Antiracism, Social Science and the Revolt Against Victorian America

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 avant-garde and spawned the cultural liberalism of the Modern Left.

President Woodrow Wilson plunged America into World War I and in the process discredited the Victorian establishment. The young writers of the Lost Generation – F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and others – rebelled against Victorian values and embraced Modernism in the 1920s. Most of this group eventually ended up living in exile in France or Britain while writing poetry or literature for an American audience in the 1920s. American youth rebelled against the Victorian values of their parents in the 1920s and began to embrace Modernism whether it trickled down to them through exposure to jazz, commercial advertising, the new poetry and literature or Hollywood movies all of which eroded the old values and promoted a more expressivist ethos. In other words, a trickle of new ideas coming in from Europe in the 1910s became a flood in the 1920s.

It was in this context of a much wider Modernist revolt against Victorianism in the 1920s that the triumph of “antiracism” in America must be seen. Victorian ideas about racial hierarchies were being challenged by Modernists along with Victorian beliefs about virtually everything and particularly about sexuality. Whereas the Victorians had believed in racial hierarchy, the repression of sexuality and sharply distinguished between the “civilized” and “savage,” Moderns leveled the racial hierarchy, promoted sexual liberation as a cure for psychological repression and embraced and celebrated “primitive” cultures. The rejection of racial science in the 1920s was “scientific,” of course, even though the decisive factor was the overall cultural atmosphere rather than the discovery of any new evidence.

The following excerpt comes from Rebellion Against Victorianism: The Impetus for Cultural Change in 1920s America:

“Anthropologists, led by students of Franz Boas, refined the concept of culture in the 1920s and applied it to new topics and geographical areas. The two most widely read books in this literature were written by Boas’s student Margaret Mead. Both books described the development of children in technologically primitive South Pacific cultures and compared the maturation of these children with that of children in middle-class American families. Mead’s pioneering studies found the two primitive cultures superior to middle-class American culture in the vital areas of female and male child rearing.”

Scientific studies in cultural anthropology have shown that … actually, primitive cultures are better than civilized Western culture. In other words, the cultural egalitarianism of Modernism is eroding the old cultural hierarchies of Victorianism. Actually, the “primitive” is better.