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February 5 - February 13, 2022
the winter of 1921–22—it came with a rush. Soon everybody was talking, not about wireless telephony, but about radio.
“There is radio music in the air, every night, everywhere. Anybody can hear it at home on a receiving set, which any boy can put up in an hour.” In February President Harding had an outfit installed in his study,
Sport, too, had become an American obsession.
Babe Ruth raised his home-run record to fifty-nine, and the 1921 World’s Series broke records for gate receipts and attendance. Sport-hungry crowds who had never dreamed of taking a college-entrance examination swarmed to college football games,
There were food-fads, too, as well as sport-fads: such was the sudden and overwhelming craze for Eskimo Pie that in three months the price of cocoa beans on the New York market rose 50 per cent.
Another new American institution caught the public eye during the summer of 1921—the bathing beauty. In early July a Costume and Beauty Show was held at Washington’s bathing beach on the Potomac, and the prize-winners were so little touched by the influence of Mack Sennett and his moving-picture bathers that they wore tunic bathing-suits, hats over their long curls, and long stockings—all but one, who daringly rolled her stockings below her knees.
A first-class revolt against the accepted American order was certainly taking place during those early years of the Post-war Decade,
The shock troops of the rebellion were not alien agitators, but the sons and daughters of well-to-do American families, who knew little about Bolshevism and cared distinctly less, and their defiance was expressed not in obscure radical publications or in soap-box speeches, but right across the family breakfast table into the horrified ears of conservative fathers and mothers.
In July, 1920, a fashion-writer reported in the New York Times that “the American woman … has lifted her skirts far beyond any modest limitation,” which was another way of saying that the hem was now all of nine inches above the ground.
Cried the Catholic Telegraph of Cincinnati in righteous indignation, “The music is sensuous, the embracing of partners—the female only half dressed—is absolutely indecent; and the motions—they are such as may not be described, with any respect for propriety, in a family newspaper. Suffice it to say that there are certain houses appropriate for such dances; but those houses have been closed by law.”
“blotto,” as their companions cheerfully put it—on the contents of the hip-flasks of the new prohibition régime, and going out joyriding with men at four in the morning. And worst of all, even at well-regulated dances they were said to retire where the eye of the most sharp-sighted chaperon could not follow, and in darkened rooms or in parked cars to engage in the unspeakable practice of petting and necking.
This Side of Paradise in April, 1920, that fathers and mothers realized fully what was afoot and how long it had been going on.
“None of the Victorian mothers—and most of the mothers were Victorian—had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed,” wrote Mr. Fitzgerald. “…
in due course other books appeared to substantiate the findings of Mr. Fitzgerald: Dancers in the Dark, The Plastic Age, Flaming Youth. Magazine articles and newspapers reiterated the scandal. To be sure, there were plenty of communities where nice girls did not, in actual fact, “behave like that”; and even in the more sophisticated urban centers there were plenty of girls who did not. Nevertheless, there was enough fire beneath the smoke of these sensational revelations to make the Problem of the Younger Generation a topic of anxious discussion from coast to coast.
Christian Endeavor Society, declared that the modern “indecent dance” was “an offense against womanly purity, the very fountainhead of our family and civil life.”
The new style of dancing was denounced in religious journals as “impure, polluting, corrupting, debasing, destroying spirituality, increasing carnality,”
President Murphy of the University of Florida cried out with true Southern warmth, “The low-cut gowns, the rolled hose and short skirts are born of the Devil and his angels, and are carrying the present and future generations to chaos and destruction.”
The New York American reported in 1921 that a bill was pending in Utah providing fine and imprisonment for those who wore on the streets “skirts higher than three inches above the ankle.”
In France, two million men had found themselves very close to filth and annihilation and very far from the American moral code and its defenders; prostitution had followed the flag and willing mademoiselles from Armentières had been plentiful; American girls sent over as nurses and war workers had come under the influence of continental manners and standards without being subject to the rigid protections thrown about their continental sisters of the respectable classes;
Some of them had acquired under the pressure of war-time conditions a new code which seemed to them quite defensible; millions of them had been provided with an emotional stimulant from which it was not easy to taper off. Their torn nerves craved the anodynes of speed, excitement, and passion. They found themselves expected to settle down into the humdrum routine of American life as if nothing had happened, to accept the moral dicta of elders who seemed to them still to be living in a Pollyanna land of rosy ideals which the war had killed for them.
The revolution was accelerated also by the growing independence of the American woman. She won the suffrage in 1920. She seemed, it is true, to be very little interested in it once she had it; she voted, but mostly as the unregenerate men about her did, despite the efforts of women’s clubs and the League of Women Voters to awaken her to womanhood’s civic opportunity; feminine candidates for office were few, and some of them—such as Governor Ma Ferguson of Texas—scarcely seemed to represent the starry-eyed spiritual influence which, it had been promised, would presently ennoble public life. Few
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The principal remaining forces which accelerated the revolution in manners and morals were all 100 per cent American. They were prohibition, the automobile, the confession and sex magazines, and the movies.
Boys and girls now thought nothing, as the Lynds pointed out in Middletown, of jumping into a car and driving off at a moment’s notice—without asking anybody’s permission—to a dance in another town twenty miles away, where they were strangers and enjoyed a freedom impossible among their neighbors.
The Lynds quoted the judge of the juvenile court in “Middletown” as declaring that the automobile had become a “house of prostitution on wheels,” and cited the fact that of thirty girls brought before his court in a year on charges of sex crimes, for whom the place where the offense had occurred was recorded, nineteen were listed as having committed it in an automobile.
hairdressers very naturally objected to women going to barbers’ shops; the barbers, on the other hand, were trying to force legislation in various states which would forbid the “hairdressing profession” to cut hair unless they were licensed as barbers. Said the Hairdresser, putting the matter on the loftiest basis, “The effort to bring women to barber shops for haircutting is against the best interests of the public, the free and easy atmosphere often prevailing in barber shops being unsuitable to the high standard of American womanhood.”
beauty shops had sprung up on every street to give “facials,” to apply pomade and astringents, to make war against the wrinkles and sagging chins of age, to pluck and trim and color the eyebrows, and otherwise to enhance and restore the bloom of youth;
Back in 1917, according to Frances Fisher Dubuc, only two persons in the beauty culture business had paid an income tax; by 1927 there were 18,000 firms and individuals in this field listed as income-tax payers. The “beautician” had arrived.
With the taste for strong liquors went a taste for strong language. To one’s lovely dinner partner, the inevitable antithesis for “grand” and “swell” had become “lousy.” An unexpected “damn” or “hell” uttered on the New York stage was no longer a signal for the sudden sharp laughter of shocked surprise; such words were becoming the commonplace of everyday talk.
the ordinance actually passed in Norphelt, Arkansas, in 1925, which contained the following provisions: “Section 1. Hereafter it shall be unlawful for any man and woman, male or female, to be guilty of committing the act of sexual intercourse between themselves at any place within the corporate limits of said town. “Section 3. Section One of this ordinance shall not apply to married persons as between themselves, and their husband and wife, unless of a grossly improper and lascivious nature.”
The outstanding achievement of the Harding Administration, however, was undoubtedly the Washington Conference for the Limitation of Armaments
Japan wanted her own way; the Americans opposed it; and there lay the Philippines, apparently right under Japan’s thumb if trouble should break out! All three powers, Britain, Japan, and the United States, would be the gainers by an amicable agreement about the points under dispute in the Pacific, by the substitution of a three-cornered agreement for the Japanese-British alliance, and by an arrangement for the limitation of fleets.
the limitation of replacement according to a 5–5–3 ratio: the American and British navies to be kept at parity and the Japanese at three-fifths of the size of each.
Secretary Hughes amid a breathless silence, “the burden of meeting the demands of competition in naval armament will be lifted. Enormous sums will be released to aid the progress of civilization.
The armaments which a nation built were now definitely recognized as being a matter of international concern, subject to international agreement.
The war accustomed the country to drastic legislation conferring new and wide powers upon the Federal Government. It necessitated the saving of food and thus commended prohibition to the patriotic as a grain-saving measure. It turned public opinion against everything German—and many of the big brewers and distillers were of German origin. The war also brought with it a mood of Spartan idealism of which the Eighteenth Amendment was a natural expression. Everything was sacrificed to efficiency, production, and health. If a sober soldier was a good soldier and a sober factory hand was a
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If anything was needed to suggest how ubiquitous was the illicit still in America, the figures for the production of corn sugar provided it. Between 1919 and 1929 the output of this commodity increased six-fold, despite the fact that, as the Wickersham Report put it, the legitimate uses of corn sugar “are few and not easy to ascertain.
While stock prices had been climbing, business activity had been undeniably subsiding. There had been such a marked recession during the latter part of 1927 that by February, 1928, the director of the Charity Organization Society in New York reported that unemployment was more serious than at any time since immediately after the war.
