The Uses of Catastrophism: Lewis Mumford, Vernon L. Parrington, Van Wyck Brooks, and the End of American Regionalism

THE CRITIQUE OF AMERICAN CULTURE WHICH EVENTUALLY FOUND A home in American Studies and American Civilization programs was the wayward child of corporate capitalism, a product of the mating of an Emersonian belief in the concordance of the natural environment and consciousness, on the one hand, and a powerful Jeffersonian bias against industrial capitalism, on the other. Nurtured by radical opposition to Woodrow Wilson's war to make the world safe for democracy and acquiring new concepts of culture from the anthropologists soon thereafter, American Studies matured in academia, on the antimodernist Right at Vanderbilt in the twenties and on the Left at Harvard a decade later. The Nashville Agrarians, with varying admissions of fatality, proposed what their most politically astute spokesman, Herman Clarence Nixon, called "the constructive acceptance of the inevitable, with a maximum effort for the preservation of community and common roots."1 In these same years, F. 0. Matthiessen, twice president of the embattled Harvard Teachers Union and trustee of the Sam Adams Labor School, defined as the fundamental test of cultural citizenship the American writer's broadly conceived loyalty to equalitarian social democracy. From its inception in Van Wyck Brooks's early complaints against the "catchpenny opportunism" of contemporary business life