Category: History, Page 29

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  • Sigmund Freud, Moderns and the Lost Generation

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 14th 2020 2:05pm EDT

    In the Victorian era, sex was the ultimate taboo. As we have seen, the Victorian generations saw sexuality as “a hidden geyser of animality existing within everyone and capable of erupting with little or no warning at the slightest stimulus.” Nothing posed a greater threat to the Victorian ideal of self-control than human sexuality which […]

  • The New Era, The Modernist Intelligentsia and the Development of Modern Culture

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 13th 2020 12:08pm EDT

    In the 1920s, a bunch of different threads that we have been tracing came together and crystallized as the Modern liberal intelligentsia which replaced the Victorian mainstream. The following excerpt comes from Paul V. Murphy’s book The New Era: American Thought and Culture in the 1920s: “By the 1920s, then, intellectuals had witnessed a society […]

  • Gods of the Upper Air

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 13th 2020 2:06am EDT

    Charles King has a new book out called Gods of the Upper Air about Franz Boas and his students and how they changed American anthropology. Note: I haven’t got the chance to read this book yet or Robert Putnam’s new book The Upswing. I’m going to try to read and review both here.

  • Modernists and American Historiography

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 13th 2020 1:54am EDT

    There are few things that I find more aggravating than listening to conservative liberals prattle on about the deracinated civic nationalism of the Founding Fathers. Victorian America was a White, Anglo-Saxon (in culture), Protestant nation with liberal and republican principles. It was not a “Nation of Immigrants” or a “melting pot.” The conservative liberal vision […]

  • H.L. Mencken, Nietzsche and the Culture War

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 11th 2020 5:48pm EDT

    Modernism arrived in the United States in the 1910s. The culture war between Moderns and Victorians began in the 1920s. If we were to go back to the 1920s, we would find that H.L. Mencken was unquestionably the single most important figure in defining the culture war. Who inspired H.L. Mencken’s culture war? The following […]

  • Jazz and Black Politics In the 1920s

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 11th 2020 12:58am EDT

    This is interesting. The following excerpt comes from Stanley Coben’s book Rebellion Against Victorianism: The Impetus for Cultural Change in 1920s America: “The Victorian color caste system was challenged most comprehensively during the 1920s by Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois. Despite their sound ideas and vigorous efforts, neither man accomplished much to raise the […]

  • Titans of Industry

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 10th 2020 3:28pm EDT

    Speaking of the Upswing, I have been enjoying this America in Color series from the Smithsonian Channel, which dovetails nicely with what I have been reading about how American capitalism evolved and became slightly less cutthroat between the Gilded Age and the Great Depression. The Rockefeller Sanity Commission, for example, began the campaign that eradicated […]

  • The Upswing

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 10th 2020 2:56pm EDT

    Impeccable timing. I saw Robert Putnam’s new book The Upswing on how America rebuilt its lost social capital which bottomed out in the Gilded Age in the bookstore last night. While I obviously haven’t read the book yet, I am sure Putnam’s book is about what Peter Turchin has described as “Age of Discord I” […]

  • Civilization in the United States

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 9th 2020 2:08pm EDT

    In Civilization in the United States (1921), Harold E. Stearns and the Moderns summed up their indictment of American culture. The following excerpt comes from Nathan Miller’s New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America: “A Harvard graduate and contributor to intellectual journals, the thirty-year-old Stearns was, in the spring of 1921, […]

  • H.L. Mencken, The Scopes Monkey Trial and the Culture War

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 9th 2020 10:58am EDT

    H.L. Mencken was a journalist, an atheist, a libertarian and a Nietzschean. He shared Nietzsche and the Modernists contempt for the masses. No one in the 1920s had a greater negative impact on shaping the values and beliefs of young Losters in college rebelling against their Victorian parents than Mencken. The following excerpt comes from […]

  • The New Era

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 8th 2020 4:04pm EDT

    As I have argued, Modern America emerged in the 1920s. The Victorian consensus on identity, culture and morality began its long term decline in this period when the Losters rebelled against their parents after World War I. The rifts that began to open up in the 1920s were temporarily overshadowed by the mirage of unity […]

  • Late Victorian Women’s Fashion

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 8th 2020 2:25pm EDT

    Queen Victoria died in 1901. Technically, we are looking at women’s fashion in the Edwardian era to put this shift in perspective. King Edward VII died in 1910 and was succeeded by King George V. Victorian culture ended around 1914 at the start of World War I. Women dressed much more modestly before the big […]

  • The New Woman and 1920s Fashion

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 8th 2020 11:56am EDT

    As we have seen, the “New Woman” who smoked Torches of Freedom was a literary creation of Modernism that originated in Henrik Ibsen’s play The Doll House (1879) and was popularized by Henry James in his novels in the late 19th century. In America, the New Woman became known as the Flapper in the 1920s. […]

  • The GOP and Cultural Change

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 7th 2020 11:13am EDT

    I’m struggling to pay attention to the 2020 election. I’ve tuned out and my mind is elsewhere at the moment. I would rather not wade into politics at the height of election season. I am dreading the outcome because of the potential for violence. If my analysis is correct, this country is a tinderbox full […]

  • The Hays Code

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 7th 2020 10:08am EDT

    In the 1920s, millions of Americans began watching Hollywood movies and movie theaters spread across America. Almost as soon as film developed into the preeminent art form of 20th century mass culture, some Americans began to worry that mass entertainment was corrupting morals. The following excerpt comes from Nathan Miller’s New World Coming: The 1920s […]

  • The Thirties

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 6th 2020 4:55pm EDT

    In the previous article, I briefly mentioned how the Great Depression and World War II were a gigantic detour from the logic of the new Modern values which supplanted Victorianism and put down their roots in the Roaring Twenties. The country had to unify, confront and overcome a major economic and international crisis before domestic […]

  • America Is Having a Moral Convulsion

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 6th 2020 3:33pm EDT

    David Brooks has a long new think piece at The Atlantic in which he tries to explain the social breakdown that we are witnessing: The Atlantic: “American history is driven by periodic moments of moral convulsion. The late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington noticed that these convulsions seem to hit the United States every […]

  • The Rise of Hollywood

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 5th 2020 9:55am EDT

    Editor’s Note: This is a work in progress. When did our age begin? What distinguishes Modern America from Victorian America? The transition between the two began in the 1910s, World War I was the rupture and was complete by the Roaring Twenties. The Lost Generation was the first Modern generation. On one side of this […]

  • Victorian Racial Attitudes

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 4th 2020 6:56pm EDT

    Victorian racial attitudes prevailed in White America until the 1920s and remained dominant well into Modern America when World War II transformed American racial attitudes. The following excerpt comes from Stanley Coben’s book Rebellion Against Victorianism: The Impetus for Cultural Change in 1920s America: “Victorianism in the United States was basically the culture of an […]

  • Franz Boas, Antiracism and the Rockefeller Foundation

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 4th 2020 5:23pm EDT

    In the 1910s, Big Philanthropy came into existence. The Rockefeller Foundation was founded in 1913. In the 1920s, the Rockefeller Foundation threw its largesse behind the recently founded Social Science Research Council (SSRC), which financed the work of Franz Boas and his students like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. The Rockefeller Foundation: “Charles Merriam, President […]

  • The Sun Also Rises

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 3rd 2020 2:32pm EDT

    In the 1920s, Franz Boas and his students in the social sciences challenged traditional Victorian beliefs and values in race, sexuality and gender roles in favor of cultural egalitarianism. Meanwhile in the arts and literature, Modernist poets, critics and novelists simultaneously challenged Victorian beliefs and values in manners, morals, beauty, sexuality and gender roles in […]

  • Antiracism, Social Science and the Revolt Against Victorian America

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 3rd 2020 12:40pm EDT

    In the 1910s, Modernism arrived in America. The first Modernists established enclaves in Chicago and Greenwich Village in New York City. Most of the Chicago group ended up moving to Greenwich Village in the years before World War I. In America’s first truly bohemian enclave, anarchists and socialists mixed with progressive liberals and the Modernist […]

  • Victorian America

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 2nd 2020 2:23pm EDT

    In order to better understand the values and beliefs of Modern America, the culture of 20th century America, lets take a look back at its predecessor, Victorian America. Towards a Definition of American Modernism: “To locate the inner dynamics of Modernism and to see how it came into being, it is necessary to return briefly […]

  • The Second Klan and Modernism

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 2nd 2020 10:44am EDT

    In the 1920s, the Second Klan was on the other side of the culture war between Victorians and Moderns that I have been describing in recent weeks. In fact, the rise of the Second Klan was more about national identity and this cultural and moral breakdown than it was about race. The Second Klan appealed […]

  • Towards a Definition of American Modernism

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 1st 2020 5:07pm EDT

    This is an excellent article. It lays out how the Victorian culture of the 19th century had divided the world into sharp hierarchies and spheres – in race, sex, class, gender roles, civilization – and how the Modernist culture of the 20th century violently reacted against its predecessor and set about dismantling all of those […]