Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  Allen Lane, and Penguin, were often too left-wing for many. But commercially speaking, the great majority of titles were a success, selling on average 40,000 but with the political specials reaching six figures.81 And in a way, Queenie Leavis had been confounded. There might not be much of a taste, by her standards, for serious fiction, but there was a healthy demand for serious books. It was, as no one needed to be reminded, a serious time.

  Clive Bell, the artist, was in no doubt about the cleverest man he had ever met: John Maynard Keynes. Many people shared Bell’s view, and it is not hard to see why. Keynes’s Political Economy Club, which met in King’s College, Cambridge, attracted the cleverest students and economists from all over the world. Nor did it hurt Keynes’s reputation that he had made himself comfortably rich by a number of ventures in the City of London, a display of practical economics rare in an academic. Since publication of The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes had been in an anomalous position. So far as the establishment was concerned, he was an outsider, but as part of the Bloomsbury group he was by no means invisible. He continued to correct politicians, criticising Winston Churchill, chancellor of the exchequer, in 1925 for the return to the gold standard at $4.86 to the pound, which in Keynes’s view made it about 10 percent overvalued.82 He also foresaw that as a result of the mines of the Ruhr being allowed back into production in 1924, coal prices would drop significantly, leading to the conditions in Britain which provoked the General Strike of 1926.83

  Being right did not make Keynes popular. But he refused to hold his tongue. Following the Wall Street crash in 1929 and the depression that followed, when unemployment rose to nearly 25 percent in the United States and 33 percent in areas of Europe, and when no fewer than 9,000 banks failed in America, most economists at the time believed that the correct course of action was no action.84 Conventional wisdom held that depressions were ‘therapeutic,’ that they ‘squeezed out’ the inefficiency and waste that had accumulated in a nation’s economy like poison; to interfere with that natural economic homeopathy risked inflation. Keynes thought this was nonsense. Worse, given the hardship caused by mass unemployment, it was immoral nonsense. Traditional economists based their views of inaction on Say’s law of markets, after Jean-Baptiste Say, the nineteenth-century French economist. Say’s law maintained that the general overproduction of goods was impossible, as was general unemployment, because men produced goods only in order to enjoy the consumption of other goods. Every increase in investment was soon followed by an increase in demand. Savings were likewise used by the banks to fund loans for investments, so there was no real difference between spending and saving. Such unemployment as arose was temporary, soon rectified, or voluntary, when people took time off to enjoy their earnings.85

  Keynes was not the only one to point out that in the 1930s the system had produced a situation in which unemployment was not only widespread but involuntary, and far from temporary. His radical observation was that people do not spend every increase in income they receive. They spend more, but they hold back some. This may not seem very significant, but Keynes saw that it had a domino effect whereby businessmen would not spend all their profits in investment: as a result the system outlined by Say would gradually slow down and, eventually, stop. This had three effects: first, that an economy depended as much on people’s perceptions of what was about to happen as on what actually happened; second, that an economy could achieve stability with a significant measure of unemployment within it, with all the social damage that followed; and third, that investment was the key matter. This led to his crucial insight, that if private investment wasn’t happening, the state should intervene, using government credits, and manipulation of interest rates, to create jobs. Whether these jobs were useful (building roads) or merely wasteful didn’t really matter: they provided cash that would be spent in real ways, generating income for others, which would then be passed on.86

  Keynes was still outside the heart of the British establishment, and it would need another war to bring him in from the cold. He had always been a ‘practical visionary,’ but others refused to recognise that.87 Ironically, the first place Keynes’s policies were tried was in Nazi Germany. From the moment he assumed office in 1933, Hitler behaved almost like the perfect Keynesian, building railways, roads, canals, and other public projects, while implementing strict exchange controls that prevented Germans sending their money abroad and forced them to buy domestic products. Unemployment was abolished inside two years, and prices and wages began to rise in tandem.88 Germany, however, didn’t count for many people. The horror of Hitler prevented them giving him credit for anything. In 1933, on a visit to Washington, Keynes tried to interest Franklin D. Roosevelt in his ideas, but the new president, preoccupied with his own New Deal, did not fully engage with Keynes, or Keynesianism. After this failure, Keynes decided to write a book in the hope of gaining a wider audience for his ideas. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money appeared in 1936. For some economists, it was sensational, and merited comparison with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) and Marx’s Capital of 1867. For others, Keynes’s radicalism was every bit as odious as Marx’s, and maybe more dangerous, because it stood a greater chance of working.89 To begin with, the book had a bigger practical effect in America than in Britain. The universities there took up The General Theory, and then it spread to Washington. J. K. Galbraith remembers that ‘on Thursday and Friday nights in the New Deal years the Federal Express out of Boston to Washington would be half-filled with Harvard faculty members, old and young. All were on the way to impart wisdom to the New Deal. After The General Theory was published, the wisdom that the younger economists sought to impart was that of Keynes.’90

  In 1937, a few months after Keynes’s book was published, it seemed that the depression was easing, and signs of recovery were at last showing themselves. Unemployment was still high, but production and prices were at least creeping up. No sooner had these green shoots begun to appear than the classical economists came out of hibernation, arguing that federal spending be cut and taxes raised, to balance the budget. Immediately, the recovery slowed, stopped, and then reversed itself. Gross national product (GNP) fell from $91 billion to $85 billion, and private investment halved.91 It is not often that nature offers a natural laboratory to test hypotheses, but this time it did.92 War was now not far away. When hostilities began in Europe, unemployment in the United States was still at 17 percent, and the depression was a decade old. World War II would remove unemployment from the American scene for generations and herald what has aptly been called the Age of Keynes.

  The essence of the 1930s as a grey, menacing time is nowhere more contradicted than in the work – and words – of Cole Porter. Queenie Leavis and her husband might lament the influence of mass culture on the general quality of thought (and their pessimism would be echoed time and again in the years to follow), but once in a while, individuals of near-genius have produced popular art, and in music, Porter stands out. Although he continued to produce good work up to 1955 (in Silk Stockings), the 1930s were his decade.93 Porter’s oeuvre in the 1930s included ‘Don’t Fence Me In,’ ‘Night and Day,’ ‘Just One of Those Things,’ ‘In the Still of the Night,’ ‘I’ve Got You under My Skin,’ ‘You’re the Top,’ ‘Begin the Beguine,’ ‘Easy to Love,’ and ‘I Get a Kick out of You’:

  I get no kick from champagne;

  Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all.

  So tell me why should it be true

  That I get a kick out of you.

  I get no kick in a plane.

  Flying too high with some guy in the sky

  Is my idea of nothing to do,

  Yet I get a kick out of you.

  Porter’s work suffered when a horse fell on him in 1937, crushing both legs, and he became a semi-invalid, but until then his sophistication and cleverness were only part of his genius. His topical eye for detail was second to none, even Audenesque, according to Graham Greene.94

 
You’re the purple light of a summer night in Spain

  You’re the National Gallery

  You’re Garbo’s salary

  You’re cellophane!

  And

  In olden days a glimpse of stocking

  Was looked on as something shocking,

  Now heaven knows, anything goes!95

  Cellophane and stockings. They were, in fact, much more impressive than Garbo’s salary.96 The 1930s, even as Linus Pauling was discovering the nature of the chemical bond, were also the decade when Baekeland’s discovery of plastic began to deliver its legacy in a proliferation of synthetic substances that hit the market one after another. The first acetylene-based fabrics were marketed in 1930, as was acrylic plastic, leading to Perspex, Plexiglass, and Lucite. Cellophane proper appeared wrapped around Camel cigarettes, also in 1930.97 Neoprene synthetic rubber was available a year later, and polyamide synthetic fibres in 1935. Perlon, an early form of nylon, was introduced in Germany in 1938, and commercial polythene in 1939. In 1940 in America cellophane was voted the third ‘most beautiful’ word in the language (after ‘mother’ and ‘memory’), a triumph of that other ‘m’ word, marketing. But it was the chemistry that mattered, and here nylon was the most instructive.98

  Despite being on the losing side in World War I, Germany had maintained a strong base in industrial chemistry. In fact, because the Allied naval blockade had been so successful, Germany was forced to experiment with synthetic foods and products, keeping her ahead of her enemies. Beginning in 1925, with the formation of I. G. Farben Chemical Group, a team of talented organic chemists was brought together to carry out basic research in polymer chemistry, aiming to build specific molecules with specific properties.99 This was categorised as fundamental research and so escaped the Allied sanctions against military products. The team synthesised a new polymer every day for a period of years. British and American industries were aware of this commercial threat, even though the politicians dismissed the military risk, so much so that in 1927 the Du Pont Company of Wilmington, Delaware, increased the research budget of the chemical department from $20,000 a year to $25,000 a month.100

  At the time it was believed that chemical substances were divided into two, those like sugar or salt whose molecules would pass through a fine membrane, and which were crystal; and those with larger molecules, like rubber or gelatin, which would not pass through such a membrane, classified as ‘colloids.’ Colloids were conceived as a series of smaller molecules held together by a mysterious ‘electrical’ force. As Linus Pauling’s experiments were showing, however, the chemical bond was basic, a part of physics: there was no ‘mysterious’ force. Once the mystery was removed, and the way molecules were linked together became clearer, the possibility of synthesising substances similar to, and maybe better than, rubber or gelatin became a practical option. In particular, there was a need for a silk substitute, silk being expensive and difficult to obtain from Japan, which was then at war with China. The fundamental breakthrough was the work of Wallace Hume Carothers, ‘Doc,’ who had been lured to Wilmington against a rival offer from Harvard with the promise of ‘massive funds’ for basic research. He began to build up ever larger chain molecules – polyesters – by using so-called difunctional molecules. In classical chemistry, alcohols react with acids to produce esters. In difunctional molecules, there are two acid or alcohol groups at each end of the molecule, not one, and Carothers discovered that such molecules ‘are capable of reacting continually with each other to set off chain reactions,’ which grow into longer and longer molecules.101 As the 1930s progressed, Carothers built up molecules with molecular weights of 4,000, 5,000, and then 6,000 (sugar has a molecular weight of 342, haemoglobin 6,800, and rubber approximately 1,000,000). One of the properties to emerge was the ability to be drawn out as a long, fine, strong filament. To begin with, says Stephen Fenichell, in his history of plastic, these were too brittle, or too expensive, to be commercially useful. Then, in late March 1934, Carothers asked an assistant, Donald Coffman, to try to build a fibre from an ester not studied before. If any synthetic fibre were to be commercially viable, it needed the capacity to be ‘cold drawn,’ which showed how it would behave at normal temperatures. The standard test was to insert a cold glass rod into the mixture and pull it out. Coffman and Carothers found that the new polymer turned out to be tough, not at all brittle, and lustrous.

  After this discovery, Du Pont went into frantic action to be the first to create a successful synthetic silk. The patent was filed on 28 April 1937, and the world was introduced to the new substance at Du Pont’s ‘Wonder World of Chemistry’ at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. Nylon – in the form of nylon stockings – stole the show. It was originally called fibre 66; hundreds of names had been tried, from Klis (silk backward) to nuray and wacara (imagine asking for ‘a pair of wacaras, please’). Nylon was preferred because it sounded synthetic and couldn’t be confused with anything else. After the fair demand for nylon built up; many stores restricted customers to two pairs each. There was a serious side to the nylon frenzy, however, which the New York Times pointed out: ‘Usually a synthetic is a reproduction of something found in nature…. This nylon is different. It has no chemical counterpart in nature…. It is … control over matter so perfect that men are no longer utterly dependent upon animals, plants and the crust of the earth for food, raiment and structural material.’102

  In the depths of the depression, only twenty-eight of the eighty-six legitimate theatres on Broadway were open, but Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra had sold out even its top-of-the-range six-dollar seats.103 O’Neill had been confirmed as ‘the great US playwright, the man with whom true American theatre really begins,’ long before Mourning, which premiered on 26 October 1931.104 Curiously, however, it was not until the other end of the decade, by which time O’Neill had turned fifty, that his two great masterpieces The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night, were written. The intervening years have become known as ‘The Silence.’

  More than for most artists, certain biographical details of O’Neill are crucial to understanding his work. When he was not yet fourteen, he found that his own birth had precipitated a morphine addiction in his mother. He also discovered that his parents blamed their first son, Jamie, for infecting their second son, Edmund, with measles, from which he had died, aged eighteen months. In 1902 Ella O’Neill, who was addicted to drugs, had run out of morphine and tried suicide; this set off in Eugene, then in adolescence, a period of binge drinking and self-destructive behaviour; he also began to hang around theatres (his father was an actor).105 After an unsuccessful marriage, O’Neill attempted suicide himself, overdosing in a flophouse in 1911, after which he saw several psychiatrists; a year later his TB was diagnosed. In 1921 his father died tragically from cancer, his mother following in 1922; his brother Jamie died twelve months after that, from a stroke, which itself followed an alcoholic psychosis. He was forty-five. O’Neill had intended to study at Princeton, taking a science course. At university, however, he was greatly influenced by Nietzsche, adopting an approach to life that his biographer calls ‘scientific mysticism.’ He was eventually removed from the course because he attended so few classes. He began writing in 1912, as a journalist, but soon turned to plays.106

  Autobiography apart, O’Neill’s dramatic philosophy may be understood from this verdict on the United States.: America, he said, ‘instead of being the most successful country in the world, is the greatest failure. It’s the greatest failure because it was given everything, more than any other country…. Its main idea is that everlasting game of trying to possess your own soul by the possession of something outside it.’107 Both The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night are very long, lasting several hours, and both are talking plays, with little action. The characters, and the audience, are trapped within the same room: here conversation is unavoidable. In The Iceman, the characters all wait in Harry Hope’s saloon, where they drink and tell each other the
same stories day in, day out, stories that are in fact pipe dreams, hopes and illusions that will never happen.108 One man wants to get back into the police force, another to be re-elected as a politician, a third simply wants to go home. As time goes by, from one thing and another that is said, the audience realises that even these far-from-exceptional aims are, in the case of these characters, illusions – pipe dreams, in O’Neill’s own words. Later it becomes clear that the characters are spending their time waiting, waiting for Hickey, a travelling salesman who, they believe, will make things happen, be their saviour (Hickey is the son of a preacher). But when Hickey finally appears, he punctures their dreams one by one. O’Neill is not making the glib point that reality is invariably cold. Instead he is saying there is no reality; there are no firm values, no ultimate meanings, and so all of us need our pipe dreams and illusions.109 Hickey leads an ‘honest’ life; he works and tells himself the truth, or what he thinks of as the truth. But it turns out that he has killed his wife because he could not bear the way she ‘simply’ accepted the fact of his numerous, casual infidelities. We never know how she explained her life to herself, what illusions she had, and how she kept herself going. But, we realise, they did keep her going. The Iceman, of course, is death. It has often been remarked that the play could be called Waiting for Hickey, emphasising the similarities to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Both, as we shall see, provided a chilling view of the world that followed the discoveries of Charles Darwin, T. H. Morgan, Edwin Hubble, and others.