The story of modernism and/in the US could do worse than begin in August 1967, when Gwendolyn Brooks – Chicagoan, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winner, and recent convert to the Black Arts Movement – read occasional poems at two dedication ceremonies for two very different pieces of public art in her home city. Her first reading was of “The Chicago Picasso” at the unveiling of an unnamed, 50-foot-tall Pablo Picasso sculpture outside Chicago’s Civic Center, a building that – then as now – housed most of Cook County’s circuit courts. Brooks’ invitation came from Chicago’s formidable mayor, Richard Daley, who cemented his notoriety the following year by orchestrating the heavy-handed policing of the combustive 1968 Democratic convention. For Brooks, the Picasso sculpture was art with a capital “A.” As she put it in her poem, “Does man love Art? Man visits Art, but squirms.”

This essay traces the Cold War Military Industrial Complex (MIC) back to the period of American neutrality in WWI, when US armaments manufacturers grew exponentially through sales to the Allied Powers. Already during this period, the sizeable peace movement argued that US defense and foreign policy was beholden to armament corporations, and later critiqued the corporate profiteering and weak regulation in the procurement system the US developed to industrially mobilize for war. This essay examines two leftist texts making such arguments—Upton Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins (1919), and John Dos Passos’ The Big Money (1936). Sinclair’s novel used a munitions-worker protagonist to examine the development of “total war,” which fragmented global labor solidarity by militarizing all industrial capacity; but its Bildungsroman form struggled to capture the expansiveness of the MIC. In contrast, Dos Passos leveraged modernist form to better chart the MIC’s interwar development, especially in the aircraft industry. The Big Money examines the MIC’s propensity to agentless violence and its hostility to workers’ movements, but also treats it as a potential space for class mobility and the bootstrap narrative—a hospitability echoed in the biography of Eddie Rickenbacker, the US’s most famous WWI flying ace and an aviation corporate titan.

This chapter considers the prominence of the Bildungsroman in the Harlem Renaissance. Classically structured around the tension between self-fulfillment and social acclimation, the genre became an important site for African American authors to consider the Jim Crow logics of what childhood and maturation meant in the USA. It was also the vehicle for many of the Renaissance’s explorations of the multiple meanings of education – both education for race leadership, and conversely what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “caste schooling” system designed to replicate white hegemony. The genre also has a close relationship to the passing novel in a social situation where normative narratives of success and achievement were coded as racially white. The chapter focuses on Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter and Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun, but includes discussion of fiction by Nella Larsen, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Wallace Thurman.