Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938

by Philipp Blom

the new journal unapologetically introduced what Thurman regarded as a more genuine picture of black America: “uneducated, crude, and scrappy black men and women depicted without tinsel or soap.”7 Thurman had recruited his contributors from the ranks of the older journals; they included Hughes, Du Bois’s future son-in-law Countee Cullen, writers Gwendolyn Bennett and Zora Neale Hurston, journalist John P. Davis, painter and illustrator Aaron Douglas, and writer and painter Richard Bruce Nugent.

Hurston

Sometimes I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can anyone deny themselves the pleasure of my company?”

Hughes,

celebrated 1926 essay, described “the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America—this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.”

Though Du Bois was taking a more and more conservative stance toward literary Harlem, his political stance was moving further to the left. In 1927, increasingly interested in the economics of class distinctions, he paid a visit to Soviet Russia.

THE BLACK CULTURAL REVIVAL had many facets. There was Du Bois with his Pan-African Congress, petitioning major powers not only to grant a greater number of enforceable civil rights to blacks everywhere but also to decolonize Africa; there was Marcus Garvey, a forceful Jamaican orator and politician who sought to repatriate all African Americans to Africa in a movement appropriately named Black Zionism; and there was everything in between. It was a climate marked by bitterness and determination to break out of the racial boundaries set by white America—but, most important, it featured an incredible optimism that a new beginning might be possible.

The majority of the inhabitants of the new Harlem, however, simply wanted a decent life without the humiliating daily experiences constantly meted out to people of color. They also wanted to have fun, and it was this aspect of the great Harlem Renaissance that was to make it famous beyond the boundaries of the district and a small circle of literature lovers who admired young black poets whose works were only just beginning to hit the literary mainstream. For most whites, Harlem meant entertainment, and principally jazz, “the most significant, the most indigenous and unprecedented American music of the 1920s.”

Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, and a whole firmament of other black stars made their show business debut, or their name, at the Cotton Club—and made its owner a fortune into the bargain.

With the opening of the Savoy Ballroom in 1926, black music took another step forward.

The now familiar Cotton Club...

was metamorp...

It was at the elegant, pink-walled Savoy

swing.

Unlike the Cotton Club, the Savoy was not segregated; under white ownership (reputedly that of Chicago mobster Al Capone) but black management,

Harlem Shadows,

Claude McKay.

BLACK MUSIC, HOWEVER, did not remain in a cultural ghetto. It was already being played on Broadway as well as uptown in Harlem,

Noble Sissle

Eubie...

Josephine Baker

Baker’s skyrocketing fame rested in equal parts on her uninhibited sex appeal and her uncomplicated willingness to play to colonialist and racist stereotypes.

orientalist erotic fantasy incarnate.

Paul Robeson

ON OCTOBER 5, 1923, ON MOUNT WILSON IN PASADENA, CALIFORNIA, our place in the universe was overturned forever. Edwin Hubble, a thirty-three-year-old astronomer and former high school teacher who had been working at the Mount Wilson Observatory for four years, wrote that he had discovered a Cepheid variable star within the galaxy known as M31 or Andromeda.

Hubble set out to test the hypothesis that the universe might consist of multiple galaxies and that the Milky Way is only one among many.

The only possible conclusion was that there were stars and entire galaxies outside our own.

his explanation for the redshift in the color of distant galaxies.

the more distant objects are traveling at greater speeds.

Hubble’s discovery had revolutionized humanity’s conception of its place in the world, and it is difficult to overestimate its long-term effects. Over three millennia, from an essentially local idea of Earth as a disc, the planet had become round and had been dislodged from its position at the center of the universe to be a mere satellite of a sun, which in turn had been found to be one of many in a galaxy of suns, the Milky Way. Now this galaxy was no longer a universe—the only universe—but merely one among countless galaxies in the immense, fathomless, and expanding darkness of space, and Earth had become an infinitesimal dot in a world of unimaginable magnitude. It was the last and perhaps greatest blow to humanity’s narcissism,

Humanity was not at the center, and not even prominently placed in the periphery; it appeared to be lost, cast into the darkness and void of deep space as a tiny speck inside the vast apparent emptiness of the universe.

Several scientists throughout Germany and elsewhere in Europe discussed and elaborated hypotheses that would change the very nature of how we look at the physical universe.

Werner Heisenberg, was still in his twenties when he made his revolutionary contributions to quantum physics, the next frontier of science after relativity.

Max Planck had posited that electromagnetic energy

was composed of multiples of a discrete and indivisible energy unit, the quantum. Against all appearances, light had to be looked at not as an immaterial wave but as a wave pattern consisting of individual units of energy.

A light quantum (or electron), Heisenberg claimed, was neither a particle nor a wave; rather, it could behave like either, depending on the circumstances and on the moment of observation.

the role of the observer became paramount in physics,

The act of observation itself, Heisenberg argued, altered the system observed, and to some degree even created it.

What was more, at the subatomic level the movement of individual particles (or waves) was essentially random and could not be predicted with any degree of certainty. Even causality, the cornerstone of Newtonian physics, was rejected in favor of mere probability.

The trajectory of an electron around the nucleus of an atom is not a stable path, and in measuring it one can only determine either its position or its impulse, never both. It is not possible to ascribe a particular speed and a particular location to any subatomic particle. Any prediction made about its behavior is therefore based purely on probability. At the macroscopic level—the level of human experience—this makes no difference to the prediction of future events because the aggregation of an immense number of probable outcomes at the...

The disturbing implications of his ideas were clear, and they attacked the very foundations of science and of Western thought.

Newton

ancient Greek philosophy, the authors of the Bible,

identity and duality, the irreducible bedrock of Western thought.

Quantum physics and other theoretical developments overturned the cumulative result of a millennium-old tradition by claiming that the very matter of the universe was unlike anything Newton had imagined, and that at its heart lay states of radical uncertainty in which particles could be two different things, had no fixed identity, had contradictory characteristics, and were governed not by laws but by simple chance. The new physics argued that there are no absolute laws in nature, only statistical probabilities.

THE DEEP PROBLEM underlying both quantum physics and cosmology was the loss of any intuitive understanding of the world.

German scientists soon found themselves embroiled in a very different debate concerned with the supposedly racial character of such a theory. Could it be that scientific theories had become so disorienting simply because so many Jews had had a hand in formulating them?

Sociologically, the reason for this lay simply in the fact that during the late nineteenth century, standard physics (which was still overwhelmingly Newtonian) was believed to be a theoretical model of the world that had almost reached completion. Theoretical physics, by contrast, was a marginal research area for cranks and lonely eccentrics, and it offered little funding, little prestige, and few career opportunities. While ethnic Germans were commonly allotted the most prestigious chairs and research positions in standard physics, work in theoretical physics was often left to Jews, or to women such as the brilliant Lise Meitner.

As often in the history of anti-Semitism, the result of social need and pressure was turned against those who had successfully accommodated to it.

The noble German physics was to be built on Anschaulichkeit, on the intuitive understanding of physical processes with a basis in classical, Newtonian physics.