1927
and the Rise of
Modern America
CultureAmerica
Erika Doss
Philip J. Deloria
Series Editors
Karal Ann Marling
Editor Emerita
1927
and the Rise of
Modern America
CHARLES J. SHINDO
© 2010 by the University Press of Kansas
All rights reserved
Published by the University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, Kansas 66045), which was organized by the Kansas Board of Regents and is operated and funded by Emporia State University, Fort Hays State University, Kansas State University, Pittsburg State University, the University of Kansas, and Wichita State University
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shindo, Charles J.
1927 and the rise of modern America / Charles J. Shindo.
p. cm. — (CultureAmerica)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-7006-1715-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-7006-2113-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-7006-2186-6 (ebook)
1. United States—History—1919–1933. 2. United States—Social conditions—1918–1932. 3. United States—Social life and customs—1918–1945. 4. Popular culture—United States—History—20th century. I. Title.
E791.S55 2010
973.91—dc22
2009052269
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication is recycled and contains 30 percent postconsumer waste. It is acid free and meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992.
to the memory of may shindo,
1927–2007,
and
to michael
The America that Columbus discovered was to our ancestors geographically a new world. Today, as a result of the revolutionary changes brought about by modern methods of production, it has again become a new world, and furthermore we have still to rediscover it.
—André Siegfried, America Comes of Age: A French Analysis (1927)
Contents
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
The Search for Modern America
CHAPTER ONE
Seeking Mastery: The Machine Age and the Idealized Past
CHAPTER TWO
Seeking Equality: Feminism and Flood Waters
CHAPTER THREE
Seeking Notoriety: The Infamous and the Famous
CHAPTER FOUR
Seeking Respectability: Modern Media and Traditional Values
CONCLUSION
The Search for American Culture
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
In conceiving, researching, and writing this project, I have benefited from the support, advice, encouragement, and friendship of numerous institutions and individuals, without whom this work would not have been possible. Financial support for this project was provided by two sabbaticals from Louisiana State University (LSU), summer stipends from the Council on Research, a research semester from the College of Arts and Sciences, a Manship Summer Research Fellowship, and travel grants from the Office of Sponsored Programs and the College of Arts and Sciences.
The staff at the Getty Research Institute at the Getty Center in Los Angeles provided research support, as did research assistants Joshua Lubin, Kristi Wallace, and Bruce Arnold, who each provided valuable research and comments on drafts. Bruce, along with Michael Higgins, provided many hours of assistance searching and collecting photographs. Kurt Kemper, Court Carney, Matt Reonas, and Jamie Saucier all provided helpful comments and suggestions on an early first draft, and I greatly appreciate the time and effort they put into their critiques. Paul Boyer, Lewis Erenberg, and Erika Doss each provided insightful suggestions and comments that have greatly enhanced this work. The participants in LSU’s Works in Progress seminar, at the 2008 Australia and New Zealand American Studies Association Conference, and the 2009 British Association for American Studies Conference all provided helpful suggestions and new avenues of thought for me to explore, and for that I thank them.
The University Press of Kansas has been patient beyond expectations and supportive of every step of the process. Everyone with whom I have had contact has been helpful and enthusiastic, from director Fred Woodward on down. In particular, editors Nancy Scott Jackson, Kalyani Fernando, Ranjit Arab, and Mike Briggs have provided an abundance of enthusiasm and sound advice along with their expertise in publishing. Copyeditor Kathy Delfosse provided suggestions that significantly improved the work, and Jennifer Dropkin and Susan Schott deftly managed the production and marketing of the book. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to all at the Press.
Throughout this project I have enjoyed the support of many colleagues, past and present, who have added insights, tidbits of information, and anything they found related to 1927 and listened to my endless ramblings about the events of the year. Maribel Dietz, Jordan Kellman, Christine Kooi, John Rodrigue, Tiwanna Simpson, and Charles Royster are but a few of the most helpful. The person most significant to the development and completion of this project has been Ian Gordon, who, as a sounding board for ideas, a source of comments on drafts, a supplier of historiography, career builder, colleague, and friend, has provided more inspiration than I deserve.
Outside of the academic realm, I have numerous people to thank who have kept me from living in the past by enjoying and appreciating the present. Longtime friends Joan Lum, Jeanette Iriarte, Doug Bieber, and their families have kept me smiling for the last thirty years. Though far away and seldom seen, Rex Palmer has been a good friend and conversant. My father, George Shindo; my aunt and uncle, Hazel and Kokki Shindo; my sisters Kathryn Nuss, Carolyn Wills, and Evelyn Okamoto; and my brother Robert Shindo, along with their families, have provided love and support for my entire life. Unfortunately, my mother, May Shindo, has not lived to see this project completed, and it is in her memory that I present this work. For over a decade, Michael Fontenot, as my partner, love, and friend, has provided me with a home, a family, and a sense of peace, and it is to him that this book is dedicated.
Charles A. Lindbergh. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Parade procession for Charles Lindbergh in New York City. (© Bettmann/Corbis)
INTRODUCTIONThe Search for Modern America
THE MEANINGS OF LINDBERGH: The response to Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight from New York to Paris illustrates the ambiguity Americans felt about their nation. As an individual, Lindbergh represented the best nineteenth-century Victorian values of self-sufficiency, courage, and determination, while his achievement represented the pinnacle of modern, cooperative, industrial society. His popularity rested on his ability to represent conflicting visions of America simultaneously. Even though Lindbergh was seen as an extraordinary individual, his achievement brought unity to a diverse America. He stood for the individual as well as for society as a whole.
In the 1920s Americans faced a perplexing world. While many Americans still believed in the Victorian values of modesty, hard work, and respect for tradition, status, and place, others defiantly broke from convention in their work and personal lives and in their actions and words. Most Americans searched for a compromise between the world they knew and the world they would come to know, not yet ready to fully disengage from the past or to fully embrace the future. While this is true of ever
y historical period, the difference between past and future in 1920s America seems particularly acute, especially for those who lived through it. People sought to reconcile their traditions and values with changes in society, the economy, politics, technology, and culture. This search did not always end successfully. Indeed, although the search to understand one’s time never really ends, in most periods there is a chance of finding a comfortable middle ground between past and future. But between the end of the Great War and the start of the Great Depression, Americans found it hard to find an accommodation between tradition and change. No single event, such as a war or depression, focused the nation’s attention and presented definitive options for the future (winning the war, ending the depression). As a result, people individually and in small groups sought their own middle ground, their own vision of what America should be, often dependent on what they assumed America had been. They searched for answers in technology, in social justice, in feminism, in migration, in sensationalism, and in such leisure activities as collegiate and professional sports, motion pictures, jazz music, and radio. What they found was modern America, a country not completely new, but one with a very different appearance, sound, and feel.
Some events transcended the differences between past and present and as a result became widely celebrated by all Americans. One single act, flying nonstop from New York to Paris, made Charles Lindbergh the most celebrated man in the country, and indeed, the world. In his single-engine plane the Spirit of St. Louis, he traversed the Atlantic Ocean in thirty-three and a half hours, landing at Le Bourget airfield outside Paris on May 21, 1927. Others had attempted or were in the process of attempting the flight. Such well-known aviators as Commander Richard E. Byrd, who had earlier made headlines flying over the North Pole, assembled and trained crews in large multiengine planes in preparation for the crossing. Flight-endurance record-holder Clarence Chamberlin, American Legion–supported Commander Noel Davis, and Great War flying ace René Fonck from France, as well as Byrd, all encountered difficulties in their attempts. Both Byrd’s and Chamberlin’s teams experienced accidents during test flights and training; Davis and copilot Stanton Wooster were both killed during their final test flight. Two members of Fonck’s crew also perished as the tri-engine biplane carrying them crashed and exploded taking off for France from Roosevelt Field in New York. Two other French pilots, Charles Nungesser and François Coli, successfully departed Le Bourget on May 8, 1927, but were never seen again after flying past the French coast out over the Atlantic. Six aviators had died in the attempt to win a $25,000 prize established in 1919 by French-American hotel owner Raymond Orteig for the first nonstop flight between Paris and New York.
Each participant in the race for the Orteig Prize was a veteran flyer and was financially supported by wealthy organizations and airplane manufacturers, except for Lindbergh. Lindbergh was the only contestant to use a single-engine plane, and the only one to forgo both the use of radio communications and a copilot to share flying time during the day-and-a-half-long flight. Lindbergh was also an unknown, not just to the public but to many in the aviation establishment. Younger than the rest of the field, Lindbergh had not flown in the Great War, nor had he established any records or pioneering feats; he was, in fact, a working pilot delivering air mail. His plane, the Spirit of St. Louis (named in honor of the group of St. Louis businessmen who backed Lindbergh), was made by Ryan Aircraft, a relatively unknown manufacturer in San Diego, and consisted almost exclusively of a cockpit surrounded by fuel tanks with an engine in front. Because of the need for fuel and the demands of aerodynamics, a tank was placed directly in front of the cockpit, obscuring any forward vision. Lindbergh could not sleep, nor could he contact anyone during his flight. That Lindbergh accomplished the flight is remarkable, especially given the way he accomplished it.
When Lindbergh landed at Le Bourget, he encountered a mob of thousands gathered to witness his historic achievement. Completely underestimating the impact of his undertaking, he flew past the field, which was lit with automobile headlights, since he had expected to see a darkened airfield unaware of his arrival. He carried on his person letters of introduction to guard against French authorities’ mistaking him for an antagonist. Indeed, Lindbergh assumed that the French public and administration would be indifferent or even hostile to him for accomplishing a task that had claimed the lives of two of their countrymen. He appeared before the public not as a brash, aggressive American full of bravado, arrogance, and superiority but, rather, as a humble, innocent young man whose naïveté was in part responsible for his success. His diffidence and humility endeared Lindbergh to the French and to the public worldwide, but it was especially important to Lindbergh’s own countrymen, who saw in him the best of the American past alongside the best of the American future.
“It is a long flight from New York to Paris;” wrote John W. Ward in his seminal 1958 essay “The Meaning of Lindbergh’s Flight”; “it is a still longer flight from the fact of Lindbergh’s achievement to the burden imposed upon it by the imagination of his time. But it is in that further flight that lies the full meaning of Lindbergh.”1 Ward explored the ambiguity, mainly unnoticed at the time, with which Americans celebrated Lindbergh’s flight. Accounts in newspapers, in magazines, and on newsreels, not to mention in poetry, drama, and song, primarily emphasized the singular nature of the Atlantic crossing. These accounts compared Lindbergh to heroes of the past, such as Christopher Columbus and the pioneer settlers of the American West. In many ways, Lindbergh represented for Americans those traits that they treasured as being historically and characteristically American: individuality, courage, and self-sufficiency, all traits associated with the past. But included in these celebrations of the American past were impressive visions of the future hinted at in Lindbergh’s success. The potential of air travel, the first major advance in overseas mobility since the steamship and a significant advance over train and automobile travel, sparked the interest of the public and gave a boost to a developing airline industry. But the flight represented more than just potential; it was the culmination of American industry, engineering, and financial investment. Only a highly organized and industrialized society could produce a plane capable of such a feat. Not only the research, both theoretical and practical, but also the way the plane was built and the flight was funded and coordinated all illustrated to Americans and the world the success of the American economy and society. Lindbergh was able to draw on the vision of businessmen who saw his attempt as a way to put St. Louis on the map as an aviation center (both industrially and geographically) for the country, and on the knowledge of engineers and engine mechanics, aircraft designers, flight instructors, and meteorologists. News of the flight spread across the nation and the world via the medium of the day, the radio. Newspaper accounts and photographs were readily accessible within hours of Lindbergh’s landing, and once in Paris, Lindbergh was able to telephone across the Atlantic, via London, to talk to his mother and let her know that all was well. The vast network of individuals involved in completing and reporting this event illustrated the success of American industry, organization, and society. While Lindbergh, as a traditional American hero, was exceptional enough to perform such a feat, his exceptionalism, many believed, was a product of a capitalist and democratic America.
Lindbergh, the Spirit of St. Louis, and the trans-Atlantic flight were more than a person, a machine, and an event. They were each symbols of the age, as well as important symbols of the past and future. For Americans in 1927, Lindbergh embodied the best American virtues and values, whether individuality, self-reliance, and courage, or cooperation and a belief in progress and technology. Lindbergh could represent each of these values, depending on which part of his story one chose to focus on: the solo flight; the pioneering aspect of being the first to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles; the danger involved, as evidenced by earlier failed attempts at the flight; the hundreds of technicians, machinists, engineers, mechanics, pilots, navigators, and so on
who played important roles in making Lindbergh’s flight possible; or the technology of aerodynamics and navigation that enabled Lindbergh to fly. Lindbergh’s flight was the symbolic achievement of the age because it could encompass the conflicting views that Americans held about the world, their nation, and themselves. While Lindbergh’s achievement became all things to all people, bringing Americans of all ages, classes, races, and genders together in national celebration, it also highlights the cultural divide between the Protestant work ethic of Victorian America and the therapeutic consumer ethic of modern society. Lindbergh’s flight was almost unique in its ability to occupy the comfortable middle ground between past and present. Other events were not so able to unify Americans; rather, they tended to reinforce and even worsen conflicts within society. Many of those events happened in the same year Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic Ocean, 1927.
The events of 1927 illustrate the often awkward ways Americans sought to come to terms with changes in American life, from developments in and increased accessibility to technology, to natural disasters like the Mississippi River flood, to such political and social changes as women’s forays into the electorate and African Americans’ migration from the rural South to the urban North. Americans also dealt with the development of a mediated culture in the tabloid press, radio, and motion pictures, which in turn created a celebrity culture of not only movie stars, radio personalities, and sports heroes but infamous criminals and other notorious news makers. Those uncomfortable with the changes occurring in American society sought to gain some control over them by incorporating some aspects and rejecting others; those responsible for the changes sought to gain respect and wealth without completely abandoning traditional values. Many Americans found themselves caught in between the two extremes and pulled in both directions. How one reacted to these changes depended on a variety of factors such as age, race and ethnicity, gender, region, occupation, religion, education, and wealth, to name just a few. Americans and American culture were not homogeneous in the 1920s, and the mass appeal enjoyed by such celebrities as Lindbergh, baseball player Babe Ruth, and movie star Clara Bow depended on Americans’ ability to interpret those celebrities’ achievements according to their own individual values. Not all events and celebrities of 1927 were amenable to conflicting interpretations, and accepting change often meant letting go of the past. How much were Americans willing to give up in order to get the new and modern? There was no single answer for Americans in 1927.
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