American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The age of the football hero began. The game in a single decade was transformed from a college pastime to a national fascination. In the first thirteen minutes of one game against Michigan, “Red” Grange scored four touchdowns for Illinois in four carries. One hundred thousand persons gathered from throughout the nation to watch Grange play his last game for Illinois in 1925. Thereafter, as a professional, he earned as much as $35,000 a game, netting himself a million dollars and enabling him to retire while still in his twenties. What Grange was to playing, Knute Rockne was to coaching. Piloting Notre Dame to football greatness, he promoted the forward pass, which broke up the old static defense formations, boosted scores, and brought new excitement to the game.

  Tennis had its own hero, in the versatile stroking machine known as Big Bill Tilden. After years of tirelessly practicing the mechanics of each shot and return, he won the singles championship at Wimbledon as an unknown, and for the next six years he dominated the game. Golf too had its brilliant technician in Bobby Jones. Dubbed “Robot, the Mechanical Man of Golf,” Jones first mastered his own self-destructive temper and then perfected the loveliest swing in the game. On the links, thousands of fans pursued him, chanting “Bobby! Bobby!” between strokes.

  But the hero of heroes, in part because he played in the game of games, was George Herman Ruth, Jr. He had risen to fame and fortune out of adversity: given up by his parents at the age of nine as incorrigible, raised in a Catholic reform school, he moonlighted as a bartender and bouncer in his father’s saloon during his first season on the diamond. Benefiting from the abolition of the “spitball” and the development of a more resilient baseball, he hit fifty-four home runs in 1920—twice the previous record—and batted a smashing .376 for the season. The Ruth legend was born. Guided by his personal manager Christy Walsh—“the first modern athletic business agent”—the Babe lent his name to newspaper articles, clothing, sports products, even automobiles.

  There was plenty of money to go around. In Ruth’s first year with the Yankees, attendance at their games doubled, topping the 1 million mark. Through the twenties, a team could expect to take in around $10 million a year in gate receipts and concessions, of which nearly 20 percent was profit. The owners were able to build huge ballparks in the hearts of the major cities. Yankee Stadium, the “House That Ruth Built,” cost nearly $2.5 million and seated more than 60,000 spectators. City bosses and businessmen rushed to invest in this newest and most lucrative of urban franchises. It was better even than the stock market. Ruth himself picked up the rags-to-riches theme. “The great thing about this country,” he said, “is the wonderful fact that it doesn’t matter which side of the tracks you were born on, or whether you’re homeless or homely or friendless. The chance is still there….”

  But for crack baseball players born on the wrong side of the color line, the chance was not there, not in the big leagues. Baseball, indeed, had an inflated reputation as the poor man’s sport. Immigrants tended to ignore the game, blacks had to play in their own league, and high ticket prices kept many poor people outside the stadium.

  The fans adored Babe Ruth despite his roguish qualities—or perhaps because of them. But about the other great sports hero from the working classes, Jack Dempsey, they remained divided. The press branded him—falsely—as a draft dodger and wife-beater; churchmen denounced him as the symbol of the American relapse into “paganism.” Dempsey was in fact neither a rogue nor a villain. A shy, uneducated man, the son of poor Colorado pioneers, he had made a meager living from impromptu fights in Rocky Mountain saloons and mining camps. Seeing the potential in the sinewy young boxer, the gambler-turned-promoter “Tex” Rickard arranged for Dempsey to fight Jess Willard, the world heavyweight champion. After the aggressive, snarling Dempsey beat his bigger foe bloody in three rounds, Rickard unleashed a blizzard of publicity for the new champion, “Jack the Giant Killer.”Rickard promoted not only Dempsey but boxing. He made prizefighting respectable, taking it out of smoke-filled rooms and staging it before upper- and middle-class audiences in big, scrubbed-up auditoriums. Purses of fifty and one hundred thousand dollars added piquancy for both spectator and contestant. Dempsey became such a celebrity that he made half-a-million annually from vaudeville and movie appearances without accepting a single fight in three years. But the fans—and the promoters—wanted him back in the ring. The obvious contender was Harry Wills of New Orleans. But he was black. Earlier, lynchings and race riots had followed in the wake of Jack Johnson’s winning of the heavyweight crown, and Rickard was not willing to run this risk again.

  So Dempsey fought Gene Tunney and made sports history—twice. Tunney was a different kind of boxer from most of the fighters Dempsey had met. For years he had studied and practiced his craft, mastering combinations of blows and footwork that he was certain could overcome Dempsey’s savage power. In a result that astonished everyone else, Tunney absorbed and evaded the champion’s blows, slowly wore him down, and won on points.

  Tunney might have walked out of a Scott Fitzgerald novel. A onetime clerk and Marine, he aspired to an educational and social status that might have seemed beyond the reach of his Irish working class and took a most unusual route to attain it. In a Scott Fitzgerald story there would have been a rematch, and there was. With movie cameras whirring above Chicago’s Soldier Field, Graham McNamee narrating for the radio fans, and 100,000 spectators in their seats, once again Dempsey threw himself into every punch, once again Tunney danced and jabbed. Knocked flat by a powerful punch, Tunney waited out a delayed count to nine, outpointed Dempsey in each of the remaining rounds, and won by unanimous decision of the judges. Tunney retired rich afterwards, married an heiress, and lived happily ever after.

  “I have no alibis to offer,” Dempsey said. “I lost to a good man, an American—a man who speaks the English language.”

  There had always been a seamy side to sports in America. Rough-and-tumble fighting on the frontier often ended in kneeing, biting, hair-pulling, eye-gouging, or even “balloching,” or emasculation. Horse racing attracted gamblers, touts, tricksters, and prostitutes. Slaveowners were reported to have pitted their best fighting slaves against those from nearby plantations. A ratting or a cockfight in a livery stable might end with a boxing match between two women naked above the waist.

  In 1919 the World Series itself was fixed, when seven White Sox players accepted $5,000 to $10,000 to let Cincinnati win. To cleanse baseball’s public image the owners hired the theatrical Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as baseball czar. Landis cut a highly visible swath through organized baseball, fining or firing players, barring them from the game, vowing an open war on gambling. Landis played too, his critics said—to his audience.

  Corruption in sports helped establish the twenties in the popular mind as the time of the great crime wave. In fact, there was no such crime wave, aside from the millions of Americans who drank illegal liquor. Public perception of crime turned largely on the mobsters who moved in on the illicit liquor traffic and the “speakeasies.” The decade also introduced a new figure into American culture, the big-time gangster hero. As the press sensationalized the sordid exploits of Al Capone and his ilk, and Edward G. Robinson immortalized the mobster in Little Caesar, crime became another spectator sport.

  Some of the spectators were not amused. President Hoover and Secretary Mellon were said to have conferred repeatedly on federal efforts to prosecute Capone. The Justice Department’s Prohibition Bureau set up a special unit to get him. Tax sleuths also investigated him. Under pressure the Chicago gangster slipped, was convicted of tax evasion, was sentenced to ten years, and later died of syphilis. But that was long after this antihero hero, bullet-headed and weasel-eyed, with his florid suits and string of grisly murders, had captured the imagination of the country.

  The Workshop and the Demos

  If more and more Americans were becoming spectators in a commercialized society, what did they see? Crammed with political and economic pieties from birth, steeped in Social D
arwinist ideology, conditioned by a conservative and sensationalist press, lulled by religious orthodoxy, opiated by heavily promoted sports and other entertainments, what could they see? Some observers contended that the people were conditioned to see nothing except the glories of capitalism—that Jack Dempsey, for example, by being made a hero helped to perpetuate conservative values, such as white superiority, or the mythology of a simple boy’s rise from nowhere to fame and riches. Others, following more a confusion theory than a conspiracy theory, held that the effect of mass spectatorship was to divert workers’ attention away from social and political matters to recreation and entertainment. Diversion was easy, for the intellectual challenge was harsh.

  The prime intellectual issue still facing the American people in the 1920s was the compatibility of a rapidly centralizing system of corporate capitalism with an old-fashioned, divided constitutional system—a republic that institutionalized civil liberties, a broad electorate, checks and balances, and minority vetoes. The key political question was which system could better satisfy people’s wants and needs, expectations and demands.

  The bemused and distracted American people hardly recognized the problem, however, much less the solution. Even if they had focused their attention they might not have seen that they had a choice between the two systems. Many felt that they had done well under capitalism, or hoped to do well in the future, or had concluded that if they had not done well it was their fault and not the system’s. In many aspects the economic system remained harsh and inhuman, but compared to the old days, when the industrial titans could let the public be damned, an army of publicists and promoters were decking out “free enterprise” in the rosiest of colors. Even more, the system was changing a bit, as some of the bigger firms began to provide free legal services, group insurance, profit-sharing, medical clinics, or other forms of welfare capitalism; Owen D. Young of General Electric shocked his Harvard Business School audience by calling for “great business organizations” that would actually belong to the workers “who are giving their lives and their efforts to them.”

  It was also evident by the 1920s that business could not mobilize the kind of naked economic power that the tycoons had wielded almost casually a half century before. Business—industrial, financial, commercial business—was too divided within itself, too localized and regionalized and specialized, to present a common front, except in final defense of property. The translation of economic into political power was not all that easy, moreover, especially in a system of dispersed authority between nation and states, between executives and legislatures and judiciaries, among public and private agencies. The growing body of regulatory legislation—federal laws passed during the days of TR and Wilson, and state measures sponsored by La Follette and other progressive governors—established rough constraints on the economic and political power of business.

  What business had been supremely successful at doing was to maintain an ideology of free enterprise that made opposition to capitalism appear wrongheaded at best and subversive at worst. Thus the issue returned full circle to the question of whether the people as a whole could see through the propaganda, the stereotypes, the prejudices surrounding corporate power and privilege, so as to achieve a realistic grasp of affairs. The answer of leading pundits of the day was: no, they could not.

  H. L. Mencken had no doubts on the matter. The Sage of Baltimore had long dismissed the typical American as “homo boobiens.” Public opinion? It gushed out from mob fears, was “piped to central factories,” there “flavoured and coloured, and put into cans.” The average man? He did not want to be free, only to be safe in a well-managed penitentiary. Democracy? A fraud perpetrated by the upper class, full of delusion, sentimentality, envy, bamboozlement.

  Walter Lippmann’s view of democracy was more considered but almost as pessimistic. In Public Opinion, written at the start of the decade, he had used the parable of Plato’s cave to contend that average people mistook the pseudo-environment they saw for reality. The world had become too complex and remote for the mass public to understand. By the mid-twenties Lippmann was taking an even bleaker view of the situation. In The Phantom Public, he asserted that the “ideal of the omnicompetent, sovereign citizen” was a “false ideal,” and that none of the educational, ethical, populist, or socialist remedies for the situation could possibly work. Mencken welcomed Lippmann to the ranks of those who viewed the masses as ignorant and unteachable.

  Lippmann made one vital concession to the ideal of self-government. He granted that the mass public did have the capacity to make decisions between clearly visible leaders, issues, parties. The public could not creatively make complex policy, but to “support the Ins when things are going well; to support the Outs when they seem to be going badly, this, in spite of all that has been said about tweedledum and tweedledee, is the essence of popular government.” Lippmann betrayed his own growing conservatism when he added that the difference between the Ins and the Outs should not be profound; otherwise “the defeated minority would be constantly on the verge of rebellion.” Surely in the 1920s the problem was not too much conflict between parties, leaderships, and programs but too much blandness and consensus.

  Still, Lippmann posed the issue: Were the deprived people of the 1920s—nonunion workers, jobless women, blacks North and South, middle-class people unprepared for the competitive scramble, among others—capable of perceiving and defending their own interests against the compact majority of the Republicans? Were they able to see through the fog of stereotypes, self-promotion, and self-satisfaction surrounding the corporate elites?

  The answer depended first of all on the extent to which the opposition was organized and militant. This could hardly have been said of the Democratic party during the twenties. Irresolute, divided, underorganized, the Democracy did little to mobilize the masses; it seemed content to hold lengthy national conventions, sometimes help and sometimes oppose the GOP in Congress, and serve as an arena for bitter primary contests among Democratic aspirants. Nor did organized labor, the other great potential countervailing force against business power, assume the task of militant opposition. On the contrary, total union membership dwindled from almost 5 million in 1921 to less than 3.5 million in 1929; AFL rolls fell by a million during that period; even John L. Lewis’s mine workers shrank from 400,000 dues-paying members to about a fifth of that. Under William Green’s benign leadership, the AFL was far more interested in business unionism than in militant opposition or even vigorous industrial unionism. Women and Northern blacks had the right to vote but continued to be politically underorganized.

  Though united by common concerns and vibrant memories, women also remained divided over priorities and tactics. “Hard core feminists” stressed above all women’s rights, while “social feminists” made social reform their first priority. Women active in the National Woman’s Party favored independent political action, while female Democratic and Republican activists worked through their respective parties. Tension developed between the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee, essentially a lobbying vehicle, and the League of Women Voters, more oriented toward its grass-roots organizations. Women who had opposed their own suffrage continued to fight the movement and its legislative goals. Still, the women’s groups—through arduous lobbying and grass-roots efforts, and despite charges of “communism” and “socialism” from women’s groups as well as men’s—were able in 1921 to push through a lethargic Congress the Sheppard-Towner maternity and infancy bill, designed to aid the states in attacking the alarming level of maternal and infant mortality in the United States. It was in part a measure of the weakness of women’s political organization, however, that the act was allowed to expire by the end of the decade.

  The main hope for the Outs in the 1920s lay in the realm of ideas, and here the picture was far more mixed. The political opposition in America, no matter how defined, had sharply limited common ideology, core of ideas, or psychological basis of unity. If the literary and political world
had no equivalent to England’s Bloomsbury circle, with its fecund and eclectic concepts and conceits, American workers also had nothing to compare with Britain’s Workers Educational Association, with its grass-roots teaching of trade unionists by some of the finest university minds. The American left could find little basis for unity; not only did socialists, communists, and La Follette progressives attack one another doctrinally, but factions within each of these groupings fought among themselves with the kind of bitterness reserved for renegades. Writers on the left seemed to war on one another with even greater fury than did the radical politicos.

  The most biting attacks on American culture came less from socialists or social scientists than from novelists. After his years at Yale, in Greenwich Village and as a reporter and free-lance writer for popular magazines, Sinclair Lewis touched an American nerve with Main Street in 1920, and stung that nerve with Babbitt two years later. In these novels, Lewis satirized in merciless detail the flat, sluggish, and supremely dull lives of the conventional middle-class people he had known while growing up in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. His characters’ voices were often his own—for example, that of Carol Kennicott in Main Street, reflecting on the contrast between the portrait of small-town life in popular fiction—friendly, honest people, etc.—and reality: a “savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.”