In the spring of 1920, very few realistic Democrats expected to win that autumn’s presidential election. Their party had been in power for nearly eight years, including the World War, and had accumulated all the assorted resentments invariably incurred in wartime. Their situation was not helped by the fact that President Wilson lay ill and and incapacitated in the White House while his wife and his doctor ran the Executive branch of the government.
It would be unfair not to include directions for the home construction of a nineteen-twenties crystal set. What you needed would cost about two dollars, plus four dollars for a pair of Brandes earphones. First, shellac one oatmeal box (or the heavier cardboard cylinder available commercially); this alone would produce a sweet smell you would never forget. Around the box, carefully wind copper wire and shellac that . Now you have, your copper coil. Affix brass tracks along its length, and the slides that run along the tracks will tune in your different stations. One end of this coil is connected to the aerial; the other end goes to your earphones. And a glistening piece of galena crystal with a cat whisker (or “feeler”) probing it is hooked into the arrangement; the reasons I never understood, but I can report that if the cat whisker hit the right spot on the crystal you had a ten per cent chance of getting something, whereas it wouldn’t work at all without the crystal.
It was strange if you stopped to think about it—a plush, midtown restaurant right oft Fifth Avenue at dinnertime, yet only three diners in the place. The sign out front read “Bearnaise.” And stranger still, the doorman, a smiling monster in gold and blue uniform, was bowing customer after customer out of lumbering Yellow cabs and chauffeured limousinescustomers who walked through the restaurant, passed the three diners, and disappeared.
But if it was dead upstairs, the basement was bedlam. Big, overstuffed lounges lined the walls behind marble-topped cocktail tables. There were potted palms in the corners and artificial leaves all over the place—on trellises, up pillars, and across the ceiling. Actors and actresses, artists and writers, brokers and debutantes, judges and gangsters, college boys and flappers, were all laughing and shouting over their Pink Ladies, a disastrous concoction of bathtub gin, applejack, grenadine, and egg white served in fancy, longstemmed glasses. The Béarnaise was where I first met John Held, Jr.
In 1924 and 1925 Vanity Fair , the magazine which most reflected all that was bright and sophisticated in the Twenties, asked a group of famous literary and theatrical people to write their own epitaphs. This was thought a delightful idea, and some fifty celebrities duly wrote out the words they wanted on their tombstones. At the time, when almost all of those who responded were very young and gay and full of life, death seemed very far away indeed. But today the tongue-in-cheek epitaphs have a bittersweet quality about them. Vanity Fair itself was killed by the hard realities of the Depression, and one by one the writers have dropped away. Most of them now rest somewhere under real tombstones with words upon them, we may be certain, far less witty than these. But these ghostly jokes from people who added so much to the roar of the Twenties form a collective epitaph for the decade.
It was a cold winter’s evening in old New York. A pleasant fire burned in the grate of the council room of the National Academy of Design at Leonard Street and Broadway. Around the big table a dozen artists, all members of the Academy, sat at their ease, a sketch pad and an array of drawing pencils before each. Yet there was an air of alertness, almost of tension, in the room, for the group was about to plunge into a friendly but difficult competitive game. When everyone was ready, the chairman announced the subject for the evening: “Raising the Wind.” There were chuckles, a few joking remarks—but within minutes everyone was hard at work. In exactly one hour a bell would ring, and each artist would then hand in what was expected to be a well-finished picture illustrating the given subject.
The resources open to men who want to believe that a course of action that is profitable is also morally justifiable, firmly based on the eternal verities, seem to be illimitable. Self-interest is both eloquent and ingenious. The darkest villainy imaginable can be made to look virtuous if it yields good cash dividends; some of the worst deeds in history were committed by men who had managed to persuade themselves that they were doing no more than what was right.
A case in point is the notorious African slave trade.
It would be possible to go on and on in this vein, to the limit of any reader’s endurance, but enough is enough. Eventually, of course, the slave trade did die; as Miss Donnan points out, people finally came to see “that this traffic was not business but crime, and crime of so intolerable a nature that it must be outlawed by civilization.” Outlawed it was, at last, and we do not really need to worry about it any more.
Except that it is and remains part of our background. This hideous chapter of the past has long echoes. There are such things as racial memories. If today there seems to be some difficulty in working out a good relationship between the white and black races of man—in the United States, and in Africa as well—is it going too far to suppose that the record of the four centuries that began in the 1440*5 may have something to do with it?