The embrace of ‘proletarian literature’ in the 1930s, to which Joseph Freeman would be a central voice, was in many ways a reaction to the literary world’s limited response to the Wilsonian-era and its intense class war. Freeman looks at the background and writers like Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Frank, Floyd Dell, Upton Sinclair, and and Sinclair Lewis, as well as the magazines and popular ideas of the time.

‘The Wilsonian Era in American Literature’ by Joseph Freeman from Modern Quarterly. Vol. 4. No. 2. June-September, 1927.

THE Wilsonian Era is the background against which the evolution of current American literature becomes lucid. The line may be long and full of obscure windings; but it leads back to the rise and fall of liberal illusions, the flare of middle-class movements like suffragism and working-class movements like the I.W.W.; the war for democracy and civilization, and the peace for the Dawes Plan and the 6% floating of loans at 23 Wall Street; the making of profiteers and the unmaking of declassed intellectuals; the exodus of spiritually homeless poets to Paris and the influx of the new psychology from Vienna; Ludlow, Lawrence and Centralia evoking the beat of drums in the Masses and the Fourteen Points the purring of teapots in the New Republic; the complete subjection of the land of the free to industrial and financial capital, and the consequent shifts, unstable balances, and prophetic frictions. among the various classes of American society.

Wilson’s troubled reign marked the rise of America as the world’s leading imperialist power. New York superseded London as the financial center of modern capitalism. The profound change percolated into American literature, which revolted against the domination of the British tradition and struck out on an independent path. From 1912 to 1920 there sprang up a number of new periodicals which consciously sought to express the American scene in the American language. There was a poetic “renaissance” which unfolded along these lines. It produced the best known of the modern American poets, novelists, and playwrights, and a host of critics now better established than college professors.

The democratic illusions, the “Americanism,” the “free” loose form of much of this work runs back to the Bible and Walt Whitman; the method and style of the American newspaper exerted a deep-going influence. What was new in content was the conscious and semi-conscious national and regional pride in the might and machinery of America–and the confused, ironic, bitter revolt of the intelligentsia against some of the implications of this highly standardized, trustified world.

A good deal of this literature is subjective. The autobiographic novel has been one of the commonest ways to begin a literary career. In its subjective aspect it is the attempt of the sensitive declassed mind to adjust itself through the medium of literature to a world. into which it cannot fit otherwise. A best seller often marks the difference between failure, humiliation, spiritual exile, poverty–and success, a good income, acceptance by the world. The gifted young man or woman, pitched out of bourgeois society for inefficiency or escaping it out of discomfort, returns riding Pegasus in triumph. Nine times out of ten the quarrel of these writers with bourgeois society is personal; most of them essentially accept it.

But the books which these men and women write are bought and read by thousands. They become social phenomena. Something in the personal problems of the authors, their irony, humor, or tragedy, finds response in the lives of their readers. In this sense a good deal of the literature of the Wilsonian Era expresses the utter helplessness of the intelligentsia in the face of modern industrial civilization controlled by the financial and industrial capitalists. This refers to formal literature, as distinguished from the popular literature dispensed by the big commercial magazines, which have enormous circulation and do business along strictly “optimistic” lines. These portray capitalist America as a paradise of clean-shaven, well-dressed young men and beautiful athletic girls who spend their lives in motor-cars, yachts, summer cottages, and seaside resorts making love in a very respectable manner.

The popular magazine is an aspect of America with which the young writer must cope directly. It is turned out and sold like Fords, razor blades, or chewing gum. There is the same mass production, trustification, speed, standardization, and profiteering. It exists on advertising. Space rates are high, and often the bulk of the magazine is devoted to ads which illuminate American life better than the romantic trifles that trail after them. The publishers of such magazines pay well. They demand in return a neat tale, one that moves easily, is well constructed, as standardized as a spare part. It is imperative that such stories avoid serious and honest treatment of American life. The writer who starts with a passion for “truth” and a few grievances must develop outside the luxurious area of these publications. Hence the flood of little reviews and magazines issued by various groups throughout the United States.

However, writers want to live, and most of them want to live “like other people”–this means they want to live like that handful of people which enjoys good incomes, the better sort of automobiles, country homes, golf, and the rest of it. The talented writer with ideals is faced by the temptation of selling out to the magazines that can pay fat checks. This struggle “against commercialism” is not without its victims. The movies exert a similar influence. A story that can be successfully filmed may bring its author a lot of money. The presumption is that in a number of cases the temptation arises, if only half-consciously, to write down to the level of ideas of the movie-producers.

America is the incarnation of technique, but most of its honest writers of the Wilsonian Era have meditated their own souls. This is sometimes ascribed to the struggle against the “Puritan tradition.” The struggle may be formulated thus: The early British settlers who had to wrestle with the stony soil of New England hardened their fatalistic Calvinist religion into an austere and ascetic code of morals. Their middle-class descendants, swimming in wealth and mechanical conveniences, find these morals useless. Official bourgeois society maintains this code in public and violates it in private. Bohemia, that bastard child of bourgeois civilization, drinks and makes love as far as its limited means will allow, and carries on a literary war against prohibition, blue laws, and the censorship of books and plays. Despite his war against its hypocrisy, the artist remains the child of this bourgeois civilization. He may repudiate the monstrous fables of religion and the fake morals of the ruling classes, but these leave their marks deep in his soul. He seeks to solve the fierce personal contradictions they engender through literary symbols. Hence the preoccupation of so many writers with sex and sex problems.

The “Puritan tradition” needs to be analyzed rather than dished out as an explanation of literary tendencies. Many contradictions have to be resolved. “Puritanism” has to be reconciled with the “scandals” about the “younger generation,” with snappy stories, roadhouse parties, leg shows, the apparently widespread exercise of the sexual faculties. The United States is probably a merrier place than Merrie England in its merriest days before the business men captured power under the Puritan banner. On the other hand, it was Catholic and wine-loving (i.e., wine-growing) France which produced not only Mademoiselle du Maupin, but also its preface–and the Bohemian slogan, Epater le bourgeoisie.

The commonest theme in the fiction of the Wilsonian Era is the struggle of the gifted, sensitive, imaginative or merely “different” individual against the brutal pressure of American capitalist civilization. In most cases, however, the capitalist nature of this civilization is ignored. The literature dealing with the decisive impact of the classes, with life in mill, factory, or mine, is as yet meagre. Many true and striking pictures of American industrial life can be found as backgrounds or the essential story of the hero grappling with his organized neighbors. This is, for example, true of Dreiser. His novels and short stories are histories of the battle, often hopeless, of any unassimilated individual against any well-regimented society. The author sides with the individual, be it artist, prostitute, crank or criminal, and thus objectively becomes an antagonist of certain aspects of existing American society.

The significant persistence of this theme in modern American fiction finds a strange illustration in Floyd Dell. He began his career in literature proper as a critic. In the pages of the Masses he wrote what was probably the first socialist literary criticism in America. He attacked the “literature of escape” and urged writers to face the realities of capitalist civilization. He knew how to trace novels and poems back to their class origin; he was quick to grasp new movements in politics and in the modern science of psychology. He is the author of one of the very few books which attempt in some manner to deal with American literature with reference to American social conditions. His creative work, however, follows another line. His first novel dealt with the revolt of a young poet and socialist against the limitations of small-town life in the Middle West, and against his own romanticism. His subsequent novels treat of the attempts of middle-class or declassed individuals to adjust their romantic notions of love and marriage to the demands of hard-boiled bourgeois society. This is increasingly the case in Briary Bush, Janet March and Runaway. The divergence between his critical and creative work represents an unsolved bipolarity.

Sinclair Lewis belongs with Dell and Dreiser both in general point of view and in style. He is, however, more objective, more satirical, and draws his scenes on a wider scale. Main Street is an accurate photograph of small-town life in America. It is a documented attack on the holy trinity of standardization, commercialism, puritanism. It satrizes the identical appearance of 100,000 towns from coast to coast, each with its railway station, United Cigar Store, church, movie, Ford garage, dull parties and passionate dollar-chasing.

At bottom Lewis’ problem is the same as Dell’s and Dreiser’s: the attempt of the middle-class idealist to function in a highly mechanized and monopolized capitalist society. The method and approach are a combination of Flaubert and a first-class American reporter with a talent for describing as accurately as a camera the surface of the world. The heroine of Main Street has been called the American Emma Bovary; actually she represents the insoluble contradictions between middle-class idealism and the modern capitalist world. In satirizing the mechanical aspects of this world, the author breaks his lance against his adversary. Something is certainly “rotten in the state of Denmark,” but is it really dollar watches, shredded wheat, safety razors, radios? Carol Kennicott–like the rest of industrialized humanity–cannot get along without these conveniences. Failing to see that what is wrong is not machinery but capitalism, she must capitulate. She cannot make Main Street conform to her romantic notions picked up in college text-books: it is she who must surrender to Main Street.

The satire of Babbitt is directed against the American business man: not the industrial baron or the financial lord, but the middle business man, the fellow who voted for La Follette. The attack is once more on standardization of dress, thoughts, habits. It is a carefully built up case against middle-class morals, ideas, aims; against all business men getting up at the same hour in the morning, taking hot baths, scraping their chins with safety razors, eating ham and eggs, reading newspapers, and making the usual comments of the 15,000-dollar-a-year mind–resentful against Big Business and scared of the working class; these identical business men, efficient as machines, going to church, drinking cocktails, suspecting intellectuals and artists, being “good fellows,” trying to appear respectable and to make as much money as possible. The satire once more collapses under the weight of its own contradictions; the author rehabilitates Babbitt; the butt of the satire turns out to be a “good fellow” after all, a victim, in fact, of American civilization.

From these two negative portraits Lewis turned to a positive one. Arrowsmith contains one “ideal” character in the old professor who sacrifices all for scientific truth. Dr. Arrowsmith himself learns to struggle for his scientific ideals against the bourgeoisie’s all-devouring lust for profits. The struggle is long and hopeless. Arrowsmith’s solution is to go off to the woods to pursue scientific truth in isolation–away from the corruption of capitalist politics and the medical and chemical trusts. The solution smacks of Thoreau and the naïve individualism of the trust-busters. Despite an essentially middle-class approach, Lewis has drawn three excellent general portraits of American life on a large scale which as documents have so far been unsurpassed in belles lettres.

A charming satire against the American bourgeoisie was W.E. Woodward’s Bunk, directed chiefly against American bluff and the unscrupulous cunning of “captains of industry.” Chronologically it came at the close of the Wilsonian Era–intellectually it springs directly out of it. Here, too, we have a middle-class romantic:–disillusioned, cynical, and witty romantic–heaving his brick at Big Business.

One of the most “psychologic” of the Wilsonian novelists is Sherwood Anderson. As in much of Dreiser’s, Dell’s and Sinclair Lewis’ work, his scenes are laid in the middle West. The regionism. of these novelists, and of their contemporary workers in verse like Sandburg and Masters, remains to be adequately explained. Anderson neither documents nor satrizes his material. To him life is a tragedy to be apprehended mystically through the emotions. He, too, is for the “different” individual against all society. He is also against machinery. Something of “peasant psychology” permeates his work; but not the psychology of the American farmer who fixes his own radio, and rides to town in his Ford to see Charlie Chaplin in the movies. It is more like that of the European peasant who resents the tractor’s interference with his old habits. It is, in fact, the resentment of the declassed intellectual who finds modern monopoly industry cutting the ground from under his feet. In his autobiography Anderson defends the handicraft arts against the unbroken identity of machine civilization. It appears as if he would abolish the sure promise of steel, electricity, and dynamos for a revival of a paradise which never existed. He sees American life as a vast engine crushing the soul of man. He, too, is preoccupied with the sex problem: the struggle of complicated natures against the hypocritical demands of bourgeois society.

More mystical and “psychologic” than Anderson, Waldo Frank is distinguished from the foregoing writers by his preoccupation with “æsthetics,” and with “spiritual problems.” He belongs to another group, one which used to center around the Seven Arts and Stiglitz’s studio. It has been profoundly influenced by vulgarized versions of psycho-analysis. It has dug down into the depths of isolated types of men and located a few old truths and a lot of new confusions. Frank attempts to be a prophet as well as a novelist. Our America is a title that stirs great expectations, but the book is silent about the immense industrial and financial world that is America: it is oblivious to steel mills, stockyards, coal mines and textile factories; it has nothing to say about strikes, the labor movement, the life of 10,000,000 Negroes; it ignores the contracts, unstable alliances, increasing frictions among bankers, Big Business, farmers and workers. The book talks a good deal about the America that can be found on the library shelves of an American æsthete; there is something about the Puritan tradition and a good deal about a small group of artists and writers who, it seems, hold the secret that would expand the American soul. It is in American soul that Frank is primarily interested, and in one obscure corner of it, at that. His fine Biblical passion explodes in a bookish vacuum.

James Branch Cabell seems, on the surface, unrelated to these Wilsonian novelists; still the great reputation he enjoys among the American middle class is based on the assumption that he is a satirist and a champion of free thought against the Puritan tradition. What appeals to the bourgeoisie most is his “art” (i.e., his romanticism and sentimentality). He does not write about the American scene as such. Occasionally certain figures in the imaginary medieval country of Poictesme symbolize American contemporaries. There are a few passages that are a pleasure to read, if one does not mind a repetition of Voltaire and Anatole France. On the whole, the stories are allegories, written in a starched style, flavored with some mild sexual jokes, and told with an aristocratic pose sustained with great labor. A thoroughgoing evasion of American reality.

The important Wilsonian novelists, with a few exceptions, attempted to express some attitude toward the American scene. Objectively it was the attitude of the middle-class intelligentsia of the transition period when the United States emerged as the leader of the world’s imperialist forces. They were confused, pained, ironical, or even “logical” and “theoretical” in the face of the universal industrialization, the rule of the Machine and Wall Street, the prevailing lust for profits, the pressure of respectability, the commercialization of art: the utter helplessness of the individual under a trust civilization and the sharp economic, social and cultural changes. Most of them had been caught by the illusions of the “war for democracy and civilization,” and much of their satire was directed against those who had betrayed them. The satire lost some of its edge because they saw no way out of the dilemmas which they raised. They were sadder, but not always wiser men.

By and large, the workers and farmers of the United States do not read this literature; culture remains the prerogative of a small class. But even to the middle classes and the middle-class intelligentsia these books were not quite satisfactory. It wasn’t the satire of Main Street alone that made it a best seller. It is a question whether Main Street itself was disturbed by Sinclair Lewis’ portrait. People like to see photographs of themselves; and reading “good books” already makes one feel superior to Main Street. Dell might attempt to solve problems of love and marriage in the light of his ideals, but America continued to flirt, seduce, marry, rape, and divorce along lines dictated by other considerations. Dreiser and Anderson could never convince the chambers of commerce, the Knights of Columbus, the Elks, the thousand and one business and fraternal organizations, that America is a tragic place–not while America sat on top of the world surrounded by porcelain bathtubs, Studebakers, loud speakers, bootleg cocktails, jazz–not while Europe and South America paid tribute to American bankers or the A.F. of L. officials licked the buttocks of Big Business. It is precisely the friction between the harassed petit-bourgeoisie and the smug, prosperous, buccaneering big bourgeoisie which stamped the literature of the Wilsonian Era with its social characteristics, which evokes Dreiser’s melancholy reporting, Lewis’ documents, Woodward’s smile and Anderson’s tears.

The tendencies of the Wilsonian era as such have run their course. New tendencies are manifesting themselves, but the ground was prepared by the older groups which severed once for all the umbilical cord that bound American literature to English tradition. More significant was their break with the self-satisfied concepts of the Howells period and the sentimentalism and rhetoric of such well-meaning and extremely useful journalists like Upton Sinclair, who occupies a unique place in American literature as a pioneer in our fiction in attempting to deal with the life of workers. Wilsonian literature was essentially a literature without roots, aptly characterized by Dell as “intellectual vagabondage.” In so far as this literature exploded a number of middle-class illusions it was progressive; in so far as it was preoccupied with and dominated by such illusions it has definitely exhausted itself.

Modern Quarterly began in 1923 by V. F. Calverton. Calverton, born George Goetz (1900–1940), a radical writer, literary critic and publisher. Based in Baltimore, Modern Quarterly was an unaligned socialist discussion magazine, and dominated by its editor. Calverton’s interest in and support for Black liberation opened the pages of MQ to a host of the most important Black writers and debates of the 1920s and 30s, enough to make it an important historic US left journal. In addition, MQ covered sexual topics rarely openly discussed as well as the arts and literature, and had considerable attention from left intellectuals in the 1920s and early 1930s. From 1933 until Calverton’s early death from alcoholism in 1940 Modern Quarterly continued as The Modern Monthly. Increasingly involved in bitter polemics with the Communist Party-aligned writers, Modern Monthly became more overtly ‘Anti-Stalinist’ in the mid-1930s Calverton, very much an iconoclast and often accused of dilettantism, also opposed entry into World War Two which put him and his journal at odds with much of left and progressive thinking of the later 1930s, further leading to the journal’s isolation.

PDF of full issue: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/iau.31858045478306