ways in which to deal with this ambivalence and Murphy presents a number of divergent ones.

Having established the existence of the culture gap and some of the complicated ways in which intellectuals generally understood and responded to it, Murphy turns to a more specific look at how different groups of intellectuals attempted to bridge the gap—or, more accurately perhaps, find space for themselves within the gap. He begins with literary intellectuals, particularly the differing approaches taken by Young American critics and the Dadaists, ultimately locating the decade’s “dominant literary currents” as “the search for symbols from the American past with which to fashion an organic American culture and the elevation of modern technology and commercial enterprise to the level of a new folklore” (105). Next, Murphy discusses the role of race, ethnicity and immigration in creating and overcoming cultural gaps, specifically noting how “immigrants reflected the contest between conformity and personal autonomy that formed one of the chief features of modern life” (111). He then turns to an analysis of Pragmatism and the social sciences, situating them as efforts by intellectuals to drive Americans out of a “cultural abyss” before finishing with a chapter on the battles between and within religion and science.

It is difficult to find fault with the impressive breadth of Murphy’s coverage of the intellectual trends of the time period. We all bring our biases and backgrounds as readers, however, and I personally missed a discussion of the Legal Realists, primarily because the discussion concerning the role of law in society taking place in the legal community at the time fits Murphy’s conception of the culture gap so well. When discussing the Pragmatists, for example, Murphy writes, “The pragmatists presented their ideas—which challenged belief in a single, real, unseen, and unchanging world beyond our own that vouchsafed absolute truth—as the means of intellectual and cultural regeneration” (176). This is similar to the challenge taking place in the world of law, particularly in the conversation between Roscoe Pound and Karl Llewellyn concerning the tenets of true Legal Realism.[2] Legal intellectuals were dealing with their own version of a gap between intellectuals and mass culture in their attempts to re-think both the status and the role of law in culture. This is one manifestation of the gap that seems to be missing, though really, this may be more of a suggestion of a way in which Murphy’s framework could be used in the future than a criticism of the work itself.

More important, one of the challenges for Murphy is find ways to link such a wide assortment of intellectuals, artists, approaches, and philosophies and to deal with each sufficiently. Murphy works hard to ensure that this book is more than a list of biographical or ideological entries and he is mostly successful. Murphy’s discussion of Gilbert Seldes, for just one example, is fascinating, showing how we can read different intellectuals not just for the substance of what they said, but for how they can be read together to better understand the debate (69). But I admit that at times it feels as though just as one is drawn into the discussion of a particular person or concept, Murphy is forced to move on. He resolves this challenge in a couple of ways. Primarily, he continually brings the narrative back to his central theme of the gap these intellectuals were facing and reminds the reader of the long term impact of the differing approaches they took.

To me, though, another unifying concept Murphy suggests is even more interesting: the concept of authenticity. The intellectuals Murphy describes seem unmoored by the cultural changes taking place around them and are, to some extent, searching for an anchor. Most, if not all, turn to some aspect of authenticity to find that cultural stronghold. Much of the writing, playing, singing, talking, and “acting” that Murphy describes comes down to using authenticity as a way to carve out space within the cultural gap. From Murphy’s discussion of the commercial packaging of hillbilly records to his description of the attempts of Dadaists to create a usable modern “folklore” to the attempt by various groups to construct a “usable past” from which to create a new culture, authenticity is everywhere in Murphy’s account. Whether Dadaists, artists, Fundamentalists, immigrants, or intellectuals, much of the work to find space within the gap took the form of the search for (or creation of) an “authentic” self. Murphy often notes this explicitly, but at other times leaves the implication to the reader.

For just one example, Murphy writes of the Harlem Renaissance, “Much of the renewed racial consciousness in the Renaissance was similarly tied to a discovery of roots, whether a respectful attention to the southern black fold roots of Negro culture or the deeper African cultural tradition” (134). Similarly, as I noted above, Murphy elsewhere describes the dominant literary currents of the 1920s as “the search for symbols from the American past with which to fashion an organic American culture and the elevation of modern technology and commercial enterprise to the level of a new folklore” (105). Read one way, both of these approaches are a search for an authentic identity, one that could be used by these intellectuals to find authority within the cultural gap. The different intellectuals Murphy describes have different ways of trying to find what is “real,” but they are virtually all linked by the understanding that discovering or creating something “real” (or that simply appeared seemed real) was important. This is present in Murphy’s account, but I would love to see more discussion of the different approaches to the authentic self taken by these intellectuals and how they used the concept both to understand the changes and attempt to control them. For whom was the authentic self the true project, for example, and for whom was the creation of a seemingly authentic self simply a means by which to assert cultural control?

Ultimately, though, for me, the best test for any work of History is that it is both illuminating and thought-provoking, that it both clarifies and clouds one’s understanding. Murphy’s work passes that test with flying colors. There is much to learn in Murphy’s book; it is useful for any scholar of the 20^thcentury, particularly any graduate student. More important, though, there is also much to think about here. Like the actors themselves, the historian of this time period can sometimes feel ungrounded by the contradictions, cultural changes, and shifting foundations of the decade. We, too, are sometimes attempting to describe a cultural gap even as we struggle to keep ourselves above it. Works like this—that meet the complexities of the 1920s head-on and do not back down from the difficult contradictions—help show us the way forward.


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[1] Dumenil, Lynn, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 12.

[2] For a much more complete account of the culmination of this discussion, see Llewellyn, Karl, “Some Realism About Realism—Responding to Dean Pound,” 44 Harvard Law Review 1222 (1931).

Round Table on Murphy's The New Era: Entry 1--Lynn Dumenil

Review of Paul V. Murphy’s The New Era: American Thought and Culture in the 1920s (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2012). ISBN: 9780742549258.  267 pages.

Reviewed by Lynn Dumenil, Robert Glass Cleland Professor of American History

Occidental College

Paul V. Murphy’s The New Era: American Thought and Culture in the 1920s is an ambitious history of American intellectuals in the 1920s. One of its most valuable contributions is the two dozen or so short portraits of key members of the intelligentsia, a diverse group that includes Mary Follett, Margaret Mead, Robert Lynd, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Walter Lippmann, H.L. Mencken, and Malcolm Cowley. These individuals made their mark on the “new era” as they grappled with the meaning of a radically transformed “modern” society.  Murphy’s starting point is the end of the “genteel tradition” whereby intellectuals viewed themselves, and were viewed as, cultural arbiters and moral exemplars. Massive industrial development, a voracious consumer culture, and omnipresent mass media disrupted older values, with World War I putting the finishing touches to the old order.

At the center of Murphy’s analysis is his argument that the response of intellectuals led the new sense of modernism, which he defines as “an internal discussion among artists and writers about their own precarious social status, which resulted from a loss of a vital connection between themselves and the masses” (p. 5).  A new notion of culture  as a people’s way of being reinforced this bifurcation – a point Murphy makes well in his discussion of the powerful ideas of anthropologists Franz Boas and Margaret Mead, and sociologist William F. Ogburn (the originator of the concept of “culture lag”). This point also emerges clearly in his assessment of Robert and Helen Merrell Lynd’s approach in Middletown. Armed with this notion of culture, intellectuals viewed themselves as the interpreters of cultural change, and Murphy argues, many sought to construct solutions based on tolerance, critical inquiry, and personal fulfillment, to the dilemmas modern mass society had created.

A number of chapters offer compelling evidence of Murphy’s assessment of the gap between intellectuals and the people and their effort to close it. In chapter 3, “The Bridge,” which is a wide-ranging discussion that also includes H.L. Mencken, Hart Crane, Joseph Stella, and Ernest Hemingway, he examines the conflicting approach of two groups of cultural critics for resolving this bifurcation.  On the one hand, he presents the self-styled “Young Americans” like Lewis Mumford and Alfred Stieglitz, who “aimed to tap into American cultural roots.” As Murphy writes of Mumford, he called upon the modern writer “not to depict the ‘blank reality’ of the universe but to create the veils that sustain humans in their faith and work; to undertake the task of building culture, not to recreate exile; to halt the pioneering and instead cultivate, recover and retrieve past forms; and to create the symbols that would endow a new age of personality” (p. 88). On the other hand, opposed to this organic approach rooted in the past, Murphy argues, were the Dadaists. These French-influenced “anti-art” artists and critics reveled in mass and mechanical culture. As critic Matthew Josephson wrote, “’We must write for our age…the poets should be no less daring or inventive than the mechanical engineers of wartime; our literature should reflect the influences of the cinema…the saxophone’”(p. 97).

Another arena of conflict between intellectuals seeking to bridge the chasm between themselves and the wider public was in public policy. Here, Murphy impressively tackles the well-known issue of intellectuals’ retreat from progressive reform in the aftermath of World War I. He argues that 1920s post-progressive reformers “spent the decade reimagining a liberal politics shaped now by a recognition of the bifurcation between reform-minded elites and an indifferent, innervated, or simply ‘eclipsed’ public” (p. 15 3). Murphy posits two new roles that political analysts developed in the 1920s to address the problem of the “eclipsed public.” One focused on social science experts’ potential for training leaders to educate the public. Walter Lippmann, with his interest in the power of propaganda and the challenge it brought to democracy, was an exemplar of this approach, with Murphy describing him as a modern Machiavelli, who proposed molding public opinion through the “creation of a new cadre of expert intelligence workers, many of whom were already working in research bureaus, legislative reference libraries, specialized lobbied funded by corporations and unions, advocacy groups, watchdog publications, and foundations”  (p. 158). In contrast, a “group of academics, educators, social welfare workers, and ministers,” were more optimistic about democracy and “imagined new forms of small-group, democratic decision making” (p. 152). Here, Murphy focuses on the work of Mary Parker Follett, who called for improved social integration based on small group interaction. Whatever the approach of these liberal reformers, Murphy notes that for both groups the “public became an abstract thing, a topic of study as well as a subject of analysis,” a clear indicating of the “yawning gap” separating intellectuals and the public (p. 179).

While all of Murphy’s chapters offer provocative insights into aspects of intellectual history of the 1920s, including his discussions on cultural pluralism, the Harlem Renaissance, the fundamentalist controversy, Chicago school sociologists, blues and hillbilly music, and the1920s roots of contemporary conservative intellectuals, in some places the arguments seem to be missing connective tissue. The chapter on mass culture, which includes an interesting analysis of the silent comedies of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Charlie Chaplin and their attention to the vulnerable “little man,” doesn’t offer enough commentary on intellectuals’ response to mass media to sustain Murphy’s argument about the gap between them and the masses.  Similarly, while the assessment of new roles of women and changing sexual and marital patterns is well done, a lengthy discussion of the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment is not obviously related to the book’s thesis about intellectuals and modernism. At times the chapters are choppy, perhaps a result of the effort to fit too many subjects and ideas into the book’s overarching theme.

These quibbles aside, readers will find valuable assessments throughout the book. Murphy does not offer evidence for his concluding claim that “The critical concerns of the 1920s – conformity, intolerance, materialism, mass culture, propaganda, cultural repression, censorship – and the liberal values proffered in response – sexual equality, free expression, personal fulfillment, pluralism, tolerance, critical inquiry, scientific rationality, and open-mindedness – came to define the next forty years of American intellectual life,” but the book does provide an imaginative framework for understanding the intellectual life of the 1920s.(p. 209).