The Devil in Babylon: Fear of Progress and the Birth of Modern Life

What should the modern world look like? Who should be its leaders? And what values should it embrace? We have never wrestled over these questions more than in the first three decades of the twentieth century.

Allan Levine’s newest book chronicles this wide-ranging emotional and moral conflict by focusing on the people who lived through this turbulent era: an array of personalities – traditionalists as well as progressives, the powerful and the powerless – who, for better or worse, shaped the contours ofcontemporary North American society. Among them were anarchist Emma Goldman, prohibitionist and creationist William Jennings Bryan, women’s rights campaigner Nellie McClung, and gangster Al Capone.

Their personal experiences are set against the heated debate about the impact of immigration, the role of women, the conflict between science and religion, the influence of Hollywood, and the changing attitudes about sex – issues that preoccupied, and even consumed, North Americans of all classes.