New World Coming

The 1920s and the Making of Modern America

Nathan Miller

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780684852959
• eBook ISBN: 9781439131046
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

"To an astonishing extent, the 1920s resemble our own era, at the turn of the twenty-first century; in many ways that decade was a precursor of modern excesses....Much of what we consider contemporary actually began in the Twenties." -- from the Introduction The images of the 1920s have been indelibly imprinted on the American imagination: jazz, bootleggers, flappers, talkies, the Model T Ford, Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh's history-making flight over the Atlantic.But it was also the era of the hard-won vote for women, racial injustice, censorship, widespread social conflict, and the birth of organized crime. Bookended by the easy living of the Jazz Age, when the booze and money flowed seemingly without end, and the crash of '29 that led to breadlines and a level of human suffering not seen since World War I, New World Coming is a lively, entertaining, and all-encompassing chronological account of an age that defined America. Chronicling what he views as the most consequential decade of the past century, Nathan Miller -- an award-winning journalist and five-time Pulitzer nominee -- paints a vivid portrait of the 1920s, focusing on the men and women who shaped that extraordinary time, including, ironically, three of America's most conservative presidents: Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.In the Twenties, the American people soared higher and fell lower than they ever had before. As unprecedented economic prosperity and sweeping social change dazzled the public, the sensibilities and restrictions of the nineteenth century vanished, and many of the institutions, ideas, and preoccupations of our own age emerged. With scandal, sex, and crime the lifeblood of the tabloids, the contemporary culture of celebrity and sensationalism took root and journalism became popular entertainment. By discarding Victorian idealism and embracing twentieth-century skepticism, America became, for the first time, thoroughly modernized. There is hardly a dimension of our present world, from government to popular culture, that doesn't trace its roots to the 1920s, and few decades are more intriguing or significant today.The first comprehensive view of the era since Only Yesterday, Frederick Lewis Allen's 1931 classic, New World Coming reveals this remarkable age from the vantage point of nearly a century later. It's all here -- the images and the icons, the celebrities and the legends -- in a book that will resonate with history readers, 1920s aficionados, and Americans everywhere.

CHAPTER 1

“The Personal Instrument
ofGod”

Wearing an old golf cap, Woodrow Wilson watched with his wife, Edith, from the bridge of the troopship George Washington as the pewter gray towers of Manhattan faded into the winter mists. It was December 18, 1918, little more than a month after the Armistice. Large crowds cheered the president as he left for a peace conference in Paris that was to create the new world eagerly awaited by Scott Fitzgerald and his generation. Hundreds of vessels sounded their whistles in an impromptu salute as the former German liner passed the Statue of Liberty. Six escorting U.S. Navy destroyers took up station as the huge ship reached the open Atlantic and picked up speed.

For a day, the ocean was rough and the weather boisterous, but after the George Washington entered the Gulf Stream, conditions moderated. Under the advice of his personal physician, Rear Admiral Cary T. Grayson, every day Wilson walked two miles about the promenade deck with the first lady at his side. Wilson’s long-jawed, long-toothed face often cracked into a smile at some joke she made. A small boy, the son of the Italian ambassador, jumped up from his deck chair and briskly saluted each time the couple passed. Wilson soon assured the lad that one salute a day was enough.

Wilson and Edith Bolling Galt had married only three years before, having met following the death in 1914 of the president’s first wife, the gentle Ellen Wilson. Sometimes he called Edith, sixteen years his junior, “Little Girl.” The second Mrs. Wilson was a descendant of Pocahontas and the widow of a wealthy Washington jeweler.^* Stylishly dressed by Worth of Paris, statuesque and vivacious, she brought a new lightness into the former professor’s arid life. An amused Secret Service man reported seeing the prim Wilson leap into the air the morning after the wedding, click his heels, and burst into the popular song “Oh, You Beautiful Doll.”

Wilson was the first American president to leave the Western Hemisphere while in office. Lifeboat drills and the threat of floating mines added spice to the voyage. Enjoying his moments of leisure, he put off a meeting with “the Inquiry,” the group of scholars who had produced nearly two thousand reports for him on subjects likely to come up at the peace conference, until the ship was steaming past the green slopes of the Azores.

The Virginia-born Wilson was the product of two centuries of Calvinist divines. He grew up steeped in righteousness and exuded moral certainty. Wilson’s father had wished his son to follow him into the Presbyterian ministry, but the young man’s own ideal was William Ewart Gladstone, the British statesman and prime minister. As a child, he had practiced speechmaking before the empty pews of his father’s church so he could bring great thoughts to the world. Wilson briefly practiced law and yearned for a political career but, lacking the stomach for the rough and tumble of politics, switched to teaching government and history, first at Johns Hopkins, then Bryn Mawr and Wesleyan and finally Princeton, his alma mater.

Wilson’s efforts as Princeton’s president to democratize the university were well publicized and in 1910, New Jersey’s Democratic bosses, looking for a reformer as a front man, picked him as their gubernatorial candidate. Two years later, he was elected president when former president Theodore Roosevelt, convinced that William Howard Taft, his conservative successor, was undoing the progressive reforms made during his administration, tried to recapture the White House on the third-party Bull Moose ticket and split the Republican vote.

The Wilson administration represented the full flowering of the Progressive Era—that extraordinary wave of reform that swept the United States in the early years of the twentieth century. Although he had denounced Roosevelt’s platform as dangerously radical, Wilson boldly hijacked most of it. Much to the anger of the Rough Rider, he made it the heart of his own plan for reform, the New Freedom. The Federal Reserve System, the Federal Trade Commission, lower tariffs, the income tax, direct election of U.S. senators, and votes for women—all the things reformers had long dreamed about—were enacted into law during his first term or were on the verge of approval. On the other hand, Wilson, who had grown up in the post-Civil War South, was a disappointment to American blacks. Although he had told them during the campaign that “they may count upon me for absolute fair dealing,” he brought racial segregation to the federal government offices in Washington where clerks of both races had previously worked together without friction. And he dismissed every black holding a postmastership in the South on grounds that no white man should be forced to work for a black.

Socialists, anarchists, social workers, suffragettes, feminists, union organizers—reformers of every stripe—thrived in the progressive years. They spoke in terms of crusades and used words like “sinful,” “wicked,” and “obligation.” With evangelical fervor, they waged campaigns against predatory monopolies, corrupt political machines, foul tenements, tainted food and drugs, and the evils of alcohol and child labor. The progressives created the modern state, which regulated corporations, directed the economy, and protected the interests of workers and consumers against the excesses of capitalism.^*

Free-wheeling young Americans—the “moderns”—sloughed off Victorian prudery in literature, psychology, drama, and art. “Realism” was an agent of social protest. New magazines, from the Socialist Masses to the arty Dial, mixed politics and literature. Literary clubs, little theaters, and experimental schools were organized all over the country. Alfred Stieglitz’s “291” gallery on the top floor of a Fifth Avenue brownstone and the Armory Show of 1913 introduced Americans to the latest art forms from Europe and the United States and signaled the decline of traditional painting and sculpture. People came to “291” to see “the craziest painters in America” and Stieglitz hectored them into becoming believers in modern art. He exhibited the work of John Marin, Abraham Walkowitz, Max Weber, Marsden Hartley, and Arthur Dove, among others. Without subsidies from Stieglitz and his friends, many of these artists would have starved.

Young people from all over the country flocked to a colorful bohemia that flourished in the neighborhood below Washington Square known as Greenwich Village, where they were free “to be themselves.” Back alley stables became studios and decayed mansions with surrealistic plumbing provided rookeries for artists, writers, and radicals. A furnished hall-bedroom could be rented for $2 or $3 a week. Long-haired men and short-haired women pursued free love, free speech, Socialism, and politically engaged art, while joyfully assaulting the bedrock values of bourgeois culture.

Looking homeward from Europe, Idaho-born Ezra Pound foresaw an American cultural upheaval that would “make the Italian Renaissance look like a tempest in a teapot.” Isadora Duncan was revolutionizing dance. Georgia O’Keeffe made an impression not only as a painter but as a model for Stieglitz’s photographs and later became his wife. The American theater was infused with a fresh energy when the Provincetown Playhouse presented the early one-act plays of Eugene O’Neill in an old stable in MacDougal Street. Pretty, redheaded Edna St. Vincent Millay came down from Vassar to flout convention in her life and poetry and to burn her candle at both ends. Bohemian women slept with men they had no intention of marrying—and with other women, too. Margaret Sanger, fresh from prison where she had been jailed for propagandizing for birth control, extolled the joys of the flesh and ridiculed the traditional sense of sin. Gay men and lesbians were prominent in Village culture although male homosexuals were still largely closeted. Sigmund Freud’s studies of dreams and the unconscious were endlessly discussed—if not completely understood. The idea of free love was so prevalent that one bohemian couple was too embarrassed to tell friends they were married.

The Village attracted the aspiring, the ambitious, the angry, the exhibitionist, the curious, and those along for the ride. Ideas and ambitions clashed at the tables in Polly Holliday’s restaurant and in saloons like the Working Girls’ Home and at the salon of wealthy Mabel Dodge, a pretty, plump heiress from Buffalo who originated “radical chic.” Both the Armory Show and a giant pageant held in Madison Square Garden to dramatize a strike in the silk mills of Paterson, New Jersey, were incubated in Mrs. Dodge’s drawing room at 23 Fifth Avenue.

Frequent guests at her “evenings” included muckraker Lincoln Steffens, and his protégés Walter Lippmann and John Reed (soon to be the hostess’s bedmate), both of the Harvard class of 1910;^*gnomelike Dr. A. A. Brill, Freud’s leading disciple in the United States; Eugene O’Neill; Floyd Dell, chronicler of Village life and loves; one-eyed “Big Bill” Haywood, leader of the radical Industrial Workers of the World, and his companion, fiery labor organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn; Emma Goldman, anarchist and advocate of free love; Randolph Bourne, the hideously deformed but brilliant conversationalist and essayist; artists; Vassar girls; poets; stage designers; and those who came merely for the food and drink. “Whether in literature, plastic art, the labor movement … we find an instinct to loosen up the old forms and traditions, to dynamite the baked and hardened earth so that fresh flowers can grow,” proclaimed the writer Hutchins Hapgood. But American society could not sustain, for more than a limited time, the tension and turbulence of reform. Some of these romantic rebels were to be buried in the wreckage.

In the West, the IWW was active among the bindle stiffs, loggers, silver and copper miners, and other members of the postfrontier underclass. Unlike the conservative American Federation of Labor, an organization of craft unions and skilled workers, the IWW supported the idea of “one big union” in which in all workers, both skilled and unskilled, would be united. Mainstream Americans, however, were badly frightened by the Wobblies’^* rhetoric of class warfare and reputation for violence.

Europe, in these same years, enjoyed unprecedented growth and prosperity, a circumstance made possible by an equally unprecedented degree of cooperation and integration of the economies of the major nations of the Continent and the United States. Political leaders, industrialists, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens all agreed that such cooperation made war impossible. Nevertheless, William James, the American philosopher, warned in his 1910 essay “The Moral Equivalent of War” that “modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory as his ancestors.” In August 1914, the wisdom of James’s observation was proven when young men in European countries eagerly trooped to the recruiting stations as if they were going to a sports event.

In the United States, progressive intellectuals, as the self-appointed custodians of ideals and fundamental moral principles, were shocked by the unstoppable rush to war in Europe. The Europeans, said the New York Times on August 2, 1914, seemed to have “reverted to the condition of savage tribes.” Few ordinary Americans were concerned with the outbreak of war, however. They were engrossed in the exploits of the Boston Braves, who were in last place in the National League on July 4, and then went on to win the pennant.

Wilson, faithful to his party’s traditional isolationism, opposed American intervention in the struggle, fearing that militarism would infringe upon the campaign for reform. Power must yield to morality, he said, and armed conflict to the force of public opinion. The tide turned when huge British and French orders for American war matériel and foodstuffs financed by private bankers—the so-called Morgan loans—boosted the depressed economy and, together with Allied propaganda about supposed German atrocities, created public sympathy for the Allied cause. Wilson continued to oppose intervention and was narrowly reelected in 1916 with the campaign slogan “He Kept Us out of War.” But in April 1917, in the face of repeated German violations of American neutrality, he led the nation into the conflict “to make the world safe for democracy ”—just in time to prevent the defeat of the exhausted British and French.

A mobilization designed to harness the nation’s immense and sprawling economy to the needs of war created a revolution that fulfilled progressive dreams. New federal agencies regulated industry, agriculture, and the railroads, reined in the power of capital, and augmented the rights of labor—causing establishment intellectuals such as John Dewey to support the war. The war, he said, would bring about the “democratization of industry.” The Food Administration, headed by Herbert C. Hoover, a brilliant mining engineer, directed the production and distribution of prodigious amounts of food. William G. McAdoo, Wilson’s son-in-law and treasury secretary, overhauled the chaotic rail industry. Labor won the right to collective bargaining and an eight-hour day.

World War I was the great turning point of modern history. Over 15 million lives were lost in the struggle, including those of about 130,000 Americans. The universal presumptions of the Victorian Age—progress, order, and culture—were blown to bits. For those who had endured the savagery of the fighting and those who lost husbands, fathers, brothers, lovers, and friends, life would never be the same again. The war ushered in a world of violent change that produced the leviathan state, consumerism, mass culture and mass communications, and the global economy—an era in which America would be supreme.

With Germany’s defeat looming in 1918, Wilson envisioned a liberal peace, a peace without victory, a peace that would restore Germany to its rightful place in a world of free trade and international harmony. It would be capped by an international organization—the League of Nations—to provide collective security and prevent future wars. Essentially, Wilson’s plan—the Fourteen Points—was designed to project abroad the progressive and reformist ideals of the New Freedom. America, said Wilson, “is the only idealistic nation in the world,” implying that the world should be remade in the American image. Wilson was also determined to prevent the spread of Bolshevism, which had seized power in Russia in November 1917 after the overthrow of the Czarist regime.

To millions of Americans war’s end meant the completion of a great and noble task and the beginning of a bright future. “You carry with you the hearts and hopes and dreams and desires of millions of your fellow Americans,” Stockton Axson, the brother of Wilson’s first wife, wrote him as he departed for Paris. “Your vision of the new world that should spring from the ashes of the old is all that had made the world tolerable to many of us. That vision has removed the sting, has filled our imaginations, and had made the war not a tragedy but a sacrament. Nothing but a new world is worth the purchase price of a war.”

Unhappily, victory fed Wilson’s messianism and he had already betrayed these dreams. Although aides advised him to remain at home to avoid being pressured into hasty decisions, he insisted on going to Paris. And rejecting the political bipartisanship that had prevailed during the war, Wilson shocked the Republicans by calling for the election of a Democratic Congress in 1918 to give him a free hand in making the peace. The nation would have been far better served had Wilson asked for a bipartisan Congress of both Democrats and Republicans who would support him.

Speaking for the angry Republicans, Theodore Roosevelt rose from his sickbed to address a rally at Carnegie Hall in New York City on October 28, 1918, in which he attacked Wilson for ignoring the loyal opposition in the peacemaking process. “We can pay with the blood of our hearts’ dearest, but that is all we are to be allowed,” thundered the former president, whose own youngest son, Quentin, had been killed in an air battle over France only a few months before.

Roosevelt, stung by Wilson’s refusal to allow him to lead a volunteer division like the Rough Riders to France as well as the pirating of his 1912 platform, had earlier denounced Wilson’s “peace without victory.” He urged Congress to pass a resolution demanding the unconditional surrender of Germany because it would “safeguard the world for at least a generation to come from another attempt by the Germans to secure world domination.” Roosevelt was cautiously affirmative about the League of Nations—but with reservations that would prevent any international body from overriding the Constitution and such fundamental principles of American nationalism as the Monroe Doctrine. In his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end the Russo-Japanese War, he had proposed a League of Peace that foreshadowed Wilson’s League of Nations, but little attention had been paid to it at the time.

Wilson was rebuked at the polls in November as the Republicans narrowly won control of both houses of Congress—the Senate by only a single vote. Henry Ford, the automobile magnate, who had run as a pro-League Democrat in Michigan at Wilson’s personal request, lost the race by only eight thousand votes.^*Had Ford won, the Senate would have been tied forty-eight to forty-eight and the vice president, Thomas R. Marshall, a Democrat, would have cast the deciding vote. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which made recommendations to the full Senate on all treaties, would have had a Democratic chairman and majority.

The president’s usually shrewd political judgment failed him. Rather than conciliating the opposition, he obstinately refused even to include pro-League Republicans such as former President William H. Taft and ex-Secretary of State Elihu Root in the American delegation to Paris. In the words of his principal biographer, Arthur S. Link, he acted “like a divine-right monarch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”^†

As Wilson boarded the George Washington, Roosevelt’s imprecations resounded about his head. “Mr. Wilson has no authority whatever to speak for the American people. His leadership has just been emphatically repudiated by them.” It was the old lion’s last roar. Worn out by sixty years of strenuous living, Roosevelt died peacefully in his sleep on January 6, 1919. “Death had to take him sleeping,” said Vice President Marshall, “for if Roosevelt had been awake, there would have been a fight.” Wilson’s reaction to his great rival’s death, noted a reporter, was surprise, then pity, and finally “transcendent triumph.”

Woodrow Wilson may have suffered a setback at home, but in Europe he was greeted by frenzied throngs who hailed him as the champion of justice and the apostle of peace. In remote villages, peasants burned candles before his picture. A hundred thousand people packed the Place de la Concorde in front of the Hôtel de Crillon, the headquarters of the American delegation in Paris, to cheer him, many waving tiny American flags. A U.S. Army captain named Harry S Truman later said he never again saw anything like the welcome the French gave Wilson in 1919. Critics grumbled, however, that this acclaim only fed the president’s vanity and messiah complex.

Paris was in a carnival mood. The city teemed with supplicants and suitors: Macedonians, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Slovaks and Czechs, Arabs in flowing robes shepherded by a craggy-faced little Englishman named Lawrence; Zionists, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and tiny men from Indochina with wispy beards—all wishing something at the expense of their neighbors. The world tingled with expectation as it awaited for a new age to be born in the Salon de l’Horloge, the gathering place of the victorious Allied leaders. Europe was in chaos. The kaiser had fled into exile; Russia was convulsed by civil war; the Hapsburgs had been deposed; and the Ottoman Empire had collapsed. Famine, typhus, and cholera stalked the Continent and the pandemic of Spanish flu that killed hundreds of thousands of people around the globe was in its final stages. And the red cloud of Bolshevism was spreading westward. “The wolf is at the door,” warned Herb...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Prologue
• CHAPTER 1 “The Personal InstrumentofGod”
• CHAPTER 2 “To the RedDawn ”
• CHAPTER 3 “We’re All Real Proud ofWurr’n”
• CHAPTER 4 “Gee How the Money RollsIn ”
• CHAPTER 5 “My God This Is a Hell of aJob ”
• CHAPTER 6 “I Thought ICould Swing It”
• CHAPTER 7 “My Country ’Tis ofMe”
• CHAPTER 8 “Coolidge or Chaos”
• CHAPTER 9 “We Loved Every Rattle”
• CHAPTER 10 “A Lost Generation”
• CHAPTER 11 “Whooping It Up for Genesis”
• CHAPTER 12 “Runnin’ Wild”
• CHAPTER 13 “Boy Can You Get Stucco ”
• CHAPTER 14 Seven Against the Wall
• CHAPTER 15 “You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet ”
• CHAPTER 16 “The Final Triumph over Poverty”
• CHAPTER 17 “Wall Street Lays an Egg”
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index