Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (44 page)

Yet if Coolidge was sparing of words, what he did say was always pithy and clear, showing that he had reflected deeply on history and developed a considered, if sombre, public philosophy. No one in the twentieth century, not even his eloquent contemporary F.E. Smith, Earl of Birkenhead, defined more elegantly the limitations of government and the need for individual endeavour, which necessarily involved inequalities, to advance human happiness. ‘Government cannot relieve from toil’, he told the Massachusetts senate in 1914. ‘The normal must take care of themselves. Self-government means self-support …. Ultimately, property rights and personal rights are the same thing …. History reveals no civilized people among whom there was not a highly educated class and large aggregations of wealth. Large profits means large payrolls. Inspiration has always come from above.’
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Political morality, he insisted, must always be judged not by intentions but by effects: ‘Economy is idealism in its most practical form’, was the key sentence in his 1925 Inaugural. In an address to the New York chamber of commerce on 19 November that year he gave in lucid and lapidary form perhaps the last classic statement of
laissez-faire
philosophy. Government and business should remain independent and separate. It was very desirable indeed that one should be directed from Washington, the other from New York. Wise and prudent men must always prevent the mutual usurpations which foolish or greedy men sought on either side.
Business was the pursuit of gain but it also had a moral purpose: ‘the mutual organized effort of society to minister to the economic requirement of civilization …. It rests squarely on the law of service. It has for its main reliance truth and faith and justice. In its larger sense it is one of the greatest contributing forces to the moral and spiritual advancement of the race.’ That was why government had a warrant to promote its success by providing the conditions of competition within a framework of security. Its job was to suppress privilege wherever it manifested itself and uphold lawful possession by providing legal remedies for all wrongs: ‘The prime element in the value of all property is the knowledge that its peaceful enjoyment will be publicly defended.’ Without this legal and public defence ‘the value of your tall buildings would shrink to the price of the waterfront of old Carthage or corner-lots in ancient Babylon’. The more business regulated itself, the less need there would be for government to act to ensure competition; it could therefore concentrate on its twin task of economy and of improving the national structure within which business could increase profits and investment, raise wages and provide better goods and services at the lowest possible prices.
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This public philosophy appeared to possess a degree of concordance with the actual facts of life which was rare in human experience. Under Harding and still more under Coolidge, the USA enjoyed a general prosperity which was historically unique in its experience or that of any other society. When the decade was over, and the prosperity had been, for the moment, wholly eclipsed, it was seen retrospectively, especially by writers and intellectuals, as grossly materialistic, febrile, philistine, and at the same time insubstantial and ephemeral, unmerited by any solid human accomplishment. The judgemental images were biblical: of a grotesque Belshazzar’s Feast before catastrophe. ‘The New Generation had matured,’ Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1931, ‘to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken; all they knew was that America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history.’
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Edmund Wilson saw the Twenties as an aberration in the basic seriousness of the American conscience: ‘the fireworks of the Twenties were in the nature of a drunken fiesta’.
⁶⁴
In
The Epic of America
, published in 1931, James Truslow Adams summed it up: ‘Having surrendered idealism for the sake of prosperity, the “practical men” bankrupted us on both of them.’
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There were indeed some intellectuals who felt the whole attempt to spread general prosperity was misconceived and certain to invoke destruction. Michael Rostovtzeff, then finishing his monumental history of the economy of antiquity, asked: is it possible to extend a higher civilization to the lower classes without debasing its
standard and diluting its quality to the vanishing point? Is not every civilization bound to decay as soon as it begins to penetrate the masses?’
⁶⁶

But the view that the 1920s was a drunken spree destructive of civilized values can be substantiated only by the systematic distortion or denial of the historical record. The prosperity was very widespread and very solid. It was not universal: in the farming community particularly it was patchy, and it largely excluded certain older industrial communities, such as the textile trade of New England.
⁶⁷
But it was more widely distributed than had been possible in any community of this size before, and it involved the acquisition, by tens of millions, of the elements of economic security which had hitherto been denied them throughout the whole of history. The growth was spectacular. On a 1933–8 index of 100, it was 58 in 1921 and passed 110 in 1929. That involved an increase in national income from $59.4 to $87.2 billion in eight years, with real
per capita
income rising from $522 to $716: not Babylonian luxury but a modest comfort never hitherto possible.
⁶⁸
The expansion expressed itself not merely in spending and credit. For the first time, many millions of working people acquired insurance (life and industrial insurance policies passed the 100 million mark in the 1920s), savings, which quadrupled during the decade, and a stake in industry. Thus, an analysis of those buying fifty shares or more in one of the biggest public utility stock issues of the 1920s shows that the largest groups were (in order): housekeepers, clerks, factory workers, merchants, chauffeurs and drivers, electricians, mechanics and foremen.
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The Twenties was also characterized by the biggest and longest building-boom: as early as 1924 some 11 million families had acquired their own homes.

The heart of the consumer boom was in personal transport, which in a vast country, where some of the new cities were already thirty miles across, was not a luxury. At the beginning of 1914, 1,258,062 cars had been registered in the USA, which produced 569,054 during the year. Production rose to 5,621,715 in 1929, by which time cars registered in the USA totalled 26,501,443, five-sixths of the world production and one car for every five people in the country. This gives some idea of America’s global industrial dominance. In 1924 the four leading European car producers turned out only 11 per cent of the vehicles manufactured in the USA. Even by the end of the decade European registrations were only 20 per cent of the US level and production a mere 13 per cent.
⁷⁰
The meaning of these figures was that the working class as a whole was acquiring the individual freedom of medium- and long-distance movement hitherto limited to a section of the middle class. Meanwhile, though rail was in decline,
the numbers carried falling from 1,269 million in 1920 to 786 million in 1929, the middle class was moving into air travel: air passengers rose from 49,713 in 1928 to 417,505 in 1930 (by 1940 the figure was 3,185,278, and nearly 8 million by 1945).
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What the Twenties demonstrates was the relative speed with which industrial productivity could transform luxuries into necessities and spread them down the class pyramid.

Indeed, to a growing extent it was a dissolvent of class and other barriers. Next to cars, it was the new electrical industry which fuelled Twenties prosperity. Expenditure on radios rose from a mere $10,648,000 in 1920 to $411,637,000 in 1929, and total electrical products tripled in the decade to $2.4 billion.
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First the mass radio audience, signalled by the new phenomenon of ‘fan mail’ in autumn 1923, then regular attendance, especially by young people, at the movies (from 1927 the talkies) brought about the Americanization of immigrant communities and a new classlessness in dress, speech and attitudes which government policy, under Wilson, had been powerless to effect and which Harding and Coolidge wisely forwent. Sinclair Lewis, revisiting ‘Main Street’ for the
Nation
in 1924, described two working-class, small-town girls wearing ‘well-cut skirts, silk stockings, such shoes as can be bought nowhere in Europe, quiet blouses, bobbed hair, charming straw hats, and easily cynical expressions terrifying to an awkward man’. One of them served hash. ‘Both their dads are Bohemian; old mossbacks, tough old birds with whiskers that can’t sling more English than a muskrat. And yet in one generation, here’s their kids – real queens.’
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Such young people identified with movie-stars; for them, movies were a force of liberation, children from parents, wives from husbands. A motion-picture research survey quoted one seventeen-year-old: ‘Movies are a godsend, and to express my sentiments long may they live and long may they stay in the land of the free and the home of the brave.’ Another: ‘I began smoking after watching Dolores Costella.’
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Smoking was then seen as progressive and liberating, specially for women; and healthy – ‘Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet’; ‘slenderize in a Sensible Way’. Advertising was a window into liberation too, especially for women of immigrant families. It educated them in the possibilities of life. The Twenties in America marked the biggest advances for women of any decade, before or since. By 1930 there were 10,546,000 women ‘gainfully employed’ outside the home: the largest number, as before, were in domestic/personal service (3,483,000) but there were now nearly 2 million in clerical work, 1,860,000 in manufacturing and, most encouraging of all, 1,226,000 in the professions.
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Equally significant, and culturally more important, were the liberated housewives,
the ‘Blondies’, to whom their appliances, cars and husbands’ high wages had brought leisure for the first time. Writing on ‘The New Status of Women’ in 1931, Mary Ross epitomized the Blondies ‘raised … above the need for economic activity’:

They raise their children – one, two, occasionally three or four of them – with a care probably unknown
to
any past generation. It is they who founded the great culture-club movement … they who spend the great American income, sustain the movie industry, buy or borrow the novels, support the fashions and the beauty-culture businesses, keep bridge and travel and medical cults at high levels of activity and help along the two-car-family standard. Out of this sudden burst of female leisure have come many good things, much of the foundation of American philanthropy for example.
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The coming of family affluence was one factor in the decline of radical politics and their union base. A 1929 survey quoted a union organizer: ‘The Ford car has done an awful lot of harm to the unions here and everywhere else. As long as men have enough money to buy a second-hand Ford and tires and gasoline, they’ll be out on the road and paying no attention to union meetings.’
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In 1915, 1921 and 1922 the unions lost three key Supreme Court actions, and their 1919 strikes were disastrous failures. American Federation of Labor membership dropped from a high-point of 4,078,740 in 1920 to 2,532,261 in 1932. ‘Welfare capitalism’ provided company sports facilities, holidays with pay, insurance and pension schemes, so that by 1927 4,700,000 workers were covered by group insurance and 1,400,000 were members of company unions.
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The American worker appeared to be on the threshold of a hitherto unimaginable bourgeois existence of personal provision and responsibility which made collective action increasingly superfluous.

This was, as might have been expected, linked to a cultural liberation which belied the accusations of philistinism hurled (later, rather than at the time) at the Coolidge era. Perhaps the most important single development of the age was the spread of education. Between 1910 and 1930 total educational spending rose fourfold, from $426.25 million to $2.3 billion; higher education spending increased fourfold too, to nearly one billion a year. Illiteracy fell during the period from 7.7 to 4.3 per cent. The Twenties was the age of the Book of the Month Club and the Literary Guild; more new books were bought than ever before but there was a persistent devotion to the classics. Throughout the Twenties,
David Copperfield
was rated America’s favourite novel, and among those voted ‘the ten greatest men in history’ were Shakespeare, Dickens, Tennyson and Longfellow.
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Jazz Age it may have been but by the end of the decade there were 35,000 youth orchestras in the nation. The decade was marked
both by the historical conservation movement which restored colonial Williamsburg and the collection of contemporary painting which created the Museum of Modern Art in 1929.
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The truth is the Twenties was the most fortunate decade in American history, even more fortunate than the equally prosperous 1950s decade, because in the Twenties the national cohesion brought about by relative affluence, the sudden cultural density and the expressive originality of ‘Americanism’ were new and exciting. In 1927 André Siegfried, the French academician, published
America Comes of Age
, in which he argued that ‘as a result of the revolutionary changes brought about by modern methods of production … the American people are now creating on a vast scale an entirely original social structure’. The point might have brought a wry response from Henry James, who had died eleven years before. In 1878 he had written a little biography of Hawthorne which contained a celebrated and (to Americans) highly offensive passage listing all the ‘items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life’ and which – so he argued – supplied the rich social texture essential to the writing of imaginative literature. America had, he enumerated,