CRISIS AND NEW SEARCHES 727
can past—in Mae West's colorful screen pictures of the gay 1890s or in the sentimental movie dramatization of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. The amazing vogue of Anthony Adverse, Gone with the Wind, and Oliver Wiswell likewise testified to the charm that an unrecoverable past held for many people.
As the threat of totalitarianism abroad enhanced the feeling of insecurity, more and more writers called upon American traditions to provide both security and strength. Van Wyck Brooks, Howard Mumford Jones, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, and others either became critical of much of the "international" and "modern" accent of the literature of the 1920s or sought in the American past a credo and a fortress. Almost insensibly people who had turned to our past for entertainment alone found themselves viewing it with pride and affection. Those who had taken democracy for granted began to think about its meaning as they read books like The Wave of the Future, Before the 1930s were over, more absorbing problems even than those of the depression were forcing Americans to reexamine their heritage, to take stock of themselves as never before.
Thus the response of Americans to the economic dislocation took a variety of forms, old and new. From an early point in the depression occasional prophets had sounded the warning that yet another escape might be forced on the American world—the escape of war. Such an escape was not sought; it came, feared, unwanted, unprepared for.
The Challenge of Totalitarianism and War
By a curious turn of affairs one of the first noticeable effects of the growth of the various forms of fascism in Europe was the enrichment of American intellectual and cultural life. The expulsion of some of the most gifted scientists, artists, and literary men from Italy and Germany meant an enhancement of the cosmopolitan tone and the distinction of cultural life all over America. The University in Exile, established in 1952 by Alvin Johnson and ultimately organized into the graduate faculty of the New School of Stfcial Research, harbored great minds and personalities. Every leading American university and many colleges profited from the presence of refugee scholars. As the life of the mind and spirit in European countries was subjected to regimentation, propa-