1927 and the Rise of Modern America

by Charles Shindo

  In his essay “The Americanization of Art,” published in the catalog for the 1927 art show The Machine-Age Exposition, Lozowick proclaimed the necessity of American art’s enriching the “meagre cultural heritage” of America by looking to uniquely American sources of inspiration. And since, according to Lozowick, “the history of America is a history of stubborn and ceaseless effort to harness the forces of nature—a constant perfecting of the tools and processes which make the mastery of these forces possible,” then American artists should contemplate the “gigantic engineering feats and colossal mechanical construction” of American industry. But in doing so, “the artist cannot, and should not, therefore attempt a literal soulless transcription of the American scene but rather give a penetrating creative interpretation of it, which while including everything relevant to the subject depicted, would exclude everything irrelevant to the plastic possibilities of that subject.” In other words, the artist should seek to represent the essence of the object, not necessarily its function or effect. That essence, according to Lozowick, “is towards an industrialization and standardization which require precise adjustment of structure to function [and] which dictate an economic utilization of processes and materials and thereby foster in man a spirit of objectivity excluding all emotional aberration and accustom his vision to shapes and color not paralleled in nature.” This objectivity would then reinforce “the dominant trend in America today . . . towards order and organization which find their outward sign and symbol in the rigid geometry of the American city.” The final result of this artistic endeavor to “organize line, plane and volume into a well knit design, arrange color and light into a pattern of contrast and harmony and weave organically into every composition an all pervading rhythm and equilibrium” would be art that is both associative and aesthetic, “clear in its intention, convincing in its reality, inevitable in its logic,” thereby creating a “potential audience [that] will be practically universal.”20

  Lozowick’s proposition clearly describes the work of the precisionists, who, according to Miles Orvell, fulfilled Walt Whitman’s calls for a uniquely American artistic expression and formed the center of “the American contribution to international modernism.”21 The Machine-Age Exposition, which featured works by precisionists, along with “actual machines, parts, apparatuses, photographs and drawings of machines, plants, constructions, etc., in juxtaposition with architecture, paintings, drawings, sculpture, constructions, and inventions by the most vital of the modern artists,” sought to bridge the divide created by “museums, dealers, and second-rate artists, [who] have frightened the general public out of any frank appreciation of the arts.” The solution to this division between art and the public lay in the union of the practical with the artistic, a union between the engineer and the artist. Indeed, the Machine-Age Exposition had as one of its primary goals the celebration of the engineer as an artist. As Jane Heap, editor of the journal Little Review, put it in the exhibit catalog for the exposition:

  There is a great new race of men in America: the Engineer. He has created a new mechanical world, he is segregated from other men in other activities. . . . It is inevitable and important to the civilization of today that he make a union with the architect and artist. This affiliation will benefit each in his own domain, it will end the immense waste in each domain and will become a new creative force.

  Central to this idea of combining engineering utility and artistic beauty is the machine. The best artists in this vein “do not copy or imitate the Machine, they do not worship the Machine,—they recognize it as one of the realities. In fact, it is the Engineer who has been forced, in his creation, to use most of the forms once used by the artist. . . . The artist must now discover new forms for himself.”22 The exposition, which ran for three days in May 1927, featured works by American artists, including Sheeler, Demuth, and Lozowick, alongside the work of such American architects as Hugh Ferriss, Raymond Hood, and Eliel Saarinen and the works of artists, architects, and engineers from Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Poland, and Russia. Products from International Harvester Company, International Business Machines, Studebaker Corporation of America, Boston Gear Works, and Edison Lamp Works of General Electric were also included in the exposition.23 While not earth-shattering, either in the world of art or in popular consciousness, the Machine-Age Exposition does illustrate an attempt, like those made by the precisionists and even by Henry Ford himself, to adapt the industrial technology of the machine age to the values of modern life without creating a radical division from the past. Ford did not see himself as a completely “modern” man but, rather, as someone who used modern means yet embraced traditional values, at least selectively.

  In the automobile industry, 1927 was an important year; it illustrates the transition from one manufacturing philosophy, Fordism—or mass production, as it eventually would be called—to a different one, what historian of technology David Hounshell calls “flexible mass production.”24 This shift primarily entailed the ability to incorporate change (annual model changes) into the production process by keeping the production process open to alteration, making it “flexible.” This technological change also involved a change in economic thinking, since this added flexibility meant increased production. Ford’s achievement was in reducing the cost of production in order to maximize profits, whereas General Motors, and eventually Ford, the rest of the automobile industry, and all of American industry as well, followed the changing economic landscape by adapting to the growing consumer-driven market, focusing not on production but on consumption and on catering to the consumer. This transition from production to consumption is illustrated in the Model A, the ad campaign supporting it, and the influence that the Ford Motor Company had on Americans’ images of modernity. The ambiguity with which Americans approached this modernity is seen in declining sales amid public affection for the Model T, the complex public image of Henry Ford himself, and the uniquely American combination of traditional subjects and values with the modern style of the precisionist painters. This ambiguity is evident in the public celebration of Charles Lindbergh, a man of science and of technology expressing the very best of traditional American values. In attempting to resolve the conflict between tradition and modernity, Ford, Sheeler, and the public at large elevated the professional and the expert into the noble position once held by the yeoman farmer, the shopkeeper, and the craftsman, and in doing so unintentionally degraded the role of the worker. The nineteenth-century values of the Protestant work ethic and independence were now ensconced in the new technocrats, the very people who made many of those values obsolete.

  protesting the modern

  Painters and photographers were not the only artists utilizing the products of the machine age as inspiration for their work. Composer George Antheil’s piece Ballet Mécanique combined percussion instruments, piano, and player pianos with the sounds of machines (propellers, bells, and buzzers) to create a musical impression of the age. First performed in Paris in 1926, Ballet Mécanique sought to create a new style of music by mechanizing aspects of the performance, for example, using synchronized player pianos. Originally intended for nine player pianos playing simultaneously, most performances required live musicians, since precisely timing the player pianos proved impossible. The technology, which the performance sought to celebrate, was not up to the task of the performance. While Antheil, with his daring works, made a name for himself in Paris as the “bad boy of music,” in the United States his notoriety focused more on the reputation of his music as riot provoking than on the music itself. Book publisher Donald Friede offered to stage the American premier of Ballet Mécanique at Carnegie Hall in April 1927, and he reinforced all the most extreme views of Antheil and his music. The performance became less about hearing the music and more about seeing a spectacle. Antheil himself recalled that the publicists for the concert arranged for a real propeller as a prop for the performance in the hopes that the sight of it would frighten the audience. A large painted backdrop a
dded to the spectacle. “This gigantic, rather tasteless curtain (representing a 1927 jazz-mad America!),” Antheil recalled, “single-handedly accomplished two things: it sent me back to Europe broke—and gave an air of complete charlatanism to the whole proceedings.”25 The circus atmosphere of the concert overshadowed the intentions of the music. Antheil wrote the Ballet Mécanique with “no idea of copying a machine directly down into music, so to speak. My idea, rather, was to warn the age in which I was living of the simultaneous beauty and danger of its own unconscious mechanistic philosophy, aesthetic.”26 Antheil’s work was as much a warning against as a celebration of the machine. The precision necessary for a proper performance of the Ballet Mécanique dehumanized the performers, turning each into a cog in the machine. Timing needed to be consistent, not flexible; the playing precise, not emotive. It was like looking at an industrial assembly line, beautiful in its function but terrifying in its consequences.27

  Attending the Carnegie Hall concert was novelist and journalist Josephine Herbst, who excitedly rushed to the theater to be at the premier. “The Antheil performance was,” in Herbst’s words “a signal for the gathering of the clan.” William Carlos Williams, Nathan Asch, and Ezra Pound and his parents were there to celebrate the genius of this modern artist. But in all the excitement of the hour and the backstage hobnobbing, what Herbst remembered most vividly was “Pound’s parents, two frail, beautiful old people with white hair, both very slender, with spots of bright color in their cheeks, who stood shaking hands as if they had been parents at the wedding reception of a favorite son.”28 For Herbst, the excitement of the new and modern was eclipsed by the recognition of something much more traditional, and seemingly out of place: family, ceremony, tradition. While others, including Herbst’s husband, writer John Herrmann, were enthralled by the performance, Herbst found herself wondering why. “What did the music mean?” she wrote years later.

  I longed to be moved as all our friends seemed to be, including John, but it seemed to me I had heard no more than a hallelujah to the very forces I feared. My longing for a still, small voice, for a spokesman not for the crash of breakers on the rock but for the currents, down under, that no eye could see, made me feel alone but not an alien, and I looked at John, too, coldly, as one who had joined forces with some mysterious enemy. Was Antheil to be the symbol of an opposition to the Philistine? In a corner of my heart a slow movement of the pulse began to turn my attention elsewhere.29

  Herbst’s attention was turned, along with many others—especially in the intellectual and artistic community—to the death sentence handed down upon avowed anarchists and convicted murderers Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti on April 9, 1927.

  Italian immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti had been convicted in 1921 of murdering a paymaster and guard during the 1920 robbery of a shoe factory in South Braintree, Massachusetts. After six years of unsuccessful appeals, up to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, Judge Webster Thayer sentenced Sacco and Vanzetti to death. During their imprisonment, and especially between their sentencing and execution in August 1927, public opinion was conflicted over whether or not they had received a fair trial. Some believed they were innocent and were the victims of the nativist and antiradical hysteria that followed American entry into the Great War in 1917 and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia that same year. Herbst recalled that the “widening breach in an impassive society had brought many people of assorted temperaments, beliefs, backgrounds, and convictions to the conclusion that the fish peddler and the cobbler were innocent of the crimes of which they had been accused.”30 The public support for the two men was more a cultural phenomenon than a reflection of concerns over criminality and justice. The case did, however, lead to a general questioning of the judicial system. Its legal legacy, according to law professor Edmund M. Morgan, is that “it has revealed defects in our system of administering criminal justice, defects inherent in trial by jury and in the overemphasis upon the adversary features of our process of litigation.”31 The case did lead to changes in judicial procedure in Massachusetts specifically, but for many the case symbolized the larger faults of modern American society, mainly the difficulty of protecting individual rights (and by extension, of maintaining individuality) in a modern industrial society. It was, in particular, the way Sacco and Vanzetti had exercised their individual rights that challenged the mood of the country. They were agitators in a nation of joiners; they were foreigners who did not speak or write English (until after studying it in prison) in a country fresh from the “100 percent Americanism” campaigns of the Great War; they were draft dodgers, or “slackers” as they were called then, in a nation of volunteers; they were atheists in a nation founded on religious ideals; and they were radicals in a nation deeply fearful of radicals. (Americans supported the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, designed to rid the country of those who would seek to destroy or change it. Both acts passed in the years following U.S. entry into the Great War.) Each of these characteristics made Sacco and Vanzetti outsiders in American society, and to many, their conviction, sentencing, and execution represented the intolerance of that society. This feeling was especially acute among many who also counted themselves as outsiders: the foreign-born, labor unionists, political leftists, anarchists, intellectuals, and artists. These groups’ feelings of being outsiders were based on very different sets of circumstances, but from April to August 1927, they found themselves supporting a common cause: saving the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti.

  Widespread support for Sacco and Vanzetti among writers, artists, and intellectuals did not flourish until after the publication of Harvard Law School professor Felix Frankfurter’s article “The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti” in the March 1927 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, followed closely by the publication of Frankfurter’s book The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Critical Analysis for Lawyers and Laymen. In both, Frankfurter laid out the case and concluded that Judge Thayer had not ensured the accused a fair trial and in fact had added to the injustice through his actions and statements. Ending with the judge’s October 1926 written ruling on the request for a new trial, Frankfurter claimed, “[It] stands unmatched for discrepancies between what the record discloses and what the opinion conveys. His 25,000-word document cannot accurately be described otherwise than as a farrago of misquotations, misrepresentations, suppressions, and mutilations.”32 Frankfurter therefore concluded unreservedly that a new trial should be granted.

  Just over a month after the publication of the Atlantic article, on April 5, the Supreme Judicial Court denied an appeal to overturn Judge Thayer’s ruling, bringing any legal action to an end. Four days later, the two convicted men stood in Judge Thayer’s courtroom, and each made a statement. (Sacco, being less fluent in English, did not speak much, but he denied his guilt and accused the judge, while Vanzetti spoke for over forty minutes.) Thayer then sentenced them to die by electrocution. The juxtaposition of the seemingly objective arguments of Frankfurter (and the moderate conclusion asking for a new trial, while more extreme supporters demanded the pair be freed) to the court’s denial of their appeal followed quickly by the death sentence shocked many into an impassioned support for the two men. While not all believed Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent, many felt that an execution should not take place with as much doubt as many people had in this case. Support came from religious leaders in the Boston area, as well as from prominent local lawyers, who petitioned for a board of review. They were soon joined by sixty-one members of law faculties from around the United States supporting the idea of establishing a commission to review the case. International concern was expressed in numerous demonstrations worldwide, as well as in a petition sent to Massachusetts governor Alvan Fuller, signed by 472,842 persons from all over the world, requesting Fuller’s executive intervention. Yet despite the high-profile support of community, religious, and other leaders, along with the international outcry, support for the two men remained a minority opinion. “Majority public sentiment had reverte
d to the fearful and angry mood which was characteristic of the Red raid period. It ignored the problem of justice in the issue of life or death, and wildly demanded that the American way of life be protected from the world threat of radicalism.”33

  The concerns of the legal profession, as well as those of many religious leaders and community organizations, dissolved when on June 1 Governor Fuller announced the formation of an advisory committee to examine the situation. The committee consisted of Judge Robert Grant, President Abbott Lawrence Lowell of Harvard University, and President Samuel W. Stratton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The committee conducted private interviews with many of the principal witnesses for the prosecution and persons in the courtroom (Judge Thayer and members of the jury included), but they did not disclose to the counsel for the defense the substance of the interviews. After receiving the recommendation of the committee, Fuller announced on August 3 his decision not to intervene. The advisory committee report was published on August 7, stating that the committee had found no reason to discredit the decision of the courts. The execution of Sacco and Vanzetti occurred just after midnight on August 22, 1927.