Not a Lost Generation: James M. Cain, Al Dubin, and the Doughboy's Voice in Popular Culture between the Wars

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER M. STERBA
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
World War I ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
World War ◽  
Lost Generation ◽  
American Life ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Norman Rockwell ◽  
Double Indemnity

James M. Cain and the songwriter Al Dubin were drafted into the army and served on the Western Front during World War I. Both men would go on to play major roles in the making of American popular culture during the interwar period: Cain writing the noir bestsellers The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, Dubin providing the lyrics for several hit musicals, including 42nd Street. For both artists, the impact of the war was more complicated than the themes of disillusionment and a collective loss of innocence more famously offered by writers like Hemingway and Dos Passos. This article argues that Cain's and Dubin's pop successes in fact reflected the attitudes of millions of other veterans, who rejected the Progressive Era's moralism and asserted a new, determined, cynical, and irreverent sensibility in American life. Cain and Dubin were not alone, but part of a larger generation of Great War veteran artists who are rarely regarded as such, Frank Capra, Preston Sturges, Jack Benny, Thomas Hart Benton, and Norman Rockwell among them. Working in the most accessible forms of art and entertainment, their contributions, no less than the Lost Generation's, should also be identified as an important legacy of World War I.

scholarly journals By the waters of the Tiber: Viacheslav Ivanov, Aleksandr Grechaninov and Russian culture in interwar Europe

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 337-354
Author(s):  
Philip Ross Bullock
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Cultural Continuity ◽  
Musical Work ◽  
World War ◽  
Musical Settings ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
Interwar Europe ◽  
The Impact

In Russia, the impact of the end of World War I was subsumed under the far greater impact of the October Revolution, which led to a bifurcation of Russian culture into Soviet and émigré branches. This article examines a hybrid literary and musical work from the interwar period: Viacheslav Ivanov’s nine Roman Sonnets ( Rimskie sonety, 1924) and the musical settings that the composer Aleksandr Grechaninov made of five of these as his Sonetti Romani in 1939. Here, both poet and composer seek to convey the experience of finding oneself in one of Europe’s most evocative historical and cultural locations. At the same time, their evocation of Rome forges a powerful historical narrative of the city’s prior inhabitants. Accordingly, Rome emerges as an intertextual palimpsest of literary and artistic references, which together create a powerful sense of cultural continuity to offset the loss of the artist’s original homeland.

scholarly journals The Wilsonian moment: Japan 1912–1952

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 565-570 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takashi Inoguchi
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
World War I ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Positive Influence ◽  
International Order ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Academic Life ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
World War ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThe aim of this special issue is to give a new spin to the study of the impact of the liberal Wilsonian moment on Japan, with a focus on the interwar period in a broader historical span. The Wilsonian liberal international order encompasses its fledgling (1914–1945), formative (1945–1952), competitive (1952–1989), and maturity (1989–2018) periods. In this special issue, the four articles deal with the first and second periods. Yutaka Harada and Frederick Dickinson adopt this longer perspective – not just President Wilson's moment of Fourteen Points – each focusing on (1) the vigor of Japan's industrialization and open economic policy in 1914–1931 and (2) the basic continuity between the prewar and postwar periods in terms of normative and institutional commitments with the fledgling, if volatile, liberal international order such as those with the Versailles and Washington treaties after World War I, the war prohibition treaty of 1928, and the naval disarmament treaty of 1930. Ryoko Nakano and Takashi Inoguchi take up the re-examination of two tiny minorities of liberal academics, Yanaihara Tadao and Nambara Shigeru, who at most kept their integrity. Nakano recasts Yanaihara's academic life with its intellectual agony of believing in a national self-determination policy for Japanese colonies. Inoguchi underlines Nambara's stoic self-discipline under wartime dictatorship and active political involvement under US occupation regarding the newly drafted Japanese Constitution. An emphasis is placed on the considerable positive influence of Wilsonian ideas on Japan, an influence that faded in the late 1930s, but re-emerged with considerable vigor after 1945.

Personalities in the Crowd: The Idea of the “Masses” in American Popular Culture

Prospects ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 225-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Smith
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
World War I ◽  
Mass Communication ◽  
World War ◽  
Urban Context ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
The Masses

“There are no masses,” Raymond Williams wisely reminds us, “there are only ways of seeing people as masses.” This idea of the social crowd, usually organic and with a mind of its own, rarely is used self-referentially; “masses” always describes others. During and immediately following World War I, American intellectuals, especially social theorists, were preoccupied with this new model for society. Authoritarian regimes abroad, America's own wartime hysteria (fueled by new communications technologies), the insistent urban context, and a consumer-based economy all made discussion of crowd behavior and mass persuasion an obvious product of new circumstances. Newer fields of sociology, psychology, and behaviorism, promised the necessary tools for understanding these “phenomena.” Walter Lippmann'sPublic Opinion(1922) was but the most popular and enduring in a genre that drew upon earlier native and European theorists like Gustave Le Bon, E. A. Ross, Boris Sidis, and William Trotter. By 1925, the American library on the mass mind includedThe Behavior of Crowds(Everett Dean Martin),Social Psychology(Floyd Henry Allport), andIntroduction to the Science of Sociology(Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess). This new body of work distinguished “the concept of the mass, a dispersed and passive body of uprooted individuals, from the pre-World War I concept of the crowd, a physically united and active throng.” The bestremembered effect of these ideas, upon the likes of H. L. Mencken, Walter Lippman, and other leading critics, was a skepticism about democracy's survival in the face of such new knowledge. But the idea of the “masses” had another life, outside of more formal circles, among Americans who were not so quick to decry a “boobocracy,” or perhaps more important and long-lasting, in the rising industries of mass communication and popular culture.

The Great War of the Postcards

2021 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 525-568
Author(s):  
Johann Strauss
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Book Illustrations ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Great War

This article examines the functions and the significance of picture postcards during World War I, with particular reference to the war in the Ottoman Lands and the Balkans, or involving the Turkish Army in Galicia. After the principal types of Kriegspostkarten – sentimental, humorous, propaganda, and artistic postcards (Künstlerpostkarten) – have been presented, the different theatres of war (Balkans, Galicia, Middle East) and their characteristic features as they are reflected on postcards are dealt with. The piece also includes aspects such as the influence of Orientalism, the problem of fake views, and the significance and the impact of photographic postcards, portraits, and photo cards. The role of postcards in book illustrations is demonstrated using a typical example (F. C. Endres, Die Türkei (1916)). The specific features of a collection of postcards left by a German soldier who served in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq during World War I will be presented at the end of this article.

From Multi-Industry Planning to Keynesian Planning: Gardiner Means, the American Keynesians, and National Economic Planning at the National Resources Committee

1990 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederic S. Lee
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Economic Planning ◽  
World War ◽  
National Planning ◽  
National Economic ◽  
Basic Characteristics ◽  
American Society ◽  
Industry Planning ◽  
The Impact ◽  
American Economy

In recent years we have witnessed a revival of interest in the National Resources Committee (NRC) and its work on national planning. The research shows that the roots of national planning at the NRC are found in the Progressive Era, when individuals sought, through city, regional, and economic planning, to bring order to American society, in the government's management of the economy during World War I, and in Hoover's attempt at macromanagement of the economy. The research also shows that national economic planning, as distinct from other forms of planning, was an important component of the committee's work. In regard to this, researchers have acknowledged that Gardiner Means, as director of the Industrial Section of the Industrial Committee and author of The Structure of the American Economy, Part I: Basic Characteristics, was an important and outspoken advocate of economic planning within the NRC, but they have been less clear as to his specific contributions to economic planning. Moreover, the researchers have not extensively investigated the NRC position toward national economic planning, the economic models from which national economic plans would be developed, and the impact of the Keynesian revolution on the NRC approach to national economic planning. These omissions are not surprising inasmuch as neither Warken's (1979) nor Clawson's (1981) general coverage of the NRC provided much more than a brief and superficial description of the Industrial Section and a listing of its most important publications. Kalish (1963), on the other hand, discussed Means and the Industrial Section in more depth but in such a disjointed manner that it is impossible to grasp the movement toward economic planning that took place in the NRC and the important role Means played in the process. Finally, neither Chapman's (1981 and 1983) nor Jeffries's (1987) discussions of the impact of the Keynesian revolution on the activities of the NRC dealt specifically with its impact on Means's work on economic planning.

scholarly journals Sprawy polskie w Kanadzie w czasie I wojny światoweJ

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2 (176)) ◽  
pp. 227-245
Author(s):  
Anna Reczyńska
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
World War I ◽  
Ethnic Group ◽  
Lake Ontario ◽  
World War ◽  
Training Camp ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Impact

Polish Issues in Canada During World War I The article presents the impact of World War I on Polish immigrants in Canada, the position of the Polish ethnic group in this country and the efforts of persons of Polish descent in regard to recruitment for the Polish Army in North America. Poles, who were subjects of Germany or the Austro-Hungarian Empire were treated as enemy aliens. Those people were forced to register and report to the police on a regular basis and some of them were interned in labour camps during the war. Some were released from the camps after an intervention of Polish organizations and priests. Soldiers of Polish descent, volunteers and recruits also fought in the Canadian Expeditionary Forces in Europe. Over 20,000 Polish volunteers from the US (including over 200 from Canada) enrolled in a training camp formed in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario on the border with the US. The problems with the organization and functioning of the camp, and opinions on Polish volunteers shaped the attitude of many Canadians towards the Polish diaspora and the newly established Polish state. Keywords: World War I, Polish Diaspora in Canada, Niagara-on-the-Lake camp, Haller’s Army, Colonel Arthur D’Orr LePan Streszczenie Artykuł przedstawia kilka przykładów obrazujących oddziaływanie wydarzeń I wojny światowej na żyjących w Kanadzie polskich imigrantów, pozycję polskiej grupy etnicznej w tym kraju oraz na aktywność osób polskiego pochodzenia na rzecz rekrutacji do wojska polskiego w Ameryce Północnej. Polaków, którzy byli poddanymi Niemiec lub monarchii austro-wegierskiej traktowano jak przedstawicieli państw wrogich. Mieli obowiązek rejestracji i regularnego zgłaszania się na policję a niektórzy zostali internowani w stworzonych w czasie wojny obozach pracy. Część z nich była z tych obozów zwolniona po interwencji polskich organizacji i polskich duchownych. Żołnierze polskiego pochodzenia, zarówno ochotnicy jak i poborowi, znaleźli się także w oddziałach Kanadyjskich Sił Ekspedycyjnych walczących w Europie. Ponad 20 tys. polskich ochotników z USA (w tym ponad 200 z Kanady) zgłosiło się też do obozu szkoleniowego utworzonego w Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, przy granicy z USA. Problemy z organizacją i funkcjonowaniem tego obozu oraz opinie o polskich ochotnikach, kształtowały nastawienie wielu Kanadyjczyków do polskiej grupy etnicznej i nowotworzonego Państwa Polskiego.

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