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This chapter presents a picture of the German Army in the mid-1880s. At the apex was a gerontocracy headed by Kaiser William, Helmuth von Moltke, and 18 aging corps commanders whom the sentimental head of state refused to retire. Most of these elderly generals frowned on the prospect of wartime field duty. Army administrative leadership was increasingly divided, moreover, after the forced resignation of Kameke. These counterproductive divisions exacerbated already existing rivalries among the three main branches of the service. Cavalry, infantry, and artillery squabbles over military technology and appropriate tactical responses further divided the army against itself. It is significant that in all three branches, conservative factions managed to write their technophobic doctrines into regulations. Foreign military developments made Germany's drift toward antimodernism even more alarming. It was the French and the Russians, not the Germans, who blazed the trail of modern military technology in the 1880s and 1890s.

This chapter explains how Francis became familiar to American non-Catholics during the second half of the nineteenth century. It lays out contextual factors and broad cultural currents, most notably antimodernism and Protestants' ambivalent attraction to Catholicism. It then argues that Americans encountered Francis through the culturally significant channels of history, travel, art, and literature. It traces these encounters through landmark works and popular discussion. This chapter also traces the shifting images of Francis, as proto-Protestant, poet, artistic inspiration, image of Jesus, common man, and individualist. It concludes with a discussion of Paul Sabatier's 1893 biography, which associated Francis with social, economic, and religious critique. This text built on earlier work and set the tone for the twentieth century.

Bilgrami argues that Gandhi’s seeming antimodernism and radicalism can be reconciled through reference to the early modern European dissenting tradition, complicating the periodization of secularism and modernity.

This chapter explores the construction of Hunza's remoteness within the discourse of antimodernism. During the mid-twentieth century, a number of Western medical doctors and farmers visited the region, fascinated with the remarkably good health of the people of Hunza, which they attributed to the traditional methods of agriculture and food production that had flourished because of Hunza's isolation from the world. If Hunza's location earlier was seen as being on the margins of—and even beyond—civilization, it was now seen as a refuge from civilization and modern society. It was depicted as a rural utopia likened to the mythical city of Shangri-la. Aware of his diminishing power, the mir manipulated tourists'representation of his domain as remote by playing along in a hopeless effort to strengthen his position against the Pakistani state, whose own policies reinforced Hunza as remote, albeit being connected more with the mainstream society and economy.

This chapter examines the question of “modernism” as the subject of theological debate and ecclesiastical condemnation and in relation to contemporary literary life. It first considers the relationship between literary modernism and Catholic antimodernism before turning to a discussion of four sets of ideas that were central to the definition of modernism as well as to the debate over literary modernism and its relationship to Catholic literary aesthetics: individual/community, iconoclasm/orthodoxy, innovation/repetition, and openness/closure. It argues that in each case, in the early years of the flourishing of literary modernism, Catholicism was strongly associated with one term of the opposition and seemed poised to define itself at least in part by rejecting the other term. It also explains how literary discussions that sought an appropriate stance toward potentially dangerous or heretical ideas emerged as an important site of Catholic engagement with philosophical modernity.

This chapter argues that one of Jack London's most consistent concerns throughout his career was the place of the machine in modern life, and his engagements with the discourses of racial formation and socialism (and his complicated attempts to both reproduce and transcend them) are consistent with this technologically deterministic concern. London's vision of Asia/Pacific, in other words, was as much a product of his hopes and fears about modern technology as it was of any rigid, biological theories of racial difference. Indeed, when viewed through the prism of his concerns about the role of technology in late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century capitalism, London's seemingly contradictory characterizations of various Asian/Pacific people become much more coherent (if still firmly rooted in a racialized, Eurocentric worldview).

This chapter introduces the banjo as a means of exploring not only the methods and motivations of contemporary instrument builders, but also as an instrument with a history as a successful agent of antimodernism, a quality that remains significant within old-time musical circles. Banjo makers who cater to this community face constraints based on this conception, made evident in reference to iconic design elements from the banjo’s past, but are also successfully using this same antimodern tendency to expand knowledge of the instrument’s earliest history. This introductory chapter also describes the research methodology the author employed and the overall organization of the book, describing each of the following chapters in some detail.

This introductory chapter discusses how the nature-loving antimodernism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was shaped by innumerable actors, including writers, painters, philosophers, pastors, politicians, architects, landscape architects, and others. Camping, the practice of living in a temporary shelter, has been present intermittently throughout human history, but only in recent times did it become an antimodern feature and socially approved custom of American culture. Military campaigns may require encampments, and unsettled, nonurban people may camp by necessity, but only a people who had become city dwellers would adopt this temporary retreat into the outdoors as an acceptable form of leisure. A key insight of this chapter is that recreational camping takes Americans away from their ordinary urban (or suburban) lives.

“Natural Environment as Refuge, Nurturer, Catalyst” places the notion of the summer camp in the broader context of societal ideas about people and nature, helping lay the groundwork for the social work profession’s involvement. Selected key events, concepts, and people impacting Americans’ view of the natural environment are highlighted. During the 19th century, as the United States became increasingly urban, writers and visual artists introduced Americans to the virtues of country life for health benefits, solace, and renewal. In the early 20th century, adherents of the conservation, back-to-nature, and antimodernism movements reacted to industrialization and urbanization. John Dewey and Jane Addams are referenced. Since the mid-20th century, a number of thinkers—scientists, historians, theologians, journalists—have turned their attention to issues related to people and the environment. Increasingly, social workers have examined the physical and natural environments as necessary components for understanding people holistically.

Early twentieth-century conservation in the United States has been identified in the public mind with the West and the protection of wilderness, parks, and national forests. Some scholars have explored conservation through the writings of naturalists and antimodernists like Henry David Thoreau. What we have only recently come to appreciate is that there was a whole generation of reformers very much concerned about the environment who were neither antimodernists nor wilderness protectors. They were modernists who rejected not the modern world, but the way the modern world was being fashioned. They did not retreat or long to retreat into the wilderness but lived in cities and towns. And they struggled to make the environment of the most settled parts of the nation more amenable to human habitation. It was in New England where these reformers first began to make their claims for the rights of citizens to clean air, clean water, and clean soil. The Massachusetts board of health argued, less than five years after the Civil War, for aggressive state action on the claim that “all citizens have an inherent right to the enjoyment of pure and uncontaminated air, and water, and soil, that this right should be regarded as belonging to the whole community, and that no one should be allowed to trespass upon it by his carelessness or his avarice.” And the New Hampshire board, in its first report, stated that “every person has a legitimate right to nature’s gifts—pure water, air, and soil—a right belonging to every individual, and every community upon which no one should be allowed to trespass through carelessness, ignorance, or other cause.” New England’s first environmental crisis was brought on by its people’s fecundity and by their material practices in the late eighteenth century. Out of that crisis emerged a changed New England with concentrated manufacturing centers and increasingly market-oriented agriculture. Although not all New Englanders enthusiastically supported this change all were affected by it. Within three generations, New Englanders saw their region transformed. That transformation created a new set of troubles. The emergence of those new problems, and the solutions nineteenthcentury Yankees offered, is the story of this book.

When James Olcott spoke before Connecticut farmers for “anti-stream pollution,” he urged the public to mobilize to stop water pollution by “ignorant or reckless capitalists.” In identifying the “ignorant and reckless capitalists,” Olcott focused the attention of the farmers on industrial waste and the role of manufacturers in their search for profits in causing pollution. Although manufacturers and the courts argued that industrialization brought wealth and prosperity to New England and hence was a general good, Olcott challenged this idea. He saw the issue as a conflict between industrialization and its costs on the one hand and the public good on the other. Concern over industrial pollution and the potential conflict between it and public health had already arisen in Massachusetts. Although the Massachusetts State Board of Health realized that the interests of the “capitalists” and those of the public health officials might be in conflict, in 1872 it hoped that with improved knowledge, “a way will be eventually found to joining them into harmonious relations,” much as Lyman believed science and technology would resolve the conflict between fishers and mill owners. The board's interest in “harmonious relations” also reflected a realization that at least for the last several years, the courts had seen pollution as an inevitable consequence of civilization and had been favorable toward industrialists, especially if no obvious alternative to dumping pollution existed. In 1866, William Merrifield sued Nathan Lombard because Lombard had dumped “Vitriol and other noxious substances” into the stream above Merrifield's factory, “corrupting” the water so badly that it destroyed his boiler. Chief Justice Bigelow ruled that Lombard had invaded Merrifield's rights. “Each riparian owner,” the judge wrote, “has the right to use the water for any reasonable and proper purpose. . . . An injury to the purity or quality of the water to the detriment of the other riparian owners, constitutes in legal effect, a wrong.” In 1872, Merrifield again went to court, claiming the City of Worcester regularly dumped sewage into Mill Brook, by which the waters became greatly corrupted and unfit to use.”