Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

12

BABBITT’S MIDDLETOWN

In the 1920s the eugenicists and scientific racists were especially persistent in America. One of their main texts was a book by C.C. Brigham called A Study of American Intelligence, which was published in 1923. Brigham, an assistant professor of psychology at Princeton University, was a disciple of Robert Yerkes, and in his book he relied on the material Yerkes had obtained during the war (Yerkes wrote the foreword for Brigham’s book). Despite evidence that the longer immigrants were in the United States, the better they performed on IQ tests, Brigham’s aim was to show that the southern and eastern peoples of Europe, and Negroes, were of inferior intelligence. In making his arguments he relied on the much earlier notions of such figures as Count Georges Vacher de Lapouge, who thought that Europe was divided into three racial types, according to the shape of their skulls. Given this, Brigham’s conclusions were not surprising: ‘The decline in intelligence [in America] is due to two factors, the change in the races migrating to this country, and to the additional factor of the sending of lower and lower representatives of each race…. Running parallel with the movements of these European peoples, we have the most sinister development in the history of this continent, the importation of the negro…. The decline of American intelligence will be more rapid than the decline of the intelligence of European national groups, owing to the presence here of the negro.’¹

In such a context, the idea for a return to segregation was never far below the surface. Cornelia Cannon, noting that 89 percent of blacks had tested as ‘morons,’ wrote in the American periodical Atlantic Monthly, ‘Emphasis must necessarily be laid on the development of the primary schools, on the training in activities, habits, occupations which do not demand the more evolved faculties. In the South particularly … the education of the whites and colored in separate schools may have justification other than that created by race prejudice.’² Henry Fairfield Osborn, a trustee of Columbia University and president of the American Museum of Natural History, believed ‘those tests were worth what the war cost, even in human life, if they served to show clearly to our people the lack of intelligence in our country, and the degrees of intelligence in different races who are coming to us, in a way which no one can say is the result of prejudice…. We have learned once and for all that the negro is not like us.’³

The battles over biology did not stop with the victory the eugenicists achieved in getting the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act passed. The following year biology was back in the public eye in the notorious Scopes trial. As early as 1910 the Presbyterian General Assembly had drawn up a list of the ‘Five Fundamentals’ which they believed to be the basis of Christianity. These were: the miracles of Christ; the Virgin birth; the Resurrection; the Crucifixion, understood as atonement for mankind’s sins; and the Bible as the directly inspired word of God. It was the latter that was the focus of the Scopes trial. The facts of the case were not in dispute.⁴ John Scopes, of Dayton, Tennessee, had taught a biology class using as a textbook Civic Biology by George William Hunter, which had been adopted as a standard text by the State Textbook Commission in 1919. (It had actually been used in some schools since 1909, so it was in circulation for fifteen years before it was considered dangerous.)⁵ The part of Hunter’s book which Scopes had used reported evolution as a fact. This, the prosecution argued, was contrary to Tennessee law. Evolution was a theory that contradicted the Bible, and it should not be asserted as bald fact. The trial turned into a circus. The prosecution was led by William Jennings Bryan, three times a presidential nominee, a former secretary of state, and a man who told Seventh Day Adventists before the trial that it would determine whether evolution or Christianity survived. He also said, ‘All the ills from which America suffers can be traced back to the teachings of evolution. It would be better to destroy every book ever written, and save just the first three verses of Genesis.’⁶ The defence was led by a no less colourful person, Clarence Darrow, a skilled orator and a fabled criminal lawyer. While Bryan was determined to make the trial a contest of Darwin versus the Bible, Darrow’s technique was to tie his adversary in knots, aided by eminent scientists and theologians who had arrived in Dayton determined to see that Bryan did not have his fundamentalist way. At one point, when Bryan insisted on testifying as an expert in biblical science, he proved unwilling or unable to answer questions about the age of the earth or of well-known archaeological sites. He defended himself by saying, ‘I do not think about things I do not think about.’ Darrow replied drily, ‘Do you think about things you do think about?’ In fact, Bryan won the case, but on a technicality. The judge kept the focus of the trial not on whether Darwin was right or wrong but on whether or not Scopes had taught evolution. And since Scopes admitted what he had done, the result was a foregone conclusion. He was given a fine of $100, which was then successfully appealed because the judge rather than the jury had set the fine. But that technicality apart, Bryan lost heavily. He was humiliated and mocked in the press, not just in America but around the world. He died five days after the trial ended.⁷

religion, however, explained only part of the reaction to the Scopes trial. In his Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter argues that particularly in the American South and Midwest, people used the Christianity/evolution struggle as a cipher for revolting against modernity. The rigid defence of Prohibition, then in force, was another side to this. Hofstadter quotes with some sympathy Hiram W. Evans, the imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who, he says, summed up the major issue of the time ‘as a struggle between “the great mass of Americans of the old pioneer stock” and the “intellectually mongrelised Liberals.”’ ‘We are a movement,’ Evans wrote, ‘of the plain people, very weak in the matter of culture, intellectual support, and trained leadership. We are demanding, and we expect to win, a return of power into the hands of the everyday, not highly cultured, not overly intellectualised, but entirely unspoiled and not de-Americanised, average citizen of the old stock…. This is undoubtedly a weakness. It lays us open to the charge of being “hicks” and “rubes” and “drivers of second-hand Fords.” We admit it.’⁸ The words of the Klan wizard highlight the atmosphere in America at the time, so different from that in Europe, where in London and Paris modernism was flourishing.

America had ended the war transformed: she alone was stronger, unravaged. The prevailing American mood was still pragmatic, practical, independent of the great isms of the Old World. ‘This is essentially a business country,’ said Warren Harding in 1920, and he was echoed by Calvin Coolidge’s even more famous words, uttered in 1922: ‘The business of America is business.’ All these different strands – anti-intellectualism, business, the suspicion of Europe, or at least her peoples – were brilliantly brought together in the novels of Sinclair Lewis, the best of which, Babbitt, appeared in that remarkable year, 1922.

It would be hard to imagine a character more different from Dedalus, or Tiresias, or Jacob or Swann, than George F. Babbitt. A realtor from Zenith, Ohio, a medium-size town in the American Midwest, Babbitt is hardworking, prosperous, and well liked by his fellow citizens. But Babbitt’s success and popularity are just the beginning of his problems. Lewis was a fierce critic of the materialistic, acquisitive society that Oswald Spengler, R. H. Tawney, and T. S. Eliot so loathed. Eliot and Joyce had stressed the force of ancient myth as a way to approach the modern world, but as the twenties passed, Lewis dissected a number of modern American myths. Babbitt, like the ‘heroes’ of Lewis’s other books, is, although he doesn’t know it, a victim.

Born in 1885, Harry Sinclair Lewis was raised in the small Minnesota town of Sauk Center, which, he was to say later, was ‘narrow-minded and socially provincial.’ One of Lewis’s central points in his books was that small-town America was nowhere near as friendly or as agreeable as popular mythology professed. For Lewis, small-town Americans were suspicious of anyone who did not share their views, or was different.⁹ Lewis’s own growing up was aided and eased by his stepmother, who came from Chicago – although not the most sophisticated place at the time, at least not a small town. His stepmother encouraged the young Harry to read ‘foreign’ books and to travel. He attended Oberlin Academy and then headed east to Yale. There he learned poetry and foreign languages and met people who had travelled even more than his stepmother. After Yale, he went to New York, where at the age of twenty-five he found work as a reader of manuscripts and as a press agent for a publisher. This introduced him to the reading tastes of the American public. He had a series of short stories published in the Saturday Evening Post. Each was slightly subversive of the American self-image, but the stories’ length did not do full justice to what he wanted to say. It was only when he published his first novel, Main Street, which appeared in October 1920, that ‘a new voice was loosed on the American ear’.¹⁰ Published in late autumn, in time for the Christmas rush, Main Street was that rare phenomenon, a best-seller created by word of mouth. It was set in Gopher Prairie, a small town that, naturally enough, had a lot in common with Lewis’s own Sauk Center. The inhabitants of Gopher, their prejudices and peccadilloes, were brilliantly observed, their foibles and their fables about themselves cleverly caught, so that the book proved as popular in middle America as it was among more sophisticated types who would not have been seen dead in ‘the sticks.’ The book was so popular that at times the publisher could not find enough paper to issue reprints. It even managed to cause a scandal back east when it was revealed that the Pulitzer Prize jury had voted for Main Street as winner but, unusually, the Columbia University trustees who administered the prize had overturned their decision and given the prize instead to Edith Wharton, for The Age of Innocence. Lewis didn’t mind; or not much. He was a fan of Wharton and dedicated his next book, Arrowsmith, to her.¹¹

In Babbitt, Lewis moved on, from small-town America to the medium-size midwestern city. This was in many ways a more typical target; Zenith, the city where the story is set, exhibited not only America’s advantages but also its problems. By 1922 there had already been a number of novels about businessmen in America – for example, Dean Howells’s Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and Theodore Dreiser’s Financier (1912). But none of them had the tragic structure of Babbitt. Lewis, with his passion for ‘foreign’ literature, took a leaf out of Emile Zola’s book. The Frenchman had ridden the railways on the footplate and descended into the mines to research his great series of Rougon-Macquart novels in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Likewise, Lewis travelled by train to visit several midwestern towns, lunching in the Rotary associations with realtors, mayors, chairmen of the chambers of commerce. Like Zola, he took copious notes, recording in his grey notebooks typical phrases and figures of speech, collecting suitable names for people and places. All this produced Babbitt, a man who lies ‘at the very heart’ of American materialist culture.¹² The central quality that Lewis gives Babbitt is his success, which for him entails three things: material comfort; popularity with his fellow citizens, who think like he does; and a sense of superiority over the less successful. Complacent without recognising his complacency, Babbitt lives by a code of Efficiency, Merchandising, and ‘Goods’ – things, material possessions. For Lewis, paralleling Eliot, these are false gods; in Babbitt’s world, art and religion have been perverted, in the service, always, of business. The point at which Lewis makes this most clear is when one of the characters, called Chum Frink, delivers a speech to the ‘Booster’s Club,’ a sort of Rotary association. The theme of Chum’s speech concerns why Zenith should have its own symphony orchestra: ‘Culture has become as necessary an adornment and advertisement for a city to-day as pavements or bank-clearances. It’s Culture, in theaters and art galleries and so on, that brings thousands of visitors…. [So] I call on you brothers to whoop it up for Culture and A World-beating Symphony Orchestra!’¹³

The self-satisfaction is all but unbearable, and Lewis doesn’t let it last. A shallow begins to form in this perfect world when Babbitt’s closest friend kills his wife. There is no mystery about the death; and it is manslaughter, not murder. Even so, the friend is sent to prison. This set of events is thoroughly dislocating for Babbitt and provokes in him a number of changes. To the reader these are small changes, insignificant rebellions, but each time Babbitt tries to rebel, to lead what he thinks of as a more ‘bohemian’ life, he realises that he cannot do it: the life he has made is dominated by, depends on, conformity. There is a price to pay for success in America, and Lewis presents it as a kind of Faustian bargain where, for Babbitt and his kind, heaven and hell are the same place.

Lewis’s indictment of materialism and the acquisitive society is no less effective than Tawney’s, but his creation, certainly more memorable, is much less savage.¹⁴ He made Babbitt’s son Ted somewhat more reflective than his father, a hint, perhaps, that middle America might evolve. This slight optimism on Lewis’s part may have been a clever move to aid the book’s success. Upon its publication, on 14 September 1922, the word Babbitt, or Babbittry, immediately entered the vocabulary in America as shorthand for conformism. Even more strongly, boosterism came into widespread use to describe an ad-too-familiar form of American self-promotion. Upton Sinclair thought the book ‘a genuine American masterpiece,’ while Virginia Woolf judged it ‘the equal of any novel written in English in the present century.’¹⁵ What sets Babbitt apart from the European literary figures being created at the same time is that he doesn’t realise he is a tragic figure; he lacks the insight of classic figures in tragedy. For Lewis, this complacency, this incapacity for being saved, was middle America’s besetting sin.¹⁶

As well as being a classic middle American, Babbitt was also a typical ‘middlebrow,’ a 1920s term coined to describe the culture espoused by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). However, it applied a fortiori in America, where a whole raft of new media helped to create a new culture in the 1920s in which Babbitt and his booster friends could feel at home.

At this end of the century the electronic media – television in particular, but also radio – are generally regarded as more powerful than print media, with a much bigger audience. In the 1920s it was different. The principles of radio had been known since 1873, when James Clerk Maxwell, a Scot, and Heinrich Hertz, from Germany, carried out the first experiments. Guglielmo Marconi founded the first wireless telegraph company in 1900, and Reginald Fessenden delivered the first ‘broadcast’ (a new word) in 1906 from Pittsburgh. Radio didn’t make real news, however, until 1912, when its use brought ships to the aid of the sinking Titanic. All belligerents in World War I had made widespread use of radio, as propaganda, and afterwards the medium seemed ready to take America by storm – radio seemed the natural vehicle to draw the vast country together. David Sarnoff, head of RCA, envisaged a future in which America might have a broadcasting system where profit was not the only criterion of excellence, in effect a public service system that would educate as well as entertain. Unfortunately, the business of America was business. The early 1920s saw a ‘radio boom’ in the United States, so much so that by 1924 there were no fewer than 1,105 stations. Many were tiny, and over half failed, with the result that radio in America was never very ambitious for itself; it was dominated from the start by advertising and the interests of advertisers. Indeed, at one time there were not enough wavelengths to go round, producing ‘chaos in the ether.’¹⁷

As a consequence of this, new print media set the agenda for two generations, until the arrival of television. An added reason, in America at least, was a rapid expansion in education following World War I. By 1922, for example, the number of students enrolled on American campuses was almost double what it had been in 1918.¹⁸ Sooner or later that change was bound to be reflected in a demand for new forms of media. Radio apart, four new entities appeared to meet that demand. These were Reader’s Digest, Time, the Book-of-the-Month Club, and the New Yorker.

If war hadn’t occurred, and infantry sergeant DeWitt Wallace had not been hit by shrapnel during the Meuse-Argonne offensive, he might never have had the ‘leisure’ to put into effect the idea he had been brooding upon for a new kind of magazine.¹⁹ Wallace had gradually become convinced that most people were too busy to read everything that came their way. Too much was being published, and even important articles were often too wordy and could easily be reduced. So while he was convalescing in hospital in France, he started to clip articles from the many magazines that were sent through from the home front. After he was discharged and returned home to Saint Paul, Minnesota, he spent a few more months developing his idea, winnowing his cuttings down to thirty-one articles he thought had some long-term merit, and which he edited drastically. He had the articles set in a common typeface and laid out as a magazine, which he called Reader’s Digest. He ordered a printing of 200 copies and sent them to a dozen or so New York publishers. Everyone said no.²⁰

Wallace’s battles to get Reader’s Digest on a sound footing after its launch in 1922 make a fine American adventure story, with a happy ending, as do Briton Hadden’s and Henry Luce’s efforts with Time, which, though launched in March 1912, did not produce a profit until 1928. The Book-of-the-Month-Club, founded by the Canadian Harry Scherman in April 1926, had much the same uneven start, with the first books, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, T. S. Stribling’s Teeftallow, and The Heart of Emerson’s Journals, edited by Bliss Perry, being returned ‘by the cartload.’²¹ But Wallace’s instincts had been right: the explosion of education in America after World War I changed the intellectual appetite of Americans, although not always in a direction universally approved. Those arguments were especially fierce in regard to the Book-of-the-Month Club, in particular the fact that a committee was deciding what people should read, which, it was said, threatened to ‘standardise’ the way Americans thought.²² ‘Standardisation’ was worrying to many people in those days in many walks of life, mainly as a result of the ‘Fordisation’ of industry following the invention of the moving assembly line in 1913. Sinclair Lewis had raised the issue in Babbitt and would do so again in 1926, when he turned down the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Arrowsmith, believing it was absurd to identify any book as ‘the best.’ What most people objected to was the mix of books offered by the Book-of-the-Month Club; they claimed that this produced a new way of thinking, chopping and changing between serious ‘high culture’ and works that were ‘mere entertainment.’ This debate produced a new concept and a new word, used in the mid-1920s for the first time: middlebrow. The establishment of a professoriate in the early decades of the century also played a role here, as did the expansion of the universities, before and after World War I, which helped highlight the distinction between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow.’ In the mid- and late 1920s, American magazines in particular kept returning to discussions about middlebrow taste and the damage it was or wasn’t doing to young minds.

Sinclair Lewis might decry the very idea of trying to identify ‘the best,’ but he was unable to stop the influence of his books on others. And he earned perhaps a more enduring accolade than the Pulitzer Prize from academics – sociologists – who, in the mid-1920s, found the phenomenon of Babbitt so fascinating that they decided to study for themselves a middle-size town in middle America.

Robert and Helen Lynd decided to study an ordinary American town, to describe in full sociological and anthropological detail what life consisted of. As Clark Wissler of the American Museum of Natural History put it in his foreword to their book, Middletowm, ‘To most people, anthropology is a mass of curious information about savages, and this is so far true, in that anthropology deals with the less civilised.’ Was that irony – or just cheek?²³ The fieldwork for the study, financed by the Institute of Social and Religious Research, was completed in 1925, some members of the team living in ‘Middletown’ for eighteen months, others for five. The aim was to select a ‘typical’ town in the Midwest, but with certain specific aspects so that the process of social change could be looked at. A town of about 30,000 was chosen (there being 143 towns between 25,000 and 50,000, according to the U.S. Census). The town chosen was homogeneous, with only a small black population – the Lynds thought it would be easier to study cultural change if it was not complicated by racial change. They also specified that the town have a contemporary industrial culture and a substantial artistic life, but they did not want a college town with a transient student population. Finally, Middletown should have a temperate climate. (The authors attached particular importance to this, quoting in a footnote on the very first page of the book a remark of J. Russell Smith in his North America: ‘No man on whom the snow does not fall ever amounts to a tinker’s damn’)²⁴ It later became known that the city they chose was Muncie, Indiana, sixty miles northeast of Indianapolis.

No one would call Middletown a work of great literature, but as sociology it had the merit of being admirably clearheaded and sensible. The Lynds found that life in this typical town fell into six simple categories: getting a living; making a home; training the young; using leisure in various forms of play, art, and so forth; engaging in religious practices; and engaging in community activities. But it was the Lynds’ analysis of their results, and the changes they observed, that made Middletown so fascinating. For example, where many observers – certainly in Europe – had traditionally divided society into three classes, upper, middle, and working, the Lynds detected only two in Middletown: the business class and the working class. They found that men and women were conservative – distrustful of change – in different ways. For instance, there was far more change, and more acceptance of change, in the workplace than in the home. Middletown, the Lynds concluded, employed ‘in the main the psychology of the last century in training its children in the home and the psychology of the current century in persuading its citizens to buy articles from its stores.’²⁵ There were 400 types of job in Middletown, and class differences were apparent everywhere, even at six-thirty on the average morning.²⁶ ‘As one prowls Middletown streets about six o’clock of a winter morning one notes two kinds of homes: the dark ones where people still sleep, and the ones with a light in the kitchen where the adults of the household may be seen moving about, starting the business of the day.’ The working class, they found, began work between six-fifteen and seven-thirty, ‘chiefly seven.’ For the business class the range was seven-forty-five to nine, ‘but chiefly eight-thirty.’ Paradoxes abounded, as modernisation affected different aspects of life at different rates. For example, modern (mainly psychological) ideas ‘may be observed in [Middletown’s] courts of law to be commencing to regard individuals as not entirely responsible for their acts,’ but not in the business world, where ‘a man may get his living by operating a twentieth-century machine and at the same time hunt for a job under a laisser-faire individualism which dates back more than a century.’ ‘A mother may accept community responsibility for the education of her children but not for the care of their health.’²⁷

In general, they found that Middletown learned new ways of behaving toward material things more rapidly than new habits addressed to persons and nonmaterial institutions. ‘Bathrooms and electricity have pervaded the homes of the city more rapidly than innovations in the personal adjustments between husband and wife or between parents and children. The automobile has changed leisure-time life more drastically than have the literature courses taught the young, and tool-using vocational courses have appeared more rapidly in the school curriculum than changes in the arts courses. The development of the linotype and radio are changing the technique of winning political elections [more] than developments in the art of speechmaking or in Middletown’s method of voting. The Y.M.C.A., built about a gymnasium, exhibits more change in Middletown’s religious institutions than do the weekly sermons of its ministers.’²⁸ A classic area of personal life that had hardly changed at all, certainly since the 1890s, which the Lynds used as the basis for their comparison, was the ‘demand for romantic love as the only valid basis for marriage…. Middletown adults appear to regard romance in marriage as something which, like their religion, must be believed in to hold society together. Children are assured by their elders that “love” is an unanalysable mystery that “just happens.” … And yet, although theoretically this “thrill” is all-sufficient to insure permanent happiness, actually talks with mothers revealed constantly that, particularly among the business group, they were concerned with certain other factors.’ Chief among these was the ability to earn a living. And in fact the Lynds found that Middletown was far more concerned with money in the 1920s than it had been in 1890. In 1890 vicinage (the old word for neighbourhood) had mattered most to people; by the 1920s financial and social status were much more closely allied, aided by the automobile.²⁹

Cars, movies, and the radio had completely changed leisure time. The passion with which the car was received was extraordinary. Families in Middletown told the Lynds that they would forgo clothes to buy a car. Many preferred to own a car rather than a bathtub (and the Lynds did find homes where bathtubs were absent but cars were not). Many said the car held the family together. On the other hand, the ‘Sunday drive’ was hurting church attendance. But perhaps the most succinct way of summing up life in Middletown, and the changes it had undergone, came in the table the Lynds presented at the end of their book. This was an analysis of the percentage news space that the local newspapers devoted to various issues in 1890 and 1923:³⁰

Certain issues we regard as modern were already developing. Sex education was one; the increased role (and purchasing power) of youth was another (these two matters not being entirely unrelated, of course). The Lynds also spent quite a bit of time considering differences between the two classes in IQ. Middletown had twelve schools; five drew their pupils from both working-class and business-class parents, but the other seven were sufficiently segregated by class to allow the Lynds to make a comparison. Tests on 387 first-grade (i.e., six-year-old) children revealed the following picture:³¹

The Lynds showed some awareness of the controversies surrounding intelligence testing (for example, by using the phrase ‘intelligent test’ in quotes) but nonetheless concluded that there were ‘differences in the equipment with which, at any given time, children must grapple with their world.’

The Lynds had produced sociology, anthropology – and a new form of history. Their pictured lacked the passion and the wit of Babbitt, but Middletown was recognisably the same beast as Zenith. The book’s defining discovery was that there were two classes, not three, in a typical American town. It was this which fuelled the social mobility that was to set America apart from Europe in the most fruitful way.

Babbitt’s Middletown may have been typical America, intellectually, sociologically and statistically. But it wasn’t the only America. Not everyone was in the ‘digest’ business, and not everyone was in a hurry or too busy to read, or needed others to make up his mind for him. These ‘other’ Americas could be identified by place: in particular Paris, Greenwich Village, and Harlem, black Harlem. Americans flocked to Paris in the 1920s: the dollar was strong, and modernism far from dead. Ernest Hemingway was there for a short time, as was E Scott Fitzgerald. It was an American, Sylvia Beach, who published Ulysses. Despite such literary stars, the American influx into the French capital (and the French Riviera) was more a matter of social than intellectual history. Harlem and Greenwich Village were different.

When the British writer Sir Osbert Sitwell arrived in New York in 1926, he found that ‘America was strenuously observing Prohibition by staying sempiternally [everlastingly] and gloriously drunk.’ Love of liberty, he noted, ‘made it almost a duty to drink more than was wise,’ and it was not unusual, after a party, ‘to see young men stacked in the hall ready for delivery at home by taxicab.’³² But he had an even bigger surprise when, after an evening spent at Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt’s ‘Fifth Avenue Chateau,’ he was taken uptown, to A’Lelia Walker’s establishment on 136th Street, in Harlem. The soirées of A’Lelia, the beneficiary of a fortune that stemmed from a formula to ‘de-kink’ Negro hair, were famous by this time. Her apartment was lavishly decorated, one room tented in the ‘Parisian style of the Second Empire,’ others being filled, inter alia, with a golden grand piano and a gold-plated organ, yet another dedicated as her personal chapel.³³ Here visiting grandees, as often as not from Europe, could mix with some of the most intellectually prominent blacks: W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Charles Johnson, Paul Robeson, Alain Locke. A’Lelia’s was the home of what came to be called ‘the new Negro,’ and hers was by no means the only establishment of its kind.³⁴ In the wake of the Great War, when American blacks in segregated units had fought with distinction, there was a period of optimism in race relations (on the East Coast, if not in the South), partly caused by and partly reflected in what became known as the Harlem Renaissance, a period of about a decade and a half when black American writers, actors, and musicians made their collective mark on the country’s intellectual landscape and stamped one place, Harlem, with a vitality, a period of chic, never seen before or since.

The Harlem Renaissance began with the fusion of two bohemias, when the talents of Greenwich Village began at last to appreciate the abilities of black actors. In 1920 Charles Gilpin, a black actor, starred in Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones, establishing a vogue.³⁵ Du Bois had always argued that the way ahead for the Negro in America lay with its ‘talented tenth,’ its elite, and the Harlem Renaissance was the perfect expression of this argument in action: for a decade or so there was a flowering of black stage stars who all shared the belief that arts and letters had the power to transform society. But the renaissance also had its political edge. Race riots in the South and Midwest helped produce the feeling that Harlem was a place of refuge. Black socialists published magazines like the Messenger (‘The only magazine of scientific radicalism in the world published by Negroes’).³⁶ And there was Marcus Garvey, ‘a little sawed-off, hammered down black man’ from Jamaica, whose Pan-African movement urged the return of all blacks to Africa, Liberia in particular. He was very much part of Harlem life until his arrest for mail fraud in 1923.³⁷

But it was literature, theatre, music, poetry, and painting that held most people’s hearts. Clubs sprang up everywhere, attracting jazz musicians like Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Wader, Edward Kennedy ‘Duke’ Ellington, Scott Joplin, and later, Fletcher Henderson. Nick La Rocca’s Original Dixieland Jazz Band made the first jazz recording in New York in 1917, ‘Dark Town Strutter’s Ball.’³⁸ The renaissance threw up a raft of blacks – novelists, poets, sociologists, performers – whose very numbers conveyed an optimism about race even when their writings belied that optimism, people like Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Jessie Fauset. McKay’s Harlem Shallows, for instance, portrayed Harlem as a lush tropical forest hiding (spiritual) decay and stagnation.³⁹ Jean Toomer’s Cane was part poem, part essay, part novel, with an overall elegiac tone, lamenting the legacy of slavery, the ‘racial twilight’ in which blacks found themselves: they can’t – won’t – go back, and don’t know the way forward.⁴⁰ Alain Locke was a sort of impresario, an Apollinaire of Harlem, whose New Negro, published in 1925, was an anthology of poetry and prose.⁴¹ Charles Johnson was a sociologist who had studied under Robert Park at Chicago, who organised intellectual gatherings at the Civic Club, attended by Eugene O’Neill, Carl van Doren, and Albert Barnes, who spoke about African art. Johnson was also the editor of a new black magazine to put alongside Du Bois’s Crisis. It was called Opportunity, its very name reflecting the optimism of the time.⁴²

The high point and low point of the Harlem Renaissance is generally agreed to have been the publication in 1926 of Nigger Heaven, by Carl Van Vechten, described as ‘Harlem’s most enthusiastic and ubiquitous Nordic.’ Van Vechten’s novel is scarcely read now, though sales soared when it was first released by Alfred A. Knopf. Its theme was High Harlem, the Harlem that Van Vechten knew and adored but was, when it came down to it, an outsider in. He thought life in Harlem was perfect, that the blacks there were, as he put it, ‘happy in their skin,’ reflecting the current view that African Americans had a vitality that whites lacked, or were losing with the decadence of their civilisation. All that may have been acceptable, just; but Van Vechten was an outsider, and he made two unforgivable mistakes which vitiated his book: he ignored the problems that even sophisticated blacks knew had not gone away; and in his use of slang, and his comments about the ‘black gait’ and so forth, though he may have thought he was being ‘anthropological,’ he came across as condescending and embarrassing. Nigger Heaven was not at all ironic.⁴³

The Harlem Renaissance barely survived the 1929 Wall Street debacle and the subsequent depression. Novels and poems continued to be put out, but the economic constraints caused a return to deeper segregation and a recrudescence of lynchings, and against such a background it was difficult to maintain the sense of optimism that had characterised the renaissance. Art, the arts, might have offered temporary respite from the realities of life, but as the 1930s matured, American blacks could no longer hide from the bleak truth: despite the renaissance, underneath it all nothing had changed.

The wider significance of the Harlem Renaissance was twofold: in the first place, that it occurred at all, at the very time that the scientific racists were introducing the Immigration Restriction Act and trying to prove that blacks were simply not capable of producing the sort of work that characterised the renaissance; and second, that once it was over, it was so comprehensively forgotten. That too was a measure of racism.*

In a sense, by the 1920s the great days of Greenwich Village were over. It was still a refuge for artists, and still home to scores of little literary magazines, some of which, like the Masses and the Little Review, enjoyed a period of success, and others, like the New Republic and the Nation, are still with us. The Provincetown Players and the Washington Square Players still performed there in season, including the early plays of O’Neill. But after the war the costume balls and more colourful excesses of bohemia now seemed far too frivolous. The spirit of the Village lived on, however, or perhaps it would be truer to say that it matured, in the 1920s, in a magazine that reflected the Village’s values by flying in the face of Time, Reader’s Digest, Middletown, and the rest. This was the New Yorker.

The fact that the New Yorker could follow this bold course owed everything to its editor, Harold Ross. In many respects Ross was an improbable editor – for a start, he wasn’t a New Yorker. Born in Colorado, he was a ‘poker-playing, hard-swearing’ reporter who had earlier edited the Stars and Stripes, the U.S. Army’s newspaper, published from Paris during the war years. That experience had given Ross a measure of sophistication and scepticism, and when he returned to New York he joined the circle of literary types who lunched at the famous Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel on Forty-Fourth Street. Ross became friendly with Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Marc Connelly, Franklin P. Adams, and Edna Ferber. Less famous but more important for Ross’s career was the poker game that some of the Round Table types took part in on Saturday evenings. It was over poker that Ross met Raoul Fleischmann, a baking millionaire, who agreed to bankroll his idea for a satirical weekly.⁴⁴

Like all the other publishing ventures started in the 1920s, the New Yorker did not prosper at first. Initially, sales of around 70,000 copies were anticipated, so when the first issue, appearing in February 1925, sold only 15,000, and the second dropped to 8,000, the future did not look good. Success only came, according to another legend, when a curious package arrived in the office, unsolicited. This was a series of articles, written by hand but extravagantly and expensively bound in leather. The author, it turned out, was a debutante, Ellin Mackay, who belonged to one of New York’s society families. Making the most of this, Ross published one of the articles with the headline, ‘Why We Go to Cabarets.’ The thrust of the article, which was wittily written, was that New York nightlife was very different, and much more fun, than the stiff society affairs organised for her by Miss Mackay’s parents. The knowing tone was exactly what Ross had in mind, and appealed to other writers: E. B. White joined the New Yorker in 1926, James Thurber a year later, followed by John O’Hara, Ogden Nash, and S. J. Perelman.⁴⁵

But a dry wit and a knowing sophistication were not the only qualities of the New Yorker; there was a serious side, too, as reflected in particular in its profiles. Time sought to tell the news through people, successful people. The New Yorker, on the other hand, elevated the profile to, if not an art form, a high form of craft. In the subsequent years, a New Yorker reporter might spend five months on a single article: three months collecting information, a month writing and a month revising (ad this before the fact checkers were called in). ‘Everything from bank references to urinalysis was called for and the articles would run for pages.’⁴⁶ The New Yorker developed a devoted following, its high point being reached immediately after World War II, when it sold nearly 400,000 copies weekly. In the early 1940s, no fewer than four comedies based on New Yorker articles were playing on Broadway: Mr and Mrs North, Pal Joey, Life with Father and My Sister Eileen.⁴⁷

The way radio developed in Britain reflected a real fear that it might have a bad influence on levels of information and taste, and there was a strong feeling, in the ‘establishment,’ that central guidance was needed. ‘Chaos in the ether’ was to be avoided at all costs.⁴⁸ To begin with, a few large companies were granted licences to broadcast experimentally. After that, a syndicate of firms which manufactured radio sets was founded, financed by the Post Office, which levied a 10-shilling (50 pence) fee payable by those who bought the sets. Adverts were dispensed with as ‘vulgar and intrusive.’⁴⁹ This, the British Broadcasting Company, lasted for four years. After that, the Corporation came into being, granted a royal charter to protect it from political interference.

In the early days the notion of the BBC as a public service was very uncertain. Ad manner of forces were against it. For a start, the country’s mood was volatile. Britain was still in financial straits, recovering from the war, and 1.5 million were unemployed. Lloyd George’s coalition government was far from popular, and these overall conditions led to the general strike of 1926, which itself imperilled the BBC. A second factor was the press, which viewed the BBC as a threat, to such an extent that no news bulletins were allowed before 7:00 P.M. Third, no one had any idea what sort of material should be broadcast – audience research didn’t begin until 1936, and ‘listening in,’ as it was called, was believed by many to be a fad that would soon pass.⁵⁰ Then there was the character of the Corporation’s first director, a thirty-three-year-old Scottish engineer named John Reith. Reith, a high-minded Scottish Presbyterian, never doubted for a moment that radio should be far more than entertainment, that it should also educate and inform. As a result, the BBC gave its audience what Reith believed was needed rather than what the people wanted. Despite this high-handed and high-minded approach, the BBC proved popular. From a staff of 4 in the first year, it grew to employ 177 twelve months after that. In fact, the growth of radio actually outstripped that of television a generation or so later, as these figures show:⁵¹

To be set against this crude measure of popularity, there was a crop of worries about the intellectual damage radio might do. ‘Instead of solitary thought,’ said the headmaster of Rugby School, ‘people would listen in to what was said to millions of people, which could not be the best of things.’⁵² Another worry was that radio would make people ‘more passive,’ producing ‘all-alike girls.’ Still others feared radio would keep husbands at home, adversely affecting pub attendance. In 1925 Punch magazine, referring to the new culture established by the BBC, labelled it as ‘middlebrow.’⁵³

Editorially speaking, the BBC’s first test arrived in 1926 with the onset of the General Strike. Most newspapers were included in the strike, so for a time the BBC was virtually the only source of news. Reith responded by ordering five bulletins a day instead of the usual one. The accepted view now is that Reith complied more or less with what the government asked, in particular putting an optimistic gloss on government policy and actions. In his official history of the BBC, Professor Asa Briggs gives this example of an item broadcast during the strike: ‘Anyone who is suffering from “strike depression” can do no better than to pay a visit to “RSVP” [a show] at the New Vaudeville Theatre.’ Not everyone thought that Reith was a stool pigeon, however. Winston Churchill, then chancellor of the exchequer, actually thought the BBC should be taken over. He saw it as a rival to his own British Gazette, edited from his official address at 11 Downing Street.⁵⁴ Churchill failed, but people had seen the danger, and it was partly as a result of this tussle that the ‘C’ in BBC was changed in 1927 from Company to Corporation, protected by royal charter. The General Strike was therefore a watershed for the BBC in the realm of politics. Before the strike, politics (and other ‘controversial’ subjects) were avoided entirely, but the strike changed all that, and in 1929 The Week in Parliament was launched. Three years later, the corporation began its own news-gathering organisation.⁵⁵

The historian J. H. Plumb has said that one of the great unsung achievements of the twentieth century has been the education of vast numbers of people. Government-funded schools and universities led the way here, but the various forms of new media, many of which started in the 1920s, have also played their part. The term middlebrow may be intended as an insult by some, but for millions, like the readers of Time or those listening in to the BBC, it was more a question of wising up than dumbing down.

* The history of Harlem was not fully recovered until the 1980s, by such scholars as David Levering Lewis and George Hutchinson. My account is based chiefly on their work.