Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Philipp Blom
Read between
July 5 - July 22, 2020
The prohibitionists had wanted to change America, and they had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams—it was just that the change went in exactly the opposite direction from what they had intended.
The big winner, however, came from the South and rapidly began to conquer the world: jazz.
The writer most associated with the young generation in the 1920s and their path from disillusion with society to disappointment in themselves was F. Scott Fitzgerald,
writers choosing to flee Prohibition-era America and settle in Paris during the Jazz Age.
The English “lost generation” may have been a myth, but the young, disillusioned, and unmoored expat bohemians in Paris were very real. Their members were aware of belonging nowhere, and expatriate life suited them. It was easier to live with the feeling of not being at home if they were in a foreign country, where they could live carefree lives.
Growing into adulthood after the war, they were acutely aware that they were lost, that they were missing a sense of themselves, of purpose, and of direction.
Ernest Hemingway
THE CULTURE WARS between conservative values and the worldview of the postwar generation was played out throughout the European continent, and in many of these battles America became a symbol for the liberating power of the New World, far away from the stifling atmosphere of Europe’s prewar ideas.
African American musicians decided to stay in or return to Europe
Berlin was a major battleground in the culture wars between the old world and the new,
the atmosphere was marked by poverty, bitterness, social hatred, and murderous political violence.
Reeling from a defeat it was totally unprepared for, Germany was a nation split down the middle and engaged in a murderous internal battle.
Since its inception in 1919, the Weimar Republic had been in the middle of a revolution that might have taken Germany in an entirely different direction had it been successful. This socialist revolution was led by social democrats but opposed by the party executive.
The government’s fragile hold on power was secured only by a destabilizing alliance with and toleration of paramilitary forces of questionable loyalty.
money was rapidly losing its value, and the savings and security of the middle class began to evaporate, further destabilizing an already volatile situation.
while many conservatives thought that salvation lay in a return to national greatness and to “German virtues,” a large, predominantly urban left-leaning and internationalist faction opposed these dreams as a form of national suicide. The German left abhorred the legacy of the empire, the world of the Prussian Junkers or landed nobility, and the generals and their militarist worldview.
Grosz
His brush dedicated to class warfare, Grosz specialized in brutal officers, flabby whores, pinched bourgeois, and mutilated veterans, the last of whom could be seen begging in every Berlin street.
Jazz became an emblem of new living and of a new generation seeking to escape the confines of the prewar world, a world whose values they no longer respected.
a sense of menace underneath
the new communist masters were even less adept at ruling than the aging aristocrats and corrupt officials had been before them. Without experience in governing or even administration—historian Richard Pipes calls them a government of professional revolutionaries—they fell back on theory and extreme experiments,
the Kronstadt sailors
were attempting to take the revolution back from the Party and anchor it in a popular democracy.
Kronstadt
perfectly clear now that Lenin’s government was prepared to crush any demand for participatory government, any challenge to his power.
FOR THE GOVERNMENT, Kronstadt was an opportunity to root out opposition on all levels of society, and the rebellion itself was followed by a wave of terror, including arrests, torture, and executions.
An international anti-Bolshevik conspiracy was concocted, and duly uncovered with great fanfare.
For the Soviet leadership the failure of a global revolution not only flew in the face of all their prophecies but also forced them to rethink their own regime, much as the church fathers had done almost two thousand years earlier, when it became clear that the imminent expectation of the Last Judgment would have to be deferred and the church be put on a more solid institutional foundation.
Karl Radek,
Halle region in eastern Germany
For the communist movement of Germany, the March Action proved a crippling disaster,
The Soviets’ most explicit attempt to ferment a revolution outside Russia had resulted in abject failure.
Beyond the Soviet experiment, the shattered economies and destabilized societies of the Western world also appeared to ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
1921 in Logan County, a mining district in West Virginia. The issue at stake in what became known as the Battle of Blair Mountain was not world revolution but the cruel exploitation of the miners.
the miners’ odds for survival were worse than those of soldiers at the Western Front.
President Warren Harding called in the army,
Blair Mountain put an end to all efforts to unionize labor in the southern mining industry.
Like other violent labor disputes during this period, it resulted in a significant erosion of workers’ rights.
The huge, devastating shock of the First World War was over, but its aftereffects would not cease to rumble on. While the Western world was no longer at war, it had definitely not found a state of peace. The brutalization and destabilization associated with the greatest armed conflict the world had ever seen was continuing to affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people—so much so that one could argue that the conflict was continuing, albeit on internal fronts. The social order had been rocked to its foundations, and the economic situation varied from apparently robust in the case of the
...more
Even for the wealthiest and most triumphant of the victors, the United States, the War entailed a vortex of social change and civil unrest that proved almost impossible to control—
transition from war to peace, from a predominantly rural economy to a predominantly urban and industrial economy, and from a predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant society to an ethnically and religiously much more diverse one,
In Europe
if the world revolution dreamed up by communist theoreticians had not followed from the war, neither had a reestablishment of the old order and its imagined firm sense of purpose and destiny. There was fighting everywhere, bitterness, and violence against or by the state.
The Western world was seeking a new order.
The Crisis. It was the official journal of the NAACP
founded in 1910 by
W. E. B. Du Bois,
Charles S. Johnson’s Opportunity, founded in 1922 as the mouthpiece for the National Urban League
Langston Hughes
Du Bois, like many of his generation, expected Hughes and other rising stars to subordinate artistic imperatives to the political needs of the wider movement for black equality and, specifically, racial integration. By contrast, Hughes and his contemporaries regarded themselves as artists first and political activists second, and even emphasized differences between the races rather than seeking to lessen or downplay them. By 1926, a new, more radical magazine was on the stands: Wallace Thurman’s Fire!!
