Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire 0X20 1TW
Copyright 2000 by Christine Stansell
Preface 2010 by Christine Stansell
All Rights Reserved
First edition, 2000
First Princeton edition, with a new preface, 2010
ISBN; 978-0-691-14283-8
press.princeton.edu
eISBN: 978-1-400-83366-5
R0
Preface to the 2009 Edition
American Moderns is the story of a group of artists, radicals, and intellectuals between 1900 and 1920, loosely knit together by a tremendous faith in the radical possibilities of the new century. From the midst of New York City, the countrys most heterogeneous, culturally dynamic metropolis, they sought to make their hopes tangible in the bohemia community they created and promotedin journalism, fiction, and theateras a harbinger of a renaissance in American art and life. Across the country, people aspiring to urbanity, sophistication, and a broad understanding of the nations problems took their cues from New York bohemians, eager to import the possibilities of the new into their own lives.
The optimism of the era was general: it pervaded any number of momentous developments in the first two decades of the century. Revolutionary technologies (electricity), improved communications (telephones and automobile and airplane travel), and cultural marvels (moving pictures) made it plausible to look on this as an epoch of greater ease and pleasure. Major changes in the makeup of electoral politics pointed to a more vigorous democracy. Theodore Roosevelt, followed by Woodrow Wilson, transformed the presidency from the weak branch of government it had been in the late nineteenth century to a powerful, activist office. Immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe boomed; radical movements flourished; Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs won a million votes in the election of 1912, when Roosevelt also ran as the third-party Progressive candidate. Propelled by a broad-based, heterogeneous campaign, women finally won the right to vote. African Americans organized the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. And finally, the United States entered the European war with the intent of making the world safe for democracy.
These developments all occupy separate and important places in historical scholarship. Yet the period itself remains ill-defined, given cursory treatment as either the tail end of the Progressive period or the run-up to the 1920s. The United States eighteen months of involvement in World War I and its low number of casualties were not enough to make the Great War the centerpiece of the era as it is in Europe. Culturally, we know there was a major shift from a Victorian worldview to a sensibility that was recognizably moderna key word of these years. But what actually happened, and how it happened, and the relationship of cultural transformation to the tumultuous politics are little understood. American Moderns, then, investigates one powerful commonalty, the attempt to create a specifically American modernity. Bohemia was the self-designation of those who appointed themselves the custodians of the new for the nation.
Looking back across the catastrophes of the twentieth century, it may be hard to imagine that intelligent people once thought that it was all going to be wonderful. The early moderns buoyant belief that their way of life could lead the way to peaceful revolution seems as antiquated as a Model-T. Yet its the very strangeness of their sensibilitythe pastness of this modern pastthat makes it such an interesting historical moment. Even as the corpses were piling up on the Western Front, American bohemians held on to a bounding faith in the world-changing efficacy of radical energies, the jazzy enthusiasm that European artists and intellectuals too had once shared but jettisoned when the war broke out.
The Americans were not naive: steeped in socialist and anarchist doctrine, they saw the grinding misery of the class system. Their involvement in labor battles near and farin Lawrence, Massachusetts, in Ludlow, Coloradorepresented some of their most efficacious and admirable political acts. Nonetheless, they treated America as potentially receptive to radical anticapitalist ideas. In writing about and dramatizing the lives of workers, the immigrant poor, and plebeian radicals, they believed they were building a bridge between the classes, stirring potent democratic sympathies in a middle-class audience made newly aware. They were the first to construe the writer as activist, transporting the nineteenth-century Romantic image of the writer-as-revolutionary from Europe to the United States. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Communist Party would try to reunite middle-class democrats and radical workers around the dogmas of world-changing Marxism. But in the 1910s, a more fluid radicalism reigned.
Most studies of bohemias have found that women were sidekicksminor characters, in Joyce Johnsons mordant description of the Beat Generation. When I set out to write American Moderns, it made sense to expect some version of the same pattern. But these New Yorkers turned out to be strikingly different, because they so often gave feminism pride of place in their longed-for democratic revival. Unmoored from social convention and loyalties to traditional family roles, bohemians heralded the newest of New Women as heroines of a desirable modernity. The determination to end misunderstanding and inequality between men and women was partner to the equally intense desire to bridge the class divide.
Feminism in these years was much more than the vote; it represented psychological and sexual freedom, a transformation of the self that would precede and contribute to the attainment of full political rights. If women could believe they were free, if they could behave as if they were free, then they would be freecitizens, workers, lovers, rebels, and artists, leading the way into the dawn of the human race, a beloved phrase of theirs. This faith in womens power to undo sexual oppression by changing themselves would crop up again and again in the twentieth century, the assumption that individuality and lifestyle could bring about emancipation. What is striking about the early twentieth century, though, and what makes it more than a precursor for clichs of womens empowerment, is that these ideals of a fully expressive female individual ran so much against the grain of mainstream culture. It took grit, bravado, and ingenuity for a young woman to fashion a life different from her mothers.
On the immigrant Lower East Side, Russian-born radicals, too, put to use the ideals of New Womanhood. Some found their way to bohemia, via political collaborations in the birth control movement and the tremendous mobilization for suffrage. The language of free love circulated widely among radicals in Europeespecially the anarchistsand the value feminists placed on womens economic independence and paid work offered elements of self-definition that ambitious young working-class women seized on. Feminists of the 1910s were involved in the struggles of workingwomen, and for the first time working-class women were drawn to American feminism.
