Modernity and the Great Depression

The Transformation of American Society, 1930-1941

Kenneth J. Bindas

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780700624003, 9780700624003
• eBook ISBN: 9780700624010
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Order, planning, and reason—in the depths of the Great Depression, with the nation teetering on the brink of collapse, this was what was needed. And this, Kenneth J. Bindas suggests, was what the ideas and ideals of modernity offered—a way to make sense of the chaos all around. In Modernity and the Great Depression, Bindas offers a new perspective on the provenance and power of modernist thought and practice in early twentieth-century America.

In the midst of a terrible economic, social, and political crisis, modernism provided an alternative to the response of many traditional moralists and religious leaders. Promoting a faith based in reason, organization, and planning, modernists espoused a salvation that was not eternal but rather temporal, tangible, and, for a generation with so little to hold onto, eminently practical—one that found virtue in pleasure and private pursuits. After surveying the contested definitional terrain of “modernism” and “modernity,” Bindas tracks their course and influence through such government programs as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the National Youth Administration; in the massive American Expositions and World’s Fairs that heralded progress and a better future; on the efforts of women interior decorators to update and enhance the comforts of the modern home; and—thanks to the proliferation of electricity and radio—on the popular and high-culture musical recordings and broadcasts that reinforced a shift away from traditional modes of performance and reception.

In the transformation he describes, Bindas also locates the limits of modernism’s influence, as later generations confronted the spiritual shortcomings of its ultra-rationalist and materialist paradigm.

the end of times
defining modernity in the 1930s

1

“The lexicographer of the future will have some difficulty” defining modernism, wrote William Thomas Walsh in The Catholic World in 1930.¹ The full effect of the market crash had yet to make itself known to most Americans, and Walsh, like many within the religious community, was more concerned that the current generation’s fascination with temporal gratification would lead them from belief and salvation. To him, modernism came from a “half-breed mating of a heresy [liberal Protestantism] and a hypothesis [science].”² On the other hand, the liberal Christians whom Walsh and other Christian traditionalists condemned saw in modernism an ethical and responsible belief structure that blended science and the secular world with the ideals of Christianity. There were also skeptics and others who went beyond religion and advocated a secular modernism that emphasized education, reason, and organizational planning as the means to salvation.

“Modernity” comes from the word—and the idea of being—“modern,” which is about the present. The past as a collection of events has only one purpose and that is to arrive at this point, whatever the time period. What made the early twentieth century unique in this regard was the proliferation of modernity throughout every aspect of society, from work to home to food to clothing to the way a person thought. To not be modern in any of these ways was to be old-fashioned. While early antimodern critics worried about the loss of individualism and authenticity, it was only later, when some of the negative aspects of being modern—Nazism, war, death, and constant replication—that intellectuals and others looked back and began to redefine modernity, modernism, and modernization. During the 1930s, if the average person on the street were asked to define modernism, they would be hard-pressed to discuss the problems associated with the replication of items or the loss of authenticity. Instead, they would answer “up-to-date,” “new,” or “current.” In the early part of the decade, perhaps some would discuss it in terms related to religion; others, as the decade progressed, would mention the positive attributes of reason, science, and planning. The term held many meanings, but its influence was omnipresent.

The debate concerning the definitions of modern, modernism, or modernity during the Depression era underscores the power and influence of language as signifier. What one labels heretical another sees as liberating. In the years leading into the 1920s, one version of modernism as a term and idea largely existed in the cultural realm outside of the United States. Peter Gay outlines the rise and artistic understanding of modernism as a European movement bereft of definition, except for the “conviction that the untried is markedly superior to the familiar,” which encouraged them to be attracted to “heresy” (in their art) and “self-scrutiny.” These tenets formed the basis of the modernist movement in high (i.e., cultivated) artistic circles in Europe, especially Paris, from the mid-nineteenth century and into most of the twentieth. However, to the masses this movement seemed exclusive, vague, decadent, and detached from the reality of most people’s understanding. And, for the most part, this is what modernists hoped for—a break from the past. These were outsiders, rebels with a cause, self-proclaimed liberators of the mind from the constraints of the past. They saw themselves as missionaries, in a way, of a new way of being.³

In the United States, this modernist movement arrived and flowered in the early twentieth century and followed the general tendencies outlined by Gay. Certainly they saw themselves as outsiders, but for reasons different from their European counterparts, primarily in relation to their desire to break from what they saw as the American Puritan tradition. Their work stressed primitivism, expertise, the exotic, and, according to historian Robert Crunden, “instead of a certain and stable universe, they saw an indeterminate and relational one.” The American modernists wanted little to do with politics or society in the larger sense. They were, in the final analysis, “socially irresponsible.”⁴

This initial modernist bloom ended with the US entrance into World War I in 1917, as many turned their attention to winning the war; however, the sense of artistic detachment continued into the 1920s. “The masses,” historian Richard Pells writes, “plainly, were not the modernists’ preferred clientele.” So although their artistic impact was significant, their presence in the imagination for most Americans was limited.⁵ For most citizens in the era leading into the 1930s, modernism came from one of two distinct lines: liberal Protestantism and the Social Gospel movement of the late nineteenth century, or in the modernization movement of the same period identified with Frederick Taylor’s factory management techniques (best exemplified and promoted by the Ford automobile company). These two lines rarely intersected in the early part of the twentieth century, even as liberal Christians advocated the “golden rule” in the hope of influencing industrial leaders and uplifting the working class, and as factory designers and company personnel departments worked to improve their employees through tighter controls and simplified work (exemplified in the assembly line).

As the country entered the Depression, the term “modernism” held onto these signifiers, but perhaps because of the failure of industry and its association with the ideals of modernization, the religious aspect of the term dominated the discussion in the early part of the decade. With the crash and the social dislocation that came with it, many religious leaders hoped for a revival similar to those that had allowed for their churches and various denominations’ expansion in earlier eras. The time was ripe for a return to God’s word to put people onto the proper path. Believers needed to turn away from the world’s “over-emphasis on social Christianity,” Lutheran minister Frederick Knubel said as he advised his congregation in 1932 to heed “the call for a return to Reformation principles.” He pointed out that during tough economic times there was a natural tendency to turn to God; however, the “bigness of material things and the bigness of man continue to control” the people’s mindset even in the midst of the economic crisis.⁶

Roger Babson, statistician and former chairman of the Commission on Church Attendance of the Congregational-Christian Denominations, heralded the coming revival. “Much of the ‘New Deal’ legislation is merely a [cyclical] phase,” he believed, designed to satisfy the immediate desires of the population, but that would not solve the problem. Only when people follow the example of Jesus—the “willingness to sacrifice”—will the country begin to prosper and grow again. His book, A Revival Is Coming, used statistics to predict a spiritual return to Christ. “America will again be swept by a great spiritual awakening. Nothing can stop it.” He compared periods of great economic development and spiritual renewal from the first colonies through the 1920s, suggesting that every period of economic advance came with an increase in religious and spiritual commitment. The Depression era, which he traced back to the early 1920s, came from society’s “ease, security, and amusement” guided by selfishness and greed at the expense of the true spiritual qualities of “sacrifice, courage, and faith.” His “Prosperity-Decline-Depression-Improvement cycle” proved that “just as certain as day follows night, so religious awakenings follow periods of religious depression. The church is on the eve of its greatest period of prosperity.”⁷

Yet there were considerable divisions among the faithful, resulting in extended discussion over the secularization of society and the church’s changing role. Some believed modernism separated people from their faith in God and transferred it to man. “The logic of modern thought is the denial of historical Christianity,” wrote Methodist minister Edwin Lewis in 1934, and unless some sort of compromise between the two ideas could be found, the schism would continue to widen. Since the latter part of the nineteenth century, this division had grown, evinced by the debate surrounding the meaning of the Social Gospel and evolution, and exacerbated by Pope Pius X’s 1907 encyclical condemning modernism for all Catholics. But in America, modernism as a break from the traditions of the past was already a contested issue with a variety of Protestant denominations. This growing schism grew to include discussions concerning women’s rights, prohibition, immigration, and civil rights, and it reached its popular zenith in 1925 with the Scopes trial. The stakes were high for all sides, because each believed the soul of the nation—the covenant—was at stake.⁸

“Our problem is to combine intelligence with spiritual insight, reason with piety,” wrote University of Chicago theologian Edwin E. Aubrey, before the country recedes “into the barbarism of a popular passion that lacks perspective, because the learned have become the spiritual dilettanti.” He echoed many who worried that the modernists, driven by their passion for scientific methodology, ignored religion and its commitment to “God in Christ.” Modern science’s desire to seek truth without any religious belief attached made their research and commitment to scientific method flawed because it lacked moral grounding. Man’s manipulation of nature enhanced the primacy of science and reinforced the humanism of modernism leading to a reliance on man to provide solutions over those proscribed by God.⁹

These traditionalists feared that the increasingly modern society would no longer need God. Presbyterian minister John McComb denounced the followers of modernism as idolaters “worshiping a man-made God, instead of the Almighty God of the Bible.” He was concerned that those who approached faith in a rational manner “destroy any system of morality.”¹⁰ Believing that all things are relative and truth mutable challenged the basic construct of faith and belief and denied the omnipotence of God, according to Allison Trice and Charles Robertson. Liberal, modern Christians viewed miracles as an “impossible” fabrication designed to convert pagans. Modernist rejections of the Bible as the “inspired word of God” left their followers empty and without a moral center: “Having no hell to fear nor heaven to gain, there is left only the deterrent forces furnished by the laws of the land, and these are so imperfectly administered that the criminal is tempted to take a chance of escaping the penalties of law.” This division between God and man’s law created lawlessness and a general state of fear, the authors suggested, and was supported by the theories of Freud, who encouraged promiscuity “opposed to chastity and virtue” as outlined by God. The reliance on the flesh weakened the marriage bonds and destroyed the family, ultimately leading to the destruction of society.¹¹

Reverend Demetrius Zema of the Department of History at Fordham University gave a series of lectures in the fall of 1933 where he laid bare what he called “The Thoughtlessness of Modern Thought.” The media had created a “deluge” of false information over the past generation to the point where it was nearly impossible to discern fact from fallacy. Modernists, religious and otherwise, denied absolute truth and based their ideas on “assumptions [which] require no thought” at all. This was because modernism “shirks definition . . . [and] moves in a twilight of half-intelligence” designed to obscure truth for the purposes of “extinguishing the very lamps which should guide men’s feet amid the encircling gloom.” The remainder of the lectures, on culture, science, and progress, argued that modernists perpetuated false gods and consciousness and worshiped before a “shrine in the midst of its intellectual wilderness.” Their continued reverence to modern ideas during this “thoughtless period” of history would only lead to personal and societal ruin. Only absolute faith in the one true God guaranteed salvation.¹²

That connection to societal and personal decline was central to the argument of many critics who condemned modernism as heresy. William T. Walsh developed a set of modernist commandments that began with “man is an animal” and followed with a list condemning the individualistic nature of society and the prophets of the new order, such as Ibsen, Wells, Tolstoy, O’Neill, Dreiser, Twain, and Haeckel. These ideas and their proponents were responsible for leading “the youth of our day like sheep into doubt and unhappiness.” The tract blamed the proliferation of the “perfidious drug” of modernism on liberals who preferred reason, which made them unhappy because there were so many unanswered questions. His advice—“if it hurts so much to think, don’t do it.”¹³

Zema and Walsh were not alone in their fear concerning the effect of modern ideas on the minds of the young. Many pointed to the media, scientists, and liberal Protestants for the debasement of society connected to modernity. But the center of modernist thought and influence was the nation’s colleges and universities, where, according to Baptist minister Cortland Myers, professors planted the seeds of atheism among their students by making fun of the “myths and legends of the Bible.” Young people were graduating without a spiritual center and were being taught that man was the center of the universe and not God. “Man has no right,” he exclaimed, “to substitute his opinions for this supreme authority.” Real Christians must “stand fast” against this intellectual modern onslaught.¹⁴

Dan Gilbert was exactly the type of young person the traditionalists spoke about. As a young university student, he was taken in by the promises of the modern prophets of progress. He soon realized the fallacies of their beliefs and published a memoir as a cautionary tale for all those tempted by the fruit of secular salvation, titled Our Retreat from Modernism. Although initially attracted to modernism, once he realized his mistake, he felt obliged to warn the “vast numbers of lost young people” misled by the “opiates” delivered by teachers, liberals, and Social Gospel–minded ministers at his college. Their teachings, he believed, were designed to bring God “down to earth” and to humanize Jesus as the “first socialist.” Gilbert blamed those who advocated that humans were endowed by God to make the world a better place, for this meant that salvation could be man-made as the modernists remade the world in their image, not God’s. This revolutionized “every branch of human activity” and worked to transform humanity to fit their modernist agenda. The false faith of reason deflated the power of God and inflated the influence of man. The modernists led their students away from traditional religion and morals and even used the religious language of the past to convert the weak-minded to their ideas.

Gilbert’s tale of seduction and deceit, where the aims of the modernists were no less than the “complete negation of all the real fundamentals of life,” outlined the schism between the liberal and fundamentalist wings of American Protestantism. His belief that modernists were blinded by materialism and worshiped the truth they created while ignoring the true word of God in the Bible became the dominant narrative of the religious right. By this point they concluded that the ultimate aim of the modernists was to humanize Jesus and transform the Gospels into stories about the possibility of creating a heaven here on earth. Professors promoted a distorted view of American exceptionalism to encourage their students to believe they had the power to transform the world. These young converts were told they were the new Adam, confused into believing that salvation was man-made and defined by social justice. Gilbert’s jeremiad ended with a call for the renewal of traditional, fundamental Christian beliefs.¹⁵

Gilbert, like many others who came to be identified as fundamentalists, believed that the people of the United States had “forgotten God,” and the collapse of the economy in 1929 was a result of the country’s “pleasurebe...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction. Order, Planning, and Reason
• 1 The End of Times: Defining Modernity in the 1930s
• 2 A New Model Army: The Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Youth Administration, and Modernity
• 3 Salvation Awaits: Expositions, World’s Fairs, and Modernity
• 4 A Woman’s Place/A Family’s Hearth: Interior Decorators and Modernity
• 5 Sounds for the Modern Age: Music as Celebration of Modernity
• Epilogue. New Directions and Challenges: The Postwar Divide
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover