nents. Even before the term came into general currency, the style of argument to which it was so well suited had already become fairly familiar, even predictable. In 1914, an editorial writer in the Nation chided those who took the position that mass production degraded the working man by reminding them that modern industry led to a "steady shortening of the hours of labor" and created "wider opportunities of pleasure, of spiritual excitement and growth." Criticism of the factory rested on the "old fallacy of the Golden Age," a refusal to understand that "for the great mass," life in the Middle Ages—so often invoked as a standard of comparison—consisted of "crushing, brutalizing toil."

Ten years later, a critic of Lewis Mumford's book on American architecture, Sticks and Stones, made the same point when he accused Mumford of seeking to "escape from the consequences of modern life." The establishment of an "urban mechanical civilization" made "all talk of the handicraftsman returning" sentimental and "unveracious." By 1931, Mumford himself could fling the charge of nostalgia against Joseph Wood Krutch and other "mournful and slightly Victorian" critics of modern culture, who found the "soul of man under modernism in a state of uneasiness and exacerbation." These writers suffered, Mumford thought, from "nostalgia for tradition." A year later, John Dewey attacked the "idealizing nostalgia" of those who wished to return to the classical curriculum. Nostalgia had attained the status of a political offense of the first order.

After World War II, criticism of nostalgia figured prominently in the attempt to revive the idea of progress by divesting it of utopian overtones. Those who located the golden age in the past, it was argued, suffered from the same kind of ahistorical thinking that led others to locate it in the future. Change was inevitable and irreversible, and there was no more sense in pining for the past than in hoping that some future utopia would bring the process of change to an end. The attack on nostalgia thus served to deflect attention from more serious issues. Could a belief in progress really be sustained? Was the modern order permanently exempt from the fate of its predecessors? Did the two world wars amount to a European civil war that was destroying European civilization? Would Europe ever be the same again? If the light went out in Europe, would the darkness engulf America as well? Those who raised such questions now exposed themselves to the charge of nostalgia. Almost any criticism of modern society, in fact, could be discredited on these grounds.

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