Victorian America was controlled by a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite. This is arguably the biggest difference between Victorian America and Modern America. Protestantism used to dominate American culture before the rise of the mass media and mass culture in the 1920s.
The following excerpt comes from Robert M. Crunden’s book A Brief History of American Culture:
“Historians have coined two terms to deal with the basic assumptions concerning mental illness before psychoanalysis. The “civilized morality” was the complex of moral values that Protestant America accepted without public questioning. Roman Catholics and Jews were quite as capable of such a morality, but in America, Protestants set the dominant tone until well into the twentieth century, and Protestants had developed a number of assumptions appropriate to the demands of a bourgeois culture. Men were to find themselves in business and to control their sexual appetites until they had the financial ability to support a wife and child in comfortable circumstances. Sexual activity outside marriage was immoral for men and unthinkable for women, and to uphold such abstinence society refused to tolerate public discussion of exceptional circumstances, or relevant topics like abortion or contraception. Men might learn the facts of life in a manner that would not bear close examination, but women should marry young and learn what they had to learn from their husbands. To protect them, novels and poems had to be purged of references to nonconforming behavior, and doctors learned to behave with great circumspection in anything relevant to the intimate details of a patient’s life.”
This sounds incredible.
Did Americans really used to live this way? Yes, what was known at the time as “free love” was a radical anarchist idea that had yet to triumph in American culture. In Victorian times, women did not go out to nightclubs, get drunk and do drugs and have sex with random people, particularly with blacks. To be sure, there were prostitutes who wore makeup, but these were not respectable women.
As we have seen, there was a strong national consensus in America on national identity, morality and culture in 1912, which was the year the Titanic sank. Americans believed in traditional moral values, progress and the values of Anglo-American literary culture. The old WASP culture of Victorian America sank like the Titanic between 1912 and 1950. By 1950, the American intelligentsia was half Jewish and American identity had been stripped of its White Anglo-Saxon Protestant character.
What happened in these years that decisively changed American culture and created our world? It is the Victorian-to-Modern transition that we have been studying in recent weeks.
The following excerpt comes from Christine Stansell’s book American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century:
“Ultimately, these tensions would lead to a break between radical and liberal versions of free-speech politics, a break that produced the particular aesthetic of talk that characterized the moderns. The story of Greenwich Village’s first institution for free speech and the conflicts within it shows the rupture. Founded in 1912, the Liberal Club briefly brought together older progressives and younger bohemians for debate and lectures. But the radical uses to which the bohemians turned the club unnerved the older people. A rift developed over talking – what to talk about, who could speak – separating the advocates of mankind’s steady improvement from the champions of a thoroughgoing revolt. …”
It is the year 1912.
The Liberal Club has been founded in the heart of Greenwich Village. It is a forum for these bohemian modernists who were pooling there. These people are the insurgents who challenged Victorian culture and who were the precursors of the Modern mainstream that emerged in the 1920s after this noisy crowd of modernists toppled their Genteel predecessors in New York.
“The third incarnation of the Liberal Club, now controlled by the champions of open membership and feminism, set up in a brownstone on narrow, decrepit Macdougal Street, south of Washington Square, in the heart of Greenwich Village. The new club blossomed with heterosexual conviviality and emancipated talk. “A Meeting Place for Those Interested in New Ideas,” the letterhead advised – the casualness of “meeting place” as opposed to “club” advertising a come-hither sociability. The decor stressed this club’s difference from other clubs: bare floors, wooden tables, cubist and fauve art on the walls. Bright colors were the fashion for furniture, fiery “futurist” oranges and acid yellows rather than the somber wooden surfaces and florid wallpaper of Victorian decor. The circulation between the clubrooms, Polly Holladay’s restaurant downstairs, and the Boni brothers’ bookstore next door undermined any interest in exclusivity that might have lingered. Weekly dances (not mannerly waltzes but the turkey trot and the shimmy, imported from “low,” working-class dance halls), unceasing ragtime on the player piano, masquerade balls, and amateur theatricals further erased the boundaries between those who belonged and those who didn’t, so that the Liberal Club hosted a free-floating clientele. A cast of drifters – “girls who had run away from their parents, women who husbands had left them, Jewish anarchists, professional beggars of the intellectual order, visiting celebrities, Russian revolutionaries,” as one poet described the crowd, surrounded the core of leftish intellectuals, writers, and theater people, the stalwarts dubbed by the curmudgeon H.L. Mencken “all the tin pot revolutionaries and sophomoric advanced thinkers in New York.” People began to gather in the late afternoon and stayed on, talking, dancing, and drifting downstairs to eat at Polly Holladay’s plain board tables.
And drinking. It is not overstating the case to say that Greenwich Village initiated a long infatuation of American writers and artists with alcohol, a love affair that began to subside only in the 1970s, if then. The generation of the 1920s – Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker – is better known for its booziness, but as it turns out, they were following in the footsteps of their bohemian predecessors. Blowsy paeans to alcohol billowed up from the moment. “An elementary thing like the sea: a universal solvent,” Floyd Dell crooned about liquor. Everyone drank hard, ventured Mabel Dodge, who doesn’t seem to have drank much herself. “But it was a very superior kind of excess that stimulated the kindliness of hearts and brought out all the pleasure,” she averred. “The idea that anybody would drink too much was unthought of,” Dell recalled of his Jackson Park threads. Drinking was virtually a social duty.”
If you were in Brooklyn today in the year 2020, it wouldn’t strike you as odd to see a hipster walking around in a flannel shirt and drinking craft beer. Free love, casual dress and experimentation in drugs is so woven into the fabric of Modern culture that it is difficult to see our age as a distinct epoch. There used to be a vitalist ideology drawn from Nietzsche, Bergson and H.G. Wells behind this that is now all but forgotten. It was part of celebrating “life” and seeking intense “experience” which is central to Modernism.
Malcolm Cowley summed up Greenwich Village-ism:
- The idea of self-expression – Each man’s, each woman’s, purpose in life is to express himself, to realize his full individuality through creative work and beautiful living in beautiful surroundings.
- The idea of paganism – The body is a temple in which there is nothing unclean, a shrine to be adorned for the ritual of love.
- The idea of living for the moment – It is stupid to pile up treasures that we can enjoy only in old age, when we have lost the capacity for enjoyment. Better to seize the moment as it comes, to dwell in it intensely, even at the cost of future suffering. Better to live extravagantly, gather June rosebuds, “burn my candle at both ends … It gives a lovely light.”
- The idea of liberty – Every law, convention or rule of art that prevents self-expression or the full enjoyment of the moment should be shattered and abolished. Puritanism is the great enemy. The crusade against puritanism is the only crusade with which free individuals are justified in allying themselves.
Click through to read the rest of his eight points. This is quite a departure from Protestantism and the Victorian consensus. Previously, the idea that you should “live for the moment” was considered ridiculous. In fact, virtually everything the Moderns believed in was abhorrent to Victorians.
“Part of the allure was that men and women could drink together. It was as if in this bracing modern space, hard drinking shed its connotations of sodden gentlemen’s maunderings or, alternatively, masculine barroom bonhomie to become an elixir of modernity. “The women worked quite regularly, even when they, too, drank,” Mabel Dodge observed brightly, meaning, probably, that the women still cleaned up and put the children to bed. There are only scraps of evidence to go about the New Women and drinking, but it’s intriguing to piece something together. Most certainly, hard drinking was a token of emancipation, like sex before marriage and talking about sex; it was understood as a constructive act of affiliation. Morphine addiction is what the women appear to have viewed as the feminine debasement to be avoided. But whiskey – so vigorous and proletarian! – and wine – so sophisticated and Continental! – must have seemed potions of transcendence into a genderless life or, even more loftily, a domain of profound community, it touch with the mysteries, to put it in the neo-pagan terms that Jig Cook was wont to use.”
This was a new thing.
It was an act of affiliation with the transgression and cultural liberation of Modernism: single men and women gathered in the same place, drinking lots of alcohol, having sex before marriage, women using birth control and bobbing their hair, engaging in free love (Margaret Sanger, for example, had sex with H.G. Wells and Havelock Ellis and multiple other men) and later smoking cigarettes in the 1920s.
“The Liberal Club’s conviviality was at once cozily domestic and racy, as men and women glowing with emancipated fervor and lubricated with liquor discussed subjects formerly taboo. “The most energetically freeloving den in Greenwich Village,” a proud member called the place. Love affairs materialized among the crowd, and spouses cast off traditional roles to dance and debate as comrades, friends, and colleagues. There were different circles of interest, all which incorporated men and women, amateurs and professionals. The extensive cast of characters makes it worth listing a few. There were the poets, a set that included Dadaist Alfred Kreymborg and Edna St. Vincent Millay. The club’s theatricals attracted a devoted, hard working group, among them Floyd Dell, who found a role as drama impresario when he arrived from Chicago, the set designer Robert Edmond Jones (one of the Harvard men), Princeton dropout Eugene O’Neill, Ida Rauh, a suffragist and lawyer, and Stella Cominsky, Emma Goldman’s niece. The writers were the largest contingent. A number were already established: Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, Steffens, Hapgood, Sherwood Anderson, and John Reed; others were still struggling their way out of the newspapers and the leftist press: Neith Boyce, Louise Bryant, Anna Strunsky Walling, Jig Cook, and Max Eastman. Around these cliques circulated an eclectic set of professionals: a psychoanalysis, a civil engineer, publishers, liberal lawyers, bookseller Albert Boni, and teacher/troublemaker Henrietta Rodman.”
In other words, a roll call of the Young Intellectuals.
The hunchback Randolph Bourne was about to show up in the Village.
The Jewish comrades from the Lower East Side were also there. Ethnicity and religion was less important to these people than their commitment to socialism, anarchism and modernism.
“Emma Goldman gave some of her spicier talks, like “Is Man a Varietist or Monogamist?” on humanity’s need for free love, and “The Intermediate Sex,” on homosexuality; Carl Jung lectured, too. There were discussions of the slit skirt, nudism, and the music of Richard Strauss.”
The Jews, Anglos and European ethnics that met in the Liberal Club in Greenwich Village in the 1910s came together as the New York avant-garde which became the Modern mainstream which is the root cause of virtually everything that is now wrong with America and the reason why it is collapsing.
Note: Last night, I was talking about this with my wife on the way home from an Irish restaurant and it reminded her of this 1960s song. She asked me if this was an example of Modernism. Yes, I explained this was the second wave of Modernism when it hit critical mass with the Boomers. This is why they believe all the absurd things they do and why the country has declined.
Wasn’t it the Jacksonian era when Americans boozed it up more than ever? And most of them were Protestant, not Catholic? When did the shift come to create the Prohibition movement, which was almost entirely Protestant? That’s more interesting than Hemingway and Fitzgerald. The shift must have taken place during Mark Twain’s lifetime, but when, and did he write about it?
Below at the link is a short overview of this issue of the roots of the temperance / prohibition movement in the USA, with links to some videos, from USA PBS TV
It was originally just to ‘moderate’ alcohol use, but like SJW anti-racism it just became more and more fanatic, that’s the ‘USA way’
But additionally, one can say that temperance got rolling after the ‘Second Great Awakening’ Bible religious revival of the 1790s-1830s petered out
USA Protestantism, and Protestantism in general, is rather ‘thin’ in sustainable substance on its own, and tends to need to be ‘in motion’ against an outside target (missionary efforts etc) or else it withers away
In USA 1800s those targets became slavery and then alcohol
Furthermore, it became a rabid Protestant cultural response to the self-confidence and oft-drunkenness of the huge wave of immigrant Roman Catholics of the 1800s … Protestants correctly feared a cultural decline against drinking, partying Catholics with colourful religious rituals, so they tried to defeat the Catholics by banning alcohol
But through this foolishness, Protestants destroyed themselves and the old America, and the Jew-Catholic alliance that defeated them, early on as mobsters (Al Capone, Meyer Lansky etc) and now as the entire USA Supreme Court, still supplies prime mafia for the USA oligarchy
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/roots-of-prohibition/
“When did the shift come to create the Prohibition movement, which was almost entirely Protestant? That’s more interesting”:
Then look at The Welsh Revival of the mid-nineteenth century, that spread to England and the U.S., though It was most intense in Cymru (Wales) itself, where the drinking establishments closed voluntarily and dumped their the unsold alcohol out on the ground, drunkenness, theft and fornication plummeted and dancing, and other vanities and vices nearly disappeared, not momentarily, but for years and decades. Revival was repeated in Wales in 1904, though a bit less intense, and the ripples of its moral influence again spread around the world, no doubt giving impetus to the Prohibition movement in the U.S.
But Protestantism may not be due all the credit. Wales was Orthodox before it was Protestant, and the memory of an uncorrupted “original Church” never died in some of the remote valleys during the centuries of Catholic occupation, as it also endured until the Reformation in some forgotten Alpine fastnesses on the European continent, in the Balkans and southern Alps
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=welsh+revival+1859&docid=608047260625272998&mid=B37E124CC18443C707E0B37E124CC18443C707E0&view=detail&FORM=VIRE
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=welsh+revival+1859&docid=608020601706513892&mid=E97F82DC48CA1B2AF0A0E97F82DC48CA1B2AF0A0&view=detail&FORM=VIRE
Irish restaurant? You are a pisser.
Prostestant heresy is what began our cycle into the abyss. It was those nations that first hosted the Jewish Geldmachers who ended up running the world using Babylonian Money Magik. Today they are the nations leading and controlling the New World Order, which is basically a British model of zero growth and elite dominance. They used their intelligence agencies to destroy the Catholic Church by putting in the compromised CIA asset Jorge Begrollio into the Papacy and wage a ruthless and unending war on national sovereignty by promoting the worst obscenities and using disaffected low IQ degenerates to ram through their moronic colour revolutions. The best thing is for the US to fall and dissolve like the USSR, it is a virus promoting British models all over the world. The Protestant nations were the first to promote humanist garbage because they though nothing of tradition. It’s the Orthodox regions who lead the way, and some Catholic nations that are against the heretic imposter in the Vatican. Once the US falls hopefully we will see the beginning of a multipolar world order, absent total centralized banker control. The US cannot change, it is not Democratic in any meaningful way, the election of Trump was several hundred thousand to one, and they are already changing the system to make another such fluke impossible. The US cannot and will not change, the path it is on will continue and become worse and worse. It is the NWO’s gendarme, and will always be. No amount of change will stop that. We need to go back to region power blocks like before WW1, this is the only proper method of maintaining sovereignty.
@Michael Leroy…
“Protestant heresy is what began our cycle into the abyss. It was those nations that first hosted the Jewish Geldmachers who ended up running the world using Babylonian Money Magik.”
Yes, Sir, but, as well, there are other factors – one being that Gentile Nations seemed to become beguiled by the notion of Federalism in the 19th century; that trend, in an of itself, leading to a wholesale usurpation of sovereignties that allied themselves to what you mention.
As well, let us not fail to mention that the falling away of Western White Gentiles from The Faith as something that has wrought a devastating effect on many things.
As Abraham Hamilton, on Trinity Family Christian Broadcasting is wont to say : “Darkness is not an affirmative force. It simply reoccupies the space vacated by the light.”
I am protestant and glad of it.
@Terry Smith
No Pope or Jew is going to tell me what to do.
@kraftywurker i believe you and appreciate your honesty.
The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith had issued a series of leaflets for Fireside Discussion Groups.
Number 7 states:
The question “Are Jews a Race?” is answered, briefly, with the conclusion that Jews are part
of a “general admixture” of races.
“Are Jews a Nation?’ is answered with the idea that Jews form parts of all nations; that some of them have the Zionist ideal of a Palestinian nation but “Jews have a consciousness of world unity.” To quote:
Jews are “definitely a type, and consciously a unity, we are an historic people; a world community.”
The question “Are Jews a Religion?” is answered by the assertion that “There are hundreds of thousands of Jews who are unbelievers. Yet they still consider themselves Jews.”
The incident of Jews converted to Christianity asking to help build a Jewish Palestine is related. “It is true that there are hundreds of thousands of atheist Jews, but they need not fear to be represented by Judaism. Of this they may be sure: that Judaism will not misrepresent them.”
The B’nai B’rith pamphlet previously quoted also states:
“We want a world in which nationalism shall definitely diminish.” And. Jews feel “they
belong to one world unity.
When the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, the Jewry of northern Africa received them.
When the Jews were expelled from Germany during the crusades, the nascent Jewry of Poland received them.
When they were expelled from Poland in
1648, the reconstituted German community received them in turn:
and when Eastern Europe sent its Jewish … exiles across the world, American Jewry helped them find a home, they have always welcomed their own exiles
We are the children of … a great and noble tradition. We were united by that tradition. Whenever a scholar in Northern Africa wrote a new commentary on the Talmud, it was read on the shores of the North Sea by another scholar, and whenever a rabbi along the Rhine became known in the field of Talmudic jurisprudence, his fame spread to Spain and even to Mesopotamia.
They were united by one spiritual culture … It is not race, so-called, but it is spiritual culture which has made us one.”
It’s IMPORTANT to note that liberalism, modernism, marxism, communism is really TALMUDIC JUDAISM
“The great ideal of Judaism is that the whole world shall be imbued with Jewish teaching and that in a Universal Brotherhood of Nations —
a greater Judaism in fact — all the separate races and religions shall disappear.”
The Jewish World, February 9, 1883
“Some call it Marxism – I call it Judaism.”
Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, in the American Bulletin of May 15, 1935
“The communist soul is the soul of Judaism.”
Harry Waton, A Program for the Jews and an Answer to All Anti-Semites (New York: Committee for the Preservation of the Jews, 1939), p. 143
Re: “The communist soul is the soul of Judaism”:
Notice the context of that rhetoric: It is being said in the 1930’s during the “Red Decade” peak of popularity of socialism in the U.S., prior to the establishment’s crackdown and beginning of the Cold War. Talmudism as such is not socialist/communistic, but recognizes that a FAKE communism/socialism can be USED as a means to the very same ends (elite domination and wealth extraction) that capitalism serves.
Ezra Pound Number #33: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zzuxaci0IGI
Thanks for the link. Required listening. The only thing my university taught me about Pound was that he was a great poet but unfortunately he became a fascist. So on the essay question about all you had to do was mention some of his poems and then condemn his as a fascist and the grad student TA marking the exam would give you at least a B.
Today I’m certain he’s totally banned from the curriculum.
I don’t know that Pound was enamored of fascism—he did like what Mussolini was doing in Italy. For that matter so did Hemmingway.
“Part of the allure was that men and women could drink together. … whiskey – so vigorous and proletarian! … not mannerly waltzes but the turkey trot and the shimmy, imported from “low,” working-class dance halls”
Mostly this narrative is about a cleavage between various parts of the elite classes.
Sure, in “proper Victorian morals in upper-class New York City in 1910” men and women didn’t drink together, in public. In private homes? Among the workers in the tenements? Out in the country?
They did.
A lot of this seems to me the emergence of a culture of anonymity in an urban area. In the 1970’s people started smoking pot openly on various streets in New York City – which would have been scandalous 20 years prior, and this is simply the same thing.
Of course, elites set the fashions, even more so in this era of the emergence of the mass media.
Certainly, too, there were various rural cultures that were quite “dry” and had a strict segregation of the sexes. The first year I went to Christian summer camp, in the 1980’s, the swimming pool was segregated by sex. But we had a pool in our backyard that was most certainly not. My parents never drank, our next door neighbors did. Muslims in Europe have always complained about sentiments against Muslim women wearing veils, pointing out that it’s no different than a nun’s habit. There are, to this day, very strict Protestant and Catholic churches wear women cover their hair, and the more “relaxed” version is simply women wearing their hats in church while men of course always remove their hats inside. In 2020 Brooklyn, orthodox Jewish women have to shave their entire head and wear wigs.
Quite a few of these moderns are basically magazine and newspaper celebrities of their time. Sure, some wrote books that we still read, but many were just “society people.”
Look at San Francisco in the late 1800’s, even before Modernism in New York – they had pretty open prostitution, a development from the Gold Rush era, and not just a culture of heavy drinking but quite a lot of drugs.
Your modernism women here can hold their liquor, but they aren’t officially prostitutes until they got hooked on morphine (“Morphine addiction is what the women appear to have viewed as the feminine debasement to be avoided.”)
This is an important era, an important development, but this?
“the root cause of virtually everything that is now wrong with America and the reason why it is collapsing.”
I don’t think it is the “root cause” at all – it’s a symptom far more than a cause – and it isn’t at all why America is “collapsing” firstly because America is not “collapsing” at all.
Before Prohibition saloons were on every street corner, and for the most part they were men only. As for women drinking, of course women drank, but we’re talking about the difference between a society where it is socially discouraged and a society where it is regarded as a rite of passage to behave like English females passed out on the concrete.
“This sounds incredible.”
Oddly enough, Mr. W., that passage that struck you as incredible, that passage about the sexual mores, for lack of a better term, of Victorian America, didn’t strike me as incredible at all. Maybe that’s because your own views have been shaped more by the so-called sexual revolution of the ’60s than you realize. On the other hand, it’s possible that it has to do not only with my having been born before that event but with my having been raised, to boot, in the Catholic milieu that the ’60s washed away along with those mores.
I was recently struck, too, that I might be Occidental Dissent’s only regular American commenter who is descended from literal Victorians, i.e., persons who were born subjects of Queen Victoria. Sixteen years ago, when I first saw the 1907 passenger list of the ship that brought my then-twelve-year-old grandmother from Ireland to America, I was startled to see “British” in the column headed “Nationality.” It was only in the next column, which was headed, I think, “Race or people,” that the word “Irish” appeared.
I was joking around.
I was just noting the distance we have traveled since the 1910s.
Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t catch it.
Back in 1978 or ’79, a classmate of mine expressed, in class, the view that a piece of fiction in which a female character felt guilty that she’d had sex before marriage wasn’t believable. The piece was an unproduced screenplay that had been making the rounds in Hollywood and was set in London, during the Great Plague. When the teacher replied that the girl’s guilt was understandable in the fictional time and place, my classmate, holding to his position, said the writer had failed, narratively, to transport the reader to that time and place and thus the moment in which the girl, while praying in church, expressed her guilt (and thus revealed, to the reader, what she’d been up to) was flat.
Because my classmate and I and virtually all the other students in the class were about the same age, early twenties, I’d never have expected that anyone in the class would have been unaware that just a decade or so earlier, before the sexual revolution, an American girl—as I thought of things, anyway—would have felt that same guilt. Either my classmate’s background was quite different from mine, or he’d already forgotten history through which he himself had lived. To this day, I don’t know which it is.
“”…The Jews, Anglos and European ethnics that met in the Liberal Club in Greenwich Village in the 1910s came together as the New York avant-garde which became the Modern mainstream which is the root cause of virtually everything that is now wrong with America and the reason why it is collapsing…..””
Can anybody explain how those wonderful people got in in the first place ? Why healthy society defense mechanism failed ?
Jews, also Eastern Europeans are well known historical bad asses who`s downsides have know for centuries. Jews were thrown out from Britain 400 years before the US was founded. For white people with good character as I learned from history lessons what are absolutely the best part of this website.
How the society defense mechanisms failed so badly at least century ago when there were not internet, computer games, TV , public education or other popular bad asses ?
All pro white people claim that it`s the Jew. But nobody want to answer the question, who let in the Jew. Centuries after Jews problem became widely known and Jews were expelled from everywhere.
Salem Nazi Trump supporting transphobic witch hunts hunt happened long before 1910-1920 when Jews jumped in and stared eating the rotten corpse.
Maybe it is good to go more back to history and take a good look to the first well recorded liberal madness expression on your soil ?
English puritan philosemitism dates back to the 1400’s.
Negrophilia was a well-known problem pre-WWI. It would be a mistake to ascribe traditional morality to Protestantism per se. It was just traditional morality, after all, wealthy Americans would send their daughters to be educated by nuns (even Thomas Jefferson tried it in France). Jefferson Davis attended Catholic school and received messages from the Pope in prison. PGT Beauregard was Catholic, James Longstreet converted to Catholicism, William Tecumseh Sherman was raised in a Catholic house. It was as early as 1870 that Catholics constituted a significant fraction of the white population, no small minority. There wouldn’t have been a significant anti-Catholic movement, there wouldn’t be kooks blaming the Catholic Church for the assassination of Lincoln, if Catholicism was not a major part of the United States.
It doesn’t really make sense to call the people in the 1920s larping after a Hollywood movie “Victorians.” Or that they were standing for “Victorian” values. The laws and values of the dominant classes had been evolving throughout the 19th Century. Divorce, birth control, the common law discipline of wives that is the foundation of paternal authority, attitudes towards these had slowly changed. When the “mainstream” flipped after the WWI it was because of the perception of a global revolution, of which the downfall of the monarchies and the Bolshevist revolution were seen as fundamental changes in the world. This overthrow of traditional civilization and traditional morality in Europe was a great encouragement to the Jews who had already begun their corruption of American customs (eg the prevalance of circumcision), the wire services had already been putting out sob stories about pogroms for decades before the 1920s.
The forces of Revolution were in ferment throughout the entire 19th Century, but they had limited success in causing radical social transformation, even after the conquest of the South, the tendency for civilization to right itself remained. It is primarily in the matter of reproduction where the fatal changes have taken place. In the 19th Century, the limitation of births by the Yankees began to steadily diminish their heritage in this country, so that by the fifties, the United States was no longer fundamentally a Yankee country. In those places that have a remnant Yankee population, they’re still burning down towns for niggers. Since the introduction of the oral contraceptive, promiscuity has reached a level that these young women search out an “urban professional” no sooner than 25 and often at the door of 35. After years of doing God knows what with whom. It wasn’t really until the 1980s that the delay of marriage became increasingly pronounced and fatal to our demographic situation.
I suggest if people want to know about the change in culture, the best thing to do is read the periodicals of the time. Family history can also be useful.
General Rosecrans, God pity him, was also Catholic.
Jefferson Davis, as a child after his parents death, was sent to a Catholic school for a year by his brother Joseph!
Before West Point, Davis graduated from Transylvania, in Lexington, Kentucky
“[T]he wire services had already been putting out sob stories about pogroms for decades before the 1920s.”
That statement of yours reminded me of a statement in Hilaire Belloc’s “The Jews” (first published 1922):
“One small but significant factor in the whole business of these [18]70’s and early 80’s—the beginning of the last quarter of the nineteenth century—was the rise to monopoly of the Jewish international news agents, among which Reuters was prominent, and the presence of Jews as international correspondents of the various great newspapers, the most prominent example being Opper, a Bohemian Jew, who concealed his origin under the false name of ‘de Blowitz,’ and for years acted as Paris correspondent for The Times, a paper in those days of international influence.”
If you’d like to read that in context, run a text-search for “Reuters” at the following:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/50556/50556-h/50556-h.htm
On drinking, social historian Aileen S. Kraditor published a short article on Prohibition in the conservative history journal Continuity entitled ” A Note on Lessons History Never Taught” (No. 10, Spring 1985, pges.11 9-121). She uses Prohibition as an an example of how popular perceptions and historical facts diverge. Contrary to belief, popular opposition to banning alcohol did not cause lack of enforcement, but lack of enforcement caused the decline in support for the law. Ironically it was the Anti-Saloon League’s mistake in thinking that strong enforcement would bred opposition that led Congress to not pass enough money to properly enforce the law, which caused public support to decline and the law to be repealed. Also contrary to fact is the view that the law generated an upswing in drinking. Prior to the law, per capita drinking was 2.6 gallons of absolute alcohol; the law brought about a decline in per capita drinking down to .97 gallons by 1934. In drink, as in other ways, the members of the Liberal Club acted the opposite of the rest of the nation.
“Contrary to belief, popular opposition to banning alcohol did not cause lack of enforcement, but lack of enforcement caused the decline in support for the law. Ironically it was the Anti-Saloon League’s mistake in thinking that strong enforcement would breed opposition that led Congress to not pass enough money to properly enforce the law, which caused public support to decline and the law to be repealed. Also contrary to fact is the view that the law generated an upswing in drinking. Prior to the law, per capita drinking was 2.6 gallons of absolute alcohol; the law brought about a decline in per capita drinking down to .97 gallons by 1934.”
I just amplified your very good, accurate comment, William.
This is nonsense. Support for prohibition was almost 100% WASP. Virtually no Catholics, German Americans or others supported it. In huge areas of the country, virtually 100% of the population refused to to support or obey prohibition. To the extent that WASPs supported prohibition, it was a kind of mass hysteria resembling modern political correctness rather than a reasonable policy.
Reviving support for prohibitionism is exactly the kind of pointless, wrong headed blunder that one would expect the alt-right to stumble into.
“Support for prohibition was almost 100% WASP”:
It depends what you mean by support, active political support or assent or agreement. You are correct about Catholics but plenty of German Americans were not opposed; although not very politically active, they appreciated it. Read my comments on “The Liberal Club” post. I think William has the correct view.
@ATBOTL
“Reviving support for prohibitionism is exactly the kind of pointless, wrong headed blunder that one would expect the alt-right to stumble into.”
Don’t worry, the Alt Right would never do that.
They will, however, get drunk and do “Hitler salutes.” Now that is good optics and not at all pointless.
So, don’t worry, the Alt Right is safe from the nefarious influence of sobriety.
Cardinal Manning supported prohibition. Of course, Cardinal Manning was the son of a director/governor of the Bank of England. Tea-totaling was a fairly popular movement at the turn of the century, and it wasn’t exclusively Protestant. That being said, there’s no doubt the impetus of the movement was mobs of Yankee women who frequently marched and engaged in vandalism. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
1. Dr Kraditor’s article was dealing on how popular perceptions and the facts of history can be in conflict, using Prohibition as an example. She may be wrong, but essentially repeating those perceptions is not an adequate answer to her argument. What you do present are blanket statements of dubious accuracy. For example, you reference Catholics, but fail to grasp that Irish priests were particularly anti-drink because they viewed drunkedness as a vice the Irish were prone to..
2.Just in case you wish to do research on the issue and see some of the historical evidence, the article she referenced on why the Volstead Act failed is “New Perspectives on the Prohibition ‘Experiment’ of the 1920’s” by John C. Burnham published in the “Journal of Social History.” in the Fall 1968 issue,
3. Where in my comment did I call for “reviving support for prohibitionism?” Noting error in the popular understanding of historical events supports nothing but truth in history. And you seemed somehow to missed that I was simply expanding on Hunter’s excellent historical essay with further historical evidence..
4. Alt right? Stuck much in the early 2010’s?
5. On the issue that she was writing about, her authority in the field exceeds yours and mine. Prior to her death this year, Dr. Kraditor was arguably the country’s leading expert on American reform movements, which clearly includes prohibition. Her work on female abolitionists is considered foundational in the field. Another of her important works was a book on the rank and file members of the Communist Party. It was based in part on her experience of being a party member for over decade before becoming a conservative.
Well, in 1916, wasp Woodrow Wilson nominated the first jew to sit on SCOTUS in Louis Brandeis. As a matter of fact, of the eight jews to ever serve on SCOTUS, six were nominated by a wasp POTUS. Only Kennedy (Arthur Goldberg) and Obama (Elana Kagen) were the only non-wasp presidents to do likewise.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-8-jewish-justices-who-made-the-us-supreme-court-jump/
We’re going to get to him as well.
There was a huge influx of jew immigrants from Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1920. That’s when they began taking over America in earnest. Organized crime, the press, Hollywood, popular music – it all became Yiddish during that period.