Ch.7 Outline Hoffman's "The Twenties"

"The Twenties" by Frederick HoffmanHoffman Ch. 7: "Critiques of the Middle Class"

I. The Booboisie
a. "The association with Nietzsche is best seen in the light of Mencken's tow major activities: the formation of an anti-democratic philosophy of government and an unceasing attack upon the stupidities of the ‘Herdenmoral'. Many Americans thought of Nietzsche as a hard-hitting, sharp shooting enemy of ‘boob-ocracy'...current in American politics and morals in the 1920s." (Hoff 345)
b. "Law, custom, and concepts of right and wrong are all designed to make the average man safe and to reduce the superior man to his own level. For his moral security, democratic man sets up the Puritan as his dictator of taste and decency. The contradictions between virtue announced and vice committed, the somberly stupid affection for the law, the one-hundred-percent-ism of the American Legion and the Ku Klux Klan, the naïve pride in locality and region, the unwitting irony of middle-class behavior, the resistant to novelty and enlightenment..."(Hoff 347)
c. "The politicians were more evidently stupid than the clergy because their errors of taste and intelligence were more glaringly public. The favorite target was the silent sage of the White House, Calvin Coolidge." (Hoff 350) "Mencken, in his reflections on the law as an image of democratic social manners, selected the Prohibition amendment as the greatest of all blunders committed by the ‘virtuosi of virtue'." (Hoff 351)

II. Philistine and Puritan
a. "Like many another term in our intellectual history, Puritanism was used in special sense in the American twenties. The Puritan had been associated with grim, stark, colonial reality; he was a pre-scientific personality, a man ignorant and rudely affirmative, who forced hid religion and its strait-laced moral code upon a growing country." (Hoff 355)
b. "Repression became the American illness. With little or no thought of personal responsibility-that is, the ever-present conflict between ego and id, which Freud insists, antedates any precise formulation of conventions." (Hoff 357). "Criticism of Puritan society assumed many forms, but the majority of it insisted on a clear cut division between natural desires and the social forces acting on every hand to frustrate them. The attack upon society as an agent of repression was most vigorous in the matter or sexual morality " (Hoff 358)
c. "The intelligentsia for the most part belonged economically to the middle class; culturally they took pride in repudiating it. The vigor of the anti-bourgeoisie criticism in the 1920s came, not from the proletarian critics, but from the middle class men and women who were disgusted with their cultural heritage and viewed the guardians of middle-class morality and culture as hopelessly stupid and comical parodies of human nature." (Hoff 359)
d. "What distressed their critics more than anything else was the religious intensity in which they exploited what had originally been chiefly and economic convenience. The bourgeoisie were condemned, not for having made money, but for having turned the making of it into a religion and a morality. The criticism of the middle class was almost wholly an urban thing; the critics were augmented from time to time by numbers of refugees from the Midwest." (Hoff 360)

III. The Midwest as Metaphor
a. "The Middle West had become a metaphor of abuse; it was on the one hand a rural metaphor, of farms, villages, and small towns; on the other, a middle-class metaphor, of conventions, piety and hypocrisy, tastelessness and spiritual poverty." (Hoff 369). All the criticisms of the middle class seemed especially adaptable to geographical and cultural facts of the ‘middle border' provincial life." (Hoff 370)

IV. The Liberals and the Public Life of the Middle Class
a. "From all the evidence of its journals, the power and influence of American liberalism suffered a serious decline in the years following the war. In the first twenty years of the century the progressives were a strong and effective political and moral force." (Hoff 377). "If men were capable of exercising their minds, of keeping their passions within reasonable bounds, and of resisting appeals to prejudices, they would eventually make their own good society." (Hoff 380)
b. "The great philosophic mentor of American liberalism in the twentieth century was John Dewey. Dewey advised against an inflexible use of authority, spoke for an intelligent use of scientific method." (Hoff 381)

V. The Anarchist and the Radical Hope
a. "In the years before 1917 there were several radical strains, which complemented one another with very little conflict. The anarchist movement had its roots, at least part in, the American tradition of individualism, but it also indebted to foreign ideological interpretations, brought over by emigrants from Russia and Italy." (Hoff 390)
b. "The Red scare helped to draw the lines sharply between active political radicals and speculative radicals, whose interests were not altogether bound up with the fate of labor or the future of the Communist party." (Hoff 396)

VI. Sacco and Vanzetti as Leftist Heroes
a. "Only one event of the 1920s succeeded in arousing intellectuals of every kind of political loyalty: the arrest, trial, and execution of two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. (Hoff 400). ‘During their seven years of imprisonment Sacco and Vanzetti became the heroes of radicals all over the world, the dramatic center of vigorous and desperate efforts to fight the forces ultimately responsible for the official crimes against their persons." (Hoff 403) The dramatic urgency and simplicity of the case appealed to the Communists and fellow travelers who saw political doctrine in dramatic terms." (Hoff 407)

VII. The Text: Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt
a. "In his novels of the 1920s, Sinclair Lewis offered every available perspective upon the middle class. He searched indefatigably for every kind of venality, corruption, stupidity, and demagoguery, every tendency toward fascism in middle-class society..."(Hoff 408)