The Culture Wars of the 1920's.
The 1920’s saw intense polarization in America on a variety of social issues.
Rapid urbanization in the cities propelled the centralization of a rising class of wealthy, intellectual elite who were increasingly disconnected from traditional values. Rural America, on the other hand, was in the throes of revival, harkening back to the familial and agrarian ideals that had become somewhat displaced following the Market Revolution of the early 19th century.
The image of the Flapper is probably one of the most iconic images of the 1920’s. Young, urban women eager to brazenly flout societal norms and embrace the post war decadence of the day. Hedonism is arguably a component or side effect of modern urbanity, and this immediately set many traditionalists against the cultural shifts and scenes they were observing. The continued push for women to sell their labor outside the home, along with the rise of contraception and a sort of extended adolescence, left many feeling that the societal bedrock of the family unit was severely under threat.
Much like today, competition between influencers heightened. Books like Lewis Sinclair’s “Main Street”, satirizing and criticizing small town America, become popular parallel to figures like Billy Sunday who rose to prominence championing opposing ideals.
Religion was a huge point of contention. Foundational Judeo-Christian orthodoxies became increasingly at odds with the ideas of the rising secular elite. This comes to a head during the Scopes Trial, where two sides of the cultural war come face to face to do battle in the courts.
Tennessee had passed a law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools, and one teacher decided to challenge based on the principle of Separation of Church and State. No real resolution is achieved, but it has huge national impact and fosters further resentment between rural and city people. The judge presiding over the case was biased against Scopes, while journalist H.L Mencken covering the event delivered glaring commentary about the rural people in attendance, often referring to them as backward, ignorant and hypocritical.
Animus towards religion and Judeo-Christian moralities grow within the intelligentsia. Pop culture academics like Sigmund Freud publicly derided religion as a primitive coping mechanism. Despite recognizing that only religion really accounted for the “meaning of life” question, he perpetuated hedonistic ideals as an alternative.
Freud suggested compensating for the pain of living with “powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery, substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it, and intoxicating substances, which make us insensitive to it.”
Religious insecurities also feed into further racial and social tensions of the era and vice-versa. Anti-immigrant sentiment grows as influxes of Irish and Italians, as well as Eastern Europeans start to displace the Anglo protestant majority that had defined the nation. The Volstead Act prohibiting alcohol was, in part, a reaction against the drinking culture of the Irish and Italians. Tensions between the Anglo-protestants and Catholics, Jews, Blacks, and Asians caused groups like the KKK to experience large national resurgence. Most of the immigrants were concentrated in the cities, which were becoming very populated. The reproportioning of representation that occurred displaced voting power from rural areas to the cities, which served to further increase the rural population’s fear and resentment of this growing ‘other’.
As outlined, the 1920’s was a socially dynamic time born out of post-war prosperity, along with increased intellectual and cultural diversity. The evolution of civilization as a whole is undoubtedly marked by the constant competition between so called “progressives” and “conservatives”, more universally perhaps between intrinsically convergent and divergent thinkers; yet the way the battle played out in 1920’s America could be considered endlessly consequential in ways not yet even fully realized. The 1920’s were a decade that elevated the inevitable cultural divides in increasingly diverse populations. We saw the politicization of all elements of culture. The personal had become the political.
