From Civil War to World War: America’s Historical Turnings from 1860–1945

The first article on this site provided a general overview of the “Turnings” model by the historians William Strauss and Neil Howe. This model observes recurring cycles in culture, each lasting for approximately a generation of around 20–25 years. Strauss and Howe call these cycles “turnings”, and outline a recurring pattern of four types of turnings: High, Awakening, Unraveling, and Crisis.

This article summarizes a near century of American history from the Civil War until after WWII through the lens of the Turnings model, and defines the cycles occurring over that time.

In introducing these historical phases, it is important to note that the subject being defined in each “turning” is the dominant collective and mainstream cultural values and norms of the USA. So a ‘crisis’ stage defines a time when the collective values of the nation have splintered to a point without a true “mainstream”, and are in conflict, while a following ‘high’ does not mean society improves for everyone, but rather that a new collective set of values and norms comes to dominate all others as the mainstream values that drive social priorities forward.

Civil Crisis and a Reconstruction “High”

Our historical journey begins in the clear Crisis turning of the Civil War. As Strauss and Howe look forward and backward through American history (even back to Tudor England), they make compelling arguments for the length of turnings as roughly 20–25 years in length. The Civil War Crisis is the only exception to this; being limited to the 5 years from 1860 to 1865. It is a credit to the model that they do not try to fit another 20 years of crisis around this turning to fit their model. Instead they observe that the 22 year “Unraveling” period of the country into a highly partisan north-south divide prior to this crisis produced a culture and political climate that concentrated the crisis period into this brief but intense self-destruction, and stunted the generational development of the adolescents and young adults who survived the war.

On the other side of the Civil War crisis stage turning, the country arrives at the “High” stage turning that the model proposes follows all crisis turnings. At this stage, with the crisis drawing to a conclusion with all its catastrophic costs, new institutions and national culture coalesce around values, norms, rules and regulations aimed at resolving those costs and building something new.

Following the Civil War, this boom is the reconstruction period in American history — a driver of industrialization, urbanization and westward expansion. But as mentioned, the “High” in this period refers only to the establishment of new institutions and cultural norms. It does not mean that these institutions and norms benefit all members of society. It is the triumph and dominance of one view within the conflict over the other. The post-Civil War High period legally abolished slavery, and drove economic and cultural change in the north. But it did not change the economics or culture of the southern states enough to avoid their quick post-war establishment of racial segregation enforced by violence that became codified in Jim Crow laws that held in place for another century.

Awakening American Romanticism

Following the model’s general rule of each turning lasting roughly 20 years, the reconstruction High would have evolved into an “Awakening” turning phase somewhere around 1886. Awakening turnings are characterized by a shift from the collectivist institutional norms that drive the boom toward more personal awakenings of consciousness, and the exploration of new systems of ethics.

This period from 1886 to 1908 saw a development of the Transcendentalist artistic and philosophical movement born during the High into an intellectual and artistic movement of American Romanticism characterized by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William James, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and James McNeill Whistler. This period saw the radical transformation of music with the birth of Ragtime, the spread of music through the phonograph, the connection of people through the telephone, the spread of images through movies, the influence of increasing electrification on the length of waking hours and what happened in them (especially in cities), the increasing momentum of the ethically minded temperance and suffrage movements, and the emergence of labor unions and the fight for workers’ rights.

In the story being told here, we’ve moved through one cycle of three turnings beginning with the Civil War to arrive at the “Unraveling” phase preceding WWII.

Expanding Horizons

In an Unraveling phase, the changing norms and values that emerged in the Awakening put existential pressure on the stability of the institutions that had previously evolved to support the High.

In the case of the Unraveling turning beginning around 1908 and continuing through 1929 we see not just an unraveling toward war, but also significant areas of expanded creativity that pull apart the threads of earlier cultural norms. During this time, the world witnessed the birth of Jazz via innovators like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Jelly Roll Morton and an evolution of American literature often referred to as the “American Renaissance” arising from writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. Through the “Roaring Twenties”, economic prosperity grew through stock market speculation. We see the culmination of the Temperance and Suffrage movements with a constitutional amendment for each. We see the dawn of human flight (which would be expanded quickly into warfare in WWI). We also see the expansion of a regionalized world into a more globalized world through the interweaving of treaties and economic interests that cascaded into the first World War.

(It should not be thought that all wars come only in crisis turnings. Wars are approached differently in each turning. In Unraveling periods, institutions are not strong enough to mobilized for prolonged conflict.)

Global Crisis

The Crisis period beginning in 1929 marked a profound turning point in American history, as the country plunged into the depths of the Great Depression. The stock market crash of October 1929 was the catalyst for an era of unparalleled economic hardship, with unemployment rates skyrocketing and banks failing in unprecedented numbers. Families lost their homes and savings, and breadlines became a common sight even in the most urbanized areas of the nation. This era was characterized by widespread poverty and despair, challenging the very fabric of American society and placing immense pressure on existing social and economic institutions.

As the country grappled with economic collapse, the Dust Bowl compounded the crisis, particularly devastating the Great Plains region. Severe drought conditions, combined with poor agricultural practices, led to massive dust storms that ravaged farmland, rendering vast areas uninhabitable. Thousands of families, often referred to as “Dust Bowl refugees” or “Okies,” were displaced, migrating westward in search of work and better living conditions. The environmental disaster highlighted the desperate need for new policies and practices, ultimately leading to significant changes in agricultural methods and federal intervention through programs like the New Deal.

The Crisis culminated in the global conflict of World War II, which began in 1939 and saw the United States’ direct involvement after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The war effort mobilized the nation in a way nothing else had, pulling the economy out of the Great Depression as industries shifted to wartime production. Millions of Americans served in the military, while those on the home front contributed through rationing, volunteering, and working in war-related industries. This period of intense national effort and unity not only brought an end to the economic woes of the Depression but also set the stage for America’s emergence as a global superpower. The war’s end in 1945 marked the conclusion of this turbulent Crisis turning, paving the way for the subsequent period of reconstruction and the dawn of what Henry Luce would call “The American Century.”

The Dawn of the American Century

After long periods of crisis, societies and the institutions underlying them will come to urgently seek a way to turn the corner from the draining force of crisis; forging a collective desire to move on from crisis into something new and better. In 1945, with the end of the war, the American production methods that were developed to win WWII began to turn toward a new objective — building the American economy. This is our most recent “High” turning (which was fittingly accompanied by a boom in babies).

This birth of “the American Century” is characterized in retrospect as a time of a second wave of mass production accompanied by consumerism, mass media and Madison Avenue advertising. The GI bill sent people to college who would never have had the chance otherwise, and plentiful blue collar and white collar jobs led to the growth of a comfortable Middle Class. Through the post-war High the institutions of the nation came together to engage in both a space race and c Cold War. Contemporary music turned from the hyper Jitterbug to Cool Jazz like Miles David and John Coltraine, and to the birth of Rock and Roll.

But as with the post-war High after the Civil War, the High after WWII, though quickly and broadly improving the American way of life for millions, is nonetheless also marred by a continuing crisis of civil rights due to racial color lines which were tolerated and institutionally enforced to various degrees through the whole country. Black GIs returning from the war still encountered segregation across the country and the same Jim Crow laws and racial violence they’d left in the south.

The “mainstream” values, norms and institutions that arose to support the American way of that time also took on an authoritarian flavor exemplified by Joseph McCarthy’s “Red Scare” hunt for communists, creating an atmosphere of fear, suspicion, and political repression, leading to the blacklisting of individuals, censorship, and infringements on civil liberties by dragging thousands of Americans before the government to investigate whether they held “un-American” thoughts or opinions, and/or promoted such opinions through speech.

Turning Toward Home

The next article picks up from this High of 1946–1964 to explore the subsequent Awakening that arose from the authoritarian High, cresting with Civil Rights movent and culminating with Ronald Regan’s morning in America before turning to the unraveling that ultimately moves us into our present point in the current “Crisis” stage.