Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants
Claiming Humanism in the 1930s: Conservatives, Radicals, and the Power of a Label
Department
History Department
College
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Date Range
2012-2013
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities
Abstract
In the late 1920s, the conservative classicists Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More drew caustic reactions when they attacked America as deficient in moral discipline. Literary polemics flared and then subsided by 1930. Subsequent historical interest wandered as well; few historians have focused on the writings and characters central to the 1920s debates. However, idiosyncratic conservative intellectuals such as Seward Collins continued to hail the New Humanists critique of modern America. This paper traces the persistence of a conservative traditionalist attack on modern values but looks, too, at the broader contest for the term humanism. Free-thinking religious liberals, including John Dewey, claimed the label new humanism as well. After 1930, debates fell into categories of conservative versus liberal, but the unstable foundations of this bipolar ideological categorization emerge in the discourse of a new humanism, in which deeper conflicts about the American past, utilitarianism, and rationalized industry figured in complex ways.
Conference Name
Midwest Political Science Association 72nd Annual Conference
Conference Location
Chicago, Illinois
ScholarWorks Citation
Murphy, Paul, "Claiming Humanism in the 1930s: Conservatives, Radicals, and the Power of a Label" (2013). Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants. 1113.
https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/fsdg/1113
