Arts and Ideas of the 1920s

One irony is that much of what was appreciated then is forgotten now, and much of what is remembered now was little appreciated then. Here is Claude’s rendition:

On the afternoon of the twelfth of February, 1924, in a concert hall on West Forty-Third Street in New York, a dance-band leader named Paul Whiteman attempted to prove a proposition about American music, and the hall was so crowded that people were turned away into the snow.

Whiteman was a large, mustached, classically trained violist from Denver who had played in the Denver and San Francisco symphonies before discovering that dance music paid, and who by 1924 led the most commercially successful orchestra in the country and permitted himself to be advertised as the King of Jazz. The concert was billed as an experiment in modern music, and its argument was laid out in the program like a court case. It opened with the Original Dixieland Jass Band’s “Livery Stable Blues” played as a deliberate specimen of the crude article, complete with the horses and roosters. It proceeded through arrangements meant to show what refinement could do with the same material. It closed with Elgar. In the audience sat Rachmaninoff, Heifetz, Kreisler, Stokowski, Walter Damrosch, and John Philip Sousa, which was the point of the exercise: the men who conferred musical respectability had been assembled in one room and asked to rule.

The second-to-last item on the program was a new work by a twenty-five-year-old who had started at fifteen as a song plugger in Tin Pan Alley, banging out other men’s tunes for twelve dollars a week. George Gershwin had learned about the concert from a newspaper item announcing that he was writing something for it, which came as news to him. He wrote it in about three weeks, partly on a train to Boston with the rhythm of the rails in it. Ferde Grofé, Whiteman’s arranger, orchestrated it while the ink dried. Passages of the piano part were still blank at the performance, and Gershwin improvised them and nodded to Whiteman when the orchestra should come back in. The opening clarinet wail — the glissando that every American recognizes within one second — had been a joke by the clarinetist Ross Gorman at a rehearsal, and Gershwin kept it.

The reviews split along the exact line the concert had been built to erase. Some critics found the Rhapsody in Blue fresh, native, and important. Lawrence Gilman, in the Tribune, found its melodic material trite and feeble and its structure derivative, and said so in a review that has aged into an exhibit. Both verdicts missed the commercial fact, which arrived within a year: the record sold, the piece was played everywhere, and a hall of European-trained authorities had been convened to certify an American popular form and had wound up ratifying it whatever they wrote afterward.

Seven years earlier the same music, in cruder form, had been sold as a barnyard novelty. Three years later a band from Washington would be playing it nightly to the whole country over a network wire from a Harlem nightclub.

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In November of 1917 the Secretary of the Navy shut down Storyville, the licensed vice district of New Orleans, on the ground that sailors should not be exposed to it. The district’s cabarets and sporting houses had employed a great many musicians. They dispersed, most of them up the river and the Illinois Central line to Chicago, where the packing houses and steel mills were hiring and where the Black population of the city would multiply several times over in a decade.

That migration is the physical route by which the music reached the country, and the fact that it coincided with three commercial accidents is what made the decade sound the way it did.

The first accident was a record made by five white musicians in a New York studio. The Original Dixieland Jass Band, New Orleans men playing in a Manhattan restaurant, recorded “Livery Stable Blues” for Victor in February 1917. It was marketed as a novelty and sold something over a million copies, which established two things at once: that there was a national appetite for the music, and that the first fortune made from it would go to white performers. Both patterns held for the rest of the decade.

The second accident was in Harlem in August of 1920. A songwriter named Perry Bradford had spent two years failing to persuade any record company that Black customers would buy records by Black singers. OKeh finally let him bring in a vaudeville performer named Mamie Smith, and “Crazy Blues” sold in numbers that startled everyone — tens of thousands in the first month, and by the standard estimate of the trade a million within the year, moving through drugstores, furniture stores, and Pullman porters carrying boxes south. Within two years every major label had a race-records series. Harry Pace founded Black Swan in Harlem in 1921 as a Black-owned house and was crushed by the majors’ capital within three years.

The third was the Theater Owners Booking Association, organized around 1920 to book Black performers into Black theaters across the South and the Midwest. Its pay was poor and its conditions were worse, and the performers’ name for what its initials stood for was obscene and accurate. It was also the only national circuit available, and it is where the record men went shopping. Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and Bill Robinson all worked it. Bessie Smith’s first record for Columbia in 1923 sold something near three-quarters of a million copies and made her the highest-paid Black entertainer in America, touring in her own railroad car because hotels would not have her.

In Chicago the music itself changed shape. King Oliver‘s Creole Jazz Band was the finest ensemble in the city, playing the collective New Orleans style in which several horns improvise simultaneously around a tune. In 1922 Oliver sent for his second cornet from New Orleans, a young man named Louis Armstrong, and the recordings the band made in 1923 in a converted piano factory in Richmond, Indiana, are the first documentation of the style at full strength.

Armstrong went to New York in 1924 to play with Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra, came back, and between 1925 and 1928 made the Hot Five and Hot Seven records under his own name. What he did on them reorganized the music permanently. The New Orleans ensemble had been a conversation among equals; Armstrong played with a rhythmic freedom and a tonal authority that made every other instrument into accompaniment, and the solo became the center of the art. On “Heebie Jeebies” in 1926 he sang nonsense syllables, by his account because he dropped the lyric sheet, and gave the country scat singing. The opening cadenza of “West End Blues” in 1928 is twelve seconds of unaccompanied cornet that musicians were still learning by heart forty years later. He was twenty-seven, he had been raised in the Colored Waif’s Home in New Orleans, and he had become, in a form invented by his own people and marketed by other people, the most influential musician in America.

In New York the money was in the nightclubs, and Prohibition had made the money large. A cabaret sold liquor at four times its old price and needed a reason for people to come in, and the reason was the band. Duke Ellington, a Washington sign painter’s son with immaculate manners and a formal composer’s ambition, took his orchestra into the Cotton Club in Harlem in December of 1927. The club was owned by a bootlegger, staffed by Black performers, and closed to Black customers. Its floor shows sold Harlem to white patrons as a jungle. And it had a radio wire, which broadcast Ellington’s band across the country several nights a week, and thereby made a national reputation for a composer who used the constraints of a floor show to write some of the most sophisticated orchestral music produced in America in the twenties.

The reaction was immediate, organized, and moralistic, and it fell along the same lines as the last lecture. In August of 1921 the Ladies’ Home Journal published an article by the music chairman of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs asking whether jazz put the sin in syncopation, and answering yes: the rhythm was said to work directly on the nervous system, to break down inhibition, and to have been imported from savagery. Municipal ordinances regulated dance halls and, in some cities, the tempo permitted in them. Ministers preached on it. The objections named the dancing more often than the music, and the dancing was the point — young people, in mixed company, unsupervised, in a room the neighbors could not see into.

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Harlem had been built in the 1890s as a white middle-class district and overbuilt at the turn of the century, and when the speculators went down a Black realtor named Philip Payton began placing Black tenants in the empty buildings. By 1930 something near two hundred thousand Black New Yorkers lived there, arrived from South Carolina and Georgia and Virginia and the West Indies, in the largest concentration of Black population anywhere in the world at that date, containing every class from the domestic servant to the physician and every politics from Republican regularity to open revolution.

Marcus Garvey came from Jamaica in 1916 and by 1920 was holding a convention in Madison Square Garden and parading twenty-five thousand people through the streets in uniform. The Universal Negro Improvement Association claimed millions of members; a hostile estimate still allowed several hundred thousand, which made it the largest mass organization of Black Americans that had ever existed. Its program was racial self-sufficiency, Black enterprise, Black pride, and eventual return to Africa; its newspaper, the Negro World, circulated internationally; its most conspicuous venture, the Black Star Line, sold stock in five-dollar shares to porters and laundresses to build a Black-owned steamship company. The ships were old and the accounting was worse. Garvey was convicted of mail fraud in 1923 over the sale of the stock, imprisoned in 1925, and deported in 1927. W. E. B. Du Bois despised him and said so in print; Garvey returned the compliment with interest. The quarrel between them was about whether the future of Black America lay in an educated leadership integrating a hostile country or in a mass movement withdrawing from it.

The literary movement grew out of the same crowded square mile, with a different theory of the same problem.

Charles S. Johnson, a sociologist running the National Urban League’s magazine Opportunity, convened a dinner at the Civic Club in March of 1924 that put a hundred-odd guests in a room: young Black writers on one side and white editors, publishers, and critics on the other. It was a deliberate act of brokerage and it worked immediately. Alain Locke — Howard professor, Harvard philosopher, the first Black Rhodes Scholar — was asked to guest-edit an issue of the Survey Graphic on Harlem, which appeared in March of 1925 and sold out twice, and then to expand it into an anthology. The New Negro came out at the end of 1925 and served as the movement’s manifesto: the argument that a people’s claim to full standing in a country could be advanced by producing art that the country would have to respect.

The writers were younger than the theory and less obedient to it. Jean Toomer‘s Cane, in 1923, was a book of sketches, poems, and prose about Georgia and Washington that sold a few hundred copies and is now taught everywhere. Countee Cullen wrote in strict traditional forms and thought a Black poet should be judged as a poet. Claude McKay, a Jamaican, had written the sonnet “If We Must Die” in the murderous summer of 1919, and his 1928 novel Home to Harlem sold enormously and appalled Du Bois, who said it left him needing a bath. Langston Hughes put the blues and the street into verse and, in a 1926 essay in the Nation, told the older generation directly that he intended to write about ordinary Black people without apology and without regard for whether it embarrassed anyone. Zora Neale Hurston came to Harlem from Eatonville, Florida, by way of Howard, went to Barnard, and studied anthropology under Franz Boas, which sent her back South with a notebook to collect the folklore that her literary elders considered an embarrassment. In 1926 she, Hughes, and Wallace Thurman produced a magazine called Fire!! intended to annoy everyone respectable. It ran one issue, and the unsold copies burned in a basement fire.

The money came from outside, and it shaped what was made. Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy white widow on Park Avenue who required her writers to call her Godmother, supported Hughes and Hurston on generous terms with one condition: that they produce the primitive, the instinctive, the African essence she believed they carried. Hurston sent her folklore and signed contracts giving her control of the material. Hughes broke with her in 1930 and was physically ill afterward. Carl Van Vechten, a white critic and novelist, promoted Black writers tirelessly, brought white money uptown, and published in 1926 a novel about Harlem whose title used the ugliest word in the language, which he intended as irony and which split Harlem opinion permanently. A’Lelia Walker, heiress to a hair-preparation fortune built by her mother out of nothing, kept a salon in a townhouse where the guest list ran from Black poets to European nobility.

The critical question of the whole enterprise was posed inside it, most sharply by Hughes and Hurston: a movement that depends on white publishers, white patrons, and a white audience is a movement whose subject matter is being purchased. The answers given in the twenties were provisional, and the Depression closed the question by drying up the money. What survived the closing is a body of work that entered the American curriculum forty years later and stayed.

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The most important American argument of the decade took place between two men who agreed about nearly everything else, and it concerned whether democracy as the country understood it was still possible.

Walter Lippmann was thirty-two in 1922 and had already been an assistant to a socialist mayor, a founding editor of the New Republic, an intelligence officer drafting propaganda in France, and a participant in the commission that prepared the American position at Versailles. He had spent the war watching a government manufacture public opinion on an industrial scale and had helped. Public Opinion, published in 1922, argued that the citizen of a modern state cannot possibly know what he is voting about. The world relevant to his decisions is out of sight, out of reach, and out of mind; what he actually carries in his head is a set of pictures assembled from newspapers, slogans, and the stereotypes his own culture supplies, and those pictures are what he acts on. Lippmann concluded that self-government of the town-meeting kind was an inheritance from a world of small communities, and that a modern government could work only if the pictures were supplied by organized intelligence — bureaus of experts, working outside the fight, feeding the officials and the press with accurate accounts of things no citizen could see for himself. In The Phantom Public three years later he went further and described the general public as a body that cannot govern and should confine itself to throwing out officials it dislikes.

John Dewey reviewed the books respectfully and disagreed fundamentally, and in 1927 answered them in The Public and Its Problems. He granted the whole diagnosis. He denied the remedy. A public, in Dewey’s account, comes into existence when people who are affected by the same consequences recognize the fact and organize around it, and the reason the American public of 1927 was inert was that the machinery for that recognition had broken down. Experts might supply knowledge; they could not identify what needed to be known, because only the people wearing the shoe know where it pinches. His prescription was communication itself: schooling, local association, journalism that explains rather than reports, the recovery of neighborly conversation as the condition of any intelligence being useful. He conceded that he did not know how to bring it about.

Neither man won. The government built the expert bureaus Lippmann described and the country kept the elections Dewey defended, and the tension between them is the permanent condition of American administration.

The psychology of the decade went in a direction neither of them liked. John B. Watson had founded behaviorism at Johns Hopkins with the claim that consciousness was not a scientific subject and that behavior was the whole of psychology’s business. In 1920 he was forced to resign over an affair with his graduate assistant, and within a year he was at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, where he did field work on the coffee habits of housewives and rose to vice president. He continued to publish. His 1928 book on the psychological care of the infant sold very well and instructed mothers to shake hands with their children in the morning and never to kiss them, on the ground that affection produced dependence. His boast that he could take a dozen healthy infants and train any one of them into any profession by controlling the environment was the most quoted sentence in American psychology for thirty years. Advertising took his premises up wholesale, because a discipline that treats human beings as reliably conditionable is exactly the discipline an advertising agency needs.

Sigmund Freud’s name was everywhere in the twenties and his institutions were not. The vocabulary arrived first — complexes, repression, inhibition, the unconscious as material for a magazine article and a dinner party — carried by popularizers, advice columns, and a Hollywood that offered him a hundred thousand dollars in 1925 to consult on a picture about love, which he declined. American psychiatry remained largely organic and custodial, the universities remained behaviorist, and the analytic profession that would dominate American psychiatry in the 1950s was built later, by refugees who arrived after 1933 and by the psychiatric experience of the second war.

And the science of race turned over. Franz Boas at Columbia had spent thirty years attacking the assumption that culture follows from biology, and in the twenties his students took the field: Kroeber, Lowie, Benedict, Herskovits, Hurston, and Margaret Mead, whose Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928 reported that adolescence in Samoa involved none of the storm that Americans considered natural to it, and concluded that American adolescence was an American artifact. The book sold in the tens of thousands and went on selling for fifty years. Its fieldwork has been contested ever since. Its effect was to put into general circulation, in the same years that Congress was writing national origins quotas into immigration law and thirty states were sterilizing the unfit, the proposition that human arrangements are learned rather than inherited.

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H. L. Mencken was a Baltimore newspaperman of German descent, the son of a cigar manufacturer, who had opposed American entry into the war, admired German philosophy, read Nietzsche in the original, and emerged in the twenties as the most quoted critic in the country. With George Jean Nathan he founded the American Mercury in 1924, a green-covered monthly that college students carried face-out under their arms as a badge. He wrote that the United States was governed by a mob of the credulous, coined booboisie for its members and Bible Belt for its geography, and conducted a monthly department called Americana consisting of nothing except items clipped from small-town newspapers, reprinted without comment, arranged to be devastating.

His readership was the young, urban, college-educated population that the decade had just produced, and his gift to American culture was a posture: the sophisticated native contemptuous of his own country’s respectable opinion. That posture has never left American letters.

In March of 1925 Tennessee made it a misdemeanor to teach in a state-supported school any theory denying the divine creation of man. The American Civil Liberties Union, two years old, advertised in the Tennessee papers for a teacher willing to be prosecuted so the law could be tested. In Dayton, a town of eighteen hundred with a failing economy, a group of businessmen sitting in Robinson’s drugstore worked out that a test case would put the town on the map, and sent for a twenty-four-year-old football coach and part-time science substitute named John Scopes, who agreed that he had probably covered evolution while filling in and was willing to be indicted for it.

What arrived was the first American trial covered live by radio, with two hundred reporters, telegraph wires strung into the courthouse, and a chimpanzee performing on the main street.

William Jennings Bryan came for the prosecution. Three times the Democratic nominee, Secretary of State until he resigned in 1915 rather than sign a note he thought would lead to war, the man who had carried the free-silver campaign and the income tax and woman suffrage and direct election of senators, he was sixty-five and had spent his last years campaigning against evolution — in substantial part because he had read the German militarists and the American eugenicists and concluded that biological determinism was being used to justify war, conquest, and the sterilization of the poor. The textbook Scopes was accused of teaching from, Hunter’s Civic Biology, contained a passage recommending that families of low type be prevented from reproducing. Bryan’s argument was also majoritarian in the plainest way: the people of Tennessee paid for the schools and were entitled to say what was taught in them.

Clarence Darrow came for the defense, sixty-eight, an agnostic, the most famous criminal lawyer in America, fresh from saving Leopold and Loeb from execution the year before. Mencken came to write about it and gave the country the phrase monkey trial.

The judge excluded the defense’s scientific experts, which gutted the case Darrow had come to make. On the seventh day, in a session moved to the courthouse lawn because the floor was giving way under the crowd, Darrow called Bryan himself to the stand as an expert on the Bible, and Bryan agreed to it. For two hours Darrow asked him about Jonah, about Joshua stopping the sun, about the date of the flood, about where Cain’s wife came from, and Bryan grew angry and conceded that the days of creation might have been long periods. The testimony was expunged from the record the next morning. Scopes was convicted and fined a hundred dollars, and the Tennessee Supreme Court threw the conviction out in 1927 on the technicality that the judge rather than the jury had set the fine, which killed the appeal the ACLU had wanted. Bryan died in his sleep in Dayton five days after the trial ended.

The law stayed on the books in Tennessee until 1967. Evolution quietly disappeared from most American high-school textbooks for a generation, because publishers sell into a national market and prefer to avoid trouble. The popular memory of the trial comes almost entirely from a play written in 1955 as an allegory about McCarthyism, in which the Bryan figure is a fool, and the play has been more widely seen than any account of what happened in Dayton.

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Sinclair Lewis published Main Street in 1920. It is the story of a young woman with cultural ambitions who marries a country doctor, moves to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, and discovers that the town is smug, ugly, mean about anyone unlike itself, and impervious to improvement. It sold something on the order of three hundred thousand copies in its first year and eventually millions, which meant that most of the copies were bought by people living in small towns very much like Gopher Prairie, about whom the book was unsparing. Babbitt followed in 1922, a portrait of a booster real-estate man in a middle-sized city, and it put a word into the language that Americans used against each other for forty years. Lewis refused the Pulitzer in 1926 and accepted the Nobel in 1930, the first American to receive it, and used the occasion in Stockholm to tell Europe that American letters were still governed by an academy of the timid.

A country buying its own indictment in hardcover, by the hundred thousand, is a fact about the twenties that the satire itself cannot explain. The audience for the criticism of American provincial life was American provincial life, newly educated, newly reading, and glad to be told the truth about the neighbors.

The publishers who printed the decade were new houses run by men the old ones would not have hired. Knopf, Boni and Liveright, Simon and Schuster, Viking, Random House — all founded between 1915 and 1927, several of them by Jewish publishers locked out of the Boston-derived trade, and they took the writers the established houses considered unsalable or indecent. Liveright alone published Dreiser, O’Neill, Hemingway’s first American book, Faulkner’s first novel, Hart Crane, Pound, and Eliot’s Waste Land, and went broke doing it.

The exiles produced a stance as much as a shelf. Paris was cheap on a dollar, drink was legal, and printers would set anything, and by 1925 there were thousands of Americans in Montparnasse. Gertrude Stein kept the salon and the paintings. Sylvia Beach published Ulysses in 1922 out of a bookshop after no commercial house would touch it, and the book stayed contraband in the United States until a federal judge cleared it in December of 1933, the same month the country legalized whiskey again. Ernest Hemingway learned to write short declarative sentences that carried their feeling underneath the words, published The Sun Also Rises in 1926, and gave a generation of American writers a prose style and a way of standing. F. Scott Fitzgerald had become famous at twenty-three in 1920 and wrote The Great Gatsby in 1925. What the exiles established, more durably than any individual book, was that an American artist could treat departure as a qualification, and that the country’s own approval was worth having only after somebody else had granted it.

What the country actually read, meanwhile, was Zane Grey, Harold Bell Wright, Gene Stratton-Porter, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, in numbers that dwarfed everyone above.

In painting the twenties produced one governing idea: the machine as a devotional object. Charles Sheeler was hired by Ford’s advertising agency in 1927 to photograph the River Rouge plant, spent six weeks there, and produced images of conveyors, stacks, and ore bins composed with the frontal severity of religious architecture. He then painted the same subjects. The movement around him, called Precisionism, painted factories, grain elevators, bridges, and water towers in clean geometry with no people in them; Charles Demuth titled a picture of a grain elevator in his Pennsylvania hometown My Egypt, which says the whole thing. Georgia O’Keeffe, exhibited and promoted and later married by Alfred Stieglitz, painted New York skyscrapers at night in the same years she painted flowers. Edward Hopper painted the other side of it, the emptied street and the lit window and the figure alone in a room, and sold his first painting to a museum in 1930.

The institutions arrived at the very end. The Museum of Modern Art opened in November of 1929, nine days after the crash, founded by three wealthy women whose husbands regarded the project as a folly. The Whitney followed in 1931, after the Metropolitan declined Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s offer of her entire collection of living American artists.

The American eye of the decade, meanwhile, was on the magazine cover. Norman Rockwell had been painting covers for the Saturday Evening Post since 1916, seen weekly by an audience of millions. Maxfield Parrish‘s Daybreak, published as a print in 1922, sold in numbers that made it plausibly the most widely hung picture in American history. Neither man was discussed in the same sentence as Sheeler by anybody who wrote about art.

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The most successful entertainment industry in America in 1917 was already national, already standardized, and organized on railroad principles.

Vaudeville ran on circuits. Keith-Albee booked the East, Orpheum the West, and an act signed for a season played a fixed route of theaters for forty weeks, doing the same twelve minutes in each town. Something like twenty-five thousand performers were at work, most of them on the small time at three and four shows a day, the fortunate few playing the two-a-day at the top houses. B. F. Keith and E. F. Albee had built the business by making it respectable: no profanity, no vulgarity, notices posted backstage warning performers what words would end their contract, an audience of women and children secured by policing the material. Albee also ran a booking monopoly, an act-registration bureau to adjudicate theft of material, a company union, and a blacklist, and he broke a performers’ strike in 1917 with all of them.

The economics rested on the fact that an act was capital. Unrecorded, mostly unwritten, and unprotectable by copyright, a routine could be worked for twenty years because the audience was new in every town. A comedian’s twelve minutes fed his family for a career.

Radio destroyed that in one evening. The first time a man did his act on a network, thirty or forty million people had heard it and it was finished. The survivors were those who understood that they now needed fresh material every week, which is where the American comedy writers’ room comes from.

Radio arrived faster than any consumer technology in American history to that point. KDKA in Pittsburgh broadcast returns from the 1920 election to an audience of a few hundred; by 1922 there were several hundred stations and a national craze for building sets; by 1929 something over a third of American households had one. Herbert Hoover’s Commerce Department convened four conferences on what to do with the spectrum, considered several models including public and endowed broadcasting, and settled on the one the industry wanted: private stations, federal licensing under the Radio Act of 1927, and advertising as the revenue. NBC formed two networks in 1926, CBS followed in 1927, and by 1929 a program originating in New York was heard the same evening in Cincinnati and Muncie and Gopher Prairie.

What the country listened to was vaudeville with the travel removed. Amos ‘n’ Andy, two white performers out of minstrel and vaudeville tradition playing Black characters, went national in 1929 and took an audience estimated at forty million, which is to say a third of the country at one time; movie theaters piped the broadcast into the auditorium during the show because otherwise the seats were empty at seven o’clock. Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Burns and Allen, Cantor, and Hope all came off the circuits, carrying the double act, the running gag, the sketch, and the timing into a medium that has never given the structures back.

The pictures learned to talk in the same years. Warner Brothers, a minor studio gambling on sound, released The Jazz Singer in October of 1927 — a story about a cantor’s son who defies his father for the American stage, played by Al Jolson, a vaudevillian, in blackface, which is the whole tangled inheritance of American popular entertainment in one artifact. Within three years nearly every theater in the country was wired, weekly attendance reached something like ninety million admissions, and the studios that owned the theater chains consolidated their hold. The vaudeville circuits themselves were absorbed: Keith-Albee-Orpheum was bought, merged with a sound-film company backed by the Radio Corporation of America, and renamed Radio-Keith-Orpheum, a movie studio built out of a vaudeville circuit and named for the radio company that had eaten it. The Palace in New York, the summit of the profession, played its last vaudeville bill in 1932.

Print did the same thing by mail. Reader’s Digest began in 1922, condensing other people’s magazines. Time began in 1923, summarizing the week for people who had not read the papers. The New Yorker began in 1925 announcing that it was not edited for the provinces. And in 1926 an advertising man named Harry Scherman founded the Book-of-the-Month Club, which mailed a novel chosen by a board of five judges to subscribers who had agreed in advance to buy whatever came. The Literary Guild followed in 1927. Within three years the clubs had a few hundred thousand members, and a small committee of critics in New York could put a book into a hundred thousand homes in a month. The complaint against it was standardization, and the complaint was correct: an educated middle class that no longer had a local authority to consult about what to read had subscribed to one.

On an evening in 1929 a family in Cincinnati and a family on Elizabeth Street in New York could sit in their own kitchens and hear the same voice, at the same hour, telling the same joke — an experience no American had ever had before 1922, and one that every American now took for granted.

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The novels Americans actually bought in the 1920s are gone.

If Winter Comes, the best-selling novel of 1922. Black Oxen, 1923. Soundings, 1925. The Private Life of Helen of Troy, 1926. Each was the most purchased book in America in its year, widely reviewed, discussed at dinner tables, and each is now unread outside a dissertation. Against them: The Great Gatsby sold about twenty thousand copies, left the second printing sitting in the Scribner’s warehouse, earned its author a final royalty statement of a few dollars, and was effectively out of print when Fitzgerald died in 1940 believing himself a failure. The Sound and the Fury sold a couple of thousand. By 1945 every book William Faulkner had written was out of print.

Both men were rescued, and the rescues were institutional. The Armed Services Editions printed and gave away a hundred and fifty thousand copies of Gatsby to soldiers who had never heard of it. Malcolm Cowley assembled a portable Faulkner in 1946 and argued the case for the whole body of work, and the Nobel followed in 1949. Then the universities adopted both, and a book that lives on a syllabus is a book that never goes out of print.

The cheapest print of the decade survived better than the respectable print. Black Mask was founded in 1920 by Mencken and Nathan for the sole purpose of subsidizing their literary magazine, and they sold it within a year, and it published Dashiell Hammett from 1923 and Red Harvest in 1929, and the hard-boiled detective story it invented is a load-bearing wall of American film and fiction today. Weird Tales began in 1923 and printed H. P. Lovecraft, whose invented mythology now supports an industry. Amazing Stories began in 1926 and gave science fiction a name and a magazine of its own. None of it was reviewed anywhere respectable.

What died was the middle: the well-made, well-received, widely sold novel that a serious person read to be current. The universities would not teach it and the genre readers never claimed it, and nobody took custody.

The pattern reverses entirely once the words stop.

In music, what survives is almost exclusively the commercial popular product. Armstrong’s Hot Fives, Bessie Smith, Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, Gershwin, Kern, Berlin — all in print continuously for a century. The composers who held official standing in the twenties are gone: the Metropolitan Opera premiered new American operas in 1927 and 1931 that were treated as national events and are now unperformed. Charles Ives, who wrote his music in Connecticut while running an insurance agency and printed it at his own expense because nobody would perform it, was excavated by other composers in the 1930s and 1940s and given a Pulitzer in 1947 at the age of seventy-two.

In film the losses are physical. Something like seven in ten American feature films made before 1930 no longer exist in any form. Nitrate stock burns and decomposes, and the studios junked prints for the silver content once the talkies made the inventory worthless. The most popular art of the decade was thrown away as scrap by the people who made it, and what remains is a fraction assembled by archives decades later, which is why Buster Keaton is more central to the history now than his box office was then.

In painting, custody went the other way, to the institutions: MoMA and the Whitney took Sheeler and O’Keeffe and Hopper into permanent collections in the first years of their existence, and the pictures that hung in a quarter of American parlors were reclassified as prints.

And vaudeville left nothing, because there was nothing to keep. No score, no manuscript, no negative — an art made of timing and presence in a room, played to people who were there. Thousands of performers were famous in a hundred towns apiece and are now less than names. What survives of the form survives because a fraction of its practitioners crossed into radio and film before it died, and carried the structures with them.

So the arts of the twenties were preserved by whoever took custody of them. The universities took the modernists. The record catalog took jazz, because the record had fixed a performance and the performance was the art. The museums took the painters. The archives took a sliver of the movies, late and by accident. Nothing else was kept, whatever its audience — and the audience of 1925 turns out to have been a poor predictor of what an American in 2025 would be able to find.

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End of Lecture 2.9

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