Immediate Antecedents:
1901-1919
For the most part, the new ideas and inventions of the end
of the nineteenth century didn't make it into the daily lives of the
urban middle class until the opening decades of the twentieth. For
rural folk and the poor, the process took even longer, with some
innovations (e.g. motion pictures) reaching the urban poor before the
rural middle class and others (e.g. the automobile) vice versa.
In the 1910s, modernization was in full swing. Victorian
fussiness was clearly on the way out. New houses were built with open
living spaces and without gingerbread trim. Mission style furniture,
sleek and unornamented, filled the rooms of these houses. Cleaner lines
were introduced into women's clothing, too, and somewhat shorter
hemlines, which suited the "New Woman," who hoped to have the right to
vote soon, just fine.
New technology was growing in leaps and bounds and swiftly
entering people's everyday lives. Machines seemed to be leading mankind
on an ever-upward path to paradise. Then came the reality check. The
science of hygiene couldn't save young adults from dying by the
millions of influenza as the decade drew to a close. In the Great War
which was going on at the same time, new technology applied to the
battlefield -- machine guns, chemical gases, torpedoes, airplanes --
killed millions of others in especially grisly ways. This led to a
disillusionment -- "disenchantment" was the word they used -- across
the board, although more with systems of politics, aesthetics,
religion, and ethics than with science and technology. Life is
uncertain, so bring on the movies, jazz records, and bathtub gin!
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