The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s

The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s. By Lynn Dumenil. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995. xii, 351 pp. $25.00, ISBN 0-8090-6978-4.)

In many ways, Lynn Dumenil's survey of American culture and society in the 1920s charts the historiographical progress of the "organizational" interpretation of modern America over the past thirty years. The organizational synthesis was most sweepingly presented in Robert H. Wiebe's The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (1967), an earlier imprint of Hill & Wang that Dumenil cites in her introduction and occasionally throughout the book. Wiebe mapped out the social crises produced by modernization and the fragile bureaucratic order that a new managerial elite confidently constructed. Dumenil's work illuminates the "defensive traditionalism" of many Americans who, up until the eve of the Great Depression, persistently and...