1922

In 1922, the two young women in Chicago were arrested for public indecency.
Their suits are "too revealing."

Following up on the success of his novel, Main Street, Sinclair publishes Babbitt. The first is set in the fictional town of Gopher Prairie, the second in the town of Zenith. (Main Street had been chosen for the Pulitzer Prize by the jury; but the trustees reversed the decision.) 

The New York Times outlines the story of Babbitt:

 

George F. Babbitt – 46 years old, a conventional (conservative) husband, father, householder, golf player, Buick owner, clubman, churchgoer – is living the American dream. “To the eye,” we’re told, he’s “the perfect office-going executive – a well-fed man in a correct brown soft hat and frameless spectacles, smoking a large cigar, driving a good motor along a semi-suburban parkway.” And yet at odd moments he senses that something is missing, that he’s buried his early impulses toward a larger, more meaningful existence: In college he had aspired to becoming a lawyer defending the poor – even running for governor someday.

 

Instead, he has become an apostle of “Boosterism,” a loud, crass glorification of his middle-class way of life in Zenith, “the Zip City – Zeal, Zest and Zowie – 1,000,000 in 1935.” He cares, in a desultory way, for his bland wife, Myra, and their three children. He enjoys his success, his growing popularity in the local business world, his lunches at the Zenith Athletic Club, whose lobby “was Gothic, the washroom Roman Imperial, the lounge Spanish Mission and the reading-room Chinese Chippendale.” Babbitt is happily climbing. Yet, inexplicably, he has begun drifting away from his automatic conservatism, actually sympathizing with local strikers. To his wife: “Honest, do you think people would think I was too liberal if I just said the strikers were decent?” (Myra’s reply: “Of course they would. But don’t worry, dear; I know you don’t mean a word of it.”) As far as his Zenith world is concerned, though, this apostasy is the first step on the road to that ultimate evil — socialism!

 

And then he does the clichéd thing: has a fling with an appealing sophisticated widow whose unlikely name is Tanis Judique – where was Lewis’s editor?  - and attaches himself to her coterie of cautiously bohemian friends. Whereupon he begins to suffer from the withdrawal of approval by his Athletic Club world. “The independence seeped out of him and he walked the streets alone, afraid of men’s cynical eyes and the incessant hiss of whispering.”

 

The crisis comes when Myra almost dies from acute appendicitis. Every afternoon for 17 days he visits her in the hospital, “and in their long talks they drifted back to intimacy.” He’s reunited with his old Zenith crowd, and within two weeks no one “was more violent regarding the … crimes of labor unions, the perils of immigration and the delights of golf, morality and bank accounts than was George F. Babbitt.”

 

As for the man himself, Lewis grew up a brilliant but awkward young man, and never escaped his past.

 

He was a notorious cutup, a mimic and the proud author of “class yells”: “Cooma laca, booma laca,/Bow wow wow – /Chingalaca, chingalaca,/ Chow, Chow, Chow.” He had crushes on one girl after another – sometimes two at the same time. …And he submitted flowery poems to various magazines, all, of course, rejected. But he was also getting ready for college, having decided to try for Yale, and after spending some time at Oberlin to sharpen his skills, he was admitted there.

 

His career in New Haven was checkered. His only distinction was being published regularly in the Yale Literary Magazine, “The Lit” – romantic stories, more flowery poems. Girls? Gauche attempts. Friends? A few. Intimacies? Hardly. The esteemed educator William Lyon Phelps said of him, “He was not disliked in college, but was regarded with amiable tolerance as a freak.”

 

His first marriage ended in divorce. His second, to Dorothy Thompson, herself a skillful writer, was marred by his drinking. Main Street sold millions of copies. His other works in coming years were acclaimed: Arrowsmith, for example, Elmer Gantry, a mocking account of evangelism and religion in America, and in 1930, he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. 

His son, Wells, by his first marriage, was killed by a sniper while fighting in World War II. But Lewis was never a good father.

 

Lewis was as terrible a father to Michael as he had been to Wells; Dorothy exhausted herself trying to get him to pay attention to the boy, but it never happened. There were two houses on the beautiful land the Lewises bought in Vermont. Momma and Poppa lived in one, and little Michael (plus nurse and attendants) lived in the other. When he was a child, Michael announced, “I think when I grow up I am going to kill my daddy.”

 

Meanwhile Lewis’s drinking grew worse and worse. It was now conceded by both husband and wife that he was an alcoholic. His behavior grew worse, too. When there were people around he would launch into brilliant, and endless, monologues, wielding his superb gift of mimicry — sometimes the speeches went on for an hour or more, until his audience fled, enraging him. When drunk (which was much of the time), he would insult people, abuse Dorothy, fire assistants, only to rehire them the next day with effusive apologies. (One of them was the young John Hersey, years before “Hiroshima,” who would later say, “I must have been too young to recognize the bitterness of an exhausted gift, and of course I was ignorant of the drinking history.”) He would also abuse students whom he had agreed to teach and people who had come to hear him speak. At a lecture at Wesleyan College, he asked the students, “How many of you want to write?” Most of them raised their hands. “Good,” he said. “Go home and write,” and he left the stage.

 

His second marriage failed and in 1939, he fell in love with an aspiring 18-year-old actress. His later novels, according to a New York Times book review critic, “range from mediocre to terrible,” although he did try to strike a blow against racism in Kingsblood Royal. 

“His life petered out into a sad, isolated existence,” writes Robert Gottlieb, “this quintessential American dying in 1951 in a hospital outside Rome, with only an anonymous Franciscan nun in attendance.” 

In his heyday, however, Sinclair Lewis was the most widely read writer in the United States.

 

* 

Lewis blasted the “Poets of Business,” men like Babbitt who could write awful business letters like this:

 

Say, Old Man!

 

I just want to know can I do you a whaleuva favor? Honest! No kidding! I know you’re interested in getting a house, not merely a place where you hand up the old bonnet but a love-nest for the wife and kiddies—and maybe for the flivver out beyant (be sure and spell that b-e-y-a-n-t, Miss McGoun) the spud garden. Say, did you ever stop to think that we’re here to save you trouble? That’s how we make a living—folks don’t pay us for our lovely beauty! Now take a look!

 

Sit right down at the handsome carved mahogany escritoire and shoot us a line telling us what you want, and if we can find it we’ll come hopping down your lane with the good tidings, and if we can’t, we won’t bother you…

 

* 

In 1910, a young musician named “Kid” Ory moved to New Orleans with his six-piece band. Born on the Woodland Plantation in LaPlace, Louisiana, on Christmas Day, 1886, he had taken an interest in music as a boy. 

From Smithsonian magazine (January-February 2021): 

Ory remembered: “We would stand on a bridge at night and hum different tunes with different harmonies. It was dark and no one could see us, but people could hear us singing and they’d bring us a few ginger cakes and some water….it was good ear training.” 

He had his friends would listen to brass bands that performed at settlements up and down the River. “Ory and his friends began playing on homemade cigar-box guitars, banjos, violins and a soap box bass, strung with fishing line and metal wire,” Jim Beaugez writes. “On occasion, while attending a brass band concert, he would pick up an unused trombone while the group was on break and start working out its mysteries.” 

 The young man made “serious money” in 1905, possibly working on that year’s sugar cane harvest. Soon after, he headed for New Orleans and paid $67 for his first trombone – nearly $2000 in today’s money. It was a shorter model than the one he would later play, one with the longer slide and the type “that would soon become synonymous with New Orleans jazz.” 

Ory was influenced by the playing of Buddy Bolden, who had a loose improvisational style, described as “hot,” as opposed to other brass bands that played from sheet music, including Bolden’s archrival, John Robichaux. Ory began creating music that balanced the two styles, Bolden’s brashness and Robichaux’s professionalism. “Ory realized that the way to get the good jobs and get the money – read: get the jobs with the white folks – was to show up, look good, be on time, do all the stuff that John Robichaux did to lock up all that white audience, but play the “hot” stuff , says another writer. “Ory would show other musicians in New Orleans how to make a living playing hot music.” 

In 1913 a teenage Louis Armstrong began showing up at Ory’s performances. In 1922, “Ory’s Creole Trombone” was the first jazz recording made by black musicians from New Orleans. An original copy today fetches $1000.  

The slide trombone enabled him to play glissando and “smear” between notes, which gave his music the boozy sound still associated with New Orleans jazz. Ory was not the first to play glissando on a trombone, but he was surely one of the most dazzling – and influential.

 

In 1925, he moved to Chicago, where jazz had taken off. He recorded with Armstrong and his Hot Five, played at haunts where Al Capone was known, but faded as big-band swing became the fad. He moved to Los Angeles, “put down his trombone and picked up a mop, working as a janitor for the Sante Fe Railway. Bebop music was less danceable, and New Orleans jazz returned to vogue. In 1942, he received $8,000 in back royalties for “Muskrat Ramble,” a song he had written and recorded in 1926. He eased back into music, and his new sextet “dazzled critics and fans.” Orson Welles hired him to lead his band on his radio show. “The most important event of 1945 in jazz – speaking of public rather than recorded performance – is the extended run of Kid Ory’s band in Hollywood,” wrote one music critic. “Ory is the Ory of old – he is an artist, the greatest hot trombone of all time.” 

He finally retired from playing in 1966, at age 80. 

September: In a book review for The New York Times, we learn about a grisly 1922 murder. The victims: the “charismatic” Rev. Edward Hall, and local housewife Eleanor Mills, a member of Hall’s church. They are found together under a crabapple tree in a field in New Jersey.

 

Their precise arrangement proved consequential: The corpses fell on the far side of the line that separates two counties — the better-off Middlesex, where both victims lived, and Somerset, where officers opened a case.

 

All signs pointed to murder. The weapon was gone, the bodies had been staged, and someone had taken the time to prop Edward Hall’s own calling card on his foot. Mills, shot in the face three times, was almost unrecognizable. Investigators — fumbling from the start — waved over a pedestrian to see if he might know the deceased. That observer was the first to notice that Mills had a 16-inch, maggot-filled gash from ear to ear.

 

The newspapers of that day picked up the story and ran with it, with the New York Daily Mirror, typically, promising readers “90 percent entertainment, 10 percent information.” 

In fact, the Mills-Hall murders helped propel the New York Daily News into the top spot for circulation in the nation. The publisher of that paper, Joseph Medill Patterson, once rated the three kinds of stories that most gripped readers: 

1.     Love or Sex.

2.     Money.

3.     Murder.

 

When the Mirror first hit 500,000 in circulation, four years later, William Randolph Hearst sent his editor a telegram. “Congratulations on circulation. It is wonderful,” he said. “Important thing for newspaper to do in making circulation is to get excited when public excited.” People, Hearst added, would reach for the first paper “which seems to express their feelings in addition to printing the facts.”

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: I wonder if students would realize that nothing has changed? What kinds of stories capture their attention? And why?