ABSTRACT
In late 1918, just around the corner from the war-preaching propaganda play The Yellow Dog, Charlie Chaplin's new movie Shoulder Arms drew crowds who laughed at this satire of pre-war. Amusements were what they had been: church socials and revivals, drives in buggies or buggy like automobiles, plays put on by stock companies or the new "movies" in made-over store buildings. A strain of hysteria continued after the war; there was hunting down of radicals and aliens; a hating of the new and the startling; a hugging of the false, a preventing of healthful innovation and spontaneity. Superficially the activities of most Americans immediately after the war seemed to revert to what they had been before the upheaval. The baseball scandal of 1919, when the World Series was "fixed," was a symptom of the extremity of the mood of the moment.
