Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (41 page)

There was an important point here: America, if it was anything, was a Protestant-type religious civilization, and the xenophobia of a Palmer was merely the extreme and distorted expression of all that was most valuable in the American ethic. From this time onwards, American ‘highbrows’ – the term, so much more appropriate than the French
intellectuel
or
intelligentsia
, had been devised by the critic Van Wyck Brooks in 1915 – had to face the dilemma that, in attacking the distortion, they were in danger of damaging the reality
of ‘Americanism’, which sprang from Jeffersonian democracy; and if that were lost, American culture was nothing except an expatriation of Europe. While Palmer was hunting aliens, East Coast highbrows were reading
The Education of Henry Adams
, the posthumous autobiography of the archetypal Boston mandarin, which the Massachusetts Historical Society published in October 1918. From then until spring 1920 it was the most popular non-fiction book in America, perfectly expressing the mood of educated disillusionment. It was the American equivalent of Strachey’s
Eminent Victorians
, rejecting the notion of a national culture – especially one imposed by brutal repression – in favour of what Adams termed ‘multiversity’ but pessimistically stressing that, in the emerging America, the best-educated were the most helpless.

In fact the East Coast highbrows were by no means helpless. Over the next sixty years they were to exercise an influence on American (and world) policy out of all proportion to their numbers and intrinsic worth. But they were ambivalent about America. In the spring of 1917, Van Wyck Brooks wrote in
Seven Arts
, the journal he helped to found, ‘Towards a National Culture’, in which he argued that hitherto America had taken the ‘best’ of other cultures: now it must create its own through the elementary experience of living which alone produced true culture. America, by experiencing its own dramas, through what he termed ‘the Culture of Industrialism’, would ‘cease to be a blind, selfish, disorderly people; we shall become a luminous people, dwelling in the light and sharing our light’.
¹¹
He endorsed his friend Randolph Bourne’s view that the whole ‘melting-pot’ theory was unsound since it turned immigrants into imitation Anglo-Saxons, and argued that America ought to have not narrow European nationalism but ‘the more adventurous ideal’ of cosmopolitanism, to become ‘the first international nation’.
¹²
But what did this mean? D.H. Lawrence rightly observed that America was not, or not yet, ‘a blood-homeland’. Jung, putting it another way, said Americans were ‘not yet at home in their unconscious’. Brooks, deliberately settling into Westport, Connecticut, to find his American cosmopolitanism, together with other Twenties intellectuals whom he neatly defined as ‘those who care more for the state of their minds than the state of their fortunes’, nevertheless felt the strong pull of the old culture; he confessed, in his autobiography, to ‘a frequently acute homesickness for the European scene’. Only ‘a long immersion in American life’, he wrote, ‘was to cure me completely of any lingering fear of expatriation; but this ambivalence characterized my outlook in the Twenties.’
¹³
In May 1919, hearing that a friend, Waldo Frank, planned to settle in the Middle West, he wrote to him: ‘All our will-to-live as writers comes to us, or rather
stays with us, through our intercourse with Europe. Never believe people who talk to you about the west, Waldo; never forget that it is we New Yorkers and New Englanders who have the monopoly of whatever oxygen there is in the American continent.’
¹⁴

That was an arrogant claim; to echo, though not often so frankly avowed, down the decades of the twentieth century. But without the Midwest, what was America? A mere coastal fringe, like so many of the hispanic littoral-states of South America. The hate-figure of the East Coast highbrows in the Twenties was William Jennings Bryan, the Illinois Democrat who had denounced the power of money (’You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold’), opposed imperialism, resigned as Secretary of State in 1915 in protest against the drift to war and, in his old age, fought a desperate rearguard action against Darwinian evolution in the 1925 Scopes trial. Fundamentally, Bryan’s aims were democratic and progressive: he fought for women’s suffrage and a federal income-tax and reserve-bank, for popular election to the Senate, for the publication of campaign contributions, for freeing the Philippines, and for the representation of labour in the cabinet. Yet his values were popular ones or, to use the new term of derogation, ‘populist’; he spoke the language of anti-intellectualism. His wife’s diaries testify to the bitterness the couple felt at the way his work was misrepresented or completely ignored in the ‘Eastern press’.
¹⁵
At the Scopes trial he was not seeking to ban the teaching of evolution but to prevent state schools from undermining religious belief: evolution should, he argued, be taught as theory not fact, parents and taxpayers should have a say in what went on in the schools, and teachers should abide by the law of the land. He saw himself as resisting the aggressive dictatorship of a self-appointed scholastic élite who were claiming a monopoly of authentic knowledge.
¹⁶

The philosopher John Dewey, while opposing the Bryan anti-evolution crusade, warned the East Coast intelligentsia that the forces it embodied ‘would not be so dangerous were they not bound up with so much that is necessary and good’. He feared the idea of a fissure, which he could see opening, between the East Coast leadership of educated opinion and what a later generation would call ‘middle America’ or ‘the silent majority’. Evolution was a mere instance of antagonistic habits of thought. In a remarkable article, ‘The American Intellectual Frontier’, which he published in 1922, he warned readers of the
New Republic
that Bryan could not be dismissed as a mere obscurantist because he ‘is a typical democratic figure – there is no gainsaying that proposition’. Of course he was mediocre but ‘democracy by nature puts a premium on mediocrity’. Moreover, he spoke for some of the best, and most essential, elements in American society:

… the church-going classes, those who have come under the influence of evangelical Christianity. These people form the backbone of philanthropic social interest, of social reform through political action, of pacifism, of popular education. They embody and express the spirit of kindly goodwill towards classes which are at an economic disadvantage and towards other nations, especially when the latter show any disposition towards a republican form of government. The Middle West, the prairie country, has been the centre of active social philanthropy and political progressivism because it is the chief home of this folk … believing in education and better opportunities for its own children … it has been the element responsive to appeals for the square deal and more nearly equal opportunities for all …. It followed Lincoln in the abolition of slavery and it followed Roosevelt in his denunciation of ‘bad’ corporations and aggregations of wealth …. It has been the middle in every sense of the word and of every movement.
¹⁷

In so far as there was an indigenous American culture, this was it. Cosmopolitanism on the East Coast was thus in danger of becoming a counter-culture and involving America in the kind of internal conflict between ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ which was tearing apart Weimar Germany and opening the gates to totalitarianism. Indeed the conflict already existed, finding its envenomed expression in the Prohibition issue. Bryan had been presented with a vast silver loving-cup in token of his prodigious efforts to secure ratification of the eighteenth ‘National Prohibition’ Amendment to the constitution, which made legal the Volstead Act turning America ‘dry’. The Act came into effect the same month, January 1920, that Mitchell Palmer pounced on the alien anarchists, and the two events were closely related. Prohibition, with its repressive overtones, was part of the attempt to ‘Americanize’ America: reformers openly proclaimed that it was directed chiefly at the ‘notorious drinking habits’ of ‘immigrant working men’.
¹⁸
Like the new quota system, it was an attempt to preserve Arcadia, to keep the Arcadians pure. America had been founded as a Utopian society, populated by what Lincoln had, half-earnestly, half-wryly, called ‘an almost-chosen people’; the eighteenth Amendment was the last wholehearted effort at millennarianism.

But if wholehearted in intention, it was not so in execution. It was another testimony to the ambivalence of American society. America willed the end in ratifying the eighteenth Amendment; but it failed to will the means, for the Volstead Act was an ineffectual compromise – if it had provided ruthless means of enforcement it would never have become law. The Prohibition Bureau was attached to the Treasury; efforts to transfer it to the Justice Department were defeated. Successive presidents refused to recommend the appropriations
needed to secure effective enforcement.
¹⁹
Moreover, the Utopianism inherent in Prohibition, though strongly rooted in American society, came up against the equally strongly rooted and active American principle of unrestricted freedom of enterprise. America was one of the least totalitarian societies on earth; it possessed virtually none of the apparatus to keep market forces in check once an unfulfilled need appeared.

Hence the liquor gangsters and their backers could always command more physical and financial resources than the law. Indeed they were far better organized on the whole. Prohibition illustrated the law of unintended effect. Far from driving alien minorities into Anglo-Saxon conformity, it allowed them to consolidate themselves. In New York, bootlegging was half Jewish, a quarter Italian and one-eighth each Polish and Irish.
²⁰
In Chicago it was half Italian, half Irish. The Italians were particularly effective in distributing liquor in an orderly and inexpensive manner, drawing on the organizational experience not only of the Sicilian, Sardinian and Neapolitan secret societies but on the ‘vanguard élitism’ of revolutionary syndicalism. Prohibition offered matchless opportunities to subvert society, particularly in Chicago under the corrupt mayoralty of ‘Big Bill’ Thompson. John Torrio, who ran large-scale bootlegging in Chicago 1920–4, retiring to Italy in 1925 with a fortune of $30 million, practised the principle of total control: all officials were bribed in varying degrees and all elections rigged.
²¹
He could deliver high-quality beer as cheaply as $50 a barrel and his success was based on the avoidance of violence by diplomacy – in securing agreements among gangsters for the orderly assignment of territory.
²²
His lieutenant and successor Al Capone was less politically minded and therefore less successful; and the Irish operators tended to think in the short term and resort to violent solutions. When this happened gang-warfare ensued, the public became indignant and the authorities were driven to intervene.

As a rule, however, bootleggers operated with public approval, at any rate in the cities. Most urban men (not women) agreed with Mencken’s view that Prohibition was the work of ‘ignorant bumpkins of the cow states who resented the fact they had to swill raw corn liquor while city slickers got good wine and whiskey’. It ‘had little behind it, philosophically speaking, save the envy of the country lout for the city man, who has a much better time of it in this world’.
²³
City enforcement was impossible, even under reforming mayors. General Smedley Butler of the US Marine Corps, put in charge of the Philadelphia police under a ‘clean’ new administration in 1924, was forced to give up after less than two years: the job, he said, was ‘a waste of time’. Politicians of both parties gave little help
to the authorities. At the 1920 Democratic Convention in San Francisco they gleefully drank the first-class whiskey provided free by the mayor, and Republicans bitterly resented the fact that, at their Cleveland Convention in 1924, prohibition agents ‘clamped down on the city’, according to Mencken, ‘with the utmost ferocity’. Over huge areas, for most of the time, the law was generally defied. ‘Even in the most remote country districts’, Mencken claimed, ‘there is absolutely no place in which any man who desires to drink alcohol cannot get it.’
²⁴

A similar pattern of non-enforcement appeared in Norway, which prohibited spirits and strong wines by a referendum of five to three in October 1919. But Norway had the sense to drop the law by a further referendum in 1926.
²⁵
America kept Prohibition twice as long and the results were far more serious. The journalist Walter Ligget, probably the greatest expert on the subject, testified to the House Judiciary Committee in February 1930 that he had ‘a truck load of detail and explicit facts’ that ‘there is considerably more hard liquor being drunk than there was in the days before prohibition and … drunk in more evil surroundings’. Washington
DC
had had 300 licensed saloons before Prohibition: now it had 700 speakeasies, supplied by 4,000 bootleggers. Police records showed that arrests for drunkenness had trebled over the decade. Massachusetts had jumped from 1,000 licensed saloons to 4,000 speakeasies, plus a further 4,000 in Boston: ‘there are at least 15,000 people who do nothing but purvey booze illegally in the city of Boston today.’ Kansas had been the first state to go dry; had been dry for half a century, yet ‘there is not a town in Kansas where I cannot go as a total stranger and get a drink of liquor, and very good liquor at that, within fifteen minutes after my arrival’. All this was made possible by universal corruption at all levels. Thus, in Detroit there were 20,000 speakeasies. He continued: