Split by the Great War and cast into shadow by the powerful mythology of the 1920s, for many commentators the 1910s hardly qualifies as a decade at all. This thoughtfully conceived and elegantly written book revels in what Mark Whalan calls the “intriguing obstacles” to periodization. It charts the continuities and changes of Progressive culture before and during the rupture of 1917–1920, while arguing persuasively that the 1910s witnessed the development of cultural forms that have proved remarkably long-lasting.

EUP's highly useful Twentieth-Century American Culture series is completed by the simultaneous publication of this book and Colin Harrison's volume on the 1990s. Each volume provides a chronology paralleling historical events with cultural production in the areas of visual art, photography and design, film (and vaudeville), fiction and poetry, and performance and music, and devotes chapters to each area which set out general contexts and provide case studies of specific texts, publications, or figures. Thus Whalan's chapter on fiction and poetry discusses naturalism, rural fiction, popular novels, ethnic fiction, and modernist poetry, identifying key links and contrasts between popular and canonical literary figures, and providing case studies of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, and Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, the latter enlivened by Whalan's appropriation of Steinian repetition. Here, as throughout the book, the juxtapositions that enable it to serve as an introduction to key material and critical debates also suggestively foreground dynamics and resistances between popular, mass, and elite cultures.

The dominant such dynamic, positioned at the heart of Whalan's narrative of the 1910s, is the commercial consolidation of an expansive middle-class taste, in film, visual art, fiction, music, and performance. Synthesizing the arguments of critics such as T. J. Jackson Lears, Ann Douglas, and Walter Benn Michaels, he implies that a major legacy of the decade was the forging of a powerful national middle-class sensibility that mediated diverse ethnic, racial, and gendered cultures into a cultural mainstream. Whalan echoes criticism that this mainstream culture filled in for a perceived loss of political cohesion, while its economic success, coupled with the wartime decimation of European cultural industries, would enable its eventual globalization, a process that, as he points out, was under way by 1920 in fields such as cinema and popular music, especially jazz. He picks apart the homogenizing effects of mainstreaming, charting, for example, the range of social and cultural modalities of dance in the era, from “tough dance” to the dance-hall craze popularized by celebrity dancing instructors such as Vernon and Irene Castle, to the avant-garde “modern dance” of Maud Allan, Isadora Duncan, and Ruth St. Denis.

At his most incisive, Whalan uses the example of the wartime propaganda machine the Committee on Public Information to epitomize the turn of Progressivism toward overtly commercial, militaristic, nativist, and nationalistic ends. But, while covering contemporary critical arenas such as Seven Arts and Greenwich Village political hobohemia, he distances himself from Randolph Bourne's sense of the Great War as a disaster for American democracy, emphasizing instead the continuing cultural vitality of the era. Whalan's attention to that vitality, helped by the well-selected illustrations, deserves an extensive and diverse readership. Fittingly, he concludes with an assessment of the legacy of the 1910s that emphasizes its nostalgic evocation in the 1970s via a reimagined “ragtime sensibility.” By reference to this retrospective celebration of the stark ethnic and racial diversity of the era as “a foundational fact of America's rich cultural heritage” (190), Whalan comes to critical terms with not only the history but also the myth of the 1910s, as what he calls, resonantly, “the last moment of modern America's supposed ‘prehistory’” (189).