It was a century ago tomorrow that the blockbuster novel Main Street appeared in American bookstores. Its author, Sinclair Lewis, had published several novels already, but it was Main Street that would make him an international celebrity and the leader of a literary movement known to scholars as “the Revolt from the Village.” Less well known is his influence on what would become, some twenty years later, the modern libertarian movement.
Appreciating why Main Street hit such a nerve requires some context. The novel appeared in the wake of the horrific Great War—one that not only left millions of people dead, but transformed the culture of the western world. To many, the boisterous optimism of the late Nineteenth Century seemed utterly discredited. Particularly disgraced—or so it seemed to many—was liberal democracy, which intellectual leaders came to view as the politics of a paltry and decadent society. Ideologies such as fascism and communism—which reveled in a mystique of military discipline, and spurned the “bourgeois” interests in abundance and private life—seized the imagination of Europe, and the consequences were felt in the art world as well. In the years to come, painters would spurn the romanticism and representationalism that marked artists such as John Singer Sargent, and embrace harsh, even ugly forms of art justified by political mandates. And writers would come to regard fiction of progress, optimism, and good cheer—most notably the work of O. Henry, Horatio Alger, and Mark Twain—as obsolete.
At the same time, American culture was transforming. Along with the war had come an almost hysterical level of conformism and nationalism, as the Wilson Administration implemented a military draft, censored opponents, and jailed dissenters such as Eugene Debs, the socialist candidate for President. The war experience, wrote sociologist Robert Nisbet, amounted to the world’s first experiment with totalitarianism. A wave of revulsion followed, which Warren Harding exploited in his campaign slogan of 1920: “return to normalcy.”
An even deeper cultural divide was opening up as a result of scientific and religious developments—particularly the theory of evolution. The term “fundamentalism,” borrowed from the title of a series of religious tracts published between 1910-1915, gained a spokesman in William Jennings Bryan, whose crusade against the godless materialism of science would climax in the 1925 Scopes trial. At the same time, technological advances, most notably the automobile, were exacerbating these cultural differences. Unlike the railroad, cars gave people in small towns convenient and private transportation—and the ability to carry liquor. Movements to ban alcohol had gained traction throughout the nineteenth century, but the ability to carry intoxicating liquors easily in automobiles gave a boost to efforts to outlaw booze, and in January 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment was adopted, banning alcohol nationwide. Meanwhile, the 1920 census marked the first time that more Americans lived off farms than on them.
In short, as Nathan Miller writes in New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of America, the decade marked “the first generational gap of the twentieth century.” By common consent, the spokesman for the younger side of this division was H.L. Mencken, who used his magazine The Smart Set to champion secular, iconoclastic writers—and to challenge the parochial, hidebound, traditionalism of what he labeled the “booboisie.” It was with his readers—the young, urban, sophisticated, cynical Americans that would later be called “the Lost Generation”—that the “Revolt from the Village” resonated most strongly.
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