Modernity and the Great Depression: The Transformation of American Society, 1930–1941

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

To Kenneth J. Bindas modernity means reason, order, and planning, and to embrace modernism means to believe, in a religious sense, that those characteristics will be the basis for a better world. In the 1930s the “ideals of order, planning, and reason became an ontology that aided the shift of consciousness toward the symbolic and practical advantages of modernity,” Bindas argues (p. 6). He does not study the actual implementation of these ideals but rather how certain Americans converted others to the proposition that modernity offers a “new road to salvation” (p. 5). In short, a quasi-religious conversion to modernism preceded an acceptance of modernity. Bindas provides a brief theoretical introduction followed by a chapter tracing liberal Protestant theologians' redefinition of modernity as the adaptation of tradition to science and the embrace of “free inquiry” (p. 23). Diverse modernists, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, John Dewey, the leaders of the technocracy movement, and Lewis Mumford, secularized this impulse, promulgating a “new gospel” of science, order, and planning (p. 29). Bindas provides four case studies of the promotion of this modernist faith: the New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps and National Youth Administration, which functioned as agencies of modernist indoctrination and whose cadres Bindas compares to the New Model Army of the English Revolution; the decade's six major world's fairs, none of which turned a profit, yet which, collectively, convinced millions that science promised salvation; primarily female interior decorators who sold American women on the simple, functional appeal of modernist furnishings and decor created primarily by male interior designers; and the decade's musicians, both popular (swing bands and cowboy singers) and “cultivated” (Virgil Thomson, Roy Harris, and Aaron Copland), who adapted to new technologies of transmission (by for example, creating the singing style of “crooning,” which worked well with microphones) but often, as with the cowboy composer Bob Nolan's “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” (1934), manipulated nostalgic tropes to express simultaneously ambivalence toward modernity and acceptance of its salvific potential.