1927 and the Rise of Modern America

by Charles Shindo

  This basic understanding of American history informed the debates over Sacco and Vanzetti, nativism, religion, and education, as well as the celebration of such cultural heroes as Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford, and Bruce Barton, who were all seen as great men making history. What they made, according to their celebrants, was a world of opportunity, possibility, and hope. Yet the clamor over the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, Lewis’s Elmer Gantry, and the debate over historical teaching suggest that the world made by Lindbergh, Ford, and Barton was not necessarily one with which all Americans were comfortable. Even though Ford could find satisfaction in the engineer as techno-artisan, the precisionists could find beauty in the function and form of industrial objects, and Barton could celebrate the benefits of modernization on business and Christianity, many Americans questioned, were wary of, or even feared the modern. Some questioned those aspects of modernity that fostered the need for standardization and efficiency, creating a desire for a homogeneity that had little tolerance for the likes of Sacco and Vanzetti and other immigrants, radicals, and outsiders. Their voices of protest fell on deaf ears, reinforcing their doubts. Some, like Sinclair Lewis and his readers, were wary of the uses to which modern methods could be put to achieve private gain over the public good. And some, like the Beards, Rolvaag, Wescott, and their readers, feared that the lessons of the past would not be adequately learned. In both celebration and trepidation, diverse Americans sought to master their country through physical, economic, artistic, spiritual, and intellectual means. Greater tensions appeared as women and African Americans sought equality in modern America.

  Poster illustration for the movie It. (© CinemaPhoto/Corbis)

  Three African American women with children. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  CHAPTER 2Seeking Equality: Feminism and Flood Waters

  UNEQUAL STRUGGLES FOR EQUALITY: Clara Bow and Hollywood provided a role model and opportunities for young women raised in the wake of feminist successes, but not all women shared in that success. Not only African American women but African American men as well suffered under segregation, peonage, and the harsh conditions of southern rural life. Bow gained financial success and celebrity as the “It” girl; African Americans in the Mississippi Delta found their situation worsened by the massive river flooding and the discriminatory handling of the relief efforts. In terms of equality, Clara Bow may have signaled how far the nation had come, and African Americans in the South illustrated how far there was yet to go.

  In searching for ways to cope with the changes resulting from a consumer-driven, industrial economy, Americans debated not only what was good and bad about those changes but also the effect they were having on different groups of people. Two groups who highlight the changes of the 1920s are women and African Americans, and in particular young urban women and rural southern African Americans. These groups’ attempts to break away from tradition, whether it be the Victorian image of womanhood or the traditional subservience forced upon African Americans, especially in the South, illustrate the conflicts with which Americans dealt. For women, the increased opportunities brought about by the vote, education, and jobs created a minority of American women looking to rebel against the Victorian morals of their mothers. No symbol of modernity was more widespread than the “new woman.” By 1927 debates over the “new woman” no longer centered on women’s suffrage; rather, the discussion had moved on to cultural issues of morality, marriage, and sex. For African Americans in the rural South, the gradual yet constant encroachment of the federal government and national corporations into the southern economy and culture, through such means as agricultural programs and chain stores, meant a weakening of local white control of the South and an increase in migration northward for African Americans. In 1927 two things illustrate these two processes: the film career and life of Clara Bow and the aftermath of the Mississippi River flood. Both illustrate the divisions within society that were aggravated by the rising expectations of women and African Americans, and both illustrate the ambiguities of American culture apparent in conflicts between women and men, blacks and whites, urban and rural, and North and South.

  flappers and feminism

  Women in the 1920s worked in greater numbers and were less likely than their mothers to devote their lives to finding and serving a husband and having and raising children. The products and services of modern life liberated women from such domestic chores as sewing, hand washing, and baking and also created opportunities for employment both by generating new jobs (from secretarial positions in growing corporations to labor positions in factories) and by making time available for women to work outside the home while still fulfilling what were seen as a woman’s domestic responsibilities. Women who took advantage of those products, services, and opportunities constituted the group collectively, and most broadly, known as the “new women.” For the most part, these women did not come under public scrutiny because they posed no real threat to the established order; they merely became more a part of it by taking on the economic role of worker along with the social role of wife and mother. But many women, mainly younger ones, saw these new opportunities not as the ends of their movement toward equality but, rather, as the means with which they would express their modernity. From this younger group of women rose the archetypical female character of the 1920s, the flapper.

  While other eras also had representative images of the idealized woman—the Gibson Girl of the 1890s was the generational predecessor of the flapper—never before had the representative woman of the time been so young or so independent or so rebellious. This youthful rebellion did entail some fundamental, though not radical, changes in values and ideas concerning gender roles in society, but it was primarily a surface rebellion, one of outward appearance, of style, and fashion. The flapper was most often described not by what she did but by how she looked: short bobbed hair, loose-fitting sleeveless slip gowns that exposed the leg below the knee, sheer stockings rolled down below the knee, tight-fitting cloche hat, and an abundance of accessories, including necklaces, bracelets, gloves, and handbags. Some of the change in style was a result of the fact that working women needed clothes that were less cumbersome than the corseted and tailored outfits worn by their mothers, but it also expressed fundamental differences in these young women’s attitudes toward sex and sexuality. Externally, the flapper was a model consumer, not only because she bought ready-made clothes, cosmetics, and accessories but also because she was very concerned about outward appearances as a statement of personality and about consumption as a means of expression.

  Yet, at a more substantive level, the flapper could be called, in Dorothy Dunbar Bromley’s words, a “Feminist—New Style.” Flappers were not feminist in the old suffragette sense. Bromley wrote in 1927, “‘Feminism’ has become a term of opprobrium to the modern young woman,” because it conjures up images of unfeminine zealots who “bear a grudge against men, either secretly or openly; they make an issue of little things as well as big; they exploit their sex for the sake of publicity; they rant about equality when they might better prove their ability.”1 Feminists in the new style, however, do not protest their status as women; rather, they work to become complete individuals. “In brief, Feminist—New Style reasons that if she is economically independent, and if she has, to boot, a vital interest in some work of her own she will have given as few hostages to Fate as it is humanly possible to give” (555). In other words, these young women sought independence for the possibilities it provided. Bromley made it very clear, however, that these young women did not want to be just like men, but remained “purely feminine, as nature intended them to be” (557). But what particularly sets these new-style feminists apart from their predecessors is that they “profess no loyalty to women en masse, although she staunchly believes in individual women” (556). She is “intensely self-conscious whereas the feminists were intensely sex-conscious. . . . She knows that it is her American, her twentieth-century birthright to emerge from a creature of instinct i
nto a full-fledged individual who is capable of molding her own life. And in this respect she holds that she is becoming man’s equal. If this be treason, gentlemen, make the most of it” (560).

  Bromley’s manifesto attempts to explain the shift in the woman’s movement from political issues to cultural concerns by infusing the economic interests of the younger generation, expressed through consumer culture, with political meaning. While not overtly political, the carefree flapper was making a statement about established social values. The flapper was clearly modern in that she rebelled against traditional values, not only concerning proper attire and economic independence but also, much more disturbing to the traditional sensibility, in leisure pursuits and sexuality as well. The flapper was not, however, opposed to such traditional aspects of womanhood as marriage and family. In 1927, psychologist Leta Hollingworth defined the ideal feminist as a happily married woman with children.2

  The flapper was the feminine expression of the modern consumer who spent what she made, or in many cases spent more than she made with the extension of credit, with pleasure as the goal: pleasure in appearance, pleasure in activity, pleasure in drinking and smoking, and pleasure in sex. This pursuit of pleasure reflected and reinforced America’s transition from a producerist to consumerist economy. This economic shift developed alongside a cultural shift favoring personality over character.3 The Gibson Girl was a model of pure womanhood. She wore her long hair up and neat, and her tight-fitting corseted attire emphasized her curves and therefore her attractiveness to men yet left little flexibility for any work other than that of wife and mother. The ideal nineteenth-century woman was celebrated for her character, with the most valued traits being devotion, chastity, and selflessness. The ideal flapper, by contrast, was more valued for her personality, and especially for her spontaneity, style, and ability to have fun. And while economic changes account for a measure of this transformation in the characteristic feminine type, generational differences reinforced the transformation. As F. Scott Fitzgerald put it in 1927, “They are just girls, all sorts of girls, their one common trait being that they are young things with a splendid talent for living.”4

  Nowhere was the “new woman” more evident than in the motion picture industry. It was the movies more than any other medium that presented the “new woman” to the American public, and no movie star embodied the image, attitude, and lifestyle of the “new woman” more than Clara Bow. “Clara Bow is the quintessence of what the term ‘flapper’ signifies as a definite description: pretty, impudent, superbly assured, as worldly-wise, briefly-clad and ‘hard-berled’ as possible,” stated Fitzgerald. “There were hundreds of them, her prototypes. Now completing the circle, there are thousands more, patterning themselves after her.”5 In 1927 Clara Bow was the top box office draw, appearing that year in Wings, Children of Divorce, Rough House Rosie, Get Your Man, Hula, and the film with which she is most identified, It. The film It was based loosely on a novel by Elinor Glyn of the same name in which Glyn describes that elusive quality, “it.” Glyn defined “it,” at various times, as being “largely to do with animal magnetism,” but “‘it’ does not depend upon looks . . . it does not depend upon intelligence or character or—anything—as you say, it is just ‘It.’”6 Serialized by Cosmopolitan magazine in 1926 and published as a novel in 1927, It became the major marketing tool to sell Clara Bow to the public. Paramount producer Budd Schulberg offered Glyn $50,000 to endorse Bow as “The ‘It’ Girl.” At the first meeting between writer and star, Glyn defined “it” as “an inner magic. . . . Valentino possessed this certain magic. So do John Gilbert and Rex,” and Bow wondered what she, two actors, and a horse had in common. Later “Madame” Glyn would make additions to her list of those who had “it” (including the doorman at the Ambassador Hotel) before dropping them all except for Clara Bow and Antonio Moreno, who had been cast as the male lead in It. Released in February of 1927, It was an instant success, bringing in 50 percent more business in its New York opening than any other film, and in every other city exceeding competing films by 100 percent or more. Although Glyn marketed the idea of “it,” it was Clara Bow who made people care about it, and with It Bow secured her position as the biggest box office draw of the late silent era.

  In It, Bow plays Betty Lou Spence, a department store salesgirl who sets her sights on the new owner of the store, Cyrus Waltham (Moreno). Using all of her feminine wiles (flirting, manipulating Waltham’s close friend Monty, cutting off the collar and sleeves of her work dress to make an evening dress), she catches Waltham’s attention at the Ritz, just after Elinor Glyn (playing herself) has explained to Waltham what “it” is: “‘It’ is self-confidence and indifference to whether you are pleasing or not, and something in you that gives the impression that you are not all cold.” Waltham’s dinner companion, his fiancée, asks him if he believes in “it,” to which he responds (with an eye toward Betty Lou), “I certainly do!” Having caught his attention, Betty Lou manages to force Cyrus on a date, this time on her turf, Coney Island. As Betty Lou introduces the well-bred Cyrus to the simple pleasures of hot dogs and amusement park rides, the two start to fall in love, but when Cyrus tries to kiss her in his automobile at the end of their date, she slaps his face, saying, “So you’re one of them minute men—the minute ya know a girl, ya think ya can kiss her!” Having shown him her fun and carefree side, she has also shown that she is a lady. Things, however, get complicated when Betty Lou must claim that she is the mother of a friend’s child to keep welfare authorities from taking the baby. Reported in the newspaper and verified by Monty, Cyrus learns of the child and tries to avoid Betty Lou, but because she has “it,” he cannot. Cyrus offers Betty Lou all she desires except marriage, which is the one thing Betty Lou desires most. Betty Lou, hurt and humiliated, quits her job and tries to forget him, but because he has “it,” she cannot. When Betty Lou discovers the reason for Waltham’s offer, she vows to get revenge for his not having given her the benefit of the doubt. She sneaks aboard Waltham’s yacht, breaks up Cyrus’s engagement, and forces him to propose marriage to her, to which she responds, “I’d rather marry your office boy!” Though she has gained her revenge, she is still heartbroken. When the boat crashes and she and Cyrus’s fiancée fall overboard, Betty saves the struggling socialite by punching her so she stops panicking, and ends up in a wet embrace on the ship’s anchor with Cyrus, and they live happily ever after.

  What is notable in It, and in most of Clara Bow’s films, is the aggressiveness of her character. Betty Lou discovers what she wants, and she proceeds to get it, by her own means and by her own rules. She is the master of the situation, and though her ultimate goal is marriage, she is presented as completely self-sufficient and also able to care for a girlfriend and her child. When the welfare ladies inquire about the father of the child by asking Betty Lou whether she has a husband, she replies that it is none of their business and that she has the means to support both herself and the child. And while the film suggests that single-motherhood was distasteful to an elite sensibility, it never condemns the practice. For most moviegoers, the underlying political message of the film was concealed by Bow’s energetic performance, in which all of her raw sexuality and ebullient personality are evident. She presented an idealized version of the modern woman, a young, independent, aggressive, stylish, and playful girl who uses her intelligence as well as her femininity to get what she wants. She has the ideal “new woman” occupation, salesgirl in a large department store, emphasizing the consumer ethic, yet her ultimate goal is marriage. Betty Lou, like most of Bow’s characters, straddles the line between a completely independent, modern woman and a completely dependent, Victorian woman who finds comfort and security in marriage.

  This tension between independence and marriage is evident in the rise in both the number of women attending college and the percentage of women marrying. As Nancy Cott notes, marriage rates increased as working women contributed to a couple’s ability to settle down at a younger age than in pr
evious generations. Educated and working women did not jeopardize marriage but, instead, increased its practice. While marriage did increase, so too did the number of young women who engaged in heavy petting and premarital sex. Sex before marriage was generally frowned upon, but it did not exclude a woman from marrying.7 The seductiveness of Bow’s characters expressed not a dissatisfaction with marriage but, rather, a woman’s ability to be active in courtship instead of a passive recipient.

  In Get Your Man, Bow plays Nancy Worthington, an American in Paris who meets and falls in love with Robert, son of the Duc de Bellecontre, as he shops for his betrothed, Simone, daughter of the Marquis de Villeneuve. The long-standing betrothal agreement between the duc and the marquis is attacked by Worthington as she “accidentally” crashes her automobile into a tree outside the Bellecontre estate and is put up at the estate to recuperate. Nancy discovers that neither Robert nor Simone wishes the marriage to take place, but neither is willing to break the agreement between their fathers. Nancy proceeds to seduce the marquis (who is visiting the estate for the pending marriage), and when he proposes marriage, she accepts, with the provision that her newly acquired daughter be allowed to marry for love, not as the result of a childhood promise. Thinking that Nancy loves the marquis, Robert tells her that he will forget her by traveling to Africa, but before he can go, Nancy gets Robert in her room and starts a commotion for the whole house to hear. When the duc and the marquis discover Robert in Nancy’s room, Nancy graciously declines the marquis’s proposal, saying she understands that he could never marry her now, and the duc insists that under the circumstances, Robert must marry Nancy. In the end, Nancy and Robert are free to marry, Simone can marry her love, and the duc and the marquis are still friends. Once again, Clara Bow’s character has used her feminine wiles and intelligence to get what she wants, marriage to the man she loves.