Bibliography

Whitley, Peggy. "1920-1929." American Cultural History. Lone Star College-Kingwood    Library, 1999. Web. 7 Feb. 2011This Web site was written and designed by Peggy Whitley.  Ms. Whitley is a renowned historian who specializes in the post-world war i era, specifically the 1920s.  The purpose of this website is to inform people of the culture of the 1920s, and provide a baseline of knowledge from which you can expand.  The value of this source lies in its concise wording- clearly stating the influential facts/people of the 1920s and their effect.  The limitation lies in its brevity as well.  The lack of detail makes this source less informative and gives less context to the time.  

"Lecture 8: The Age of Anxiety: Europe in the 1920s (1)." The History Guide. Web. 03 May 2012. <http://www.historyguide.org/europe/lecture8.html>.This site was written by Steven Kreis.  Steven Kreis has extensive knowledge and education, earning his Ph.D. University of Missouri-Columbia (History, 1990), his M.A. University of Missouri-Columbia (History, 1984), as well as his B.A. Boston University (Philosophy and Political Science, 1977.  The purpose of the site is to give an informative lecture on the Age of Anxiety, and the different factors which influenced it.  The value of the source lies in the reliability of the author as well as the incredible source of information- clear and concise- but still informative.  The limitation lies in the bias which the author has most likely developed through his years of research.  

Nazis

Eugenic: The Nazis believed in purifying Germany to become a pure Aryan race.  They wanted to breed the most physically fit, academically gifted, and those who conformed to the Aryan requirements.  Nazis wanted to create a higher race.  They prosecuted those who did not fit the "requirements" of superiority.  


Führerprinzip (Leader Principle)/ Belief in the leader: responsibility up the ranks, and authority down the ranks.  The Nazis believed strongly in rank and the responsibility which a man has to his country.  Nazi Germany was built upon a loyalty to the Führer and the responsibility of the soldier to his country, and his superiors.  


Anti- ______ist: Anti-Semitist, Anti-Marxist, Anti-Communist, Anti- Bolshevist (The Nazis stood against a lot of political movements, opposing an enormous amount of people.) Hitler used the downfalls of others, he used other's failures to promote himself and his party.   

Mussolini

Mussolini understood that there was a need for a complete revolution of values to replace those of decadent and bankrupt bourgeois civilization. These values were not socialist, they were not communist and they certainly were not liberal. Mussolini sought to move beyond contemporary political ideologies and his solution was fascism.  Mussolini apposed virtually all previous forms of government and sought to form his own, which gave him complete power.  


Fascism stressed charismatic leadership, a dynamic leadership which would bring Italy away from the humiliation it had suffered since the late 19th century.  Mussolini knew how to communicate with the masses and used popular demands to promote fascism.  He had undeniable charisma, he knew how to simplify things for the citizens, added to his quick and articulate mind he became very popular in Italy.   


 Mussolini's fascism attempted to remove class antagonisms through nationalism and corporatism. The economy was organized and all producers -- from peasants and factory workers to intellectuals and industrialists -- were situated into twenty-two corporations to improve productivity and avoid industrial disputes.  Mussolini sought this approach rather than the Marxist approach of the need for a proletariat uprising.  Mussolini believed that this approach would help him successfully remove the class antagonism.  

Post WWI Political Outlooks

After the Great War, people throughout Europe were looking for a form of government which would solve their problems.  Many thinkers formed new opinions about how a government should be run, and the manner in which a country, a people were to survive.  Italian Fascism was not a consistent doctrine but rather a fusion of different ideas. It was successful, temporarily at least, because Italy was near total collapse.  In Spain, Francisco Franco was forming a totalitarian government, and in Germany Hitler rose to power.  The reason for these drastic governmental changes is due to the many problems that WWI had left behind, as well as the rebellion against previously instituted governments.  Mussolini decided to take various opinions and standpoints to form a new government, one which he promised his citizens, would solve all their problems.  Franco promised reprieve from the disorder which had been characteristic of the previous government.  Hitler promised economic prosperity, and punishment to those who had caused their downfall.  The War forced people to reevaluate the organization of their government.  New ideas were formed, new leaders rose up, speaking of theories and plans to fix what had been wrong before.  The great war was a large factor in the development of the new political ideas.

1920s

Culture in the 1920s

According to one journalist in 1920, Americans were “weary of being noble” after a decade of intense progressive reform, morality, and self-righteousness. Due to new technology available allowing movies to have both sound an color, the movie industry free fast.  IN 1919, laws were passed, institution Prohibition of the consumption and even possession of alcohol, making it illegal.  Due to these laws, the 1920s provided some of the most well known gangsters a means to create wealth by opening illegal bars.  The most well known gangster of the time was Al Capone.  Also this period saw the growth of the Ku Klux Klan and the growth of the Vigilante groups who took the law into their own hands and lynched black victims without any trial.  After World War I, the birth of commercial radio helped the radio to become a significant provider of news and entertainment.  The 1920s saw the growth of popular recreation, in part because of higher wages and increased leisure time.  Professional sports gained a new popularity, as well. Baseball star Babe Ruth enjoyed massive fame, as did boxers such as Jack Dempsey. College sports rose to national attention, as demonstrated by the fame of the Notre Dame football team’s “four horsemen.” The 1920s also saw the emergence of nonsporting national heroes like Charles Lindbergh, who made the first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic in May 1927.

Art: Marcel Duchamp


Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) has had a huge impact on twentieth-century art.  By World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists as "retinal" art, intended only to please the eye.  Instead, Duchamp wanted, he said, "to put art back in the service of the mind."  Duchamp was born in Normandy in northern France.  His initial foray into modern art followed the trends of his contemporaries, with his first paintings in the mode of Cézanne and the Impressionists, while after 1910 his work reflects a shift toward Cubism.   One of his most important works, Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) reflects Duchamp's ambivalent relationship with Cubism.  Duchamp received a lot of criticism for his controversial artwork.  Subverting traditional or accepted modes of artistic production with irony and satire is a hallmark of Duchamp's legendary career.  His most striking, iconoclastic gesture, the readymade, is arguably the century's most influential development on artists' creative process.  Duchamp, however, did not perceive his work with readymade objects as such a radical experiment, in part because he viewed paint as an industrially made product, and hence painting as an "assisted-readymade."  He wanted to distance himself from traditional modes of painting in an effort to emphasize the conceptual value of a work of art, seducing the viewer through irony and verbal witticisms rather than relying on technical or aesthetic appeal.  The object became a work of art because the artist had decided it would be designated as such.  The mundane, mass-produced, everyday nature of these objects is precisely why Duchamp chose them (other works would include a snow shovel, a urinal, and a bottle rack).  He ensured that the fruits of modern industrial life would be a fertile resource in the production of works of art.  Satirical works such as Duchamp's readymade Fountain (1917) tested the limits of public taste and the boundary of artistic technique.  By pushing and ultimately transgressing such boundaries within the art world, Duchamp's works reflected the artist's sensibility.  His use of irony, puns, alliteration, and paradox layered the works with humor while still enabling hi to comment on the dominant political and economic systems of his time. Duchamp's iconoclasm appealed to the vehemently untraditional and bitingly critical nature of the Dada movement.  His work can easily be understood as a forerunner to this revolutionary sensibility, which actively sought to undermine the reigning values of conservatism that governed Europe and that perpetuated the devastating reality of World War I.  The reality of the war hit the art world hard, breaking all boundaries and pushing all limits.  A prolific artist, his greatest contribution to the history of art lies in his ability to question, admonish, critique, and playfully ridicule existing norms in order to transcend the status quo- he effectively sanctioned the role of the artist to do just that.  

Music: Cole Porter


Cole Porter's name derives from the surnames of his parents, Kate Cole and Sam Porter.  Cole composed songs as early as 1901 (when he was ten) with a song dedicated to his mother, a piano piece called Song of the Birds, separated into six sections with titles like The Young Ones Leaning to Sing and The Cuckoo Tells the Mother Where the Bird Is.
His first Broadway show was See America First, which was a 1916 flop despite the social luminaries in the early audiences -- a feature of hiring Bessie Marbury as theatrical producer. 
In July of 1917, he set out for Paris and war-engulfed Europe. Paris was a place Cole flourished socially and managed to be in the best of all possible worlds. He lied to the American press about his military involvement and made up stories about working with the French Foreign Legion and the French army. This allowed him to live his days and nights as a wealthy American in Paris, a socialite with climbing status, and still be considered a "war hero" back home, an 'official' story he encouraged throughout the rest of his life.
The parties during these years were elaborate and fabulous, involving people of wealthy and political classes. His parties were marked by much gay and bisexual activity, Italian nobility, cross-dressing, international musicians, and a large surplus of recreational drugs.  By 1919, Cole was spending time with the American divorcee Linda Thomas. The two became close friends quickly. Their financial status and social standing also made them ideal candidates for marriage -- as a business contract, not for passion. The fact that Linda's ex-husband was abusive and Cole was gay made the arrangement even more palatable. Linda was always one of Cole's best supporters and being married increased his chance of success, and Cole allowed Linda to keep high social status for the rest of her life. They married on December 19, 1919 and lived a happy friendship, a mostly successful public relationship, but a sexless marriage until Linda's death in 1954.

Literature: Gertrude Stein


Disgusted with the American life they saw as overly material and spiritually void, many writers during this period lived in Europe, including Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway.  Gertude Stein was an imaginative, influential writer in the 20th century and a patron of the arts. She collected post-Impressionist paintings, helping artists like Henri Mastisse and Pablo Picasso. She and her brother established a famous literary and artistic salon, hosting writers from around the world. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Stein is a book about the life of her companion.  Gertrude Stein had been writing for several years and began to publish her innovative works, Three Lives (1909), The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress (written 1906–11; published 1925), and Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms(1914). Intended to employ the techniques of abstraction and Cubism in prose, much of her work was virtually unintelligible to even educated readers.

During World War I she bought her own Ford van, and Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas served as ambulance drivers for the French. After the war, she maintained her salon (although after 1928 she spent much of the year in the village of Bilignin, and in 1937 she moved to a more stylish location in Paris) and served as both hostess and inspiration to such American expatriates as Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. (She is credited with coining the term, “the lost generation.”) She lectured in England in 1926 and published her only commercial success, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), written by Stein from Toklas's point of view.

Stein pushed boundaries even before the war but after she had seen the direct consequences from the war upon the soldiers she pushed even farther away from the mainstream.  She encouraged the production of raw art, whether it was literary or artistic.  She critiqued and guided many of the most influential artists and authors of the 20th century, helping them to develop a style that can communicate the confusion they felt.  Gertrude Stein was a groundbreaking author, she pushed both herself and others, she was an incredible influence in 20th century culture.

Architecture: Frank Lloyd Wright

Dadaism

Dadaism or Dada is a post-World War I cultural movement in visual art as well as literature (mainly poetry), theatre and graphic design. The movement was, among other things, a protest against the barbarism of the War and what Dadaists believed was an oppressive intellectual rigidity in both art and everyday society.  Its works were characterized by a deliberate irrationality and the rejection of the prevailing standards of art. It influenced later movements including Surrealism.  Dada probably began in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, and there were active dadaists in New York such as Marcel Duchamp and the Liberian art student, Beatrice Wood, who had left France at the onset of World War I. At around the same time there had been a dadaist movement in Berlin. Slightly later there were also dadaist un-communities in Hanover (Kurt Schwitters), Cologne, and Paris. In 1920, Max Ernst, Hans Arp and social activist Alfred Grunwald set up the Cologne Dada group.  But while broad reaching, the movement was also unstable: artists went on to other ideas and movements, including Surrealism, Socialist Realism and other forms of modernism.  By the dawn of World War II, many of the European Dadaists who remained had fled or been forced into exile in the United States, some died in death camps under Hitler, who personally disliked the kind of radical art that dada represented. The movement became less active as post-World War II optimism led to new movements in art and literature.

DADA doubts everything. Dada is an armadillo. Everything is Dada, too. Beware of Dada. Anti-dadaism is a disease: selfkleptomania, man’s normal condition, is DADA. But the real dadas are against DADA.

-Tristan Tzara 

Art is dead. Long live Dada.

-Walter Serner 

Freedom: Dada, Dada, Dada, crying open the constricted pains, swallowing the contrasts and all the contradictions, the grotesqueries and the illogicalities of life.

-Tristan Tzara

Frederick Nietzche

Nietzsche's thought extended a deep influence during the 20th century.  

During the last decade of Nietzsche's life and the first decade of the 20th century, his thought was particularly attractive to avant-garde artists who felt separated from society.  Here, Nietzsche's advocacy of new, healthy beginnings, and of creative artistry was appealing.  His propensity to seek explanations for commonly-accepted values and outlooks in the less-elevated realms of sheer animal instinct was crucial to Sigmund Freud's development of psychoanalysis. Later, during the 1930's, aspects of Nietzsche's thought were used by the Nazis and Italian Fascists, partly due to the encouragement of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche through her associations with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.  Nazi interpreters  assembled, quite selectively, various passages from Nietzsche's writings, which out of context, appeared to justify war, aggression and domination for the sake of nationalistic and racial self-glorification.  In the English-speaking world, Nietzsche's unfortunate association with the Nazis kept him from serious philosophical consideration until the 1950's and 60's, when landmark works such as Walter Kaufmann's, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950) and Arthur C. Danto's, Nietzsche as Philosopher (1965), paved the way for a more open-minded discussion.

Specific 20th century figures who were influenced, usually quite substantially, by Nietzsche include painters, dancers, musicians, playwrights, poets, novelists, psychologists, sociologists, literary theorists, historians, and philosophers: Alfred Adler, Georges Bataille, Martin Buber, Albert Camus, E.M. Cioran, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Isadora Duncan, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Stefan George, André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, Martin Heidegger, Gustav Mahler, André Malraux, Thomas Mann, H.L. Mencken, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jean-Paul Sartre, Max Scheler, Giovanni Segantini, George Bernard Shaw, Lev Shestov, Georg Simmel, Oswald Spengler, Richard Strauss, Paul Tillich, Ferdinand Tönnies, Mary Wigman, William Butler Yeats and Stefan Zweig.

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

Age of Anxiety

With the end of the 1920s came the beginning of the Age of Anxiety. 


People began to be preoccupied by the anxiety they felt about their existence, their culture, and their destiny rather than their superiority and their genius.  Many lost faith, lost faith in humanity, lost faith in religion, lost faith in everything they had previously known to be true.  Without religion many felt as if they were living without a purpose, this purposelessness caused suffering.  Man was liberated, no responsibility to any higher being, no need to abide to the rules of anyone else.  With this "liberation" came abandon, but with it also came loneliness, and a crushing fear.  The rejection of everything previously accepted caused unrest and uncertainty.  

Post World War I

The horror of World War I hit everybody hard, and the need to disassociate themselves with everything that had been previously true was reevaluated and a revolution of culture began.  The war was supposed to be short, and the men who participated righteous, however the war dragged on, dirty and cruel, and the men returned changed, shells of the people who they had been before.  


Promises of the honor of war were recalled with irony among the soldiers of the war.  As they lay in the trenches among the horrors of the war they could not help but notice that all was not as they had been promised.  Instead of being basked in the glory of war, they were covered in feces and the rotting flesh of horses.  They had been promised glory, they had expected greatness, but instead they were narrowly escaping death at every turn, only dumb luck separated them from the men whose bodies lay rotting in the mud.  Rats the size of domestic cats roamed the trenches, gorging themselves on the dead soldiers, and nibbling at the live soldiers while they slept.  Fleas were rampant, and because of them many soldiers suffered from Trench Fever which began as unbearable pain and a fever.  It became impossible to escape the damp, and during the winters snow would cover the battlefield and many men died from exposure or lost extremities to frost bite.  At times the rain would fill the trenches until the soldiers were submerged to their waists'.  Soldiers of World War I knew that their king and country expected them to fight to the death.  Such was the expectation of their military commanders, their political leaders and even their loved ones that there was no question that if mortal danger came, they should face it like men.  It was the only way for good to triumph over evil.  But WWI quickly became the most brutal war in history and not even the most seasoned serviceman was prepared for the scale of carnage that unfolded before him.  For many the horror proved too much.  Hundreds were unable to cope, many were driven insane and several simply ran away, the others became desensitized to death, to the horror the war presented.  The soldiers did not fight for their countries', they fought for their lives, and the lives of their fellow soldiers. 

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--

Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen 

A sense of distrust of political leaders and government officials pervaded the minds of the people who had witnessed the horror and destruction that the war brought about.  After the destruction of the war, people abandoned all previous ideals and were in need of revolutionary new ideas to replace their old ones.  A feeling of disillusionment spread across the world as people bitterly questioned everything they knew to be true.  Anything which existed before the war was reevaluated.  Any belief, any truth, anything and everything was doubted.  The brutality of man became painfully clear as 1 in 4 men lost his life in battle, and an estimated 10 to 13 million died, nearly one third being civilians Many felt lost, and a widespread acceptance of the futility of purity permeated society.  World War I gave way to a cultural revolution.  The turbulent period after World War I called for a major readjustment of art, music, culture, philosophy, politics, and views on the world.  The 1920s were a time when people launched head first into the new.  


“They were smart and sophisticated, with an air of independence about them, and so casual about their looks and clothes and manners as to be almost slapdash. I don't know if I realized as soon as I began seeing them that they represented the wave of the future, but I do know I was drawn to them. I shared their restlessness, understood their determination to free themselves of the Victorian shackles of the pre-World War I era and find out for themselves what life was all about.”


Colleen Moore 

http://www.gwpda.org/photos/coppermine/index.php

Age of Anxiety Project

Age of Anxiety Project: 

Part One: Complete Blog / Website answering Questions 1 - 4 (Due Friday April 20th - I know you are not in class - but submit work no later than Friday)

Part Two - Complete Blog / Website answering Questions 5 - 8 (Due April 27) 

Your job is to create either a Blog or a Website that gives a specific overview of the time period just following World War I. Your assignment is to show what you learn and develop a very engaging form of technology to explain what you learned. You are required to research on your own and avoid cutting and pasting information. You must generalize and summarize. You are to use a combination of your own research and the reading posted on the Moodle titled "Politics and the Age of Anxiety" - answer questions 6 - 8.

There will be a total of 9 pages or postings for this assignment. Each "Page" of your blog or website must title / heading that answers each of the questions. Do not simply title your heading as the question. The ANSWER to the questions will become the heading. Your title does not need to be a sentence - instead it can be a word or phrase that encompasses the idea. 

You must include a page that is a bibliography / evaluation page. You do not need to cite every aspect of your research, but you must have a page that is an OPVL of your BEST TWO sources that you located. Do not focus on why it was good to YOUR research, instead, focus on why they are good sources in general. 

You will be graded on the MYP criteria for all components: 

A) Knowledge:

• Do you show understanding by writing in your words with clear summaries that address the concept assigned? 
• Do you give clear examples and avoid "cutting" and pasting materials. 
• Do you use specific references and address the question asked. 

B) Concepts: 

• Do you specifically address and explain the concept of "The Age of Anxiety"? 
• Is each section / summary connect to the idea of Age of Anxiety? 

C) Skills: 

• Are you able to take your research and make meaningful summaries that address the concept and questions given?
• Do you use the media of choice in an engaging way? Are there use of images, videos, pictures, etc? 
• Do you evaluate your sources correctly? 

D) Organization and Presentation: 

• Do you follow the directions? Is your work completed on time and in the ways assigned?
• Does the Web Page or Blog follow a clear pattern of organization? Does it make sense?
• Do you have enough information to answer the questions?
  

Here are the questions each section must address: (This is what will be the basis for your entire web / blog: 

1) Why was the time following World World I such a time of change and why was WWI often referred to as the "Big Lie"? Give specifics. (The posted reading has some connection to this question) 

2) Describe and explain what made the 1920's the Age of Anxiety? (Also introduced in the reading) 

3) What were the arguments developed by the philosopher Fredrick Nietzsche? To what extent were they are direct result of World War I? (research on your own) 

4) What was Dadaism and how was it a direct outcome of WWI? (research on your own)

5) Choose one example of Art, Music, Architecture, Literature and Culture from 1920's. Describe the aspect of each and then give some specific evaluation of how these were a product of the times. (research on your own)

6) Using the article on the moodle describe some of the new political outlooks following WWI? (Give specific people, ideas, theories, etc.) 

7) Using the Moodle article - What are the three most significant ideas presented by Mussolini? 

8) (Using the posted article and your own research) Pick THREE adjectives that best describe the ideals of the Nazi party / rise of Hitler in relation to the time period. Why was the time period a particular influence on the rise of Nazis. Once you pick the three terms, give specific examples that support this. Build an argument for your terms.