Are We Headed For Another "Roaring Twenties"? Let's Hope Not

What were the 1920s like?

After years of strikes, plots, raids, bombings, deportations, war and (Russian) revolution, brazen plutocracy seized the helm, progressive idealism sank from view, the K.K.K. revived, and Republican Warren Harding was nominated for president by a handful of machine politicians in a smoke-filled Chicago back room. Seen besotted and disheveled on a hotel elevator with bloodshot eyes and two days growth of beard, the "densely ignorant" Harding (William Allen White) was devoid of ethical aspiration but popular as a compromise candidate for lacking enemies. Calling for "less government in business and more business in government," he promised all-too-believably that capital would "exploit the world market." Employers celebrated with a drive to "Americanize" immigrants, ban unions, and get "back to normalcy." 

Progressive reform didn't even rate token mention anymore. The National Association of Manufacturers walked arm in arm with Wall Street and every state delegation attending the 1920 Republican Convention was loaded with fat cats from major industries - oil, railroads, telephones, steel, coal, and textiles. Founding editor of the New Masses Joseph Freeman sounded a dissenting note, pointing out that the Harding ascension was more nightmarish than reassuring:

"America was back to 'normalcy' under the small-town smile of a chief executive in golf knickers signing bills which Wall Street ghosted. The elderly playboy in the White House, with his entourage of poker players, topers, Casanovas and oil thiefs, posed benignly for the rotogravures as the Republic relaxed from the war through a long Roman holiday on bootleg gin. Million-dollar prizefights, baseball games and horse races indicated a bigger and better Gilded Age. The public avidly followed a press which, concealing the truth about Mooney and Billings [militant labor leaders falsely convicted of a 1915 Preparedness Day bombing in San Francisco], Sacco and Vanzetti, devoted pages to beauty contests and lust murders; and the bourgeois journalists were telling the truth about the war. But as usual after the event and under compulsion; for it was the proletarian revolutions in Russia, German and Hungary that brought to light the secret robber treaties of the imperialist governments. The fraud, the deadly hypocrisy of the prevailing social system, which had duped millions into slaughter (WWI), stood out in all its naked horror." (Joseph Freeman, An American Testament - a narratives of rebels and romantics, Farrar and Rinehart, 1936) p. 233)

Organized diversion soon returned American attention to fads, fashions, mah jong, bathtub gin, radio, bathing beauties, crime, women, smoking, Babe Ruth, sex and Freud. The allegedly value-free theories of the father of psychoanalysis proved particularly useful in undermining discontent before it could become popular rebellion, as psychoanalysis blossomed into one of the major preoccupations of the decade. According to the Viennese physician, unconscious personal habits need to be inspected, phobias overcome, and ego strengthened. Catharsis, not class struggle, was the way to liberate oneself from the tyranny of primal fears and societal taboos, an apolitical approach that tacitly reinforced the status quo. Reformer Frederic Howe, despairing over the collapsed dreams of a new society, consulted a psychiatrist, who told him he had to rid himself of guilt and tend to his private life. In short order Howe had forsaken social change in preference for seeking "harmony within," trying to fix "gaps in [his] personality," and pursuing a "comradeship with myself such as I have never known before."

In the name of healthy adaptation psychoanalysts helped the socially troubled take advantage of expensive medical treatment denied to all but a few, in order to ease them out of ethical upheaval into complacent lives of private acquisition that made excessive self-preoccupation possible in the first place. Purporting to explain and understand vulnerable conscience, they ushered in moral surrender disguised as the wisdom of an integrated personality. The incongruous result was a contentment-oriented inner quest flourishing alongside an increasingly abysmal outer reality of nightriding Klansmen, bloody Mafia wars, crushed unions, lynch mobs, and brutal subjugations in the Caribbean and Central America. 

Far from revolutionary, psychoanalysis settled for merely adjusting patients to an unjust social order's demand for self-perpetuation. Those burdened with guilt that led them to revolt against conventional morality ended up treated by psychoanalysts who diagnosed rebellion as pathology. Honest social conscience, straightforward guilt, direct self-accusation concerning exploitation, all were neutralized for a fee. To quote Freeman again:

"Psychoanalysis was not, as the romantic rebels imagined, amoral. It was highly moral, conventional and bourgeois. Himself thoroughly steeped in middle-class attitudes, the average psychoanalyst looked upon the radical's hatred of capitalist as a mental derangement . . . In many cases, the psychoanalysis of bohemian writers and artists opened for them a back door through which they re-entered the bourgeois society which they had repudiated in their period of romantic rebellion. It turned out in twentieth century America, as in nineteenth century Europe, that adolescent revolt against paternal authority, clothing itself in literary and political symbols, was but the repudiation of conventional mores under the pressure of a normal sensuality in conflict with an abnormal conscience. Once that conflict was resolved, once sensuality and conscience were reconciled, the road was open for the return of the prodigal to the bourgeois fold. The neurotic bohemian sought in love pleasure without responsibility. When psychoanalysis gave him a sense of responsibility, by leading him out of the realm of fantasy into the realm of reality, he could conceive of responsibility only as the complete acceptance of bourgeois society."

 The problem, of course, was that psychoanalysis reduced the sphere of legitimate interest to personal relations alone. Thus, those who protested the organized robbery of private monopoly and its attendant imperialist wars were branded paranoid, on the grounds that they had never met any of the people who carried out the plunder and murder they abhorred. Of course, during WWI it had been considered evidence of sound mind to shriek for the Kaiser's head and yearn for the slaughter of sixty million Germans one could not possibly have met. But that was sincere patriotism, admirable love of country, righteous and healthy desire to shoot, shell, bomb, starve, maim, and kill all those your leaders (whom you had also never met) insisted made the world unsafe for democracy. Thus it came to pass that those pronounced psychologically fit evidenced their mental health by adoring segregationist Woodrow Wilson and Mexican "bandit" killer General Pershing, while those who bitterly resented industrialist leaders for killing workers in Ludlow, Lawrence, Youngstown, and Pittsburgh were found to be delusional. Ditto for those who objected to the sending of ten million young men to their deaths charging headlong into withering machine-gun fire in a war President Wilson conceded was the fruit of "commercial rivalry" - after the fact. Those who stood against U.S. participation in the war when it could do some good - like Eugene Debs - were railroaded into prison for obstructing the draft and never forgiven. In the closing days of his presidency Woodrow Wilson granted a customary departing pardon to others, but not Debs, who had violated a prime commandment of Empire: "Thou Shalt Not Refuse To Kill!"

 "If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it."

        --------Edward Bernays, often called "The Father of Public Relations"

Psychoanalytic insights also proved useful in creating artificial wants, which soon established conspicuous consumption as the ultimate measure of a meaningful life. 

The possibilities of regimenting the public mind had been spectacularly demonstrated by the Creel Commission during WWI, when an essentially pacifist American public was converted to raging jingoist fanatics in a matter of months. Now economist Roger Babson predicted that mind management would move into the commercial sphere: "The war taught us the power of propaganda. Now when we have anything to sell to the American people, we know how to sell it. We have the school, the pulpit, and the press."

Social scientist J. B. Watson of Johns Hopkins University, the founder of modern behaviorism, quickly grasped the possibilities for social engineering in the so-called science of mind. Advocating docility at work and the substitution of marketplace gratifications for the rewards of family life, he dismissed traditional child-rearing practices of kissing, fondling, and caressing as perverse and psychologically damaging, maintaining that they were poor preparation for the realities of commercial and professional life, as indeed they were. What remained unthinkable to him was that private corporate power might have to give way so that the needs of sane and healthy human beings could be fulfilled.

But the demands of corporations for limitless profit won out, so consumption was made the antidote for the frustrations of production. Since industrial employments had long since institutionalized monotony, a sense of personal failure at achieving a more meaningful life was a common worker complaint. To prevent this discontent from finding outlet in movements for social change, the business classes celebrated the atomization of the workforce as "rugged individualism," cultivating a corresponding "philosophy of futility" that enshrined consumption as the central meaning of life. In newspapers, magazines, and on the radio they paraded before America a vision of passive self-fulfilment through spending that shrewdly channeled the dissatisfactions of industrial life into mass consumption. Since by definition workers could never get enough of superfluous commodities designed to replace every partial gratification with a fresh desire, frustration multiplied as the economy boomed.

The inherent pointlessness of such al life struck business economist Paul Nystrom as just another opportunity to investigate what the public might be induced to buy: "This lack of purpose in life has an effect on consumption similar to that of having a narrow life interest, that is, in concentrating human attention on the more superficial things that comprise much of fashionable consumption." Soon a narrow life interest became a touchstone of normality as mass produced goods enabled novelty to masquerade as change. "Fatigue" with the futility of modern industrial life was deliberately associated with "fatigue . . . with apparel and goods." This, in turn, allowed the purchase of "new and improved" commodities to provide momentary relief from the triviality of everydayness and become America's version of counterfeit liberation. The illusion lasted so long as the dazzling array of goods and alluring images never faltered. 

Fashionable consumption as an alternative to social change was a major theme of 1920s business literature. Helen Woodward, the leading woman copywriter of the decade, admitted that change would be "the most beneficent medicine in the world to most people," then put forth consumption as a means of gratifying those impulses without resorting to change. "To those who cannot change their whole lives or occupations," she observed," even a new line in a dress is often a relief. The woman who is tired of her husband or her home or a job feels some lifting of the weight of life from seeing a straight line change into a bouffant, or a gray pass into beige." 

Preoccupied with considerations such as these, disliking one's assigned role as an atom of production and a maximizer of consumption was far less likely to be resented, or even perceived. Woodward did not think fundamental change was even possible, finding fault with the targets of consumerist designs, not the architects. "Most people do not have the courage or the understanding to make deeper changes," she said dismissively.

While diverting people from social change, advertisers exploited their insecurities in a perpetual effort to increase consumption. According to the fantasies of the marketing czars people existed in a totally judgmental world in which it was impossible to trust even one's family and close friends. For the social landscape was booby-trapped with stigma and daily life was full of private horrors: "sneaker smell," "paralyzed pores," "vacation knees," "spoon-food face," "office hips," "underarm offense," and "ashtray breath." In the corporate mind bonds of solidarity simply could not exist, so fear of disapproval had to be raised to a paralyzing terror. Ads depicting home life, community, and the job taught that status insecurity was an occasion to "suspect yourself first," and after that loved ones, friends, and neighbors. Stuart Chase, an early consumer advocate, noted that "for ordinary people" the basic function of mouthwashes "is confined to scaring us to death."

In short, by establishing a spectacle of change in the marketplace, boredom and frustration with regimented existence were mobilized in support of increased consumption rather than social transformation. This, in turn, further entrenched the structures that bred dissatisfaction, in the process legitimizing corporations, pacifying workers, and commodifying visions of private life. Meanwhile, every fleeting gratification offered by the consumption of goods and services only whetted the appetite for further multiplication of artificial needs and yet more gluttonous consumption. Craving, not desire, was enshrined as the engine of American life.

This manifested itself through a tidal wave of advertising copy in newspapers, magazines, motion pictures, and on the radio, as a new class of consumption engineers dedicated itself to manufacturing wants, stimulating envy, and stigmatizing laggard consumers for failing to "keep up with the Joneses." Every year a new automobile, gadget, radio speaker, electric fan, or vacuum cleaner muffler was presented as the indispensable cure for social inferiority. An incessant stream of premiums, prizes, and gifts cultivated brand loyalty at the same time that "down payments" were reduced, "trade in" allowances increased, and credit terms relaxed. With advertisers defining the popular will as the sum total of consumer choices in the marketplace, what Thorstein Veblen had satirized as the conspicuous consumption of the leisure class became the ideal of American democracy.

Predictably, these spurious choices were advanced as a matter of the utmost gravity. Economist Nystrom emphasized the negative social consequences that would be visited on anyone trying to abstain from the commodified life: "There will be quizzical looks, doubtful stares and critical estimates. He will be thought queer. He will be judged as lacking in brain power and, perhaps, as an undesirable person." There would be no mercy for the recalcitrant:  "If he persists [in violating the norms of consumption] . . . he will, if he is an employee, lose his job! He will lose customers if he is a salesman; he will lose votes if he is a politician. He will lose his customers if he is a doctor or a lawyer. He will lose all of his friends."