January 2011

It was a picture every American boy could see, in his mind’s eye: the ball park packed with people suddenly gone mad as a large man wearing the number 3 on his striped uniform selects a big, heavy bat, steps from the dugout, and makes his way to the plate. In the batter’s box he stands with feet close together, his body erect, peering at the pitcher; the bat, cocked over his left shoulder, is held so far down that his little finger curls over the bottom of the knob. The pitcher goes into his windup, the ball streaks toward the plate, and at the last instant the big man takes a long stride and whips the bat around with his powerful wrists. There is a sharp crack of wood against leather and the ball rockets high into the air, up and up until it is no more than a tiny white dot, soaring from sight over the top tier of the grandstand. In the bleacher seats boys jump up and down, howling deliriously, and grown strangers embrace, thumping each other on the back, for the mighty Babe Ruth has just hit another home run.

The image of the New York speakeasy in its finest flowering during the fourteen years of the Great Foolishness—an interval when Americans were joined together in a blood brotherhood of revolt against bondage as they will never be again—has with the passing of time been distorted to a degree scarcely recognizable by veterans of those heroic years.

Admittedly, this image had its original, or paradigm, in individual establishments. There were the handful of supercostly, ornate, and very plush restaurant-speakeasies of which Jack & Charlie’s 21 West Fifty-second Street, then known as the Puncheon Club and now simply as “21,” may be taken as the exemplar. Here manners, dress, and decorum were what had been required at Sherry’s or the Waldorf in happier days. The food was superlative, prepared by a kitchen staff under the direction of a $20,000 chef de cuisine , and the wine card impeccable. The vintages no less than the Scotch were what the labels promised, and you paid a great deal of money for them.

The Twenties brought us modern advertising, partly a curse, partly a side-show looking glass in which to catch a kind of distorted image of the new society. It exaggerated our needs, anticipated our dreams, banished the lingering reticences of gentlefolk, and prostituted a great section of the American press. But it also served an economic purpose. The economy was booming: new products spewed from factories, and people had the money and the urge to buy them. Moreover, advertising had become respectable to most people. Bruce Barton wrote a best seller, The Man Nobody Knows , revealing that Jesus Christ was really the greatest salesman of all time, and Calvin Coolidge declared, to an enthusiastic business convention, that “advertising ministers to the spiritual side of trade.”

The impulse which carried Theyre Hamilton Weigall into the Miami madness of 1925 was about as logical as that which carried anybody else into it. An unemployed English newspaperman wandering the streets of New York in the summer of that year, he was suddenly stopped by a sign in a window announcing that there were fortunes to be made in Florida real estate. “One Good Investment Beats a Lifetime of Toil. Say! YOU can do what George Cusack, Jr., did!” Cusack, Weigall judged from the accompanying photo, was a little half-witted anyway. If he could make $500,ooo in four weeks in Florida real estate, anybody could.

The New York premiere of The Son of the Sheik , in late July of 1926, was a smash success: when Rudolph Valentine, the star of the film, made a personal appearance at the theatre, he was mobbed. Screeching females clawed at him, stole his hat, and tore off his coat pockets. One high-spirited flapper tackled the Latin lover by the ankles and, frantic for a souvenir, started unlacing his shoestrings. He had to be rescued by a squadron of police.

Precisely at 10 A.M. on Thursday, October 24, 1929, William R. Crawford, superintendent of the mechanical department of the New York Stock Exchange, whanged his gavel against the traditional gong. Beneath the Stars and Stripes and the blue banner of the Empire State, some nine hundred brokers began moving around the 16,000 square feet of felt-padded floor, giving orders to clerks in seersucker and linen coats manning the bron/.e, stockadelike trading posts. Another market day had begun.

According to the critic and author Malcolm Cowley, the historical period we think of as the nineteen twenties began with the Armistice and continued through 1930. Between the time when the “lost generation” returned home from Europe and the grim year when the country slid toward economic depression, America went on a spree— escapist, irresponsible, creative, and vivid. The essence of this volatile decade is captured in a new anthology of writings of the Twenties, from which volume most of the following excerpts are taken. (The book is still untitled, although a special college textbook edition is to be called Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age .) The publisher is Charles Scribner’s Sons, and the editors are Mr. Cowley and his son, Robert, formerly an editor of this magazine and now on the staff of The Reporter .

Malcolm Cowley describes how the decade began:

The decade of the nineteen twenties was at one and the same time the gaudiest, the saddest, and the most misinterpreted era in modern American history.

It was gaudy because it was lull of restless vitality burgeoning in a field where all of the old rules seemed lo be gone, and it was sad because it was an empty place between two eras, with old familiar certainties and hopes drifting oft like mist and new ones not yet formulated. It was misunderstood because so many of its popular interpreters became so fascinated by the tilings that floated about on the froth that they could not see anything else.

We drove home to Evansville that year from Washington, B.C., in mid-June, my father and mother and sister and I, in the family Hudson. I had taken the Federal Express down from Boston as soon as my exams were over, and the next day we left the capital, where my father had just finished his first term as a congressman from Indiana. I was pleased with myself, secretly but no doubt obviously, for surviving the year at Harvard fresh and green out of a midwestern high school, and I was proud of my father for his record as a freshman in Congress.