Penguin History of the United States of America (93 page)

Andrew Mellon thus played a part in stimulating the economic buoyancy which was so marked a feature of the twenties. The plain facts of life in America were still more exhilarating. Thanks to Henry Ford, the motor-car had come into its own. The Model T was the best-selling automobile until 1926, but Ford’s methods were being copied and surpassed by his competitors, above all by the giant General Motors, which did not subscribe to the great man’s celebrated dictum, ‘You can have any colour you like, so long as it’s black,’ or to any other of his conservative business attitudes. GM’s innovations lay rather in the fields of organization and marketing than in technology, where Henry Ford’s strength lay; but it was precisely in those fields that the crucial advances were now to be made, so, willy-nilly, the Ford company had to emulate General Motors if it wanted to remain one of the industry’s leaders. In 1927 Tin Lizzie was retired, and after fourteen months of mysterious preparation her successor, the Model A, was unveiled to the world and became for a year America’s best-selling car. But in the gap the newly formed Chrysler Corporation had seen and seized an opportunity to launch its own cheap, popular model, the Plymouth, with huge success. Those two years, in short, saw the emergence of the motor industry in the form it has since retained: at the top the great monopolistic corporations, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler; at a respectful distance, a cluster of much smaller firms, competing for what was left of the market after the monopolies had finished with it.

This was no bad prospect in the twenties, for the market seemed to be infinitely buoyant. The assembly line made cars wonderfully cheap; wages rose fairly steadily from 1917 onwards, registering a gain, in real terms, of 26 per cent between 1920 and 1929; credit was available on the cheapest terms (Ford and GM did all they could to encourage sales by setting up organizations whose sole purpose was to facilitate hire-purchase – or instalment buying, as it is called in America); the irresistible appeal of the car to the consumer, which needs no explanation, did the rest. The result
was a multifarious transformation of American life which is not over yet. The economic impact alone was striking enough. The mass market for cars pushed the auto-makers into the front line of American businesses. By 1929 the industry was the largest in the country, employing nearly half a million workers, and Detroit was America’s fourth largest city. US Steel, the prewar giant of the corporations, was hopelessly dwarfed by the Big Three. The demand for petroleum products made the oil companies ever larger, more profitable and more powerful. Demand for the materials which went to the making of automobiles – steel, glass, rubber, paint, for instance – soared, stimulating these industries too, and stimulating rapid technological innovation, for the car itself was changing yearly. It needed good roads to drive on: road-builders and the producers of concrete profited. A whole new profession, that of car-dealer (whether of used or new vehicles), sprang up. And still the sales rose. In 1920,1,905,500 cars were produced; in 1929, 4,455,100 – a figure not to be surpassed until 1949. By 1929, 26,704,800 automobiles, trucks and buses were in registered ownership. It was reckoned proudly that the whole population of the United States could, in theory, be fitted at one moment into existing motor-vehicles.

Yet perhaps the social results were even more impressive than the economic and, in the long run, more important. The car began to break down the ancient sharp division between town and country. The movement perhaps began with the prosperous urban middle class, anxious for a holiday from New York: they were delighted to discover the rest of their country. After one lengthy motor journey a gentleman with the wonderfully pretentious name of Frederic F. Van De Water reported that ‘we had lived on Manhattan Island so long that we had come to consider all America suspicious, hostile, abrupt, insolent… New York and all it signifies, while geographically of the nation, are no more intrinsically America than a monocle is part of the optic system.’ He and people like him began a movement that would eventually cover America with motels and wayside restaurants serving drinks, hot meals and Howard Johnson’s celebrated multiplicity of ice creams. But the cheap car enabled the working class also to travel, for pleasure, or in search of work. Even poor rural people, it turned out, could own cars, and when they did so many of them used the freedom thus attained to depart – to the West, or to the cities; and thus one more of the great migrations of American history began. Even more important, perhaps, was the impact of the car on daily life. It came into use for all sorts of short trips – to work or to the shops – which had previously been made by trolley-car or urban railway. It made a whole new pattern of living possible: vast suburbs began to spread over the land, to the great profit of the building industry. No longer did you have to live in comparatively cramped quarters near the railroad station. Nor did you have to take your annual holiday at one of the traditional, crowded resorts near home. Instead you could speed over the hills and far away, where planners like Robert Moses of New York state had prepared parks and beaches
for you: a new function for government. Even Congress, though in its most conservative years, was ready to take a hand: under the Federal Highway Act of 1921 federal funds paid for 50 per cent of the new trunk highways.

The carefree motorist, in short, was not only the symbol of the twenties: he was its central driving force. For ill as well as good: he brought traffic jams as well as mobility, and as early as 1925, 25,000 people were killed by cars in one year – 17,500 of them pedestrians.

There were yet other ways in which the consumer stimulated American industry to new feats: the popularity of the cinema, for instance, produced a whole new giant business as Hollywood took wing; radio was a magic word for gamblers on the stock market; the demand for alcohol was actually increased by prohibition and put millions of dollars into the pockets of bootleggers, rum-runners and outright gangsters (most notably, Al Capone of Chicago); and the very rich lived in a whirl of parties, yachts, furs and cosmetics (at least according to the legend fostered by Scott Fitzgerald in the decade’s representative novel,
The Great Gatsby)
. The near-absolute exclusion of European goods acted as a short-term boost to American industry. It is no wonder that Mr Mellon presided over an epoch of prosperity or that he got the credit for creating it. People are naturally inclined to be generous when times are good.

His formidable colleague, Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes (Theodore Roosevelt had described him as ‘the bearded iceberg’), presided over an epoch of lasting peace, or so his countrymen hoped. Hughes, former Governor of New York, former Presidential nominee, future Chief Justice of the United States, represented what was left of progressive Republicanism; in foreign policy he belonged to the nationalistic school of Henry Cabot Lodge, which had no objection to a vigorous foreign policy provided that it was untrammelled by alliances and the League. But, as he very quickly discovered, the Americans, having shaken off Woodrow Wilson and the yoke of internationalism, were disinclined to assume that of nationalism. The last tide of idealism, which had seemed to carry a majority to support some sort of League as recently as 1920, had ebbed very fast: on reflection, the returned soldiers and their families wanted no more action of any kind which implied the possibility, however remote, that the dreadful experience of the war might be repeated. They could only be interested in proposals to diminish, not to increase, their diplomatic responsibilities; even the World Court at The Hague came to seem to them a dangerous institution; at any rate Hughes and his successors could never induce Congress to allow American membership. So it is not very surprising that the greatest achievement of Hughes’s term in office was the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–2. This was indeed a welcome enterprise. Ever since the end of the war the rival empires, British, American and Japanese, had found themselves caught up in a naval race in the Pacific. Each had vulnerable possessions to protect (in the American case, the Philippines, the Hawaiian islands and
Guam), none wanted another war, but so far none had thought ofameansof averting it. Pressure for some sort of conference mounted during Harding’s first year in office, and when finally one opened at Washington on 12 November 1921, Hughes took the lead. The results were spectacular. The naval race ended, the United States, Britain and Japan agreeing to scrap large parts of their navies. They agreed to respect each other’s imperial holdings in the Pacific; not to add to their fortifications, naval bases and coastal defences there; and to settle disputes peacefully; nine Powers recognized the principle of the Open Door; and Japan, in an ecstasy of cooperation, evacuated Shantung and Siberia.

It was a remarkable and promising achievement, and had it been followed up the Pacific War of 1941–5 might never have occurred. Unfortunately the next step towards a permanent pacification of the East required economic concessions by the United States. The high tariff excluded the Japanese from the only market to which they could have exported profitably; their failure to export meant that they were unable to import essential raw materials; the net result was a prolonged depression, which slowly but surely turned Japan towards the mixture of authoritarianism at home and imperialist war abroad which was to prove so catastrophic for the world. This disaster, like every other, was unforeseen by American statesmen; but even if it had been, there was nothing they could do; Congress and its constituents remained obstinately attached to the Fordney-McCumber tariff.

The diplomatic, or rather the undiplomatic, disposition of the American people was also illustrated by another important development in the early twenties. Ever since the Dillingham Report the forces which were making for immigration restriction had been gathering strength. Organized labour had struggled, on the whole successfully, to maintain the wage-levels reached during the war and to improve them: it feared the continued importation of cheap labour from overseas. During the war general suspicion of the foreign-born had increased (‘hyphenated Americans’ were assumed to have a divided loyalty) and the Red Scare afterwards had not helped. What may be called the cultural panic of the post-war period expressed itself, as was natural, in noisier and noisier assertions of American superiority and in a dread of foreign infiltration. The great industrialists no longer believed that they needed an immigrant labour supply: there were enough unemployed native workers for their purposes. The hyphenated Americans themselves had not yet attained their full political strength. The result was a series of illiberal acts: the Immigration Act of 1917 (passed over Woodrow Wilson’s veto); the Quota Act of 1921 (a stopgap measure); and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924. The intricacies of these laws need not be detailed: the Johnson-Reed Act was so ill-devised that it took five years to come into operation and gave conscientious bureaucrats infinite trouble as long as it lasted. The general effect can be easily summarized: mass immigration was ended (the annual average went down from 862,514 in the 1907–14 period to no more
than 150,000
²
– all that was allowed under the 1924 arrangements) and discrimination against suspect nationalities was built into the system. Immigration from the so-called Asiatic Barred Zone – China, Japan, Indo-China, Afghanistan, Arabia, the East Indies – was stopped almost entirely;
³
and immigration from everywhere but Northern and Western Europe was made exceedingly difficult, by the expedient of allotting four-fifths of the permitted admissions to persons from that area. The spirit in which the Golden Door was slammed shut was lucidly expressed by Senator Albert Johnson, of Washington state, a sponsor of the 1924 Act, who explained that ‘the foreign-born flood’ was a threat to the happiness of individual Americans and to American institutions and liberties.

It is no wonder, therefore, that the myth of the melting pot has been discredited. It is no wonder that Americans everywhere are insisting that their land no longer shall offer free and unrestricted asylum to the rest of the world… The United States is our land. If it was not the land of our fathers, at least it may be, and it should be, the land of our children. We intend to maintain it so.

Of course neither Senator Johnson nor anyone else foresaw the tragic consequences that this Act would begin to have nine years later. He was simply enjoying himself, in the ancient fashion of Congress, giving his prejudices the force of law.

He was answered indirectly some years later from the dock, when Bartolo-meo Vanzetti heard that his appeals for a fresh trial had been finally rejected, and that he and his fellow-defendant, Nicola Sacco, were to be executed. They had been arrested in 1920, at the height of the Red Scare, and later found guilty of murdering and robbing a postmaster in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Superficially the case was ordinary enough, even down to the fact that the evidence against Vanzetti and Sacco was far from conclusive;
⁴
but it became famous, became indeed the American equivalent of the Dreyfus Affair, because the defendants were anarchists, draft-evaders and immigrants; because the judge showed extreme prejudice against them, even to the length of boasting afterwards of what he had done to ‘those anarchist bastards’; and because the friends and associates of Vanzetti and Sacco skilfully alerted the Left throughout the world to what seemed to be a monstrous perversion of justice, all too typical of America in the twenties. Crowds swarmed threateningly outside the US embassy in Rome, there was a general strike in Montevideo and an attempt to bomb the US consulate in Lisbon. A bomb actually did go off inside the American ambassador’s house in Paris, and, tragically, another exploded during a
large demonstration in favour of Vanzetti and Sacco in Paris, killing twenty people. These events alerted opinion in America itself, where the original trial had been little noticed: the liberal intelligentsia mobilized with a vigour and enthusiasm that it had not shown since Woodrow Wilson sailed for France. Money was collected, speeches were made, articles published, demonstrations were held outside Boston State House (where the police threw many of the demonstrators into jail) and outside the prison where the victims languished. All in vain: the Governor of Massachusetts appointed a committee of the utmost respectability to advise him on the question of pardon or a fresh trial (the men had by now been in prison for seven years), and the committee, headed by the President of Harvard, found that, although the judge had disgraced himself, the defendants were guilty as charged. So on 9 April 1927 they were told that they were to be executed. Vanzetti’s last statement was as movingly dignified as all his words and deeds throughout the affair, perhaps the more so because his English was slightly imperfect: