America Draws Back Into Its Shell -

America Draws Back Into Its Shell -

Almost two million American Doughboys come home from the war to be demobilized in 1919. The hysteria of wartime propaganda and patriotism turns rapidly into cynicism and apathy. Despite America's massive industrial power and innovative technology, the country is still essentially provincial. The end of the war leaves America appalled in its still basically puritanical heart.

There will now begin a period of last-ditch stands of the rural state of mind against the realities of the twentieth century. The industrial expansion in the first part of the century has resulted in massively increased use of electrical power, at least 200,000 tractors a year produced, over eight million cars on the road and the ever increasing presence of the radio and motion pictures. For the first time in history the average American can see and hear faces, voices and scenes produced thousands of miles away.

Almost half of all Americans still live in rural areas and Small-town, conservative America believes itself to be America. The real instrument of change will be the automobile. The advent of the cheap auto (thanks to Mr. Ford*, by 1924 the price of one of his cars will be down to $290) and the changes it makes in buying habits and credit practices will revolutionize society. Sexual morality has been changing and the automobile accelerates it. The rise of suburbia comes with the new mobility. The first American radio station goes on the air in the fall of 1920 and it is quickly possible to tune in to Pittsburgh, Philadelphia or New York any evening. The new kind of music and the sophisticated humour becomes available to the backlands, along with the dramatic alteration in politics made possible by the candidates new-found ability to reach voters far beyond his personal reach. Despite these changes, rural America will fight for its conservative values.

There are four major themes in the remainder of our period that show the passion of rural state of mind reacting to change.

The first theme is the moralism of prohibition*. In 1919 the wartime patriotism of prohibition is translated into constitutional law with the Eighteenth Amendment and Americans begin the great "experiment."

The second major theme is widespread fear of "radicals" (socialists, anarchists, reds, etc.) which leads to the Big Red Scare and the reaction as demonstrated by the Palmer* raids (1919-20). [Attorney General Palmer took advantage of the hysteria and the incapacity of President Wilson (he's down with a stroke in September) to act on his own authority, round up The second major theme is widespread fear of "radicals" (socialists, anarchists, reds, etc.) which leads to the Big Red Scare and the reaction as demonstrated by the Palmer* raids (1919-20). [Attorney General Palmer took advantage of the hysteria and the incapacity of President Wilson (he's down with a stroke in September) to act on his own authority, round up

The third theme shows up as small-town America's rebellion against imagined corruption from outside the country and from the big city. This shows up in the Ku Klux Klan's* revival in the 1920s. The new Klan is dedicated to being anti-catholic, anti-jewish, anti-negro, anti- foreign and anti-urban. Its successful expansion is due almost entirely to American business know-how embodied in a publicity man named Edward Y. Clarke. By 1923 the Klan will grow to over five million and increasing by 3,500 members a day. It will come to dominate the government of at least seven states. "TWK" (trade with the Klan) becomes a valuable device to display in a merchants window.

The final theme is the emotional stand of fundamentalist religion exemplified in the "monkey" trial (Scopes* trial) of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee. The war between Fundamentalism and science had been going on since the 1850s publications of Charles Darwin.* The current crop of evangelists include Billy Sunday* and Aimee Semple McPherson*, but it is the fading "Great Commoner," William Jennings Bryan* who will defend fundamentalism at the trial in Tennessee against the lawyer Clarence Darrow.*