1927 and the Rise of Modern America

by Charles Shindo

  The dangers in the publicity machine are more specific and threatening than simply a mass public distracted by frivolity. One specific danger involves the courts, according to Lippmann, especially in heavily reported cases like the Snyder-Gray trial. “No doubt the pair were guilty as Satan. It was nevertheless a scandal to have the trial conducted to an accompaniment of comments by celebrities seated in the bleachers who took the case out of the hands of the judge and the jury, and rendered a daily verdict at so much per column on the precise guilt of the two defendants.” But there is a larger, more sinister danger as well. “There is no way of imagining where it will take us. We do not, for example, know how to imagine what the consequences will be of attempting to conduct popular government with an electorate which is subjected to a series of disconnected, but all in their moments absolutely absorbing, hullabaloos.” The publicity machine will continue to develop and to create better and faster ways to entertain the public, diverting attention away from public affairs and important public questions. For Lippmann, this is not necessarily a bad thing, since the amount of effort needed to understand important public affairs is so great. “I am inclined to ask myself whether in view of the technical complexity of almost all great public questions, it is really possible any longer for the mass of voters to form significant public opinions.”43 Thus, the management of public affairs rests upon those expert enough and willing to manage, namely a nonhereditary, untitled, governing class.

  Whereas Hoover believed that publicity could expand democracy by presenting citizens with the information necessary to participate responsibly in a democratic society, Lippmann saw publicity as responsible for a decline in democratic participation by the masses. These divergent views outline a crucial debate in modern America between individual rights governed by a free market or individual rights limited by civic responsibility. The press often claimed that they were merely presenting “what the public wanted” and that as a business they were bound by the whims of the public. The public, as free individuals, decided what was and was not newsworthy. This conflicts, however, with the idea that the media and publicity machine inform people about things of which they should be aware and knowledgeable. Stories for which people will pay are not, in most cases, stories that are necessary to the smooth and efficient running of a democracy. The attention in the press accorded to Nan Britton, Ruth Snyder, and Judd Gray far outweighed the attention given to the upcoming presidential election, or other political news, and, more often than not, served the interests and bank accounts of the few instead of the many.

  While the turn away from democratic participation on the part of the public was partially a consequence of media coverage of sensational events rather than political issues, Lippmann, in his 1927 collection of essays Men of Destiny, noted that there were many other factors as well. The lack of strong national political figures and national agendas for the two political parties “bewilder the electorate and make the voters feel that politics is an elaborate game which has no serious and immediate consequences.”44 The main reason for this political floundering was the growing irrelevance of Progressivism. As the economy strengthened, revolt against economic change lessened. “The interested motives which are the driving forces of political agitation were diverted to direct profit making” (23). Not only were people more interested in making money than in fighting for reforms, but the Progressives’ targets had disappeared with “the rise of what may be called the New Capitalism” (24). Industrialists and corporate leaders in the 1920s had adapted to the new circumstances of the market, realizing that in a consumer-driven economy, great care needs to be taken to please the consumer. When production controlled profit, reformers could focus their anger at greedy corporate taskmasters squeezing every possible ounce of productivity out of workers; but in a consumer-driven economy, the public image of the corporation is key to a successful business. According to Lippmann, the new executive is a contrast from the robber barons and industrialists of the late nineteenth century. “His attitude toward labor, toward the public, toward his customers and his stockholders, is different. His behavior is different. His manner is different. His press agents are different.” And though he is far from perfect, and “no doubt as powerful as he ever was, . . . his bearing is less autocratic.” As a result, he does not stir in the populace the same antagonisms as did earlier corporate leaders (24). Without visible enemies, the Progressive movement lost focus.

  While economic prosperity and the decline of progressive motivation both increased political indifference, so too did the actions of Calvin Coolidge. “He has devoted himself to encouraging the people to turn their eyes away from the government,” Lippmann wrote. “Public spirit is at best a fragile thing when it comes into competition with the urgent demands of our private lives for money, for power, and for pleasure. So it has not been difficult for Mr. Coolidge to persuade the country that it need not take a vivid interest in public affairs” (21).

  The press aided Coolidge in this task by focusing on sensational news, like murder trials, celebrity gossip, and sports reporting. While Hoover touted a responsibly managed information system as the key to modernization and economic prosperity, Coolidge left information management primarily in the hands of the market. This conflict between a market-driven publicity machine and a responsibly managed information system was compounded by another ambiguity of American culture, the tendency to create celebrities who are both extraordinary in abilities and accomplishments and at the same time common in origin. Twentieth-century celebrities, both the famous and the infamous, tended to be alternately worshipped as unique and special and yet described as not much different from the average American. The all-American character of Lindbergh, the everyman quality of Henry Ford, the humble origins of Clara Bow, the rags-to-riches-to-service story of Herbert Hoover, and the ordinariness of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray made each of those celebrities seem common. This characterization reinforced the notion that in America anything was possible, that hard work, dedication, good luck, and perseverance, and/or circumstances and bad luck, could lead to extraordinary events. Yet, although the publicity that surrounded such events as Lindbergh’s flight, the Mississippi flood, or the Snyder-Gray trial was extraordinary, it occurred within an overall increase in publicity that encompassed other types of celebrities as well. Nowhere was this characteristically American celebrity more evident than in the world of spectator sports.

  the golden age of sportswriting

  Sportswriters and historians of sport in America have characterized the period from the end of World War I to the start of the Great Depression as the “Golden Age of Sport.” Sportswriter Grantland Rice felt the designation apt “because this postwar period gave the game the greatest collection of stars, involving both skill and color, that sport has ever known since the first cave man tackled the mammoth and the aurochs bull.”45 For Rice it was not only the achievements of such athletes as baseball player Babe Ruth, boxer Jack Dempsey, golfer Bobby Jones, tennis players Bill Tilden and Helen Wills, sprinter Charlie Paddock, and even thoroughbred racehorse Man o’ War that made this a golden age, but also the popular appeal that these athletes fostered with their personalities, or in Rice’s word, “color.” While the emergence of the United States internationally as both a military and an economic power may account for the higher quality of athleticism that appeared in the 1920s, this does not explain the uniqueness of the era. According to Rice, “Skill and ability were not the major factors in this Golden Age. They were, of course, important factors, but they were, after all, only a minor part of the story. It was their color and their crowd appeal, their vivid splash against the skyline, their remembered deeds, that write their story.”46 But Rice believed that the qualities of personality that made these “Golden Age” athletes into celebrities were inherent in each of them, rather than being the result of media attention and focus in which sportswriting, radio announcing, newsreels, and motion pictures created personalities. What made the period unique was the way t
he media presented sports figures to the public, from the actual staging of boxing matches, football games, and baseball series to media reporting and celebrity appearances.

  Sportswriting in the vein of Grantland Rice was one of the most important factors in the creation of the “Golden Age.” “The so-called Golden Age of Sports, the twenties and early thirties, was really the Golden Age of Sportswriting,” claims journalist and sports critic Robert Lipsyte, who sees Rice as a transformative figure in sportswriting.47 According to Lipsyte, “Rice was a True Believer” who loved sports and truly saw its practitioners as heroic figures. Rice wrote “the most famous lead in sports journalism history” when he described the 1924 Notre Dame backfield as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which “liberated sportswriters from the traditional humdrum recitation of points scored. They were free to exercise their imaginations and flash their often prodigious stores of book-learning.”48 Rice turned sports reporting into sportswriting, a form of entertainment itself rather than an account of an entertainment. “He was reporting a staged spectacle in a mock-heroic manner, extending the entertainment from the field to the page.”49 But Rice, and the many imitators of his style, “dehumanized the contests and made objects of the athletes,” according to Lipsyte.50 By taking athletes out of the context of sportsmanlike competition and placing them into a mythical context of heroic figures, sportswriters helped transform athletes into celebrated beings, or more cynically, commodities for the public market.

  Sportswriters were not the only ones commodifying sports figures. The staging and promoting of sporting events, the media hype before, during, and after the event, and the crossover of athletes into such other fields of entertainment as the variety stage and motion pictures all reinforced the image of sports celebrities created by the sportswriters. As sportswriter Paul Gallico put it, “Sports were suddenly inundated with money and publicity and blossomed into social acceptance.”51 In 1927 three sports illustrate best this phenomenon: professional boxing, college football, and professional baseball.

  By 1927, professional boxing reached new heights of respectability. What had once been a sport mainly for working-class participants and audiences had become an acceptable, and indeed highly sought after, entertainment for all classes. People not only accepted boxing and boxers but were intensely interested in them, primarily due to the amount and duration of the press coverage given to championship bouts. Like a sensational murder trial, a boxing championship built up in the public’s attention over time, from the announcement of the fight, to the details of the time, place, and guarantees of profits, to the training of each opponent, to the weighing in, and eventually to the fight itself. Each story would try to present more than just the facts of training programs and financial details and to present to the public a more personal view of the fighters. People knew what these fighters ate and read and how they entertained themselves, and as a result the public developed very personalized opinions of each. As writer Paul Gallico observed, “The human being whom we either loved or detested, admired or despised, was entering a kind of public ordeal and we simply had to be there, either in person or by proxy of our newspapers or radio.”52

  Much of this transformation in the world of boxing was due to one man, boxing promoter Tex Rickard. Bringing respectability and economic authority to the world of sports, especially boxing, was no easy task. Nineteenth-century bare-knuckle fighting was populated by the underworld and the criminal element and was at best attended to by the working classes. Many states banned or severely limited boxing. In New York boxing exhibitions could be held, but there could be no official decision in the fight in order to limit gambling. In 1908 Tex Rickard began his promoting career out West, where fewer restrictions existed, by staging a lightweight championship bout in Goldfield, Nevada. He sold the idea of the fight to the town’s leaders as a way to promote their growing city, and he promoted the fight by creating a $32,000 purse for the fighters and displaying it in gold coins in the window of his saloon. Rickard capitalized on the idea that people might want to see a great fight, but, more than that, they wanted to see exorbitant wealth won and lost. As Paul Gallico recalled, “Rickard never forgot the compulsion exercised by large sums of cash, or the lure of the yellow metal. Twenty years later, he remembered to emboss the backs of his tickets for his outdoor fights with gold. They were large, heavy, imposing-looking, and felt like money.”53

  Rickard used guarantees of large purses and predictions of grand gate receipts to lure people to his fights. By 1920 he had staged some of the largest boxing events ever experienced, but he had still not made the ring a respectable entertainment. In 1920 he acquired the old Madison Square Garden and began promoting fights in New York, which had recently legalized boxing. In 1921 he staged a fight at the Garden as a charity event for Anne (sister of J. P.) Morgan’s American Committee for Devastated France. This event attracted not only the well-to-do but women as well. Rickard employed a large staff of uniformed ushers and security guards to make the environment safe and accommodating to women. “It became as safe for a woman and her escort to attend a Rickard fight as it was to go to the theater.”54 In the decade of the 1920s Rickard (who died in 1929) sold $15 million worth of tickets to boxing matches, more than enough to build an all-new Madison Square Garden in 1925. He was responsible for the largest crowd for a bout (Dempsey-Tunney; Philadelphia, 1926; 120,757), the largest gate (Tunney-Dempsey; Chicago, 1927; $2.6 million), and the largest purse for a champion (Tunney; Chicago, 1927; $990,445) until late into the twentieth century. His skill as a promoter was reinforced by the fact that he enjoyed the talents of charismatic boxers like Jack Dempsey. Together, they created the spectacle of modern prizefighting. “As a team,” wrote New York Times boxing editor James P. Dawson, “they were the greatest boxing ever knew, probably ever will know.”55

  In 1927, the biggest boxing event was the rematch title fight between defending champion Gene Tunney, the “Fighting Marine,” and former champion Jack Dempsey, the “Manassa Mauler.” Dempsey had lost his title to Tunney in a ten-round decision in September 1926 before a record crowd in Philadelphia, which grossed gate receipts of over $1.8 million and garnered Dempsey the sum of $711,868. Despite his loss, Dempsey remained a crowd favorite, attracting over a million dollars in gate receipts in his next fight against Jack Sharkey before his rematch with Tunney. The second Tunney versus Dempsey fight, at Chicago’s Soldier Field, grossed over $2.6 million and was heard by an estimated 50 million radio listeners. While some of the attraction was the excitement of a World Championship title, much of boxing’s appeal had to do with Dempsey’s appealing personality. When Tunney fought to retain his title in 1928, the gate gross was less than $700,000.

  According to sportswriter Paul Gallico, Jack Dempsey “created the dramatic image of the perfect pugilist and more than this, he was Jack the Giant Killer who tumbled into the dust men who outsized and outweighed him.”56 Dempsey became the heavyweight champion on the Fourth of July, 1919, when he defeated the gigantic Jess Willard. He successfully defended his title five times between 1920 and 1923, including in two bouts that were the first sporting events to gross over a million dollars, and he fought in over twenty exhibitions before losing the title to Tunney in 1926. Much of Dempsey’s appeal was not just in his winning fights but in the way he fought and won them. Dempsey was known for his wild abandon when he fought; he was not a great technician but an emotional boxer. In four of his five successful title-defense fights, Dempsey knocked out his opponent, including seven knockdowns in one round against Luis Angel Firpo, “the Wild Bull of the Pampas.” Firpo had knocked Dempsey down in the opening seconds of the fight, and Dempsey sent Firpo to the mat seven times before Firpo knocked Dempsey clear out of the ring and into the press row. Dempsey returned to knock down Firpo twice before knocking him out in the second round. The Dempsey-Firpo fight lasted less than four minutes but included twelve knockdowns in what the Chicago Tribune’s James Crusinberry called “the greatest round of battling since
the Silurian Age.”57 Dempsey’s style of unbridled fighting in this bout drew criticism from the boxing establishment and led to rule changes that included prohibiting contestants who were knocked out of the ring from getting any assistance in regaining the ring (Dempsey, it was claimed, was helped by a reporter to get back into the ring) and mandating that if a combatant is knocked down, the opponent must retire to the farthest neutral corner before the count begins (Dempsey’s ten knockdowns of Firpo were the result of his standing over Firpo waiting for him to get up and then knocking him down again).

  Tunney’s path to the championship title was quite different from Dempsey’s. Tunney studied boxing and fought according to well-laid plans based on his opponent’s style of fighting, weaknesses, and strengths. He had boxed as part of his service with the U.S. Marines in the Great War. Tunney became the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) light-heavyweight champion during the course of the war and took up professional boxing afterwards. His style was the opposite of Dempsey’s emotional, hard-hitting, offensive fighting. Tunney admitted to being “more interested in dodging a blow than in striking one.”58 He first observed Dempsey’s style during the 1921 championship fight between Dempsey and challenger Georges Carpentier in which Dempsey retained his title by knocking out his opponent in the fourth round. Tunney estimated that fast feet and a good defense could defeat Dempsey’s battering assault. This feeling grew as Tunney observed more of Dempsey’s bouts, both in person and on film, and was nearly confirmed when Dempsey failed to knock out challenger Tommy Gibbons in 1923. Dempsey won a fifteen-round decision, but Gibbons’s defensive fighting convinced Tunney that “good boxing could thwart the murder in the Dempsey fists” (155). While training for his first match with Dempsey, a reporter visited Tunney’s training camp and noticed that Tunney was in the midst of reading The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler. The reporter, Brian Bell, began to question Tunney on books instead of training or fighting, and when Tunney stated that he liked to read Shakespeare, Bell knew he had a story. The Associated Press “flashed the story far and wide—the challenger, training for Jack Dempsey, read books, literature—Shakespeare. It was a sensation. The Shakespeare-Tunney legend was born” (159). This characterization of Tunney—studious, serious, and intellectual—reinforced most sportswriters’ belief that he was no match for the powerful Dempsey.