The Flight

by Dan Hampton

  Illiteracy would decrease from 6 percent overall in 1920 to 4.3 percent by decade’s end. Capitalizing on the trend, Time magazine would begin publishing in 1923 and create its “Man of the Year” in 1927.* The New Yorker hit the street in 1925, and by the summer of Lindbergh’s flight more than 36 million newspapers were read each day. This newfound voracious appetite for the written word made it possible for the nation to closely follow Lindbergh’s flight, though, as he himself would ruefully discover, journalists sometimes placed sensationalism above accuracy.

  Automobiles sat outside 10 million homes, and there were more cars in New York City alone than in Germany, and France had fewer automobiles than Kansas. Home to the largest publishers and banks, New York’s Woolworth Building at 792 feet was the world’s tallest structure, and the 8,558-foot Hudson River Vehicular Tunnel was the longest underwater tunnel on earth.† New York had also surpassed London in terms of population, and 40 percent of U.S. international trade passed through its port.

  It would be simplistic and incorrect to believe the nation suddenly rejected its values and, as is popularly portrayed, abandoned its past and future for the present. Many certainly did not go on benders, cut their hair, wear short skirts, or ditch prewar notions of morality. But many did. A tremendous labor shortage had occurred when the men joined up to fight, and the vacuum was largely filled with women and black men, who had become temporarily accustomed to the relative independence provided by a steady income.

  When the soldiers came home and were demobilized, they wanted their jobs back and a return to the old social order. But many women resisted falling back into domestic servitude, and black men had shown they could perform as equals in every facet of American life—if they were permitted to do so.

  Labor unions, highly influential at the time, found themselves at a crossroads. Should they protect only white workers, which would reduce their collective bargaining power with big business—or should they represent all workers regardless of color? By generally choosing the latter, they fed racial resentment among whites, bringing organizations like the Ku Klux Klan back to life. By 1920 the Reverend William J. Simmons, a former Methodist minister from Alabama, had increased the Klan’s membership to more than four million. As their influence grew, so did their sense of self-importance; like the Taliban of a later era, they saw themselves as the sole guardians of “pure” American life. “Native, White, Protestant supremacy” became a motto, with dancing, drinking, religion, and any moral issues falling within their self-appointed purview.

  They were not alone in this myopic, intolerant Puritanism. Some of the fanatics, like Wilbur Glenn Voliva, were silly. Head of the Christian Apostolic Church, Voliva stated in 1922 that “the sky is a vast dome of solid material, from which the sun, moon and stars are hung like chandeliers from a ceiling.” Others were not so easy to dismiss. During the war’s closing years, and those immediately following the armistice, enthusiasm for various forms of extremism was viewed by many as a counterweight to social change. Speaking German was made illegal in several states, books were burned, and in Boston, of all places, Beethoven was banned. In Collinsville, Illinois, a young man named Robert Prager, who happened to be born in Germany, was stripped, wrapped in an American flag, and lynched. His murderers were acquitted of this “patriotic crime” in only twenty-five minutes.

  The Anti-Saloon League and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) were both given a new lease on life through the politics of the Wartime Prohibition Act. Ostensibly created to control critical resources like mines, factories, railroad rolling stock, and all manner of raw materials for the war effort, the act was meant to last only “for the duration” of the war. Taxes gained from the manufacture, import, and sale of liquor were to be a major source of revenue and, since Washington had imposed similar acts to pay for the Civil War and Spanish-American War, there was little concern. After all, Americans were fighting in the Great War.

  The main problem was that it went into effect after the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918. But the “drys,” as they were called, saw the act for what it was: a slightly open door through which a full-scale assault on “wet” America could be launched. In this they had a willing, powerful, and energetic partner in the United States government. Since the creation of a permanent federal income tax by the 1913 ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, Washington had shown an enthusiasm to intrude in public life as never before and a perfect opportunity, under the cover of war, now existed to expand its control. Four separate revenue acts had been passed since 1913, raising the tax rates to an astonishing 77 percent on those in the highest bracket, and four more would be passed between 1921 and 1928.

  Cracked open by the Wartime Prohibition Act, the doorway to civil liberty and freedom of choice was kicked off its hinges a minute past midnight on January 17, 1920. The Eighteenth Amendment, stating in part that “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within . . . the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited,” was now in effect. The National Prohibition Act, also known as the Volstead Act, was also passed that year in an attempt to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment.

  On its surface this was called a “noble experiment,” but in truth it was a graphic illustration of the power of the political lobby. Where there is government there is always some degree of influence peddling and corruption, yet for the most part the United States had avoided these perils, at least on a large scale. Not so after 1920. Interest groups learned that if they were well organized, well financed, and extremely vocal about their desires they could influence, and actually create, legislation to their liking. It is a trend that has continued to this day, and was born during the Prohibition years.

  The postwar loosening of morals, the influx of immigrants, and the faltering economy all fostered a rise in evangelical Protestantism that was determined to save America from itself, even against its will. Billy Sunday, a former professional baseball player turned itinerant preacher, declared that alcohol was “God’s worst enemy and hell’s best friend.” Unable to explain biblical contradictions on that subject, he and others like him hired scholars to actually rewrite the Bible and remove such passages.

  A number of like-minded groups sprang up to purge America of its booze: the Anti-Saloon League, the WCTU, and the Orwellian-named Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals. Spreading the evangelical word included a proposition to hang up alcohol offenders by their tongues, and sterilization. Other punishments were advocated that ranged from exile to execution. In a country desperately trying to rest a bit after the war, weary of spreading democracy and saving the world, there was initially little resistance to this sort of fanaticism. Most Americans then, as they do now, had a laissez-faire attitude toward the cranks as long as they left other people alone.

  But they didn’t.

  The dry movement quickly capitalized on its success with Prohibition and began trying to remove other types of public evils: Catholics, Jews, immigrants, city dwellers, businessmen . . . basically anyone who wasn’t a white, rural Protestant. By turning the Prohibition cause into a crusade against anyone beyond their narrow worldview, they overreached. This evolved into a proxy class war, with alcohol as its battlefield, in an effort to control American life. The surge in immigration hadn’t helped; in the decade prior to the Great War more than 10 million people entered the United States, a nation with a population of just over eighty million. Generally poorer and less educated eastern or southern Europeans, they assimilated slowly and tended to live in cultural groupings within large American cities. The new arrivals clung to their non-Protestant religions and comforting traditions, which included drinking. Earlier immigrants, like the Germans and especially the Irish, came from a culture that had always incorporated alcohol, and the nearly 900 million gallons consumed by 1900 proved it. Big brewers like Pabst, Schlitz, Busch, and Miller were all German-American companies, founded by immi
grants, and built around large, working-class, urban populations.

  The nation’s large distilleries were generally controlled by Jewish businessmen like Lee Levy and the Canadian Bronfman brothers. By 1916 Jewish companies made up some 80 percent of the National Liquor Dealers Association, including Max Hirsch, Pritz & Company, and Elias Hyman & Sons. The stage was set, then, for the showdown of white, rural Protestant teetotalers against city-dwelling alcoholic papists, Jews, and immigrants. Other issues, such as direct senatorial elections, income tax, and women’s suffrage, were dragged into the fight whenever possible. As Philipp Blom wrote in Fracture, “The great campaign for renewed morality was old America fighting new America, rural America fighting urban life, the nineteenth century fighting the twentieth.”

  This thirteen-year feud unquestionably changed the fabric of life in the United States by altering how people thought. Because some 1,500 underpaid federal agents could never patrol the 5,525-mile Canada-U.S. border, nor blockade the 4,993 miles of American coastline,* disrespect for the law, at least silly laws, became commonplace. To take advantage of a $3 billion untaxed industry, organized crime also rose dramatically. Violent assaults and murders rose from 12 per 100,000 in 1920 to 16 per 100,000 by the time Prohibition was repealed. At least 30,000 “speakeasies,” illegal drinking establishments, popped up in New York alone.

  Skirt hems rose to nine inches and girls rolled their stockings down to show some leg below the knee. Corsets were discarded. Wild young social ladies called flappers appeared in the speakeasies, drinking in public in thin, sleeveless dresses. By 1927 their skirts were above the knee, though there’s no indication Charles Lindbergh noticed—if he did, he was certainly too shy to discuss it. Corsets and petticoats declined in use, with cotton largely replaced by silk or rayon stockings. Bobbed hair was no longer a sign of fashionable radicalism; it was simply fashionable. The veneration of youth and beauty over age and experience had begun and the trend has never waned, at least in the United States.

  The young medium of motion pictures reflected the times. Lee de Forest had invented the triode detector tube, which essentially amplified sound, thus making long-distance communications possible. He also figured out how to imprint sound onto movie film, and when Warner Bros. released Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, talking pictures became commercially viable. As the Spirit of St. Louis flew east toward Europe, 80 percent of the world’s movies were made in Hollywood and film was the fourth-largest industry in the country. More than eight hundred films per year were created, and some 100 million tickets were sold each week, in 20,000 theaters. Some of these were palaces, beautiful, ornate picture houses like the Roxy Theater in New York, or Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles.* Toward the middle of the decade, as the recession ended and prosperity increased, Americans often saw Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin, and others on-screen several times a week.

  The saxophone made its debut, heralding the fox-trot and slow dancing in the dark. Cincinnati’s Catholic Telegraph was among those expressing shock and indignation. “The music is sensuous, the embracing of partners—the female only half dressed—is absolutely indecent; and the motions—they are such as may not be described.” The New York American decried jazz as “a pathological, nerve-irritating, sex-exciting music.” People loved it nonetheless. “Petting parties” became a common indoor pastime, further shocking mothers and fathers across the country. “I’ve kissed dozens of men,” Rosalind exclaims in Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. “I suppose I’ll kiss dozens more.” Yet this worldly, upper-class view was definitely at odds with most of rural, grassroots America. A city ordinance passed in Norphelt, Arkansas, read: “Section 1. Hereafter it shall be unlawful for any man and woman, male or female, to be guilty of committing the act of sexual intercourse between themselves at any place within the corporate limits of said town.” This did not, of course, apply to married couples, unless the act was “of a grossly improper and lascivious nature,” though who would police this and render a judgment was far from clear. But in cities, sex was truly out in the open, nearly as much an obsession as drinking.

  Meanwhile the evangelicals, the Klan, and myriad groups of teetotalers fumed. They believed illicit alcohol was the root of all this decadence, and immigrants were providing it. They viewed immigrants as filthy masses from Eastern Europe or drunken Irish. Theodore Roosevelt once called his opponents “a stupid, sodden, vicious lot, most of them being equally deficient in brains and virtue.” Immigrants were at the root of job shortages, crime, and, above all, the alcoholic evil causing moral decay, or so the various movements claimed. Frances Willard, national president of the WCTU, called immigrants the “scum of the old world” and joined the Klan in petitioning Congress to keep out “European riff-raff.” This riffraff had put ground glass into Red Cross bandages, they claimed, and plotted to poison American reservoirs or blow up bridges. A sort of national paranoia spread and anyone who was European or a socialist or spoke against the government, the flag, or the president was a target. One immigrant, arrogant or unaware enough to shout “To hell with the United States,” was shot and killed in Indiana. A jury took just two minutes to acquit the shooter.

  Washington’s answer was the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which created an annual limit on immigrants, capped at 2 percent of their countrymen already residing in the United States. Gaming the system further, the government based this total number on the 1890 census, not the more current 1920 census. There were 943,781 Poles in the United States as of the 1920 census, but the 1890 figure of 91,000 would be used, thereby reducing the number of incoming Poles from 18,876 to 1,890.

  But the real concern was the Russians.

  On November 7, 1917, Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks stormed the Imperial Winter Palace in Petrograd. Early in March 1918, the new Soviet government made a separate peace with the Kaiser and pulled out of the Great War. This released an additional million German soldiers to fight the combined American, British, and French armies on the western front and prolonged the war. Surprisingly, communist and socialist ideology had enough of a following in the United States to cause concern and produce the “Red Scare.”

  In April 1919, a six-inch by three-inch brown paper package was delivered to the Atlanta home of Senator Thomas R. Hardwick, chairman of the Senate Immigration Committee and a vehement supporter of immigration restriction. Tragically, a female servant opened it and lost both hands as it blew up in her face. The next day a clerk in the New York Post Office parcel post division read about the Hardwick bomb and remembered that he had put sixteen such packages aside for insufficient postage. Returning to work, he informed the police, who examined them in a nearby fire station and found they all contained explosives. All were marked with a return address to Gimbel Brothers in New York and intended for prominent officials and businessmen: J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller Jr., the commissioner of immigration, and a Supreme Court justice, to name a few.

  In Washington, D.C., the attorney general of the United States, A. Mitchell Palmer, was going to bed on June 2 when he heard something hit the front door. An explosion followed, so powerful that the entire front of Palmer’s house at 2132 R Street NW was peeled off and windows were shattered all over the neighborhood. Smoking rubble hung from trees and was scattered over lawns. So were bloody bits and pieces of the bomber; a leg was across the street on a neighbor’s doorstep and part of his head wound up on S Street, two blocks away. He had likely stumbled on the Palmers’ steps, fell against the door, and detonated the bomb prematurely.*

  Bombs rocked seven other U.S. cities that night, all within ninety minutes of each other. As with modern concerns with terrorist groups, the anarchists caused a great deal of public unrest and distrust. Advocating violence as a means to effect change, they saw as their prime enemy a society based on law and the people who supported such a society through capitalist principles; in other words, the United States of America. Special Agent Todd Daniel of the Department of Justice Bureau of Investigation
characterized it as a “terrorist movement . . . national in scope.” Indeed this was, and it further fragmented a populace already struggling with other issues.

  Though such fanatics had always been present in small numbers, they had previously not attracted much of a following in the United States. With the successful Russian upheaval as a model, a wealth-based class system to fight against, and a faltering economy, the radicalization found fertile ground among the disillusioned and those who believed themselves disenfranchised. The immediate catalyst for this had been the 1918 armistice and subsequent widespread cancellation of government war contracts. Unemployment rose as plants shut down and thousands of men were laid off, while the artificially high cost of living from the war years remained high. Sirloin steak had increased from 27 to 42 cents a pound, milk from 9 to 15 cents per quart, and eggs from 34 to 62 cents a dozen. The price of coffee, sugar, and all other sorts of essentials rose with the wartime economy but did not correct when it ended.

  For sectors that remained strong, shipbuilding in particular, companies refused to increase wages and shorten hours. Owners felt they had sacrificed profits for the war and they now wanted to get back to the business of making money. Anyone or anything hampering that return, particularly the American Federation of Labor and other such unions, was not to be tolerated. Fears of a Bolshevik-style revolution were very real in 1919, and to pour fuel on the flames the United Mine Workers struck in September, advocating the nationalization of the mining industry. That meant full government control over private ownership, essentially communism. These sentiments were echoed by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), nicknamed the “Wobblies.” Emerging in 1905, the IWW was more radical than other unions. Their central platform was workplace democracy, a system by which workers elected their own immediate supervisors, or delegates, and in the most extreme cases advocated running their own factories.