1927 and the Rise of Modern America

by Charles Shindo

  chapter one. seeking mastery: the machine age and the idealized past

  1. Charles Sorenson, quoted in David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 222.

  2. Keith Sward, The Legend of Henry Ford (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 44–45.

  3. Ray Batchelor, Henry Ford: Mass Production, Modernism and Design (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1994), 55–56.

  4. Sward, Legend of Henry Ford, 199–201.

  5. Mary Jane Jacob and Linda Downs, The Rouge: The Image of Industry in the Art of Charles Sheeler and Diego Rivera (Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1978), 7.

  6. Robert Lacey, Ford: The Men and the Machine (Boston: Little, Brown, 1986), 298–299. See also Richard S. Tedlow, “Putting America on Wheels: Ford vs. General Motors,” in his New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 112–181.

  7. There is an extensive literature describing the effects of the economic shift from production to consumption. Most important are T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985); Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2003); Lewis Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2004); Hal Barron, Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); William R. Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1994); Charles F. McGovern, Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Tedlow, New and Improved; and Richard Wrightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983).

  8. William Knudsen, quoted in Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 265.

  9. Henry Ford, quoted in Batchelor, Henry Ford, 40. Batchelor believes that Ford made the statement not in 1909, as he claimed, but only later in his ghostwritten autobiography, My Life and Work (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1923). Regardless, it did become part of the myth of Henry Ford and the Model T.

  10. Batchelor, Henry Ford, 60.

  11. Sward, Legend of Henry Ford, 204.

  12. Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 100–101.

  13. Smith, Making the Modern, 101.

  14. Susan Fillin Yeh, “Charles Sheeler: Industry, Fashion, and the Vanguard,” Arts Magazine, February 1980, 156.

  15. For a more detailed account of this argument, see Smith, Making the Modern.

  16. Yeh, “Charles Sheeler,” 158.

  17. Quoted in Yeh, “Charles Sheeler,” 156.

  18. Karen Tsujimoto, Images of America: Precisionist Painting and Modern Photography (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), 22.

  19. Reyner Banham, quoted in Tsujimoto, Images of America, 22.

  20. Louis Lozowick, “The Americanization of Art,” in The Machine-Age Exposition Exhibit Catalogue (New York: Little Review, 1927), 18–19.

  21. Miles Orvell, “Inspired by Science and the Modern: Precisionism and American Culture,” in Precisionism in America, 1915–1941: Reordering Reality (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 54.

  22. Jane Heap, “Machine-Age Exposition,” in Machine-Age Exposition Exhibit Catalogue, 36.

  23. Machine-Age Exposition Exhibit Catalogue, 37.

  24. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 263.

  25. George Antheil, Bad Boy of Music (Hollywood, Calif.: Samuel French, 1990), 193.

  26. Ibid., 140.

  27. The precision necessary for a complete, as-written performance of Ballet Mécanique could not be achieved until computers became available, decades after Antheil wrote it. For more on the use of computers to perform Ballet Mécanique, see the documentary film Bad Boy Made Good: The Revival of the Ballet Mécanique (directed by Ron Frank, 2006) and Paul Lehrman, “Reconstructing Ballet Mécanique: An Interview with Paul Lehrman,” by Preston Wright, American Public Media, January 2003, available at http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/features/interview_lehrman.html.

  28. Josephine Herbst, “A Year of Disgrace,” in The Starched Blue Sky of Spain, and Other Memoirs (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999), 84.

  29. Ibid., 84–85.

  30. Ibid., 85.

  31. G. Louis Joughin and Edmund M. Morgan, The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948), 197.

  32. Felix Frankfurter, “The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1927, 409–432.

  33. Joughin and Morgan, Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti, 271.

  34. Ibid., 297.

  35. Ibid.

  36. Ibid., 513.

  37. Herbst, “Year of Disgrace,” 97.

  38. Walter Lippmann, “The Causes of Political Indifference Today,” in Men of Destiny (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 28–30.

  39. Bruce Barton, “Creed of an Advertising Man,” quoted in Susman, Culture as History, 128.

  40. Bruce Barton, What Can a Man Believe? (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1927), 5. Henceforth cited in text.

  41. Calvin Coolidge, “Remarks to Amherst College Alumni Association, February 4, 1916,” in Have Faith in Massachusetts: A Collection of Speeches and Messages (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), 14.

  42. For an extended discussion of Lewis’s depiction of modern society, see Stephen S. Conroy, “Sinclair Lewis’s Sociological Imagination,” American Literature 42, no. 3 (November 1970): 348–362.

  43. Nicholas Birns, “Building the Cathedral: Imagination, Christianity, and Progress in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop,” Religion and the Arts: A Journal from Boston College 3, no. 1 (1999): 10.

  44. Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927; repr., New York: Vintage Classics, 1990), 290. Citations are to the Vintage Classics edition. Henceforth cited in text.

  45. Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 299.

  46. Dorothy Ross, “Grand Narrative in American Historical Writing: From Romance to Uncertainty,” American Historical Review 100, no. 3 (June 1995): 657, 656.

  47. Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1927, rev. and enlarged, two volumes in one, 1933), x. Citations are to the 1933 edition.

  48. David W. Marcell, “Charles Beard: Civilization and the Revolt against Empiricism,” American Quarterly 21, no. 1 (Spring 1969): 68.

  49. Ross, “Grand Narrative,” 658.

  50. April Schultz, “‘The Pride of the Race Had Been Touched’: The 1925 Norse-American Immigration Centennial and Ethnic Identity,” Journal of American History 77, no. 4 (March 1991): 1294.

  51. O. E. Rolvaag, quoted in April Schultz, Ethnicity on Parade: Inventing the Norwegian American through Celebration (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 58.

  52. Glenway Wescott, The Grandmothers: A Family Portrait (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1927; repr. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 33. Citations are to the University of Wisconsin Press edition. Henceforth cited in text.

  53. Jonathan Zimmerman, “‘Each “Race” Could Have Its Heroes Sung
’: Ethnicity and the History Wars in the 1920s,” Journal of American History 87, no. 1 (June 2000): 110.

  chapter two. seeking equality: feminism and flood waters

  1. Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, “Feminist—New Style,” Harper’s Monthly, October 1927, 552. Henceforth cited in text.

  2. For more on the transformation of feminism after suffrage, see Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 158.

  3. For a more elaborate discussion of the ascendance of personality over character, see Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2003).

  4. F. Scott Fitzgerald, quoted in Margaret Reid, “Has the Flapper Changed?” Motion Picture, July 1927, 28–29, 104.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Elinor Glyn, quoted in Meredith Etherington-Smith and Jeremy Pilcher, The “It” Girls: Lucy, Lady Duff Gordon, the Couturiere “Lucile,” and Elinor Glyn, Romantic Novelist (London: Hamish House, 1986), 240–241.

  7. For a fuller discussion of marriage rates and sexual practices, see Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism, 147–151.

  8. Budd Schulberg, Moving Pictures: Memories of a Hollywood Prince (New York: Stein & Day, 1981), 172.

  9. Ben B. Lindsey and Wainwright Evans, The Companionate Marriage (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927), 17. Henceforth cited in text.

  10. Charles Larsen, The Good Fight: The Life and Times of Judge Ben B. Lindsey (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972), 173.

  11. Ibid., 174.

  12. Quoted in Larsen, The Good Fight, 175.

  13. Quoted in Larsen, The Good Fight, 176.

  14. Virginia Dale, “The Season in Chicago,” in The Best Plays of 1927–1928, ed. Burns Mantle (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1928), 17.

  15. Her First Affaire, a comedy in three acts; by Merrill Rogers. Produced by Gustav Blum at the Bayes Theatre, New York, August 22, 1927.

  16. Mantle, Best Plays of 1927–1928, 394–395.

  17. Five O’Clock Girl, a musical comedy in two acts; book by Guy Bolton and Fred Thompson; music and lyrics by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby. Produced by Philip Goodman at the 44th Street Theatre, New York, October 10, 1927.

  18. Mantle, Best Plays of 1927–1928, 427.

  19. Padlocks of 1927, a musical review in two acts. Sketches by Paul Gerard Smith and Ballard Macdonald; lyrics by Billy Rose; music by Lee David, Jesse Greer, and Henry H. Tobias. Produced by Duo Art Productions at the Shubert Theatre, New York, July 5, 1927.

  20. New York Evening Post, February 19, 1927, quoted in Louise Berliner, Texas Guinan: Queen of the Night Clubs (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 121–123.

  21. Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 248.

  22. Quoted in Larsen, The Good Fight, 177.

  23. Coquette, a play in three acts by George Abbott and Ann Preston Bridgers. Produced by Jed Harris at the Maxine Elliott Theatre, New York, November 8, 1927.

  24. Abbott and Bridgers, Coquette, in Mantle, Best Plays of 1927–1928, 146–147.

  25. Show Boat, a musical comedy adapted from Edna Ferber’s novel of the same name; book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II; music by Jerome Kern. Produced by Florenz Ziegfeld at the Ziegfeld Theatre, New York, December 27, 1927.

  26. Oscar Hammerstein II, “Ol’ Man River,” from Show Boat.

  27. Edna Ferber, Show Boat (New York: Book League of America, 1926), 111. Henceforth cited in text.

  28. Hammerstein, “Ol’ Man River.”

  29. Statistical information concerning the flood and relief measures comes from The Mississippi Valley Flood Disaster of 1927: Official Report of the Relief Operations (Washington, D.C.: American National Red Cross, 1928), 4–10.

  30. For a full account of the flood, see John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

  31. Ibid., 408–411.

  32. Ibid., 133.

  33. Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901–1969 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 151.

  34. Ibid., 149. See also Pete Daniel, Deep’n as It Come: The 1927 Mississippi River Flood (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1996).

  35. Barry, Rising Tide, 183.

  36. E. C. Sanders, “Report of Activities at Camp Rex,” in Report of Flood Relief Expedition, Mississippi National Guard, Office of the Adjunct General, quoted in Barry, Rising Tide, 200.

  37. A. G. Paxton, “National Guard Activities in Connection with Levee Fight and Flood Relief Expedition, Greenville, Mississippi,” in Report of Flood Relief Expedition, quoted in Barry, Rising Tide, 202.

  38. Barry, Rising Tide, 202.

  39. Mississippi Valley Flood Disaster of 1927, 7–8.

  40. “The Flood, the Red Cross, and the National Guard,” Crisis, January 1928, 5.

  41. The Final Report of the Colored Advisory Commission Appointed to Cooperate with the American National Red Cross and the President’s Committee on Relief Work in the Mississippi Valley Flood Disaster of 1927 (Washington, D.C.: American National Red Cross, 1929), available online at www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/flood/filmmore/ps_cac.html.

  42. Mississippi Valley Flood Disaster of 1927, 11.

  43. Sidney Redmond to Calvin Coolidge, April 30, 1927, quoted in Daniel, Shadow of Slavery, 153–154.

  44. Daniel, Shadow of Slavery, 154.

  45. Ibid., 156.

  46. Quoted in ibid., 159.

  47. Robert Moton to Herbert Hoover, June 13, 1927, available online at www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/flood/filmmore/ps_moton1.html.

  48. Ibid.

  49. Ibid.

  50. Robert Moton, “Memorandum for the Committee,” quoted in Daniel, Shadow of Slavery, 161.

  51. Walter White, “The Negro and the Flood,” Nation, June 22, 1927, 688. Henceforth cited in text.

  52. Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 66.

  53. Mississippi Valley Flood Disaster of 1927, 11.

  54. Ibid., 16.

  55. Calvin Coolidge, quoted in Mississippi Valley Flood Disaster of 1927, 13.

  56. John Crowe Ransom to Allen Tate, quoted in Mark G. Malvasi, The Unregenerate South: The Agrarian Thought of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 44.

  57. Quoted in Kendrick A. Clements, Hoover, Conservation, and Consumerism: Engineering the Good Life (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 114.

  58. Bruce Lohof, “Herbert Hoover, Spokesman of Humane Efficiency: The Mississippi Flood of 1927,” American Quarterly 22, no. 3 (Autumn 1970): 693.

  59. Quoted in ibid., 695.

  60. For a full description of how these state credit corporations worked, see Lohof, “Herbert Hoover, Spokesman of Humane Efficiency,” 695–696.

  61. U.S. House of Representatives, Eleventh Annual Report of the Federal Farm Loan Board, 1927, 70th Cong., 1st sess., 1928, House Doc. 324, quoted in Lohof, “Herbert Hoover, Spokesman of Humane Efficiency,” 696.

  62. Lohof, “Herbert Hoover, Spokesman of Humane Efficiency,” 696.

  63. Ibid., 692.

  64. Herbert Hoover, memorandum, May 12, 1927, Hoover Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa, as quoted in Lohof, “Herbert Hoover, Spokesman of Humane Efficiency,” 697.

  65. Lohof, “Herbert Hoover, Spokesman of Humane Efficiency,” 697.

  66. Barry, Rising Tide, 395. Barry provides a detailed discussion of the interactions between Hoover and Moton; see especially chaps. 31–33, and 34.

  chapter three. seeking notoriety: the infamous and the famous

  1. Joan Hoff Wilson, Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), 80.

  2. Ibid., 81–82.

  3. Arthur Capper, editorial, T
opeka (Kansas) Daily Capital, July 19, 1927, quoted in Craig Lloyd, Aggressive Introvert: A Study of Herbert Hoover and Public Relations Management, 1912–1932 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1972), 120.

  4. Wilson, Herbert Hoover, 118.

  5. Quoted in Richard M. Fried, The Man Everybody Knew: Bruce Barton and the Making of Modern America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005), 128–129.

  6. Nan Britton, The President’s Daughter (New York: Elizabeth Ann Guild, 1927), i.

  7. Ibid., iii–iv.

  8. Robert H. Ferrell, The Strange Deaths of President Harding (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996), 68.

  9. Britton, President’s Daughter, 385.

  10. Paul Sann, The Lawless Decade: A Pictorial History of a Great American Transition; From the World War I Armistice and Prohibition to Repeal and the New Deal (New York: Crown, 1957), 165.

  11. Nan Britton, Honesty or Politics (New York: Elizabeth Ann Guild, 1932), ix–x.

  12. For a full discussion of Harding’s reputation as president, see Ferrell, Strange Deaths of President Harding.

  13. Most of the accounts of the trial, including newspaper and later book-length accounts, tended to side with Gray for several reasons, some valid, some not so much. The most convincing argument lies in the fact that Gray’s account of the murder in no way seeks to absolve him of wrongdoing, nor did it work to his advantage in any way, whereas Snyder’s testimony sought to place the blame fully on Gray.

  14. Ruth Snyder, quoted in John Kobler, The Trial of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1938), 53. Kobler does not provide citations in his work.

  15. Kobler, Trial of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, 4.

  16. Judd Gray, Doomed Ship: The Autobiography of Judd Gray, Prepared for Publication by His Sister Margaret Gray (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928), 154–155. Henceforth cited in text.

  17. Aimee Semple McPherson, quoted in Sann, Lawless Decade, 139.

  18. Chicago, a satirical comedy in three acts; by Maurine Watkins. Produced by Sam H. Harris at the Music Box Theatre, New York, December 30, 1926; in The Best Plays of 1926–1927, ed. Burns Mantle (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1927), 104.

  19. Kobler, Trial of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, 51. The case would later inspire another writer, James M. Cain, to write Double Indemnity (1943, first published in Liberty Magazine in 1936), which became a classic film noir in 1944.