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American Modernity

Lawrence A. Scaff

in Max Weber in America

This chapter examines Max Weber's thoughts on American modernity based on his observations during his trip to New York City. It first considers Max and Marianne Weber's experience with religious ... More

This chapter examines Max Weber's thoughts on American modernity based on his observations during his trip to New York City. It first considers Max and Marianne Weber's experience with religious services in New York, including a Presbyterian service at the Marble Collegiate Church, the service of the First Church of Christ Scientist, and the service of the Ethical Culture Society. It then discusses Max's views about the social implications of religious faith and social capital, as well as Marianne's thoughts about Americanization. It also analyzes Weber's account of the “cool objectivity of sociation” and his ideas on the issues of class, race, and gender; the relationship between religious ethics and economic action; and cultural pluralism.Less

Latin American Varieties of Modernity

Jorge Larrain

in Varieties of World-Making: Beyond Globalization

This chapter examines the historical transformations of Latin American modernity, highlighting the historically variable ambivalence between democratic self–constitution and the attempt to create a ... More

This chapter examines the historical transformations of Latin American modernity, highlighting the historically variable ambivalence between democratic self–constitution and the attempt to create a self–sustained model of economic organization. Through the need to arrive at an interpretation of this ambivalence that is adequate to Latin America, Europe and the US have served as points of orientation, with the US now sometimes seen as an imposed model and Europe in terms of the hope for an alternative to the US.Less

Introduction

Aldo J. Regalado

in Bending Steel: Modernity and the American Superhero

This introductory chapter discusses how understanding modernity is essential in identifying the cultural significance of the American superhero. At their genesis, superheroes are cultural responses ... More

This introductory chapter discusses how understanding modernity is essential in identifying the cultural significance of the American superhero. At their genesis, superheroes are cultural responses to American modernity. Indeed, Americans had been employing heroic fiction as a means of navigating modernity's challenges as early as the nineteenth century. The work of authors writing in the genre during the early national period is rife with considerations of how democracy, capitalism, slavery, westward expansion, immigration, urbanization, technological innovation, and increased mobility shaped the nation's character. Initially written and distributed by people of privilege, these stories too often served to underpin the power of traditional elites at the expense of those marginalized by ethnicity, race, class, or gender. Such categories, therefore, became significant for defining the contours of modernity.Less

A New Musical Rhythm Was Given to the People: Ragtime and Representation in Black Manhattan

David Gilbert

in The Product of Our Souls: Ragtime, Race, and the Birth of the Manhattan Musical Marketplace

This chapter examines the American cultural revolution brought about by the ragtime operetta, Clorindy; or, The Origin of the Cakewalk, and how it initiated a reevaluation of Negro music and its ... More

This chapter examines the American cultural revolution brought about by the ragtime operetta, Clorindy; or, The Origin of the Cakewalk, and how it initiated a reevaluation of Negro music and its place within a cultural market dominated by white ideologies and sensibilities. In their performance, Will Marion Cook and Ernest Hogan inaugurated new considerations of Negro music, by disrupting many of the rigid distinctions African American intellectuals held between folk/formal and high/low (and many others). Most significantly, the duo called attention to a historical process that turned the folk music of the American slave into the sound of modern America. In the first and second decades of the twentieth century, Negro music resounded as a rhythmic dance music representing not only African American modernity, but U.S. modernity more broadly.Less

Introduction: The Machine with a Soul

Katy Hull

in The Machine Has a Soul: American Sympathy with Italian Fascism

This introductory chapter discusses how the representation of fascism as a machine with a soul explains why Italian fascism appealed to some Americans in the interwar years. Although Richard Washburn ... More

This introductory chapter discusses how the representation of fascism as a machine with a soul explains why Italian fascism appealed to some Americans in the interwar years. Although Richard Washburn Child, a former ambassador to Italy, and other fascist sympathizers echoed their contemporaries in their critiques of American modernity, they parted ways with most other Americans in their interpretation of Benito Mussolini and his government. In their telling, fascism was an effective system for managing contemporary challenges because it delivered the material benefits of the machine age while protecting Italians from its emotionally draining effects. These observers claimed that the fascists had intentionally reformed democratic institutions to create a government that was more receptive to the needs of ordinary people. In each case, they asserted that fascism produced a different kind of modernity from that which prevailed in the United States — one that upheld traditions, restored connections between government and the governed, and rebalanced the relationship between men and machines. The chapter then provides a background of the four individuals selected for the in-depth study of fascist sympathies: Richard Washburn Child, the diplomat and writer; Anne O'Hare McCormick, the New York Times journalist; Generoso Pope, the Italian-American community leader; and Herbert Wallace Schneider, the professor of moral philosophy.Less

Introduction: Detroit, Capital of the Twentieth Century

Stefan J. Link

in Forging Global Fordism: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Contest over the Industrial Order

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Fordism. Fordism, in its most common usage, was a term that first originated in the 1970s and then boomed in the 1980s, when social scientists sought ... More

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Fordism. Fordism, in its most common usage, was a term that first originated in the 1970s and then boomed in the 1980s, when social scientists sought ways to theorize the structural crises of the industrialized West. Henry Ford in fact never used the term — his global admirers created it. Fordism enjoys a second popular usage: as a shorthand for a distinctively American modernity that is said to have spread across the world in the twentieth century, in a process that historians of Europe have called “Americanization.” Finally, Fordism is used in a third way that focuses more narrowly on what goes on inside firms and on shop floors. To labor historians, Fordism means the shop regime associated with mass production: a focus on unskilled laborers working monotonous tasks on assembly lines. The chapter then details how the spread of Fordism during the interwar years arose from an antagonistic development competition that was initially triggered by the rise of the United States and then accelerated by the Great Depression. It looks at how Detroit became the destination of engineering delegations bent on wholesale technology transfer.Less

Ford’s Bible of the Modern Age

Stefan J. Link

in Forging Global Fordism: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Contest over the Industrial Order

This chapter discusses how European postliberals on both the left and the right grasped Fordism as a compass by which to navigate the economic and ideological confusions of the 1920s. It studies ... More

This chapter discusses how European postliberals on both the left and the right grasped Fordism as a compass by which to navigate the economic and ideological confusions of the 1920s. It studies Henry Ford's My Life and Work (1922). What accounts for this book's astonishing impact? Part of the answer lies, as historians have long recognized, in the fascination that all things American exerted upon the world after the Great War. Dazed and diminished by the war, Europeans squinted across the Atlantic and saw an image of the future: a new type of civilization, characterized by mass production and mass-consumption, skyscrapers and Hollywood, assembly lines and flapper dresses. Like no other phenomenon, Henry Ford's factories seemed to exemplify this new American modernity: here the machine-like uniformity of modern industrial production begot a high standard of living and new possibilities for extravagant consumption and cultural expression. Ford's book went straight to the heart of the fierce Soviet debates about socialist industrial development. In essence, My Life and Work and its successor volumes elaborated a producerist agenda for the twentieth century.Less

From Strange Visitors to Men of Tomorrow

Aldo J. Regalado

in Bending Steel: Modernity and the American Superhero

This chapter focuses on the creation of Superman. As second-generation Jewish immigrants, Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's experiences in America differed from that of men like ... More

This chapter focuses on the creation of Superman. As second-generation Jewish immigrants, Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's experiences in America differed from that of men like Burroughs and Lovecraft, combining the realities of urban living, the consequences of the Great Depression, America's entry into World War II, the pervasiveness of ethnic and racial discrimination, and the formidable challenges of acculturating to a society that was violent, oppressive, and culturally distant for their parents. Responding to these realities, Siegel and Shuster engaged the fiction of previous authors in the spirit of appropriation, renegotiating its meanings and employing its forms to express distinctly different ethnic, masculine, and national identities suited to navigating their own particular encounters with American modernity. As the ultimate product of his authors' creative endeavors, therefore, Superman worked towards redefining the ethnic and class requirements of masculinity in America.Less

Making the Flesh Word: Binomial Being and Representational Presence

Lindon Barrett

Justin A. Joyce, Dwight A. Mcbride, and John Carlos Rowe (eds)

in Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity

This chapter focuses on the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano/Gustavus Vassa (1745?–1801), the African captured by slave traders in the Niger River region when he was ten years old, taken to the U.S. ... More

This chapter focuses on the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano/Gustavus Vassa (1745?–1801), the African captured by slave traders in the Niger River region when he was ten years old, taken to the U.S. South, sold to a West Indian planter, who then worked aboard slave ships sailing between the Caribbean and England until he was nineteen. Buying his freedom, he continued his life as a merchant seaman and quartermaster for many years, working vigorously for the abolition of slavery, marrying an English woman, and serving as Commissary of Stores for freed slaves returning to Sierra Leone. The chapter demonstrates how Equiano/Vassa's “binomial being” elaborates the social and psychological consequences of the Euro-American political economy of modernity outlined in the first chapter.Less

Introduction

Joshua O. Reno

in Waste Away: Working and Living with a North American Landfill

Waste is a general outcome of processes of formation, but it assumes a distinct character in North American modernity. If forms can last only by releasing transient materials, then their relative ... More

Waste is a general outcome of processes of formation, but it assumes a distinct character in North American modernity. If forms can last only by releasing transient materials, then their relative durability is reliant on the constitutive absence of wastes. North American moderns manage wastes in a way that further transforms their imaginations and social relations. Mass waste is the anonymous and indeterminate by-product of modern life that requires management by someone else somewhere else. Landfilling disposes of mass waste so efficiently and cheaply that more disposability is introduced and bigger landfills are required at greater distances from our everyday lives. Examining how people live with the mass waste of other people and places at one landfill makes this clear.Less

Misinformation and Ideology

Scott Timcke

in Algorithms and the End of Politics: How Technology Shapes 21st-Century American Life

This chapter applies theoretical insights around misrecognition to better understand the intersection of misinformation and ideology in the United States. It argues that misinformation practices are ... More

This chapter applies theoretical insights around misrecognition to better understand the intersection of misinformation and ideology in the United States. It argues that misinformation practices are products of modernity. American modernity is characterized by contradictions between its basic social forms such as the money form, the commodity form, and so on. The contradictions create a bind for rulers. On the one hand, these contradictions mean that their rule is never stable. On the other hand, acknowledging the contradictions risks courting redress that also threatens their minority rule. Due to the imperative to mystify these contradictions, social problems are subsequently treated as anomalies or otherwise externalized; they can never be features of the capitalist political economy itself. Misinformation is a common by-product of this externalization as the capitalist ruling class uses it to weld together pacts and alliances that preserve the social hierarchy. The chapter outlines the broad argumentation offered by securocrats, reactionaries and technologists on Russia-gate. It takes a look at the proof put forward, the ethical reasoning invoked and the emotive appeals employed. It also looks at why these explanations fall short.Less