ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the reactions in European literature to US mechanization and mass society and their similarities with the Spanish New York narratives published at the time. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Europeans developed a contradictory opinion of the United States as a primitive society in which the influence of technology and mechanization. The United States are characterized as a primitive society, where the 'masses' are threatening the moral and cultural authority of the intellectual elites, and Americans are described as a mass of dehumanized individuals, standardized by capitalism, the machine, and mass production. The sense of decadence was also generated by the unprecedented growth of population produced by industrialism and the rise of the so-called 'masses'. In Spain, debates about the decadence of the country intensified after its defeat in the war against the United States in 1898.
