The pastoral of the American way in the technological society: liberalism in transition, 1922-1939

Abstract

This study reassesses the American literary pastoralism that is the subject of Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden and disagrees with Marx about the nature and function of recurrent portrayals of the conflict between the "machine" and the "garden." The Pastoral of the American Way began as a method of dramatizing the political and social theory of the eighteenth-century liberalism that informs the primary political documents of American society. Far from being a static body of beliefs and attitudes, this liberalism has inherent philosophical and political tensions, a condition that insures both dissent and assent within the same ideological framework as well as conceptual differences over time. This liberalism derives from Locke's social contract theory and is what many have named the "American Way." Locke's state of nature setting encouraged the development of a pastoralism that dramatizes the American Way. Following Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner, the Pastoral of the American Way is a dynamic ideological system of myths and symbols that makes an autonomous politics possible and which serves as a ritual process. The Pastoral of the American Way functions as what Kenneth Burke calls a "terministic screen" that selects and deflects "reality." Drawing on the work of Sacvan Bercovitch, this study argues that the Pastoral of the American Way functions as a jeremiad transformed for a secular, Lockean society. The Pastoral of the American Way plays a vital and constructive role in evaluating and transforming American liberalism in the years between the First and Second World Wars. During this period, the imagery of the Pastoral of the American Way is explicitly associated with the label of American liberalism, and both are used to signal the "true" meaning of America. Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, Louis Bromfield's The Farm, and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath use pastoral practices to comment on the status of American liberalism, and parallel the writings of such public intellectuals and figures as Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Walter Lippmann, Henry Adams, and Frederick Winslow Taylor.