13.1 Postwar Social Changes

Read the Following Section and answer the questions that follow. 
Postwar Social Changes
The catastrophe of World War I shattered the sense of optimism that had grown in the West since the Enlightenment. Despair gripped survivors on both sides as they added up the staggering costs of the war. It seemed as though a whole generation of young men had been lost on the battlefields. In reaction, the society and culture of Europe, the United States, and many other parts of the world experienced rapid changes.

Changes in Society After World War I
During the 1920s, new technologies helped create a mass culture shared by millions in the world’s developed countries. Affordable cars, improved telephones, and new forms of media such as motion
pictures and radio brought people around the world closer together than ever before.

The Roaring Twenties 
In the 1920s, many radios tuned into the new sounds of jazz. In fact, the 1920s are often called the
Jazz Age. African American musicians combined Western harmonies with African rhythms to create jazz. Jazz musicians, like trumpeter Louis Armstrong and pianist Duke Ellington, took simple melodies and improvised endless subtle variations in rhythm and beat. They produced original music, and people loved it. Much of today’s popular music has been influenced by jazz.
While Europe recovered from the war, the United States experienced a boom time. Europeans embraced American popular culture, with its greater freedom and willingness to experiment. The nightclub and the sounds of jazz were symbols of that freedom.
After the war, rebellious young people, disillusioned by the war, rejected the moral values and rules of the Victorian Age and chased after excitement. One symbol of rebellious Jazz Age youth was the liberated young woman called the flapper. The first flappers were American, but their European sisters soon adopted the fashion. Flappers rejected old ways in favor of new, exciting freedom.

Women’s Lives 
Flappers were highly visible, but they were a small minority. Most women saw limited progress in the postwar period. During the war, women held a wide range of jobs. Although most women left those jobs when the war ended, their war work helped them win the vote in many Western countries. A few women were elected to public office, such as Texas governor Miriam Ferguson or Lady Nancy Astor, 
the first woman to serve in the British Parliament.
By the 1920s, labor-saving devices had become common in middle-class homes. Washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and canned foods lightened the burden of household chores. Some women then sought work outside the home or did volunteer work to help the less fortunate.
In the new atmosphere of emancipation, women pursued careers in many areas—from sports to the arts. Women golfers, tennis players, swimmers, and pilots set new records. Women worked as newspaper reporters, published bestselling novels, and won recognition as artists.
Most professions, though, were still dominated by men.

Reactions to the Jazz Age 
Not everyone approved of the freewheeling lifestyle of the Jazz Age. For example, many Americans supported Prohibition, a ban on the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. For almost 90 years, social activists had waged an intense campaign against the abuse of alcohol. Finally, they gained enough support to get the Eighteenth, or Prohibition, Amendment ratified in 1919. Prohibition
was meant to keep people from the negative effects of drinking. Instead, it caused an explosion of organized crime and speakeasies, or illegal bars. The Amendment was repealed in 1933.
In the United States in the early 1900s, a Christian fundamentalist
movement swept rural areas. Fundamentalists support traditional Christian ideas about Jesus and believe that all of the events described in the Bible are literally true. Popular fundamentalist
preachers traveled around the country holding inspirational revival meetings. Some used the new technology of radio to spread their message.
In 1925, a biology teacher in Tennessee named John T. Scopes was tried for teaching evolution in his classroom. His action broke a law that barred any teaching that went against the Bible’s version of creation. The teacher was found guilty in the well-publicized Scopes trial, but many fundamentalists believed that the proceedings had hurt their cause.

The New Literature
In the 1920s, war novels, poetry, plays, and memoirs flowed off the presses. All Quiet on the Western Front by German novelist Erich Remarque, and other works like it, exposed the grim horrors of modern warfare. These works reflected a powerful disgust with war.

A Loss of Faith 
To many postwar writers, the war symbolized the moral breakdown of Western civilization. In 1922, the English poet T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land. This long poem portrays the modern world as spiritually empty and barren. In The Sun Also Rises, the American novelist Ernest Hemingway shows the rootless wanderings of young people who lack deep convictions. “I did not care what it was all about,”
says the narrator. “All I wanted to know was how to live in it.” Many of these authors, including Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, left the United States and moved to Paris. Gertrude Stein, an American writer living in Paris, called them the “lost generation.” Her label caught on. It referred to Stein’s literary friends, and their generation as a whole. 

Literature of the Inner Mind 
Some writers experimented with stream of consciousness. In this technique, a writer appears to present a character’s random thoughts and feelings without imposing any logic or order. In the novel Mrs. Dalloway, British novelist Virginia Woolf used stream-of-consciousness to explore the thoughts of people going through the ordinary actions of their everyday lives. In Finnegans Wake, the Irish
novelist James Joyce explored the inner mind of a hero who remains sound asleep throughout the novel.

The Harlem Renaissance 
Also during the 1920s, an African American cultural awakening called the Harlem Renaissance began in Harlem, a neighborhood in New York City that was home to many African Americans.
African American writers and artists expressed their pride in their unique culture. James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston explored the African American experience in their novels and essays. The poets Claude McKay and Langston Hughes experimented with new styles, while Countee Cullen adapted traditional poetic forms to new content. How did postwar authors show disillusionment with prewar institutions?

New Scientific Theories
It was not only the war that fostered a sense of uncertainty. New scientific discoveries challenged long-held ideas about the nature of the world. Discoveries made in the late 1800s and early 1900s showed that the atom was more complex than anyone suspected.

Marie Curie and Radioactivity 
In the early 1900s, the Polish-born French scientist Marie Curie and others found that the atoms of certain elements, such as radium and uranium, spontaneously release charged particles. As scientists studied radioactivity further, they discovered that it can change atoms of one element into atoms of another. Such findings proved that atoms are not solid and indivisible.

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity 
In 1905 and 1916, the German-born physicist Albert Einstein introduced his theories of relativity. Einstein
argued that measurements of space and time are not absolute but are determined by the relative position of the observer. Einstein’s ideas raised questions about Newtonian science, which compared the universe to a machine operating according to absolute laws. 
In 1934, building on Curie’s and Einstein’s theories, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi and other scientists around the world discovered atomic fission, or the splitting of the nuclei of atoms in two. This splitting produces a huge burst of energy. In the 1940s, Fermi (now an American), along
with fellow American physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, would use this discovery to create the devastating atomic bomb.
In the postwar years, many scientists came to accept the theories of relativity. To the general public, however, Einstein’s ideas were difficult to understand. They seemed to further reinforce the unsettling sense of a universe whirling beyond the understanding of human reason.

Fleming Discovers Penicillin 
In 1928, the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming made a different type of scientific discovery. He accidentally discovered a type of nontoxic mold that kills bacteria, which he called “penicillin.” Later, other scientists used Fleming’s work to develop antibiotics, which are now used all over the world to treat infections.

Freud Probes the Mind 
The Austrian physician Sigmund Freud (froyd) also challenged faith in reason. He suggested that the subconscious mind drives much of human behavior. Freud said that learned social values such as morality and reason help people to repress, or check, powerful urges. However an individual feels constant tension between repressed drives and social training. This tension, argued Freud, may
cause psychological or physical illness. Freud pioneered psychoanalysis, a method of studying how the mind works and treating mental disorders. Although many of his theories have been discredited, Freud’s ideas have had an extraordinary impact far beyond medicine.

Modern Art and Architecture
In the early 1900s, many Western artists rejected traditional styles. Instead of trying to reproduce the real world, they explored other dimensions of color, line, and shape. Painters like Henri Matisse (ma TEES) utilized bold, wild strokes of color and odd distortions to produce works of strong emotion. He and fellow artists outraged the public and were dubbed fauves (fohv), or wild beasts, by critics.

New Directions in Painting 
While Matisse continued in the fauvist style, other artists explored styles based on new ideas. Before World War I, the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and the French artist Georges Braque (brak) created a revolutionary new style called cubism. Cubists painted three-dimensional objects as complex patterns of angles and planes as if they were composed of fragmented parts.

Later, the Russian Vasily Kandinsky and the Swiss Paul Klee moved even further away from representing reality. Their artwork was abstract, composed only of lines, colors, and shapes, sometimes with no recognizable subject matter at all.
During and after the war, the Dada movement burst onto the art world. Dadaists rejected all traditional conventions and believed that there was no sense or truth in the world. Paintings and sculptures by Jean Arp and Max Ernst were intended to shock and disturb viewers. Other dadaist artists
created collages, photomontages, or sculptures made of objects they found abandoned or thrown away.
Cubism and Dada both helped to inspire surrealism, a movement that attempted to portray the workings of the unconscious mind. Surrealism rejected rational thought, which had produced the horrors of World War I, in favor of irrational or unconscious ideas. The Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali used images of melting clocks and burning giraffes to suggest the chaotic dream state described by Freud.

New Styles of Architecture 
Architects, too, rejected classical traditions and developed new styles to match a new world. The famous Bauhaus school in Germany influenced architecture by blending science and technology with design.
Bauhaus buildings feature glass, steel, and concrete but have little ornamentation. The American architect Frank Lloyd Wright held that the function of a building should determine its form. He used materials and forms that fit a building’s environment.

Looking Ahead
Stunned by the trauma of World War I, many people sought to change the way they thought and acted during the turbulent 1920s. As nations recovered from the war, people began to feel hope rising out of their disillusionment. But soon, the “lost generation” would face a new crisis—this one economic—that would revive many old problems and spark new conflicts.

(define) flapper

(define) Prohibition

(define) speakeasies

(define) Harlem Renaissance

(define) psychoanalysis

(define) abstract

(define) Dada

(define) Surrealism

(checkpoint) Describe the Jazz Age and some of the reactions to it.

(checkpoint) How did postwar authors show disillusionment with prewar institutions?

(checkpoint) What effect did World War I have on art movements in the 1920s?

(assessment) How did flappers symbolize changes in Western society during the 1920s?

(assessment) How did the ideas of Einstein and Freud contribute to a sense of uncertainty?

(assessment) Choose one postwar writer and one postwar artist. Explain how the work of each reflected
a new view of the world.

(objectives) Analyze how Western society changed after World War I.

(objectives) Describe the literary and artistic trends that emerged in the 1920s.

(objectives) List several advances in modern scientific thought.

(focus question) What changes did Western society and culture experience after World War I?