1940s: The Cultural Legacy of World War II

Abstract

In 1941 Henry Luce announced ‘the American Century’ on the eve of America’s entry into World War II. It may seem surprising that Luce proposed the nation’s predominant role during the most serious economic crisis in modern American history. But the creation of a distinctly American culture became the project of many artists in the 1930s. The historian Warren Susman suggests that one of the most significant characteristics of the 1930s was the popular discovery of the anthropological concept of culture, reflected in the remarkable popular success of Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934). In the 1920s expatriate Modernists like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound embraced Matthew Arnold’s narrow definition of culture as high culture; now artists adopted the anthropological view that everything a society produced was culture. Susman notes, ‘It is not too extreme to propose that it was during the Thirties that the idea of culture was domesticated, with important consequences. Americans then began thinking in terms of patterns of behavior and belief, values and lifestyles, symbols and meaning.’ He points out that it was during the 1930s that the phrases ‘American Way of Life’ and ‘The American Dream’ became commonplace. ‘It is in fact possible to define as a key structural element in a historical reconstruction of the 1930s the effort to find, characterize, and adapt to an American Way of Life as distinguished from the material achievements (and the failures) of an American industrial civilization.’