Nathan Miller - New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America

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NEW WORld

COMiNG

The 1920s

and the Making of Modern America

NATHAN MILLER

A LISA DREW BOOK

SCRIBNER

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Copyright 2003 by Nathan Miller

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

The lines from the season tis,my lovely lambs, Copyright 1926, 1954, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright 1985 by George James Firmage, from Complete Poems: 1904-1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage.

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Text set in Goudy Oldstyle

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Miller, Nathan, 1927

New world coming : the 1920s and the making of modern America / Nathan Miller.

p. cm.

A Lisa Drew Book

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. United StatesHistory1919-1933.

2. United StatesSocial conditions1918-1932.

3. Nineteen twenties.

4. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott), 1896-1940.

I. Title.

E784.M555 2003

973.91dc21

2003046001

ISBN 0-684-85295-0

eISBN 13: 978-1-4391-3104-6

ISBN 13: 978-0-6848-5295-9

To Joan and Stan Weiss

Myra and Jerry Barron

and their offspring

To mention the 1920s in America immediately conjures up such personalities and events as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Prohibition, the Charleston, flappers, speakeasies, Hello, Sucker! the Wall Street boom, and the Great Crash. In part, this is so because of Frederick Lewis Allens compulsively readable account Only Yesterday. But that book has certain defects, beginning with the fact that it was published in 1931, and contains little in the way of hard data. Allen also neglected blacks and the bitter labor struggles of the period. I have tried to present the story of this rollicking decade without these defects. To frame my narrative in human terms, I have used the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, which was at its most flamboyant in those years.

It is indeed a judgment call to select one decade to describe the warp and woof of American history, but the 1920s present themselves admirably for such treatment. They have a clear beginning at World War I and the battle for the League of Nations, and end with the stock market crash of 1929 and the resulting political explosion. 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. We, too, have engaged in foolishly dangerous stock market manipulations. Much of what we consider contemporary actually began in the Twentiesfor example, jazz and psychiatry. Criminal conduct by business and industrial leaders was altogether too familiar then and now. As in the 1990s, one political party prevailed in the zeitgeist of the times, encouraging the high-flying mood of the nation.

I wish to thank the distinguished Civil War historian Ernest B. Furgurson for helping to make this a better book than it would have been. Similar thanks are due Gary Gerstle, professor of history at the University of Maryland and Princeton University. Dr. Jonathan Barron of the Department of English at the University of Southern Mississippi read the chapters on the literary revolution of the Twenties. Much of the data herein was drawn from Gerald Leinwands 1927: High Tide of the 1920s. Dr. Joseph D. Lichtenberg, an internationally known psychiatrist, commented on the chapter in which I deal with psychiatry in America.

As the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David M. Kennedy has written of Only Yesterday, Allens field of vision, for all its comprehensiveness, was severely bound by the view from the New York editorial offices of Harpers restricted geographically by the Hudson and East Riversor perhaps Cape Cod and the Hamptonsand restricted sociologically to his eastern urban and suburban subscribers. I have tried to look farther and deeper.

Throughout the pale summer nights of 1919, a light always seemed to be burning in a third-floor front room of a brownstone at 599 Summit Avenue in St. Paul. Sometimes a slim figure paced back and forth across the open windows. Up there, amid the treetops, twenty-two-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald, subsisting mainly on cigarettes and nervous energy, was working on a novel he desperately hoped would bring him money and acclaim. Not long out of the U.S. Army following the Armistice, which ended World War I, he was being supported by his parents, his career as a writer was stymied, and his girl had broken up with him because she believed he had no prospects.

To get a breath of air, Fitzgerald unlatched a screen on one of the windows and, careful not to disturb the chapter outlines pinned to the curtains, stepped out onto a small landing where he had a sweeping view up and down the boulevard. Summit Avenue crowns a bluff overlooking the Lower Town, St. Pauls business section, and is the spine of the Summit, then the citys most fashionable neighborhood. Nearby, the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. PaulFitzgerald was christened therecrouched at the intersection of Summit and Selby Avenues like a plump white bulldog. Wooden Queen Annes, Romanesque sandstones, red-brick faux chteaus with fairy-tale towers, and Renaissance palazzos lined the avenuea museum of American architectural failures, in his words.

As a child, Fitzgerald mingled with children whose surnames were the same as the streets on which they playedGriggs and MacKubin and Hersey. It was a good time and a good place to grow up. Scott and his companions saw the coming of the automobile and the airplane, the spread of electric lights and the telephone, and for a nickel they could pass an enchanted hour watching the first movies. Nearby, there were still fields to race across and woods in which to gather chestnuts. These were Americas Confident Years in which Theodore Roosevelt fought trusts and political bosses at home, made the dirt fly on the Panama Canal, and sent the U.S. Navys white-hulled battleships around the world.