The The Modern Temper - 1124 Words

The beginning of the â€Å"Roaring 20’s† requires a complex understanding of the forces in the United States and how it created a self-conscious break with the past and a search for new forms of expression and politics. Dumenil in her book â€Å"The Modern Temper† identifies and defines how modernism came about in the United States. Her thesis stipulated that through the rapid industrialization of the United States following the footsteps of WWI; the mass migration from Eastern Europe and the South to the industrial belt of the Midwest; and the expansion of urbanization (4) lead to the rise of modernism. Dumenil asserts throughout her book that the rejection that changing values and behavior contributed to the shaping or a more pluralistic†¦show more content†¦The industrial capacity of the United States quickly recovered while rural America lingered in a post-war depression. However, with the rise of business the rise of consumerism became the norm. This was lightly or poorly covered in my opinion since it would expand the role of the traditional values of the rural or older values against the newer values of industrialization and leisure. Dumenil next covers the emerging consumer culture with the reinvention of work and its implications on the American society as well as the influence of more aptly the lack of influence of the labor unions. At the heart of this new consumerism was the rise of the automobile industry in the northern Midwestern industrial belt. Dumenil makes a faulty assertion that the Black migration to the Northern industrial belt were for these relatively high paying jobs. They were not; they were for the service industry in those cities. Dumenil fails to cover the white migration out of the Appalachia’s (Hillbilly Highway) to the industrial belt. This is a critical error in her thesis since in her later chapters she covers the expansion of the KKK and its role in the 1920s. The Appalachian migration now expanded rolls of KKK in new areas that were previously not covered. In addition to her failure of mentioning the role of the Appalachian migration; was its impact in the northern labor unions. These individuals were less willing to unionize than the