I. THE JAZZ AGE

After they were married, Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert moved into his New York City apartment, and from there,

they sallied triumphantly to Yale-Harvard and Harvard-Princeton football games, to the St. Nicholas ice-skating rink, to a thorough round of the theatres and to a miscellany of entertainments—from small, staid dances to the great affairs that Gloria loved, held in those few houses where lackeys with powdered wigs scurried around in magnificent Anglomania under the direction of gigantic majordomos.… [Then] through a golden enervating spring, they had loitered, restive and lazily extravagant, along the California coast, joining other parties intermittently and drifting from Pasadena to Coronado, from Coronado to Santa Barbara, with no purpose more apparent than Gloria’s desire to dance by different music or catch some infinitesimal variant among the changing colors of the sea.

Anthony and Gloria, of course, were the fictional alter egos of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in Scott’s The Beautiful and the Damned (1922) chronicling the antics of the “lost generation.” To be sure that readers understood the reference, the book’s jacket cover was a drawing of a handsome but discontented young couple in evening clothes, who were unmistakably Scott and Zelda.¹

When Scott’s first book, This Side of Paradise, burst on the literary scene in 1920, he and Zelda became instant celebrities. It is a beautifully written tale of the existential and amorous quests of Amory Blaine, a Princeton man very much like Scott, and captures the confusions of the Jazz Age—the gross excesses of a war-fueled new hyper-rich, the modernist assaults on traditional literary and artistic canons, the waverings of established religion, the visible corruptions of the political order.

Scott and Zelda were mostly amused by their sudden status as cultural icons. They scoffed at the notion that he had invented the “Jazz Age” label, and that she had been dubbed “first flapper” on her first trip to New York. But they were young—Scott was just twenty-four, Zelda twenty—and they were beautiful. Women rhapsodized over the perfections of Scott’s face, his charm and wit, the way he looked in a dinner jacket. Zelda was the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court justice, and she was a beauty of sufficient note that her presence at a Georgia Tech football game had been reported in both the Alabama and Georgia press.

They plunged into their new roles with gusto. Dorothy Parker first saw them arriving at the Ritz in a taxi, Zelda riding on the hood, Scott on the roof, both looking “as though they had just stepped out of the sun.”² Zelda was a true original, with a quicksilver mind and a knack for making surprising but insightful connections between disparate topics. And she was utterly uninhibited—jumping into fountains, diving off high cliffs, flirting with everybody, dancing by herself in the middle of a crowded floor, lost in the music. A talented writer, she published a novel and a number of magazine pieces—although her stories often listed Scott as co-author in order to command higher fees. Scott lacked Zelda’s physical grace, but he spoke as elegantly and as fluently as he wrote, and he readily commanded a room. The two showed up anywhere likely to be in a gossip column, enthralling the press with their splashy spending, high-wattage charm, and calculated boorishness. Lillian Gish said, “They didn’t make the twenties, they were the twenties.”³

Their lives fed seamlessly into Scott’s novels. Large chunks of The Beautiful and the Damned were drawn from Zelda’s diary, often word for word. His last completed novel, Tender Is the Night, which took him nine years to write, was drawn mostly from their experiences in Europe, as part of a brilliant salon of American and French literary and artistic figures assembled on the French Riviera by a rich American couple, Gerald and Sara Murphy. Gerald was an accomplished modernist painter in his own right, who had exhibited in Paris alongside Picasso and Léger. Both painters were regulars at chez Murphy, along with a shifting cast that might at any time include Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, Monty Woolley, Gilbert Seldes, Piet Mondrian, Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinsky, and George Antheil. Tender opens with a lovely portrait of the Murphys (dubbed Dick and Nicole Diver) smoothly welding a set of contentious guests into a contented and harmonious group. Over the course of the novel, however, the Divers morph into Scott and Zelda—the one an obnoxious falling-down drunk, and the other mirroring Zelda’s mental breakdowns.

Scott’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby (1924), was his least autobiographical novel. The main female character, Daisy Buchanan, had some affinities with Zelda, and the narrator, Nick Carraway, was also a Princeton man, but he is more a cynical observer than an independent character. Gatsby is a composite. A friend of Scott’s, Robert Kerr, once rowed out in a Great Lakes storm to warn a yachtsman of a dangerous tide; Gatsby does the same thing, and the yachtsman, a fabulously wealthy copper tycoon, becomes Gatsby’s tutor in the ways of high society. The seamy side of Gatsby is usually traced to one or the other of several Long Island bootleggers, and his wild parties may be modeled after George Gordon Moore’s, a Canadian who parlayed World War I munitions profits into a street railway and utilities fortune. He entered international society by staging Gatsby-style bacchanals both on his Long Island estate and in London where he was avidly pursuing Lady Diana Cooper, heiress to one of England’s top families. Lady Diana was a free spirit, an icon of female rebellion in London well before Zelda’s emergence in New York. She had naturally befriended the Fitzgeralds on their European jaunts, and visited them in America.⁴

By the mid-1920s the Fitzgeralds’ star was waning. Gatsby was warmly praised by serious critics but was a commercial disappointment. Scott commenced his long struggle to produce Tender Is the Night and failed as a Hollywood script writer, but still collected top rates for slick, catchy stories in mass circulation magazines like Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post. But he was nearly always drunk, and his antics had alienated even long-standing friends. Zelda meanwhile had been eclipsed by new celebrities like Clara Bow and Mary Pickford. Her relations with Scott had turned toxic, and her behavior was increasingly bizarre. She was first institutionalized in Switzerland in 1930, with symptoms that suggest bipolar disorder. During one hospitalization, Zelda wrote her novel, Save Me the Waltz, which was, in effect, her side of the story. Scott intervened at a late stage to insist that she excise her diary materials, since he needed them for his own work. Zelda eventually returned to Montgomery and lived quietly with her mother. She and Scott stayed in close touch, although they rarely saw each other. In shaky health from his years of binge drinking, Scott died of a heart attack in 1944. After her mother died, Zelda moved to a Montgomery nursing home and was killed in a fire in 1948.

Extraordinary cultural changes were afoot in the United States. The elites, of course, were the first to take advantage of electricity; automobiles; radios and telephones; modern plumbing; air travel; a flood of smart journalism, novels, and new criticism; and remarkable developments in mass entertainment. But for them, none of it was life-changing. Servants had always coddled their travel. They had the finest foods and wines on their tables and discreet venues for their debauches. Theater, the arts, and deep information networks were all taken for granted. But for working people, the automobile’s casual mobility and privacy were entirely new. The radio presented a feast of music, news, comedy, sports, drama, and political conventions—right in your living room. Movies, tabloids, and salacious fan magazines made the private lives of celebrities the stuff of back-fence gossip. Working-class teenage girls did not become flappers, but the new media showed them that females could break rules—and so they did, timidly at first, with cigarettes, makeup, and less constricting clothing, and then with regard to more important things, like the canons of sex and marriage and the protocols of finance and careers.

There was a tectonic shift in the perspectives of ordinary people. Before the war, the United States was still predominately an agrarian nation, not all that far away from Jefferson’s dream of a polity of yeomen. For working farmers, the highlight of a week was likely a wagon ride into a nearby small town to get supplies and to meet and gossip with other farmers. The new media of the 1920s, especially the movies, opened strange worlds—of fabulous riches, exotic travel, casual sex, and fiery romance. Elites were not always shown to best advantage. Daddy Warbucks was obviously a war profiteer. Sinclair Lewis won the 1930 Nobel Prize in literature for his scathing portraits of small-city corruption and the hypocrisies of official religion.

The revolution was greased with rising incomes even for common people, amplified by new access to credit. From 1921 through 1929, the economy grew by 5 percent per year in real (inflation-adjusted) terms—one of the best performances on record. The underlying dynamism was fueled, above all, by two revolutionary industries—AC power transmission and the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine, with its flagship product, the personal automobile, and its corollary technology of mass manufacturing, spitting out identical, highly complex, precisely engineered products at prices almost anyone could afford. Each had been evolving over the previous couple of decades, and both reached transformational scales in the 1920s. We will briefly sketch the technologies and the visionaries who piloted the new industries to their revolutionary promise.

The most consequential transformation, however, may have been the creation of the world’s first consumer society. Many of the leading brands, especially in food, cigarettes, and fashions, reached back as far as the 1880s, but it was not until the 1920s that the consumer culture took hold up and down the income ladder. New York City became the national metropolis, where fashions and fads were born, nurtured, and cast aside. We will examine its emergence, not just in finance, but as a prime mover in mass communications, publishing, and standards of dress and behavior. And then we’ll reverse the glass and take a look from the bottom up, examining the same phenomena through the eyes of the working people of Muncie, Indiana.