as the United States' traumatic "coming of age," despite the fact that U.S. direct
involvement was relatively brief (1917-1918) and its casualties many fewer than
those of its European allies and foes. John Dos Passos expressed America's
postwar disillusionment in the novel Three Soldiers (1921), when he noted that
civilization was a "vast edifice of sham, and the war, instead of its crumbling, was
its fullest and most ultimate expression." Shocked and permanently changed,
Americans returned to their homeland but could never regain their innocence.
Nor could soldiers from rural America easily return to their roots. After
experiencing the world, many now yearned for a modern, urban life. New farm
machines such as planters, harvesters, and binders had drastically reduced the
demand for farm jobs; yet despite their increased productivity, farmers were poor.
Crop prices, like urban workers' wages, depended on unrestrained market forces
heavily influenced by business interests: Government subsidies for farmers and
effective workers' unions had not yet become established. "The chief business of
the American people is business," President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed in 1925,
and most agreed.
In the postwar "Big Boom," business flourished, and the successful
prospered beyond their wildest dreams. For the first time, many Americans
enrolled in higher education -- in the 1920s college enrollment doubled. The
middle-class prospered; Americans began to enjoy the world s highest national
average income in this era, and many people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile. The typical urban American home glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the house with the outside world, and perhaps a
telephone, a camera, a typewriter, or a sewing machine. Like the businessman
protagonist of Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbitt (1922), the average American
approved of these machines because they were modern and because most were
American inventions and American-made.
Americans of the "Roaring Twenties" fell in love with other modern
entertainments. Most people went to the movies once a week. Although Prohibition
- a nationwide ban on the production, transport, and sale of alcohol instituted
through the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution -- began in 1919,
underground "speakeasies" and nightclubs proliferated, featuring jazz music,
cocktails, and daring modes of dress and dance. Dancing, moviegoing, automobile
touring, and radio were national crazes. American women, in particular, felt
liberated. Many had left farms and villages for homefront duty in American cities
during World War I, and had become resolutely modern. They cut their hair short
("bobbed"), wore short "flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to vote assured by
the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1920. They boldly spoke their
mind and took public roles in society.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and disillusioned with the savage
war, the older generation they held responsible, and difficult postwar economic
conditions that, ironically, allowed Americans with dollars -- like writers F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound -- to live abroad
handsomely on very little money. Intellectual currents, particularly Freudian
psychology and to a lesser extent Marxism (like the earlier Darwinian theory of
evolution), implied a "godless" world view and contributed to the breakdown of
traditional values. Americans abroad absorbed these views and brought them back
to the United States where they took root, firing the imagination of young writers
and artists. William Faulkner, for example, a 20th-century American novelist,
employed Freudian elements in all his works, as did virtually all serious American
fiction writers after World War I.
Despite outward gaiety, modernity, and unparalleled material prosperity,
young Americans of the 1920s were "the lost generation" -- so named by literary
portraitist Gertrude Stein. Without a stable, traditional structure of values, the
individual lost a sense of identity
Numerous novels, notably Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) and
Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise (1920), evoke the extravagance and
disillusionment of the lost generation. In T.S. Eliot's influential long poem The
Waste Land (1922), Western civilization is symbolized by a bleak desert in
desperate need of rain (spiritual renewal).
The world depression of the 1930s affected most of the population of the
United States. Workers lost their jobs, and factories shut down; businesses and
banks failed; farmers, unable to harvest, transport, or sell their crops, could not pay
their debts and lost their farms. Midwestern droughts turned the "breadbasket" of
America into a dust bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for California in search
of jobs, as vividly described in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939). "
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