1927 and the Rise of Modern America

by Charles Shindo

  Reinforcing this idea, Edith Wharton’s 1927 novel, Twilight Sleep, revolves around the lives of the extended family of Pauline and Dexter Manford, a new-money, New York couple whose every hour of every day is consumed with activity. While Dexter spends most of his waking hours working at his law firm, Pauline fills her day with scheduled social visits, fund-raisers, organizational meetings, exercise, and meditation and with learning about the newest and latest trends and fads in religion, social reform, and disaster relief. She unexpectedly experiences a free hour when her facial-massage artist cancels at the last minute, and Wharton describes her as “painfully oppressed by an hour of unexpected leisure.” Pauline contemplates what to do with the time:

  To be sure, she had skipped her “Silent Meditation” that morning; but she did not feel in the mood for it now. And besides, an hour is too long for meditation—an hour is too long for anything. Now that she had one to herself, for the first time in years, she didn’t in the least know what to do with it. That was something which no one had ever thought of teaching her; and the sense of being surrounded by a sudden void, into which she could reach out on all sides without touching an engagement or an obligation, produced in her a sort of mental dizziness. She had taken plenty of rest-cures, of course, all one’s friends did. But during a rest-cure one was always busy resting; every minute was crammed with passive activities; one never had this queer sense of inoccupation, never had to face an absolutely featureless expanse of time. It made her feel as if the world had rushed by and forgotten her.4

  Wharton’s portrayal of Pauline Manford illustrates Siegfried’s idea of constant activity as an American trait. If one is not engaged in gainful employment, then one needs to fill one’s days with other occupations. To not do anything goes against the grain of society, against the task of production and the goal of consumption. But in describing the inability of a woman of leisure to be leisurely, Wharton also alludes to the contradictions inherent in American society. This contradiction is reinforced by such phrases as “busy resting” and “passive activities.”

  Those contradictions alluded to by Wharton include Pauline’s efforts to uphold traditional society by scheming to keep her daughterin-law from leaving and divorcing her son Jim, while she herself challenged traditional society by divorcing Jim’s father to marry Dexter. Much like Lippmann’s Americans who do not believe the United States is an empire yet engage in imperial policies, Wharton’s characters communicate one set of ideals while living up to another set. In 1927, although not all Americans behaved hypocritically, what Americans did collectively did appear hypocritical and contradictory, since the range of experiences did not reflect a shared sense of what it meant to be an American; rather, it was the result of individuals’ engaging in individual or group activities that each fit into different ideas about American society in different ways. And in 1927, Americans found many ways to express themselves both individually and collectively, from the unifying yet diverse responses to Charles Lindbergh’s flight, to the similarly unifying but also divisive responses to the flooding of the Mississippi River. Both events brought Americans together in common celebration and common cause, but each event also illustrated the deep divides within American society, between older, traditional ideas about American values and newer, modern ideas, and between white landowners with the power incumbent in their position and the black tenant farmers and laborers with few rights in practice.

  As Americans expressed themselves in art, literature, religion, sex, and consumerism, they also expressed the nature of American culture, a culture that is vague and general enough to encompass many ideals, many ambiguities, and many conflicts, while in its broadest sense still speaking for almost all Americans. What makes this flexibility possible is the fact that it is a culture based on consumerism in which everyone can individually express themselves through consumption while participating collectively in a shared cultural practice. This culture was made possible by the growth of mass production, which enabled larger numbers of people to participate in consumption, even with the homogenizing effect of mass culture. “To standardize the individual in order to standardize things it is intended that he should buy,” claims Siegfried, “is to lose sight of the fact that goods were made for man and not man for goods” (America Comes of Age, 169). And although it is true that mass-produced goods do lack individuality in design and craftsmanship, that conformity is somewhat countered by the fact that while 15 million people bought Ford’s Model T, they all used the product in the ways best suited to their own needs and desires. The Model T made some feel as if they were a part of the great mass of American consumers entering the bright future; others saw their Model Ts as a means to remain independent, as in the case of small farmers.

  The individuality that Americans sought was not necessarily in the products they selected but in the combination of products consumed and the uses to which they were put, a concept only vaguely understood by Siegfried when he proclaims that “a democracy of capitalists is being built up among the people, a democracy that will be conservative because it is satisfied” (165). His concern is for political, religious, and economic equality and not for cultural expression, and in this sense he is correct in pointing out the limits placed on personal freedom by mass consumerism. But Siegfried sees Americans making a Devil’s bargain by choosing efficiency and quantity over individuality and social justice, all in the name of “service.” “In the end,” he writes, “‘service’ is the doctrine of an optimistic Pharisee trying to reconcile success with justice” (179). “Service” is the justification newspapers offered for devoting more print space to violent crimes and sporting events than to international events and domestic politics. Giving readers what they wanted to read instead of deciding what was important for them to know marked a significant shift in journalism, emphasized by the appearance of tabloid newspapers like the New York Illustrated Daily News, the New York Daily Mirror, and the New York Evening Graphic, which all specialized in image-driven content. Consumers saw these tabloids as an efficient way to get the news, since they could be read faster than a standard newspaper. The owners of the papers made substantial profits from these ventures, which still provided the basic service of informing the public, even though they were more focused on such events as the Snyder/Gray trial than on important issues of the day. “Service” is also what justified distributing radio licenses to large networks rather than to smaller independent, often ethnic, radio stations after the Radio Act of 1927. Since large networks served more people than did niche stations, the FRC saw fit to grant them the most licenses at the best frequencies, despite the fact that service to a small minority could also benefit not just that particular group but society in general. Again, in the name of service to the masses, the content of radio programming, like that of newspapers, became homogenized, leaving fewer choices for individual expression.

  Yet people did express their preferences through consumption as consumer goods and services came more and more to dominate the definition of American culture. While novelists, playwrights, musicians, and artists sought to define a uniquely American culture with such works as Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth, Kern and Hammerstein’s Show Boat, Whiteman’s recording of Ferde Grofé’s “Mississippi Suite,” and Sheeler’s Criss-Crossed Conveyors, most Americans expressed their culture by attending professional and college sporting events and motion pictures, listening to network radio programs, following the exploits of famous and infamous people, and celebrating national heroes such as Charles Lindbergh. They were able to share these experiences with each other yet not necessarily to interpret their experiences in the same way and according to the same values.

  While some lamented the damaging impact a radio minstrel show could have on perceptions of African Americans, others (including many African Americans) celebrated the progress that they believed the inclusion of African American characters on a popular radio program represented. Likewise, the successes of Harlem Renaissance artists can be seen as
a celebration and appreciation of black culture, a selling of black stereotypes to an eager white audience while selling out authentic African American culture, or a combination of the two. For every comment about the negative influence of movies portraying immoral behavior, there were positive comments about the benefits of easy access to entertainment. Clara Bow’s films and life represented both the liberating effects of feminism and the dangers that the loss of traditional roles presented for the stability of society; the more economically successful businesswoman, Mary Pickford, represented traditional female subservience and infantilization in the roles she played. While onscreen they portrayed very different types of women, their lives represent the opportunities available to the “new woman.” Ultimately, Pickford was the more modern woman, with her three marriages and business empire, as opposed to Bow’s marriage and retirement from the screen, but each engaged in both traditional and modern practices. Bruce Barton believed that religion, modernized according to business methods, could save the world; Sinclair Lewis saw the same process as a danger to American society. Hollywood used religion to bring respectability to the film industry, while fundamentalism and religious intolerance continued. In a variety of ways, the uses and abuses of religion reveal the ambiguities of American culture.

  Visually representing the ambiguities of American culture, Charles Demuth’s 1927 painting of a Lancaster, Pennsylvania, grain silo is titled My Egypt. The title plays not only on the craze for everything Egyptian in the wake of the discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922 but also on the many references, such as Le Corbusier’s 1923 book Towards a New Architecture, that likened American grain elevators to the Egyptian pyramids. The comparison is meaningful on a number of levels; as a celebration of American industry and technology, as well as in sheer size, grain elevators illustrated the ingenuity of American business and efficiency. Also, the idea that American industrial and agricultural workers were similar to the slaves of ancient Egypt, building monuments to other men’s glory, alluded to the negative aspects of American society. But Demuth’s painting is more than an ambiguous look at modernization. Barbara Haskell argues that the “my” in My Egypt refers to the role industrial modernization plays in American society. Just as the bondage of slavery in Egypt helped create the religion and identity of the Jews, American industry serves as a source of inspiration as well as imprisonment for creative endeavors. “My Egypt was Demuth’s radical assertion of the dilemma of the American artist as well as his acknowledgment that the very difficulties America posed were also the ultimate source of his aesthetic invention and creative freedom.”5 Or as Demuth himself put it, “America doesn’t really care—still, if one is really an artist and at the same time an American, just this not caring, even though it drives one mad, can be artistic material.”6 The ideas Demuth felt about America and sought to convey were too complex for words alone and needed to be spoken through his art. “Words, Demuth now felt,” Haskell argues, “could not generate sufficient ambiguity or force one to internalize the levels of meaning in a work of art.”7 The stately, monumental, and overwhelming structure in the painting both inspires and intimidates; the beams of light celebrate and cast shadows. Ambiguity abounds in both the painting and in the nation that inspired it.

  Every event in American history contains clues to the way Americans felt about their nation and the world, and the events of 1927 illustrate a society deeply conflicted about the direction of American culture. This was more than a carefree age of flappers, bathtub gin, and ballyhoo. It was an age of anxiety, hope, caution, and fear. Anxiety about what the future would bring and what was being lost of the past, hope for economic prosperity and a rising standard of living, caution about changing too many things and ideas too quickly, and fear that the America that many people remembered and cherished was disappearing all created tension in American life. The contradictions expressed in American culture underscored the inherent differences in values held by individual Americans. These differences created an air of ambiguity that pervaded every moral crusade, every raucous speakeasy celebration, every celebrity’s image, and every artistic expression.

  While Siegfried does not address the cultural expressions of Americans, his analysis of the economic, political, and ethnic situation in the United States is fully reinforced by it. What Americans did, consumed, and experienced expressed their feelings about their world. The successes of Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford, Clara Bow, Herbert Hoover, Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Duke Ellington, and others helped Americans reinforce their belief in the American superiority ushered in by the Great War. For most Americans, the culture reflected the economic and political triumph of American values as expressed in the military triumph of the war. But as Siegfried points out, these things also give warning to the dangers of American ideals. Would America’s new leadership role bring about greater harmony, peace, and prosperity, or would it mark a turn in the progress of individual freedom? Is modern America good for individual Americans?

  In 1927, that question was yet to be answered, but investigating the ways people dealt with these issues and expressed them in their everyday lives not only can help us understand how the past dealt with these issues but can also inform current debates over similar issues. Gay marriage and abortion now occupy the same ground where prohibition and antievolutionism stood in the 1920s, a basic argument over which values and morals should represent the nation as a whole. Illegal immigration, citizenship, and English-only debates mimic debates over immigration reform and nativism by arguing over who has a right to the American dream. While the subjects of such concerns have changed, the issues are consistent. Optimistic predictions about radio’s democratizing effect mirrors current predictions concerning the “new media” of cyberspace, illustrating Americans’ firm belief in the ability of progress and technology to ameliorate problems. The consequences of Hurricane Katrina, much like those of the Mississippi flood of 1927, revived concerns about racial inequality in the South and the nation and about whose vision of American society should be used to reconstruct devastated regions. In the end, it is a matter of dealing with inevitable change that some see as progress and others see as decline.

  While some fear changes occurring in American society, others look to the future for a better world. Yet still, the conflict between the demands of the majority and the rights of individuals and minorities continues and is still expressed in the culture of everyday life. The main difference between the early twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first is that instead of dealing with an America on the rise in the world, we are dealing with one in decline, as a unified Europe and the growing economies of India and China seek to displace American economic strength and with it the political influence that the United States held during the American century. In many ways, the search for modern America that engaged Americans in 1927 is still going on today.

  Notes

  introduction. the search for modern america

  1. John W. Ward, “The Meaning of Lindbergh’s Flight,” American Quarterly 10, no. 1 (Spring 1958), 15.

  2. Allen Churchill, The Year the World Went Mad (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1960), vii; Gerald Leinwald, 1927: High Tide of the Twenties (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2001), x; Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (New York: Harper & Row, 1931); Nathan Miller, New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America (New York: Scribner, 2003).

  3. Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill & Wang, 1995). Other useful works include Ellis W. Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American People and Their Institutions, 1917–1933 (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1992); David J. Goldberg, Discontented America: The United States in the 1920s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Elizabeth Stevenson, Babbitts and Bohemians: From the Great War to the Great Depression (Edison, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1997).

  4. Ro
derick Nash, The Nervous Generation: American Thought, 1917–1930 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1990), 2.

  5. Paul A. Carter, The Twenties in America (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968), 8. My thanks to Paul Boyer for pointing out the particularly appropriate quotation here.

  6. Lawrence W. Levine, “Progress and Nostalgia: The Self Image of the Nineteen Twenties,” in The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 189–205; Warren I. Susman, “Culture and Civilization: The Nineteen-Twenties,” and “Culture Heroes: Ford, Barton, Ruth,” both in Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2003), 105–121, 122–149.

  7. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985); Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Charles L. Ponce de Leon, Self-Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).