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| Flappers playing mahjong. Image source. |
Last week’s post, “If You Were to Write a History of 21st Century America, What Would It Look Like?,” asked what a 21st century version of Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s might look like. Here is how I described the book in that post:
There are many things to love about this book. Allen wrote his history of the 1920’s in a jaunty, breezy style. When you pick his book up it is hard to put it down. Allen’s tone is fair, his judgements sharp, and prose delectably entertaining. The most notable thing about this history of the 1920s, however, is its publication date: Allen wrote the book in 1930. He saw it published in 1931.
I often wish Allen had more imitators. Allen’s book shines as a social history. The genius of writing such a history directly after the events took place is that the historian can narrate not just what happened in a period, but what it felt like to live through it. Names have not receded into history; the little things of daily existence are still remembered, and often still in use. Judgements of past events have not been too clouded by the downstream effects they had three or four decades down the line. There is an immediacy to Only Yesterday that I have never found in any other work of history (though I have found it in several works of fiction).
While Allen gives due coverage to economic and political affairs (the League of Nations debates, the Teapot Dome scandal, and the crash of ’29 each get their own chapter length narrations), the majority of Allen’s book is what we would today call “social history.” Allen spends about equal time describing the fads for crossword puzzles and mahjong (yes, you read that last one right) as he does the entire administration of Calvin Coolidge.
But one of Allen’s other strengths is his willingness to generalize and analyze. He has a rare gift for gathering the thousands strands of thought that made up the momentary milieu to spin it into one dashing paragraph. What is more, he never fears to attempt an explanation for why these things of the soul proceeded as they did. One of his most arresting passages delivers a sense of his style. The topic is the American flapper:
These changes in fashion—the short skirt, the boyish form, the straight, long-waisted dresses, the frank use of paint—were signs of a real change in the American feminine ideal (as well, perhaps, as in men’s idea of what was the feminine ideal). Women were bent on freedom—freedom to work and to play without the trammels that had bound them heretofore to lives of comparative inactivity.
But what they sought was not the freedom from man and his desires which had put the suffragists on an earlier day into hard straw hats and mannish suits and low-heeled shoes. The woman of the nineteen-twenties wanted to be able to allure man even on the golf links and in the office; the little flapper who shingled her hair and wore a manageable little hat and put on knickerbockers for the weekends would not be parted from her silk stockings and her high-heeled shoes.
Nor was the post-war feminine ideal one of fruitful maturity or ripened wisdom or practiced grace. On the contrary: the quest of slenderness, the flattening of the breasts, the vogue of short skirts (even when short skirts still suggested the appearance of a little girl), the juvenile effect of the long waist,—all were signs that, consciously or unconsciously, the women of this decade worshiped not merely youth, but unripened youth: they wanted to be—or thought men wanted them to be—men’s casual and light-hearted companions; not broad-hipped mothers of the race, but irresponsible playmates. Youth was their pattern, but not youthful innocence: the adolescent whom they imitated was a hard-boiled adolescent, who thought not in terms of romantic love, but in terms of sex, and who made herself desirable not by that sly art which conceals art, but frankly and openly. In effect, the woman of Post-war Decade said to man, “You are tired and disillusioned, you do not want the cares of a family or the companionship of mature wisdom, you want exciting play, you want the thrills of sex without their fruition, and I will give them to you.”
And to herself she added, “But I will be free.” [k. location 1490-1530].
But we get ahead of ourselves. The place to start is in 1919, before anyone had heard of the word “flapper” and few women dared to use “paint:”
Mrs. Smith [Allen’s stand-in for the average American in 1919] may use powder, but she probably draws the line at paint. Although the use of cosmetics is no longer, in 1919, considered prima facie evidence of a scarlet career, and sophisticated young girls have already begun to apply them with some bravado, most well-brought-up women still frown upon rouge. The beauty-parlor industry is in its infancy; there are a dozen hair-dressing parlors for every beauty parlor, and Mrs. Smith has never heard of such dark arts as that of face-lifting. When she puts on her hat to go shopping she will add a veil pinned neatly together behind her head. In the shops she will perhaps buy a bathing-suit for use in the summer; it will consist of an outer tunic of silk or cretonne over a tight knitted undergarment—worn, of course, with long stockings….
If you have forgotten what the general public thought of short hair in those days, listen to the remark of the manager of the Palm Garden in New York when reporters asked him, one night in November, 1918, how he happened to rent his hall for a pro-Bolshevist meeting which had led to a riot. Explaining that a well-dressed woman had come in a fine automobile to make arrangements for the use of the auditorium, he added, “Had we noticed then, as we do now, that she had short hair, we would have refused to rent the hall.” [k. location 69-75].
Although golf is gaining every day in popularity, it has not yet become an inevitable part of the weekly ritual of the American business man. Mr. Smith very likely still scoffs at “grown men who spend their time knocking a little white ball along the ground”; it is quite certain that he has never heard of plus fours; and if he should happen to play golf he had better not show his knickerbockers in the city streets, or small boys will shout to him, “Hey, get some men’s pants!”
…[As for sight seeing], the idea of making a hundred-mile trip in two and a half hours—as will constantly be done in the nineteen-thirties by drivers who consider themselves conservative—would seem to Mr. Smith perilous, and with the roads of 1919 to drive on he would be right [k. location 149].
This code, as it currently concerned young people, might have been roughly summarized as follows: Women were the guardians of morality; they were made of finer stuff than men and were expected to act accordingly. Young girls must look forward in innocence (tempered perhaps with a modicum of physiological instruction) to a romantic love match which would lead them to the altar and to living-happily-ever-after; and until the “right man” came along they must allow no male to kiss them. It was expected that some men would succumb to the temptations of sex, but only with a special class of outlawed women; girls of respectable families were supposed to have no such temptations. Boys and girls were permitted large freedom to work and play together, with decreasing and well-nigh nominal chaperonage, but only because the code worked so well on the whole that a sort of honor system was supplanting supervision by their elders; it was taken for granted that if they had been well brought up they would never take advantage of this freedom. And although the attitude toward smoking and drinking by girls differed widely in different strata of society and different parts of the country, majority opinion held that it was morally wrong for them to smoke and could hardly imagine them showing the effects of alcohol. [k. location 1302].
[The automobile] universally available means of escaping temporarily from the supervision of parents and chaperons, or from the influence of neighborhood opinion…. The closed car, moreover, was in effect a room protected from the weather which could be occupied at any time of the day or night and could be moved at will into a darkened byway or a country lane [k. location 1423].
In 1919 hardly more than 10 per cent of the cars produced in the United States were closed; by 1924 the percentage had jumped to 43, by 1927 it had reached 82.8. [k. location 1421].
Bernarr Macfadden’s True-Story, launched as late as 1919, had over 300,000 readers by 1923; 848,000 by 1924; over a million and a half by 1925; and almost two million by 1926—a record of rapid growth probably unparalleled in magazine publishing. [k. location 1436].
“America,” wrote Katharine Fullerton Gerould in Harper’s Magazine as late as 1922, “is no longer a free country, in the old sense; and liberty is, increasingly, a mere rhetorical figure.… No thinking citizen, I venture to say, can express in freedom more than a part of his honest convictions. I do not of course refer to convictions that are frankly criminal. I do mean that everywhere, on every hand, free speech is choked off in one direction or another. The only way in which an American citizen who is really interested in all the social and political problems of his country can preserve any freedom of expression, is to choose the mob that is most sympathetic to him, and abide under the shadow of that mob.” [k. location 899].
But its white robe and hood, its flaming cross, its secrecy, and the preposterous vocabulary of its ritual could be made the vehicle for all that infantile love of hocus-pocus and mummery, that lust for secret adventure, which survives in the adult whose lot is cast in drab places. Here was a chance to dress up the village bigot and let him be a Knight of the Invisible Empire. The formula was perfect. [k. location 951].
Furthermore, criminals and gangs of hoodlums quickly learned to take advantage of the Klan’s existence: if they wanted to burn someone’s barn or raid the slums beyond the railroad tracks, they could do it with impunity now: would not the Klan be held responsible? Anyone could chalk the letters K. K. K. on a fence and be sure that the sheriff would move warily. [k. location 997].
Another aspect of 21st century that sounds distressingly familiar were the newspapers:
They discovered—the successful tabloids were daily teaching them—that the public tended to become excited about one thing at a time. Newspaper owners and editors found that whenever a Dayton trial or a Vestris disaster took place, they sold more papers if they gave it all they had—their star reporters, their front-page display, and the bulk of their space. They took full advantage of this discovery: according to Mr. Bent’s compilations, the insignificant Gray-Snyder murder trial got a bigger “play” in the press than the sinking of the Titanic; Lindbergh’s flight, than the Armistice and the overthrow of the German Empire. Syndicate managers and writers, advertisers, press agents, radio broadcasters, all were aware that mention of the leading event of the day, whatever it might be, was the key to public interest. The result was that when something happened which promised to appeal to the popular mind, one had it hurled at one in huge headlines, waded through page after page of syndicated discussion of it, heard about it on the radio, was reminded of it again and again in the outpourings of publicity-seeking orators and preachers, saw pictures of it in the Sunday papers and in the movies, and (unless one was a perverse individualist) enjoyed the sensation of vibrating to the same chord which thrilled a vast populace. [k. location 2690].
Since April, 1917, his will had been irresistible. In the United States open opposition to his leadership had been virtually stifled: it was unpatriotic to differ with the President. His message and speeches had set the tone of popular thought about American war aims and the terms of eventual peace. In Europe his eloquence had proved so effective that statesmen had followed his lead perforce and allowed the Armistice to be made upon his terms. All over the world there were millions upon millions of men and women to whom his words were as those of a Messiah. Now that he envisioned a new world order based upon a League of Nations, it seemed inevitable to him that he himself should go to Paris, exert this vast and beneficent power, and make the vision a reality. The splendid dream took full possession of him. Critics like Senator Lodge and even associates like Secretary Lansing might object that he ought to leave the negotiations to subordinates, or that peace should be made with Germany first, and discussion of the League postponed, in order to bring an unsettled world back to equilibrium without delay; but had he not silenced critics during the war and could he not silence them again? [k. location 356].
The very singleness of purpose, the very uncompromising quality of mind that had made him a great prophet, forced him to take upon his own shoulders at Paris an impossible burden of responsible negotiation. It prevented him from properly acquainting his colleagues with what he himself was doing at the sessions of the Council of Ten or the Council of Four, and from getting the full benefit of their suggestions and objections. It prevented him from taking the American correspondents at Paris into his confidence and thus gaining valuable support at home. It made him play a lone hand. [k. location 396].
His intelligence was visual rather than oral. As Ray Stannard Baker has well put it, Wilson was “accustomed to getting his information, not from people, but out of books, documents, letters—the written word,” and consequently “underestimated the value of … human contacts.” At written negotiations he was a past master, but in the oral give and take about a small conference table he was at a disadvantage. When Clemenceau and Lloyd George and Orlando got him into the Council of Four behind closed doors, where they could play the game of treaty-making like a four-handed card game, they had already half defeated him. [k. location 400]
He must go home and vow that the Conference had been a love-feast, that every vital decision had been based on the Fourteen Points, that Clemenceau and Orlando and Lloyd George and the rest had been animated by an overpowering love for humanity, and that the salvation of the world depended on the complete acceptance of the Treaty as the charter of a new and idyllic world order. That is what he did; and because the things he said about the Treaty were not true, and he must have known—sometimes, at least—that they were not, the story of Woodrow Wilson from this point on is sheer tragedy. He fell into the pit which is digged for every idealist. Having failed to embody his ideal in fact, he distorted the fact. He pictured the world, to himself and to others, not as it was, but as he wished it to be. The optimist became a sentimentalist. The story of the Conference which he told to the American people when he returned home was a very beautiful romance of good men and true laboring without thought of selfish advantage for the welfare of humanity. He said that if the United States did not come to the aid of mankind by indorsing all that had been done at Paris, the heart of the world would be broken. But the only heart which was broken was his own. [k. location 435]
Politics, they were deciding, was a vulgar mess; the morons always outnumbered the enlightened, the tobacco-spitting district leaders held the morons in a firm grip, and the right to vote was a joke. Welfare work was equally futile: it was stuffy, sentimental, and presumptuous. The bright young college graduate who in 1915 would have risked disinheritance to march in a Socialist parade yawned at Socialism in 1925, called it old stuff, and cared not at all whether the employees of the Steel Corporation were underpaid or overpaid. Fashions had changed: now the young insurgent enraged his father by arguing against monogamy and God. [k. location 3224].
Thus:
In 1915 the word reformer had been generally a complimentary term; in 1925 it has become—among the intellectuals, at least—a term of contempt. [k. location 3336].
The war played an interesting part in this transformation. Some of its effects were practical and predictable (“two million men had found themselves very close to filth and annihilation and very far from the American moral code and its defenders” [k. location 1339]). But the psychological effect of fighting and dying for the sake of European empires in trenches of death led to a certain disgust with the world order.
“The older generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us,” wrote one of them (John F. Carter in the Atlantic Monthly, September, 1920), expressing accurately the sentiments of innumerable contemporaries. “They give us this thing, knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up; and then they are surprised that we don’t accept it with the same attitude of pretty, decorous enthusiasm with which they received it, way back in the ’eighties.” [k. location 1348]
They may be roughly and inclusively defined as the men and women who had heard of James Joyce, Proust, Cézanne, Jung, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Petronius, Eugene O’Neill, and Eddington; who looked down on the movies but revered Charlie Chaplin as a great artist, could talk about relativity even if they could not understand it, knew a few of the leading [Freudian] complexes by name, collected Early American furniture, had ideas about progressive education, and doubted the divinity of Henry Ford and Calvin Coolidge. [k. location 3237].
Some of them, in fact, seemed to be persuaded that all periods prior to the coming of modernity had been ridiculous—with the exception of Greek civilization, Italy at the time of Casanova, France at the time of the great courtesans, and eighteenth-century England. [k. location 3337].
They took a particular pleasure in overturning the idols of the majority; hence the vogue among them of the practice for which W. E. Woodward, in a novel published in 1923, invented the word “debunking.” Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria, which had been a best seller in the United States in 1922, was followed by a deluge of debunking biographies. Rupert Hughes removed a few coats of whitewash from George Washington and nearly caused a riot when he declared in a speech that “Washington was a great card-player, a distiller of whisky, and a champion curser, and he danced for three hours without stopping with the wife of his principal general.” Other American worthies were portrayed in all their erring humanity, and the notorious rascals of history were rediscovered as picturesque and glamorous fellows; until for a time it was almost taken for granted that a biographer, if he were to be successful, must turn conventional white into black and vice versa. [k. location 3350].
That we are residents of an insignificant satellite of a very average star obscurely placed in one of who-knows-how-many galaxies scattered through space; that our behavior depends largely upon chromosomes and ductless glands; that the Hottentot obeys impulses similar to those which activate the pastor of the First Baptist Church, and is probably already better adapted to his Hottentot environment than he would be if he followed the Baptist code; that sex is the most important thing in life, that inhibitions are not to be tolerated, that sin is an out-of-date term, that most untoward behavior is the result of complexes acquired at an early age, and that men and women are mere bundles of behavior-patterns, anyhow. [k. location 2812].
Statistically, the churches apparently just about maintained their position in American life. Yet it is difficult to escape the conclusion that they maintained it chiefly by the force of momentum—and to some extent, perhaps, by diligent attention to the things which are Caesar’s: by adopting, here and there, the acceptable gospel according to Bruce Barton; by strenuous membership and money-raising campaigns (such as Bishop Manning’s high-pressure drive in New York for a “house of prayer for all people,” which proved to be a house of prayer under strictly Episcopal auspices); and by the somewhat secular lure of church theatricals, open forums, basket-ball and swimming pools, and muscular good fellowship for the young. Something spiritual had gone out of the churches—a sense of certainty that theirs was the way to salvation. Religion was furiously discussed; there had never been so many books on religious topics in circulation, and the leading divines wrote constantly for the popular magazines; yet all this discussion was itself a sign that for millions of people religion had become a debatable subject instead of being accepted without question among the traditions of the community. [k. location 2781]
The Reverend Charles Stelzle, a shrewd observer of religious conditions, spoke bluntly in an article in the World’s Work: the church, he said, was declining largely because “those who are identified with it do not actually believe in it.” Mr. Stelzle told of asking groups of Protestant ministers what there was in their church programs which would prompt them, if they were outsiders, to say, “That is great; that is worth lining up for,” and of receiving in no case an immediate answer which satisfied even the answerer himself….doctrines in which the bulk of American Protestants had grown up believing (such as the Virgin birth, the resurrection of the body, and the Atonement) that they seemed to many to have no religious cargo left except a nebulous faith, a general benevolence, and a disposition to assure everyone that he was really just as religious as they…. One New England clergyman said that when he thought of God he thought of “a sort of oblong blur.” [k. location 2793]
It was significant that almost every one of the novelists who were ranked most highly by the post-war intellectuals was at outs with the censors, and that the Pulitzer Prize juries had a hard time meeting the requirement that the prize-winning novel should “present the wholesome atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of American manners and manhood,” and finally had to alter the terms of the award, substituting “whole” for “wholesome” and omitting reference to “highest standards.” [k. location 2793]
And its vernacular:
And with a cocktail glass in one’s hand it was easy at least to be frank. “Listen with a detached ear to a modern conversation,” wrote Mary Agnes Hamilton in 1927, “and you will be struck, first, by the restriction of the vocabulary, and second, by the high proportion in that vocabulary of words such as, in the older jargon, ‘no lady could use.’” With the taste for strong liquors went a taste for strong language. To one’s lovely dinner partner, the inevitable antithesis for “grand” and “swell” had become “lousy.” An unexpected “damn” or “hell” uttered on the New York stage was no longer a signal for the sudden sharp laughter of shocked surprise; such words were becoming the commonplace of everyday talk. [k. location 1591]
And thus tragic:
The decade was ill-mannered, it was also unhappy. With the old order of things had gone a set of values which had given richness and meaning to life, and substitute values were not easily found. If morality was dethroned, what was to take its place? Honor, said some of the prophets of the new day: “It doesn’t matter much what you do so long as you’re honest about it.” A brave ideal—yet it did not wholly satisfy; it was too vague, too austere, too difficult to apply. If romantic love was dethroned, what was to take its place? Sex? But as Joseph Wood Krutch explained, “If love has come to be less often a sin, it has also come to be less often a supreme privilege.” And as Walter Lippmann, in A Preface to Morals, added after quoting Mr. Krutch, “If you start with the belief that love is the pleasure of a moment, is it really surprising that it yields only a momentary pleasure?” The end of the pursuit of sex alone was emptiness and futility—the emptiness and futility to which Lady Brett Ashley and her friends in The Sun Also Rises were so tragically doomed. [k. location 1721]
Yet Allen admits that this sense of disillusionment and unhappiness was felt far more keenly by intellectuals than by the man on the street. The men of main-street only
felt a queer disappointment after the war, they felt that life was not giving them all they had hoped it would, they knew that some of the values which had once meant much to them were melting away, but they remained cheerful and full of gusto, quite unaware of the change which was taking place beneath the surface of their own minds. [k. location 1772].
seven years during which men and women might be disillusioned about politics and religion and love, but believed that at the end of the rainbow there was at least a pot of negotiable legal tender consisting of the profits of American industry and American salesmanship; nearly seven years during which the business man was, as Stuart Chase put it, “the dictator of our destinies,” ousting “the statesman, the priest, the philosopher, as the creator of standards of ethics and behavior” and becoming “the final authority on the conduct of American society.”[k. location 2264].
Business had learned as never before the immense importance to it of the ultimate consumer. Unless he could be persuaded to buy and buy lavishly, the whole stream of six-cylinder cars, super-heterodynes, cigarettes, rouge compacts, and electric ice-boxes would be dammed at its outlet. The salesman and the advertising man held the key to this outlet. As competition increased their methods became more strenuous. No longer was it considered enough to recommend one’s goods in modest and explicit terms and to place them on the counter in the hope that the ultimate consumer would make up his mind to purchase. The advertiser must plan elaborate national campaigns, consult with psychologists, and employ all the eloquence of poets to cajole, exhort, or intimidate the consumer into buying,—to “break down consumer resistance.”
Not only was each individual concern struggling to get a larger share of the business in its own field, but whole industries shouted against one another in the public’s ear. The embattled candy manufacturers took full-page space in the newspapers to reply to the American Tobacco Company’s slogan of “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.” Trade journals were quoted by the Reader’s Digest as reporting the efforts of the furniture manufacturers to make the people “furniture conscious” and of the clothing manufacturers to make them “tuxedo conscious.” The salesman must have the ardor of a zealot, must force his way into people’s houses by hook or by crook, must let nothing stand between him and the consummation of his sale. As executives put it, “You can’t be an order-taker any longer—you’ve got to be a salesman.” [k. location 2398].
according to Jesse Rainsford Sprague, still another company invented—and boasted of—a method of goading its salesmen which for sheer inhumanity probably set a record for the whole era of Coolidge Prosperity. It gave a banquet at which the man with the best score was served with oysters, roast turkey, and a most elaborate ice; the man with the second best score had the same dinner but without the oysters; and so on down to the man with the worst score, before whom was laid a small plate of boiled beans and a couple of crackers. [k. location 2422].
Here were the sagas of the age, romances and tragedies depicting characters who became more familiar to the populace than those in any novel. The man who distinctly remembered Mr. Addison Sims of Seattle.… The four out of five who, failing to use Forhan’s, succumbed to pyorrhea, each of them with a white mask mercifully concealing his unhappy mouth.… The pathetic figure of the man, once a golf champion, “now only a wistful onlooker” creeping about after the star players, his shattered health due to tooth neglect.… The poor fellow sunk in the corner of a taxicab, whose wife upbraided him with not having said a word all evening (when he might so easily have shone with the aid of the Elbert Hubbard Scrap Book).… The man whose conversation so dazzled the company that the envious dinner-coated bystanders could only breathe in amazement, “I think he’s quoting from Shelley.”… The woman who would undoubtedly do something about B. O. if people only said to her what they really thought.… The man whose friends laughed when the waiter spoke to him in French.… The girl who thought filet mignon was a kind of fish.… The poor couple who faced one another in humiliation after their guests were gone, the wife still holding the door knob and struggling against her tears, the husband biting his nails with shame (When Your Guests Are Gone—Are You Sorry You Ever Invited Them?… Be Free From All Embarrassment! Let the Famous Book of Etiquette Tell You Exactly What to Do, Say, Write, or Wear on Every Occasion).… The girl who merely carried the daisy chain, yet she had athlete’s foot.… These men and women of the advertising pages, suffering or triumphant, became a part of the folklore of the day. [k. location 2456].
The Swedish Immanuel Congregational Church in New York, according to an item in the American Mercury, recognized the superiority of the business to the spiritual appeal by offering to all who contributed one hundred dollars to its building fund “an engraved certificate of investment in preferred capital stock in the Kingdom of God.” And a church billboard in uptown New York struck the same persuasive note: “Come to Church. Christian Worship Increases Your Efficiency. Christian F. Reisner, Pastor.” [k. location 2526].
So frequent was the use of the Bible to point the lessons of business and of business to point the lessons of the Bible that it was sometimes difficult to determine which was supposed to gain the most from the association. Fred F. French, a New York builder and real-estate man, told his salesmen, “There is no such thing as a reason why not,” and continued: “One evidence of the soundness of this theory may be found in the command laid down in Matthew vii:7 by the Greatest Human-nature Expert that ever lived, ‘Knock and it shall be opened unto you.’” He continued by quoting “the greatest command of them all—‘Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself’”—and then stated that by following such high principles the Fred F. French salesmen had “immeasurably strengthened their own characters and power, so that during this year they will serve our stockholders at a lower commission rate, and yet each one earn more money for himself than in nineteen hundred twenty-five.” In this case Scripture was apparently taken as setting a standard for business to meet—to its own pecuniary profit. Yet in other cases it was not so certain that business was not the standard, and Scripture complimented by being lifted to the business level. [k. location 2551].
And witness, finally, the extraordinary message preached by Bruce Barton in The Man Nobody Knows, which so touched the American heart that for two successive years—1925 and 1926—it was the best-selling non-fiction book in the United States. Barton sold Christianity to the public by showing its resemblance to business. Jesus, this book taught, was not only “the most popular dinner guest in Jerusalem” and “an outdoor man,” but a great executive. “He picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.… Nowhere is there such a startling example of executive success as the way in which that organization was brought together.” His parables were “the most powerful advertisements of all time.… He would be a national advertiser today.” In fact, Jesus was “the founder of modern business.” Why, you ask? Because he was the author of the ideal of service. [k. location 2563].
They could not endure a life without values, and the only values they had been trained to understand were being undermined. Everything seemed meaningless and unimportant. Well, at least one could toss off a few drinks and get a kick out of physical passion and forget that the world was crumbling. And so the saxophones wailed and the gin-flask went its rounds and the dancers made their treadmill circuit with half-closed eyes, and the outside world, so merciless and so insane, was shut away for a restless night.… [k. location 1731].
What the fashions suggested was borne out by a variety of other evidence. The revolution in manners and morals had at least reached an armistice. Not that there was any general return to the old conventions which had been overthrown in the nineteen-twenties. The freedom so desperately won by the flappers of the now graying “younger generation” had not been lost, and it was difficult to detect much real change in the uses to which this freedom was put. What had departed was the excited sense that taboos were going to smash, that morals were being made over or annihilated, and that the whole code of behavior was in flux. The wages of sin had become stabilized at a lower level. Gone, too, at least in some degree, was that hysterical preoccupation with sex which had characterized the Post-war Decade. Books about sex and conversation about sex were among the commodities suffering from overproduction. Robert Benchley expressed a widely prevalent opinion when he wrote in his dramatic page in the New Yorker, late in 1930, “I am now definitely ready to announce that Sex, as a theatrical property, is as tiresome as the Old Mortgage, and that I don’t want to hear it mentioned ever again.… I am sick of rebellious youth and I am sick of Victorian parents and I don’t care if all the little girls in all sections of the United States get ruined or want to get ruined or keep from getting ruined. All I ask is: don’t write plays about it and ask me to sit through them.” [k. location 4980]
Fascinating excerpts.
This one I found particularly striking-
"Rupert Hughes removed a few coats of whitewash from George Washington and nearly caused a riot when he declared in a speech that “Washington was a great card-player, a distiller of whisky, and a champion curser, and he danced for three hours without stopping with the wife of his principal general.”
It is hard to remember now a world in which that would be a damning, or even particularly noteworthy, list of attributes. Unless danced was a euphemism.
I have just been reading through the fiction of HP Lovecraft, Achmed Abdallah, and late work by RW Chambers, all products of the pre-20s or early 20s. In Chambers' "The Slayer of Souls", there is a lot of noteworthy cultural baggage. Even his wanting to condemn Reds, anarchists and foreigners, in extravagant terms, I'm fine with. And, much as we today insist on supervillains and secret technological conspiracies as the real actors behind nations and political movements, somehow unable to conceive of such things having their own motives, so he fixated in that era's way on ancient occult societies. Still OK with it.
But in one cringeworthy passage, there is a whole crisis when the best idea for the main character's security is if she, a young woman, lives chastely with the federal agent entrusted with guarding her. This is imagined as such a scandal as would ruin her life if it ever gets out. and it is assumed that such an arrangement would get out somehow despite these people's obscurity in the wider world, and this is treated with such horror that they must immediately contract a sham marriage.
It is very hard to remember that this world existed. Save that some years ago an older female friend of mine retired to a small island community. She noted that if I ever came to visit it should be with my parents [whom she had met] because if I came myself it might affect her reputation.
Since there would not have been the slightest chance of any kind of physical intimacy between us nor any inclination by either of us in that direction, I was quite taken aback. I guess even in the 21st century being a city boy still gives you different assumptions. I was surprised that in the village there would still be a climate that on one hand was prurient enough to assume untoward behaviour, and on the other prudish enough to shame it.
SO I guess it isn't so hard to mentally reach back to the 20s, except for not understanding the hysteria which such things generated.
RO–
I have road tripped with those who insisted on men and women getting separate hotel rooms, for similar reasons. But my milieu leans Mormon, and that is a part of it.
Outstanding. Though Allen is quite naïve to think the problem with President Wilson was "idealism." I think racism, fascism, and aversion to the US Constitution deserve top billing, but it was his book.
Yet his flapper culture and social insights are keen and prose magisterial. I look forward to reading the whole thing.
A great pop-history book on the period is Bill Bryson's "One Summer: America, 1927."
Somewhere in my copy of the pop history "I Remember, Do You?" the author muses for about a page on the utterly new (post-World War 2, IIRC) concept of the "teen-ager," and how strange and revolutionary the notion was to older folks at the time.