The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  In general, they found that Middletown learned new ways of behaving toward material things more rapidly than new habits addressed to persons and nonmaterial institutions. ‘Bathrooms and electricity have pervaded the homes of the city more rapidly than innovations in the personal adjustments between husband and wife or between parents and children. The automobile has changed leisure-time life more drastically than have the literature courses taught the young, and tool-using vocational courses have appeared more rapidly in the school curriculum than changes in the arts courses. The development of the linotype and radio are changing the technique of winning political elections [more] than developments in the art of speechmaking or in Middletown’s method of voting. The Y.M.C.A., built about a gymnasium, exhibits more change in Middletown’s religious institutions than do the weekly sermons of its ministers.’28 A classic area of personal life that had hardly changed at all, certainly since the 1890s, which the Lynds used as the basis for their comparison, was the ‘demand for romantic love as the only valid basis for marriage…. Middletown adults appear to regard romance in marriage as something which, like their religion, must be believed in to hold society together. Children are assured by their elders that “love” is an unanalysable mystery that “just happens.” … And yet, although theoretically this “thrill” is all-sufficient to insure permanent happiness, actually talks with mothers revealed constantly that, particularly among the business group, they were concerned with certain other factors.’ Chief among these was the ability to earn a living. And in fact the Lynds found that Middletown was far more concerned with money in the 1920s than it had been in 1890. In 1890 vicinage (the old word for neighbourhood) had mattered most to people; by the 1920s financial and social status were much more closely allied, aided by the automobile.29

  Cars, movies, and the radio had completely changed leisure time. The passion with which the car was received was extraordinary. Families in Middletown told the Lynds that they would forgo clothes to buy a car. Many preferred to own a car rather than a bathtub (and the Lynds did find homes where bathtubs were absent but cars were not). Many said the car held the family together. On the other hand, the ‘Sunday drive’ was hurting church attendance. But perhaps the most succinct way of summing up life in Middletown, and the changes it had undergone, came in the table the Lynds presented at the end of their book. This was an analysis of the percentage news space that the local newspapers devoted to various issues in 1890 and 1923:30

  Certain issues we regard as modern were already developing. Sex education was one; the increased role (and purchasing power) of youth was another (these two matters not being entirely unrelated, of course). The Lynds also spent quite a bit of time considering differences between the two classes in IQ. Middletown had twelve schools; five drew their pupils from both working-class and business-class parents, but the other seven were sufficiently segregated by class to allow the Lynds to make a comparison. Tests on 387 first-grade (i.e., six-year-old) children revealed the following picture:31

  The Lynds showed some awareness of the controversies surrounding intelligence testing (for example, by using the phrase ‘intelligent test’ in quotes) but nonetheless concluded that there were ‘differences in the equipment with which, at any given time, children must grapple with their world.’

  The Lynds had produced sociology, anthropology – and a new form of history. Their pictured lacked the passion and the wit of Babbitt, but Middletown was recognisably the same beast as Zenith. The book’s defining discovery was that there were two classes, not three, in a typical American town. It was this which fuelled the social mobility that was to set America apart from Europe in the most fruitful way.

  Babbitt’s Middletown may have been typical America, intellectually, sociologically and statistically. But it wasn’t the only America. Not everyone was in the ‘digest’ business, and not everyone was in a hurry or too busy to read, or needed others to make up his mind for him. These ‘other’ Americas could be identified by place: in particular Paris, Greenwich Village, and Harlem, black Harlem. Americans flocked to Paris in the 1920s: the dollar was strong, and modernism far from dead. Ernest Hemingway was there for a short time, as was F Scott Fitzgerald. It was an American, Sylvia Beach, who published Ulysses. Despite such literary stars, the American influx into the French capital (and the French Riviera) was more a matter of social than intellectual history. Harlem and Greenwich Village were different.

  When the British writer Sir Osbert Sitwell arrived in New York in 1926, he found that ‘America was strenuously observing Prohibition by staying sempiternally [everlastingly] and gloriously drunk.’ Love of liberty, he noted, ‘made it almost a duty to drink more than was wise,’ and it was not unusual, after a party, ‘to see young men stacked in the hall ready for delivery at home by taxicab.’32 But he had an even bigger surprise when, after an evening spent at Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt’s ‘Fifth Avenue Chateau,’ he was taken uptown, to A’Lelia Walker’s establishment on 136th Street, in Harlem. The soirées of A’Lelia, the beneficiary of a fortune that stemmed from a formula to ‘de-kink’ Negro hair, were famous by this time. Her apartment was lavishly decorated, one room tented in the ‘Parisian style of the Second Empire,’ others being filled, inter alia, with a golden grand piano and a gold-plated organ, yet another dedicated as her personal chapel.33 Here visiting grandees, as often as not from Europe, could mix with some of the most intellectually prominent blacks: W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Charles Johnson, Paul Robeson, Alain Locke. A’Lelia’s was the home of what came to be called ‘the new Negro,’ and hers was by no means the only establishment of its kind.34 In the wake of the Great War, when American blacks in segregated units had fought with distinction, there was a period of optimism in race relations (on the East Coast, if not in the South), partly caused by and partly reflected in what became known as the Harlem Renaissance, a period of about a decade and a half when black American writers, actors, and musicians made their collective mark on the country’s intellectual landscape and stamped one place, Harlem, with a vitality, a period of chic, never seen before or since.

  The Harlem Renaissance began with the fusion of two bohemias, when the talents of Greenwich Village began at last to appreciate the abilities of black actors. In 1920 Charles Gilpin, a black actor, starred in Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones, establishing a vogue.35 Du Bois had always argued that the way ahead for the Negro in America lay with its ‘talented tenth,’ its elite, and the Harlem Renaissance was the perfect expression of this argument in action: for a decade or so there was a flowering of black stage stars who all shared the belief that arts and letters had the power to transform society. But the renaissance also had its political edge. Race riots in the South and Midwest helped produce the feeling that Harlem was a place of refuge. Black socialists published magazines like the Messenger (‘The only magazine of scientific radicalism in the world published by Negroes’).36 And there was Marcus Garvey, ‘a little sawed-off, hammered down black man’ from Jamaica, whose Pan-African movement urged the return of all blacks to Africa, Liberia in particular. He was very much part of Harlem life until his arrest for mail fraud in 1923.37

  But it was literature, theatre, music, poetry, and painting that held most people’s hearts. Clubs sprang up everywhere, attracting jazz musicians like Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Edward Kennedy ‘Duke’ Ellington, Scott Joplin, and later, Fletcher Henderson. Nick La Rocca’s Original Dixieland Jazz Band made the first jazz recording in New York in 1917, ‘Dark Town Strutter’s Ball.’38 The renaissance threw up a raft of blacks – novelists, poets, sociologists, performers – whose very numbers conveyed an optimism about race even when their writings belied that optimism, people like Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Jessie Fauset. McKay’s Harlem Shadows, for instance, portrayed Harlem as a lush tropical forest hiding (spiritual) decay and stagnation.39 Jean Toomer’s Cane was part poem, part essay, part novel, with an overall elegiac tone, lamenting the legacy of slaver
y, the ‘racial twilight’ in which blacks found themselves: they can’t – won’t – go back, and don’t know the way forward.40 Alain Locke was a sort of impresario, an Apollinaire of Harlem, whose New Negro, published in 1925, was an anthology of poetry and prose.41 Charles Johnson was a sociologist who had studied under Robert Park at Chicago, who organised intellectual gatherings at the Civic Club, attended by Eugene O’Neill, Carl van Doren, and Albert Barnes, who spoke about African art. Johnson was also the editor of a new black magazine to put alongside Du Bois’s Crisis. It was called Opportunity, its very name reflecting the optimism of the time.42

  The high point and low point of the Harlem Renaissance is generally agreed to have been the publication in 1926 of Nigger Heaven, by Carl Van Vechten, described as ‘Harlem’s most enthusiastic and ubiquitous Nordic.’ Van Vechten’s novel is scarcely read now, though sales soared when it was first released by Alfred A. Knopf. Its theme was High Harlem, the Harlem that Van Vechten knew and adored but was, when it came down to it, an outsider in. He thought life in Harlem was perfect, that the blacks there were, as he put it, ‘happy in their skin,’ reflecting the current view that African Americans had a vitality that whites lacked, or were losing with the decadence of their civilisation. All that may have been acceptable, just; but Van Vechten was an outsider, and he made two unforgivable mistakes which vitiated his book: he ignored the problems that even sophisticated blacks knew had not gone away; and in his use of slang, and his comments about the ‘black gait’ and so forth, though he may have thought he was being ‘anthropological,’ he came across as condescending and embarrassing. Nigger Heaven was not at all ironic.43

  The Harlem Renaissance barely survived the 1929 Wall Street debacle and the subsequent depression. Novels and poems continued to be put out, but the economic constraints caused a return to deeper segregation and a recrudescence of lynchings, and against such a background it was difficult to maintain the sense of optimism that had characterised the renaissance. Art, the arts, might have offered temporary respite from the realities of life, but as the 1930s matured, American blacks could no longer hide from the bleak truth: despite the renaissance, underneath it all nothing had changed.

  The wider significance of the Harlem Renaissance was twofold: in the first place, that it occurred at all, at the very time that the scientific racists were introducing the Immigration Restriction Act and trying to prove that blacks were simply not capable of producing the sort of work that characterised the renaissance; and second, that once it was over, it was so comprehensively forgotten. That too was a measure of racism.*

  In a sense, by the 1920s the great days of Greenwich Village were over. It was still a refuge for artists, and still home to scores of little literary magazines, some of which, like the Masses and the Little Review, enjoyed a period of success, and others, like the New Republic and the Nation, are still with us. The Provincetown Players and the Washington Square Players still performed there in season, including the early plays of O’Neill. But after the war the costume balls and more colourful excesses of bohemia now seemed far too frivolous. The spirit of the Village lived on, however, or perhaps it would be truer to say that it matured, in the 1920s, in a magazine that reflected the Village’s values by flying in the face of Time, Reader’s Digest, Middletown, and the rest. This was the New Yorker.

  The fact that the New Yorker could follow this bold course owed everything to its editor, Harold Ross. In many respects Ross was an improbable editor – for a start, he wasn’t a New Yorker. Born in Colorado, he was a ‘poker-playing, hard-swearing’ reporter who had earlier edited the Stars and Stripes, the U.S. Army’s newspaper, published from Paris during the war years. That experience had given Ross a measure of sophistication and scepticism, and when he returned to New York he joined the circle of literary types who lunched at the famous Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel on Forty-Fourth Street. Ross became friendly with Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Marc Connelly, Franklin P. Adams, and Edna Ferber. Less famous but more important for Ross’s career was the poker game that some of the Round Table types took part in on Saturday evenings. It was over poker that Ross met Raoul Fleischmann, a baking millionaire, who agreed to bankroll his idea for a satirical weekly.44

  Like all the other publishing ventures started in the 1920s, the New Yorker did not prosper at first. Initially, sales of around 70,000 copies were anticipated, so when the first issue, appearing in February 1925, sold only 15,000, and the second dropped to 8,000, the future did not look good. Success only came, according to another legend, when a curious package arrived in the office, unsolicited. This was a series of articles, written by hand but extravagantly and expensively bound in leather. The author, it turned out, was a debutante, Ellin Mackay, who belonged to one of New York’s society families. Making the most of this, Ross published one of the articles with the headline, ‘Why We Go to Cabarets.’ The thrust of the article, which was wittily written, was that New York nightlife was very different, and much more fun, than the stiff society affairs organised for her by Miss Mackay’s parents. The knowing tone was exactly what Ross had in mind, and appealed to other writers: E. B. White joined the New Yorker in 1926, James Thurber a year later, followed by John O’Hara, Ogden Nash, and S. J. Perelman.45

  But a dry wit and a knowing sophistication were not the only qualities of the New Yorker; there was a serious side, too, as reflected in particular in its profiles. Time sought to tell the news through people, successful people. The New Yorker, on the other hand, elevated the profile to, if not an art form, a high form of craft. In the subsequent years, a New Yorker reporter might spend five months on a single article: three months collecting information, a month writing and a month revising (all this before the fact checkers were called in). ‘Everything from bank references to urinalysis was called for and the articles would run for pages.’46 The New Yorker developed a devoted following, its high point being reached immediately after World War II, when it sold nearly 400,000 copies weekly. In the early 1940s, no fewer than four comedies based on New Yorker articles were playing on Broadway: Mr and Mrs North, Pal Joey, Life with Father and My Sister Eileen.47

  The way radio developed in Britain reflected a real fear that it might have a bad influence on levels of information and taste, and there was a strong feeling, in the ‘establishment,’ that central guidance was needed. ‘Chaos in the ether’ was to be avoided at all costs.48 To begin with, a few large companies were granted licences to broadcast experimentally. After that, a syndicate of firms which manufactured radio sets was founded, financed by the Post Office, which levied a 10-shilling (50 pence) fee payable by those who bought the sets. Adverts were dispensed with as ‘vulgar and intrusive.’49 This, the British Broadcasting Company, lasted for four years. After that, the Corporation came into being, granted a royal charter to protect it from political interference.

  In the early days the notion of the BBC as a public service was very uncertain. All manner of forces were against it. For a start, the country’s mood was volatile. Britain was still in financial straits, recovering from the war, and 1.5 million were unemployed. Lloyd George’s coalition government was far from popular, and these overall conditions led to the general strike of 1926, which itself imperilled the BBC. A second factor was the press, which viewed the BBC as a threat, to such an extent that no news bulletins were allowed before 7:00 P.M. Third, no one had any idea what sort of material should be broadcast – audience research didn’t begin until 1936, and ‘listening in,’ as it was called, was believed by many to be a fad that would soon pass.50 Then there was the character of the Corporation’s first director, a thirty-three-year-old Scottish engineer named John Reith. Reith, a high-minded Scottish Presbyterian, never doubted for a moment that radio should be far more than entertainment, that it should also educate and inform. As a result, the BBC gave its audience what Reith believed was needed rather than what the people wanted. Despite this high-handed and high-minded approach, the BBC proved popular. From a staff of 4
in the first year, it grew to employ 177 twelve months after that. In fact, the growth of radio actually outstripped that of television a generation or so later, as these figures show:51

  To be set against this crude measure of popularity, there was a crop of worries about the intellectual damage radio might do. ‘Instead of solitary thought,’ said the headmaster of Rugby School, ‘people would listen in to what was said to millions of people, which could not be the best of things.’52 Another worry was that radio would make people ‘more passive,’ producing ‘all-alike girls.’ Still others feared radio would keep husbands at home, adversely affecting pub attendance. In 1925 Punch magazine, referring to the new culture established by the BBC, labelled it as ‘middlebrow.’53

  Editorially speaking, the BBC’s first test arrived in 1926 with the onset of the General Strike. Most newspapers were included in the strike, so for a time the BBC was virtually the only source of news. Reith responded by ordering five bulletins a day instead of the usual one. The accepted view now is that Reith complied more or less with what the government asked, in particular putting an optimistic gloss on government policy and actions. In his official history of the BBC, Professor Asa Briggs gives this example of an item broadcast during the strike: ‘Anyone who is suffering from “strike depression” can do no better than to pay a visit to “RSVP” [a show] at the New Vaudeville Theatre.’ Not everyone thought that Reith was a stool pigeon, however. Winston Churchill, then chancellor of the exchequer, actually thought the BBC should be taken over. He saw it as a rival to his own British Gazette, edited from his official address at II Downing Street.54 Churchill failed, but people had seen the danger, and it was partly as a result of this tussle that the ‘C’ in BBC was changed in 1927 from Company to Corporation, protected by royal charter. The General Strike was therefore a watershed for the BBC in the realm of politics. Before the strike, politics (and other ‘controversial’ subjects) were avoided entirely, but the strike changed all that, and in 1929 The Week in Parliament was launched. Three years later, the corporation began its own news-gathering organisation.55