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

by Lynn Dumenil

Lynn Dumenil's The Modern Temper provides a unique perspective into the American Jazz Age.

When most of us take a backward glance at the 1920s, we may think of prohibition and the jazz age, of movies stars and flappers, of Harold Lloyd and Mary Pickford, of Lindbergh and Hoover--and of Black Friday, October 29, 1929, when the plunging stock market ushered in the great depression.

But the 1920s were much more. Lynn Dumenil brings a fresh interpretation to a dramatic, important, and misunderstood decade. As her lively work makes clear, changing values brought an end to the repressive Victorian era; urban liberalism emerged; the federal bureaucracy was expanded; pluralism became increasingly important to America's heterogeneous society; and different religious, ethnic, and cultural groups encountered the homogenizing force of a powerful mass-consumer culture. The Modern Temper brings these many developments into sharp focus.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Historical, Politics, 20th Century

368 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 1995

About the author

Lynn Dumenil is the Robert Glass Cleland Professor Emerita of American History at Occidental College.

Reviews

[Destiny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I originally saw this book online, but since I didn't have the money right then to purchase it, I decided the next best thing was to go the library (Which was awesome. I'm definitely going more often.)

Compared to the lighthearted Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, I liked that this book gave a more serious side to the Twenties. It also had more than a paragraph dedicated to minorities, so I was very happy for that.

I will definitely buy my own copy of this book when I get a chance. It'll be helpful for research for my series set in the 1920s.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 4 out of 5]

While it can be a little dry and overly synthetic of others' work at points, Lynn Dumenil's "The Modern Temper" is at its core a strong portrait of the 1920s. She shows how a sense of haltering tension—progress mixed with regression, tradition, and backlash—characterized cultural changes in the arts, social sciences, politics, and religion. I liked the book's kaleidoscopic narrative and emphasis on historical continuities dating back to the Progressive Era. WWI was a generation-shaping event, yes, but there was more to America in the 1920s than disillusionment that turned into hedonism. There were modernist artists duking it out in the press with Southern agrarians, biologists debating creationists, ascendant conservatives fretting about the place of individual autonomy while the last few Progressives tried in vain for reform, and other cultural tensions that predated WWI. I'd have loved some footnotes, but they were sacrificed to the God that is Popular Press Publication. The book's readability makes it useful for college seminars.

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

This thematic overview of the 1920s does a fantastic job of showing how complex the era was, and complicates any one-sided depiction of the people and events of that decade. Dumenil's writing is vivid and engaging the whole time, and she does a nice job tying a truly voluminous amount of information into a relatively succinct narrative. Some chapters feel a tad long, and there is some repetitive coverage of certain events and ideas across the various chapters, but only because of how intertwined and challenging the realities of the decade were. All in all the book is a vivid and engaging look at a bygone era with some real and strange parallels to our current political and media climate.

[Giuliana Kevlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really informative, but I thought it was not extremely captivating.

[Valerie · Rating 4 out of 5]

It sucks that we're still fighting about the majority of the conflicts in this book, 100 years later.

[Brandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this for a grad class.
This is a rather fantastic, quite readable general history of the 1920s, which recognizes that there is some truth to the popular conception of the "Roaring Twenties," but that there is so much more than that. The story of how consumer culture took off like a rocket while so much of the country lived in poverty is so much more complicated and intriguing than Gatsby ever led me to believe.
I'll be keeping this one around for that magical day in the future when I'm hopefully teaching this stuff.