FLOUNDERING IN MODERNITY 
George C. Clancy 
It is surely unnecessary to remind our contemporaries that they 
are living in a modern age. Our times are reeking with “modern¬ 
ity^” whatever that means. To be modern apparently implies 
escape from the dreary dullness of mid-Victorianism, the ennui of 
the fin de siecle, and the shackles of faith in anything whatsoever. 
Intellectually, it is a gay time to be on earth. For the generation 
latest born, life has particular zest. “Bliss is it in this dawn to 
be alive, but to be young is very heaven.” Youth plays saucily 
with the gray-beards, and the older generation, for all its hoary 
wisdom, is hard put to it to preserve its dignity—alas, it has 
to defend its innermost shrines from sacrilege by its own children. 
If we were inclined to sentimental mooning we could shed a few 
tears in the grave-yard where lie buried sacred traditions of litera¬ 
ture and art, ardent hopes for democracy, and some of the holy 
faiths of our fathers. Even our efforts at virtue and culture, into 
which we Americans have thrown what we think is a pardonable 
enthusiasm, are the object of the indulgent smiles of the intelli¬ 
gentsia. A recent article by a brilliant foreign critic refers to 
our orgies of prohibition and suppression as unbelievable to the 
civilized European, calls our reforms debauches of virtue, finds a 
malady of intellectual anaemia in the varied departments of Ameri¬ 
can life, and scores the books of popular idealists as the namby- 
pamby product of moral soothsayers. Even the time-honored 
institution of marriage is under a hot cross-fire; the family, once 
a centre of intense loyalties, gives evidence of losing its unity; 
“Home,” as Robert Frost says, “home is the place where, when 
you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Our democracy 
as expressed in the House of Representatives at Washington, we 
are told is a mess of incompetence and imbecility. H. L. Mencken, 
writing on “Politics,” says that our Congressmen are, in the 
overwhelming main, shallow fellows, ignorant of the grave matters 
they deal with and too stupid to learn, with the intelligence of 
the country newspaper editor, or the evangelical divine. As a 
