ABSTRACT
In this essay on cultural nationalism in the 1920s, Matthew Baigell demonstrates that the quest for national identity in American art, which defined the spirit of the interwar decades, was to be drastically altered by the nativist propaganda of the 1930s. Responding to what was perceived as a crisis in the nation’s cultural identity, American art and literature of the 1920s was more focused on self-discovery than self-definition. Notions of national expression were expansive and flexible, rooted in complex understandings of American character and experience, rather than narrowly conceived nativism.
But with the onslaught of the Depression and the ascendence of the so-called American Scene Movement—the name given to the preference among American artists for subjects drawn from American life—many critics became increasingly chauvinistic and intolerant in their demands for cultural nationalism. Baigell describes the process whereby an ambivalent search for national identity characteristic of the 1920s was transformed in the 1930s into the hardening of a particular kind of identity, one far less open to the diversity of American heritage and experience.
