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Loss Of Innocence 1880-1914

The loss of innocence: 1880-1914
Brian Lee and Robert Reinders

Forces of change: The machine and the city

Innocence, it could be argued, is a state of mind which prefigures dual feelings of loss and guilt. Thus childhood is a period of innocence; to become adult is to sin and lose innocence. Primitives are often considered innocents dwelling in a pre-lapsarian Eden close to the divinity of Nature, but Western man with his sense of collective guilt can only yearn for and never attain the innocence of the primitive. There is, however, another sense of loss of innocence that arises in many people when the values, mores, even physical qualities of the lives they have inherited and take for granted appear to collapse in a world undergoing change with a rapidity that to many signifies chaos and catastrophe. The thirty-seven years after 1880 produced deep changes in the quality of American life which seriously tested older value systems and behavioural patterns. These changes - chiefly associated with industrialization and urbanization - required new disciplines, new goals and a new kind of consciousness from a predominantly rural folk. The value system based on the existential realities of an agrarian society had to be adapted and partly transformed to meet the new realities. As relations between people and their surroundings altered, new methods of description and new forms of observation had to be devised. Of course, old ways of living, thinking and seeing persisted, or at best were reluctantly accepted, and to some the new times were times of crisis and despair. But after 1900 there are indications that some elements in American society saw in the new urban-industrial structures the potential for a society which was logically ordered and humanely satisfying.
If one speaks of a loss of innocence in this period it may be measured - assuming one can quantify a feeling as tenuous as innocence - in selected statistics which, underneath the cold numbers and...