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The blow that hurled the modern world on its course of self‐destruction was the Great War of 1914–18. — Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence (2001), 683

Modernity is a collective noun that subsumes a variety of changes. The nature, pace, and consequences of modernization are the central preoccupations of this book.

Let us start with mass production, including of agricultural goods. This shifted the economy from one dependent upon finding ways of increasing output (supply) to one focused upon increasing consumption (demand). Economic abundance, however unevenly distributed, made modernity both possible and inescapable. The underlying challenge was to distribute wealth sufficiently broadly to permit continuously increasing levels of consumption. The failure to achieve this broad distribution meant that millions of Americans did not participate in the prosperity of the 1920s. It also meant that prosperity would not last.

As ever‐increasing levels of consumption became normative, traditional values became suspect. Seeking pleasure, for example, became enshrined among approved motives. Self‐denial became old‐fashioned and, therefore, passé. Traditional notions of virtue had rested upon self‐denial. Consider the “seven deadly sins.” Each is a legitimate activity taken to an extreme. Satisfying hunger is necessary; gluttony is a sin. The new capitalism of the post‐World War I (WWI) years required self‐indulgence, not self‐denial.

As the consumption ethos of always acquiring more undermined Judeo‐Christian values, science and other empirical disciplines undermined traditional understandings of scripture. This is most visible in the Scopes Trial over the teaching of evolution in the public schools in Tennessee. Concern for preserving these traditional understandings, what revivalist Billy Sunday called “Old Time Religion,” underlaid the fight over the “fundamentals” in Protestant churches in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. It continues to fuel the “culture wars” of today.

Previously marginalized groups – women, blacks, Catholics, Jews, and then others – insisted on full participation in all aspects of this rapidly changing society. They encountered fierce resistance, and their success was uneven. But the general trajectory of change was apparent. Even as anti‐immigrant, anti‐Catholic, and anti‐Semitic hostilities intensified during and after the war, the United States became an increasingly diverse society. And popular culture increasingly reflected that diversity.

Government needed to respond to the new era. How and to what extent it should act became the questions of twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century American politics.

Change can be cumulative, as with urbanization or the emergence of a consumer ethos in which the pursuit of pleasure is a legitimate, even respectable, motive. Historians looking for specific origins invariably disagree. Did the 1920s usher in a new set of attitudes toward sexuality? Or was there a pre‐war sexual revolution? We cannot easily answer such questions. What we can identify more readily are those historical moments when people realize that something has changed decisively. For Americans, as for people around the world, the watershed event that announced the new era was the Great War.

In the spring of 1914, the “urgent demands” of the nineteenth century, to use Barzun’s phrase for those issues that every thinking person had to confront in one way or another, seemingly had been met in the United States and western Europe. Countries had worked out ways of combining universal manhood suffrage with private property rights. They had adopted at least rudimentary forms of factory safety legislation, mandatory public schooling, public health measures, and other elements of the welfare state. This was most fully articulated in Germany, the nation to which American “progressives” most frequently turned for models. Western Europeans and Americans in general shared the complacent view that they had solved the basic problems that had confounded humanity from the beginning of time.

Their consensus ran along the following lines: Government required some sort of parliament or congress. Citizens deserved basic civil liberties, such as free speech, and “entitlements,” i.e., the sorts of welfare measures, such as unemployment insurance and old‐age pensions, that Bismarck had introduced in Germany. The economy required a capitalist market but one subject to some regulation along the lines of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Religion should be some benevolent form of Christianity, although non‐Christians should be allowed to practice their own religions. Science would continue to fuel technological innovations that, in turn, would continue to turn out greater and ever greater amounts of everything from food to automobiles to as yet undreamed of new products. Medicine, finally on a scientific basis, would continue to conquer disease. American and European empires testified to the overall superiority of western civilization. As the British economist John Maynard Keynes summed up the pre‐war West:

What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was that came to an end in August, 1914! The greater part of the population, it is true, worked hard and lived at a low standard of comfort, yet were, to all appearances, reasonably contented with this lot. But escape was possible, for any man of capacity or character at all exceeding the average, into the middle and upper classes, for whom life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages.1

More importantly, in Keynes’ opinion, Americans and western Europeans “regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable.” They believed in the inevitability of progress. In the United States, not only did political candidates claim to be “progressives,” so did businessmen and farmers.

Within a few years this complacency shattered. In 1913 the dissonance Igor Stravinsky employed in The Rite of Spring struck many listeners as barbaric. By 1918, it sounded prophetic. So too with the theories of Sigmund Freud and the fiction of Franz Kafka. Both proclaimed that humans were not the rational creatures pre‐war westerners imagined. They were instead driven by irrational drives and urges, as Freud claimed. And authorities behaved in the nightmarish fashion Kafka imagined.

Many people in the United States and western European countries had been highly self‐satisfied before the war. Collectively, these countries represented progress, enlightenment, and civilization. Or so most of their citizens thought.

Then came the war.

We can start our exploration of the impact of WWI with some numbers. France mobilized 8,410,000 men; 6,160,800 were killed, wounded, taken prisoner, or went missing in action. More than three in four, that is, were casualties. A nearly identical percentage of Russian soldiers met the same fates. Germany mobilized 11,000,000; 7,142,588 or almost two in three were killed, wounded, taken prisoner, or went missing in action. The proportion in the Austro‐Hungarian Empire was a daunting nine in ten. Is it any wonder that the Austro‐Hungarian Empire collapsed? As did the German Empire. And the Russian. And the Ottoman. Compared to these losses, the United States got off relatively easily. Nonetheless, 126,000 Americans died; another 234,300 were wounded. Only 4,500 were taken prisoner or went missing in action. For Europeans, the war eliminated an entire generation. For Americans, it was less traumatic but still deeply disillusioning.

WWI was a “Total War,” mobilizing civilians as well as the military. Modern technology produced new weapons of mass destruction: submarines, tanks, machine guns, airplanes, poison gas, and huge artillery pieces. It did not produce new strategies. Initially, everyone expected a short war because the most recent European conflict, the Franco‐Prussian War (1870), had been quite brief. Instead, WWI turned out to be like the first modern war, the American Civil War. On the eastern front, the German armies inflicted horrific losses upon the Russians but were unable to achieve a decisive victory until the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. Lenin took power on a promise of “Peace, Land, and Bread” and negotiated a separate peace with Germany in March of 1918.

On the western front the two sides literally dug in, in vast networks of trenches separated by a barren “no man’s land.” Each took turns attacking. The battles would begin with massive artillery bombardments intended to “soften up” the enemy. Then infantrymen would “go over the top” of their own trenches and charge across “no man’s land.” Machine gun fire cut them down like wheat. Thousands died in a morning or an afternoon. Soon enough the enemy would try the same thing. With the same results. The slaughter was as mindless as it was seemingly endless. As the war dragged on, people became ever more appalled.

When the new Soviet Union signed its “separate peace,” ending the war on the eastern front, Germany moved those armies to the western front for what turned out to be a final massive assault. American reinforcements helped defeat it. They and their British and French allies then forced the Germans into a long retreat. Finally, on November 11, 1918, its troops still occupying foreign territory, Germany signed the Armistice. The war was finally over.

You could not have appreciated the devastating cultural and psychological impacts of the war by listening to American popular music of the day. George M. Cohan wrote the great patriotic anthem of the war years, “Over There.” It began:

Johnnie, get your gun,

Get your gun, get your gun,

Take it on the run,

On the run, on the run.

Hear them calling, you and me,

Every son of liberty.

Hurry right away,

No delay, go today,

Make your daddy glad

To have had such a lad.

Tell your sweetheart not to pine,

To be proud her boy’s in line.

And ended with the triumphal chorus:

Over there, over there,

Send the word, send the word over there –

That the Yanks are coming,

The Yanks are coming,

The drums rum‐tumming

Ev’rywhere.

So prepare, say a pray’r,

Send the word, send the word to beware.

We’ll be over, we’re coming over,

And we won’t come back till it’s over

Over there.

Another big hit of the day was Irving Berlin’s “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” from a show he wrote to raise money for Army recreation centers, Yip, Yip, Yaphank. Yaphank is a town on Long Island where Berlin did his basic training. He volunteered to serve despite his very poor eyesight that otherwise would have kept him out of the army. The song laments the early hour at which the new soldiers had to rise.

For the hardest blow of all

Is to hear the bugler call

Ya gotta get up

Ya gotta get up

Ya gotta get up this morning

Someday I’m going to murder the bugler

Someday they’re going to find him dead

I’ll amputate his reveille

And step upon it heavily

And spend the rest of my life in bed

It is worth emphasizing that George M. Cohan was an Irish Catholic and that Irving Berlin (born Israel Baline) was a Russian Jew. The war intensified anti‐Catholic, anti‐Semitic, anti‐black, and anti‐immigrant hatreds. But Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and blacks continued to help shape the popular culture. Lt. James Reese Europe and his Harlem Hellfighters Orchestra, for example, helped launch the popularity of jazz with their recording of “Memphis Blues.”

Despite the upbeat music, civilian populations had been called upon to make heroic sacrifices for the war effort, and some had been subject to bombardment. Virtually every commodity was rationed in every warring nation. Civilians were exposed to unrelenting propaganda that demonized the enemy and lionized “our boys.”

If the Wilson administration, like other governments, called on its citizens to rally ‘round the flag, it did nothing to tamp down rising racial, ethnic, and religious hatreds. Even those who thought of themselves as promoting true Americanism often made these hatreds more intense by treating Americanism as a zero‐sum process. That is, Americanizers usually insisted that immigrants give up their “foreign ways” even down to eating such “American vegetables” as peas instead of foreign vegetables like cabbage. Why anyone thought that peas were an American vegetable remains a mystery.

That serene sense of superiority that had characterized pre‐war America shattered. Had the war made “the world safe for democracy”? Had the Armistice ended the war that would “end all wars”? Was Wilsonian idealism guiding the building of a postwar world? For many, especially among the young, the answer to all of these questions was a resounding NO.

The war would lead to bitter racial conflict at home. Even before U.S. entry into the war in April 1917, the “Great Migration” of African Americans from the South had begun. They were moving north in search of economic opportunities and an escape from segregation, discrimination, and lynching. They were successful in finding jobs because the war effectively cut off immigration from Europe. The jobs paid considerably more than these people had earned in the South.

Blacks took jobs that previously had gone to Poles, Italians, Lithuanians, and other southern and eastern European newcomers. Whites, especially immigrants and their children, bitterly resented the African Americans. They saw them as potential strikebreakers. They complained that the competition for housing drove up rents. Race relations became more and more volatile. The 1917 riot in East St. Louis was a bloody indicator of things to come. Ida Wells‐Barnett, famed for her long campaign against lynching, went to the city at the behest of a black organization in Chicago. Historians have not had to correct her account:

the rioting started on the morning of July 2nd, when the workers were coming off the 11 o’clock shift at the factories and packing plants. The cause was alleged to be the killing of two white police officers who had been shot by colored men when they went into the Negro district on the Denver side to quell a supposed riot. These colored men said that an automobile had gone through the neighborhood firing right and left into the windows of the houses and of the church. A bell was rung and the men rapidly came together at the church to plan for resisting other attacks of similar character. When a second automobile came on the scene very soon after, they thought it were the same parties, and fired into it after a parley, wounding two officers who afterwards died.…

When the officers were killed in the unfortunate mixup of July 1st, it gave excuse for the breaking out of the mob composed largely of union workers and the Negro haters who gathered from small towns surrounding, and even from the South. Horrible stories were given both by eye witnesses as well as by others, the saddest part of them all being, that in every instance, as the mob set upon men coming from their work at 11 o’clock in the day, the soldiers or the police held up the black men, searched them and even took their pocket knives, then left them at the mercy of the mob. In all that disgraceful twenty‐four hours of rioting, murder and arson, not a shot was fired by the militia.

Indeed, according to General Dickson, the state militia were given orders not to shoot white men and women, and they stood by and saw the most brutal savagery perpetrated without lifting a finger for protection or punishment for those who did murder, committed arson or burned up little children and old people.²

There would be dozens of similar race riots, the worst being in Chicago in 1919 and in Tulsa in 1921.

Also in 1917, copper companies in Bisbee, Arizona, “deported” workers who had joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a radical union that opposed American entry into the war, to New Mexico. Local sheriffs deputized volunteers, who then rounded up IWW supporters, herded them into a baseball field, and then marched them to the railroad station and packed them into freight cars. The federal government investigated and found that the companies’ actions were illegal, but that they violated state rather than federal law. No one was ever convicted. Many of those deported were immigrants from Europe; many others were Mexicans or Mexican Americans.

Nativist hostility only increased. Over President Wilson’s veto, Congress passed an immigration restriction bill. It imposed a literacy test. A large percentage of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe could not read or write. When passed in 1917, the law was largely symbolic because the war had brought immigration to a virtual halt. When it resumed in the latter part of 1919, the literacy test proved to be entirely ineffectual. Immigrants had learned to read; they knew that otherwise they would be turned away. The literacy test would be replaced by the Emergency Quota Act, which established quotas for countries sending emigrants to the United States. The Johnson‐Reed Act of 1924 set permanent quotas using the 1890 Census. Why 1890 and not 1920? The year 1890 marked the start of the so‐called new immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Advocates of restriction wanted to reduce the total number of immigrants; they especially wanted to reduce the numbers of Italians, Poles, Russian Jews, Greeks, and other supposedly inferior peoples.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of the Johnson‐Reed law. With the exception of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 with Japan, both of which excluded immigrants from those countries, the United States had pursued a policy of admitting all comers provided that they did not bring with them a communicable disease. This changed beginning in 1917, when Congress passed – over President Wilson’s veto – the literacy test for immigrants. When trans‐Atlantic passenger service resumed in 1919, it continued to have little impact. Potential immigrants had learned to read, and a measure intended to keep down the numbers from eastern and central Europe failed to do so. This led Congress to pass the Emergency Quota Act in 1921 and then the Johnson‐Reed Act three years later. A look at the quotas imposed showed that migration from those parts of Europe virtually ceased (see table).

Immigration Quotas under the Johnson‐Reed Restriction Act

Northwest Europe and Scandinavia	Eastern and Southern Europe	Other Countries
Country	Quota	Country	Quota	Country	Quota
Germany	51,227	Poland	5,982	Africa (other than Egypt)	1,100
Great Britain and Northern Ireland	34,007	Italy	3,845	Armenia	124
Irish Free State (Ireland)	28,567	Czechoslovakia	3,073	Australia	121
Sweden	9,561	Russia	2,248	Palestine	100
Norway	6,453	Yugoslavia	671	Syria	100
France	3,954	Romania	603	Turkey	100
Denmark	2,789	Portugal	503	Egypt	100
Switzerland	2,081	Hungary	473	New Zealand and Pacific Islands	100
Netherlands	1,648	Lithuania	344	All others	1,900
Austria	785	Latvia	142
Belgium	512	Spain	131
Finland	471	Estonia	124
Free City of Danzig	228	Albania	100
Iceland	100	Bulgaria	100
Luxembourg	100	Greece	100
Total (number)	142,483	Total (number)	18,439	Total (number)	3,745
Total (%)	86.5	Total (%)	11.2	Total (%)	2.3
(Total annual immigrant quota: 164,667)

The Wilson administration, despite the president’s veto of the literacy law, fanned the flames of nativism. It established the Committee on Public Information soon after the American declaration of war. Director George Creel defined its mission as bringing patriotism, defined as support for the war, to a “white hot” level. This included censoring the foreign language press, sending out “Four Minute Men” to give brief speeches at movie theaters, promoting the sale of war bonds, and organizing “I Am an American” Day parades on the Fourth of July. States created their own Councils of National Defense, which organized Americanization programs. So did the national government. Both the Bureau of Education and the aturalization bureau sought to control public school programs for immigrants. Neither succeeded.

One influential Americanization program was sponsored by Henry Ford for his foreign‐born workers.

This photograph is of a graduation ceremony at the Ford English School, the centerpiece of the company’s Americanization program. Attendance at the twice‐weekly classes was mandatory for non‐English speakers. Graduates filed into the “melting pot” dressed in ragged costumes. Teachers used giant ladles to stir the pot. Then, dressed in “American” clothes, the newly Americanized workers emerged to the cheers of the audience.

Source: Courtesy of Collections of The Henry Ford.

Anti‐German sentiment ran especially high. Symphony orchestras refused to play works by German composers. Sauerkraut, frankfurters, and hamburgers all received new names. Liberty cabbage and Salisbury steak did not catch on. Hot dogs did. Many Germans anglicized their names. Ochs, for example, became Oakes; Weiss became White. Hostility was by no means limited to German Americans. Immigrants generally became “hyphens,” as in Italo‐American, for example. Self‐styled “real Americans” questioned their loyalty. Many immigrants from Hungary and Poland, who had no love for the Austro‐Hungarian or German Empires, nonetheless were classified as enemy aliens and found themselves barred from working in defense plants or flying a plane.

Racial, ethnic, and religious hatreds continued after the war. And, bad as the war was, the immediate postwar years were in some ways worse.

First came a pandemic, the so‐called Spanish flu. Quarantine measures failed to stop its spread. There was no cure. At least twenty million people died worldwide, twice as many as in the war. The same ratio held for the United States.

During the war, the federal government controlled wages (which even so did not keep pace with rising prices) and mediated labor‐management disputes. With war’s end, the administration abruptly terminated its mediation efforts. A wave of strikes ensued. Three were especially important – the Steel Strike, led by William Z. Foster who would run for president in 1920 as the candidate of the American Communist Party; the Seattle General Strike that closed down much of that city and turned Seattle’s mayor into a crusader against communism; and the Boston Police Strike, which set off a crime wave and turned Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge into a national hero for his stand that there was “no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime,” All three happened in 1919. All three strikes failed.

The years 1919–1920 also saw a wave of terrorist bombings, including a highly destructive blast that killed dozens on Wall Street in Manhattan. Authorities failed to locate the bomber. Historians tend to link the bombing to Italian anarchists and to the Sacco and Vanzetti case.

The strikes, bombings, and unrest generally lent credence to warnings from Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and others that tens of thousands of Bolsheviki intended to overthrow the American government. Palmer and a young J. Edgar Hoover then led the first Red Scare. In a series of raids, government agents arrested thousands of alleged “Reds.” Palmer wanted to deport them all. Cooler and wiser heads prevailed. Most of those picked up were guilty of nothing more than subscribing to a left‐wing publication. Some were only guilty of having a name ending in “ski” or “sky.” But several hundred were deported to the Soviet Union on a so‐called Soviet Ark. Included were the well‐known anarchists Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman. Both were critics of the Communist regime and went into exile in France.

Race relations worsened. The most destructive of the dozens of riots during the “Red Summer” of 1919 was in Chicago. The beaches along Lake Michigan were unofficially segregated. One black youth floated into a part of the lake that whites considered their own. Outraged, those on the shore hurled rocks at the young man. One struck him on the head. He died. Outraged blacks attacked. The police only arrested blacks in breaking up the fighting. The incident touched off a wave of violence against blacks, often led by white gangs. Blacks retaliated. There were fires as well. It was East St. Louis all over again but on a larger scale.

Economic conditions worsened as well. The Wilson administration demobilized the military as quickly as possible; it also cut military spending. This meant that manufacturers had no transition period in which to switch back to civilian production. They had to close their plants and retool. This put many out of work just as millions of soldiers and sailors reentered the labor market. The result was a brief but very sharp recession.

The cumulative impact of all of these calamities cannot be overstated. Americans longed, in Warren G. Harding’s word, for normalcy, a return to a prewar America shrouded in nostalgia, an America that had never existed. For along with dismaying events existed long‐term developments that were transforming the economy and the culture.

One especially important long‐term shift was in how Americans thought about gender roles and sexuality. Consider pre‐ and postwar images of ideal feminine beauty.

The Sweetest Story Ever Told, by Charles Dana Gibson (Collier’s Weekly, August 13, 1910) – Gibson created the “Gibson Girl,” who epitomized the ideal female beauty of pre‐war America. He had a large number of imitators, each of whom strove to create a “Girl” of his own. Magazine covers of the pre‐war period often featured a “Gibson Girl” or a close imitation.

Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Reproduction number LC‐DIG‐ppmsca‐01590 (digital file from original)LC‐USZC4‐10352 (color film copy transparency)LC‐USZ62‐8637 (b&w film copy neg.)

Portrait of Louise Brooks from the film Diary of a Lost Girl, the epitome of the “flapper.”

Source: PictureLux / Alamy Stock Photo. Brooks began as a professionally trained dancer, became a showgirl in the “Ziegfeld Follies,” had a featured role in a Broadway musical, starred in several silent films, and then went to Germany, where she made Pandora’s Box, a film so controversial it was not shown in the United States until the 1980s.

Pre‐war beauties, and women generally, had very long hair, often reaching to the small of the back, which they wore up. “Letting your hair down” was a prelude to intimacy. The flapper wore her hair short, a cut nicknamed the “bob.” The “Gibson Girl” had an hourglass figure, i.e., full bosom and hips and a “wasp waist.” Corsetry was the key. The flapper favored shifts, dresses that did not disclose curves. Women with full busts purchased breast restrainers to attain the ideal boyish figure. Dresses had come to the ankle. With the war and shortages of fabric, they rose to mid‐calf. The flapper wore dresses that came to the knee. She sometimes rolled her stockings below the knee, something likely to scandalize her mother, who considered that “fast,” i.e., indicating sexual availability. She did not wear a corset.

Another way to appreciate how rapidly cultural change arrived is to study popular music. It had been dominated by ballads largely based on European models, on the one hand, and comic ditties written for minstrel shows, on the other. This changed with Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” (1899), the iconic masterpiece that captivated the nation in the pre‐WWI era. Ragtime drew upon several musical traditions, including minstrel songs, marches, and the syncopated rhythms that African American musicians were experimenting with in the 1890s, especially in Chicago and St. Louis. Joplin’s song took its name from a “social club” (aka brothel) in Sedalia, Missouri, where he briefly worked as a piano player. Joplin claimed Chopin as a major influence. Like Chopin, he sought to create popular music that would nevertheless reach the level of high art. Virtually no one at the time took Joplin’s ambitions seriously, not with every composer trying to copy his tunes, not with every amateur piano player struggling to play them. Now Joplin’s work is seen as indeed in the same class as Chopin’s.

Jelly Roll Morton’s music takes us to the transition from ragtime to jazz (originally jass). The word ragtime comes from “ragged time,” the fact that the right and left hands of the pianist play different tempos. Jass is a more mysterious term. Some theorize that it comes from “jasmine,” an inexpensive perfume supposedly favored by whores in New Orleans’ famed red‐light district, Storyville. The fact that “jass” and then “jazz” were African American slang terms for sexual intercourse lends some credibility to the theory. Jelly Roll always claimed that his nickname did not refer to any fondness for the pastry. It was, he boasted, his signature move in making love. His “Black Bottom Stomp” is a good example of early jazz. The Black Bottom was a popular dance of the day, one that openly proclaimed its origins in the African American community.

The emergence of the “modern young woman” and the increasing influence of African Americans on American culture were highly controversial aspects of a far more general set of changes – modernization.

1920 also marked several major transitions. According to the Census, for the first time a majority of Americans lived in cities. The census defined urban as any place with a population of 2,500, so many “cities” were actually small towns. Nonetheless, urbanization was quite real. Cities attracted residents because that was where people could find work, entertainment, and a kind of freedom. But cities could also be frightening. There was crime and corruption, temptations of all sorts. There was anonymity; some considered it a boon, others a bane.

Diversity flourished in cities. People spoke dozens of languages, practiced dozens of religions, ate scores of cuisines. In the biggest cities, like Chicago or Philadelphia, clubs openly catered to homosexuals. There were notorious neighborhoods, like the Bowery in New York, where tourists and natives alike could find ways of satisfying any appetite. There were theaters. Revivalist Billy Sunday claimed that more sinners fell because of the theater than from drinking.

Sunday’s discomfort with modernity was widely shared. We can see it in the battles over what he called “Old Time Religion” and the related struggles among Protestants over the “fundamentals.” We can see it in the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan. We can see it in the campaigns to censor films and plays. We can see it in the decade‐long controversy over the one‐piece bathing suit for women. We can see it in efforts to outlaw the teaching of evolution. The list of battles in an ongoing, seemingly unending, culture war goes on and on. We will look at these and several others.

Underlying the culture war lay a fundamental question: Whose country was this? One answer, supposedly based on scientific research, was offered by the “science” of eugenics.

The infant selected as the “most perfect baby” in the Panama Canal Zone by the Eugenics Society of America. “Beautiful Baby” and “Fitter Family” contests were very popular during the 1920s and 1930s. At state fairs, for example, the Eugenics Society would set up exhibits at which visitors could answer questionnaires that would reveal their family’s “fitness.” In addition to getting their picture in the local newspaper, the winning family gained the assurance that it was among nature’s elite. In fact, any family scoring highly enough received a medal proclaiming, “Yea, I have a goodly heritage.”

Source: Truman State University.

Crime, insanity, mental defects, alcoholism, indigence, on one hand, were all products of “bad heredity.” Intelligence, industriousness, moral probity, on the other hand, were all products of a “goodly heritage.” There was a crisis confronting America because too many of those with bad genes were having too many babies, while those with good genes were having too few. Madison Grant, one of the most effective spokespeople for the movement, described this as The Passing of the Great Race (1916) in his best‐selling book. Lothrop Stoddard, for whose best‐seller Grant wrote an introduction, called it The Rising Tide of Color against White Supremacy (1920).

Eugenics exhibits typically used “flashing lights” to make the movement’s central points. “Some People Are Born to Be a Burden on the Rest,” the exhibit proclaimed. Every fifteen seconds a light flashed to mark the $100 in tax money spent on the insane, the feeble‐minded, criminals, and “other defectives” with “bad heredity.” Another light flashed every sixteen seconds. That was how often a baby was born in the United States. Few of these were perfect, however. Every forty‐eight seconds a light flashed, for the frequency of babies born who would grow up with the mental age of eight or lower. Every fifty seconds another light flashed. This was the frequency with which Americans went to jail. “Very few normal people ever go to jail,” the society insisted. At the far right was a light that flashed every seven and one‐half minutes. This marked the birth of a “high grade person who will have the ability to do creative work and be fit for leadership.” Only 4% of the American population, the society calculated, fell into this category.

Eugenics activists, as both titles demonstrate, asserted a paradoxical message. Members of the “great race,” i.e., people of northern and western European backgrounds (with the noteworthy exception of Irish Catholics), were threatened by the proliferation of those, in the words of University of Wisconsin sociologist E.A. Ross, “whom evolution has left behind.” But how could the less fit possibly endanger the more fit? Wasn’t the story of evolution “the survival of the fittest”? No, according to eugenicists. They based that “no” on two sorts of arguments. Both began with the interference of humans in the workings of natural selection. Advanced societies no longer allowed the less fit to die. Instead, charitable organizations and the state intervened to protect those with various disabilities with the consequence that the less fit could successfully reproduce. But this did not explain why the members of the “great race” had declining birth rates. Once again, the answer had to do with human intervention in the natural process of selection. In comparatively primitive societies, up to and including the American colonies, children were economic assets. But, with the emergence of modern industrial societies, children became more and more clearly drains on family well‐being. Members of these advanced societies had fewer children. Immigrants, coming from less advanced societies, continued to have large families. So did people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Hence the “rising tide” with its threat to “white supremacy.”

Eugenicists did not condemn these human interferences, however much they decried the consequences. Instead, they made “the human direction of evolution” the cornerstone of their movement. No longer should we allow nature to select human traits; having already intruded upon the process, we should continue to do so but in a scientific manner. Here is how the Eugenics Record Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Biological Laboratory phrased it in 1927: “Eugenics Seeks to Improve the Natural, Physical, Mental and Temperamental Qualities of the Human Family.” Source: American Philosophical Society. Noncomercial, educational use only.

Who was “most richly endowed by nature”? The Record Office, supported by Carnegie and Harriman funding, sought to find out. Or, more precisely, it sought evidence for what its staff and their supporters thought that they already knew to be the truth. Consider the winning family at the 1925 Eastern States (Massachusetts) Exposition “Fitter Family” contest. Poor eyesight “ran” in the family. So did nervousness. Neither prevented the family from being adjudged “fit.” Why not? Those concerned with designing the questionnaires had already determined the meanings of “fitness,” which mirrored almost perfectly middle‐class respectability. The winning family, for example, was headed by a clergyman who also lectured on literary subjects. Several of the children had college educations; all had at least high school educations. All of the males held “good” jobs, as did several of the females. The mother was a housewife, according to the form. The family’s interests and hobbies ran to math, literature, and music, in addition to golf. None had ever committed a crime, become indigent, had a child out of wedlock (at least so far as revealed by their answers to the form). Social factors were at least as important to the eugenic notion of fitness as physical characteristics.

Who were the “hereditary defectives and degenerates”? Again, the state fair exhibits make the answer perfectly clear. Criminals (“very few normal people ever go to jail”), the mentally ill, the developmentally disadvantaged, and the chronically indigent were all “born to be a burden.” These “defectives” and “degenerates” supposedly appeared disproportionately frequently among certain racial and ethnic groups. Lita Hollingworth, associate professor at Columbia Teachers College, noted in her highly influential Gifted Children: Their Nature and Nurture (1926), “one result recurs persistently wherever American children are tested by nationality of ancestors. American children of Italian parentage show a low average of intelligence. The selection of Italians received into this country has yielded very few gifted children.”

WWI intelligence tests showed incontrovertibly, according to Harry Laughlin and other eugenicists, including Lewis Terman of Stanford, who helped create the original I.Q. tests, that Italians and other immigrants possessed low intelligence on average. Indeed, 70% of the foreign‐born draft sample scored 90 or lower on these I.Q. tests, compared to 46% among the native‐born white draft sample. African American scores were even lower: 49% scored below 70. A score of 100 indicated “normal” intelligence.

Who were “those in control” who “must see to it that there shall be fit matings and many children among those most richly endowed by nature” and that “hereditary defectives and degenerates” not be “permitted to reproduce at all”? Eugenicists contemplated – and to large extent achieved – a state far more powerful and intrusive than that created by the Founders. Consider just a brief list of the movement’s successes in the 1920s:

 State after state adopted variants of Virginia’s racial purity law, which outlawed interracial marriage and/or a model sterilization law drafted by Record Office assistant director Laughlin that provided for the involuntary sterilization of criminals, “defectives,” and “degenerates.”

 The Immigration Act of 1924, which established U.S. immigration quotas until 1965, closely followed the recommendations of Laughlin’s testimony.

 Public school systems across the country began “tracking” students based upon I.Q. tests developed in accord with eugenics principles.

 By the 1920s, eugenics was well established as a branch of biology. Most high school and college textbooks, for example, devoted a chapter to it – including the one used by John T. Scopes to teach evolution in Tennessee. Typical treatments began with the observation that experience had shown how plants and animals could be improved by proper breeding techniques. Surely it was reasonable to assume the same would hold for humans.

In addition to the reasons advanced by advocates of eugenics, there were others that drew upon historic prejudices and hatreds, prejudices and hatreds that became ever more vitriolic during the 1920s and 1930s. Anti‐Catholicism and anti‐Semitism lurked just below the surface in the quota system. Look at the quotas for such predominantly Catholic countries as Poland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Austria, and Spain. The only predominantly Catholic country with a comparatively large quota was the Irish Free State. Look at the quotas for countries with large Jewish populations – Russia, Poland, Lithuania, and Austria. Look at the countries with large populations of Orthodox Christians, such as Russia, Greece, and Syria. The bias against non‐Protestants was pronounced.

Racial animosities predated the campaigns of eugenicists. Note that the exclusion of Chinese and Japanese continued. There were also no quotas for Korea or India. Fears of the “Yellow Peril” had not diminished in the two generations after the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Eugenicists were just one voice in the quarrel over who was or could become an American, albeit a disproportionally powerful voice. There was also the Ku Klux Klan, whose rebirth tells a good deal about postwar America.