American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  College students in the twenties, on the other hand, were by no means lacking in a measure of idealism, or at least old-fashioned liberalism. On issues that did not clearly affect their future pocketbooks they could take advanced positions. They were often tolerant of dissent, intolerant of intolerance as embodied in the Ku Klux Klan, protective of civil liberties and academic freedom. But they saw little linkage between such issues and party politics. “The only subjects that are getting any attention from the ‘political minded,’ ” observed an editor at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1926, “are Prohibition, Birth Control and the Bible Issue, none of which are in the least related to politics or political wisdom.” The simmering issue of racial justice was largely ignored, except when a campus incident produced a quick but fleeting expression of concern.

  On the fringes of campus life, small groups of students spoke up for socialism or liberalism or black rights or academic liberty or—especially in the immediate post-World War I years—pacifism and internationalism and disarmament. Here and there a student editor or group might speak up against United States policy in Latin America or the efforts of an American Legion post to get a normal-school teacher fired for radical views. But college students formed no general political movement, headed toward no confrontation with their teachers or their elders. There was, it is true, one issue on which concerned students were relatively consistent—the supreme issue in America of individual liberty. Thus, when the New York State legislature proposed to purge socialist and communist teachers from the schools, an editor of the Cornell Sun demanded: “Has the panic caused by Bolshevism and socialism so befuddled the college graduate [in the legislature] that he can urge the investigation of the beliefs of every member of the Cornell faculty, and the discharge of every man whose views do not coincide with his own? Since when, may we ask, has any group of citizens been granted the power of determining what a man may think in order that he may secure a livelihood?” But such occasional challenges as these, in the 1920s, merely reinforced the views of those who chose to believe that the colleges were hotbeds of subversion as well as sex.

  Most college youth of the 1920s had shared educational experiences outside the classroom. They were graduates of American Protestantism, the products of Sunday school and church pews, of YMCAs and YWCAs, during the years when the Protestant Establishment had been at the height of its numbers, momentum, and apparent influence. Protestantism encompassed diverse tendencies—this was part of its strength—both theological conservatism and the powerful Social Gospel movement, both old-fashioned fundamentalist orthodoxy and liberal reformism. It was learning to live with a Roman Catholic community that was developing the “largest private educational system in the world.”

  Having developed historically in intimate embrace with capitalist ideals and institutions, dynamic Protestantism might have seemed poised at the start of the twenties for another great period of expansion. Yet by 1921, notes Winthrop Hudson, “much of the contagious enthusiasm exhibited by the churches in the prewar years had begun to be dissipated. By 1925 the usual indices of institutional strength—church attendance, Sunday school enrollment, missionary giving—showed a downward trend that was to continue for at least a decade.” Perhaps nothing better indicated Protestantism’s loss of verve and idealism during the twenties than the fact that 2,700 students applied for foreign missionary service in 1920, 252 eight years later.

  Most serious of all for the Protestant churches in the 1920s, according to Sydney Ahlstrom, “was a pervasive thinning out of evangelical substance, a tendency to identify religion with the business-oriented values of the American way of life.” Much of the leadership of the church, instead of countering the conservatism, commercialism, and complacency of the decade, succumbed to these tendencies.

  The most glaring sign of the churches’ surrender to the commercial spirit was the effort to “merchandise” religion. In part, this was due to the need to compete with films and radio, with the automobile that made whole families mobile on weekends, with burgeoning entertainments and recreation; in part it was due to the role of businessmen in promoting and financing churches; most of all, probably, it was due to the prevailing commercial ethos of the twenties. Ministers “are salesmen with a wonderfully fine ‘line’ to sell their congregations,” a Methodist paper editorialized. “Selling Religion—that is the only business of the Church,” advised the clerk of the Presbyterian General Assembly. Promoters and preachers concocted teasing slogans and sermon topics: “Worship Increases Your Efficiency” or “Business Success and Religion Go Together.”

  By far the most successful promoter of Protestantism was Bruce Barton, onetime muckraker and radical, later a sensationally successful Manhattan advertising executive and publicist for the Republican party. In 1925, he published The Man Nobody Knows, a portrait of Jesus Christ as master salesman, vigorous executive, and creator of the best twelve-member management team of all time. Critics charged that Barton ignored Christ’s divinity and even remade Jesus in the author’s own image, but the work headed the nonfiction best-seller lists for many months. Barton was in fact a sophisticated and thoughtful conservative, and The Man Nobody Knows was by no means a crass defense of capitalism; rather, in Otis Pease’s words, its “principal thrust was to urge business-minded Americans, concerned with success, to model their lives on a man who, Barton insisted, exemplified humaneness, sociability, service to others, the leadership to inspire ordinary people to rise above themselves, a capacity to love everyone as persons….” But these finer points tended to become lost in the decade’s ballyhoo.

  There was little protest against conservatism and commercialism in the churches, except on the part of a few liberals and radicals in the theological schools and the religious press. No strong movement appeared on the religious left. Opposition, on the contrary, rose on the “rural right” from the old fundamentalist, revivalist sectors of Protestantism. The new fundamentalist militancy in the 1920s took two distinct forms, according to Ahlstrom: an effort to stop public schools and colleges from teaching scientific theories thought to be contrary to traditional interpretations of the Bible, and an effort to halt liberal theology and critical scholarship within the churches. Protestant unity soon was shattered by bitter fundamentalist-modernist disputes.

  Fundamentalism in the twenties embraced some ministers of great congregations in the North, not merely the rural South and West, but the movement came to be characterized—and caricatured—by some of its more spectacular leaders. Billy Sunday, a former professional baseball player, had become a super-evangelist who could attract a million-and-a-half attendance in a ten-week campaign. He also denounced “hireling” ministers who forgot Jesus Christ in their effort to please their liberal parishioners. While Sunday had reached the peak of his influence before the war, both his revival rhetoric and his rescuing of the fallen at two dollars a soul cast their spell over the evangelists of the 1920s. The most unforgettable of these was Aimee Semple McPherson, proprietor of the Angelus Temple in Los Angeles. Presented in her $1.5 million temple, attired in virginal white, McPherson made a continuous wedding service of entertainment, commerce, and evangelism. “There is no way to understand how a jejune and arid pulpit has become a dynamic of literally National proportions,” said a rival Los Angeles minister, “but to hear and see the woman.” And that was just what Aimee Semple McPherson wanted.

  What the modernist-fundamentalist conflict needed in the 1920s was a drama with a morality theme, and this was provided by the trial of John Scopes in Dayton, Tennessee, in July 1925, for teaching evolution in defiance of the laws of the state. Over one hundred newspaper journalists telegraphing 2 million words of newspaper reportage brought an audience of tens of millions into the morality play. Eagerly they followed the principals and the scenario: young Scopes, struggling through his first year of high school teaching; Clarence Darrow, the famed attorney for the defense; William Jennings Bryan, who had helped draft an anti-evolution resolution passe
d by the Florida legislature; and then the tragicomic encounter between Darrow and Bryan, as the attorney led the old Commoner into detailing an absurdly literal interpretation of the Bible. Day after day, in killing heat, the ordeal continued, with Scopes found guilty—and Bryan found dead a few days later.

  Not reported was one arresting aspect of the “monkey trial”; the whole issue had arisen in Dayton because a group of local businessmen wanted to stage an event that would spark the town’s economic development. Even the most spectacular ideological confrontation of the 1920s had not escaped the commercial taint.

  The Press as Entertainment

  The one hundred or more newspeople who reported the Scopes trial were not a high number for the coverage of courtroom dramas in the 1920s. The Hall-Mills murder trial—the bodies of a minister and his church’s choir leader had been found together under a New Jersey crab-apple tree—attracted twice as many reporters. The New York Times printed 528,000 words on the trial and 435 pictures; the New York American, 347,000 words and 2,691 pictures; the Daily News, 223,000 words and 2,962 pictures. For the Times, half a million words on the trial was almost literally all the news fit to print.

  Doubtless the press felt it deserved such self-indulgence, for it had ballyhooed the case into sensationalism in the first place. Indeed, after a grand jury had refused to indict, a tabloid had gotten the case reopened on the basis of flimsy evidence, and then reaped circulation benefits by its avid coverage of the subsequent trial. The press corps at the later murder trial of a corset salesman included Mary Roberts Rinehart and Billy Sunday, and D. W. Griffith and Peggy Joyce did special interpretations. It received more play than the sinking of the Titanic; the press assigned 120 reporters to this case, “more than represented all the American newspapers and news agencies in the Far East,” Silas Bent observed.

  Sensationalism was nothing new in the American press, but the 1920s was indeed the age of ballyhoo. The reason was in part economic. For half a century the newspapers had undergone rising costs and circulation wars. The indispensable Linotype machine now cost $18,000. Newsprint had soared from 2 1/4 cents to 6 cents a pound during the war. Printers’ and pressmen’s wages had doubled since 1910, to $50 a week during the twenties. But newspapers were still selling for the smallest coin of the realm. Until recently, Walter Lippmann wrote in Public Opinion, the public had accustomed itself “to paying two and even three cents on weekdays, and on Sundays, for an illustrated encyclopedia and vaudeville entertainment attached, we have screwed ourselves up to paying a nickel or even a dime.”

  More than ever this cost-price gap was being filled by advertising, which by the 1920s was generating two-thirds of the newspaper revenue and, in metropolitan newspapers, appropriating three columns for every two of reading matter. The cost of advertising in English language newspapers tripled between 1915 and 1929, amounting to $860 million in the latter year. Earlier, Ivory Soap had boasted, “It Floats”; now Maxwell was urging installment buyers of autos to “Pay As You Ride”; the railroads were exhorting travelers to “See America First”; Listerine was warring on halitosis and Life Buoy Soap on “B.O.”

  In the frenzied search for advertising and hence for circulation, the newspapers offered entertainment and diversion—scandal, crime, fashion notes, puzzles, society gossip, recipes, beauty hints, astrology, chess, whist, bridge, gardening, palmistry, advice to the lovelorn. “The newspaper offers a mart wherein the commodity factory may shriek its wares, and exploit its own workers, who spend more and more of their surplus on newly-created wants,” Silas Bent wrote during mid-decade. “The newspaper offers to the literate but uneducated workers an escape, an entertainment, a thrill, an opiate.”

  Nothing combined all these qualities more graphically than the comics, which had originated earlier as day-to-day gags but came into their own as continuity strips at the start of the twenties. Millions followed the lives and times of Andy Gump, Toots and Casper, Skeezix, Winnie Winkle, Barney Google, Tillie the Toiler, Moon Mullins, and Blondie. Accident-prone, crisis-ridden, vociferous, funny, they let their eager public identify itself with their family squabbles and personal foibles. “If historians of the next century were to rely upon the comic strip,” Stephen Becker has observed, “they would conclude that we were a peaceful lot of ruminant burghers from 1920 to 1929, with only flashes of inspired insanity, and that our social conflicts and national crises were settled by family conferences at the dinner table.”

  No ideological pattern emerged from the zany characters and their doings. Cartoonist Harold Gray’s conservatism, individualism, and philosophy that “only the good have rights” expressed itself in Little Orphan Annie’s millionaire protector Daddy Warbucks, but most of the comic characters of the 1920s are notable only for their human vanities and failings. The comics represented commercialism more than conservatism. Publishers knew that the comic strips were by far the most read of all their features, and their artists were among the best paid of all who worked for newspapers.

  More than ever before, the big papers were big business, sharing the powers and vicissitudes of big business. Newspaper proprietors, it was said, had to be “reelected” every day, as customers casually chose among a dozen competing papers at a newsstand. One response to “destructive competition” was consolidation. Strong newspapers swallowed up weak ones; morning and evening papers combined, thus keeping a single plant running twenty-four hours; papers merged to keep or gain the precious Associated Press franchise. Consolidation intensified during the war years and continued into the twenties.

  The monarch of mergers in the 1920s was surely Frank A. Munsey. A Horatio Alger figure who had started out at thirteen as a clerk, he rose to fame and riches by buying, selling, merging, or discontinuing a large number of newspapers. After buying the New York Press and merging it with the Sun, a penny paper, he poured $2 million in it by 1920 without much effect on circulation. He then bought the Herald, a venerable paper that with the Sun had set high standards in American journalism. After neither turned a profit, Munsey eyed the Tribune, another excellent and unprofitable organ. When the Reid family refused to sell this living legacy of their late father, Munsey abruptly sold them the Herald. The result was the Herald Tribune.

  Munsey did not sentimentalize over the seven New York dailies or the eleven magazines that he merged, sold, killed off, or renamed. “The same law of economics applies in the newspaper business that operates in all other important business to-day,” he said. “Small units in any line are no longer competitive factors.” The mergers that made newspapers scarcer made Munsey richer, to the tune of $20 million.

  At the start of the twenties, Upton Sinclair threw down his gauntlet before the working press. “The Brass Check is found in your pay-envelope every week—you who write and print and distribute our newspapers and magazines. The Brass Check is the price of your shame—you who take the fair body of truth and sell it in the market place, who betray the virgin hopes of mankind into the loathsome brothel of Big Business.”

  Strong words, but Walter Lippmann granted that Sinclair spoke for a large body of Americans. How answer such a charge? Lippmann could hardly defend the accuracy of the press, for he and a colleague were just completing a test of the New York Times’s coverage of the Russian Revolution and concluding that the “news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was” but rather what reporters and editors “wished to see.” But Lippmann would not blame the big publishers as big businessmen. The problem lay elsewhere—in the fact that news and truth were by no means the same thing. The press could report only palpable events, “like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision.” It could not report underlying, tangled, “social truth.” That could be done only through a system of intelligence, a machinery of knowledge.

  Others traced the failure to economics and technology. “The industrialization of the news gathering process,” according to a recent study, “had inevitably required f
urther and further division of labor. From a colonial institution in which one man wrote, edited and printed the entire newspaper, the press had developed into a complex operation in which the facts in any one story were transmitted from one person to another in an expanding chain. An overseas story might go from reporter to rewrite man to editor of the originating paper in the United States and thence through wire or syndicate editors to hundreds of other papers for handling by still other rewrite men and editors. The process provided limitless possibilities for honing and focusing news, but it also made possible a good deal of misunderstanding and re-interpretation.”

  Perhaps the critical change had taken place in the nature of public opinion itself. Trying to collect news from a chaos of sights and sounds, reporters lacked a shaping framework in which to conduct their work. In earlier days, at least in their political reporting, they had operated in a party environment and worked for partisan newspapers. Public opinion was largely party opinion. Parties were already declining in the 1920s under the impact of the anti-party reforms of earlier in the century, however, and the number of party-affiliated newspapers had dropped dramatically—from 801 Republican and 732 Democratic dailies in 1899 to 505 Republican and 434 Democratic dailies by 1929. More party independence did not free the press from political or economic controls, but simply made reporters dependent on other influences and moorings.

  To some degree, publicity agents filled the party gap—a clear sign, Lippmann noted, that “the facts of modern life do hot spontaneously take a shape in which they can be known. They must be given a shape by somebody.” Also interpreting events were syndicated political columnists, who came into their own during the twenties. Arthur Brisbane’s column “Today” was syndicated by Hearst’s Washington Times. Mark Sullivan, Walter Winchell, and Will Rogers appeared in scores of papers; Heywood Broun’s “It Seems to Me” appeared in the New York Tribune and then in the New York World until he clashed with his employers and moved to the New York Telegram. And when the World disappeared into the World-Telegram in 1931, the dispossessed Walter Lippmann moved to the Herald Tribune, where for years he would help “shape the news.”