Architecture didn’t so much evolve as break the mold all at once. Classical styles had dominated the vocabulary for two decades, but the end of the Twenties brought designs that sprang from a new approach to the tall tower that had nothing to do with history. The Empire State is thought of as a ‘30s building, but the designs came from its architects’ late-’20s Reynolds Building in Winston-Salem. The “Art Deco” Chrysler building was begun in 1928 — and looked gaudy in a few years when the stern, stripped-down competitors were finished. The Depression made the severe new style apt for an era of Sober Federal Post Offices everywhere, and Hollywood glamorized the style, softened it, and popularized Depression Moderne. The look of the cities was changed, for good. 1929, in other words, doesn’t fit in the same box as 1921.
What did it smell like? BO, hair tonic, cigarettes, cigars, probably. What did it taste like? Simpler, thicker, but probably recognizable. They ate Abba-Zaba bars (taffy with a peanut butter center), Baby Ruths, Bit-O-Honeys, and maybe a Charleston Chew when climbing up the flagpole. The magazine ads are heavy on bacon and the miracles of canned pineapples; Jell-o is presented as an elegant confection served in the finest homes. White Castle was the McDonald’s of the day, with its doppelganger White Tower serving tiny square hamburgers, cooked in front of everyone so you could see there weren’t any flies. (Really: the white ensured Purity, a big thing in the days of dubious meat.) You could reconstruct a day of 19’20s flavors without much effort.
For that matter, you could find a street in New York where it still looks like 1926, aside from the signage and fashion, but you couldn’t convince yourself it wasn’t 2013. The reason? Cars. I’m convinced this is why the ‘20s seem more remote than the ‘30s. The river of indistinguishable black Fords coursing down the streets, versus the streamlined vehicles of the ‘30s — the ‘30s look like the start of the world in which we live. The ‘20s look like the end of the world that began with Verdun and the miseries of World War One, the last gasp of the old world in its familiar forms. In truth the transition was already underway when the ‘20s began — we just see their end, and the spectacular flameout of its cultural and political assumptions, in the headlines of the Crash.
It would have been fun to stand on Gatsby’s lawn and watch the revels, but as Fitzgerald himself wrote after Gatsby was dead:
From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building and, just as it had been a tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza Roof to take leave of the beautiful city, extending as far as eyes could reach, so now I went to the roof of the last and most magnificent of towers. Then I understood — everything was explained: I had discovered the crowning error of the city, its Pandora’s box. Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits — from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground.
Crash it did, and to someone who rode the decade as high as it would go, it might still seem that everything that followed was just rearranging the rubble. Things were never quite fun in the same way. When youth culture returned in the ’50s, people were dancing in the shadows of nuclear weapons; it curdled into an anti-technology culture in the hippie-60s that would have amused the progress-minded novelty-seekers of the ‘20s. The U.S. was on top, eager for joy, unchallenged. Party time.
Which is why it’s amusing that Coolidge is the symbol. Chris Rock wouldn’t call him the national dad, but he was a grown-up.
They come in handy when the juveniles start to think they know everything.
Related: PJM’s Ed Driscoll interviews Amity Shlaes on Coolidge.
Earlier: Seaside Sopranos: Boardwalk Empire Comes to DVD.
White Castle and White Tower were merely the franchise versions of what, in the 1920s, were generically referred to as “whitefronts”—cheap hamburger joints and lunch counters.
It was common back then to use a white-tile facade on such restaurants, whether they were free-standing or whether they were jammed into a brownstone storefront in the middle of an urban block, just as it was common to use large slabs of tile or enamel to front bakeries. The tile, easily cleaned, was intended to signal “sanitariness,” regardless of the conditions back in the kitchen.
One can see a survival of a similar use of tile on the remaining older English pubs, which often have tile fronts at least to chest height—and were easy to hose down if the patrons had a little trouble retaining their earlier purchases.
See’s Candy stores still rely on white tile.
And as another example of how the 1960′s reiterated the ’20s, McDonalds restaurants were mostly white tiles under golden arches until well into the ’70s.
Bumper stickers are just so darn useful of a way to pretend to “cover” an era without really doing so. Those who see them can assume that there’s not much more to say.
For the average student in Public School, this might mean:
The 1920’s: “Teapot Dome”. ‘nuff said!
The 1948 election: “Dewey Beats Truman”. ‘nuff said!
For anyone who wants a really good journey through American history, I recommend searching out a copy of the Variety Music Cavalcade.
This superb volume appears in several editions; one covers America from 1620 to 1950, and there is a later version which goes from 1620 to 1961. There is a list of the top songs for each year, followed by a series of short paragraphs which describe, in factual but not in dry language, various happenings of note in that year—some political, some cultural. Usually major books, plays, and notable performances are mentioned, but also the introduction of new inventions, and noteworthy accidents or disasters.
It is a source for hours of casual historical spelunking. I particularly recommend it to parents who are either homeschooling or interested in getting their children more engaged in history.
For anyone who wants to “read” the ’20s — and other eras — in depth, there is:
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ (Chronicling America).
Marvelous stuff for scholars and the curious alike. Just reading the front page of a newspaper of the period tells volumes.
Kind of like how WWII was won by the Tuskegee Airmen after the Navaho Windtalkers broke the Enigma code so that the French Resistance could free the interned Japanese-Americans from the Concentration Camps in the planes that Rosie the Riveter made and the black drivers delivered with the Red Ball Express. Oh yeah, there was something about Nazis, Jews, a guy named Himmler, Hitler, Hummer, or something like that. And the US killed about a billion Japanese with a nuke.
If one were to leaf through a typical high school history book and read the pictures and feature pages, that would be the gist of WWII. You could read the text and get a more accurate telling (BOOORING!!). But what students actually read (or are required to read) text?
Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
Nope. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor to avenge Hiroshima, remember?
Forget it, Dork. He’s on a roll.
Definitely not, Bluto.
Some progressive schools don’t even teach the “War” part of WWII. No, really. I heard this first-hand from a “history” teacher at an elite private school. That is considered “military history” which is not encouraged. What she taught was “the home front,” and the earliest “civil rights” efforts, and stuff like that. A male teacher from a more traditional school attending the same roundtable discussion turned to her and asked, “so, lady, do your students even know who WON?”
No matter where you go to school, if you want to learn anything about History or the World in general (as opposed to basic math and how to read) you need to do it YOURSELF.
For some strange reason, I was a “history geek” by the second grade…must have been from looking up who “The Red Barron” really was, after hearing that Snoopy song on the Radio.
Aviation, war, technology, the Titanic, The Hindenburg, Lindbergh and Earhardt…Rickenbacker, The Somme, U-boats the Lusitania…Gas, trenches, war reparations , facism, communism, Saco and Vanzetti…From the Second Grade all the way through college, nothing EVER taught in any ‘history class” I’ve taken even scratched the surface of what I ALREADY READ, on my own, just because I “wanted to”.
Because I DECIDED it was important. Worthy of my time. Something I felt I “owed” to my heritage as an American to see, to know, and understand. A scary sense of People and The World being larger, more dangerous, tragic, visceral, heroic, and just plain LARGER than anything YOU would ever experience.
A fascinating, humbling and rewarding experience.
Its out there.
I found it…..
Long before cable TV, “The History Channel” and others like it spoon-feeding us every little nuance and tale, with re-enactments and computer graphics, there was “Victory at Sea” and “The World at War”….
In good old, pre-historic, Black and White.
I had pretty much the same self-propelled interest history that you did – aided by my mother’s subscription to American Heritage, when it was a hard-bound publication without advertisements. That, and a library card; I’d take a mad interest in finding out all there was to know about – something, and then I’d read every book in the library on it. This has come in very handy in my current career, of scribbling historical fiction novels, but my mother says that I scared the ever-living daylights of some of my middle-school teachers because pinned them to the wall with searching questions, to which they usually didn’t know the answers.
One of the major turning points in my life was when my uncle found a high school world history text book “Men and Nations” while jogging. I devoured that book from age 7 onward. I enjoyed its objective but old school British style. I can’t imagine how revisionist its present-day successor “People and Nations” must be.
“Persons,” is, I believe, the correct term. And drop “Nations.” What are you, some sort of racist nationalist warmongering… er, guy?
Probably more like “Persons of Diverse Ethnicity.”
I gotta agree- when I was a kid I was fascinated by World War II and read everything I could get my hands on. Stories about fighter planes and pilots of that era- does it get more exciting than that? I don’t think I really much about it from my teachers but at least they had the books in the library. I wonder if any boys now get into that stuff. Maybe there is too much competition from the sea of stimulating content available now.
Like others here, when young I read everything pertaining to WW2 that I could get my hands on. I still have dozens of these books. Some years ago, my ex-wife’s uncle was staying with us for a few days. His response to seeing a shelf of books with swastikas on the spine was to ask her if she was married to “some kind of nazi”. I thought he was joking. He wasn’t.
I never had much interest in history because it seemed so dry until I started learning ancient history because that fueled my imagination. Then I started investigating on my own. There is so much between excellent fiction and good, solid historical fiction that you can do to learn about things no one will ever teach you in school. It’s such a crime.
I still prefer classical Greek and Roman history. But history is a much less dreaded subject than it used to be.
“I never had much interest in history because it seemed so dry…”
Exactly! My brother and I had both found history and science to be very dry and not very interesting until we saw the first Connections series on PBS. As my brother put it so well, “If only they taught it this way in school, it wouldn’t be so boring!”.
It’s still an excellent series to watch and it’s still available, as are two follow-on series and some of the presenter’s other books. Some of the things James Burke mentions in the series still stick with me today as illustrations of the strange turns that history takes.
We need much better teaching of history and science. In fact, I believe that every subject would benefit from learning about its history and how that particular subject emerged as more was known about it.
Aviation, war, technology, the Titanic, The Hindenburg, Lindbergh and Earhardt…Rickenbacker, The Somme, U-boats the Lusitania…Gas, trenches, war reparations , facism, communism, Saco and Vanzetti…From the Second Grade all the way through college, nothing EVER taught in any ‘history class” I’ve taken even scratched the surface of what I ALREADY READ, on my own, just because I “wanted to”.
Same here! I first learned of the Titanic in a World Book Encyclopedia entry in about third grade. I read Eddie Rickenbacker’s autobiography before I was a teenager. And as a young boy, I was an Amelia Earhart fan long before I ever heard of feminism.
So I had already developed something of an interest in history on my own. I dropped out of high school, then got a GED and took some community college courses to prepare for college. At the community college, I took an Introduction to American History course. The first lecture covered the late Middle Ages to Columbus’ first voyage. It was spellbinding, and that’s what made me a confirmed history buff.
I ended up dropping out of college as well, but I still enjoy reading history. I’ll take a good history book over a novel any day. I probably know more history than 100 random people I meet on the street, but not more than 100 random blog commenters.
LOL! Reminded me of a “War in the Pacific” history class I took in college, taught by two profs alternating sessions: One, a woman, lectured on cultural differences, the Japanese efforts at setting up the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere and the political intrigues of FDR’s administration in setting up an embargo of Japan that, in part, led directly to Pearl Harbor. Her class sessions, while interesting, were half full, filled with quiet note-takers and respectful questioners.
The other session, taught by a man,involved military strategies and tactics, weapons and discussion of the island-hopping battles and naval confrontations. It was always difficult to find a seat for his classes and there were contentious and raucous discussions of the merits and superiority of the Zero versus first the Wildcat, then the Hellcat or the merits of battleships versus aircrft carriers, as well as the descriptions of the brutal jungle fighting, in which all “civilized” rules of warfare were abandoned early on, under the Bushido Code and the American response to that.
Nobody took notes, and you joined the discussion by talking louder than your fellow students.
One of the best classes I ever took, from both perspectives!
You forgot the part where Obama’s grandpa (or great uncle, or something) liberated Auschwitz.
The history text books have been like this for years. During the late 80′s, my wife was a 7th/8th grade “social studies” teacher at a Catholic school in Nebraska. I remember looking at her text book’s WWII write up. It contained several pages of inserts, each describing a “minority’s” participation in the war. Navajos, women, blacks, & Hispanics were each given a page describing their contributions. I believe there was also one about the Japanese internment.
The text describing the actual events in the war was relegated to one half of one column (two columns per page) of print.
I can only imagine what the public school textbooks look like now.
BTW, Fallout was a GREAT computer (video) game. Rife with the sort of thing that is all the rage to criticize today. Like people (and mutants) being literally shot to pieces by various weaponry.
I remember when I was very young and I asked my mother if she had been a flapper. She sternly told me that, no, she had not been a flapper – she had been an infant. My grandmother would have been the flapper, but since she was a respectable person, she was merely a lady.
My grandfather came out of the 20s with the firm determination to never go to the doctor, stating “All medicine is dope.” Since at that time, medicine was pretty much confined to aspirin, quinine and various mixtures of alcohol and opium, he was largely correct. What did the 20s smell like? Infection and laudanum.
Odd of James Lileks to overlook flappers and feminism in his tour through the 1920s.
And that cover of Sex Monthly is festooned with teasers that would fit right in with any issue of Cosmopolitan since Helen Gurley Brown took its helm in ’65 (another example of the ’60s being a reprise of the ’20s).
We lose decades in our education by later “big events”. The 1920s is such a decade. However, much of our modern world came about in the 1920s. Urban populations peaked just before 1920 and have declined until recently as the train, then auto freed people from the unpleasantness of dense urban living with suburbanization. I remember an old string of stores they wanted to restore in Silver Spring, MD. There was some art deco features on the otherwise usual buildings. It was promoted as being built in the 1920s as the first shopping facility where off-street parking was provided, or, if you consider that description, the first strip mall.
It is interesting, there were significant improvements in kerosene lantern and lamp technology in the 1920s then they kind of became frozen. I have somewhere on my hard disk an academic paper on the design of chimneys and hearths. Very serious research in the mid-twenties only to be overwhelmed by heating appliances soon after. And we shouldn’t forget that in 1928, sliced bread came about. The standard by which all other innovations are judged, “the best thing since sliced bread…”
For a quick familiarization, google up ‘Only Yesterday’ by Frederick Lewis Allen, an informal history of the 1920s in the US published in 1930. His follow up “Since Yesterday’ is a good contemporary history of the 1930s. They are good reads for a feel unaffected by the more recent events.
Ditto on Only Yesterday and Since Yesterday . Allen also wrote another, more broadly focused book, The Big Change.
I would also recommend 1929, America Before the Crash by Warren Sloat (Macmillan, 1979). There is a section in it about the rise of radio and of the power of the media , and the fear some felt of all Americans getting their news and being told what to believe by a few corporations, mostly based in NYC. There is a passage in that section that gave me the cold chills the first time I read it. Basically, the president of NBC quietly confessed that there was a concerted effort underway to make the USA a “single nation” by culturally homogenizing it to destroy or at least reduce the influence of regional cultures-AND that this standardization of the states into a single culture would be controlled by a few elites in NYC (pp 102-108).
Some things really are a conspiracy.
My parents were little kids in the 20′s, one (father) in NYC, and my mother in the Balkans. Very different perspectives.
Dad wore “knickers” as knee-britches were called in America at the time (which must have amused the heck out of British boys of the time). “Knickers” were a virtual uniform for boys up to age 13-15, depending on place and parentage. Long pants were a graduation to adulthood.
This is beside the point but I remember a picture of my father taken at school. It must have been a parochial school as the two men in the picture were wearing cassocks. Anyway, it was a group class photo, my father is standing on one end with one of the priest’s hands on his shoulder. He’s probably 10 or 12 and wearing knickers. He has a huge black-eye and a big shit-eating grin on his mug. One of my favorite photos.
Wow, I knew the Jesuits were tough, but jeez…
It is also interesting to note how past decades re-surface. There was a burst of nostalgia for the 1920s which began in the mid-late ’50s and continued through the early-mid ’60s. The “Continental” suits of the JFK era, with their high closures, close cut trousers, and narrow lapels, were a revival of the suits worn by men in the early ’20s; the bell bottoms which came in with the mid-’60s were a revival of the bell bottom trousers worn by the “sheiks” of that earlier era.
Shows and films, such as “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (based on a 1920s book by Anita Loos), “Some Like It Hot,” “The Five Pennies,” “The Bandwagon” (a revival, in part, of a late-’20s hit), etc., also were part of this 20s-revival craze. Even in non-’20s-revival films, some of the conventions of the earlier era were preserved; in the film “Bells Are Ringing,” the primary set, a brownstone basement that houses an answering-service switchboard, is furnished in Mission/Arts and Crafts furniture to show that it is down-at-heel and out of date; this convention came in in films of the ’20s and early ’30s, where Colonial furniture signified Old Money, overstuffed ’20s furniture signaled respectability, modernistic furniture indicated either that one was nouveau riche, a gangster, or a kept woman, and Victorian or Mission furniture indicated you were a back number or living in dire poverty.
Orphans
One of the hallmarks of the 20′s was the large number of orphans as a result of the “Spanish” Flu that help close the WWII era. The pandemic had a perverse habit of killing young adults and those in their prime of life, rather than the usual disease targets of the elderly and the very young children. Both my grandparents were orphans, and met and married in the early 20′s.
Lil’ Orphan Annie, anyone? It was from that era (1924).
WWI era, NOT “WWII”
“Helped close the WWI ear” is how it should read.
Sheesh! (an expletive from the ’20s
)
“era,” NOT “ear.”
SIGH . . .
I wish we had editing privileges here. My fingers keep betraying me.
That’s OK, herodotus. ‘Round these parts, you only get smacked around for typos if you come in as an arrogant lefty claiming to have been first in line when they handed out the brains. For everyone else, to err is human and to forgive, the least one can do…
My grandmother’s father died before she was born and her mother died in the Spanish flu epidemic when my grandmother was a baby. She was reared by her mother’s parents. She didn’t know that her grandparents were actually not her parents until she was a teen and the family told her. Times were different back then.
The Spanish Flu was a strain completely new to most people’s immune systems. Because of that, while it was still just the flu and very nasty to the young and elderly like normal, it tended to provoke healthy immune systems into an overboard response. Most of the healthy, young victims of the Spanish Flu were killed by their own immune systems.
I once saw a documentary that said the Spanish Flu didn’t actually begin in Spain, that’s just where it was first identified as an epidemic. According to the documentary, it actually began at a rather filthy American army base during WW I and travelled to Europe with the American troops going over to fight the Kaiser.
Does anyone know if that’s true? I have no idea what the documentary was but it was probably 20 years ago or more that I saw it. It might have been on PBS since that’s where I saw most of my documentaries in those days.
I remember that documentary. I also saw a recent comment by a PJM regular who described an ancestor (grandfather or great-uncle, maybe) who was a survivor of that initial outbreak.
The alternate breakout site is the British Army’s personnel camp at Etaples, where versions of the flu began appearing in 1916.
http://ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/body-and-mind/the-etaples-flu-pandemic/
http://download.thelancet.com/flatcontentassets/H1N1-flu/epidemiology/epidemiology-33.pdf
Summary: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2805838/
Cheers
James Lileks is the bees knees.
The Hays Code didn’t go fully into effect until 1930.
…and the Code crackdown didn’t really kick in until 1934; hence, the term “pre-Code movies,” which refers to the talkies up to the 1934 crackdown that had much more racy material than what came after.
I remember catching an early 30′s film on TV late one night. There was a party in a mansion and a gorgeous blonde was sitting at a bar. She wore a clingy, sheer satiny dress that would have qualified as a micro-mini in the 60′s. It barely reached her thighs when she was sitting with her profile to the camera. As far as I could tell, she was naked underneath. I was stunned.
Don Ameche: “Are you wet through?”
Claudette Colbert: “How far do you think ‘through’ is for a lady these days?”
—Midnight
The women’s dresses of the early ’30s were often cut on the bias, so they clung to the form. And the filmmakers weren’t shy about showing those forms, either; check out “Murder at the Vanities,” one of the last films to be made before the Code crackdown, or Alice Faye’s “Nasty Man” number in “George White’s Scandals,” or the “China Teacup” number in “International House”—or the title number from “Hollywood Party,” or some of the Busby Berkeley numbers in either “42nd Street” or “Golddiggers of 1933.”
Look up the “Forbidden Hollywood” series of DVDs available from TCM. Lots of fun stuff; people living together without being married, having children out of wedlock, sexual harassment in the workplace, homosexual activity—you name it, they covered it.
Remember Clara Bow, the “It” girl? Possibly the first real Hollywood-made sex symbol. And she was pretty amazing – one of the few silent movie actresses who, to me at least, looked beautiful and natural and amazing, not weird. And nobody back then had to ask what “It” was.
(Dorothy Parker said Clara didn’t have “It,” she had “Those.” Nobody had to ask what that meant, either.)
Not sure what the difficulty is. The 20′s is the grey area where steampunk transitions to full blown art deco dieselpunk. Duh.
What else do you need to know?
I had heard that Marketing/Advertising research during the 1920s saw the invention of the “teenager” as an identifiable demographic. Prior to that, children, or youths simply grew to adulthood.
I decided to offer my sons an opportunity to be treated either as a “child” or as a “young man”, their decision. They could pick and I would treat them appropriately. Invariably, they took the latter choice. No regrets.
George Washington, in his farewell address, made very clear that he thought political parties (factionalism) could become the death knell of a Republic. He preferred to have every politician in competition with all the others, and defending their constituents. He declaimed against the rise of factionalism in the same way Eisenhower did the “military-industrial complex”.
In part this was supposed to be held in check by the Senate, which was voted on by each State government, not by popular vote. The 17th Amendment changed the way Senators were elected, and the 16th Amendment gave Congress the power to tax incomes. Both changes have led to the leviathan we now have in Washington DC.
If we don’t repeal these two Amendments then we need something else to let our States reassert their sovereignty as a check against Federal power. Otherwise we remain on the path toward dictatorship, just like the ancient Romans, and just like the Old Republic from “Star Wars”, which was based on what happened to the Romans.
> He declaimed against the rise of factionalism in the same way Eisenhower did the “military-industrial complex”.
Eisenhowr warned about several things, including:
“Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely
to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
How could Mr. Lileks forget the most important social change of all: Prohibition of alcohol!
Prohibition started in 1920. And it didn’t take too long before folks started buying black-market booze. This gave the gangsters of the era, like Al Capone, the opportunity to make fantastic profits by selling the stuff.
It led to speakeasies, the “jake dance,” etc.
The Roaring 20′s were called that, because the economy soared after Harding and Coolidge took office. There was a massive financial meltdown in 1920. It was five times as bad as our recent meltdown, but Harding’s and Coolidge’s policies fixed it right quick.
The average household income during those 8 years increased 75%. Suddenly, things which had been luxuries for decades became everyday household items. The list includes: the phonograph; the telephone; the automobile; the refrigerator; and best of all, the washing machine, an item which saved women about 2 hours per day of drudgery.
The Roaring part referred to the economy. Ordinary people suddenly felt rich. Coolidge won re-election in a walk in ’24. He could have done so again in ’28. He demurred, and we got his Sec of Commerce, Hoover, a Progressive Republican, and things just went to Hell.
And part of the big problem with the crash of ’29 and the destitution it caused is the same thing that happened with our meltdown – prosperous people become spendthrift. When the crash happened and the economy contracted sharply, those who had overleveraged themselves found out why you don’t do that in a very painful way. Same as now.
Harding’s and Coolidge’s policies fixed it right quick.
And their policy was to do nothing and let the economy heal itself. Which it promptly did.
I think of the 20′s in three phases.
Phase 1 – Wilson is completely incapacitaed, but his wife and Administration hide it. There is a Post WWI depression – the steepest of the century.
Phase 2 – The Harding / Coolidge Administration takes over in March, 1921. They cut spending and start paying down Wilson’s debt. Top tax rate was cut from 77% to 25%. The economy start to take off and the Twenties start to roar.
Phase 3 – Conservative Coolidge is replaced by Progressive Hoover. The overheated market crashes. Hoover overreacts, raises spending, and taxes. He turns a recession into a Depression. FDR later doubles down on Hoover’s mistakes and turns it into a decade-long economic disaster.
The Harding / Coolidge Administration was an island of conservationism between Wilson’s and Hoover / FDR’s Progressiveness. It was the Roaring Twenties because everything before and after stunk.
And that explains why historians and media-types either disparage or totally ignore Harding and Coolidge – because they give they lie to everything progressives believe in, as did Reagan.
The older I get (and the further we sink into Obama’s swamp of socio-fascist decline), the more interested I become in previous eras like the 20s and what they can teach us – so I’d like to thank Lileks and Shlaes for these articles.
Two things internationalized the Great Depression. One was the crippling reparation payments Germany was forced to make cascaded throughout all Western European economies and weakened them (nobody had even coined the term globalization then but it was going on even then). Nobody knew how fragile the postwar European economies were and how interlinked.
The other was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, possibly the stupidest thing the pre-WWII Republican Party ever did (although that would be tied to their asinine isolationism in the face of militant despotism). It ensured that the disruption of the crash and recession would be extended and exported.
I know nothing about the 20′s so it can’t be “all wrong.” Ha don’t you feel stupid now.
During his presidency, Calvin Coolidge was more popular than Will Rogers.
Why? Coolidge was the first president who cultivated the press, and he also pioneered the use of radio. The myth was “Silent Cal”, which is a myth almost as big as when he said “The Business of America is business”, which was actually a quote from a speech he gave to Newspaper Publishers Association, encouraging them to cover business as NEWS, “…because, after all, the business of America is business”
However, I think Grace Coolidge has been overlooked by history. Google for her official White House portrait: dressed in a flapper’s red dress, with the Coolidge dog, Rob Roy, at her side. Rob Roy’s name was the Coolidge dig at Prohibition.
Grace’s portrait was in the WH China Room (dishes) during the Bush43 presidency, but I suspect the O’s have hidden it in the basement.
I wrote a paper on the Coolidge presidency in grad school in 2004, and my professor wanted me to turn it into a biography. I assume Ms. Shlaes has written her biography to conform to her view, unlike me, totally independent researcher. I came away a huge fan of Coolidge, our most under-rated president.
Hope Schlaes included the untold story of how Coolidge avoided a war with Mexico.
Men’s suits were much better in the 1920s. The music was cool, as well.
Check out Bryan Ferry’s new CD, The Jazz Age. He reinvents some of his songs and those of Roxy Music as 1920s tunes. I know this may be difficult to envision, but try to image “Love is the Drug” played like “Minnie the Moocher.” Who knew that 70′s glam rock had its roots in the 1920s! Great music and good times!
But the seventies WERE all about Kung Fu Fighting! I was there. That’s all anybody did! We were Kung Fu Fighting. And I hated it! Hatedhatedhated it! I was so glad when the seventies were brought to a close, by Jimmy Carter’s electoral victory over Richard Nixon, in 1977. I felt like dancing on a flag pole! But darn it, the inflation was too high. Higher than under Nixon! In fact, to this day, the inflation has yet to return from the moon. Which Obama has now given to the Arabs, of course. And how they would ever afford to live there is beyond me! But at any rate, those were hateful days, and I miss them so. Please, just don’t tell Keith Carradine how much I hate that stupid song.
The seventies were all about the 20s. Remember the night Chicago died? When a man named Al Capone tried to make the town his own?
The 70s were about the 40s! Remember Bette Midler and “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B?”
Seriously, I think young people in the 70s had a better knowledge of their cultural history. They “got” references to music, movies, and other things from way before they were born. Today? Well, I saw some really smart kids on Jeopardy the other night and they missed a really easy question about Frank Sinatra and another one about a song he was famous for, “New York, New York.” It’s like nothing older than they are really exists for them.
And I wish they’d stay the hell off my lawn!
The ’70s were about the ’50s! Remember “LIFE Looks At the ’50s”, Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, and Grease? Even Sha Na Na had their own syndicated TV show. And it was the revival of ’50s style that gave us the Punk/Prep look, pastel-colored consumer electronics, and the mullet (by way of the revived ’50s D.A. cut).
The era 1945-1965 was the high water mark of American civilization. On January 4 of that year, Lyndon B. Johnson announced the Great Society program. It’s been downhill ever since.
That’s true – the 50s were probably the most influential decade in the 70s, whatever that means. I guess we were sick of Vietnam and Watergate and Nixon and wanted to escape to a “simpler” time, which supposedly existed during the Eisenhower presidency. All it meant to me was that I had to get rid of my “flares” and buy new straight-leg jeans.
I’m not big on video games, but at least the kids playing “Guitar Hero” were aware that rock music existed before 2008. Quite a few bands have been having a second go lately because of that video game.
Today? Well, I saw some really smart kids on Jeopardy the other night and they missed a really easy question about Frank Sinatra and another one about a song he was famous for, “New York, New York.” It’s like nothing older than they are really exists for them.
I know what you mean! I remember a quiz show I saw three or four years ago where I heard some of the most appallingly bad answers to questions I could imagine.
One girl, who looked to be around 20, was asked to name any of the three ships in Columbus’ first voyage to the New World in 1492. She guessed: “The Titanic?”
Another man, who looked to be around 30, was given a multiple choice question. “A famous musical group had four men in named John, Paul, George and Ringo. What was the name of the group?” I don’t remember what all of the four choices were but one, of course, was the correct answer, The Beatles. This contestant guessed “The Village People?”.
The gods wept….
Seems to me that was a Jaywalking segment on the Tonight Show.
Surely you meant to say: “Jesus wept”.
…which leads to the conversation I overheard between two teens after watching “Apollo 13.” One asked the other why we didn’t just send up the Shuttle to rescue them.
The 20′s were the most dynamic decade of the 20th Century. There was a book written in 1931 called “Only Yesterday” which described all that happened during the decade. The author was Frederich Lewis Allen. The telling fact, in 1921 women’s dresses were ankle length (remember the line from Anything Goes, “In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking”). By the end of the decade, women’s dresses were above the knees and they were smoking and drinking in public. Yes, the greatest change in American culture ever.
By the end of the (1920s), women’s dresses were above the knees and they were smoking and drinking in public.
By the end of the 1960s, even civil service secretaries working at military bases were wearing dresses above the knees and Virginia Slims cigarettes were recruiting a whole generation of feminist-wannabee females for tobacco. And the margarita was named after a woman. The ’60s as a youth culture rerun of the ’20s is an intriguing thesis. I think James Lileks is on to something.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoroughly_Modern_Millie
Well, we know what reading Capt. Billy’s Whiz-Bang will do to our kids. Ya got trouble, Right here in River City. With a capital “T,” and that rhymes with “P,” and that stands for Pool.
Monorail! Monorail! Monoraaiiil!
Thank you Professor Hill!
That boy ain’t right.
Remember the Maine, Plymouth Rock, and the Golden Rule!
The trouble with experts… “The overacting shades of the silent era.” Now you, sir, turn into the bozo leading the cliche parade. Do you actually know anything about acting, except for “what you like”? The actor who invented the American cowboy movie, William S. Hart, was a Broadway star, an accomplished Shakespearean leading man, and the original Marsala in the epic Broadway production of “Ben Hur.” He also spoke Sioux and rode horses like centaur. His peers in the Teens, during the WW I Victory Bond drives, and Twenties were Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Doug Fairbanks. Which of these four still-revered actors would you be willing to characterize as “a gesticulating shade.”
“Now you, sir, turn into the bozo leading the cliche parade. Do you actually know anything about acting, except for “what you like”?”
Yikes. A little civility goes a long way, especially when you have a valid point to make.
You’re too generous, Random Ralph.
A “gesticulating shade” (despite Max Factor’s best efforts) is pretty much what one sees in those hand cranked 1920s flicks. And they did overact, just as actors did on a New York stage in order to communicate emotion and pose to the entire audience, including those in the rearmost seats.
This was, of course, the plot of “Singin’ in the Rain.“
“Yes, yes, yes!” “No, no, no!”
Acting on the stage is very different from acting for the movies (or television). I can easily forgive the pioneers of the movies for not knowing everything learned in the decades after their careers.
My grandfather immigrated from Italy just before Mussolini took over (more a coincidence than a cause)
He was discriminated against in the job market but saved enough cash to buy a house.
Now I have to fill out a plethora of forms that I am “white” and the idea of buying a home with cash is similar to herding unicorns onto Noah’s Ark.
While it’s a little late to get ‘first hand’ accounts of what the 20′s were like, I’m old enough to have had an adult conversation with my grandmother about her days as a flapper girl. She would chuckle about how hip we thought we were in the late 60′s/ early 70′s. We did little more than repeat the past with a few new drugs tossed in. Views about race, being the biggest change.
This being “black history month” and all, it is appropriate to point out that the view that we have come a long way in race relations since the 1920s is one of the Big Lies of the 1960s. While in some ways, it is true—the Civil Rights Movement did correct some inequities in voting, hiring, etc.—it was at the huge cultural cost of both black and white society suppressing, to the point of all but wiping out, the memory of the many contributions that black people made to American culture in the 1920s and 1930s.
Black musicians and performers were at the center of American culture in the decades between the wars; everyone wanted to be able to play like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller and Sidney Bechet, to dance like Bill Robinson or the Nicholas Brothers. During the Civil Rights Movement and its aftermath, however, these people were considered “Uncle Toms” for having managed to prosper despite the barriers color put in their way—and their performances were systematically cut out of films shown on television because they “perpetuated injurious stereotypes,” with the result that several generations, black and white, grew up without ever knowing the riches of an earlier era.
to dance like Bill Robinson or the Nicholas Brothers.
I saw a video on YouTube recently of the Nicholas Brothers dancing. They were amazing! They had to be in terrific physical condition to dance that strongly for so long. They were a couple of the best dancers I’ve ever seen.
I had the very great privilege, years ago, of being invited by a musician friend to a private showing, by the Nicholas brothers, of their film clips. Their finale to the film “Stormy Weather” is a well-deserved classic.
The talented but extremely surly modern-day tap dancer Savion Glover had a number in his Broadway show “Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk” which sneered at the Nicholas Brothers for “shufflin’.”
We did little more than repeat the past with a few new drugs tossed in
Uhhh . . . no. Cocaine and marijuana were in use among the “flapper” and “hipster” set in the 20′s. Cocaine was referred to as “snow.” Marijuana was reccommended for headaches.
Yeah, we knew about marijuana and cocaine abuse in the 1920s.
You forgot to mention amphetamines and barbituates. Were they commonly abused in the ’20s in the same proportion that they were in the ’60s?
The 20s were the 60s waiting to happen. The ‘revolution’ got delayed by the Depression and WWII.
In some respect, WWI gravely wounded western civilization, and “un generation perdue” hopped on the old girl and started stabbing her while she laid there bleeding. WWII delayed things for a bit and then the 60s radicals, bolstered by that other ugly 20′s invention, the Frankfurt School’s neo-marxist thought, administered the coup de grace.
Interesting connection. As I’ve remarked before, the “youth” of the 60s didn’t make the counterculture out of nothing. They got their ideas from certain of their elders.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the Twenties to me is the music. Popular music really grew up in that decade. And Whiteman deserves the rubric “King of Jazz” because he popularized it, supported it, and hired some of the best jazz musicians for his band. Oh, and let’s not forget that he commissioned “Rhapsody in Blue.”
The late Twenties was one of the most productive periods in American music. For a time, all the various currents flowed together–pop, jazz, folk, so-called “race”, and art music.
I recently read William Strauss and Neil Howe’s book The Fourth Turning.
The book has been recommended to me by a number of people in recent years, and I finally got around to reading it. They postulate that history consists of approximately 80-year cycles, and that those cycles are subdivided by four “turnings” of about 20 years each, analogous to seasons.
They say that the period from about 1908-1929 was a third turning, or “Unraveling”, which is a prelude to the fourth turning, “Crisis”.
The latest Unraveling was from 1984-2008. We are very clearly in a Crisis now.
The last three Crises in American history were the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Depression/World War II. So if their theory is even close to accurate, we are really in for it.
Their book was published in 1997, in the middle of the last Unraveling. They predicted a Crisis beginning in the mid-2000s. I don’t see how any thinking person can deny that we’re actually in it now.
If you haven’t read the book, see the links in the left column here for definitions of their terms.
I just thought it was interesting that they considered the 20s as an “Unraveling”. I’d never though of it that way before. But now I can see parallels to the 90s and early 00s.
Chiming in rather late to say a word for the 1960s multi-volume series, Time/LIFE’s History of the World. Our mother ordered it, and they sent a new volume every month. I was the only one in the family who took to it (I was in the 7th-8th grade), and I hoovered it up. Really eagerly awaited the arrival of each new volume.
They had illustrations, photographs, and it was written in the Time/LIFE style, very engaging, not at all stuffy. AND it was written before the pinkos were putting their stamp on everything: old-fashioned scholarship, rather than axe-grinding, guided their pens.
I was enthralled. And so well educated about Western Civilization that I passed it with flying colors in college, without actually having to get out of bed to go to the lectures (I know, naughty, naughty!) They also did a good bit of coverage of Asia and India.
One interesting thing to hear these days is a new music Genre called “Electroswing”. MOST of it merely consists of electronic dance music playing samples of 1920′s recordings, but there are some original composers. Search YouTube for “Caravan Palace”, which produces some delightful modern interpretations of the 1920′s musical aesthetic.
And thanks for the recording, I do like the music of that era, even if I’m woefully ignorant about it.
A curious child whose mother had a “flapper” wedding gown and whose aunt and uncle broke into The Charleston at the drop of a hat learned the history of that era. Kids don’t seem curious any more. I knew about marathon dance contests too.