Thanks to a reader, more on Barzun here.
I read ‘From Dawn To Decadence‘ not long after it came out.
As posted, Barzun at The American Scholar-‘The Cradle Of Modernism‘:
‘For yet another cause of unhappiness was the encroachment of machine industry and its attendant uglification of town and country. The Romanticists had sung in an agrarian civilization; towns were for handiwork and commerce. Industry brought in not factories only, and railroads, but also the city — slums, crowds, a new type of filth, and shoddy goods, commonly known as “cheap and nasty.” And when free public schools were forced on the nation by the needs of industry, a further curse was added: the daily paper, also cheap.’
Via C-SPAN-The Historical Context Of Allan Bloom…From Humanities: Why Nabokov’s ‘Speak, Memory’ Still Speaks To Us