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T
his cover of Life(1925) offered a stereotypical rendering
of the new generation: a young couple dressing alike,
sharing the indulgence of smoking, and completely wrapped
up in themselves. Was this a fair portrait youth during the
Roaring Twenties?
Frederick Lewis Allen claimed that it was in Only
Yesterday(1931), an immediate bestseller. In his view young
people believed that “life was futile and nothing much mat-
tered.” So they occupied themselves with “tremendous tri-
fles” such as mah-jong, jazz, and illicit booze. Of the wider
world, they cared little. In 1937 Samuel Eliot Morison and
Henry Steele Commager added a political gloss to Allen’s cul-
tural pessimism. Because people were “weary of reform and
disillusioned by the crusade of democracy,” they drifted
toward conservatism.
Two important works were published in 1955. John
Higham referred to the “tribal twenties” as a time when
Americans attempted to “close the gates” of immigration,
and Richard Hofstadter derided the decade as an insignifi-
cant“entr’acte”(intermission) bracketed by the more conse-
quential eras of progressivism and New Deal reform.
William Leuchtenburg (1958) sought to balance these
assessments: There was much more to the decade than “rac-
coon coats and bathtub gin.” While conceding that politicians
had failed to solve problems of state authority, industrial con-
centration, and mass culture, they had not done much worse
than the progressives. (Recall Debating the Past “Were the
Progressives Forward-Looking?” in Chapter 21, p. 569.)
In later decades leftist scholars such as Roland
Marchand (1985) associated the 1920s with the triumph of
advertising and consumption, part of a “cultural hegemony”
that promoted sales to ensure corporate profits. On the other
hand, Kathy Peiss (1998) was among a group of scholars who
insisted that consumption could add depth and richness to
life. She found, for example, that in purchasing cosmetics
women partook of the “pleasures of fantasy and desire.”
George Chauncey (1994) championed the self-
absorption—self-expression?—of gays who, left mostly to
DEBATING THE PAST
The 1920s: A Decade of
Self-Absorption?
themselves, exulted in a remarkably open homosexual
culture in many big cities.
Source: Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday(1931); Samuel Eliot Morison and
Henry Steele Commager, The Growth of the American Republic(1937); John
Higham,Strangers in the Land(1955); Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform
(1955); William Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity(1958); Roland Marchand,
Advertising the American Dream(1985); T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance
(1995); Warren I. Susman, Culture as History(1984); Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar
(1998); George Chauncey, Gay New York(1994).■ ■ ■ ■ ■contempt. But their success was instantaneous with
recent immigrants and many other slum dwellers. In
1912 there were nearly 13,000 movie houses in the
United States, more than 500 in New York City alone.
Many of these places were converted stores called
nickelodeons because the admission charge was only
five cents.
In the beginning the mere recording of move-
ment seemed to satisfy the public, but success led to
rapid technical and artistic improvements and conse-
quently to more cultivated audiences. D. W. Griffith’s
twelve-reelBirth of a Nation(1915) was a particu-
larly important breakthrough in both areas, although
his sympathetic treatment of the Ku Klux Klan of
Reconstruction days angered blacks and white liberals.
By the mid-1920s the industry, centered in
Hollywood, California, was the fourth largest in
the nation in capital investment. Films moved from
the nickelodeons to converted theaters. So large
was the audience that movie “palaces” seating sev-
eral thousand people sprang up in the major cities.
Daily ticket sales averaged more than 10 million.