IV. TRANSFORMATIONS: NEW YORK CITY

For New York City, the 1920s was the most splendid of decades. For one thing, it was swimming in money. In consequence of the devastation in Europe and Churchill’s mismanagement of the pound, global monetary rivers had rechanneled to run through New York. The deepening sediments of gold dust provided the loose change to pay for great advances in broadcasting and publishing, in advertising and popular entertainment, in couture, in culture and the arts, and finally for the decade’s great building boom that established skyscraper art deco as the characteristic New York City design standard.¹⁷

New York was the country’s communications hub. David Sarnoff, born on a Russian shtetl, and running his own shoeshine and newsstand businesses in the New York ghetto at thirteen, became an office boy at Marconi’s Wireless, made himself a top wireless operator for ship-to-shore communications, and was part of the team that mediated the rescue of Titanic passengers. Sarnoff was also among the first to realize the potential entertainment value of radio. After the war, Marconi’s Wireless was purchased by General Electric and renamed the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), headed by Sarnoff. His official job was to expand the market for General Electric radios, and his great insight was that the best way to sell radios was to create material people wanted to listen to. Sarnoff formed the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) by a merger that brought him AT&T’s broadcasting infrastructure. (It was part of a broad communications patent-sharing agreement that left the radio market to General Electric and telephones to AT&T.) Sarnoff bought out a struggling Victor phonograph company for its music library, and fought off competitive challenges from Westinghouse and other companies. He recruited Arturo Toscanini to conduct the NBC Symphony Orchestra, and paid lavishly for the rights to broadcast Jack Dempsey’s fights. Amos ‘n Andy, played by two white men speaking in minstrel show accents, was on for fifteen minutes six nights a week, with probably the greatest percentage radio audience market share ever. Grantland Rice broadcast the 1923 World Series.

Sarnoff’s flaw was that he was an aspiring highbrow, and much of his programming was dull. William Paley, a rich man’s kid, saw his opening and took over a struggling Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). Unlike Sarnoff, he did not try to soft-pedal the advertising, and pitched all of his programming to a mass audience. He targeted Toscanini with the much more popular Paul Whiteman, and countered Sarnoff’s dramas with soaps and comics like Bob Hope and Jack Benny. But Sarnoff was a competitor, and quickly changed his programming and advertising policies to keep pace. His owners were content, as sales of radios soared from $60 million in 1922 to $843 million in 1929 (despite much cheaper small radios), while NBC’s advertising revenues jumped proportionally.¹⁸ Along the way, Sarnoff and Paley created the programming and revenue models that are still the basis of today’s television industry.

The national print media was also concentrated in New York. The New York World, featuring Walter Lippmann on the editorial page, was the highest of the highbrow dailies, while other New York-based columnists—Walter Winchell, Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner, Westbrook Pegler—all achieved national syndication. The Daily News adopted the down-market tabloid format in 1919, and in 1924, Bernarr Macfadden, the former bodybuilder, launched the decidedly downscale New York Evening Graphic, sometimes referred to as the “Evening Porno-graphic.” Macfadden also pioneered the “True” tag in confession and pulp adventure magazines—which spawned True Story, True Romances, True Experiences, and other progeny, often referred to as “sex magazines.” At the other end of the economic scale, Harold Ross, from Salt Lake City, founded The New Yorker, and made it a success by focusing on the narrow class of Manhattan glitterati—emphasizing that it was specifically for “sophisticated” and “enlightened” readers who enjoyed the “metropolitan life,” and decidedly “not edited for the old lady in Dubuque.” Scott and Zelda, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and Edna St. Vincent Millay were regulars at New Yorker parties and helped recruit other writers. But the most creative departure in the magazine business was undoubtedly Henry Luce’s and Brit Hadden’s launch of Time in 1923, which Luce rapidly turned into a national media empire.

The 1920s were also one of the great ages of book publishing, almost all of it centered in New York. Maxwell Perkins of Scribner’s launched the careers of Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe; Horace Liveright of Boni & Liveright published William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Eugene O’Neill, Robinson Jeffers, and Hart Crane; Alfred A. Knopf was home to Willa Cather, H. L. Mencken, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Stevens. It was also an era of publishing projects—like The Harvard Classics and Will and Ariel Durant’s multivolume bestseller, The Story of Civilization, which targeted a middlebrow audience aspiring to expand its tastes and erudition. Bennett Cerf acquired the splendid Modern Library from Liveright, and founded the very successful The Book of the Month Club.

Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight from New York to Paris in 1927 was a watershed event in the history of mass communications—the first 1920s viral, social-media-like, flash-crowd event. Lindbergh was an appealing young man—a former army and mail-service pilot, a superb natural flier and stunt man, devoid of pretension, resourceful, and brave. The event itself, however, had a whiff of the artificial. A number of teams had already flown across the Atlantic—they just hadn’t flown from New York to Paris nonstop, and a wealthy hotel owner had offered a $25,000 prize to the first team that made it. Lindbergh decided he would try, scraped up some $13,500 and, with the help of a start-up airplane company, designed a completely stripped down plane, and filed for the event.

But there was nothing artificial about Lindbergh’s accomplishment, and it placed him in the ranks of the world’s greatest aviators. At a full load of gas, his plane was dangerous to fly, so he had never tested it fully loaded. Taking off for the real event, he nearly consumed the entire runway before finally getting airborne and barely cleared a ribbon of telephone wires that would have destroyed the plane. Several of the most experienced competitors came to watch his takeoff, and all were deeply impressed. Richard Byrd, who led a forty-person team, and who had previously flown over the North Pole, told the press, “his takeoff was the most skillful thing I have ever seen from any aviator.”

The flight itself was just as extraordinary. Lindbergh said he flew through “sleet and snow for a thousand miles; sometimes he flew as low as ten feet, sometimes as high as ten thousand.” Although a number of other transoceanic attempts had gone far off course, Lindbergh not only hit Paris on the nose, but hit all of his intermediate points as well. Without a radio (to save weight) or a crew, he did it by dead reckoning with maps, compass, and slide rule in the cruelly cramped cockpit, often by flashlight, at times working the math even when he had been without sleep for more than two days. Charmingly, his main worries as he approached Paris were, in rough order, whether anyone knew he was coming, whether he needed a French visa, and how he would find the airport in the dark.

But the real event was the event itself. The press had not discovered Lindbergh until a few weeks before his flight, but were naturally drawn to him, for he made great copy. Weeks of bad weather delayed the start of the contest. Characteristically, Lindbergh was the first to decide that it was good to go, although he made no announcement. The night before the flight, he got almost no sleep, was at the airport by 3 a.m. with a small crew to ready his plane, and got off the ground at 8 a.m. During the flight, he had no idea that he was front page news throughout the country, or that ship-to-shore radio buzzed with possible “Lindy” sightings all that day, or that on that same evening, twenty-three thousand people at a heavyweight boxing match in Madison Square Garden stood with heads bowed to offer a silent prayer for his safety. And when he arrived in Paris late that night, he couldn’t imagine why the area that he had calculated as Le Bourget airport appeared to be occupied by tens of thousands of torch-waving people, or why roads were clogged with traffic as far as he could see. When he finally decided to land, he was almost consumed by the jubilant mob, and his plane was damaged before he was whisked away along with the American ambassador and a panoply of French officials. Literally overnight Lindbergh became the most famous man in the world.

The power of the movies was that they could bring a constant stream of Lindbergh-like events to anyone for the modest price of a ticket. Filmmaking was also the most successful American media business, the fourth largest industry in the United States, producing 80 percent of the world’s films, including some eight hundred features and 20,000 shorts each year. Its stars were world famous. Ironically, it was also in desperate financial straits. To attract audiences, movie theaters were piling on the extras—lavish décors, giant orchestras, live comedy acts. The Roxy theater in midtown Manhattan had 6,200 seats, dressing rooms for 300 performers, space for a 118-piece orchestra, and an organ so big it took three men to play it. After paying the hefty film rental fees, theater owners couldn’t cover their overheads.

The savior was sound, beginning with Al Jolson’s few minutes of speaking aloud exactly 354 words in the 1928 The Jazz Singer. It took time to work out the kinks in the technology, and even longer to complete the practical accommodations. The grandiose 1,000+-seat theaters were too big for the day’s best sound equipment. Silent movie audiences were accustomed to talking freely during performances, and had to be retrained. Many actors who had built solid careers didn’t have the voice or the diction, or even the command of English, to make it in the talkies, although figures like Peter Lorre, Greta Garbo, and Marlene Dietrich made a virtue of their accents. Scriptwriting was suddenly much more demanding, creating a new market for writers like Fitzgerald and Faulkner, while soundtracks were a boon for composers and conductors. The lure of vast profits accelerated the transition, and by the early 1930s, millions of new fans streamed to the talkies, and movies became the decade’s quintessential recreation.

Movies, like much contemporary fiction, were frequently culturally transgressive, portraying a sexual ethic at odds with the prim official canons retailed by America’s middle-class parents and pulpits. Actors like Clara Bow, Louise Brooks, Mae West, and Joan Crawford exemplified the recreational, the manipulative, and the comic sides of sex. From the very start producers had understood that nothing else sold quite as well as sex. The advertisements for movies, and frequently the content, were quite salacious, well after the “Code” had been ostensibly adopted by Hollywood. It was not until the mid-1930s, deep into the Depression, when the entire country was pulling away from the exuberances of the pre-Crash days, that Hollywood adopted a Code that, with the assistance of organizations like the Legion of Decency, actually worked.^*

Mass population movements created more upheavals. The American entrance into World War I triggered the first crumblings of the totalitarian regimes in the former Confederate states. Since Reconstruction, Southern whites had pinned their black citizens under a terror-enforced yoke of white rule. Lynch-law, the ultimate penalty for being “uppity,” reigned throughout most of the South. The torture and mutilations that frequently accompanied it were object lessons to quell incipient restiveness. But both the draft and the war-time shutdown of immigration created severe labor shortages in northern factories, and the braver Southern black workers were delighted to seize the opportunity.

Isabel Wilkerson’s splendid The Warmth of Other Suns is a close-to-the-ground story of the black hegira. During the decade of the war, 555,000 Southern blacks relocated to the North, more than in the entire half-century since Emancipation. Southern whites reacted with scorn at first: “As the North grows blacker, the South grows whiter,” a New Orleans paper chuckled.¹⁹

As the labor shortage started to bite, the South swung to a posture of heavy-handed repression. Labor agents from the North were harassed and threatened. In Macon, agents had to pay a $25,000 fee and get forty-five recommendations from local luminaries. Police patrolled bus and train stations, stopped trains in mid-journey to search for escapees, and often enough arrested every black person in a station. If a black worker did not show up for work, it was not uncommon for a sheriff’s officer to be dispatched to bring her in to be sure she wasn’t absconding. Recalcitrant black workers could be imprisoned or taken into the woods and savagely beaten—but as a South Carolinian paper asked, “If you thought you might be lynched by mistake, would you stay in South Carolina?”²⁰

The North was no picnic. A job in a modern “Ford-ized” factory was neither less back-breaking nor menial than picking cotton, but the pay was higher, and the boss didn’t keep part of your paycheck. But even in the menial factory jobs, white workers often rebelled when blacks were hired. The plant owners exacerbated the animosities when they hired black strike-breakers.

And there was anti-black violence in the North, although it wasn’t state-sponsored, as in the South. When the war ended, and factory employment flagged in 1919, blacks became a target for struggling white workers. In Chicago, a black boy crossed an invisible line while swimming in Lake Michigan. A crowd of whites threw rocks at him, and he drowned. Blacks asked the police to arrest the whites, but they arrested a black man instead, apparently for protesting too forcefully. Unlike in the South, blacks often fought back in the North, but with the police generally backing the whites, the tolls were lopsided.²¹

Harlem became the de facto capital of the black North, with a half million people crammed into a 50-block long slice of Manhattan, just seven or eight blocks wide. Since realtors generally enforced informal, but strict, segregation rules, rents in the black zone rose to 40–60 percent higher than in comparable white areas. To meet the high rents, tenants often resorted to “rent parties” at the end of each month, when they “drank bathtub gin, ate pig knuckles and danced with the lights off,” usually for twenty-five cents a head. It is likely that the profits were miniscule, but the parties at least were fun.²²

The black northward migration left a profound stamp on American culture, especially in the arts, and in reinforcing the transgressiveness of the 1920s culture. In New York, the “Harlem Renaissance” was personified by writers and poets like Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and James Weldon Johnson. Venues like the gangster-owned Cotton Club, featuring artists like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and Cab Calloway, exposed white audiences to the deeply sensual beats of blues and jazz. The Cotton Club and many of its competitors were still segregated—the entertainers and the waiters were black, but all the customers were white. Black audiences had their own clubs.

Critics like Carl Van Vechten, himself a man of fluid sexuality, explored the seamier sides of Harlem life, especially the small jazz clubs and polymorphic sex tourism industry, which had a mixed black and white clientele. Van Vechten threw lavish parties at his downtown apartment that mixed notable blacks and wealthy whites. Invitations were much sought-for, despite lingering suspicions of exploitation. Blacks were wary of being displayed like zoo animals, while whites were nervous about being hustled. Van Vechten himself illustrates the problem. He more or less single-handedly turned the spotlight on Langston Hughes’s great talents, tirelessly boosted the careers of James Johnson and Paul Robeson, was very helpful to Ethel Waters, and played a major role in developing the production that introduced the nineteen-year-old Josephine Baker. His payback—aside from expanding his sexual menu—was to cement his position as the leading interpreter of black culture for the white world.

But perhaps nothing undermined respect for authority like Prohibition, one of history’s signal demonstrations of unintended consequences. It was not imposed on an unwilling populace, for the temperance societies had clearly won the battle for public opinion. Forty-six of the forty-eight states ratified the constitutional amendment, which was quickly embodied in the Volstead Act. The law provided that no one could “manufacture, sell, barter, transport, import, export, deliver, or furnish any intoxicating liquor,” except as specifically provided in the act, which generally exempted any beverage with less than 0.05 percent alcohol. It did not prohibit purchasing or drinking alcoholic beverages. So California vineyards made up some of their lost wine sales by selling concentrated grape pulp—add water and allow it to ferment and you had legal wine. The promise of Prohibition was that it would reduce crime and the prison population, keep families together, and lower spousal abuse.²³

A fair review of the evidence suggests, first of all, that Prohibition did substantially reduce drinking. While data on the volume of drinking during Prohibition are necessarily speculative, the volume of drinking after Prohibition’s repeal confirm its success. During the years 1900–1915, American adults consumed, on average, about 2.5 gallons of pure alcohol per year. In the first year after repeal, however, alcohol consumption was less than one gallon a year, and it increased only slowly thereafter—to 1.2 gallons in 1935, and 1.5 gallons in 1936–1941—and did not reach the 1900–1915 average until the 1960s. In addition, in the early years of Prohibition, admission to state hospitals for alcoholism dropped substantially, and a number of social service studies concluded that there had been a substantial decline in drinking, especially in smaller towns and among the working classes.²⁴

But those gains came at a cost. For one thing, the actual workings of the law broke sharply along class lines. In big cities, and especially in New York and Chicago, the business, political, and social elites virtually ignored it. Scott, Zelda, and their friends never wanted for quality spirits, and flasks were freely displayed at Harvard-Yale games. Illegal supply networks quickly sprang up—like the bootlegger ships ringing New York harbor just outside Coast Guard jurisdiction and the Canadian border runners in Chicago and Detroit. Although Prohibition did not create the contending Jewish, Italian, and Irish gangster networks, it vastly expanded their revenues and facilitated their moves into casinos, prostitution, loan sharking, dope trafficking, and a number of legitimate businesses.

The repeal of Prohibition was driven in great part by the elite flaunting their noncompliance. In a representative sample of films that opened in 1930, more than three-quarters of them had references to liquor, and two-thirds showed people drinking.²⁵ Even the president of the United States drank—copiously during the Harding administration. Parental lectures on respect for law and social canons rang hollow when the parents had cocktails before dinner. The intermittent gangland slaughters, especially in Chicago, were frightening. The solid support for Prohibition was clearly waning by the 1930s. During his campaign, Franklin Roosevelt had been cautious of taking a position on repeal, but by the time he took office, repeal was almost as uncontroversial as its imposition had been in 1920.

Cultural transgression was also reflected in the couture industry. A business newspaper calculated in 1928 that, since the war, the material required for a woman’s clothing had dropped from 19¼ yards to only 7. Even that would have been an intolerable weight for The New Yorker’s fashion arbiter, Lois Long—who signed her restaurant and nightclub reviews “Lipstick.” “I know nothing about men at all, being a modest and retiring type,” she wrote. “I know only that they all love black lace over pink; they adore long, sheer black silk stockings, plain pumps without buckles or straps, and long eyelashes.”²⁶

Shoppers could have found all that and more on New York City’s Fifth Avenue, the cynosure of American fashion. Earlier in the century, New York’s fashionable ladies had their clothes hand-fitted by custom tailors, as often as not working from pirated Parisian designs. In the 1920s, however, Edwin Goodman, who had kept the trademark Bergdorf Goodman after his partner retired, achieved a smash-hit with high-quality, high-style off-the-rack clothing for upscale ladies. His secret was to pair standardized design with very personal service, and to complement his clothing with a full line of handbags, scarves, and other accessories.

The rest of the industry quickly followed suit, with most of the major stores creating their own lines, at first usually manufactured on-site. As the industry expanded, a new breed of Jewish real estate entrepreneurs, most of them with roots in the garment industry, concentrated the manufacture of clothing in the “garment district,” the area bounded by Sixth and Ninth Avenues from 35th to 40th Streets. During the last half of the decade, they built 120 new high-rise garment district centers for clothing manufacture and showrooms. For many years the workers in a single garment-district building made half of all ladies’ hats sold in the country.

The 1920s saw the United States rise to dominance in high-end service industries—not just finance, but insurance, law and accountancy, publishing and printing, advertising, radio and movies, air travel, and others. Broadway created new genres of staged musicals, while Tin Pan Alley churned out the nation’s most popular songs. In all big cities, but especially in New York, there was a surge of demand for white-collar workers, and the age of the ultra-high skyscraper was born. In the last half of the 1920s, Manhattan office space roughly doubled, most of it in skyscrapers, mostly in Midtown, centered around Grand Central Station. By 1929, New York City had half of all the nation’s buildings over twenty-one stories high. Not everyone approved. The critic Lewis Mumford wrote in 1926, “the less said about the aesthetic triumphs of the skyscraper the better.… The people who see our architectural salvation in the skyscraper know very little, I suspect, about either architecture or salvation.” Scientific American, in a 1925 article “Panic!,” calculated that if Manhattan subways and skyscrapers had to evacuate their occupants at the same time, the pile of people on the pavements would be eighteen feet high.

Yet the skyscraper has survived, and splendidly. Iconic 1920s buildings like the Chanin Building at Lexington and 42nd, and the French Building at Fifth and 45th are now national landmarks. The Chrysler Building eclipsed the downtown Woolworth Building (which opened in 1918) as the world’s tallest, and was quickly dethroned by the 1930s Empire State Building. The Chrysler and Woolworth Buildings, however, still reign as consummate examples of the art deco style.²⁷