American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Certainly no creed arose in the 1920s to challenge Sumner’s Social Darwinism or Herbert Hoover’s Individualism; no radical movement or party arose that could mobilize popular support in the fashion that the Republican party did. While the weakness of the left was partly political—the socialists, for example, were unable truly to engage with the “masses”—the failure was primarily intellectual. Few demanded of Hoover how far he would go if he really believed that everyone should be given the chance to develop “the best with which he has been endowed in heart and mind.” If life chances were to be equalized, if everyone, in Hoover’s words, was to be given an equal place at the starting line, where would that starting line be established? Who would provide the “life chances”; only one’s parents or employers, or also schools, literacy projects, vocational programs, health and welfare agencies—in short, government?

  “Equality of opportunity” was becoming the catchword of corporate conservatism—its formula for combining liberty and equality. But how much genuine equality was implied in this slogan, and what kind, and when? How much liberty; not only of property but of speech, ideas, dissent?

  CHAPTER 15

  The Commercialized Culture

  MORE THAN ANY OTHER decade since the Civil War, the 1920s quickly settled into the American memory as a distinctive era in the nation’s history. Perhaps the reason was simply that the years seemed clearly bracketed by the coming of Harding and the economic crisis under Hoover. Or perhaps it was because the decade was studded by events that took on enormous symbolic importance even though they appeared later as of little historical significance. Unlike the first dozen years of the century, which would be remembered as the age of muckraking, TR, and the Square Deal, or of the second decade—the New Freedom, Wilson, the war—the 1920s seemed to have had no shape, no hero in the presidency, no long-run impact.

  Yet the twenties would become the most unforgettable of decades, the most sentimentalized and scorned, evoked and rejected. America could never quite get the era out of its hair. It began to apply labels to the decade even before it was over.

  It was, first and last, the Dollar Decade. Real national income soared during the period; real earnings of workers—at a time of relative price stability—rose sharply; millionaires multiplied. From its cornucopia the huge American workshop showered goods onto eager buyers. Industrial production almost doubled between the recession year of 1921 and the boom year of 1929. Spending skyrocketed—on cars, telephones, cigarette lighters, oil furnaces, fresh fruit and vegetables from distant parts. The smell of money hung in the air. A big electric sign blinked out the message over New York’s Columbus Circle: YOU SHOULD HAVE $10,000 AT THE AGE OF 30; $25,000 AT THE AGE OF 40; $50,000 AT 50.

  It was the Age of Ballyhoo, with enormous promotion of prizefights, football contests, parlor games, movie stars—the age of fads, crimes, trials, Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey, Mah-Jongg and crossword puzzles, Red Grange and Bobby Jones, the marriage of Gloria Swanson to a marquis and the funeral of Rudolph Valentino, which was promoted as heavily as an opening night. The winds of publicity blew capriciously: the slow and closely followed death of one man, Floyd Collins, in a Kentucky cave-in won a three-column headline from the New York Times, while the deaths of fifty-three miners in a North Carolina cave-in a month later attracted only routine notice. Thousands craned their necks as Shipwreck Kelly sat on a Baltimore flagpole for twenty-three days and seven hours; while the morbid watched, marathon dancers shuffled night and day, day and night, in an agony of fatigue.

  It was the Jazz Age. This new music was fast, loud, feverish, exciting. A verb entered the popular vocabulary—to “jazz” or “jazz up.” The new music was all the more delicious because the establishment opposed it: jazz would drive out opera, claimed the Italian composer Mascagni; it was insane, boring, brainless, said others. It was the day of the saxophone; Mark Sullivan said a skillful player “could achieve titillating arpeggios, glissandos, every sort of musical coruscation; he could toot and he could tootle, he could blare and blast, could bleat and blat, he could chatter, he could coo.” Proclaimed Paul Whiteman: “I sincerely believe that jazz is the folk-music of the machine age.”

  It was the Roaring Twenties, by which people meant flaming youth, illegal liquor, dancing the Charleston, singing the blues, joyriding in the family Wills Saint Claire, partying through the night. They also meant factories working round the clock, the booming stock market, the passion for size and speed. Above all they meant sex—petting parties, the twosome with a flask in the rumble seat, people dancing as if glued together, cheek to cheek, body to body. Women smoking, women with rouge, women abandoning corsets, women getting “blotto”—these were the big issues.

  “The low-cut gowns, the rolled hose and short skirts are born of the Devil and his angels,” warned the president of the University of Florida, “and are carrying the present and future generations to chaos and destruction.”

  For some, it was the worst of decades. Millions of people remained in poverty and squalor amid the boom. Countless middle-class innocents were swindled out of their life’s savings by con artists like the fabled Charles Ponzi of Boston. Tens of thousands of blacks who had migrated north found that settling in and becoming “neighbors” did little to mitigate intolerance and discrimination. Blacks were still mobbed, shot, beaten, and stabbed in riots or individual encounters. Reorganized and reinvigorated, the Ku Klux Klan under Wizards and Goblins and Kleagles sold memberships at ten dollars a head, recruiting, according to one estimate, over 4 million persons by the mid-twenties. Long after the 1920 expulsion of five socialist members of the New York State Assembly on the grounds of “disloyalty,” the anti-red and anti-radical hysteria continued to flare. Middle-class Catholics and Jews suffered more subtle kinds of discrimination, often as a result of WASP “gentlemen’s agreements.”

  For some, it was the best of decades. Millions of Americans realized their dream of owning an automobile and a home. Big industry cut the hours of work, giving its employees more time with their families and for recreation. A construction boom provided laborers with jobs building highways, bridges, and skyscrapers. The consumption of entertainment—sports, films, plays, games, trials—reached new highs.

  Amid this boom in money and stocks and things, one epic adventure transcended the intolerance and the self-seeking. On the evening of May 19, 1927, a twenty-five-year-old stunt flyer named Charles A. Lindbergh took off from Long Island into drizzling skies and headed out over the Atlantic. For thirty-three hours the nation held its breath. Lindbergh’s arrival in Paris unloosed a flood of relief, joy, and ballyhoo. He was young and lean and tousle-haired and modest. President Coolidge sent a cruiser to fetch him back, commissioned him a colonel, presented him with the Congressional Medal of Honor. New York dumped 1,800 tons of torn-up paper on his triumphal procession. Streets and schools were named for him. Nor did the adulation cease. Hero-worshippers packed the roads around his New Jersey farm on weekends; laundries kept his shirts for souvenirs; medals, tributes, dollars were showered on him.

  Why? For years men had been flying the Atlantic, in both directions; Lindbergh’s distinction was only to be the first to do it alone. The explanation was simple, wrote Frederick Lewis Allen as the decade came to an end. “A disillusioned nation fed on cheap heroics and scandal and crime was revolting against the low estimate of human nature which it had allowed itself to entertain.” The flyer seemed to be a modern Galahad. He “did not accept the moving-picture offers that came his way, he did not sell testimonials, did not boast, did not get himself involved in scandal, conducted himself with unerring taste—and was handsome and brave withal. The machinery of ballyhoo was ready and waiting to lift him up where every eye could see him.”

  The flight was a triumph of individual daring and enterprise; it was also the “climax of the co-operative effort of an elaborately interlocked technology,” noted John W. Ward. In pinning the Distinguished Flying Cross on Lindbergh, President Coolidge expressed his
delight that the flyer, who liked to use the term “we,” gave equal credit to his plane—for which, Coolidge asserted, “more than 100 separate companies furnished materials, parts or service in its construction.”

  This “silent partner,” declared the President, “represented American genius and industry.”

  THE WORKSHOP OF EDUCATION

  Soon Lindbergh’s portrait was adorning thousands of school classrooms, side by side with Washington and Lincoln, Edison and Ford. It was a tribute to Lindy’s enterprise and heroism that he was admitted to the pantheon of portraiture, for even small changes such as this were not made lightly in the nation’s schools. The elementary school was one of the most immobile institutions in America.

  Exploring the work of the seventh grade in Muncie, Indiana, the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd noted that reading, writing, arithmetic, language, spelling, drawing, music, and geography, which had comprised the essential curriculum of that grade in 1890, still did so thirty-four years later, though civic training, history and civics, and manual arts for boys and home economics for girls had been added.

  Nor had the life of the school changed much in those thirty-four years. “The school, like the factory, is a thoroughly regimented world,” reported the Lynds. “Immovable seats in orderly rows fix the sphere of activity of each child. For all, from the timid six-year-old entering for the first time to the most assured high school senior, the general routine is much the same. Bells divide the day into periods. For the six-year-olds the periods are short (fifteen to twenty-five minutes) and varied….” They were free to move about except during “recitation,” but as they grew older “the taboo upon physical activity becomes stricter, until by the third or fourth year practically all movement is forbidden except marching from one set of seats to another” and brief exercise.

  The teachers of Muncie children also provided continuity. They were predominantly women brought up in Indiana; in Middletown, as in the nation, the percentage of male teachers had dropped by more than half in two generations. All were high school graduates, but less than half had attended college or even “normal school.” They shared little in Muncie community life, much less any broader one. Middletown, the Lynds discovered, paid the people to whom it entrusted its children about what it paid retail clerks, and otherwise rather ignored them.

  The nation’s high schools gave promise in the 1920s of turbulence and change, if only as a result of skyrocketing numbers of youths entering secondary school. Enrollments in the four public high school years doubled during the 1920s, from 2.2 million in 1920 to 4.4 million ten years later. Immense high school buildings were overflowing within a few years of construction. The buildings themselves “reflected the ideology of mid-1920s prosperity and power,” Edward Krug has observed. “Massive and overwhelming on the outside, coldly ostentatious on the inside, they fit well the impersonal dignity of institutions that daily processed several thousand students with efficiency and dispatch.” Behind the school explosion lay major social trends: rising middle-class and business stress on education as the key to success, lessened child labor in industry since 1910, and, to some degree, tougher school attendance laws. Still, for every student enrolled in high schools in 1920, two teenagers were not.

  Out of these teeming numbers in school rose the image of flaming youth. Not only in college but in high school the “Wild Young People” proceeded to shock their elders—even more so by charging that the “older generation,” as one of the self-proclaimed wild ones said, “had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us.” The elders—especially the educators—hunted for scapegoats: drink, lurid magazines and novels, the sensationalist press, films like The Mad Whirl, Sinners in Silk, Mad Hour, Unguarded Women, A Perfect Flapper. An Illinois high school teacher blamed jazz for loose speech, morals, and dress; Wisconsin county superintendents condemned it by formal vote. Conservative students at the University of Minnesota, blaming improper dancing, passed out cards to offenders: “We do not dance cheek to cheek, shimmy, or dance other extreme dances. You must not.”

  It was a picture of wild abandon, untrammeled sex, unabashed self-indulgence. It led to even wilder expectations. “Institutions everywhere are in flux,” wrote Miriam Van Waters. “In morals the old is not dead and the new is not strong enough to stand,” as “youth dances into the streets, eager and untaught....” In fact the picture was wildly exaggerated. Behind the hullabaloo, conservative attitudes in secondary education in the 1920s hardly changed. The schools of the 1920s were many times more effective as bulwarks of the existing order than as challengers to it.

  “As a public agency,” wrote an educator early in the decade, “the schools of this democracy have in every age reflected the current political and social philosophy, the dominant social theory and aim of the day…. That aim today is social efficiency through mass conservation. Consequently, layman and educator alike are no longer defining education in terms of personal accomplishment or political rights, but in terms of social necessity, social efficiency, social conservation, social adjustment.” In practice this meant playing up patriotism and the flag, assimilating and homogenizing immigrants and other students who were “different,” teaching them not only English but “American” English, emphasizing vocational education as preparation for practical work, trimming down the classics, both ancient and later, in favor of courses that could lead directly into the world of business, discouraging dissent in thought, speech, or action.

  Business exerted influence not by a heavy hand from the top circles of corporate capitalism—education was too decentralized and locally controlled for that—but through a widely shared perception that schools should teach youth how to get ahead in the practical world. The Indiana and Muncie educational leaders, the Lynds noted, stressed that history should teach reverence for law and for private property, that other social studies should emphasize respect for “fundamental institutions of society: private property, guaranteed privileges, contracts, personal liberty, right to establish private enterprises.” A solid education, said Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, would teach Americans to lose their fear of stocks, Wall Street, banks, and large corporations, so that even women would find that “the symbols of the ticker tape are not Sanskrit after all.”

  Few worried that education for “social efficiency” or for “life adjustment” could be profoundly hostile to the intellect—hostile to the free play of the mind, exploration of new ideas, vigorous controversy over fundamentals, learning for its own sake. There were few protests against anti-intellectualism, even within the teaching community. Elmer Ellis of the University of Missouri argued for “making modern life comprehensible to the individual so that he can act intelligently in relation to it,” but far more typical was the New York committee of principals and teachers who complained that certain textbooks were written from the point of view “of a critical historian” rather than from the point of view of teachers.

  Nor was there a genuine youth revolt in the twenties, or even a youth movement. Although countercultural philosophy was available in the works of Randolph Bourne and. others, most young people, as usual, reflected the conventional attitudes of their parents. “The image that teases the historical imagination,” according to Paula Fass, “is of a rebellious youth, iconoclastic, irreverent, frivolous, lost to social responsibility, and even more lost to traditional values and beliefs.” It was in fact “a portrait carefully constructed by contemporaries in the twenties—in the creative literature, popular journals, and volumes of social analysis by educators, judges, and poets.”

  College youth had an even more distorted reputation than high school students. After all, college was where flaming youth really congregated, with its raccoon coats, hip-pocket flasks, fraternity parties, rumble-seat petting, ear-splitting jazz. But here too the noisy, gaudy façade cloaked the reality of apathy, a dash of cynicism, a touch of revolt, and a structure of conservative Republicanism.

  Like the high school students, the
college generation in the twenties seemed lively and rebellious in large part because of sheer numbers. The number of men students receiving bachelor’s degrees during the decade doubled; the number of women graduates, after rising steadily since 1890, tripled in the same decade. But in general, the students seemed to bring their home lives and attitudes with them. They joined fraternities and sororities dominated by the same middle-class virtues they had learned at their parents’ knees. “We are all more or less self-centered residents of Main Street,” said a Trinity College editor. Fraternities, with their boosterism and their absorption in athletics and socializing, were easy way-stations to postgraduate membership in the Kiwanis and Rotary Club. College youth read the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Cosmopolitan, just as their parents did; they also read Sinclair Lewis, and perhaps even glimpsed their futures in Babbitt.

  “George F.” Babbitt Jr. “is going to college,” said an Ohio State University editor, “and he is even more secure in college than in the world of business, if we are to believe our eyes and ears and the college papers.”

  Politically, college students outside the South were heavily Republican. A large, moderately representative poll of students in 120 institutions in October 1924 gave Coolidge 30,000 “votes” to fewer than 14,000 for Davis and 7,500 for La Follette. Women were no less conservative than men. Coolidge, who as Vice-President had called eastern women’s colleges hotbeds of radicalism and Bolshevism, “carried” Wellesley by 76 percent of the vote, Smith by 73, Vassar and Bryn Mawr each by 54. La Follette made a decent showing only at Barnard.