____________________
“The older generation pretty much ruined this
world before passing it on to us.”
John
F. Carter
____________________
In an August 1965 issue of American
Heritage, Bruce Catton explains, “All the old rules seemed to be vanishing
in the Twenties.” “…the characteristic figure of the era was the Flapper, the
girl who bobbed her hair and wore short skirts with nothing in particular
beneath them and put in her time piling in and out of open cars populated by
collegians in coonskin coats.”
Catton writes: “There was an immense, all-pervading
disillusionment. The nation’s highest ideals had been appealed to during the
war, so that to win the war seemed the holiest of causes; the war had been won,
but it was hard to see that anything worth winning had been gained; the
idealism had been used up, and people had an uneasy feeling that they had been
had.”
Westbrook Pegler called it “the Era of Wonderful Nonsense.” Says
Catton: “Publicity was the thing, and it had no standards of value except pure
sensation.” Farmers and wage earners did not share in the growing prosperity.
On “conservative senator announced that congressmen who protested about this
situation were simply ‘sons of the wild jackass’ whose cries need not be
noticed.”
E. B. White summed up the impact of radio: that man’s “words leap
across rivers and mountains, but his thoughts are still only six inches long.”
Jack Shuttleworth described the Jazz Age: “Fitzgerald wrote it,
Held drew it…” John Held, Jr. was born in Salt Lake City in 1889. At age
nine he sold his first woodcut for nine dollars. He was later trained by one of
Brigham Young’s “160-odd grandsons,” Mahonri Young.
Shuttleworth describes Held’s art:
The scenes were football games,
fraternity houses, speakeasies, cocktail parties, tea dances. The step was the
Charleston or Black Bottom and the picturesque means of transportation the
Stutz Bearcat, the Marmon roadster, and the Model T. And at all these places,
in any car, stairway, and alcove, one main, almost relentless recreation was
necking.
 |
Held makes fun of college men and their affectations. |
Malcolm Crowley describes how the decade began:
When we first
heard of the Armistice we felt a sense of relief too deep to express, and we
all got drunk. We had come through, we were still alive, and nobody at all
would be killed tomorrow. The composite fatherland for which we had fought and
in which some of us believed—France, Italy, the Allies, our English homeland,
democracy, the self-determination of nations—had triumphed. We danced in the
streets, embraced old women and pretty girls, swore blood brotherhood with
soldiers in little bars, drank with our elbows locked in theirs, reeled through
the streets with bottles of champagne, fell asleep somewhere. On the next day,
after we got over our hangovers, we didn’t know what to do, so we got drunk.
…We returned
to New York, appropriately—to the homeland of the uprooted, where everyone you
met came from another town and tried to forget it; where nobody seemed to have
parents, or a past more distant than last night’s swell party, or a future
beyond the swell party this evening, and the disillusioned book he would write
tomorrow.
Hemingway talks
about the embarrassing use of words like “sacred, glorious, and sacrifice.” Having
served in the ambulance corps, he admitted, “I had seen nothing sacred, and the
things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the
stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.”
John F. Carter Jr. wrote
in a letter to a friend: “the older generation pretty much ruined this world
before passing it on to us.” It was like a child had been handed this Thing
back in the 90s in good shape. “But the child couldn’t steer it. He hit every
possible telegraph-pole, some of them twice, and ended with a head-on collision
for which we shall have to pay the
fines and damages.”
*
MARION DAVIES stars in the movie, “The Restless Sex,” as an adventurous young woman, torn between her love for two different men.
*
THAT SPRING,
Arthur Walworth writes, Wilson faced a number of post-war problems:
long-simmering
problems of labor and industry were brought before the recuperating President
for settlement. During his illness the men of his Cabinet had been debating
delicate, incendiary issues of law. Now, when Palmer suggested the use of an
injunction to suppress a strike in New York Harbor, the President turned to him
quietly and said: “Every lawyer knows that is an abuse of the writ.” Labor
could never be forced back into the conditions under which had worked before
the war, Wilson thought.
Wilson refused, however, to consider a
pardon for Eugene Debs, the Socialist, whom he considered a “traitor.” (10/397
II)
*
March 26: This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut novel, is published. At a time when
polite society believed a woman who allowed a man to kiss her must then be
engaged, this line shocked readers.
Amory Blaine’s girlfriend Rosalind Connage tells him, “I’ve kissed
dozens of men, I suppose I’ll kiss dozens more.”
In the wake of World War I, young people challenged the old rules.
*
REACTION against
immigration continues to fester. H.L. Mencken offers his acerbic
take on the Anglo-Saxon type:
As I say, the American of the old stock is not
unaware of his steady, and, of late, somewhat rapid deterioration – this gradual
loss of his old mastery in the land his ancestors helped to wring from the
Indian and the wildcat. He senses it, indeed, very painfully, and, as if in
despair of arresting it in fact, makes desperate efforts to dispose of it by
denial and concealment. These efforts often take grotesque and extravagant
forms. Laws are passed to hobble and cage the citizen of newer stocks in a
hundred fantastic ways. It is made difficult and socially dangerous for him to
teach his children the speech of his fathers, or to maintain the cultural
attitudes that he has inherited from them. Every divergence from the norm of
the low-caste Anglo-Saxon is treated as an attentat against the
Commonwealth, and punished with eager ferocity.
It so happens that I am myself an Anglo-Saxon –
one of far purer blood, indeed, than most of the half-bleached Celts who pass
under the name in the United States and England. I’m in part Angle and in part
Saxon, and what else I am is safely white, Nordic, Protestant and blonde. Thus
I feel free, without risk of venturing into bad taste, to regard frankly the soi
disant Anglo-Saxon of this incomparable Republic and his rather less
dubious cousin of the Motherland. How do the two appear to me, after years
spent largely in accumulating their disfavor? What are the characters that I
discern most clearly in the so-called Anglo-Saxon type of man? I may answer at once
that two stick out above all others. One is his curious and apparently
incurable incompetence – his congenital inability to do any difficult thing
easily and well, whether it be isolating a bacillus or writing a sonata. The
other is his astounding susceptibility to fears and alarms – in short, his
hereditary cowardice.
He adds that the two great
empires, English and American, “were built up primarily by swindling and
butchering unarmed savages, and after that by robbing weak and friendless
nations.”
In fact, Mencken quotes a report focusing on the condition of the people of southeast Ohio, at the time, described as “more purely American than in any of the rest of the State.”
Here gross superstition exercises strong control
over the thought and action of a large proportion of the people. Syphilitic and
other venereal diseases are common and increasing over whole counties, while in
some communities nearly every family is afflicted with inherited or infectious
disease. Many cases of incest are known; inbreeding is rife. Imbeciles, feeble
minded, and delinquents are numerous, politics is corrupt, and selling of votes
is common, petty crimes abound, the schools have been badly managed and poorly
attended. Cases of rape, assault, and robbery are of almost weekly occurrence
within five minutes’ walk of the corporation limits of the one of the county
seats, while in another county political control is held by a self-professed
criminal. Alcoholic intemperance is excessive. Gross immorality and its evils
results are by no means confined to the hill districts, but are extreme also in
the towns. (49-131-132)
*
May: In a book review, The New York Times takes note of the anti-Semitism of the era.
The Dearborn
Independent, a newspaper that was owned by Ford and circulated via Ford
dealers around the country, launched a series titled “The International Jew.”
It cited “The Protocols,” and advanced the plot: Schiff and the Warburgs, in
this telling, had not just brought down the Russian Empire; they had also
conspired to bring the Bolsheviks to power in 1917. (Unsurprisingly, these rich
bankers did not in fact support the Bolsheviks.) International Jews, Ford’s
paper said, were the “conscious enemies of all that Anglo-Saxons mean by
civilization.”
The
newspaper series was a crisis for American Jews. But Schiff,
uncharacteristically, advised restraint. “If we get into a controversy we shall
light a fire, which no one can foretell how it will become extinguished,” he
wrote to a group of Jewish leaders in June. “I would strongly advise therefore
that no notice be taken of these articles and the attack will soon be
forgotten.”
Schiff
died later that same year, and did not live to see how terribly wrong he had
been.
Ford turned the series, “The International Jew,” into a book (subtitle: “The World’s Foremost Problem”) and millions of copies were printed.
Two
years later, The Times reported that Adolf Hitler, had a portrait of
Ford on his office wall in Munich. On a table in his anteroom you could pick
from a stack of copies of The International Jew, translated into German.
*
August 10: Mamie
Smith and Perry Bradford record a song, written by Bradford, “Crazy Blues.”
Smith is from Cincinnati, a singer with only one other recorded title to her
credit. In the first month, “Crazy
Blues” sells 75,000 copies, two million over time. As The New
York Times noted on the
hundredth anniversary of its release, “It established the blues as a popular
art and prepared the way for a century of Black expression in the fiery core of
American music.”
“Crazy
Blues”
By Mamie
Smith
I can’t sleep at night
I can’t eat a bite
‘Cause the man I love
He don’t treat me right
He makes me feel so blue
I don’t know what to do
Sometime I sit and sigh
And then begin to cry
‘Cause my best friend
Said his last goodbye
There’s a change in the ocean
Change in the deep blue sea, my
baby
I’ll tell you folks, there ain’t
no change in me
My love for that man will always
be
Now I can read his letters
I sure can’t read his mind
I thought he’s lovin’ me
He’s leavin’ all the time
Now I see my poor love was blind
I went
to the railroad
Hang my
head on the track
Thought
about my daddy
I gladly
snatched it back
Now my
baby’s gone
And gave
me the sack
Now I got the crazy blues
Since my baby went away
I ain’t got no time to lose
I must find him today
Now the doctor’s gonna do all that he can
But what you’re gonna need is an undertaker man
I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news
Now I got the crazy blues
I’m
gonna do like a Chinaman
Go and
get some hop
Get
myself a gu, and shoot myself a cop
I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news
Now I’ve
got the crazy blues.
The Times explains the power of the song:
A boisterous cry of outrage by a
woman driven mad by mistreatment, the song spoke with urgency and fire to Black
listeners across the country who had been ravaged by the abuses of race-hate
groups, the police and military forces in the preceding year — the notorious “Red
Summer” of 1919.
The blues worked on multiple
levels simultaneously and partly in code, with “my man” or “the man”
translatable as “the white man” or “white people.”
Out of her mind with despair,
the singer turns to violence against her oppressor for relief in the chorus
that gives the song its title: “Now the doctor’s gonna do all that he can/ But
what you’re gonna need is an undertaker man/ I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news/
Now I’ve got the crazy blues.”
Indeed, the blues became a
full-blown craze, with listeners of every color able to buy and listen at home
to music marketed as “race records.” The form was initially associated almost
exclusively with women such as Ms. Smith, Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters and Bessie
Smith. They and many more women made hundreds of records that sold millions of
copies over more than a decade — well before the great bluesman Robert Johnson
stepped into a recording studio for the first time, in November 1936.
But so was the song’s disturbing
but powerful ending, in which Ms. Smith sings allegorically of the darkening
circumstances: “There’s a change in the ocean/ change in the deep blue sea.” In
the concluding verse, she speaks of changing the way she responds. She has
decided to “go and get some hop,” she announces, and “get myself a gun and
shoot myself a cop.”
Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” was also a dance tune: People were not only moved by it; they moved to it.
 | ||||
A young woman of the era: showing too much ankle!
|
*
September: In the Atlantic Monthly, “These
Wild Young People” appears, written by One of Them.
The older
generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to
us. They gave 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 eighteen-nineties, nicely painted, smoothly running, practically fool-proof.
“So simple that a child can run it!” But the child couldn’t steer it. He hit every
possible telegraph-pole, some of them twice, and ended with a head-on collision
for which we shall have to pay the fines and damages. Now, with loving pride,
they turn over their wreck to us. (155/frontispiece)
*
November 2: President Wilson is convinced Democrats will prevail in the voting. “You need not worry,” he tells his cabinet on Election Day. “The American people will not turn Cox down and elect Harding.” (10/403 II)
It’s not even close.
Warren G. Harding polls 16,151,916 votes, a winning margin of 60.3 percent. James M. Cox earns 9,134,074. Democrats manage to win the votes of every former Confederate state, save Tennessee.
They also pick up Kentucky. The rest of America votes – as we might say a century later – red.
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