1928

F. Scott Fitzgerald when sober.

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“We in America are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.”

 

President Herbert Hoover

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T.S. Eliot captures the malaise of the period, writing, “We know too much and are convinced of too little.”

* 

February: Bernard DeVoto, writing in The America Mercury, decries the “increasing vulgarization of American society and the democratization of the colleges that accompanied it,” in an essay titled “English A.” All colleges, he groans, now compel incoming freshmen to take a class in writing, and other departments grumble at the English department’s stranglehold on enrollment. 

He describes the typical writing class:

 

It is a paradoxical and equivocal course. Nothing in the colleges is more grotesquely taught. It is so mechanically organized that any intelligence, student’s or instructor’s, is caught helpless in the gears. Lately, the Department of Education has been turned loose on it, so that stupendous insanities have been added upon chaos. It is universally loathed by those who teach and those who take it, and it is attacked by all the other departments of the college, which, seeing their own registrations lesson as courses in salesmanship and chautauqua technique multiply, resent the English department’s prerogative of compelling all comers to register in it. And yet, for all of this, it generally gets results. Students do usually write a little better when they have finished it than they did when they began. It requires a vigorous optimism to attribute as much success to any other course in the colleges.

 

They swarm in from the prairies and the swamps and the farmlands all about, four thousand freshmen newly come to the State university. Some of them come decently prepared from private academies or metropolitan high-schools that know their business, but in the main they are so much leaf lard –sterile, inert, soggy. They are formed into from one hundred to one hundred and fifty sections, each presided over by an instructor. I can attest the paralyzing effect that the first sight of them has on the instructor. Dazed, bewildered, self-conscious, depressed, they sit before him like so many drawn carcasses in a refrigerating room. They are incredibly docile and propitiatory, incredibly stupid, incredibly highbound.

 

The sum of the instructor’s job is to teach them, in three sessions a week over a semester or a full year, how to write a grammatical sentence. To that end a tremendous machinery has been developed. They are furnished with the specified manuals, grammars, and correction charts. In the more pretentious colleges they are given, besides, an intricate notebook wherein everything they will do in the course has been set out for them, leaving them nothing to do but to fill in the blanks. Their way has been made as plain before them as pedagogy can mark it out.

 

Perhaps the end I have described, the ability to write a grammatical sentence, seems a lowly one. Surely, one might think, a college freshman may be trusted to write a ten-word sentence according to the conventions of the language. Well, in good years, when the better high-schools of the State send their best students to State U, fully 10% of them can be trusted to do so, and these exceptional ones are in for a weary time in English A, but the rest, though they may have taken honors in English at Waukesha High and edited the Waukeshan there, are quite virgin of such knowledge. Many come from city slums or rural foreign colonies, where Yiddish, German or Norwegian is normally spoken and where, perhaps the early primary grades are conducted in it. Many more, though innocent of foreign tongues, have never heard literate English spoken except by the alumnae of the cross-roads normal-schools that teach the high-school classes. Few have been forced to do enough writing to acquire any familiarity with English idiom. That is why English A variably becomes the very course in high-school composition that is announced as a prerequisite for it.

 

I quote from a freshman theme – preserved in my notes not because it was exceptional but because the definition it contains amused me. This freshman, given some leeway in his choice of subject, had elected to tell me why it was that his very soul thrilled to poetry, and had found himself obliged to define poetry. He wrote: “I think that Poetry are words placed in harmony or rhythm, that having an emotionally reaction upon the reader. Usually in the form of rhythm. It is a defanite arrangement of words. The defanite arrangement not meeting does not mean not flexible but altering to suit the author.”

 

This is, I grant somewhat worse than the average freshman’s work when it comes to English A, but not much worse, for the man was in my section and not the sub-section to which we relegated the impossible ones. The average freshman, reading this theme over, would have crossed out “not meaning” or “does not mean” in the fourth sentence and would perhaps have been faintly troubled by the second. He might even have spelled “defanite” correctly. But on the whole he would have been satisfied with the passage and rather proud of its intellectual content.

 

Clearly, educators have been bemoaning bad writing by students since the ancient scribes first introduced vowels. DeVoto is no exception, warning, that the typical freshman will use “ain’t” repeatedly in his essays – if you suggest it might occasionally be workable.

 

You cannot tell him that ain’t is sometimes an agreeable and effective way out of a dilemma, but sometimes an atrocity. However you phrase the proposition, it will reach his consciousness and remain there as a blanket permission to use ain’t in all circumstances whatever. … No, you tell the freshman that ain’t is never permissible, in any sense whatsoever. Then you repeat the interdiction three times a week throughout the semester, flunking every theme in which he uses the word. Perhaps, after eighteen weeks you will have a suggested to half the class that the use of ain’t is sometimes inadvisable.

 

Devoto does finally add a bit of optimism. “By the end of the course,” he writes, “the average student will be writing as well as he was supposed to write when he was a sophomore in high-school.” (155/102-111)

 

* 

September: John Dewey, also had a few thoughts on “Progressive Education,” which he laid out. He holds out hope, that from the progressive schools there will at least “emanate suggestions which radiate to other schools to enliven and vitalize their work.” 

What was a “progressive school,” he asked rhetorically and then answered.

 

The query as to common elements in the various schools receives an easy answer up to a certain point. All of the schools, I take it for granted, exhibit as compared with traditional schools, a common emphasis upon respect for individuality and for increased freedom; a common disposition to build upon the nature and experience of the boys and girls that come to them, instead of imposing from without external subject matter and standards. They all display a certain atmosphere of informality, because experience has proved that formalization is hostile to genuine mental activity and to sincere emotional expression and growth. Emphasis upon activity as distinct from passivity is one of the common factors. And again I assume that there is an all of these schools a common unusual attention to the human factors, to normal social relations, to communication and intercourse which is like in kind to that which is found in the great world beyond the school doors; that all alike believe that these normal human contacts of child with child and of child with teacher are of supreme educational importance, and that all alike disbelieve in those artificial personal relations which have been the chief factor in isolation of schools from life. So much at least of common spirit and purpose we may assume to exist. And in so far we already have the elements of a distinctive contribution to the body of education theory: respect for individual capacities, interests and experience; enough external freedom and informality at least to enable teachers to become acquainted with children as they really are; respect for self-initiated and self-conducted learning; respect for activity as the stimulus and centre of learning; and perhaps above all belief in social contact, communication, and cooperation upon a normal human plane as all-enveloping medium.

 

Dewey argues for many paths to the goal of progressive education, experimentation being necessary. In using the word “science” in education, he says, one must be modest and humble, for 

there is no subject in which the claim to be strictly scientific is more likely to suffer from pretence, and none in which it is more dangerous to set up a rigid orthodoxy, a standard set of beliefs to be accepted by all. Since there is no one thing which is beyond question, education, and since there is no likelihood that there will be until society and hence schools have reached a dead monotonous uniformity of practice and aim, there cannot be one single science. (155/118-123)

 

* 

Clothing for women “shrank.” One estimate in 1928 was that it took 19 ¼ yards to dress a woman in 1913; now it took 7.

 

*

 

“Anyone can not only be rich, but ought to be rich

 

Stock prices are rocketing upward. “Never before our since have so many become so wonderously, so effortlessly and so quickly rich,” wrote John Kenneth Galbreath.

 

Everybody was talking. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s barber made $500,000 in the market and retired. John J. Raskob, a business leader, said, “I am of the firm belief that anyone can not only be rich, but ought to be rich.”

 

In 1928 more and more people began to buy on margin. That is they bought stock by paying 10% down, and borrowing 90% from a stockbroker, or salesman. Before they had to pay off the loan, they expected to do what? If Individual X put his life savings of $11,000 into stock on margin what would he owe?

 

What would happen if prices for stocks fell?

 

*

 

Accepting the nomination to run for president, Herbert Hoover announces, “We in America are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.” (1127/2) 

Wolfskill on Hoover’s philosophy:

 

Hoover admitted that circumstances, particularly the realities of the Industrial Revolution, required government to take an active role in the daily lives of people. But that role had to be carefully drawn, so as to curb forces in business that would endanger equality of opportunity, and to nurture the initiative of people. “To preserve the former,” wrote Hoover, “we must regulate that type of activity that would dominate. To preserve the latter, the government must keep out of production and distribution of commodities and services. This is the deadline between our system and socialism.” In Hoover’s solution to the problem of the Of the relationship of government to the national economy the litmus test was two questions: Does this act of government safeguard equality of opportunity? Does this act maintain the initiative of the people? (1127/4)

 

Advertising helps convince people a family needs a second car.

Sex appeal c. 1928.

A gentleman bought Arrow shirts.

 

* 

Lucius Beebe describes prohibition in a story, in American Heritage, called “Moriarty’s Wonderful Saloon.”

 

Access was through a stout steel door, with the conventional judas hole and chain locks, under the stoop of a brownstone house whose façade was brilliantly lit by a strategically place arc lamp – possibly the management had had the Edison Company locate if where it would reveal the nocturnal customers plainly.

 

“Behind the cash register the house cat had kittens at regular intervals.” For some reason, Dan Moriarty, one of three brothers who ran the joint, called them “little small cats.” Joe Morgan, who did handyman work for the place, wore a derby hat and underneath, on cold days, what he called “ear muffins.” 

As closing time approached, at 2 a.m., customers would chant, “House wolf, house wolf!” This was a signal they expected a free round of drinks if they were expected to leave without trouble. Beebe was told the chant might have referred to “the label on Gordon’s gin, then the universal elixir of life, which includes a picture of a wolf’s head with menacing jaws agape and lolling red tongue.” He never heard the same chant in other places. 

Scott Fitzgerald made a number of appearances at the bar and just as often acted up and ended up being thrown out. 

 

On one occasion Fitzgerald and a few friends headed for another speakeasy down the street. There, the famous writer made an insulting comment about George Washington, a large steel engraving of whom hung behind the bar. “The bartender, quite unresponsive to the finer nuances of the literary life, reached for a bung-starter and swung it viciously at Fitzgerald’s head, only narrowly failing to put an end then and there to the career that was later torpedoed by Zelda.” 

On another occasion, Paul Mellon, undergraduate at Yale and son of the man of banking fame, got “bogged down in wine” and awoke in his hotel room only the morning after he was supposed to have been a member of his cousin’s wedding in Pittsburgh. Since “he lived in terror of the frosty Midas who begot him,” the younger Mellon quickly made a call home to say he was bed-ridden with some terrible affliction. 

Specific illness: unknown. 

What about law enforcement? “Certainly, no policeman in uniform ever darkened the doorway of the saloon, although ranking officers in mufti were frequent customers. They always ostentatiously paid for their drinks.” 

In fact, there seem a minimal interest in enforcing the law. “Sometimes case goods were delivered boldly from a large truck during business hours with no more attempt at concealment crossing the sidewalk than would have been accorded so much furniture or groceries; but mostly deliveries were made at night.” 

The bar opened early on Sunday, too.

 

Noise was abated to the irreducible minimum; conversation was limited to the briefest possible amenities of greeting, and Dan and Mort, whoever had the duty, set down the heavy bar glasses and returned bottles to their racks without perceptible clinks,” out of regard for their recovering customers.

 

When a newcomer arrived to join the ranks of the maimed and contused, all heads turned as one to identify him subdued recognition was muttered, and then, as he eased himself onto a stool, the communal gaze was again concentrated front and center in a profound silence broken only by heavy breathing and an occasional moan of unendurable anguish.

 

Beebe notes, “the Bloody Mary had yet to be invented as a sovereign remedy for katzenjammer.” Beebe himself would later bombard J. P. Morgan’s yacht with rolls of toilet paper launched from a low-flying plane. Whether or not he was “under the influence of Moriarty’s martinis or not is unclear.”

 

* 

H.L. Mencken will describe the waning days of the presidency of Calvin Coolidge this way: 

“There was a volcano boiling under him, but he did not know it, and was not singed. When it burst forth at last, it was Hoover who got its blast, and was fried, boiled, roasted and fricasseed.” 

“He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.” 

The ordinary folk liked Coolidge, because “what little he said was precisely what was heard in every garage and barbershop.” 

“The kind of government he offered the country was government stripped to the buff. It was government that governed hardly at all.” 

“There were no thrills while he reigned, but neither were there any headaches. He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance.” (49/221-223)