The Social Critics and the End of American Innocence: 1907–1921

Abstract

Shortly before America's involvement in the First World War there appeared a series of works of social and cultural criticism remarkable for their range and sophistication. The familiar list includes Herbert Croly's The Promise of American Life (1909) and Progressive Democracy (1914), Walter Weyl's The New Democracy (1912), Walter Lippmann's Preface to Politics (1913) and Drift and Mastery (1914), Van Wyck Brooks's The Wine of the Puritans (1909), America's Coming of Age (1915), and H. G. Wells (1915), and Randolph Bourne's Youth and Life (1913), The Gary Schools (1916) and Education and Living (1917). The authors of these books were involved as well in the development of vehicles for social criticism such as The New Republic and The Seven Arts which continued and institutionalized the preoccupations of their books.