Reviews for No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920

The average rating for No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-05-11 00:00:00 Paul Baert This is a book about an irony of modern life. Thanks to its very openness, modernity (defined by relentless official rationality on the one hand, a universal belief in the value of free thought on the other, and boundless materialism between them) seems to be inescapable, and even efforts to escape modernity actually reinforce it. It may not be obvious to all readers, however, that this is Jackson Lears's message -- thanks in large part to the fact that the author himself is caught in the bind he describes. Jackson Lears strongly feels the "antimodern impulse" himself: "In our time," he writes, "the most profound radicalism is often the most profound conservatism" (xviii). According to him, the dominant American culture since the late nineteenth century has been a therapeutic culture that liberates the individual only to accommodate him to industrial bureaucracy, insatiate consumption, and spiritual aimlessness. It is therefore not the impulse of individual liberation, Lears thinks, but the impulse to conserve and govern that offers escape from this comfortable prison. Yet Lears also shows that the antimodern impulse (felt most strongly at the turn of the century by old Protestant families in the East) failed to liberate. Antimodernism became, for most affluent and educated Americans at the turn of the century, yet another form of accommodation to the modern order. It merely allowed old elite families to "revitalize" their values for a new capitalist century, which they would continue to dominate. Seemingly, Jackson Lears has -- beautifully -- written himself into a corner. Beyond this philosophical aim, however, Lears has two broad historiographic aims. First, he aims to show that antimodernism was not the "death rattle of old-stock Northern elites" (xvi) but rather the elites' way of marking their transition to the secular industrial age. The antimodern impulse gave old money a dominant cultural role in the new economy, establishing the first families of Boston and New York as natural artistic guardians of a sordid commercial society. Second, he aims to show that the hedonistic consumer culture of the twentieth century was not invented after the First World War, but instead originated in the nineteenth century as Protestantism declined and secular cultural values replaced it as the hegemonic ideology of the middle-class United States. In pursuing these aims Lears enjoys considerable success, if we accept his assumption that the values of the articulate middle class were "hegemonic" -- i.e., that they indirectly defined the values even of Americans who did not strictly share in their cultural basis. Because of other studies in a variety of fields, I think they generally were, especially by the end of Lears's period. In the late nineteenth century, Lears writes, middle-class Americans shared in a transatlantic ideology that located freedom and beauty in "progress," technology, rationalization of all areas of life, lowered tolerance for discomfort, and an ideology of self-control. This was the age of Frederick Winslow Taylor, who applied science to the factory line to achieve maximum discipline and productivity, and his psychic counterpart John Harvey Kellogg, who wrote advice books for growing boys, enjoining them to master every fleeting sexual thought. The "focal point" of this Victorian morality was the domestic ideal, which promoted the middle-class home (and wife) as a haven within (and essential disciplinary support to) the competitive world of working men. The central philosophy was that of Herbert Spencer, who promoted not cutthroat "social Darwinism," as has often been claimed, but rather a vision of benign evolutionary progress that would end cruel competition -- a positivist vision that liberal Protestant religious leaders enthusiastically embraced. These ministers, Lears writes, "sought to exorcise the last vestiges of shadow and magic from their creeds, to create a clean, well-lighted place where religion and rationalist optimism could coexist in harmony." In the process, though, they undermined their faith as "an independent source of moral authority and [it:] became a handmaiden of the positivist world view" (23). But by the 1880s, upper- and middle-class Americans were entertaining doubts about the rationalist vision. Some of them noticed that "the rationalization of urban culture and the decline of religion into sentimental religiosity" threatened a coherent sense of self; many now longed for the sort of intense, spiritual experience that seemed to be missing in their comfortable lives. Editorialists inveighed against a lack of heroism or robust sense of sin in American society. "Neurasthenia" -- depression -- seemed to be epidemic among young men in American cities. (George Miller Beard named the malady in American Nervousness in 1880, and it rapidly gained currency.) Meanwhile, labor unrest was unsettling bourgeois complacency about industry and cultural assimilation. From this sense of doubt about the advance of civilization, the antimodern impulse in America was born. One manifestation of antimodernism came in the form of the Arts and Crafts movement. The idealists of this movement (including early figure Charles Eliot Norton, Horace Traubel, Edward Pearson Pressey, Elbert Hubbard, Gustav Stickley, and Oscar Lovell Triggs) protested modern industry's production values (or lack thereof) and the alienation of the worker from his product. Yet they had nothing, Lears writes, to offer the actual working classes. Their artisanism was exclusively a bourgeois leisure pursuit; it made well-educated hobbyists the masters of a craft industry that did not exist. Meanwhile, many bourgeois antimodernists cultivated a darker ideal. Romantic militarists such as Charles Majors, author of the Tudor novel When Knighthood Was in Flower; the "Rough Rider" and ersatz western rancher Theodore Roosevelt; youth organizations like the Princely Knights of Character Castle; poets Richard Hovey and Louise Imogen Guiney; Frank Norris, who wrote about the American West and the Middle Ages alike; and Brooks Adams, a pessimistic imperialist, sought in medieval violence and pain a refuge from industrial decadence, lassitude, and femininity. But their martial ideal, Lears points out, promoted American imperialism in the Caribbean and Latin America -- not a force of feudalism but a powerful engine of modern machinery and trade. Another medieval fantasy arrived in the form of "vitalism," an impulse to celebrate medieval or otherwise exotic spirituality without embracing its doctrinal content. Many vitalists looked to the Middle Ages as the "childhood of the race" (in the terms of psychologist G. Stanley Hall) -- an ambivalent image of both sincerity and simplemindedness. They participated in artistic enthusiasms such as a cult of Dante (devotees included Lowell, Longfellow, and Charles Eliot Norton) that celebrated the Italian poet's religious sincerity but did not enter into its substance. Popular literature, likewise, included wildly popular work on medieval themes by Howard Pyle and Mark Twain; the former managed to assimilate his premodern fantasies of Sherwood Forest to an optimistic view of the modern West, but Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court contrasted the premodern with the modern and revealed its author to be unable to choose between them without bitter regret. Many late Victorians also mined medieval magic and myth for archetypes that might inform modern life; examples include Sir James Frazer (The Golden Bough, 1890), the folklorist John Fiske, William Butler Yeats and Richard Wagner, and the orientalists Lafcadio Hearn and Sir Edwin Arnold. Most of these antimodern vitalists, Lears charges, were sentimentalists who elevanted "weightless" aesthetic experience over tangible outcomes or analytic systems. They tried to satisfy religious longings with disconnected, irrational sensations; thus, Lears believes, they promoted a secular therapeutic ethic of self-expression that did nothing to challenge the values of industrialism. At their best, however, some of them did at least celebrate feelings of "dread and awe -- emotions altogether alien to the enlightened optimism of the emerging twentieth century" (143). Some antimodernists, though, did tack toward more traditional and systematic expressions of religion. The end of the nineteenth century was a period of great fascination with Catholicism among young members of old families, who sought in high tradition the meaning they could not find in sentimental liberal Protestantism (or atheism). It was, in other words, the age of Anglo-Protestantism among not only Episcopalians but also members of other churches. Some, like the great church architect Ralph Adams Cram, had religious epiphanies in European cathedrals and returned to the United States to spread the beauty of Catholic tradition among rootless, mechanical-minded Americans. Cram, however, was "entangled in bourgeois institutions"; he built new cathedrals in which the Episcopalian titans of business could flaunt their civic power and taste. Cram protested "centrifugal liberalism" authentically enough, but his conservatism was a conservatism of the capitalists (209). Lears contrasts his approach with that of Vida Dutton Scudder, a self-identified Christian socialist who, like Cram, found in Catholic sacramentalism a refuge from doubt and anomie, but who became a champion the poor. On the whole, Lears thinks, the church movement toward art and ritual was the most two-sided of all the antimodern movements; it pointed to a uniquely viable alternative to therapeutic consumer culture, yet it also encouraged a consumer ethic within churches themselves as they built more impressive structures and filled them with costly furnishings. Lears ends his book with biographical studies of seven elite men who came of age or came to prominence during this period. Six of them -- William Sturgis Bigelow, George Cabot Lodge, Percival Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton, G. Stanley Hall, and Van Wyck Brooks -- are presented as specimens of ambivalent affluence seeking meaning in their comfortable lives. (The ambivalent young educated man is this author's leitmotif.) Lears believes that all of them failed to resolve their misgivings about the modern world. Their attempts to find refuge in premodernist fads ended in failure, inasmuch as these men ended up where they had started -- as cultural leaders of modern America who saw no escape from its obligations. The seventh, on the other hand, is closer to Lears's heart: Henry Adams, the cranky patrician responsible for still-legendary indictments of modern pretensions. It seems that Henry Adams is, for Lears, the only respectable sort of dissident from modernity -- an incorruptible outsider. And a pessimist.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-05-07 00:00:00 William Burn This book profoundly altered the way I think about America at the turn of the 20th century, and also how I go about writing history myself. Weaving insights from psychoanalysis, sociology, literary theory, and cultural history, Lears creates a topical history that resists telling history with a simple narrative arc, even as it utilizes the narratives of the lives of exemplary figures. Half history, half theory, No Place of Grace is a deeply moral work that makes a case for spirituality and the quest for meaning.