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Explain some of the influences, attributes, and differences between 1920s and 1960s America. Use the text as evidence.

Explain some of the influences, attributes, and differences between 1920s and 1960s America. Use the text as evidence.

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Explain some of the influences, attributes, and differences between 1920s and 1960s America. Use the text as evidence.
Few decades have produced as many great works of art, music, or literature as the 1920s. At the decade's beginning, American culture stood in Europe's shadow. By the decade's end, Americans were leaders in the struggle to liberate the arts from older canons of taste, form, and style. It was during the 1920s that Eugene O'Neill, the country's most talented dramatist, wrote his greatest plays, and that authors William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe published their first novels. American poets of the 1920s, such as Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Edna St Vincent Millay, and Wallace Stevens experimented with new styles of punctuation, rhyme, and form. Likewise, artists like Charles Demuth, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Joseph Stella challenged the dominant realist tradition in American art and pioneered non-representational and expressionist art forms. The 1920s marked America's entry into the world of serious music. It witnessed the founding of 50 symphony orchestras and three of the country's most prominent music conservatories--Julliard, Eastman, and Curtis Institution. This decade also produced America's first great classical composers, including Aaron Copland and Charles Ives, and saw George Gershwin create a new musical forms by integrating jazz into symphonic and orchestral music. World War I had left many American intellectuals and artists disillusioned and alienated. Neither Wilsonian idealism nor Progressive reformism appealed to America's post-war writers and thinkers who believed that the crusade to end war and to make the world safe for democracy had been a senseless mistake. "Here was a new generation..." wrote the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1920 in This Side of Paradise, "grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken..." (page 180) During the 1920s, many of the nation's leading writers exposed the shallowness and narrow-mindedness of American life. The United States was a nation awash in materialism and devoid of spiritual vitality: "a wasteland," wrote the poet T.S. Eliot, "inhabited by hollow men." No author offered a more scathing attack on middle class boorishness and smugness than Sinclair Lewis, who in 1930 became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. In Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922), he satirized the narrow-minded complacency and dullness of small town America, while in Elmer Gantry (1922), he exposed religious hypocrisy and bigotry, As editor of Mercury magazine, H.L. Mencken wrote hundreds of essays mocking practically every aspect of American life. Calling the South a "gargantuan paradise of the fourth rate," and the middle class the "booboisie," Mencken directed his choicest barbs at reformers, whom he blamed for the bloodshed of World War I and the gangsters of the 1920s. "If I am convinced of anything," he snarled, "it is that Doing Good is in bad taste. The writer Gertrude Stein defined an important group of American intellectuals when she told Ernest Hemingway in 1921, "You are all a lost generation." Stein was referring to the expatriate novelists and artists who had participated in the Great War, only to emerge from the conflict convinced that it was an exercise in futility. In their novels, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway pointed toward a philosophy now known as existentialism," which maintains that life has no transcendent purpose and that each individual must salvage personal meaning from the void. Hemingway's fiction lionized toughness, and "manly virtues" as a counterpoint to the softness of American life. In The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), he emphasized meaningless death and the importance of facing stoically the absurdities of the universe. In the conclusion of The Great Gatsby (1925), Fitzgerald gave pointed expression to an existentialist outlook: "so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Transcribed Image Text:Few decades have produced as many great works of art, music, or literature as the 1920s. At the decade's beginning, American culture stood in Europe's shadow. By the decade's end, Americans were leaders in the struggle to liberate the arts from older canons of taste, form, and style. It was during the 1920s that Eugene O'Neill, the country's most talented dramatist, wrote his greatest plays, and that authors William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe published their first novels. American poets of the 1920s, such as Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Edna St Vincent Millay, and Wallace Stevens experimented with new styles of punctuation, rhyme, and form. Likewise, artists like Charles Demuth, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Joseph Stella challenged the dominant realist tradition in American art and pioneered non-representational and expressionist art forms. The 1920s marked America's entry into the world of serious music. It witnessed the founding of 50 symphony orchestras and three of the country's most prominent music conservatories--Julliard, Eastman, and Curtis Institution. This decade also produced America's first great classical composers, including Aaron Copland and Charles Ives, and saw George Gershwin create a new musical forms by integrating jazz into symphonic and orchestral music. World War I had left many American intellectuals and artists disillusioned and alienated. Neither Wilsonian idealism nor Progressive reformism appealed to America's post-war writers and thinkers who believed that the crusade to end war and to make the world safe for democracy had been a senseless mistake. "Here was a new generation..." wrote the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1920 in This Side of Paradise, "grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken..." (page 180) During the 1920s, many of the nation's leading writers exposed the shallowness and narrow-mindedness of American life. The United States was a nation awash in materialism and devoid of spiritual vitality: "a wasteland," wrote the poet T.S. Eliot, "inhabited by hollow men." No author offered a more scathing attack on middle class boorishness and smugness than Sinclair Lewis, who in 1930 became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. In Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922), he satirized the narrow-minded complacency and dullness of small town America, while in Elmer Gantry (1922), he exposed religious hypocrisy and bigotry, As editor of Mercury magazine, H.L. Mencken wrote hundreds of essays mocking practically every aspect of American life. Calling the South a "gargantuan paradise of the fourth rate," and the middle class the "booboisie," Mencken directed his choicest barbs at reformers, whom he blamed for the bloodshed of World War I and the gangsters of the 1920s. "If I am convinced of anything," he snarled, "it is that Doing Good is in bad taste. The writer Gertrude Stein defined an important group of American intellectuals when she told Ernest Hemingway in 1921, "You are all a lost generation." Stein was referring to the expatriate novelists and artists who had participated in the Great War, only to emerge from the conflict convinced that it was an exercise in futility. In their novels, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway pointed toward a philosophy now known as existentialism," which maintains that life has no transcendent purpose and that each individual must salvage personal meaning from the void. Hemingway's fiction lionized toughness, and "manly virtues" as a counterpoint to the softness of American life. In The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), he emphasized meaningless death and the importance of facing stoically the absurdities of the universe. In the conclusion of The Great Gatsby (1925), Fitzgerald gave pointed expression to an existentialist outlook: "so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
The New Left had a series of heroes, ranging from Marx, Lenin, Ho, and Mao to Fidel, Che, and other revolutionaries. It also had its own uniforms, rituals, and music. Faded-blue work shirts and jeans, wire-rimmed glasses, and work shoes were de rigueur even if the dirtiest work the wearer performed was taking notes in a college class. The proponents of the New Left emphasized their sympathy with the working class--an emotion that was seldom reciprocated--and listened to labor songs that once fired the hearts of unionists. The political protest folk music of Greenwich Village--of Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, and their crowd--inspired the New Left. But the New Left was only one part of youth protest during the 1960s. While the New Left labored to change the world and remake American society, other youths attempted to alter themselves and reorder consciousness. Variously labeled the counterculture, hippies, or flower children, they had their own heroes, music, dress, and approach to life. In theory, supporters of the counterculture rejected individualism, competition, and capitalism. Adopting rather unsystematic ideas from oriental religions, they sought to become one with the universe. Rejection of monogamy and the traditional nuclear family gave way to the tribal or communal ideal, where members renounced individualism and private property and shared food, work, and sex. In such a community, love was a general abstract ideal rather than a focused emotion. The quest for oneness with the universe led many youths to experiment with hallucinogenic drugs. LSD had a particularly powerful allure. Under its influence, poets, musicians, politicians, and thousands of other Americans claimed to have tapped into an all-powerful spiritual force. Timothy Leary, the Harvard professor who became the leading prophet of LSD, asserted that the drug would unlock the universe. Although LSD was outlawed in 1966, the drug continued to spread. Perhaps some takers discovered profound truths, but by the late 1960s, drugs had done more harm than good. The history of the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco illustrated the problems caused by drugs. In 1967, Haight was the center of the counterculture, the home of the flower children. In the city of love," hippies ingested LSD, smoked pot, listened to "acid rock," and proclaimed the dawning of a new age. Yet the area was suffering from severe problems. High levels of racial violence, venereal disease, rape, drug overdoses, and poverty ensured more bad trips than good. Even music, which along with drugs and sex formed the counterculture trinity, failed to alter human behavior. In 1969, journalists hailed the Woodstock music festival as a symbol of love. But a few months later, a group of Hell's Angels violently interrupted the Altamont Raceway music festival. As. Mick Jagger sang "Under My Thumb," an Angel stabbed a black man to death. Like the New Left, the counterculture fell victim to its own excesses. Sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll did not solve. the problems facing the United States. And by the end of the 1960s, the counterculture had lost its force.
Transcribed Image Text:The New Left had a series of heroes, ranging from Marx, Lenin, Ho, and Mao to Fidel, Che, and other revolutionaries. It also had its own uniforms, rituals, and music. Faded-blue work shirts and jeans, wire-rimmed glasses, and work shoes were de rigueur even if the dirtiest work the wearer performed was taking notes in a college class. The proponents of the New Left emphasized their sympathy with the working class--an emotion that was seldom reciprocated--and listened to labor songs that once fired the hearts of unionists. The political protest folk music of Greenwich Village--of Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, and their crowd--inspired the New Left. But the New Left was only one part of youth protest during the 1960s. While the New Left labored to change the world and remake American society, other youths attempted to alter themselves and reorder consciousness. Variously labeled the counterculture, hippies, or flower children, they had their own heroes, music, dress, and approach to life. In theory, supporters of the counterculture rejected individualism, competition, and capitalism. Adopting rather unsystematic ideas from oriental religions, they sought to become one with the universe. Rejection of monogamy and the traditional nuclear family gave way to the tribal or communal ideal, where members renounced individualism and private property and shared food, work, and sex. In such a community, love was a general abstract ideal rather than a focused emotion. The quest for oneness with the universe led many youths to experiment with hallucinogenic drugs. LSD had a particularly powerful allure. Under its influence, poets, musicians, politicians, and thousands of other Americans claimed to have tapped into an all-powerful spiritual force. Timothy Leary, the Harvard professor who became the leading prophet of LSD, asserted that the drug would unlock the universe. Although LSD was outlawed in 1966, the drug continued to spread. Perhaps some takers discovered profound truths, but by the late 1960s, drugs had done more harm than good. The history of the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco illustrated the problems caused by drugs. In 1967, Haight was the center of the counterculture, the home of the flower children. In the city of love," hippies ingested LSD, smoked pot, listened to "acid rock," and proclaimed the dawning of a new age. Yet the area was suffering from severe problems. High levels of racial violence, venereal disease, rape, drug overdoses, and poverty ensured more bad trips than good. Even music, which along with drugs and sex formed the counterculture trinity, failed to alter human behavior. In 1969, journalists hailed the Woodstock music festival as a symbol of love. But a few months later, a group of Hell's Angels violently interrupted the Altamont Raceway music festival. As. Mick Jagger sang "Under My Thumb," an Angel stabbed a black man to death. Like the New Left, the counterculture fell victim to its own excesses. Sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll did not solve. the problems facing the United States. And by the end of the 1960s, the counterculture had lost its force.
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