The 1920s and 1930s were the culmination of a transformation of American history, literature, and culture, which had begun in the mid- nineteenth century. The transformation created not only a new and different but also an unequal and inequitable modern American society. Through a series of events— many of them happening sequentially and simultaneously without being held together by societal norms and values— the United States in the early twentieth century grew into an economic superpower, with confidence in its new imperial power. Culturally, the era of the 1920s is known as the age of obedience and social conformity, representing itself as a modern, rational, middle- class, Christian, and industrial society. Patriarchal (families), Eurocentric, Victorian values and the repression of desires, sexual prudery, crass moneymaking, and privileged Anglo- Saxon “whiteness” comprise the American norm, which was the accredited regime of power/ knowledge. The darker side of this unequal and inequitable modern American society was legal racial segregation and deadly economic exploitation of the working class, colonized indigenous nations, incorporated/ occupied territories and protectorates. There was also second- class citizenship for women and people of color. The relation of power to knowledge supported this unequal “way of structuring the world that forecloses alternative possibilities of ordering” and that did not “readily admit of the constraints by which that ordering takes place.”

But the United States’ emergence during the last three decades of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century into an unequal and inequitable conformist, consumer, and an imperial formation entailed not only coexistent and parallel developments in industrial and technological growth, mass production, the rise of corporations and the stock market, urbanization, an “uneven constellation of state and local governments,” colonized indigenous nations, and federally administered public lands3 but also parallel massive, multiracial, multiethnic, and multireligious immigration from Ireland, Germany, eastern and southern Europe, China, Japan, the Caribbean, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. In addition, there were the simultaneous rise of the labor, Civil Rights, Progressive, Native American and Asian, and women's resistant and countermovements on the mainland and in the incorporated/ occupied territories, which were not held together by a singular theme or value, which challenged and contested this unequal and inequitable modern American society, and which I will discuss in the next chapter. Thus, the emergence of modern America was a dynamic process of always becoming, which is a reinvention.