1925

 

____________________

 

“There was among us quite too little care for the ideal side of life.”

 

Benjamin Andrews

____________________

 

 

January 1: Benjamin Andrews, in his History of the United States, Vol. IV, offers a grim picture of the state of the nation in 1925. With apologies to any members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, he writes:

 

A greater peril beset the nation in the decay which slowly crept over our family life. The family has in every civilized age been justly regarded as the pillar of the state, but the integrity which it possessed among our fathers, their children invaded in many ways. Mormonism, decadent if not dead, about which so much had been said, was but one of these, and perhaps not the worst. If crimes of a violent nature were becoming less frequent, crimes against chastity were on the increase. Easy divorce was considerably responsible for this. The diversity of marriage and divorce laws in the various states was a great abomination. How to remedy it did not appear. Many called for a constitutional amendment, lodging solely in Congress the power of making laws upon this vital subject.

 

We proved very fortunate as a people in what our material prosperity itself did not prove a greater curse. More than every other disaster was to be feared the growth of a temper for mere material thinking and enjoyment, the love of lucre and of those merely material comforts and delights which lucre can buy. There was among us quite too little care for the ideal side of life. Too many who purchased books loved them only for the money they cost. Rich engravings and bindings were often sought rather than edifying matter. Costly daubs were purchased at enormous prices for lack of true artistic taste or relish. In sadly frequent cases the great captain of industry was nothing but a plodder. There was too great rush for wealth. We became nervous. Nervous diseases increased alarmingly. We read, but only market reports. Think, we did not; we only reckoned. (4/373-375)

 

On a more optimistic note, Andrews ends Volume IV, saying, that while Europe was in ruins after the war, “American thought was that we should express our superiority in the form of ideas, not of arms, and use it in elevating mankind to richer culture and a nobler life.” (4-382)

 

Jeanette Loff. Too risque for 1925!

* 

January 30: An experienced spelunker named Floyd Collins becomes trapped in a cave in Kentucky. By the time he dies in mid-February, dozens of reporters and film crews from six motion-picture studios had made him into a “popular martyr.” At the time it cost $1 to get into Mammoth Cave, $4 to stay all day. Collins was one of nine children, and had been raised in a log cabin. 

Competition to gain part of the cave business was fierce, with one entrepreneur cutting a new entry into the Mammoth complex to siphon off tourist dollars. Floyd was exploring for another potential business, in Sand Cave. Collins even found a skull and gave it to the backer of his exploration.

 

On Friday, January 30, he went into the cave again. He crawled down into the dark, on his belly, into a narrow passage. He slid fifteen feet straight down, then twisted through a hundred feet of loops that sloped at thirty degrees. He dropped straight for eight feet and then crawled for fifty feet more between loose rock walls until he reached a small cavern. He lay on his belly, looking down into a fifty-foot pit, twenty-five feet long and ten feet wide. He went down into it, looking for a passage, but it was closed. He scaled the walls and headed back the way he had come. He kicked a rock that knocked some stones that started a slide that trapped him. He was caught a hundred and twenty-five feet deep in the ground, in a space eight inches high and twelve feet long. The temperature was sixteen degrees [this is clearly incorrect]. He was facing up in the direction from which he’d come, but there was a seven-ton boulder on his left foot. He lay in mud and black night, with water dripping on his head.

 

Floyd had been trapped for two days once before, in 1922, in a different cave, but now efforts to free him repeatedly failed and his fate made headlines across the nation. Floyd’s brothers, Marshall and Homer, and others tried to free him – first, heating the rock with a blowtorch, and hammering at it with chisels. They worked all of one day and failed to save him. By February 5, Collins’ fate was national news. 

On February 9,

 

Homer Collins told a reporter, that he’d spent Sunday night in the tunnel with his brother. “Floyd told me that last night he dreamed of white angels riding in white chariots drawn by white horses… he saw chicken sandwiches [and] a red hot stove ... I heard him praying…“Oh Lord help me. I’m going home to the angels.” Homer offered five hundred dollars to any surgeon who could crawl into the passage and cut his brother’s leg off. Would-be heroes arrived from nearby counties and tried to crawl down the tunnel. Hundreds of men stood around the hole telling one another what to do and offering one another drinks. They’d ask Homer or Marshall for permission and then crawl in carrying blankets and gloves, thermoses of coffee, bottles of milk, and cans of soup. Some of them got halfway down before they became frightened and stuffed the blankets and bottles and cans into the nearest crevice; they’d come out and tell everyone how grateful Floyd had been and exactly what he’d said.

 

None of their rescue plans worked. One “expert” suggested attaching a windlass to Floyd and yanking him out, even if it meant his leg was ripped off. He was hooked up and they began to pull, but he asked them to stop. An ex-business partner of Floyd and two other men managed to go down the cave, clear rock from around the trapped explorer’s body, and free his hands. They widened the passage, and fed him coffee, milk, and grape juice. 

At the surface, the scene was a cross of a “county fair and a circus.” Hundreds of spectators crowded around the cave entrance. There were complaints of pickpockets and tire thieves. The president of the People’s Bank of Cave City and others asked the governor to send national guard troops and a U.S. Army engineer to help. Lee Collins, Floyd’s father sold pictures of his son to people in the crowd – and “resisted signing over checks sent to the Red Cross in his name.” 

A youthful reporter named Skeets Miller crawled into the cave, knocked some rock away, and interviewed Floyd.

 

Death holds no terror for Floyd Collins, he told me. … As I placed a bottle of milk to his lips. … I have been in the cave three times... I am very small… I am confident… I lead the way… I succeeded. … It is terrible...I went first. … His paper ran the headline “COURIER JOURNAL MAN LEADS 3 RESCUE ATTEMPTS.” That night Skeets pulled a shining electric bulb with him into the tunnel and left it looped around Floyd’s neck to keep him warm. The next day the Courier printed a front page picture of Lee Collins shaking his hand. Lee was a bent old man who’d taken his hat off. Skeets stood young and tall as a prince. “‘Skeets the First’ is Cave City Ruler,” said the Courier. “Modest Young Miller is Hero of Town With Unwavering Determination.” He had crawled into the deep pit and returned to tell the world. People followed him everywhere. In spite of danger and fame he still acted like a boy: “I wish you’d… tell my mother that there isn’t any real danger because I know she’ll be worried.”

 

The more people admired Skeets, the more Johnny Gerald resented him. Johnny chased him away on Wednesday morning and led ten men into the hole. He chipped at the boulder that held Floyd’s foot until Floyd told him he was free. The crew headed back to get a piece of canvas to drag him out. They were fifty feet from him when the tunnel collapsed. Five days of digging had loosened the roof and weakened the walls. The heat of the work had thawed the frozen mud that had helped hold the rock in place. Gerald broke through again twelve hours later. Floyd’s foot was still caught. It had never been freed. He’d been delirious. He was dying of pneumonia. A young miner from Central City named Maddox gave him the last food he ever ate. He mumbled and whispered: “Maddox, get me out… why don’t you take me out… kiss me goodbye, I’m going.” Maddox saw purple circles around his eyes and two front teeth made of gold. He kissed him goodbye.

 

As the story had grown, roads to the scene became clogged with cars. Tents went up at the site. Souvenir peddlers arrived, Vendors sold hot dogs, sandwiches, and coffee to sight-seers. Reporters from the national papers now arrived. The Red Cross set up a hospital. Mining experts came to study the situation and suggest ways Collins might be saved. Three hundred volunteers went to work in three shifts, digging a new shaft down to where Floyd was trapped. A radio detector was attached to his neck. A “grating noise” could be heard every twenty seconds – what one doctor said was the sound of Floyd struggling for breath. Three thousand people watched as the volunteers worked to dig down to Floyd and get him out. Reporters learned that Collins’ faithful dog Shep hadn’t eaten or slept for eight days. That, too, became part of the story. They learned that Floyd had once driven all the way to Louisville to buy chocolate-covered cherries for Alma Clark, his sweetheart. Then came the rumors. Floyd had done this for publicity. Floyd had already escaped through a secret tunnel. Doctors were said to have put stimulants in the coffee taken down to the trapped man (that was true.) Some hinted that Collins had been murdered by persons suspected, but not known. The whole affair was an “advertising scheme” and there was grumbling about “fake journalism.” 

Anyone who lived through the Trump presidency, whether fans of the 45^th president or not, would likely understand. 

The crowd grew to 20,000. Lee Collins moved among the people, handing out leaflets urging them to visit White Crystal Cave, which he and Floyd already owned. Restaurants in Cave City, the nearest town, ran out of food, as tourists poured in for meals. The stories became wilder, too.

 

While all this went on, a man from Haddam, Kansas revealed that he was Floyd Collins. “Please contradict statements that I am buried alive in Sand Cave. Tell mother I am alright. Am coming home.” He said he had an American-flag tattoo on his right arm and a scar on the left of his navel that Johnny Gerald [Floyd’s old business partner] had given him. Two little boys in Pittsburgh played Floyd Collins and trapped themselves in a cave near a beer vault.” A lady from Chicago wrote to  let everyone know that she knew Floyd Collins was still alive “because her coffee grounds had settled in a heart shape.” But on Friday, February 13, rescuers discovered the shaft they had been digging was deep enough – but somewhere off to the side of the trapped spelunker’s position. One of them said he heard a faint groan, “like you hear a man that’s got hurt in a hospital.”

 

They recovered Collins’ body the next day. A doctor said he’d probably been dead for five days. “Dark Carnival” by Michael Lesy, American Heritage, October 1976, pp. 34-45)

 

* 

February 21: The New Yorker is published for the first time in 1925, the editor explaining, “THE NEW YORKER will be a magazine which is not edited for the little old lady in Dubuque.” American Heritage (8-1965).

 

* 

The Great Gatsby is published in 1925: A neighbor describes the scene at Jay Gatsby’s country house:

 

There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.

 

Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York — every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb.

 

At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby’s enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.

 

By seven o’clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pit full of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing up-stairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors, and hair shorn in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names.

 

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.

 

Suddenly one of the gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray’s understudy from the Follies. The party has begun.

 

Expressions included “making whoopee,” and “petting.” “Irish palsy,” was drunkenness.

1925 Buick.

* 

The Hollow Men

by T. S. Eliot

 

   Mistah Kurtz-he dead
            A penny for the Old Guy


                       I

    We are the hollow men
    We are the stuffed men
    Leaning together
    Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
    Our dried voices, when
    We whisper together
    Are quiet and meaningless
    As wind in dry grass
    Or rats’ feet over broken glass
    In our dry cellar
   
    Shape without form, shade without colour,
    Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
   
    Those who have crossed
    With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
    Remember us-if at all-not as lost
    Violent souls, but only
    As the hollow men
    The stuffed men.

   
                              II

    Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
    In death’s dream kingdom
    These do not appear:
    There, the eyes are
    Sunlight on a broken column
    There, is a tree swinging
    And voices are
    In the wind’s singing
    More distant and more solemn
    Than a fading star.
   
    Let me be no nearer
    In death’s dream kingdom
    Let me also wear
    Such deliberate disguises
    Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
    In a field
    Behaving as the wind behaves
    No nearer-
   
    Not that final meeting
    In the twilight kingdom

   
                   III

    This is the dead land
    This is cactus land
    Here the stone images
    Are raised, here they receive
    The supplication of a dead man’s hand
    Under the twinkle of a fading star.
   
    Is it like this
    In death’s other kingdom
    Waking alone
    At the hour when we are
    Trembling with tenderness
    Lips that would kiss
    Form prayers to broken stone.

   
                     IV

    The eyes are not here
    There are no eyes here
    In this valley of dying stars
    In this hollow valley
    This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
   
    In this last of meeting places
    We grope together
    And avoid speech
    Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
   
    Sightless, unless
    The eyes reappear
    As the perpetual star
    Multifoliate rose
    Of death’s twilight kingdom
    The hope only
    Of empty men.

   
                           V

    Here we go round the prickly pear
    Prickly pear prickly pear
    Here we go round the prickly pear
    At five o’clock in the morning.
   
    Between the idea
    And the reality
    Between the motion
    And the act
    Falls the Shadow

                                   For Thine is the Kingdom
   
    Between the conception
    And the creation
    Between the emotion
    And the response
    Falls the Shadow
                                   

                   Life is very long

   
    Between the desire
    And the spasm
    Between the potency
    And the existence
    Between the essence
    And the descent
    Falls the Shadow

                                   For Thine is the Kingdom
   
    For Thine is
    Life is
    For Thine is the
   
    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    Not with a bang but a whimper.

 

Notes provided by website: 

Mistah Kurtz: a character in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” 

A...Old Guy: a cry of English children on the streets on Guy Fawkes Day, November 5, when they carry straw effigies of Guy Fawkes and beg for money for fireworks to celebrate the day. Fawkes was a traitor who attempted with conspirators to blow up both houses of Parliament in 1605; the “Gunpowder Plot” failed. 

Those...Kingdom: Those who have represented something positive and direct are blessed in Paradise. The reference is to Dante’s “Paradiso.” 

Eyes: eyes of those in eternity who had faith and confidence and were a force that acted and were not paralyzed.

Crossed stave: refers to scarecrows.

Tumid river: swollen river. The River Acheron in Hell in Dante’s “Inferno.” The damned must cross this river to get to the land of the dead. 

Multifoliate rose: in Dante’s “Divine Comedy” paradise is described as a rose of many leaves.

Prickly pear: cactus. 

Between...act: a reference to “Julius Caesar” “Between the acting of a dreadful thing/And the first motion, all the interim is/Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.” 

For...Kingdom: the beginning of the closing words of the Lord’s Prayer. © by owner. Provided at no charge for educational purposes.

* 

Countee Cullen writes the poem, “For a Woman I Know.” 

She thinks that even up in heaven

Her class lies late and snores,

While poor black cherubs rise at

            seven

To do celestial chores.                     

 

*

Zora Neale Hurston.

At age 13, Zora Neale Hurston ran away from her Florida home, but not before attempting to kill her stepmother with her bare hands. She survived, doing odd jobs until age 26. Then she lied about her age to get into an all-black Baltimore high school. 

She graduated in 1918, attended Howard University, and was awarded an associate degree in 1920. She later befriended Fannie Hurst, a best-selling white novelist. Hurst helped Hurston get a scholarship to Barnard. 

A story in the NYT book review notes:

 

When they met, Zora would amuse Fannie with stories about being the only black person at Barnard. Her classmates, she reported in a letter to another friend, had warmed up to her enough to urge her to come to the junior prom at the Ritz Carlton. They even “offered to exchange dances with me if I will bring a man as light as myself.”

 

At a 1925 awards dinner there were so many elite white people who supported black causes that Zora coined a word for them. By combining “Negro” with “humanitarian,” she came up with “Negrotarians.” 

A minimum of research leads this blogger to a story she wrote, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” about life growing up in Eatonville, and after. Eatonville was one of the earliest incorporated all-Negro towns in the country; and Zora saw white people only passing through. Not till she was sent to boarding school in Jacksonville, did she realize she was “colored.” 

She writes of her discovery with a clear sense of pride and a dash of humor:

 

I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown—warranted not to rub nor run.

 

But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

 

“At certain times, I have no race,” she writes later, “I am me.” Walking down an avenue in Harlem, her hat tilted slightly to accentuate her look, she says,

 

The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.

 

I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.

 

Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.

 

But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held—so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place—who knows?

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: The PDF file comes with a set of questions; but this former teacher finds them disappointing. I think the crux of the story boils down to that last paragraph, above, and how, though the bags are filled differently, God, the Great Stuffer, sees them all the same, that all colors lead similar lives, mixed sorrow with happiness. If I were teaching, I’d focus entirely on that idea. 

I might also ask students: “Do you think Hurston’s brilliance helped her chart a course that less intelligent individuals would find much harder?” What, for example, might have been her fate if she was not so bright, not so gifted a writer, in a Jim Crow world, growing up, and living all her life until near the end? 

In any case, the story is a quick read, and might lead you to other Hurston writings. I’d certainly prepare a sheet of vocabulary words for students first: assegai, for example, “a slender, iron-tipped, hardwood spear used chiefly by southern African peoples.” Few students will know exactly what “circumlocutions” means. I taught seventh and eighth graders. I’m not sure they could deal with Hurston’s vocabulary: “veneer,” “rambunctious,” “proscenium box,” even “rending.” 

I’d be tempted to try the story, make a copy and do what I used to do with complicated readings for my classes. In the sentence with the word “rending,” I’d add in brackets [tearing]. Some lines could be dropped, as well, for younger readers.

 

* 

The first real boom in Florida real estate is exploding and 7,000 people are moving to Florida every day. Most are hoping to make their fortunes selling land. 

A review in The New York Times highlights some of the leading characters involved in what would become a classic bubble:

 

There’s D. P. Davis, who in 1924 sold 300 building lots in Tampa Bay in three hours — while they were still underwater — and who remarried his first wife because, his brother said, he wanted to make his mistress jealous. There’s Barron Collier, who developed 1.2 million acres of southwest Florida that made him, if you could believe the price tags he put on them (and many thousands did), richer than John D. Rockefeller. The impresario who built Coral Gables, George E. Merrick, hired a publicist who would describe him as a brilliant artist who used “wood and steel and stone” to “paint his pictures upon a canvas of spacious fields, cool groves and smiling waterways.” The society architect Addison Mizner spun a fairyland of neo-Spanish castles in Palm Beach. His con man brother Wilson prophetically said, “Easy street is a blind alley,” and not much later the two of them found themselves stumbling along its darkened length.

 

The key figure was Carl Fisher, who had made his first money in the automobile industry. “He built the Indianapolis Speedway, initiated the idea of the first transnational highway and made his first fortune manufacturing headlights before seeking a second one on a dredged-out slice of Biscayne Bay,” the Times explains. “When Warren G. Harding came to play golf in Miami Beach, Fisher provided a small elephant to serve as the president’s caddy, an unbeatable photo op in a decade” filled with that kind of photo op. Fisher’s “advertisements spread cheesecake photos (the term itself coined by Fisher’s publicist) of women in bathing suits across the country. One bore the caption, ‘Turalura Lipschits and Her Twin Sister Tondalaya Are in Miami Beach Enjoying Seventy-Eight-Degree Sunshine on December 21!’” 

Even more than fun in the sun and bathing beauties, the boom was about getting rich. Fisher promised increases in property values of 10% annually, at least. “The smell of money in Florida, which attracts men as the smell of blood attracts a wild animal, became ripe and strong last spring,” wrote Gertrude Matthews Shelby, who wrote for Harper’s Monthly. Doubtful, at first, Shelby got caught up in the mania herself. In one month, she made the equivalent of $190,000 in 2019 dollars, buying and selling undeveloped land — “not much,” she concluded, “but a lot to a little buyer on a little bet.” This flipping of property was then called “reloading.” 

Once national magazines began warning of a bubble, Florida leaders headed for New York City to make the case that the bubble was not about to burst. The governor of Florida, leading newspaper publishers and developers and bankers  came north to testify to the soundness of their dreams. Three months later the collapse began. By 1927 a single edition of one Florida daily

 

carried 41 pages of tax delinquency notices. In time, nearly 90 percent of Florida’s municipalities were compelled to default on their bonds. Overleveraged banks collapsed. Empty lots stretched across mile after mile of unbuildable land. The developer Walter P. Fuller offered the not-quite-last word in a memoir published nearly three decades later: “We just ran out of suckers.”

 

“That isn’t quite correct,” he later wrote. As the Times explains, “Pondering his own world of developers and promoters and fellow-traveling bankers and corrupt officials, he said, ‘We became the suckers.’” 

Shortly before the start of World War II, an old friend of Carl Fisher found him “loitering on a park bench in Miami Beach. ‘I’m a beggar — dead broke,’ Fisher said. ‘No family to fall back on.’” 

Nothing.

 

*

Florida Everglades.

Florida did not boom again until the 1960s, when air conditioning became more common in homes and businesses. 

In the 1920 census, for example, Florida had a population of 962,000; with the spread of air conditioning in the 60s, the state boomed. Population quadrupled, reaching an estimated 21,480,000 in 2019. 

Ohio had 5,779,000 people in 1920, and nearly double Florida’s population in 1960, at just under ten million. Growth stalled in the 1970s and by 2019, positions had reversed, with Florida nearly doubling the Buckeye State, which had 11,690,000. 

The California boom is even more amazing: 3,554,000 in 1920, rising to 39,510,000 in 2019.

 

* 

“Dogs barking idiotically through endless nights.” 

March 4: H. L. Mencken mocked Harding’s inaugural address:

 

That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean-soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.

 

* 

June 1: A newsreel film exists. It captures the moment Babe Ruth returns from the illness dubbed the “bellyache heard ‘round the world.’” Lou Gehrig also pinch hits, the start of a streak of 2,130 games. Walter Johnson is on the mound for the Washington Senators. 

At that point Gehrig is an unproven major leaguer. He is batting .174, with 0 homeruns in 11 games; and he has played little his first two seasons. He flies out in the eighth; but the next day he replaces Wally Pipp at first base and doesn’t miss a game until May 1, 1939. (NYT; “Capturing a Piece of Yankee History,” 3/26/2014) 

Lou’s parents were German immigrants, and he had not learned to speak English until he was five. But he starred in baseball from the start, and was hitting mammoth homeruns by the time he went to Columbia for college. A reserved superstar, his mother long dominated his life – and he lived at home until he was thirty. When he finally married, Eleanor, his wife, would describe going over to Lou’s parents’ house for dinner, where the parrot would shout baseball lingo until someone put a cloth over his cage for the night.

 

* 

July 10-21: During the Scopes trial, Darrow puts William Jennings Bryan on the stand and undercuts his positions on the literal truth of the Bible:

 

Darrow: Did you ever discover where Cain got his wife?

Bryan: No, sir; I leave the agnostics to hunt for her.

Darrow: You have never found her out?

Bryan: I have never tried to find out…

Darrow: …Were there other people on the earth at the time?

Bryan: I cannot say.

 

Darrow then asked if Bryan believed the literal truth of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden. Was it God’s punishment that the serpent should crawl for tempting Eve?

 

Bryan: I believe that.

Darrow: Have you any idea how the snake went before that time?

Bryan: No, sir.

Darrow: Do you know whether he walked on his tail or not?

Bryan: No, sir. I have no way to know. Your Honor, I think I can shorten this testimony. The only purpose Mr. Darrow has is to slur at the Bible, but I will answer his question…

Darrow: I object to your statement. I am examining you on your fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes… American Heritage (8-1965) 

 

* 

July: In an essay called “The Hills of Zion,” H.L. Mencken provides his irreverent take on the recent Scopes trial.

 

It was hot weather when they tried the infidel Scopes at Dayton, Tenn., but I went down there very willingly, for I was eager to see something of evangelical Christianity as a going concern. In the big cities of the Republic, despite the endless efforts of consecrated men, it is laid up with a wasting disease. The very Sunday-school superintendents, taking jazz from the stealthy radio, shake their fire-proof legs; their pupils, moving into adolescence, no longer respond to the proliferating hormones by enlisting from missionary service in Africa, but resort to necking instead. Even in Dayton, I found, though the mob was up to do execution upon Scopes, there was a strong smell of antinomianism. The nine churches of the village were all half empty on Sunday, and weeds choked their yards. Only two or three of the resident pastors managed to sustain themselves by their ghostly science; the rest had to take orders for mail-order pantaloons or work in the adjacent strawberry fields; one, I heard, was a barber.

 

A newswoman from Chattanooga tells Mencken that Dayton is to Rhea County, similar to Paris in France. He is taken in tow by a Christian man, who introduced him to a favorite drink, “half corn liquor and half Coca-Cola,” which Mencken called “a dreadful dose.” 

The writer sits with a group of local “illuminati,” and observes.

 

They were all hot for Genesis, but their faces were far too florid to belong to teetotalers, and when a pretty girl came tripping down the main street, which was very often, they reached for the places where their neckties should have been with all the amorous enterprise of movie actors. It seemed somehow strange.

 

He observes a “country girl,” come to town for one of her infrequent trips to the big city.

 

In every village lout she saw a potential white-slaver. The hard sidewalks hurt her feet. Temptations of the flesh bristled to all sides of her, luring her to Hell. This newspaper woman told me of a session with just such a visitor, holden a few days before. The latter waited outside one of the town hot-dog and Coca-Cola shops while her husband negotiated with the hardware merchant across the street. The newspaper woman, idling along and observing that the stranger was badly used by the heat, invited her to step into the shop for a glass of Coca-Cola. The invitation brought forth only a gurgle of terror. Coca-Cola, it quickly appeared, was prohibited by the country lady’s pastor, as a levantine and Hell-sent narcotic. He also prohibited coffee and tea – and pies! He had his doubts about white bread and boughten meat. The newspaper woman, interested, inquired about ice-cream. It was, she found, not specifically prohibited, but going into a Coca-Cola shop to get it would be clearly sinful. So she offered to get a saucer of it, and bring it out to the sidewalk. The visitor vacillated – and came near being lost. But God saved her in the nick of time. When the newspaper woman emerged from the place she was in full flight up the street. Later on her husband, mounted on a mule, overtook her four miles out on the mountain pike.

 

One night, Mencken attends a religious gathering, outdoors. The topic is the Day of Judgment. A woman in the audience arises. Mencken has to strain, at first to hear:

 

She was denouncing the reading of books. Sme wandering book agent, it appeared, had come to her cabin and tried to sell her a specimen of his wares. She refused to touch it. Why, indeed, read a book? If what was in it was true, then everything in it was already in the Bible. If it was false, then reading it would imperil the soul. … The first speaker resumed the floor. He argued that the gift of tongues was real and that education was a snare. Once his children could read the Bible, he said, they had enough. Beyond lay only infidelity and damnation. Sin stalked the cities. Dayton itself was a Sodom.

 

A large country woman rises next to speak, but is “soon leaping and roaring,” and it was hard to follow what she said.

 

A couple of other discourses followed, and there were two or three hymns. Suddenly a change of mood began to make itself felt. The last hymn ran longer than the others, and dropped gradually into a monotonous, unintelligible chant. The leader beat time with his book. The faithful broke out with exultations. When the singing ended there was a brief palaver that we could not hear, and two of the men moved a bench into the circle of light, directly under the flambeaux. Then a half-grown girl emerged from the darkness and threw herself upon it. We noticed with astonishment that she had bobbed hair. “This sister,” said the leader, “has asked for prayers.” We moved a bit closer. We could now see faces plainly and hear every word. At a signal all the faithful crowded up to the bench and began to pray – not in unison, but each for himself. At another they all fell on their knees, their arms over the penitent. The leader kneeled facing us, his head alternately thrown back dramatically or buried in his hands. Word spouted from his lips like bullets from a machine-gun – appeals to God to pull the penitent back out of Hell, defiances of demons of the air, a vast impassioned jargon of apocalyptic texts. Suddenly he rose to his feet, threw back his head and began to speak in the tongues – blub-blub-blub, gurgle-gurgle-gurgle. His voice rose to a higher register. The climax was a shrill, inarticulate squawk, like that of a man throttled. He fell headlong across the pyramid of supplicants. From the squirming and jabbering mass a young woman gradually detached herself – a woman not uncomely, with a pathetic homemade cap on her head. Her head jerked back, the veins of her neck swelled, and her fists went to her throat as if she were fighting for breath, she bent backwards until she was like a half hoop. Then she suddenly snapped forward. We caught a flash of the whites of her eyes. Presently her whole body began to be convulsed – great throes that began at the shoulders and ended at the hips. She would leap to her feet, thrust her arms in the air, and then hurl herself upon the heap. Her praying flattened out into a mere delirious caterwauling. I describe the thing discreetly, and as a strict behaviorist. The lady’s subjective sensations I leave to infidel pathologists, privy to the works of Ellis, Freud and Moll. Whatever they were, they were obviously not painful, for they were accompanied by vast heavings and gurglings of a joyful and even ecstatic nature. And they seem to be contagious, too, for soon a second penitent female joined the first, and then came a third, and a fourth, and a fifth. The last one had an extraordinarily violent attack. She began with mild enough jerks to the head, but in a moment she was bounding all over the place, like a chicken with its head cut off. Every time her head came up a stream of hosannas would issue out of it. Once she collided with a dark, undersized brother, hitherto silent and stolid. Contact with her set him off as if he had been kicked by a mule. He leaped into the air, threw back his head, began to gargle as if with a mouthful of BB shot. Then he loosed one tremendous, stentorian sentence in the tongues, and collapsed.

 

By this time the performers were quite oblivious to the profane universe and so it was safe to go still closer. We left our hiding and came up to the little circle of light. We slipped into the vacant seats on one of the rickety benches. The heap of mourners was directly before us. They bounced into us as they cavorted. The smell that they radiated, sweating there in that obscene heap, half suffocated us. Not all of them, of course, did the thing in the grand manner. Some merely moaned and rolled their eyes. The female ox in gingham flung her great bulk on the ground and jabbered an unintelligible prayer. One of the men, in the intervals between fits, put on his spectacles and read his Bible. Beside me on the bench sat the young mother and her baby. She suckled it through the whole orgy, obviously fascinated by what was going on, but never venturing to take any hand in it. On the bed just outside the light the half a dozen other babies slept peacefully. In the shadows, suddenly appearing and as suddenly going away, were vague figures, whether of believers or of scoffers I do not know. They seemed to come and go in couples. Now and then a couple at the ringside would step out and vanish into the black night. After a while some came back, the males looking somewhat sheepish. There was whispering outside the circle of a vision. A couple of Model T Fords lurched up the road, cutting holes in the darkness with their lights. Once someone out of sight loosed a bray of laughter.

 

Mencken and the other sceptics returned to Dayton around 11 p.m. “an immensely late hour for those latitudes,” he observed. The whole town was gathered on the courthouse lawn,

 

listening to the disputes of theologians. The Scopes trial had brought them in from all directions. There was a friar wearing a sandwich sign announcing that he was the Bible champion of the world. There was a Seventh Day Adventist arguing that Clarence Darrow was the beast with seven heads and then horns described in Revelation XIII, and that the end of the world was at hand. There was an evangelist made up like Andy Gump, with the news that atheists in Cincinnati were preparing to descend upon Dayton, hang the eminent Judge Raulston, and burn the town. There was an ancient who maintained that no Catholic could be a Christian. There was the eloquent Dr. T. T. Martin, of Blue Mountain, Miss., come to town with a truck-load of torches and hymn-books to put Darwin in his place. There was a singing brother bellowing apocalyptic hymns. There was William Jennings Bryan, followed everywhere by a gaping crowd. Dayton was having a roaring time. It was better than the circus. (49/153-161)

 

*

July 27: Mencken wrote again about the events in Dayton, the day after William Jennings Bryan died (“In Memorium: W.J.B.”). To say, he is less than charitable would be an understatement. A few quotes follow:

 

There was something peculiarly fitting in the fact that his last days were spent in a one-horse Tennessee village, beating off the flies and gnats, and that death found him there. The man felt at home in such simple and Christian scenes. He liked people who sweated freely, and were not debauched by the refinements of the toilet. Making his progress up and down the Main street of little Dayton, surrounded by gaping primates from the upland valleys of the Cumberland range, his coat laid aside, his bare arms and hairy chest shining damply, his bald head sprinkled with dust – so accoutered and on display, he was obviously happy. He liked getting up early in the morning, to the tune of cocks crowing on the dunghill. He liked the heavy, greasy victuals of the farmhouse kitchen. He liked country lawyers, country pastors, all country people. He liked country sounds and country smells.

 

I believe that his liking was sincere – perhaps the only sincere thing in the man. His nose showed no uneasiness when a hillman in faded overalls and hickory shirt accosted him on the street, and besought him for light upon some mystery of Holy Writ. The simian gabble of the cross-roads was not gabble to him, but wisdom of an occult and superior sort. In the presence of city folks he was palpably uneasy. Their clothes, I suspect, annoyed him, and he was suspicious of their too delicate manners. He knew all the while that they were laughing at him – if not at his baroque theology, then at least at his alpaca pantaloons. But the yokels never laughed at him. To them he was not the huntsman but the prophet, and toward the end, as he gradually forsook mundane politics for more ghostly concerns, they began to elevate him in their hierarchy. When he died he was the peer of Abraham. His old enemy, Wilson, aspiring to the same white and shining robe, came down with a thump. But Bryan made the grade. His place in Tennessee hagiography is secure. If the village barber saved any of his hair, then it is curing gall-stones down there today.

 

But what label he bear in more urbane regions? One, I fear, of a far less flattering kind. Bryan lived too long, and descended too deeply into the mud, to be taken seriously hereafter by fully literate men, even of the kind who write school books.

 

Was the man sincere? (This blogger would absolutely argue that William Jennings Bryan was.) Mencken is scathing:

 

This talk of sincerity, I confess, fatigues me. If the fellow was sincere, then so was P.T. Barnum. The word is disgraced and degraded by such uses. He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the barnyard. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not. What animated him from end to end of his grotesque career was simply ambition – the ambition of a common man to get his hands upon the collar of his superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb into their eyes. He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits. His whole career was devoted to raising those half-wits against their betters, that he himself might shine.

 

Mencken says Bryan hated the city men who had laughed at him for so long, and that he “yearned to lead the anthropoid rabble against them, to punish them for their execution upon him by attacking the very vitals of their civilization.” 

Eviscerated by Clarence Darrow’s questioning during the trial (as I think most historians agree), Mencken describes him as a man caught on a fishing hook:

 

Upon that hook, in truth, Bryan committed suicide, as a legend as well as in the body. He staggered from the rustic court ready to die, and he staggered from it ready to be forgotten, save as a character in a third-rate farce, witless and in poor taste. It was plain to everyone who knew him, when he came to Dayton, that his great days were behind him – that, for all the fury of his hatred, he was now definitely an old man, and headed at last for silence.

 

He adds, finally, “Thus he fought his last fight, thirsting savagely for blood. All sense departed him from him. He bit right and left, like a dog with rabies. He descended to demagogy so dreadful that his very associates at the trial table blushed.” (49/161-167) 

Later, Mencken jokes about the task of a writer, wondering, “Why, then, do rational men and women engage in so barbarous and exhausting a vocation[?]”

  

* 

In Paris a 19-year-old American dancer, of mixed white and black ancestry, named Josephine Baker, has taken the city by storm. The New York Times captures some of the reaction to her efforts on stage.

 

The French graphic designer Paul Colin said he’d never seen anyone move like her: “Part kangaroo, part prizefighter. A woman made of rubber, a female Tarzan.” To the writer Colette, a rumored lover, she was “a most beautiful panther,” and to Ernest Hemingway, “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw.” Over the next decade, she was also called “Black Venus,” “Black Pearl” and “Creole Goddess.”

 

It is the Baker of this era – doing her scantily clad “danse sauvage” – who still looms large in the cultural imagination. 

 

White audiences were mesmerized by Ms. Baker’s sexualized, sometimes stereotyped routines. Costumes included, “anklets of feathers, elaborate vests made of crystals and pearls, bikinis festooned with hornlike protrusions and, of course, the infamous skirt of jewel-encrusted bananas that bounced and twinkled when she danced the Charleston.” 

The beautiful young dancer influenced fashion, and later wrote a memoir, which was translated into many languages. The Times adds,

 

Baker lived and worked across a Europe shaped by its colonial exploits and was keenly aware of how she could embody the racist ideas of her audience. “People have done me the honor of comparing me to an animal,” Baker once said slyly of comments like those from Colin or Collette.

 

She used hackneyed colonial symbols, like bananas, palm trees and tropical creatures, to her own ends, and her pet cheetah Chiquita sometimes terrorized the orchestra pit. Her performances were self-aware appropriations, played for laughs with absolute sincerity: See how I move, see how I grin, see how stereotype and desire are entwined. See how you can’t look away.

 

It was certainly a different era in many ways. Baker had already been married twice, the first time at thirteen, the second at fifteen. Despite her youth, Josephine was not afraid to condemn the racism she had faced in the United States, and she would later develop a deep hatred of the Nazis, and other fascists. (See: 1940.)

 

Josephine Baker.