American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  [Young on employee ownership]: quoted in Josephine Young Case and Everett Ncedham Case, Owen D. Young and American Enterprise (David R. Godine, 1982), p. 374.

  533 [“Homo boobiens”]: Mencken, Notes on Democracy (Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), p. 45. See also, Mencken, “On Being an American,” in Mencken, Prejudices: Third Series (Alfred A. Knopf, 1922), pp. 9–64.

  [Mencken on public opinion]: Notes on Democracy, p. 192.

  [Mencken on the average man]: ibid., p. 148.

  [Mencken on democracy]: ibid., p. 4 and passim.

  [Plato’s cave in Lippmann]: Lippmann, Public Opinion, op. cit., esp. ch. 1.

  [Lippmann on the “false ideal”]: Lippmann, The Phantom Public (Harcourt, Brace, 1925), pp. 38–39, quoted at p. 39.

  [Mencken’s welcome to Lippmann]: Mencken, “Katzenjammer” (review of The Phantom Public), American Mercury, vol. 7, no. 25 (January 1926), pp. 125–26.

  [Lippmann on public support of Ins and Outs]: Phantom Public, pp. 126, 127.

  534 [Democratic party, 1920s]: David Burner, The Politics of Provincialism (Alfred A. Knopf, 1968); James Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System (Brookings Institution, 1973), ch. 9.

  [Union membership, 1920s]: Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, op. cit., part 1, p. 177 (Series D 940–945); Morton S. Baratz, The Union and the Coal Industry (Yale University Press, 1955), p. 61.

  [AFL in the twenties]: James O. Morris, Conflict Within the AFL: A Study of Craft versus Industrial Unionism, 1901–1938 (Cornell University Press, 1958), chs. 1–5; Philip Taft, The A.F. of L from the Death of Gompers to the Merger (Harper & Bros., 1959).

  [Women’s politics in the 1920s]:). Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen (University of Illinois Press, 1973).

  535 [Leftist writers in the twenties]:Daniel Aaron: Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), chs. 4–7.

  [Lewis]: Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (McGraw-Hill, 1961).

  535 [Kennicott on fiction and reality of small-town life]: Lewis, Main Street (Hodder and Stoughton, 1920), p. 265.

  [Lewis’s Nobel Prize address]: reprinted in Lewis, The Man from Main Street: Selected Essays and Other Writings, 1904–1950, Harry E. Maule and Melville H. Cane, eds. (Random House, 1953), pp. 3–17. quoted at pp. 6–7.

  [Reaction to Nobel address]: Schorer, pp. 552–53.

  536 [Time review of Gantry]: “Bible Boar,” Time, vol. 9, no. 11 (March 14, 1927), pp. 38–40, quoted at p. 38.

  [Lippmann breach with Harcourt, Brace]: Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1980), p. 260.

  [Lippmann’s judgment of Lewis]: Lippmann, Men of Destiny (Macmillan, 1927), ch. 7.

  [Lewis-Dreiser feud]: Schorer, pp. 561–64.

  [Hicks on Manhattan Transfer]: Hicks, “The Politics of John Dos Passos,” Antioch Review, vol. 10, no. 1 (March 1950), pp. 85–98, quoted at p. 89.

  [Class and individual struggle in Dos Passos]: Lionel Trilling, “The America of John Dos Passos,” in Trilling, Speaking of Literature and Society, Diana Trilling, ed. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 108.

  [Influence of Whitman and Veblen]: Harry Levin, “Revisiting Dos Passos’ U.S.A.,” Massachusetts Review, vol. 20 (Autumn 1979), p. 404.

  [Dos Passos’s style and the modern temper]: Jack Diggins, “John Roderigo Dos Passos,” in Garraty, op. cit., p. 287. See also, Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (Doubleday, 1956), pp. 267ff.

  537 [Fitzgerald]: Arthur Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise (Houghton Mifflin, 1965); see alsoWilliam Wasserstrom, The Ironies of Progress: Henry Adams and the American Dream (Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), ch. 8.

  [Fitzgerald’s ambivalences towards the rich]: Henry Dan Piper, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), pp. 175–77.

  [“Let me tellyou about the very rich”]: “The Rich Boy,” in The Bodley Head Scott Fitzgerald (The Bodley Head, 1959–63), vol. 3, pp. 355–96, quoted at pp. 355–56.

  [Daisy’s voice “full of money”]: The Great Gatsby (Scribner’s, 1925), p. 144. [Eight servants and an “extra gardener”]: ibid., p. 47.

  [Fitzgerald on the Jazz Age]: Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” in Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, Edmund Wilson, ed. (New Directions, 1945), pp. 13–22, quoted at p. 14.

  [“Thai incredible pigsty”]: Anthony Patch in The Beautiful and the Damned, in Bodley Head Scott Fitzgerald, vol. 4, quoted at p. 56.

  [Sacco and Vanzetti]: Herbert B. Ehrmann, The Case That Will Not Die: Commonwealth vs. Sacco and Vanzetti (Little, Brown, 1969); David Felix, Protest: Sacco-Vanzetti and the Intellectuals (Indiana University Press, 1965).

  538 [Frankfurter in the Atlantic]:”The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti,” Atlantic Monthly, vol. 139 (March 1927), pp. 409–32. Frankfurter’s The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti (Little, Brown, 1927) is an expanded version of the Atlantic piece.

  [Lippmann on Sacco-Vanzetti]: New York World, August 8, 12, 19, 24, 1927; Steel, pp. 227–34.

  [“they are stronger… all right we are two nations”]: Dos Passos, The Big Money (Harcourt, Brace, 1933), pp. 461–62.

  16. THE VACANT WORKSHOP

  539 [Soviet primer]: M. Ilin, New Russia’s Primer: The Story of the Five-Year Plan, George S. Counts and Nucia P. Lodge, translators (Houghton Mifflin, 1931), pp. 5–9.

  540 [Florida land boom]: A. M. Sakolski, The Great American Land Bubble (Harper & Bros., 1932; reprinted by Johnson, 1966), ch. 16; Frederick Lewis Allen, Only yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen Twenties (Harper & Bros., 1931), ch. 11; John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash: 1929 (Houghton Mifflin, 1954), pp. 8–12; Bruce Bliven, “Where Ev’ry Prospect Pleases,” New Republic, vol. 38, no. 486 (March 26, 1924), pp. 116–18.

  [Ponzi]: Geoffrey Perrett, America in the Twenties (Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp. 356–57; “Mr. Ponzi and His ‘Ponzied Finance,’ ” Literary Digest, vol. 66, no. 8 (August 21, 1920), pp. 44–50.

  [Number of players in the market]: Galbraith, pp. 82–83; Allen, pp. 314–16.

  541 [Fishers’ move to Wall Street]: Galbraith, p. 19.

  [Morgan investment trust]: ibid., pp. 55–56.

  [Brisbane]: ibid., pp. 123–24; Perrett, p. 365.

  [Coolidge on Wall Street]: quoted in Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Great Depression, 1929–1941(Macmillan, 1952), p. 16.

  [Raskob]: Allen, pp. 302–3.

  [Rise in shares traded, 1928]: Galbraith. pp. 20, 22.

  [Rise in loans and interest rates]: ibid., pp. 24–27, esp. pp. 26–27.

  [President Hoover and the boom]: Hoover, pp. 16–19; David Burner, Herbert Hoover: A Public Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), pp. 246–47; Harris G. Warren, Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression (Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 102–3.

  [September halt]: Galbraith, pp. 87–92.

  Life in the Depression

  For causes of the Crash and the Depression, see Galbraith, op. cit.; Robert Sobel, Panic on Wall Street: A History of America’s Financial Disasters (Macmillan, 1968), ch. 11; Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz, The Great Contraction: 1929–1933 (Princeton University Press, 1965); Peter Temin, Did Monetary Forces Cause the Great Depression? (W. W. Norton, 1976); Elmus Wicker, “A Reconsideration of the Causes of the Banking Panic of 1930,” Journal of Economic History, vol. 40, no. 3 (September 1980), pp. 571–83; Ferdinand Pecora, Wall Street Under Oath (Simon and Schuster, 1939).

  542 [Trading volume, Black Thursday]: Galbraith, p. 104.

  [Meeting at Morgan]: ibid., p. 106; Sobel, pp. 376–77.

  [“A little distress selling”]: quoted in Galbraith, pp. 106–7.

  [Whitney on the floor]: ibid., pp. 107–8.

  [The crumbling dam]: ibid., pp. 110–16.

  [Galbraith on “the most devastating day”]: ibid., p. 116.

  [Times on “the most disastrous” day]: New York Times, October 30, 1929, p. 1.

  543 [Hoover on �
��a sound and prosperous basis”]: quoted in Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression (Times Books, 1984), p. 66.

  [“Practitioner of industrial rationalization”]: David Burner, “Herbert Clark Hoover,” in John Garraty, Encyclopedia of American Biography (Harper & Row, 1974), p. 535.

  [Hoover’s economic views]: McElvaine, pp. 56–62, 65–69; J. Joseph Huthmachcr and Warren I. Susman, eds., Herbert Hoover and the Crisis of American Capitalism (Schenkman, 1973); Peri E. Arnold, “The ‘Great Engineer’ as Administrator: Herbert Hoover and Modern Bureaucracy,” Review of Politics, vol. 42, no. 3 (July 1980), pp. 329–48.

  [GNP drop]: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), part 2, p. 224 (Series F 1–5).

  [Unemployment rise]: ibid., part 1, p. 126 (Series D 1–10).

  [National income drop]: Dixon Wecter, The Age of the Great Depression: 1929–1941 (Macmillan, 1948), p. 17.

  [Wecter on business failures, bank suspensions, and lost savings accounts]: ibid.

  [Unemployment in the cities]: William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–1932 (University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 247.

  [Weekly layoffs]: ibid.

  [Automobile industry turndown]: ibid., p. 248.

  [Chicago wheat prices]: Allen, Only Yesterday, op. cit., p. 343.

  544 [Effect of crash upon the vulnerable]: see Bernard Sternsher, ed., Hitting Home: The GreatDepression in Town and Country (Quadrangle, 1970); Mauritz A. Hallgren, Seeds of Revolt (Alfred A. Knopf, 1933); Clarence Enzler, Some Social Aspects of the Depression, 1930–1935 (Catholic University of America Press, 1939), ch. 3; Lorenzo J. Greene, “Economic Conditions Among Negroes in the South,” Journal of Negro History, vol. 64 (1979), pp.265–73; Lawrence Gordon, “A Brief Look at Blacks in Depression Mississippi, 1929–1934: An Eyewitness Account,” Journal of Negro History, vol. 64 (1979), pp. 377–90.

  [Hoover’s actions, early days following the Crash]: Galbraith, pp. 142–46; Hoover, Memoirs, op. cit., ch. 6; Warren, op. cit., ch. 9.

  [Ford’s pledge]: McElvaine, p. 73.

  544 [Burner on Hoover at the World Series]: Burner, Hoover: A Public Life, op. cit., p. 248.

  [Hoover’s use of “depression”]: ibid.

  [Hoover on passing the worst]: quoted in Hoover, p. 58.

  [Skepticism and resistance to Hoover]: see Warren, pp. 120–21.

  [Allen on visible effects of Depression]: Frederick Lewis Allen, Since Yesterday: The Nineteen-Thirties in America (Harper & Bros., 1940), pp. 59–60, quoted at p. 59.

  545 [Decline in strikes and union membership]: Historical Statistics, part 1, pp. 177 (Series D 940–945) and 179 (Series D 970–985); seealso Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933 (Houghton Mifflin, 1960), pp. 335, 341–42.

  [Buttons and billboards]: quoted in Sternsher, p. 28.

  [Anonymous on how he lost his job]: “I Lost My Job,” Outlook, vol. 160, no. 6 (March 1932), pp. 180–81, 184–85.

  546 [Suicides in the depression]: Galbraith, pp. 133–37; Enzler, pp. 74–78; “The Depression and Suicide,” Literary Digest, vol. 114, no. 2 (July 9, 1932), p. 7; Caroline Bird, The Invisible Scar (David McKay, 1966), pp. 8–9.

  [“If you can’t do something for me”]: quoted in Robert S. McElvaine, Down and Out in the Great Depression (University of North Carolina Press, 1983), p. 18.

  [Women in the depression]: Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (Twayne Publishers, 1982); Winifred Wandersee, Women’s Work and Family Values (Harvard University Press, 1981); Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Random House, 1969); Robert S. Lynd and Helen M. Lynd, Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (Harcourt, Brace, 1937), pp. 54–64, 179–86.

  [Marriage, divorce, birth rates, early thirties]: Ware, pp. 6–8; Bird, pp. 283–91; Lynd and Lynd, pp. 144–79.

  [Married women in the teaching profession]: Ware, p. 28.

  [Unemployment among women, 1930]: ibid., p. 36.

  [Blacks and jobs m the depression]: Raymond Wolters, Negroes and the Great Depression: The Problem of Economic Recovery (Greenwood Press, 1970), esp. pp. 90–94, 113–24; Erwin D. Hoffman, “The Genesis of the Modern Movement for Equal Rights in South Carolina, 1930–1939,” in Bernard Sternsher, ed., The Negro in Depression and War: Prelude to Revolution, 1930–1945 (Quadrangle, 1969), pp. 193–223; John Williams, “Struggle of the Thirties in the South,” in ibid., pp. 166–80; Robert Weaver, “Negro Labor Since 1929,” Journal of Negro History, vol. 35, no. 1 (January 1950), pp. 20–38, esp. pp. 20–23.

  [Social worker on white displacement of blacks]: Forrester B. Washington, quoted in Wolters, p. 113.

  [Black firemen of the Illinois Central]: ibid., p. 116.

  547 [Ilin]: New Russia’s Primer, op. cit., pp. 11–12.

  The Crisis of Ideas

  [“Where to? What next?”]: “The People, Yes,” in Carl Sandburg, Complete Poems (Harcourt, Brace, 1950), pp. 437–617, quoted at p. 617.

  [Lippmann on the arrival and departure of the public]: Lippmann, The Phantom Public (Harcourt, Brace, 1925), p. 65.

  548 [NAM and pre-crash crisis]: James W. Prothro, Dollar Decade: Business Ideas in the 1920s (Louisiana State University Press, 1954). pp. 212–13.

  [Edgerton’s assurance to Hoover]: quoted in ibid., p. 218.

  [Edgerton on the causes of poverty]: ibid., p. 213.

  [Sargent’s prescription for a return to prosperity]: ibid., p. 217.

  [Edgerton on “Socialistic” legislative proposals]: ibid., pp. 217–18.

  549 [Edgerton on crime]: ibid., p. 219.

  [Hoover and his “program “]: quoted in Warren, op. cit., p. 295.

  [Hoover and voluntarism]: see Burner, Hoover, op. cit., pp. 259–69; Hoover, Memoirs, op. cit., pp. 53–56, 174–75.

  550 [Hoover on Mellon’s proposed purge]: Memoirs, p. 30.

  [Hoover and the tariff]: Warren, pp. 84–92; Burner, pp. 297–99; Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Cabinet and the Presidency, 1920–1933 (Macmillan, 1952), ch. 41.

  551 [Public works and the RFC]: Warren, pp. 142–47, 194; James S. Olson, Herbert Hoover and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (Iowa State University Press, 1972).

  [Voluntarism and unemployment insurance in the AFL]: Bernstein, op. cit., pp. 91, 345–55.

  [Bernstein on the inadequacies of Gompersism]: ibid., p. 345.

  [Gompers on unemployment insurance]: quoted in ibid., p. 347.

  552 [AFL convention debates over unemployment insurance]: see Reports of Proceedings of the 50th (1930), 51st (1931), and 52nd (1932) Annual Conventions of the American Federation of Labor, 3 vols. (Law Reporter Printing, 1930–32); Bernstein, pp. 347–54.

  [Delegate on workers’ liberty and unemployment relief]: Victor Olander, quoted in Report of Proceedings (1930), p. 311.

  [Green on insurance, 1931]: Report of Proceedings (1931), p. 397.

  [1932 vote for insurance]: Report of Proceedings (1932), pp. 39–44, 325–60.

  [Socialist Party, early Depression]: David A. Shannon, The Socialist Party of America (Macmillan, 1955), ch. 9; Michael Harrington, “The Socialist Party,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., History of U.S. Political Parties (Chelsea House, 1973). vol. 3, pp. 2426–28.

  [Socialist Party membership, 1932]: Harrington, p. 2427.

  [Dos Passos on Socialist Party]: quoted in Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), p. 192.

  [Communist Party, early Depression]: Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party: A Critical History (1919–1957) (Beacon Press, 1957). ch. 5.

  [Dos Passos’s advice to the Communist Party]: quoted in Aaron, p. 192.

  553 [Democratic party, early 1930s]: David Burner, The Politics of Provincialism: The DemocraticParty in Transition, 1918–1932 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), pp. 244–45.

  [Smith’s movement to the right]:
Burner, Politics of Provincialism, p. 245; McElvaine, Great Depression, op. cit., pp. 123–24.

  [Davis on Hoover’s “socialism”]: Burner, Politics of Provincialism, p. 245.

  [Cox’s demand for balanced budget and sales tax]: ibid.

  [Graham on Democratic party]: Otis L. Graham, Jr., “The Democratic Party, 1932–1945,” in Schlesinger, vol. 3, pp. 1939–64, quoted at p. 1940.

  [Democrats and the sales tax]: Burner, Hoover, pp. 280–82.

  [La Guardia on sales tax bill]: quoted in ibid, p. 281.

  554 [1932 campaign for Democratic nomination]: Burner, Politics of Provincialism, pp. 246–50; McElvaine, pp. 123–28; James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (Harcourt, Brace, 1956), pp. 123–34.

  [FDR’s attack upon Hoover and Smith’s retort]: New York Times, April 8, 1932, p. 1; Richard O’Connor, The First Hurrah: A Biography of Alfred E. Smith (Putnam’s, 1970), p. 251.

  [Lippmann on FDR]: Lippmann, “Governor Roosevelt’s Candidacy,” New York Herald Tribune, January 8, 1932, reprinted in Lippmann, Interpretations: 1931–1932, Allan Nevins, ed. (Macmillan, 1932), pp. 260, 262.

  [Democratic convention, 1932]: O’Connor, pp. 255–63; Frank Freidel, Franklin Roosevelt: The Triumph (Little, Brown, 1956), ch. 20; Michael Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance (W. W. Norton, 1980), pp. 69–73.

  555 [McAdoo’s announcement]: quoted in Burns, p. 137.

  “Once I Built a Railroad, Made It Run”

  [Emerson on the rails]: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Young American,” in Emerson, Nature: Addresses and Lectures (Houghton, Mifflin, 1903; reprinted by AMS Press, 1979), pp. 363–95, quoted at p. 364.

  [American Locomotive sales]: William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream (Little, Brown, 1974). p. 34.