Product Details

Publishers Weekly

Turning to the flip side of the '20s' flapper image, Dumenil looks at the darker side of the decade forming the ``central motifs that have shaped the modern American temper.'' Between the end of WWI and the stock market crash, the aura of get-rich-quick prosperity overshadowed tensions resulting from the highly skewed distribution of wealth. The unfettered capitalism of the time is reflected by Calvin Coolidge, who said, ``The man who builds a factory builds a temple. The man who works there, worships there.'' In 1920, for the first time, half the U.S. population lived in cities. While life grew more organized, complex and sexually liberated, the reaction increased, too. Capitalists fanned a Red Scare following the 1919 Bolshevik Revolution, forcing American reformers to confront this inflated fear along with homegrown poverty and racism. Dumenil points to the mass consumer culture, corporate mentality, job structure that eroded individual autonomy, assembly lines, intense special-interest lobbying in Washington and the fusion of sexuality with consumption as among the decade's legacies to later American culture. Readers may wish that Dumenil spent more time on countervailing radical forces (Rand School of Social Science; Scott Nearing; Max Eastman's The Masses; Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW) that contributed to the ferment of this formative era. Even so, she has captured the fire of this volcanic time and weaves together scores of social and political threads into an insightful overview. (June)

Booknews

Eschewing the notion that the Jazz Age constitutes a neatly- defined period, Dumenil describes the 1920s as an era of changing values which brought an end to the Victorian era; of emerging urban liberalism; of an expanding federal bureaucracy; of pluralism's increasing importance to America's heterogeneous society; and of the encounter between different religious, ethnic, and cultural groups and the homogenizing force of a powerful mass- consumer culture. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

What People Are Saying

The Modern Temper is an engaging, stimulating and thoughtful re-creation of one of our most interesting and complex decades. A wonderful accomplishment!
—Lawrence W. Levine, George Mason University

What People Are Saying

Lynn Dumenil's The Modern Temper provides an exciting and original synthesis of a crucial decade that few of us really understand. She makes the insights and confusions of the women and the men of the twenties come alive. This is an important book.
—Ellen Dubois, University of California at Los Angeles

What People Are Saying

Dumenil offers a wealth of fresh insights on a fascinating decade. This illuminating study subtly recasts our understanding of an era whose tensions and stresses often uncannily parallel those of our own day.
—Paul Boyer, University of Wisconsin

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Table of Contents