It may seem surprising that few Americans ascribed pernicious social effects to science before the 1920s. After all, a populist suspicion of elites and experts runs deep in American political culture. Yet that populist sentiment rarely targeted scientists before the 1920s. Many Americans viewed science as a kind of “people’s knowledge,” a practical, commonsense mode of reasoning that stood against all forms of elite authority. The political ascendance of Progressivism after 1890 made science increasingly central to governance, but the habitual identification of science with a populist rejection of authority largely persisted. Meanwhile, hardly any Americans believed that science had given their culture its distinctive character. Even those religious leaders who equated Darwinism with materialism thought that it threatened American culture in the future, not that it had already remade that culture. Up through World War I, the vast majority of Americans assumed that they lived in a Christian country, for better or worse. Indeed, the early twentieth century brought some of the loftiest expectations to date that the United States, and indeed the world, would be Christianized in every aspect.
Such hopes survived the 1920s in many circles. But small groups of cultural critics began to trace social changes that alarmed them to the cultural influence of science. Some lamented the mobilization of science by city and state governments: in classrooms, where biology lessons and sex education courses violated conventional norms, and in mandatory vaccination programs, which involved state agencies intervening directly in citizens’ bodies. Other critics worried about the growing federal bureaucracy, which continued to gain regulatory authority despite the rightward shift in electoral politics after 1920. Still others thought a climate of utilitarianism and industrialism had corrupted politics and learning alike. The hedonistic tenor of the 1920s consumer culture and the violations of sexual propriety by Jazz Age youth also signaled to some critics a widespread loss of moral guideposts.
Above all else, however, loomed the popular vogue of psychology, with its emphasis on cultural conditioning, childhood traumas, and other nonmoral, nonrational causes of behavior. The post–World War I years witnessed an explosion of popular interest in all of the natural and social sciences. But psychology became a veritable craze, with millions of readers devouring popular treatments and applying the new interpretive categories to themselves and others. Small cadres of literary scholars, southern writers, and mainline Protestants, along with larger groups of Catholic leaders and conservative Protestants, connected the vogue of psychology to wider social and cultural changes. They identified science as the source of a dangerously amoral worldview that had captured the public mind and eroded society’s cultural foundations. These critics of the 1920s levied a charge that would become increasingly common in subsequent decades: modern science had dissolved conventional understandings of the human person and led the entire culture astray.