1927 and the Rise of Modern America

by Charles Shindo

  Although Guinan was not a great beauty, nor a great singer or actor, she was very adept at gaining publicity. Each arrest increased attendance at her clubs, and every occasion was a possible media event. In February 1927, in the midst of raids by New York City police on illegal nightclubs, Sister Aimee Semple McPherson visited Texas Guinan’s 300 Club. The club had been closed down by the police, and Guinan had spent the evening in police custody, but she could be found the following night presiding over an even larger crowd than before the raid. Sister Aimee, on a national tour to rehabilitate her image after her disappearance/kidnapping incident of the year before, was in New York City to aid in the attempt to clean up the town. Once Guinan discovered her spiritual guest, she promptly announced to the crowd that “a great little lady from the Golden West, a wonderful, brave woman, is going to say a few words.” Put on the spot, Sister Aimee admonished the crowd to stop their evil, materialistic ways before it was too late. “With all your getting and playing and good times,” she said “don’t forget you have a Lord. Take him into your hearts!”20 Guinan then encouraged the audience to join her and her girls at Sister Aimee’s sermon at the Chapel of Glad Tidings the next day. Guinan sat in the front row at the chapel, singing hymns and making sure that the press took pictures of the two women together and that they noted not only her presence but what she was wearing as well. The event proved more beneficial to Texas Guinan than to Sister Aimee. McPherson, long the champion at creating notoriety, had met her match.

  Texas Guinan represents the “new woman” in a number of ways. Economically independent, and therefore fully capable of taking advantage of the consumer culture, Guinan did not conform to traditional stereotypes of what a woman should be. She was a successful businesswoman (in addition to her nightclubs, she also briefly ran her own film production company) and a star of stage and screen, but she is most accurately described as a celebrity. People were interested in her whereabouts, and rarely did a week go by without a mention of her in the papers. She was known, primarily, for being famous. She was an embodiment of people’s excitement about modern America. Her “ranch-to-riches” story was uniquely American and entailed the particularly modern industry of motion pictures and the modern novelty of a female club owner operating an illicit business. Guinan took advantage of the opportunities available to the modern woman, yet she still embodied some characteristics of traditional womanhood. Her flamboyant dress and anything-but-demure personality combined the urban sophistication of the flapper with the rugged independence of the western cowgirl. Guinan made the most of her western roots, emphasizing her tomboy nature and independent spirit, right in line with pioneer women and such figures as Annie Oakley and Belle Starr. While such western women may have gone against the grain of acceptable female behavior, they were not modern in that they were not urban, sophisticated, or educated. The talents Guinan was known for, likewise, were seen as extensions of traditional women’s roles of entertainer and service provider. She was the attraction of her nightclubs, and her fame rested on her “particularly modern talent of getting along with all kinds of people up and down the social hierarchy,”21 a modern usage of a traditional female role.

  tradition in the south

  Modern notions of women were acceptable in the big cities and in the Wild West, but not in the South. In 1927, portrayals of southern women, as opposed to urban dwellers or westerners, maintained Victorian ideals of womanhood, marriage, and sex. As one reader of Lindsey’s Companionate Marriage wrote, criticizing his proposal to change existing divorce laws, “Your law may be suitable for the ‘wild west,’ but not for ‘our dear old Georgia’ and the South.”22 Southern womanhood seemed to be the last bastion of respectable ladies in an era of flappers, divorcées, and working women. One of the early hits of the 1927–1928 theater season in New York was Coquette, written by George Abbott and Ann Preston Bridgers and starring Helen Hayes.23 Hayes played Norma Besant, the title character and daughter of Dr. Besant, “a gentleman of the old South, dignified and formally courteous” with “an intolerance of things outside his strict code of conduct.” Norma, as a well-bred southern belle, has a number of suitors vying for her attentions, but her heart belongs to the one suitor her father deems unacceptable, Michael Jeffery, “a roughneck.”24 Dr. Besant forbids Norma and Michael to see each other, but despite the obstacles, they carry on their romance. When Norma’s father discovers her disobedience, he reacts by shooting and killing Michael. Distraught and enraged, Norma must testify in court that Michael’s advances were unwanted in order to spare her father’s life. The case hinges on whether or not Dr. Besant was defending Norma’s honor or killing for revenge. Ultimately, the main issue in question is whether or not Norma’s “honor” is intact and therefore worthy of defending. Norma confesses to Stanley (friend, suitor, and son of Dr. Besant’s lawyer) not only that she is no longer a virgin but that she is pregnant with Michael’s child. With no other way to save both her reputation and her father, Norma kills herself.

  Like Bow’s Children of Divorce, Coquette describes the limits of acceptable feminine behavior. In both cases, good but fallen women sacrifice themselves for the happiness of others and at the same time also relieve others and society of their tainted selves. While on the surface these dramas present a traditional morality play, with virtue outlasting pleasure and desire, they also subtly criticize traditional values by showing their rigidity. Both characters, Kitty Flanders and Norma Besant, realize that the existing moral code offers them no alternative but suicide. The audience is not relieved by their decision but, rather, sees the tragic implications of their conclusions. Even though the new order of easy divorce and acceptable promiscuity does not triumph in the end, the old order is portrayed as anachronistic. Set in a small southern town, Coquette establishes itself as a drama about traditional values simply by placing the story as far away from modern values as possible. Whereas large cities were the site of modern technology and ideas, small towns were isolated from modernity. Likewise, the South was less “modern” than the North or the West; its conservatism was primarily due to the lack of large urban centers but was also reinforced by the morality of the old South. In the South the gentleman and lady still existed, and the past exerted a greater hold on the popular imagination than elsewhere.

  One of the hit musicals of 1927 was also set in the South, Show Boat.25 With lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein and music by Jerome Kern, Show Boat was based on the 1926 best-selling novel by Edna Ferber. In the novel, Ferber laments the passing of an era, and the simple entertainment of the showboat reflects that simpler time. She recounts the lives of three generations of the Hawks family, and she not only recounts the workings of a showboat, a unique American institution, but describes the changes that occurred in popular entertainment from the 1870s to the 1920s. The novel also touches on issues of morality, marriage, race, and love. The novel was not a likely source for a Broadway musical in the 1920s, since it was considerably more serious than the variety/review type of musicals descended from vaudeville that were a staple of Broadway. What Hammerstein and Kern developed was a new kind of musical: not just a story sprinkled with songs and dancing, but a work in which the songs and dancing were an integral part of the narrative. In so doing, they also took Ferber’s story about three generations of strong women and developed a story about the lasting bonds of marriage.

  In both novel and play, Magnolia’s life is at the center of the story. The play, however, focuses on Magnolia’s married life. It starts with Magnolia’s meeting Gaylord Ravenal, the first act ends with their marriage, and the play ends with their reunion. Captain Andy, Magnolia’s father, along with Ravenal, are the two main influences on her throughout. Andy helps his daughter succeed in show business after she is deserted by Ravenal, and it is Andy who orchestrates the reunion of the couple at the end of the play (a departure from the novel, where he drowns). One does see a transformation take place in Magnolia (something not usually seen in musical comedy of the time) from innocent to self-s
ufficient, though never out of love with Ravenal. This focus on Magnolia and Gaylord’s marriage is expressed in the repeated use of the song “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man,” which describes the inability to stop loving someone despite who he is and what he does. The other thematic song in the play also describes something unalterable and everlasting, the Mississippi River: “He don’t plant ’taters, He don’t plant cotton, An’ dem dat plant ’em, Is soon forgotten, But ol’ man river, He jes’ keeps rollin’ along.”26 But against this backdrop of everlasting love and the enduring Mississippi is a story about changing times and changing people. In the musical, everyone is happiest when they find their place, whether it be on the river, in another’s arms, or on stage, and for the women in the play, their place is with their man.

  Ferber describes Magnolia’s life as a dynamic, ever-changing force of nature like the Mississippi River itself. As a child Magnolia states that if she were a river, she’d “want to be the Mississippi.” When asked why, she replies, “The Mississippi is always different. It’s like a person that you never know what they’re going to do next, and that makes them interesting.”27 Magnolia experiences in her life the calms and rapids, the low and high water, and the changes of course experienced by the river. She grows up on the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre under the strict supervision of her New England mother Parthenia Ann and is thrust onto the stage as a last-minute replacement and becomes successful. She falls in love with her leading man, Gaylord Ravenal, a gambler with a shady past, and they elope. Their daughter Kim—named after the fact that she was born at the point where the Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri rivers all converge—was born during a flood on the river. After the death of Magnolia’s father, Captain Andy (drowned in the Mississippi), the Ravenals escape Parthy Ann’s control and move to Chicago, where Magnolia lives the life of a gambler’s wife—sometimes rich, sometimes poor. Deserted by Ravenal, now unable to make a living after reformers shut down the gaming houses, Magnolia becomes a star on the variety stage to support herself and Kim. Eventually Kim herself becomes an actress on the Broadway stage. The novel ends with the death of Parthy Ann, who has become a legendary showboat operator, and with Magnolia’s return to the river life as owner/operator of the Cotton Blossom.

  Each woman, Parthy Ann, Magnolia, and Kim, illustrates a stage in the changing role of women and the changing values of the society. Parthy Ann is a strong-willed woman whose only outlet for her energy and drive is in dominating her husband, her child, and eventually the workers of the Cotton Blossom. As Ferber tells us, “Life had miscast her in the role of wife and mother. She was born to be a Madam Chairman. Committees, Votes, Movements, Drives, Platforms, Gavels, Reports all showed in her stars. Cheated of these, she had to be content with such outlet of her enormous energies as the Cotton Blossom afforded.” She had the misfortune of being born in an era when one spoke “not of Women’s Rights but of Women’s Wrongs” (124). But Parthy Ann’s steadfast dedication to the Cotton Blossom resulted in her leaving a half-million dollar inheritance for Magnolia and Kim upon her death. Parthy Ann represents the force of the Mississippi, which makes earth and man conform to her power. Similar in character, but different in circumstance, is Kim. “Clear headed. Thoughtful. Deliberate” (386). Magnolia never imagined her daughter as an actress, since Magnolia’s experience was that acting came naturally and was not a learned skill. Kim, as a twentieth-century woman with options open to her, spent time in stock companies in Chicago before attending the National Theatre School of Acting in New York, where she learned everything from voice to movement to fencing to French. “She was almost the first of this new crop of intelligent, successful, deft, workmanlike, intuitive, vigorous, adaptable young women of the theatre.” Kim was urban and sophisticated, married to a theatrical producer, but “there was about her—or them—nothing of genius, of greatness, of the divine fire” (390). For Magnolia, there was something missing in Kim and in modern urban life, something that was rapidly disappearing from the nation. “There was no Mississippi in Kim” (393). The natural rhythm of life along the river and in rural towns was vanishing, and with it a sense of place, of connection to the land, and of history were vanishing as well.

  The connection between the nineteenth-century pioneer woman Parthy Ann and the sophisticated modern Kim is of course Magnolia herself. She represents the tumultuous, ever-changing, and powerful force of the Mississippi, adapting to the times, reacting to her surroundings and situations instead of acting upon them. She is often caught between what is seen as proper (defined by her mother) and what is necessary (defined by her situation). Magnolia gains economic independence, yet her ultimate goal is a stable marriage. She is, ultimately, the ideal 1920s woman, who carefully discovers which traditions to maintain and which to discard. While not the ultramodern flapper, like Clara Bow, Magnolia conducts her life in a way that blends the old with the new, leaving her neither a slave to the past nor a slave to modern society. These three women, along with the characters played by Clara Bow, illustrate the variety of roles for the “new woman” in a consumer society where the entertainment industry—while reinforcing many stereotypes of women—allowed women financial freedom from men. For Ferber, Magnolia best reflects the lessons of a life on the river. As Kim leaves her mother standing on the deck of the Cotton Blossom at the end of the novel she remarks, “‘There’s something about her that’s eternal and unconquerable—like the River.’” But in the end, “the river, the show boat, the straight silent figure were lost to view” (398). In the novel, as in real life, the values of southern, rural life were disappearing in the 1920s.

  The novel and play also touch upon another source of conflict in the South, race. In both works, local southern authorities force Julie and Steve, a husband-and-wife acting team on board the Cotton Blossom, to leave the show boat when it is revealed that Julie is a black woman who has been passing as white. The story makes a point of ridiculing the notion that “one drop” of black blood is all it takes to condemn a person to second-class citizenship by having Steve prick Julie’s finger and swallow a drop of blood so that he and the rest of the company can truthfully say that he has black blood in him and that therefore his marriage to Julie is not miscegenation. While the novel and play both condemn the racist attitudes of the South, they also reinforce the subservient roles of African Americans and the characterizations of them as primitive and simple. Queenie and Jo are the cook and handyman on the ship, and they teach Magnolia how to sing spirituals. Ferber describes how the couple left the boat each winter with three hundred dollars and new clothes and shoes and returned each spring “penniless, in rags, and slightly liquored.” Still, “Captain Andy liked and trusted them. They were as faithful to him as their childlike vagaries would permit” (122). In the musical, Queenie was played by Tess Gardella, a blackface artist who often used the stage name “Aunt Jemima,” and Jo was played by Jules Bledsoe. Gardella portrayed Queenie as the stereotypical mammy, and Bledsoe played Jo as the typical lazy, shiftless coon.

  It is Jo’s song “Ol’ Man River” that states the condition of former slaves in the South and provides an ambiguous take on the lives of southern blacks. “You an’ me, we sweat an’ strain, body all achin’ an’ racked wid’ pain. Tote that barge! Lift that bale! Git a little drunk an’ you land in jail.” The songs even elicit sympathy for the black workers and their situation. “I git weary an’ sick of tryin’, I’m tired of livin’ and skeered of dyin’; but ol’ man river, he jes’ keeps rollin’ along.”28 In both the casting of a white actor in the role of Queenie and Jo’s song, the musical reinforces Ferber’s stereotypical images of African Americans. “Ol’ Man River” speaks to the enduring quality not only of nature but of black subservience as well. Just as the river rolls along, so too must African Americans suffer the hardships of their lives. Both are natural phenomena, and therefore neither can be changed. Show Boat allowed readers and audiences with progressive attitudes toward racial equality to see the story as a critique of sou
thern society, a remnant of former days. But neither the novel nor the musical challenged the attitudes toward African Americans of those who sought to maintain segregation, and indeed, both novel and musical reinforced many of their prejudices.

  While Show Boat was debuting on Broadway in the recently opened and monumental Ziegfeld Theatre, much of the geographic area where the action of the play occurs was still recovering from the worst flood ever experienced on the Mississippi River. In August 1926, just as Edna Ferber’s Show Boat was released in bookstores, rain began to fall on the upper Mississippi Valley and the northern Great Plains. By September, rivers in eastern Kansas, northwestern Iowa, and Illinois began to overflow from the abnormal amounts of rain. By January, floodwaters had overtaken rivers in Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky. Continued heavy rainfall throughout the spring, especially in the lower Mississippi Valley, added more rain to saturated ground and already overflowing rivers. Levees meant to hold back the waters of the Mississippi and its tributaries began to break; eventually the waters breached the levees in 145 places. The floodwaters spread out over more than 16 million acres (26,000 square miles) reaching from Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico, destroying farms and towns, and killing at least 246 people. Flood waters destroyed over 5 million acres of cropland, and much of this remained uncultivated for months under the slowly receding waters. Estimated crop losses topped $100 million, while livestock and other farm losses reached $23 million. Over 162,000 homes were flooded, and the American Red Cross relief efforts cared for over 600,000 people for fourteen months.29