The Big Time
The Lawless Decade. A Pictorial History of a Great American Transition: From the World War 1 Armistice and Prohibition to Repeal and the New Deal. By Paul Sann. Picture collation by George Hornby. (Arco Publications, 50s.) WE all have our little fragment of madeleine that brings back a dearly remembered but half-forgotten past, and mine was provided not by the rumbustious authors of The Lawless Decade but by the more sober, academic work of Professor Leuchtenburg. For it was the Pro- fessor who quoted the Gaudeatnus igilur of the era of The Girl Friend: he brought up from my submerged memories 'Collegiate,' and all, or nearly all, came back. 'Collegiate, collegiate, nothing intermediate,' that was the spirit of the epoch which was nominally presided over by Messrs. Harding and Coolidge, the epoch in which I first set timid steps upon American soil, the era of the big bonanza, of the last, great, carefree explosion of 100 per cent. Americanism, the last period in which God's People and God's Country were believed to be exempt from the ills that deservedly befell more sinful lands and when there were few evils that a few laws, usually promoted by formidably righteous women, would not cure.
Here it all is. In Professor Leuchtenburg's clear, well-proportioned and vigorously and correctly opinionated academic narrative, in the sardonic prose and equally sardonic pictures of Messrs. Sann and Hornby. It was the age of Babe Ruth, of the Ku Klux Klan, of Lindbergh as a folk hero, and of Al Capone. One is tempted to say especially of Al Capone, for in impressiveness, if not in mere numbers, the photographs illustrating the rise and fall of the great gangsters seem to dominate a magnificently diverting picture book. It was the era when Miss Nan Britton, not very coyly, revealed the fact that she had had a child by Warren G. Harding, the most preposterous President the United States has ever had, the era in which Heywood Broun suggested a prize for the first unmarried mother to swim the Chan- nel. It was the age of John Held's flapper and the discovery of SEX. There had been rumours of its existence in the past, but it was now in the Big Time. Even as late as Scott Fitzgerald's very bad first novel, it was news that nice girls kissed, but by the time I got to America, things had gone farther than that. Freud had broken through and repression had a bad name. The family and the old-time religion was breaking down. The green cover of the American Mercury was the oriflamme of revolt and the hip flask was Excalibur.
Rightly, Messrs. Sann and Hornby devote a good deal of text and pictures to the 'experiment noble in purpose.' Denounced as the foulest tyranny, it was, in fact, the fruit of an almost attractive innocence. The American wife and mother was out to save her sons and her husband. The ills as old as the world from which other lands suffered would vanish like a bad dream if the Demon Rum was finally chained. It was be- lieved that a generation would grow up with no knowledge of the taste of booze and hence no desire to find out! And so, in the face of feeble gestures of enforcement, the great wet wave rolled in and on. The price lists printed in The Lawless Decade may well make our mouths water today, but the stuff sold under these impressive labels often appeared to burn a hole in the tongue. How much is brought back—and almost up!
The American woman was, or thought she was, in the saddle and she had the vote, the whiphand, the spending of the family revenues and the making of national taste. It was the day of literary protest by threatened man. A play like Craig's Wife not only got a Pulitzer prize, but taught a lesson. Its author, Mr. George Kelly, cannot have foreseen that his pretty little niece would later give up a brilliant career of her own to be a mere wife and princess. For myself, I be- lieve this is nearly all hooey. The politicians took the ladies for a ride and the equality of the sexes turned out to be if not fraudulent, at any rate deceptive and disappointing. Little women became big girls, dancing the Charleston with barely room for a flask under their exiguous skirts. Novels, movies, plays told all and the traditional dispen- sers of social counsel like Emily Post had to take a deep breath and hedge.
Admittedly, it was still far from the days when Miss Lana Turner's misadventures made her an even more successful star and when a colleague tried and failed to conceal the awkward fact that she was not living in sin, but was actually and humiliatingly married. No! There were still standards, and hypocrisy, the homage of vice and virtue, was the duty of all public figures. But in a gratifying number of cases the slip showed and the shocked and gratified public learned that 'Anything Goes,' as Mr. Cole Porter was to put it. If Billy Sunday was on the way out, Mrs. Aimde Semple McPherson was on the way up. Her faithful refused to believe all those stories about the love nest in Carmel. But the contrast with Dr. Billy Graham is significant. There is plenty of circus-type religion in America today
but it is less suspect. In this, as in other things, General Eisenhower's America is more respectable and less fun. It was the era of the sporting hero much larger than life. What is any modern baseball player to Babe Ruth? Even if he had married a film star, he could not have been eclipsed by her as was Mr. Joe di Maggio by Miss Marilyn Mon- roe. What boxer is a patch on Dempsey? (Who is heavy-weight champion at the moment? I know, but do you?) But the serious reader (Taper, for instance) will ask, don't these books deal with serious matters? Don't you remember anything about the Twenties but crime, booze, flappers, religious razzmatazz? I must confess that the gaudy sides of the America I first knew came back to me more easily than did the formally more serious aspects. Of grave affairs it was only the Sacco-Vanzetti case that lived in my conscious mind. But in both these books the allegedly more serious things get due treatment, though in the picture book the Devil is given all the good tunes—even serious figures like Mrs. Boole, the hammer of the wets, are made to look funny (perhaps they just were funny). Professor Leuchtenburg is a caustic and convincing critic of the many failures of the higher seriousness, like the abdication of responsibility in 1919. The record of lynchings, the wave of malignant non- sense that found its fine flower in the Ku Klux Klan, the preposterous emptiness of politics all are revealed in these books. But, shamefacedly, I must confess that both books have recalled to me not so much great public issues and pitblic wrongs, as the astonishing country with which I fell in love in the late summer of 1925. It was the country that was producing the New Yorker as well as the Dearborn Independent, the early not the later Lindbergh, Al Smith not Sherman Adams. Talleyrand was right. The bonheur de vivre has its own times and places. It was the age when the North End of Boston harboured the Old Howard and you went across the Bay from San Francisco by ferry. 'The days of our youth are the days of our glory.' Then, as Variety put it, in the fall of 1929, 'Wall Street laid an Egg.' It was never to be the same again. But while it lasted what a show, defying sense and probability! The song was right. 'Nothing inter-
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