|  "The Twenties" by Frederick Hoffman
Hoffman Ch.4 “Forms of Traditionalism”
I. Using the American Past: “New England served, more often than not, as the scapegoat of their abuse when American critics of the 1920’s attended at all to the past: Puritanism and the transcendentalists, and frequently Emerson.” (Hoffman 144).
a. John Dewey wrote about the future as a time “when the consciousness of science if fully impregnated with the consciousness of human value. There was more than a hint of utopianism in this; the actual present, usable past, and the definable future were combined to produce a liberal metaphor of linear progress ” (Hoffman 145) Science is viewed as a powerful force that will revolutionize society, and science is always seen as progressive.
b. “Many critics sought to redress a historical balance, to break the barrier of chronology and to use criteria of ‘neglected greatness,’ ‘genuine value as opposed to historical place,’ and ‘usefulness for our own time’”. World War I at least temporarily put the younger writers on their guard with respect to superficial readings of the American tradition. The realist and naturalist development, which antedated the war by several decades, had prepared the way for a general trend toward value reduction in the 1920’s.” (Hoff 146)
c. “Perhaps one of the most important reactions-and the most difficult to explain- was the hatred of the American nineteenth century. Some writers were convinced that a pre-institutional life, which antedated the destructive growth of industrial America, was a lost and all but irrecoverable ideal.” America was being repressed by destructive forces such as Puritanism, and Industrialism, and artists expressed their concern for the loss of primitive self.
II. Emerson, Whitman, and the Silhouette of Sweeney: “For the most part it was the conservatives who insisted that the real measure of American culture was its past. They were also the first to regret the decline in influence exerted by the past upon the younger generation.” (Hoff 148)
a. Interest in Emerson, Thoreau, and transcendentalism increased in the 1920’s. “The major objective was to find some use for the past, and for many Emerson was scarcely usable and hardly acceptable.” (Hoff 149)
b. “In many ways Walt Whitman escaped the decade’s general censure of the past. For one thing, he was himself seen as a rebel against tradition, and he had experimented in new ways of speaking; for another, his appeals for a native literary tradition, a lyrical celebration of these ‘United States,’ offered a challenge that was not ignored. He was a ‘modern’ in ways that Emerson could not be described as being.” (Hoff 149). “Whitman was a very special case in the American tradition. He seemed closer to the 1920s than Emerson, and his work seemed less implausible, more assimilable.
c. “While the ‘institution’ of American studies began in the decade, there was a strong tide of feeling against accepted traditional values.” (Hoff 151). “Perhaps the greatest barrier to a proper evaluation of America’s past in the 1920s was the general spirit of skepticism concerning the worth of any past. Writers suspected that American culture had suffered from various kinds of disease, or they claimed that critics had in the past misled and misinformed their readers concerning the reality of American life.” (Hoff 152). “For Parrington the Puritans were not so much the originators of a malaise of which men and women of the 1920s were trying to cure themselves as an authoritarian, autocratic people, who needed to be properly placed in the real American tradition.” (Hoff 155).
d. “American culture feel short of achieving the ideal-went on to examine the past with the aim of discovering reasons for the failure.” (Hoff 156)
III. Impressionistic Versions of American History: We need to understand America’s past to understand our present and predict our future.
a. “All Gertrude Stein’s views of writing and the arts were closely associated with a theory of time. Her major assumptions were that generations are the same; that generations are different in what they experience and in the nature of experiencing.” (Hoff 157)
b. “As Williams sees the American past, the major superior evil was Puritanism: its view of America as place was from the beginning abstract and theological. The Puritan stupidity was demonstrated in the treatment in the treatment of witches; in the Salem witch trials the Puritan failure to understand the most elementary human facts was abundantly proved.” (Hoff 163)
IV. Humanism: The “Classical” Past: “The Humanists shared several views in their survey of morality and taste in the 1920s: that the most important part of the American past was New England Puritanism.” (Hoff 165)
a. “They were much concerned over the presence and the exercise of a moral will, and the Puritan will most nearly represented it in the American tradition.” (Hoff 166). “To the extent that Humanists did affect the dominating literature of the decade, it was to increase the interest of writers in those things the Humanists most bitterly opposed.” (Hoff 172).
V. The “Southern” Past: “The Agrarians, like the Humanists, opposed the progress of industrialism, together with its liberal humanitarian gospels of glorification of science practically realized and applied. Unlike the Humanists, they did not set up a formal past dissociated from region or specific place.” (Hoff 173)
a. “The most important Southern poets were torn between deep emotional attachment to a traditional object and a naturalistic tendency to reduce it to brute and pitiful fact.” (Hoff 177)
VI. The Text: Willa Cather’s Two Worlds: “Some human pattern must rise from this union of Old World manner and New World necessity.” (Hoff 182)
a. “From her reflections upon the moral and religious significance of the pioneer scene, Miss Cather suggests her ideal pattern of morality and decorum.” (Hoff 183). “Like other forms of traditionalism in the decade, Miss Cather’s was motivated by a firm conviction concerning the world as she saw it then, and it was shaped as she acted upon her conviction. Of all the forms of traditionism, hers was the most apparently, and illusorily, precise and the most unfamiliar to those who naively and excitedly answered the challenge of immediacy.” (Hoff 190).
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