Modernist Culture. Only recently have historians come to appreciate the significance of modernist culture in the United States. Modernism was long considered a movement of the European avant‐garde that could be found in the United States primarily in bohemian enclaves such as New York's
Greenwich Village or
San Francisco's North Beach. In reality modernist culture played a major role in determining how twentieth‐century Americans understood and shaped their world. Far from being monopolized by a tiny intellectual and artistic elite, modernism exerted its influence everywhere, in areas ranging from
architecture to
literature to the visual arts to the social and natural sciences, as well as in
popular culture. Indeed, some scholars view it as the dominant—though assuredly not the only—cultural sensibility of twentieth‐century America.
Although the constellation of beliefs and values now known as modernism first appeared in Paris in the final decades of the nineteenth century among the symbolist poets and impressionist painters, the movement soon reached the United States. A band of cultural radicals who had gathered in
New York City shortly after 1900 supplied the main point of entry. The group included fledgling journalists such as John Reed (1887–1920), Max Eastman (1883–1969), Randolph
Bourne, and Walter
Lippmann, as well as the playwright Eugene
O'Neill, the dancer Isadora Duncan (1878–1927), and the controversial birth‐control advocate, Margaret
Sanger. Another key member of this circle, the photographer Alfred
Stieglitz, began exhibiting the works of Cezanne, Picasso, and Matisse at his Little Gallery of the Photo‐Secession, leading to the New York
Armory Show of 1913—a display of 1,200 works by foreign and native‐born modernist artists that heralded the arrival of the new culture on American shores.
Not all of the action took place in New York. During the first decade of the century, early modernist writers from the
Middle West, such as Theodore
Dreiser, Vachel Lindsay, and Sherwood Anderson, assembled in
Chicago, where publications vital to the movement like
Poetry and
The Little Review were headquartered. By then Gertrude Stein had settled in Paris as the
grande doyenne of American modernist expatriates, while the London‐based American poets Ezra
Pound and Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) were turning out daring aesthetic manifestos and masterpieces of contemporary verse. Equally influential were two pioneering academics, the psychologist William
James and the philosopher John
Dewey, whose writings on
pragmatism and radical empiricism helped to supply the conceptual framework for modernist thought in both the United States and Europe.
At its core, modernism arose by way of rebellion against the major historical culture that preceded it. During the nineteenth century the emerging bourgeoisie in those societies caught up in the Industrial Revolution embraced Victorianism, a belief system that, as they saw it, ordained a glorious future of progress and prosperity based on technological advancement and the continuous spread of civilization. To ensure that progress, Victorians struggled to maintain a firm moral dividing line between the secure, tranquil world of the middle class, in which emotions were kept under strict control, and the “savage,” violence‐ridden world of the lower classes and noncivilized nations where the “animal” passions were allowed to run riot. To a proper Victorian, nothing could be worse than permitting savagery to contaminate the purified precincts of “high” civilization.
Modernist culture, by contrast, was premised on recovering the very animal component of human nature that the Victorians had sought to suppress and, at the social level, on bringing together all that the nineteenth century had struggled to keep apart. Viewing Victorian life as fatally severed from reality, modernists sought to reorient human existence toward the cultivation of direct experience, no matter how discomforting that might be. Following the dictates of Sigmund Freud, they insisted on reconnecting the faculties of the mind governing rationality and logic with those subconscious forces governing the senses and emotions in order to produce a more “authentic” self. At the cosmic level, modernists banished the Victorian conception of a stable, predictable universe presided over by a benevolent deity, putting in its place what James called an “unfinished” universe characterized by constant and unforeseeable change. As a consequence, knowledge of the empirical world would always be imperfect at best, and the moral values constructed on the basis of that knowledge would need to stay provisional, evolving to keep pace with the incessant evolution of historical circumstances. The one thing of which we can be sure, Dewey declared in
The Quest for Certainty (1929), is that we can never obtain certainty about anything.
The reality discovered by modernism may have been filled with flux and fragmentation, but the foremost impulse within the culture nonetheless consisted of a deep yearning for integration in all aspects of human life. Over the course of the twentieth century, modernists attempted to heal the many divisions that the Victorians had bequeathed, from those separating mind from body and thought from emotion to those involving race,
social class, and
gender. This powerful desire to eradicate boundaries helped fuel the movements to gain equal rights and status for
African Americans and women, as well as a more general campaign against elitism within American society, all of which had gained sufficient momentum to transform national mores and politics by the 1960s and 1970s. In this way, what began as an “adversary” culture (to borrow the critic Lionel Trilling's term) matured into one of abiding achievement.
As the twentieth century ended, modernism appeared to have reached its final phase, with
postmodernism replacing it among the intellectual avant‐garde. Whether or not postmodernism truly represented a new cultural entity or was in fact better understood as an extension and exaggeration of basic modernist precepts remained a matter for debate. What did seem clear was that anyone seeking to understand twentieth‐century American historians must give modernism, in all its manifestations, very close attention.
See also
Feminism;
Gilded Age;
Literature: Civil War to World War I;
Literature: Since World War I;
Painting: To 1945;
Photography;
Poetry;
Progressive Era;
Secularization;
Social Science;
Women's Rights Movements.
Bibliography
Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds., Modernism, 1890–1930, 1976.
Sanford Schwartz , The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot and Early Twentieth‐Century Thought, 1985.
Daniel J. Singal, ed., Modernist Culture in America, 1991.
Dorothy Ross, ed., Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, 1870–1930, 1994.
Steven Watts , The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and Modern American Culture, 1996.
Daniel J. Singal , William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist, 1997.
Christine Stansell , American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century, 2000.
Daniel J. Singal
