American Life in the "Roaring Twenties" 1919-1929 PDF

32 American Life in the “Roaring Twenties”  1919–1929 America’s present need is not heroics but healing; not nostru...

32 American Life in the “Roaring Twenties”  1919–1929 America’s present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but restoration;... not surgery but serenity. WARREN G. HARDING, 1920 B loodied by the war and disillusioned by the peace, Americans turned inward in the 1920s. Shunning diplomatic commitments to foreign New technologies, new consumer products, and new forms of leisure and entertainment made the twenties roar. Yet just beneath the surface lurked countries, they also denounced “radical” foreign widespread anxieties about the future and fears that ideas, condemned “un-American” lifestyles, and America was losing sight of its traditional ways. clanged shut the immigration gates against foreign peoples. They partly sealed off the domestic econ- omy from the rest of the world and plunged head- Seeing Red long into a dizzying decade of homegrown prosperity. The boom of the golden twenties showered gen- Hysterical fears of red Russia continued to color uine benefits on Americans, as incomes and living American thinking for several years after the Bol- standards rose for many. But there seemed to be shevik revolution of 1917, which spawned a tiny something incredible about it all, even as people sang, Communist party in America. Tensions were height- ened by an epidemic of strikes that convulsed the My sister she works in the laundry, Republic at war’s end, many of them the result of My father sells bootlegger gin, high prices and frustrated union-organizing drives. My mother she takes in the washing, Upstanding Americans jumped to the conclusion My God! how the money rolls in! that labor troubles were fomented by bomb-and- 728  The Red Scare 729 home of Palmer. The “Fighting Quaker” was there- upon dubbed the “Quaking Fighter.” Other events highlighted the red scare. Late in December 1919, a shipload of 249 alleged alien radi- cals was deported on the Buford (“Soviet Ark”) to the “workers’ paradise” of Russia. One zealot cried, “My motto for the Reds is S.O.S.—ship or shoot.” Hyster- ia was temporarily revived in September 1920, when a still-unexplained bomb blast on Wall Street killed thirty-eight people and wounded several hundred others. Various states joined the pack in the outcry against radicals. In 1919–1920 a number of legisla- tures, reflecting the anxiety of “solid” citizens, passed criminal syndicalism laws. These antired statutes, some of which were born of the war, made unlawful the mere advocacy of violence to secure social change. Critics protested that mere words were not criminal deeds, that there was a great gulf between throwing fits and throwing bombs, and that “free screech” was for the nasty as well as the nice. Violence was done to traditional American concepts of free speech as IWW members and other radicals were vigorously prosecuted. The hysteria went so far that in 1920 five members of the New York legislature, all lawfully elected, were denied their seats simply because they were Socialists. The red scare was a godsend to conservative businesspeople, who used it to break the backs of the fledgling unions. Labor’s call for the “closed,” or all-union, shop was denounced as “Sovietism in disguise.” Employers, in turn, hailed their own whisker Bolsheviks. A general strike in Seattle in antiunion campaign for the “open” shop as “the 1919, though modest in its demands and orderly in American plan.” its methods, prompted a call from the mayor for Antiredism and antiforeignism were reflected in federal troops to head off “the anarchy of Russia.” a notorious case regarded by liberals as a “judicial Fire-and-brimstone evangelist Billy Sunday struck a lynching.” Nicola Sacco, a shoe-factory worker, and responsive chord when he described a Bolshevik as Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fish peddler, were convicted “a guy with a face like a porcupine and a breath that in 1921 of the murder of a Massachusetts paymaster would scare a pole cat.... If I had my way, I’d fill the and his guard. The jury and judge were prejudiced jails so full of them that their feet would stick out the window.” The big “red scare” of 1919–1920 resulted in a nationwide crusade against left-wingers whose Americanism was suspect. Attorney General A. An author-soldier (Guy Empey) applauded Mitchell Palmer, who “saw red” too easily, earned the “deportation delirium” when he wrote, the title of the “Fighting Quaker” by his excess of “I believe we should place them [the reds] all zeal in rounding up suspects. They ultimately on a ship of stone, with sails of lead, and that totaled about six thousand. This drive to root out their first stopping place should be hell.” radicals was redoubled in June 1919, when a bomb shattered both the nerves and the Washington 730 CHAPTER 32 American Life in the“Roaring Twenties”, 1919–1929 in some degree against the defendants because they Communist, anti-internationalist, antievolutionist, were Italians, atheists, anarchists, and draft dodgers. antibootlegger, antigambling, antiadultery, and Liberals and radicals the world over rallied to anti–birth control. It was also pro–Anglo-Saxon, the defense of the two aliens doomed to die. The pro–“native” American, and pro-Protestant. In case dragged on for six years until 1927, when the short, the besheeted Klan betokened an extremist, condemned men were electrocuted. Communists ultraconservative uprising against many of the and other radicals were thus presented with two forces of diversity and modernity that were trans- martyrs in the “class struggle,” while many Ameri- forming American culture. can liberals hung their heads. The evidence against As reconstituted, the Klan spread with astonish- the accused, though damaging, betrayed serious ing rapidity, especially in the Midwest and the “Bible weaknesses. If the trial had been held in an atmos- Belt” South. At its peak in the mid-1920s, it claimed phere less charged with antiredism, the outcome about 5 million dues-paying members and wielded might well have been only a prison term. potent political influence. It capitalized on the typi- cally American love of on-the-edge adventure and in-group camaraderie, to say nothing of the adoles- Hooded Hoodlums of the KKK cent ardor for secret ritual. “Knights of the Invisible Empire” included among their officials Imperial Wizards, Grand Goblins, King Kleagles, and other A new Ku Klux Klan, spawned by the postwar horrendous “kreatures.” The most impressive dis- reaction, mushroomed fearsomely in the early plays were “konclaves” and huge flag-waving 1920s. Despite the familiar sheets and hoods, it parades. The chief warning was the blazing cross. more closely resembled the antiforeign “nativist” The principal weapon was the bloodied lash, sup- movements of the 1850s than the antiblack plemented by tar and feathers. Rallying songs were nightriders of the 1860s. It was antiforeign, anti- “The Fiery Cross on High,” “One Hundred Percent Catholic, antiblack, anti-Jewish, antipacifist, anti- American,” and “The Ku Klux Klan and the Pope” (against kissing the Pope’s toe). One brutal slogan was “Kill the Kikes, Koons, and Katholics.” This reign of hooded horror, so repulsive to the best American ideals, collapsed rather suddenly in the late 1920s. Decent people at last recoiled from the orgy of ribboned flesh and terrorism, while scandalous embezzling by Klan officials launched a congressional investigation. The bubble was punc- tured when the movement was exposed as a vicious racket based on a $10 initiation fee, $4 of which was kicked back to local organizers as an incentive to recruit. The KKK was an alarming manifestation of the intolerance and prejudice plaguing people anx- ious about the dizzying pace of social change in the 1920s. America needed no such cowardly apostles, whose white sheets concealed dark purposes. Stemming the Foreign Flood Isolationist America of the 1920s, ingrown and provincial, had little use for the immigrants who began to flood into the country again as peace settled soothingly on the war-torn world. Some 800,000 stepped ashore in 1920–1921, about two-  Immigration Restriction 731 A recognized expert on American immigration, Henry P. Fairchild (1880–1956), wrote in 1926, “The typical immigrant of the present does not really live in America at all, but, from the point of view of nationality, in Italy, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, or some other foreign country.” thirds of them from southern and eastern Europe. The “one-hundred-percent Americans,” recoiling at the sight of this resumed “New Immigration,” once again cried that the famed poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty was all too literally true: they claimed that a sickly Europe was indeed vomiting on America “the wretched refuse of its teeming shore.” Congress temporarily plugged the breach with the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. Newcomers from Europe were restricted in any given year to a defi- nite quota, which was set at 3 percent of the people of their nationality who had been living in the natory section of the Immigration Act of 1924 United States in 1910. This national-origins system slammed the door absolutely against Japanese was relatively favorable to the immigrants from immigrants. Mass “Hate America” rallies erupted in southern and eastern Europe, for by 1910 immense Japan, and one Japanese superpatriot expressed his numbers of them had already arrived. outrage by committing suicide near the American This stopgap legislation of 1921 was replaced by embassy in Tokyo. Exempt from the quota system the Immigration Act of 1924. Quotas for foreigners were Canadians and Latin Americans, whose prox- were cut from 3 percent to 2 percent. The national- imity made them easy to attract for jobs when times origins base was shifted from the census of 1910 to were good and just as easy to send back home when that of 1890, when comparatively few southern they were not. Europeans had arrived.* Great Britain and Northern The quota system effected a pivotal departure Ireland, for example, could send 65,721 a year as in American policy. It claimed that the nation was against 5,802 for Italy. Southern Europeans bitterly filling up and that a “No Vacancy” sign was needed. denounced the device as unfair and discrimina- Immigration henceforth dwindled to a mere trickle. tory—a triumph for the “nativist” belief that blue- By 1931, probably for the first time in American eyed and fair-haired northern Europeans were of experience, more foreigners left than arrived. Quo- better blood. The purpose was clearly to freeze tas thus caused America to sacrifice something of its America’s existing racial composition, which was tradition of freedom and opportunity, as well as its largely northern European. A flagrantly discrimi- future ethnic diversity. The Immigration Act of 1924 marked the end of an era—a period of virtually unrestricted immigra- tion that in the preceding century had brought *Five years later the Act of 1929, using 1920 as the quota base, some 35 million newcomers to the United States, virtually cut immigration in half by limiting the total to 152,574 a year. In 1965 Congress abolished the national-origins quota mostly from Europe. The immigrant tide was now system. cut off, but it left on American shores by the 1920s a 732 CHAPTER 32 American Life in the“Roaring Twenties”, 1919–1929 Average annual inflow, 176,983 1907–1914 685,531 198,082 Quotas under Act of 1921 158,367 140,999 Quotas under Act of 1924 21,847 Quotas under National- 132,323 Origins Provision of 1929 20,251 Immigrants from Northern and Western Europe Quotas under McCarran- 125,165 Immigrants from other countries, Walter Act of 1952 29,492 principally Southern and Eastern Europe Annual Immigration and the Quota Laws The national-origins quota system was abolished in 1965. Legislation in that year capped the level of immigration at 170,000 per year but made exceptions for children, spouses, and parents of persons already arrived. It also restricted immigration from any single country to 20,000 people per year. The immigration laws were again significantly revised in 1986 (see p. 930 and p. 1023). patchwork of ethnic communities separated from The legal abolition of alcohol was especially each other and from the larger society by language, popular in the South and West. Southern whites religion, and customs. Many of the most recent were eager to keep stimulants out of the hands of arrivals, including the Italians, Jews, and Poles, lived blacks, lest they burst out of “their place.” In the in isolated enclaves with their own houses of wor- West prohibition represented an attack on all the ship, newspapers, and theaters (see Makers of vices associated with the ubiquitous western America: The Poles, pp. 734–735). Efforts to organize saloon: public drunkenness, prostitution, corrup- labor unions repeatedly foundered on the rocks of tion, and crime. But despite the overwhelming rati- ethnic differences. Immigrant workers on the same fication of the “dry” amendment, strong opposition shop floor might share a common interest in wages persisted in the larger eastern cities. For many “wet” and working conditions, but they often had no foreign-born people, Old World styles of sociability common language with which to forge common were built around drinking in beer gardens and cor- cause; indeed cynical employers often played upon ethnic rivalries to keep their workers divided and powerless. Ethnic variety thus undermined class and political solidarity. It was an old American story, but one that some reformers hoped would not go on Automaker Henry Ford (1863–1947), an forever. ardent prohibitionist, posted this notice in his Detroit factory in 1922: “From now on it will cost a man his job... to The Prohibition “Experiment” have the odor of beer, wine or liquor on his breath, or to have any of these intoxicants on his person or in his home. The Eighteenth One of the last peculiar spasms of the progressive Amendment is a part of the fundamental reform movement was prohibition, loudly sup- laws of this country. It was meant to be ported by crusading churches and by many women. enforced. Politics has interfered with the The arid new order was authorized in 1919 by the enforcement of this law, but so far as our Eighteenth Amendment (see the Appendix), as im- organization is concerned, it is going to be plemented by the Volstead Act passed by Congress enforced to the letter.” later that year. Together these laws made the world “safe for hypocrisy.”  Prohibition 733 ner taverns. Yet most Americans now assumed that the loss of their cheap beer, while pointing out that prohibition had come to stay. Everywhere carousers the idle rich could buy all the illicit alcohol they indulged in last wild flings, as the nation prepared wanted. Flaming youth of the jazz age thought it to enter upon a permanent “alcoholiday.” “smart” to swill bootleg liquor—“liquid tonsillec- But prohibitionists were naive in the extreme. tomies.” Millions of older citizens likewise found They overlooked the tenacious American tradition forbidden fruit fascinating, as they engaged in “bar of strong drink and of weak control by the central hunts.” government, especially over private lives. They for- Prohibition might have started off on a better got that the federal authorities had never satisfacto- foot if there had been a larger army of enforcement rily enforced a law where the majority of the officials. But the state and federal agencies were people—or a strong minority—were hostile to it. understaffed, and their snoopers, susceptible to They ignored the fact that one cannot make a crime bribery, were underpaid. The public was increas- overnight out of something that millions of people ingly distressed as scores of people, including inno- have never regarded as a crime. Lawmakers could cent bystanders, were killed by quick-triggered dry not legislate away a thirst. agents. Peculiar conditions hampered the enforcement Prohibition simply did not prohibit. The old- of prohibition. Profound disillusionment over the time “men only” corner saloons were replaced by aftermath of the war raised serious questions as to thousands of “speakeasies,” each with its tiny grilled the wisdom of further self-denial. Slaking thirst window through which the thirsty spoke softly became a cherished personal liberty, and many before the barred door was opened. Hard liquor, ardent wets believed that the way to bring about especially the cocktail, was drunk in staggering vol- repeal was to violate the law on a large enough ume by both men and women. Largely because of scale. Hypocritical, hip-flasked legislators spoke or voted dry while privately drinking wet. (“Let us strike a blow for liberty” was an ironic toast.) Frus- trated soldiers, returning from France, complained that prohibition had been “put over” on them while they were “over there.” Grimy workers bemoaned  The Poles he Poles were among the largest immigrant These Polish-speaking newcomers emigrated T groups to respond to industrializing America’s call for badly needed labor after the Civil War. not from a unified nation, but from a weakened country that had been partitioned in the eighteenth Between 1870 and World War I, some 2 million Pol- century by three great European powers: Prussia ish-speaking peasants boarded steamships bound (later Germany), Austria-Hungary, and Russia. The for the United States. By the 1920s, when antiforeign Prussian Poles, driven from their homeland in part feeling led to restrictive legislation that choked the by the anti-Catholic policies that the German impe- immigrant stream to a trickle, Polish immigrants rial government pursued in the 1870s, arrived in and their American-born children began to develop America first. Fleeing religious persecution as well new identities as Polish-Americans. as economic turmoil, many of these early immi- The first Poles to arrive in the New World had grants came to the United States intending to stay. landed in Jamestown in 1608 and helped to develop By contrast, most of those who came later from Aus- that colony’s timber industry. Over the ensuing two trian and Russian Poland simply hoped to earn and a half centuries, scattered religious dissenters enough American dollars to return home and buy and revolutionary nationalists also made their way land. from Poland to America. During the Revolution Some of the Polish peasants learned of America about one hundred Poles, including two officers from propaganda spread throughout Europe by recruited by Benjamin Franklin, served in the Conti- agents for U.S. railroad and steamship lines. But nental Army. many more were lured by glowing letters from But the Polish hopefuls who poured into the friends and relatives already living in the United United States in the late nineteenth century came States. The first wave of Polish immigrants had primarily to stave off starvation and to earn money established a thriving network of self-help and fra- to buy land. Known in their homeland as za chlebem ternal associations organized around Polish Catholic (“for bread”) emigrants, they belonged to the mass parishes. Often Polish-American entrepreneurs of central and eastern European peasants who had helped their European compatriots make travel been forced off their farms by growing competition arrangements or find jobs in the United States. One from the large-scale, mechanized agriculture of of the most successful of these, the energetic western Europe and the United States. An excep- Chicago grocer Anton Schermann, is credited with tionally high birthrate among the Catholic Poles “bringing over” 100,000 Poles and causing the Windy compounded this economic pressure, creating an City to earn the nickname the “American Warsaw.” army of the land-poor and landless, who left their Most of the Poles arriving in the United States in homes seasonally or permanently in search of work. the late nineteenth century headed for booming In 1891 farmworkers and unskilled laborers in the industrial cities such as Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Detroit, United States earned about $1 a day, more than Milwaukee, and Chicago. In 1907 four-fifths of the eight times as much as agricultural workers in men toiled as unskilled laborers in coal mines, the Polish province of Galicia. Such a magnet was meatpacking factories, textile and steel mills, oil irresistible. refineries, and garment-making shops. Although 734 married women usually stayed home and con- tributed to the family’s earnings by taking in laun- dry and boarders, children and single girls often joined their fathers and brothers on the job. By putting the whole family to work, America’s Polish immigrants saved tidy sums. By 1901 about one-third of all Poles in the United States owned real estate, and they sent so much money to relatives in Austria and Russia that American and European authorities fretted about the consequences: in 1907 a nativist U.S. immigration commission groused that the huge outflow of funds to eastern Europe was weakening the U.S. economy. When an independent Poland was created after World War I, few Poles chose to return to their Old World homeland. Instead, like other immigrant groups in the 1920s, they redoubled their efforts to integrate into American society. Polish institutions like churches and fraternal organizations, which had served to perpetuate a distinctive Polish culture in the New World, now facilitated the transforma- tion of Poles into Polish-Americans. When Poland was absorbed into the communist bloc after World War II, Polish-Americans clung still more tightly to their American identity, pushing for landmarks like Chicago’s Pulaski Road to memorialize their culture in the New World. 735 736 CHAPTER 32 American Life in the“Roaring Twenties”, 1919–1929 the difficulties of transporting and concealing bot- tles, beverages of high alcoholic content were popu- lar. Foreign rumrunners, often from the West Indies, had their inning, and countless cases of liquor leaked down from Canada. The zeal of American prohibition agents on occasion strained diplomatic relations with Uncle Sam’s northern neighbor. “Home brew” and “bathtub gin” became popu- lar, as law-evading adults engaged in “alky cooking” with toy stills. The worst of the homemade “rotgut” produced blindness, even death. The affable boot- legger worked in silent partnership with the friendly undertaker. Yet the “noble experiment” was not entirely a failure. Bank savings increased, and absenteeism in industry decreased, presumably because of the newly sober ways of formerly soused barflies. On the whole, probably less alcohol was consumed than in the days before prohibition, though strong drink continued to be available. As the legendary tippler remarked, prohibition was “a darn sight bet- ter than no liquor at all.” The Golden Age of Gangsterism Prohibition spawned shocking crimes. The lush profits of illegal alcohol led to bribery of the police, many of whom were induced to see and smell no evil. Violent wars broke out in the big cities between And the pistols’ red glare, rival gangs—often rooted in immigrant neighbor- Bombs bursting in air hoods—who sought to corner the rich market in Give proof through the night booze. Rival triggermen used their sawed-off shot- That Chicago’s still there. guns and chattering “typewriters” (machine guns) to “erase” bootlegging competitors who were trying Capone, though branded “Public Enemy Number to “muscle in” on their “racket.” In the gang wars of One,” could not be convicted of the cold-blooded the 1920s in Chicago, about five hundred mobsters massacre, on St. Valentine’s Day in 1929, of seven were murdered. Arrests were few and convictions disarmed members of a rival gang. But after serving were even fewer, as the button-lipped gangsters most of an eleven-year sentence in a federal peni- covered for one another with the underworld’s code tentiary for income-tax evasion, he was released as of silence. a syphilitic wreck. Chicago was by far the most spectacular exam- Gangsters rapidly moved into other profitable ple of lawlessness. In 1925 “Scarface” Al Capone, a and illicit activities: prostitution, gambling, and grasping and murderous booze distributor, began narcotics. Honest merchants were forced to pay six years of gang warfare that netted him millions of “protection money” to the organized thugs; other- blood-spattered dollars. He zoomed through the wise their windows would be smashed, their trucks streets in an armor-plated car with bulletproof win- overturned, or their employees or themselves dows. A Brooklyn newspaper quipped, beaten up. Racketeers even invaded the ranks of  Science and Fundamentalism 737 local labor unions as organizers and promoters. Organized crime had come to be one of the nation’s most gigantic businesses. By 1930 the annual “take” Hiram Wesley Evans (1881–1966), imperial of the underworld was estimated to be from $12 bil- wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, in 1926 lion to $18 billion—several times the income of the poignantly described the cultural grievances Washington government. that fueled the Klan and lay behind much Criminal callousness sank to new depths in of the Fundamentalist revolt against 1932 with the kidnapping for ransom, and eventual “Modernism”: murder, of the infant son of aviator-hero Charles A. “Nordic Americans for the last generation Lindbergh. The entire nation was inexpressibly have found themselves increasingly shocked and saddened, causing Congress in 1932 to uncomfortable and finally deeply distressed. pass the so-called Lindbergh Law, making interstate... One by one all our traditional moral abduction in certain circumstances a death-penalty standards went by the boards, or were so offense. disregarded that they ceased to be binding. The sacredness of our Sabbath, of our homes, of chastity, and finally even of our Monkey Business in Tennessee right to teach our own children in our own schools fundamental facts and truths were torn away from us. Those who maintained Education in the 1920s continued to make giant the old standards did so only in the face of bootstrides. More and more states were requiring constant ridicule.... We found our great young people to remain in school until age sixteen cities and the control of much of our industry or eighteen, or until graduation from high school. and commerce taken over by strangers.... The proportion of seventeen-year-olds who fin- We are a movement of the plain people, very ished high school almost doubled in the 1920s, to weak in the matter of culture, intellectual more than one in four. support, and trained leadership.... This is The most revolutionary contribution to educa- undoubtedly a weakness. It lays us open to tional theory during these yeasty years was made the charge of being ‘hicks’ and ‘rubes’ and by mild-mannered Professor John Dewey, who ‘drivers of second-hand Fords.’” served on the faculty of Columbia University from 1904 to 1930. By common consent one of America’s few front-rank philosophers, he set forth the princi- ples of “learning by doing” that formed the founda- was destroying faith in God and the Bible, while tion of so-called progressive education, with its contributing to the moral breakdown of youth in the greater “permissiveness.” He believed that the jazz age. Numerous attempts were made to secure workbench was as essential as the blackboard, and laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution, “the bes- that “education for life” should be a primary goal of tial hypothesis,” in the public schools, and three the teacher. southern states adopted such shackling measures. Science also scored wondrous advances in The trio of states included Tennessee, in the heart of these years. A massive public-health program, launched by the Rockefeller Foundation in the South in 1909, had virtually wiped out the ancient affliction of hookworm by the 1920s. Better nutri- tion and health care helped to increase the life The bombastic Fundamentalist evangelist expectancy of a newborn infant from fifty years in W. A. (Billy) Sunday (1862–1935) declared 1901 to fifty-nine years in 1929. in 1925, Yet both science and progressive education in “If a minister believes and teaches evolution, the 1920s were subjected to unfriendly fire from he is a stinking skunk, a hypocrite, and a liar.” the Fundamentalists. These old-time religionists charged that the teaching of Darwinian evolution 738 CHAPTER 32 American Life in the“Roaring Twenties”, 1919–1929 the law, set aside the fine on a technicality.* The Fundamentalists at best won only a hollow victory, for the absurdities of the trial cast ridicule on their cause. Yet even though increasing numbers of Christians were coming to reconcile the revelations of religion with the findings of modern science, Fundamentalism, with its emphasis on literal read- ing of the Bible, remained a vibrant force in Ameri- can spiritual life. It was especially strong in the Baptist Church and in the rapidly growing Churches of Christ, organized in 1906. The Mass-Consumption Economy Prosperity—real, sustained, and widely shared—put much of the “roar” into the twenties. The economy kicked off its war harness in 1919, faltered a few steps in the recession of 1920–1921, and then sprinted forward for nearly seven years. Both the recent war and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon’s tax policies favored the rapid expansion of capital investment. Ingenious machines, powered by rela- tively cheap energy from newly tapped oil fields, dramatically increased the productivity of the laborer. Assembly-line production reached such perfection in Henry Ford’s famed Rouge River plant near Detroit that a finished automobile emerged the so-called Bible Belt South, where the spirit of every ten seconds. evangelical religion was still robust. Great new industries suddenly sprouted forth. The stage was set for the memorable “Monkey Supplying electrical power for the humming new Trial” at the hamlet of Dayton, eastern Tennessee, in machines became a giant business in the 1920s. 1925. A likable high-school biology teacher, John T. Above all, the automobile, once the horseless char- Scopes, was indicted for teaching evolution. Batter- iot of the rich, now became the carriage of the com- ies of newspaper reporters, armed with notebooks mon citizen. By 1930 Americans owned almost 30 and cameras, descended upon the quiet town to million cars. witness the spectacle. Scopes was defended by The nation’s deepening “love affair” with the nationally known attorneys, while former presiden- automobile headlined a momentous shift in the tial candidate William Jennings Bryan, an ardent character of the economy. American manufacturers Presbyterian Fundamentalist, joined the prosecu- seemed to have mastered the problems of produc- tion. Taking the stand as an expert on the Bible, tion; their worries now focused on consumption. Bryan was made to appear foolish by the famed Could they find the mass markets for the goods they criminal lawyer Clarence Darrow. Five days after the had contrived to spew forth in such profusion? trial was over, Bryan died of a stroke, no doubt Responding to this need, a new arm of Ameri- brought on by the wilting heat and witness-stand can commerce came into being: advertising. By per- strain. suasion and ploy, seduction and sexual suggestion, This historic clash between theology and biol- advertisers sought to make Americans chronically ogy proved inconclusive. Scopes, the forgotten man of the drama, was found guilty and fined $100. But the supreme court of Tennessee, while upholding *The Tennessee law was not formally repealed until 1967.  The Automobile Age 739 discontented with their paltry possessions and want “the house that Ruth built.” In 1921 the slugging more, more, more. A founder of this new “profes- heavyweight champion, Jack Dempsey, knocked out sion” was Bruce Barton, prominent New York part- the dapper French light heavyweight, Georges Car- ner in a Madison Avenue firm. In 1925 Barton pentier. The Jersey City crowd in attendance had published a best-seller, The Man Nobody Knows, paid more than a million dollars—the first in a setting forth the provocative thesis that Jesus Christ series of million-dollar “gates” in the golden 1920s. was the greatest adman of all time. “Every advertis- Buying on credit was another innovative feature ing man ought to study the parables of Jesus,” Bar- of the postwar economy. “Possess today and pay ton preached. “They are marvelously condensed, as tomorrow” was the message directed at buyers. all good advertising should be.” Barton even had a Once-frugal descendants of Puritans went ever good word to say for Christ’s executive ability: “He deeper into debt to own all kinds of newfangled picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of marvels—refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and espe- business and forged them into an organization that cially cars and radios—now. Prosperity thus accu- conquered the world.” mulated an overhanging cloud of debt, and the Sports became big business in the consumer economy became increasingly vulnerable to disrup- economy of the 1920s. Ballyhooed by the “image tions of the credit structure. makers,” home-run heroes like George H. (“Babe”) Ruth were far better known than most statesmen. The fans bought tickets in such numbers that Babe’s Putting America on Rubber Tires hometown park, Yankee Stadium, became known as A new industrial revolution slipped into high gear in America in the 1920s. Thrusting out steel tentacles, it changed the daily life of the people in unprece- dented ways. Machinery was the new messiah—and the automobile was its principal prophet. Of all the inventions of the era, the automobile cut the deepest mark. It heralded an amazing new industrial system based on assembly-line methods and mass-production techniques. Americans adapted rather than invented the gasoline engine; Europeans can claim the original honor. By the 1890s a few daring American inven- tors and promoters, including Henry Ford and Ran- som E. Olds (Oldsmobile), were developing the infant automotive industry. By 1910 sixty-nine car companies rolled out a total annual production of 181,000 units. The early contraptions were neither speedy nor reliable. Many a stalled motorist, pro- fanely cranking a balky automobile, had to endure the jeer “Get a horse” from the occupants of a pass- ing dobbin-drawn carriage. An enormous industry sprang into being, as Detroit became the motorcar capital of America. The mechanized colossus owed much to the stop- watch efficiency techniques of Frederick W. Taylor, a prominent inventor, engineer, and tennis player, who sought to eliminate wasted motion. His epi- taph reads “Father of Scientific Management.” Best known of the new crop of industrial wizards was Henry Ford, who more than any other individual 740 CHAPTER 32 American Life in the“Roaring Twenties”, 1919–1929 Months 20 15 10 5 0 1908 1914 1920 1924 (Model T introduced) The Cost of a Model T Ford, 1908–1924 Henry Ford’s mass-production techniques cut the costs of production dramatically and put the automobile within reach of the workingperson’s purse. (Cost is shown in months of labor for an employee at the average national wage.) bile any color he desired—just as long as it was black. So economical were his methods that in the mid-1920s he was selling the Ford roadster for $260—well within the purse of a thrifty worker. The flood of Fords was phenomenal. In 1914 the “Automobile Wizard” turned out his 500,000th Model T. By 1930 his total had risen to 20 million, or, put America on rubber tires. His high and hideous on a bumper-to-bumper basis, more than enough Model T (“Tin Lizzie”) was cheap, rugged, and rea- to encircle the globe. A national newspaper and sonably reliable, though rough and clattering. The magazine poll conducted in 1923 revealed Ford to parts of Ford’s “flivver” were highly standardized, but be the people’s choice for the presidential nomina- the behavior of this rattling good car was so eccen- tion in 1924. tric that it became the butt of numberless jokes. By 1929, when the great bull market collapsed, Lean and silent Henry Ford, who was said to 26 million motor vehicles were registered in the have wheels in his head, erected an immense per- United States. This figure, averaging 1 for every 4.9 sonal empire on the cornerstone of his mechanical Americans, represented far more automobiles than genius, though his associates provided much of the existed in all the rest of the world. organizational talent. Ill educated, this multimillion- aire mechanic was socially and culturally narrow; “History is bunk,” he once testified. But he dedicated The Advent of the Gasoline Age himself with one-track devotion to the gospel of standardization. After two early failures, he grasped and applied fully the techniques of assembly-line The impact of the self-propelled carriage on various production—“Fordism.” He is supposed to have aspects of American life was tremendous. A gigantic remarked that the purchaser could have his automo- new industry emerged, dependent on steel but dis-  The Impact of the Automobile 741 placing steel from its kingpin role. Employing explosive development. Hundreds of oil derricks directly or indirectly about 6 million people by 1930, shot up in California, Texas, and Oklahoma, as these it was a major wellspring of the nation’s prosperity. states expanded wondrously and the wilderness Thousands of new jobs, moreover, were created by frontier became an industrial frontier. The once- supporting industries. The lengthening list would feared railroad octopus, on the other hand, was include rubber, glass, and fabrics, to say nothing of hard hit by the competition of passenger cars, highway construction and thousands of service sta- buses, and trucks. An age-old story was repeated: tions and garages. America’s standard of living, one industry’s gains were another industry’s pains. responding to this infectious vitality, rose to an Other effects were widely felt. Speedy marketing enviable level. of perishable foodstuffs, such as fresh fruits, was New industries boomed lustily; older ones grew accelerated. A new prosperity enriched outlying sickly. The petroleum business experienced an farms, as city dwellers were provided with produce at attractive prices. Countless new roads ribboned out to meet the demand of the American motorist for smoother and faster highways, often paid for by taxes on gasoline. The era of mud ended as the nation made haste to construct the finest network A lifelong resident of Muncie, Indiana, of hard-surfaced roadways in the world. Lured by disguised as “Middletown” in Robert and sophisicated advertising, and encouraged by tempt- Helen Lynd’s exhaustive investigation of ing installment-plan buying, countless Americans American life in a typical medium-size with shallow purses acquired the habit of riding as community during the 1920s, pooh-poohed they paid. their scientific sociological methods: Zooming motorcars were agents of social “Why on earth do you need to study what’s change. At first a luxury, they rapidly became a changing this country? I can tell you what’s necessity. Essentially devices for needed transporta- happening in just four letters: A-U-T-O!” tion, they soon developed into a badge of freedom and equality—a necessary prop for self-respect. To some, ostentation seemed more important than 742 CHAPTER 32 American Life in the“Roaring Twenties”, 1919–1929 transportation. Leisure hours could now be spent voiced parents’ worst fears when he condemned the more pleasurably, as tens of thousands of cooped-up automobile as “a house of prostitution on wheels.” souls responded to the call of the open road on Even the celebrated crime waves of the 1920s and joyriding vacations. Women were further freed from 1930s were aided and abetted by the motorcar, for clinging-vine dependence on men. Isolation among gangsters could now make quick getaways. the sections was broken down, and the less attractive Yet no sane American would plead for a return states lost population at an alarming rate. By the late of the old horse and buggy, complete with fly- 1920s, Americans owned more automobiles than breeding manure. The automobile contributed bathtubs. “I can’t go to town in a bathtub,” one notably to improved air and environmental quality, homemaker explained. despite its later notoriety as a polluter. Life might be Other social by-products of the automobile cut short on the highways, and smog might poison were visible. Autobuses made possible the consoli- the air, but the automobile brought more conven- dation of schools and to some extent of churches. ience, pleasure, and excitement into more people’s The sprawling suburbs spread out still farther lives than almost any other single invention. from the urban core, as America became a nation of commuters. The demon machine, on the other hand, Humans Develop Wings exacted a terrible toll by catering to the American mania for speed. Citizens were becoming statistics. Not counting the hundreds of thousands of injured Gasoline engines also provided the power that and crippled, the one millionth American had died enabled humans to fulfill the age-old dream of in a motor vehicle accident by 1951—more than all sprouting wings. After near-successful experiments those killed on all the battlefields of all the nation’s by others with heavier-than-air craft, the Wright wars to that date. “The public be rammed” seemed brothers, Orville and Wilbur, performed “the mira- to be the motto of the new age. cle at Kitty Hawk,” North Carolina. On a historic Virtuous home life partially broke down as day—December 17, 1903—Orville Wright took aloft joyriders of all ages forsook the parlor for the high- a feebly engined plane that stayed airborne for 12 way. The morals of flaming youth sagged correspond- seconds and 120 feet. Thus the air age was launched ingly—at least in the judgment of their elders. What by two obscure bicycle repairmen. might young people get up to in the privacy of a As aviation gradually got off the ground, the closed-top Model T? An Indiana juvenile court judge world slowly shrank. The public was made increas-  Airplanes and Radio 743 ingly air-minded by unsung heroes—often mar- The impact of the airship was tremendous. It tyrs—who appeared as stunt fliers at fairs and other provided the restless American spirit with yet public gatherings. Airplanes—“flying coffins”—were another dimension. At the same time, it gave birth used with marked success for various purposes dur- to a giant new industry. Unfortunately, the accident ing the Great War of 1914–1918. Shortly thereafter rate in the pioneer stages of aviation was high, private companies began to operate passenger lines though hardly more so than on the early railroads. with airmail contracts, which were in effect a sub- But by the 1930s and 1940s, travel by air on regularly sidy from Washington. The first transcontinental scheduled airlines was significantly safer than on airmail route was established from New York to San many overcrowded highways. Francisco in 1920. Humanity’s new wings also increased the tempo In 1927 modest and skillful Charles A. Lind- of an already breathless civilization. The flounder- bergh, the so-called Flyin’ Fool, electrified the world ing railroad received another setback through the by the first solo west-to-east conquest of the loss of passengers and mail. A lethal new weapon Atlantic. Seeking a prize of $25,000, the lanky stunt was given to the gods of war, and with the coming of flier courageously piloted his single-engine plane, city-busting aerial bombs, people could well debate the Spirit of St. Louis, from New York to Paris in a whether the conquest of the air was a blessing or a grueling thirty-three hours and thirty-nine minutes. curse. The Atlantic Ocean was shriveling to about Lindbergh’s exploit swept Americans off their the size of the Aegean Sea in the days of Socrates, feet. Fed up with the cynicism and debunking of the while isolation behind ocean moats was becoming a jazz age, they found in this wholesome and hand- bygone dream. some youth a genuine hero. They clasped the soar- ing “Lone Eagle” to their hearts much more warmly than the bashful young man desired. “Lucky Lindy” The Radio Revolution received an uproarious welcome in the “hero canyon” of lower Broadway, as eighteen hundred tons of ticker tape and other improvised confetti The speed of the airplane was far eclipsed by the showered upon him. Lindbergh’s achievement—it speed of radio waves. Guglielmo Marconi, an Ital- was more than a “stunt”—did much to dramatize ian, invented wireless telegraphy in the 1890s, and and popularize flying, while giving a strong boost to his brainchild was used for long-range communica- the infant aviation industry. tion during World War I. 744 CHAPTER 32 American Life in the“Roaring Twenties”, 1919–1929 While other marvels of the era—like the auto- mobile—were luring Americans away from home, the radio was drawing them back. For much of the decade, family and neighbors gathered around a household’s sole radio as they once had around the toasty hearth. Radio knitted the nation together. Various regions heard voices with standardized accents, and countless millions “tuned in” to peren- nial comedy favorites like “Amos ’n’ Andy.” Pro- grams sponsored by manufacturers and distributors of brand-name products, like the “A&P Gypsies” and the “Eveready Hour,” helped to make radio-touted labels household words and purchases. Educationally and culturally, the radio made a significant contribution. Sports were further stimu- lated. Politicians had to adjust their speaking tech- niques to the new medium, and millions rather than thousands of voters heard their promises and pleas. A host of listeners swallowed the gospel of their favorite newscaster or were even ringside partici- pants in world-shaking events. Finally, the music of famous artists and symphony orchestras was beamed into countless homes. Next came the voice-carrying radio, a triumph of many minds. A red-letter day was posted in November 1920, when the Pittsburgh radio station Hollywood’s Filmland Fantasies KDKA broadcast the news of the Harding landslide. Later miracles were achieved in transatlantic wire- less phonographs, radiotelephones, and television. The flickering movie was the fruit of numerous The earliest radio programs reached only local audi- geniuses, including Thomas A. Edison. As early as ences. But by the late 1920s, technological improve- the 1890s, this novel contraption, though still in ments made long-distance broadcasting possible, crude form, had attained some popularity in the and national commercial networks drowned out naughty peep-show penny arcades. The real birth of much local programming. Meanwhile, advertising the movie came in 1903, when the first story “commercials” made radio another vehicle for sequence reached the screen. This breathless melo- American free enterprise, as contrasted with the drama, The Great Train Robbery, was featured in the government-owned systems of Europe. five-cent theaters, popularly called “nickelodeons.” Spectacular among the first full-length classics was D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), which glorified the Ku Klux Klan of Reconstruction days Radio came in with a bang in the winter of and defamed both blacks and Northern carpetbag- 1921–1922. A San Francisco newspaper gers. White southerners would fire guns at the reported a discovery that countless citizens screen during the attempted “rape” scene. were making: A fascinating industry was thus launched. Hol- “There is radio music in the air, every night, lywood, in southern California, quickly became the everywhere. Anybody can hear it at home on movie capital of the world, for it enjoyed a maxi- a receiving set, which any boy can put up in mum of sunshine and other advantages. Early pro- an hour.” ducers featured nudity and heavy-lidded female vampires (“vamps”), and an outraged public forced the screen magnates to set up their own rigorous  Movies and Changing Lifestyles 745 tures was lost, but the standardization of tastes and of language hastened entry into the American main- In the face of protests against sex in the stream—and set the stage for the emergence of a movies, the industry appointed a “movie working-class political coalition that, for a time, czar,” Will H. Hays (1879–1954), who issued would overcome the divisive ethnic differences of the famous “Hays Code” in 1934. As he stated the past. in a speech, “This industry must have toward that sacred thing, the mind of a child, toward that clean The Dynamic Decade virgin thing, that unmarked slate, the same responsibility, the same care about the impressions made upon it, that the best Far-reaching changes in lifestyles and values paral- clergyman or the most inspired teacher of leled the dramatic upsurge of the economy. The youth would have.” census of 1920 revealed that for the first time most Americans no longer lived in the countryside but in urban areas. Women continued to find opportuni- ties for employment in the cities, though they tended to cluster in a few low-paying jobs (such as retail clerking and office typing) that became classi- code of censorship. The motion picture really fied as “women’s work.” An organized birth-control arrived during the World War of 1914–1918, when it movement, led by fiery feminist Margaret Sanger, was used as an engine of anti-German propaganda. openly championed the use of contraceptives. Alice Specially prepared “hang the kaiser” films aided Paul’s National Woman’s party began in 1923 to powerfully in selling war bonds and in boosting campaign for an Equal Rights Amendment to the morale. Constitution. (The campaign was still stalled short A new era began in 1927 with the success of the of success seven decades later.) To some defenders first “talkie”—The Jazz Singer, starring the white per- of traditional ways, it seemed that the world had former Al Jolson in blackface. The age of the suddenly gone mad. “silents” was ushered out as theaters everywhere Even the churches were affected. The Funda- were “wired for sound.” At about the same time, mentalist champions of the old-time religion lost reasonably satisfactory color films were being ground to the Modernists, who liked to think that produced. God was a “good guy” and the universe a pretty Movies eclipsed all other new forms of amuse- chummy place. ment in the phenomenal growth of their popularity. Some churches tried to fight the Devil with Movie “stars” of the first pulchritude commanded worldly weapons. Competing with joyriding auto- much larger salaries than the president of the mobiles and golf links, they turned to quality enter- United States, in some cases as much as $100,000 tainment of their own, including wholesome for a single picture. Many actors and actresses were moving pictures for young people. One uptown far more widely known than the nation’s political house of the Lord in New York advertised on a bill- leaders. board, “Come to Church: Christian Worship Critics bemoaned the vulgarization of popular Increases Your Efficiency.” tastes wrought by the new technologies of radio and Even before the war, one observer thought the motion pictures. But the effects of the new mass chimes had “struck sex o’clock in America,” and the media were not all negative. The parochialism of 1920s witnessed what many old-timers regarded as insular ethnic communities eroded as the immi- a veritable erotic eruption. Advertisers exploited grants’ children, especially, forsook the neighbor- sexual allure to sell everything from soap to car tires. hood vaudeville theater for the downtown movie Once-modest maidens now proclaimed their new palace or turned away from Grandma’s Yiddish freedom as “flappers” in bobbed tresses and dresses. storytelling to tune in “Amos ’n’ Andy.” Much of the Young women appeared with hemlines elevated, rich diversity of the immigrants’ Old Country cul- stockings rolled, breasts taped flat, cheeks rouged, 746 CHAPTER 32 American Life in the“Roaring Twenties”, 1919–1929 and lips a “crimson gash” that held a dangling ciga- adventuresome females shocked their elders when rette. Thus did the “flapper” symbolize a yearned- they sported the new one-piece bathing suits. for and devil-may-care independence (some said Justification for this new sexual frankness could wild abandon) in some American women. Still more be found in the recently translated writings of Dr. Sigmund Freud. This Viennese physician appeared to argue that sexual repression was responsible for a variety of nervous and emotional ills. Thus not plea- sure alone, but health, demanded sexual gratifica- tion and liberation. Many taboos flew out the window as sex- conscious Americans let themselves go. As unknow- ing Freudians, teenagers pioneered the sexual fron- tiers. Glued together in rhythmic embrace, they danced to jazz music squeaking from phonographs. In an earlier day a kiss had been the equivalent of a proposal of marriage. But in the new era, exploratory young folk sat in darkened movie houses or took to the highways and byways in auto- mobiles. There the youthful “neckers” and “petters” poached upon the forbidden territory of each other’s bodies. If the flapper was the goddess of the “era of wonderful nonsense,” jazz was its sacred music. With its virtuoso wanderings and tricky syncopa- tion, jazz moved up from New Orleans along with the migrating blacks during World War I. Tunes like W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” became instant classics, as the wailing saxophone became the trumpet of the new era. Blacks such as Handy, “Jelly Roll” Morton, and Joseph (“Joe”) King Oliver gave  Examining the Evidence 747 The Jazz Singer, 1927 The Jazz Singer was the first blackface performer. White actors had gradually feature-length “talkie,” a motion picture in which taken over the southern black minstrel show during the characters actually speak, and its arrival spelled the nineteenth century. By the early twentieth cen- the end for “silent” films, where the audience read tury, Jewish entertainers had entirely monopolized subtitles with live or recorded music as background. these roles. Jolson, like other Jewish blackface per- Although moviegoers flocked to The Jazz Singer to formers, used his ability to impersonate a black per- hear recorded sound, when they got there they son to force his acceptance into mainstream white found a movie concerned with themes of great American society. This use of blackface seems ironic interest to the urban, first- or second-generation since black Americans in the 1920s were struggling immigrant audiences who were Hollywood’s major with their own real-life battles against Jim Crow–era patrons. The Jazz Singer told the story of a poor, segregation, a blatant form of exclusion from Amer- assimilating Jewish immigrant torn between follow- ican society. Besides the novelty of being a “talkie,” ing his father’s wish that he train as an Orthodox what may have made The Jazz Singer a box office hit cantor and his own ambition to make a success for in 1927? How might different types of viewers in the himself as a jazz singer, performing in the popular audience have responded to the story? What does blackface style. The movie’s star, Al Jolson, was him- the popularity of blackface reveal about racial atti- self an immigrant Jew who had made his name as a tudes at the time? 748 CHAPTER 32 American Life in the“Roaring Twenties”, 1919–1929 birth to jazz, but the entertainment industry soon spawned all-white bands—notably Paul White- man’s. Caucasian impresarios cornered the profits, though not the creative soul, of America’s most native music. A new racial pride also blossomed in the north- ern black communities that burgeoned during and after the war. Harlem in New York City, counting some 100,000 African-American residents in the 1920s, was one of the largest black communities in the world. Harlem sustained a vibrant, creative cul- ture that nourished poets like Langston Hughes, whose first volume of verses, The Weary Blues, appeared in 1926. Harlem in the 1920s also spawned a charismatic political leader, Marcus Garvey. The Jamaican-born Garvey founded the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) to promote the resettlement of American blacks in their own “African homeland.” Within the United States, the UNIA sponsored stores and other businesses, like the Black Star Line Steamship Company, to keep blacks’ dollars in black pockets. Most of Garvey’s enterprises failed financially, and Garvey himself was convicted in 1927 for alleged mail fraud and deported by a nervous U.S. government. But the race pride that Garvey inspired among the 4 million blacks who counted themselves UNIA followers at the movement’s height helped these newcomers to northern cities gain self-confidence and self- reliance. And his example proved important to the later founding of the Nation of Islam (Black Muslim) movement.  Literary Renaissance 749 Cultural Liberation In A Farewell to Arms (1929), Ernest Likewise in literature, an older era seemed to have Hemingway’s (1899–1961) hero, Frederic ground to a halt with the recent war. By the dawn of Henry, confesses, the 1920s, most of the custodians of an aging gen- “I was always embarrassed by the words teel culture had died—Henry James in 1916, Henry sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the ex- Adams in 1918, and William Dean Howells (the pression in vain.... There were many words “Dean of American literature”) in 1920. A few novel- that you could not stand to hear and finally ists who had been popular in the previous decades only the names of places had dignity. Certain continued to thrive, notably the well-to-do, cos- numbers were the same way and certain mopolitan New Yorker Edith Wharton and the dates and these with the names of the Virginia-born Willa Cather, esteemed for her stark places were all you could say and have them but sympathetic portrayals of pioneering on the mean anything. Abstract words such as prairies. glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene But in the decade after the war, a new genera- beside the concrete names of villages, the tion of writers burst upon the scene. Many of them numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the hailed from ethnic and regional backgrounds differ- numbers of regiments, and the dates.” ent from that of the Protestant New Englanders who traditionally had dominated American cultural life. The newcomers exhibited the energy of youth, the ambition of excluded outsiders, and in many cases the smoldering resentment of ideals betrayed. They bestowed on American literature a new vitality, imaginativeness, and artistic quality. A patron saint of many young authors was H. L. Mencken, the “Bad Boy of Baltimore.” Little escaped his acidic wit. In the pages of his green-covered monthly American Mercury, he wielded a slashing rapier as much as a pen. He assailed marriage, patri- otism, democracy, prohibition, Rotarians, and the middle-class American “booboisie.” The South he contemptuously dismissed as “the Sahara of the Bozart” (a bastardization of beaux arts, French for the “fine arts”), and he scathingly attacked do- gooders as “Puritans.” Puritanism, he jibed, was “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy.” The war had jolted many young writers out of their complacency about traditional values and lit- erary standards. With their pens they probed for new codes of morals and understanding, as well as fresh forms of expression. F. Scott Fitzgerald, a handsome Minnesota-born Princetonian then only twenty-four years old, became an overnight celebrity when he published This Side of Paradise in 1920. The book became a kind of Bible for the young. It was eagerly devoured by aspiring flappers and their ardent wooers, many of whom affected an air of bewildered abandon toward life. Catching the 750 CHAPTER 32 American Life in the“Roaring Twenties”, 1919–1929 spirit of the hour (often about 4 A.M.), Fitzgerald found “all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” He followed this melancholy success Langston Hughes (1902–1967) celebrated with The Great Gatsby (1925), a brilliant evocation Harlem’s role in energizing a generation of of the glamour and cruelty of an achievement- artists and writers in his poem “Esthete in oriented society. Theodore Dreiser’s masterpiece of Harlem” (1930): 1925 explored much the same theme: An American “Strange, Tragedy dealt with the murder of a pregnant work- That in this nigger place ing girl by her socially ambitious young lover. I should meet life face to face; Ernest Hemingway, who had seen action on the When, for years, I had been seeking Italian front in 1917, was among the writers most Life in places gentler-speaking, affected by the war. He responded to pernicious Until I came to this vile street propaganda and the overblown appeal to patriotism And found Life stepping on my feet!”* by devising his own lean, word-sparing but word- perfect style. In The Sun Also Rises (1926), he told of disillusioned, spiritually numb American expatri- ates in Europe. In A Farewell to Arms (1929), he crafted one of the finest novels in any language took up residence in England. In “The Waste Land” about the war experience. A troubled soul, he finally (1922), Eliot produced one of the most impenetra- blew out his brains with a shotgun blast in 1961. ble but influential poems of the century. Robert Other writers turned to a caustic probing of Frost, a San Francisco–born poet, wrote hauntingly American small-town life. Sherwood Anderson dis- about his adopted New England. The most daringly sected various fictional personalities in Winesburg, innovative of all was e.e. cummings, who relied on Ohio (1919), finding them all in some way warped unorthodox diction and peculiar typesetting to pro- by their cramped psychological surroundings. Sin- duce startling poetical effects. clair Lewis, a hotheaded, heavy-drinking journalist On the stage, Eugene O’Neill, a New York from Sauk Centre, Minnesota, sprang into promi- dramatist and Princeton dropout of globe-trotting nence in 1920 with Main Street, the story of one background, laid bare Freudian notions of sex in woman’s unsuccessful war against provincialism. plays like Strange Interlude (1928). A prodigious In Babbitt (1922) he affectionately pilloried George playwright, he authored more than a dozen produc- F. Babbitt, a prosperous, vulgar, middle-class tions in the 1920s and won the Nobel Prize in 1936. real estate broker who slavishly conforms to the O’Neill arose from New York’s Greenwich Vil- respectable materialism of his group. The word Bab- lage, which before and after the war was a seething bittry was quickly coined to describe his all-too- cauldron of writers, painters, musicians, actors, and familiar lifestyle. other would-be artists. After the war a black cultural William Faulkner, a dark-eyed, pensive Missis- renaissance also took root uptown in Harlem, led sippian, penned a bitter war novel, Soldier’s Pay, in by such gifted writers as Claude McKay, Langston 1926. He then turned his attention to a fictional Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston, and by jazz artists chronicle of an imaginary, history-rich Deep South like Louis Armstrong and Eubie Blake. In an out- county. In powerful books like The Sound and the pouring of creative expression called the Harlem Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), Faulkner Renaissance, they proudly exulted in their black cul- peeled back layers of time and consciousness ture and argued for a “New Negro” who was a full from the constricted souls of his ingrown southern citizen and a social equal to whites. characters. Architecture also married itself to the new Nowhere was innovation in the 1920s more materialism and functionalism. Long-range city obvious than in poetry. Ezra Pound, a brilliantly planning was being intelligently projected, and erratic Idahoan who deserted America for Europe, rejected what he called “an old bitch civilization, gone in the teeth” and proclaimed his doctrine: *From Collected Poems by Langston Hughes. Copyright © 1994 “Make It New.” Pound strongly influenced the Mis- by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Reprinted by permission of souri-born and Harvard-educated T. S. Eliot, who Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.  The Stock Market 751 architects like Frank Lloyd Wright were advancing the theory that buildings should grow from their sites and not slavishly imitate Greek and Roman importations. The machine age outdid itself in New York City when it thrust upward the cloud-brushing Empire State Building, 102 stories high. Dedicated in 1931, the “Empty State Building” towered par- tially vacant during the depressed 1930s. Wall Street’s Big Bull Market Signals abounded that the economic joyride might end in a crash; even in the best years of the 1920s, several hundred banks failed annually. This some- thing-for-nothing craze was well illustrated by real estate speculation, especially the fantastic Florida boom that culminated in 1925. Numerous under- water lots were sold to eager purchasers for prepos- terous sums. The whole wildcat scheme collapsed when the peninsula was devastated by a West Indian hurricane, which belied advertisements of a “sooth- ing tropical wind.” The stock exchange provided even greater sen- sations. Speculation ran wild, and an orgy of boom- or-bust trading pushed the market up to dizzy peaks. “Never sell America short” and “Be a bull on America” were favorite catchwords, as Wall Street A businesslike move toward economic sanity bulls gored one another and fleeced greedy lambs. was made in 1921, when a Republican Congress cre- The stock market became a veritable gambling den. ated the Bureau of the Budget. The bureau’s director As the 1920s lurched forward, everybody seemed was to assist the president in preparing careful esti- to be buying stocks “on margin”—that is, with a small mates of receipts and expenditures for submission down payment. Barbers, stenographers, and elevator to Congress as the annual budget. This new reform, operators cashed in on “hot tips” picked up while on long overdue, was designed in part to prevent hap- duty. One valet was reported to have parlayed his hazardly extravagant appropriations. wages into a quarter of a million dollars. “The cash The burdensome taxes inherited from the war register crashed the social register,” as rags-to-riches were especially distasteful to Secretary of the Trea- Americans reverently worshiped at the altar of the sury Mellon, as well as to his fellow millionaires. ticker-tape machine. So powerful was the intoxicant Their theory was that such high levies forced the of quick profits that few heeded the voices raised in rich to invest in tax-exempt securities rather than certain quarters to warn that this kind of tinsel pros- in the factories that provided prosperous payrolls. perity could not last forever. The Mellonites also argued, with considerable per- Little was done by Washington to curb money- suasiveness, that high taxes not only discouraged mad speculators. In the wartime days of Wilson, the business but, in so doing, also brought a smaller net national debt had rocketed from the 1914 figure of return to the Treasury than moderate taxes. $1,188,235,400 to the 1921 peak of $23,976,250,608. Seeking to succor the “poor” rich people, Mel- Conservative principles of money management lon helped engineer a series of tax reductions from pointed to a diversion of surplus funds to reduce 1921 to 1926. Congress followed his lead by repeal- this financial burden. ing the excess-profits tax, abolishing the gift tax, and 752 CHAPTER 32 American Life in the“Roaring Twenties”, 1919–1929 reducing excise taxes, the surtax, the income tax, to $16 billion. But foes of the emaciated multimil- and estate taxes. In 1921 a wealthy person with an lionaire charged that he should have bitten an even income of $1 million had paid $663,000 in income larger chunk out of the debt, especially while the taxes; in 1926 the same person paid about $200,000. country was pulsating with prosperity. He was also Secretary Mellon’s spare-the-rich policies thus accused of indirectly encouraging the bull market. If shifted much of the tax burden from the wealthy to he had absorbed more of the national income in the middle-income groups. taxes, there would have been less money left for Mellon, lionized by conservatives as the “great- frenzied speculation. His refusal to do so typified est secretary of the Treasury since Hamilton,” the single-mindedly probusiness regime that domi- remains a controversial figure. True, he reduced the nated the political scene throughout the postwar national debt by $10 billion—from about $26 billion decade. Chronology 1903 Wright brothers fly the first airplane 1923 Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) proposed First story-sequence motion picture 1924 Immigration Act of 1924 1919 Eighteenth Amendment (prohibition) ratified Volstead Act 1925 Scopes trial Seattle general strike Florida real estate boom Anderson publishes Winesburg, Ohio Fitzgerald publishes The Great Gatsby Dreiser publishes An American Tragedy 1919- 1920 “Red scare” 1926 Hughes publishes The Weary Blues Hemingway publishes The Sun Also Rises 1920 Radio broadcasting begins Fitzgerald publishes This Side of Paradise 1927 Lindbergh flies the Atlantic solo Lewis publishes Main Street First talking motion pictures Sacco and Vanzetti executed 1921 Sacco-Vanzetti trial Emergency Quota Act of 1921 1929 Faulkner publishes The Sound and the Fury Bureau of the Budget created Hemingway publishes A Farewell to Arms 1922 Lewis publishes Babbitt Eliot publishes “The Waste Land” For further reading, see page A22 of the Appendix. 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