Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (45 page)

No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor Norman churches; no great Universities, nor public schools – no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class – no Epsom nor Ascot!
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By the end of the Twenties America had achieved the social depth and complexity whose absence James had mourned, and achieved it moreover through what Hawthorne himself dismissed as the ‘commonplace prosperity’ of American life.
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But it was prosperity on an unprecedented and monumental scale, such as to constitute a social phenomenon in itself, and bring in its train for the first time a national literary universe of its own. The decade was introduced by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
This Side of Paradise
(1918) and it ended with
A Farewell to Arms
(1929) by Ernest Hemingway, who was to prove the most influential writer of fiction in English between the wars. It included Sinclair Lewis’s
Main Street
(1920), John Dos Passos’s
Three Soldiers
(1921), Theodore Dreiser’s
An American Tragedy
(1926), William Faulkner’s
Soldier’s Pay
(1926), Upton Sinclair’s
Boston
(1928) and Thomas Wolfe’s
Look Homeward, Angel
(1929). The emergence of this galaxy of novels, and of playwrights like Eugene O’Neill and Thornton Wilder, was evidence, as Lionel Trilling put it,
that ‘life in America has increasingly thickened since the nineteenth century’, producing not so much the ‘social observation’ James required of a novel but an ‘intense social awareness’, so that ‘our present definition of a serious book is one which holds before us an image of society to consider and condemn’.
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This growing tendency of American culture to dispense with its umbilical source of supply from Europe began in the 1920s to produce forms of expression which were
sui generis
, not merely in cinema and radio broadcasting, where specific American contributions were present at the creation, but on the stage. The most spectacular maturing of the decade was the New York musical. It was the progeny, to be sure, of the Viennese operetta, the French boulevard music-play, English Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas and the English music-hall (its origins might be traced back, perhaps, to
The Beggar’s Opera
of 1728) but the ingredients of American minstrel-show, burlesque, jazz and vaudeville transformed it into a completely new form of popular art. There had been prolific composers in the proto-genre before 1914, notably Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. But their work then seemed so marginal and fugitive that some of Kern’s earliest and best songs have disappeared without leaving any copy.
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It was in the early Twenties that the spectacular new prosperity of the Broadway theatres combined with the new talents – George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Howard Dietz, Cole Porter, Vincent Youmans, Oscar Hammerstein, Lorenz Hart and E. Y. Harburg–to bring the American musical into full flower. On 12 February 1924 Gershwin’s
Rhapsody in Blue
was performed by the Paul Whiteman band at the Aeolian Hall. It was the archetypal creative event of the decade. And that season, just after Coolidge had got himself elected in his own right, Gershwin’s
Lady, Be Good!
, the first mature American musical, opened on 1 December in the Liberty Theatre, starring Fred Astaire and his sister Adele.
⁸⁶
It was the outstanding event of a Broadway season which included Youmans’
Lollypop
, Kern’s
Sitting Pretty
, Rudolph Friml’s and Sigmund Romberg’s
The Student Prince
, Irving Berlin’s
Music Box Revue
and Sissie and Blake’s
Chocolate Dandies—
among about forty musicals – as well as Marc Connelly’s
Green Pastures
, Aaron Copland’s First Symphony and the arrival of Serge Koussevitsky at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Indeed, with the possible exception of Weimar Germany, the America of Coolidge prosperity was the leading theatre of western culture at this time, the place where the native creator had the widest range of opportunities and where the expatriate artist was most likely to find the freedom, the means and the security to express himself.

The trouble with Twenties expansion was not that it was philistine or socially immoral. The trouble was that it was transient. Had it endured, carrying with it in its train the less robust but still (at that time) striving
economies of Europe, a global political transformation must have followed which would have rolled back the new forces of totalitarian compulsion, with their ruinous belief in social engineering, and gradually replaced them with a relationship between government and enterprise closer to that which Coolidge outlined to the business paladins of New York City. In 1929 the United States had achieved a position of paramountcy in total world production never hitherto attained during a period of prosperity by any single state: 34.4 per cent of the whole, compared with Britain’s 10.4, Germany’s 10.3, Russia’s 9.9, France’s 5.0, Japan’s 4.0, 2.5 for Italy, 2.2 for Canada and 1.7 for Poland. The likelihood that the European continent would lean towards America’s ‘original social structure’, as Siegfried termed it, increased with every year the world economy remained buoyant. Granted another decade of prosperity on this scale our account of modern times would have been vastly different and immeasurably happier.

On 4 December 1928 Coolidge gave his last public message to the new Congress:

No Congress of the United States ever assembled, on surveying the state of the Union, has met with a more pleasing prospect …. The great wealth created by our enterprise and industry, and saved by our economy, has had the widest distribution among our own people, and has gone out in a steady stream to serve the charity and business of the world. The requirements of existence have passed beyond the standard of necessity into the region of luxury. Enlarging production is consumed by an increasing demand at home and an expanding commerce abroad. The country can regard the present with satisfaction and anticipate the future with optimism.
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This view was not the flatulent self-congratulation of a successful politician. Nor was it only the view of the business community. It was shared by intellectuals across the whole spectrum. Charles Beard’s
The Rise of American Civilization
, published in 1927, saw the country ‘moving from one technological triumph to another, overcoming the exhaustion of crude natural resources and energies, effecting an ever-widening distribution of the blessings of civilization – health, security, material goods, knowledge, leisure and aesthetic appreciation ….’
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Writing the same year, Walter Lippmann considered: ‘The more or less unconscious and unplanned activities of businessmen are for once more novel, more daring and in a sense more revolutionary, than the theories of the progressives.’
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John Dewey, in 1929, thought the problem was not how to prolong prosperity – he took that for granted – but how to turn ‘the Great Society’ into ‘the Great Community’.
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Even on the Left the feeling spread that perhaps business had got it right after all. Lincoln
Steffens, writing in February 1929, felt that both the USA and the Soviet systems might be justified: ‘The race is saved one way or the other and, I think, both ways.’
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In 1929 the
Nation
began a three-month series on the permanence of prosperity, drawing attention to pockets of Americans who had not yet shared in it; the opening article appeared on 23 October, coinciding with the first big break in the market.

It may be that Coolidge himself, a constitutionally suspicious man, and not one to believe easily that permanent contentment is to be found this side of eternity, was more sceptical than anyone else, and certainly less sanguine than he felt it his duty to appear in public. It is curious that he declined to run for president again in 1928, when all the omens were in his favour, and he was only fifty-six. He told the chief justice, Harlan Stone, it is a pretty good idea to get out when they still want you.’ There were very severe limits to his political ambitions, just as (in his view) there ought to be very severe limits to any political activity. Stone warned him of economic trouble ahead. He too thought the market would break. His wife Grace was reported: ‘Poppa says there’s a depression coming.’ But Coolidge assumed it would be on the 1920 scale, to be cured by a similar phase of masterly inactivity. If something more was required, he was not the man. Grace Coolidge said he told a member of the cabinet: ‘I know how to save money. All my training has been in that direction. The country is in a sound financial condition. Perhaps the time has come when we ought to spend money. I do not feel I am qualified to do that.’ In his view, Hoover was the Big Spender; not the last of them, the first of them. He viewed Hoover’s succession to the presidency without enthusiasm: ‘That man has offered me unsolicited advice for six years, all of it bad.’ Coolidge was the last man on earth to reciprocate with his own. Asked, during the interregnum in early 1929, for a decision on long-term policy, he snapped, ‘We’ll leave that to the Wonder Boy.’ He left the stage without a word, pulling down the curtain on Arcadia.

SEVEN
Dégringolade

On Friday 3 October 1929, a new under-loader took part in his first pheasant shoot on the Duke of Westminster’s estate near Chester. The day before a conference of senior officials had been held in the main gun-room. As dawn was breaking, the young loader put on his new uniform and reported to the head keeper, who ‘looked very impressive in green velvet jacket and waistcoat with white breeches, box-cloth leggings and a hard hat with plenty of gold braid around it’. There were eighty keepers dressed in livery: ‘a red, wide-brimmed hat with a leather band, and a white smock made of a very rough material in the Farmer Giles style and gathered in at the waist by a wide leather belt with a large brass buckle’. The beaters assembled and were inspected. Next to arrive were the leather cases of the ‘guns’, with their engraved and crested brass name-plates. Then came the guests in their chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royces and Daimlers, and finally the Duke himself, to whom the new loader was deputed to hand his shooting stick. As soon as ‘His Grace’ got to his place, the head keeper blew his whistle, the beaters started off and the shoot began. ‘It was all organized to the fine degree that was essential to provide the sport that His Grace wanted and expected.’ At lunchtime the keepers drank ale poured from horn jugs, and in the afternoon the Duke’s private narrow-gauge train, ‘passenger carriages all brightly painted in the Grosvenor colours’, brought the ladies to join the sport. The bag was nearly 2,000.
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A fortnight before this quasi-medieval scene was enacted, the Duke’s good friend Winston Churchill, who until earlier that year had been Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer for five years, wrote to his wife from America:

Now my darling I must tell you that vy gt & extraordinary good fortune has attended me lately in finances. Sir Harry McGowan asked me rather earnestly before I sailed whether he might if an opportunity came buy shares on my account without previous consultation. I replied that I could always find 2 or 3,000£. I meant this as an investment limit i.e. buying the shares outright. He evidently took it as the limit to wh I was prepared to go in a speculative purchase on margin. Thus he operated on about ten times my usual scale …. So here we have recovered in a few weeks a small fortune …. It is a relief to me to feel something behind me and behind you all.
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It is interesting that Churchill should have been speculating on margin right up to the brink of the crash. He was one of about 600,000 trading on margin of the 1,548,707 customers who, in 1929, had accounts with firms belonging to America’s twenty-nine stock exchanges. At the peak of the craze there were about a million active speculators, and out of an American population of 120 million about 29–30 million families had an active association with the market.
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Churchill, despite his experience and world-wide contacts, was no better informed than the merest street-corner speculator. The American economy had ceased to expand in June. It took some time for the effects to work their way through but the bull market in stocks really came to an end on 3 September, a fortnight before Churchill wrote his joyful letter. The later rises were merely hiccups in a steady downward trend. The echoes of the Duke’s shoot had scarcely died away when the precipitous descent began. On Monday 21 October, for the first time, the ticker-tape could not keep pace with the news of falls and never caught up; in the confusion the panic intensified (the first margin-call telegrams had gone out the Saturday before) and speculators began to realize they might lose their savings and even their homes. On Thursday 24 October shares dropped vertically with no one buying, speculators were sold out as they failed to respond to margin calls, crowds gathered in Broad Street outside the New York Stock Exchange, and by the end of the day eleven men well known on Wall Street had committed suicide. One of the visitors in the gallery that day was Churchill himself, watching his faerie gold vanish. Next week came Black Tuesday, the 29th, and the first selling of sound stocks in order to raise desperately needed liquidity.
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