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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781568582450 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Basic Books |
| Publication date: | 09/09/2002 |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
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Chapter One
The Year in Review
January 1: Rain along the east coast of the United States did not dampen the spirits of the revelers who celebrated the arrival of 1927. Although a thousand extra police were on duty in New York City, traffic jams were the worst ever. Despite the Prohibition Amendment (XVIII) which forbade Americans from consuming, manufacturing, or importing hard liquor, beer, or wine, the celebrants had a good time as illicit "booze" was readily available. Eight revelers died alcohol poisoning.
The celebrations were lavish, there was not a vacant hotel room in Manhattan, and tickets for the theaters of New York's Great White Way, as Broadway was then known, were difficult to come by. In 1927, two hundred seventy shows were to open, a record which still stands. Among them were "Countess Maritza," "Desert Song," "The Girl Friend," "Peggy Ann," "Connecticut Yankee," "Hit the Deck," "My Maryland," "Rio Rita," and "Show Boat." The New York Times reported, "Prosperous with all confidence in the newcomer, New York gave a rousing welcome ... to 1927...."
* * *
Dubbing 1927 the "Year of the Big Shriek," popular writer Herbert Asbury concluded, "Not since the close of the World War has there been a year which produced such an amazing crop of big news as 1927...." Of the reported events some showed America in all its glory, some showed America with all its warts.
Profile of a Year
• It was the year Charles A. Lindbergh, theLoneEagle, captured the imagination of the nation and the world with his solo flight from New York to Paris. In the ticker tape parade held in Lindbergh's honor amid the skyscrapers of New York's financial district, more paper rained down on him, 1,750 tons, than on any other American so honored.
• The Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, after numerous appeals and delays, were electrocuted in Charlestown, Massachusetts, for a crime in South Braintree, Massachusetts, that occurred seven years earlier.
• The nation's worst flood tore down the Mississippi River levees and flooded a land area about the size of Rhode Island with the loss of hundreds of lives and millions of dollars in property damage. Other natural disasters included the devastating floods in New England, and in St. Louis a blistering five-minute, 90-mile tornado killed 87, injured 1,500, and destroyed a thousand homes.
• In 1927 Ford produced the 15 millionth Model T. By year's end, in an attempt to recapture the automobile market in America which he was losing to General Motors among others, Ford introduced the Model A in a spectacular media blitz.
• If further evidence was needed that the age of the automobile had come to stay, the Holland Vehicular Tunnel under the Hudson River between New York and Jersey City, New Jersey, opened on November 12.
• Ruth Snyder and her lover Judd Gray, a corset salesman, were convicted for the murder of Albert Snyder, Ruth's husband. The trial made sensational headlines and titillated the reading public. A year later, the couple were electrocuted at Sing Sing Prison.
• The settlement of marital difficulties between "Peaches" and "Daddy" Browning fueled the passion of the times. These salacious stories were perfect grist for the new tabloid journalism. The New York Daily Mirror pandered to the public's taste for those who reveled in murder, mayhem, sex, and infidelity. The Daily Mirror devoted the entire front page to these stories, screaming in five-inch type: "Peaches' Shame!" and "Oh - Oh - Oh! Daddy Browning." Journalism such as this contributed to a huge increase in circulation during the year.
• The combined circulation of English language dailies in the United States rose to 38 million, about one copy for every two literate persons over ten years of age.
• Actress Mae West, the sex symbol of her time, was fined $500 for her role in the play "Sex" and sentenced to ten days in jail.
• In South Dakota, Gutzon Borglum began working on Mount Rushmore to carve the heads of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt.
• The American Telephone and Telegraph Company gave the first public demonstration of television in America. Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce in the Coolidge administration, delivered a speech in Washington, D.C., that was seen and heard by a group of bankers in New York City.
• Duke Ellington's band opened at the Cotton Club in New York's Harlem. The show lasted for years.
• Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs, a record that stood until 1961.
• Al Jolson, in The Jazz Singer, made the first "talkie." But the silent screen was not without excitement. In the still-silent Flesh and the Devil, starring John Gilbert and Greta Garbo, American viewers gasped at the sight of the first filmed soul kiss. That the more straight-laced objected made little difference. Americans wanted more of the same and got it.
• Robert Maynard Hutchins, at age 28, became the youngest Dean of Yale Law School and remained a formidable figure in American education.
• On May 16, 1927, the first Academy Awards awarded an "Oscar" to Wings for "Best Picture." Janet Gaynor, in Seventh Heaven, and Emil Jannings, in The Way of All Flesh, were chosen best actress and actor.
• Fans of boxing in 1927 paid two and a half million dollars to see Gene Tunney win a controversial decision over Jack Dempsey in the "greatest ring spectacle of all time."
• Tennis was the most rapidly growing sport in America in 1927. The value of tennis goods produced by American manufacturers in 1927, the first year that tennis goods were listed separately in the census report, totalled $3,227,552. Golf also grew spectacularly. Between 1927 and 1929, the manufacture of golf equipment gained 71.8 percent.
• In New York City, William S. Paley, a 28-year-old son of a Russian immigrant, took control of a money-losing radio network. He renamed it the Columbia Broadcasting System.
• An organization called the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America, made up of Hollywood movie moguls, drew up a code of "good taste" in order to avoid government censorship of films. Under the direction of Will H. Hays, producers could not show the following on film: "any licentious or suggestive nudity," "miscegenation," "ridicule of clergy," "inference of sexual perversion," "indecent or undue exposure," and "excessive and lustful kissing." However, "actual hangings or electrocutions ... brutality and possibly gruesomeness" may be shown "within careful limits of good taste." Movie makers innovatively skirted the guidelines.
• The Federal Radio Commission was created by Congress to oversee the newest form of domestic and international communication.
• "Scarface" Al Capone became the country's biggest bootlegger and controlled most its illicit liquor industry. He made $100 million in liquor, $30 million in the protection racket, $25 million in gambling, and $10 million in prostitution and other rackets. Most Americans did not seem to care.
• For those with a literary interest, 1927 was a bonanza year. P. G. Wodehouse wrote Carry on Jeeves, and William Faulkner wrote Mosquitoes. Ernest Hemingway wrote Men Without Women, a book of short stories, and Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop. Motivated by the extraordinary evangelism of Aimee Semple McPherson, Sinclair Lewis wrote Elmer Gantry to illustrate how high-pressure tactics of business had corrupted religion. Philo Vance became the "private eye" of the year and hero of Willard Wright's (S. S. Van Dine) The Canary Murder Case. In non-fiction, Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy surprisingly became a runaway best-seller. Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey became the Christmas book gift of the year and won a Pulitzer Prize a year later. In 1927, Paul Green's play In Abraham's Bosom, a sympathetic treatment of the African American and the sharecropper, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama as did Louis Bromfield's Early Autumn for fiction. James Weldon Johnson wrote God's Trombone: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, in which he described the spiritual world of Harlem.
• While there was a great deal of good literature, Americans preferred the lurid journals True Story and Confessions.
• At age 66, the notorious Lizzie Borden died of natural causes. Although she had been found not guilty of the murder of her father and stepmother in 1892, many of her neighbors continued to believe that she had gotten away with murder. The rhyme from which she could not escape was:
Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks,
And when she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.
• As an expression of newly won freedom, women bobbed their hair, wore skirts just above the knee, smoked cigarettes, and drank bootleg whiskey in public.
• Americans ate two million Eskimo Pies, and in March, this $25 million ice cream company went public.
• Despite the euphoria of the year, the suicide rate among American youth reached alarming proportions.
• Over a billion and a half dollars were spent on advertising, much of it designed to arouse feelings of guilt and anxiety over such matters of personal hygiene as body odor and bad breath.
• The beautician became a recognized professional, and in 1927, 18,000 income taxpayers listed themselves as beauticians.
• Reporting on the scene with biting criticism was H. L. Mencken, "the bad boy of Baltimore," whose Mercury Magazine achieved a circulation of 77,000. This made Mencken, according to Waiter Lippmann, "the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people."
• "Zyxt," a Kentish word which means "thou seest," became the final word in the final volume of the Oxford English Dictionary. To complete the project required seventy years, the talents of 130,000 people, and the expenditure of $250,000.
• The twenty-two newspapers of William Randolph Hearst, published in fifteen cities, reached 3,500,000 daily readers and 4,000,000 on Sunday.
• President Calvin Coolidge sent the Marines to Nicaragua and Dwight Morrow to Mexico to quell conflicts in Latin America.
• The optimism of the time was reflected in a worthy but unsuccessful attempt, in the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact, to outlaw war.
• Americans could not keep themselves completely aloof from global affairs, as many would have preferred. Friends of the World Court prevailed and the United States Senate ratified adherence to the court by a vote of 76-17. President Coolidge soon approved the senate resolution.
• Population as a worthy field of study was recognized in 1927, when the first conference on world population convened in Geneva in August. During the conference, biologists and statisticians joined in developing a scientific base for the study of world population trends.
• While not yet sharply etched in the American mind, affairs in China began to reverberate in the United States and around the world. Chinese Communists attacked government fortresses and women and children needed to be evacuated from Hankow. Revolts broke out in Shanghai and Nanking, and American marines were sent to protect U.S. nationals and diplomats. Despite initial successes, the Communists under the leadership of Mao Zedong were defeated. Americans could not know that he would be the ultimate victor.
• Of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, Winston Churchill, then the British Chancellor of the Exchequer and later prime minister, remarked: "I could not help being charmed by his gentle simple bearing and his calm, detached poise...."
• In Germany, Houston Stewart Chamberlain was near death. His assertion of the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race, along with his claim that the German race was being defiled by Jews, held great appeal for the Nazis. Hitler kissed the dying hand of the man upon whose theories his own were based.
• The German states of Bavaria and Saxony ended their ban on Hitler's public speaking. During the first ten months of the year, Hitler spoke publicly fifty-six times. Dr. Josef Goebbels, one of his most devoted followers, pledged that if the Nazi party could not win power legally, "Then we'll march against this government."
• The United States and Canada established diplomatic relations independent of Great Britain. The International Peace Bridge, which links the two countries at Buffalo, New York, opened with the Prince of Wales and Vice President Dawes presiding at the opening ceremonies. Today the two countries are squabbling about whether to build a new, state-of-the-art bridge, or renovate the old one.
• Meeting in Moscow, the 15th All-Union Congress of the Communist Party condemned all "deviation from the general party line as interpreted by Joseph Stalin," thus ceding to that despot effective control of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
• Alexander Kerensky, head of the overthrown provisional government of Russia, came to New York City to live in exile.
• Mustapha Kemal Ataturk was elected president of Turkey and announced plans for the "westernization" of his country. Ataturk declared that Islam would no longer be the state religion, and men would abandon the fez and women the veil.
• Anthropologists found the origin of humankind in "Peking Man" and scientists and religionists continued to debate evolution and the theory of the universe's creation.
The distinguished journalist Elmer Davis described Americans of 1927 as the new "Chosen People." But were they? Let us see.
Profile of a People
In 1927, some 118 million people lived in America. Substantially more than half (66 million) lived in urban areas, while about 52 million lived in rural areas. As in previous years, people continued to move from farms to cities and towns, but at a somewhat slower rate. As of July 1, 1927, the farm population was about twenty-eight million or about three million less than what it had been in 1920. While the remaining farmers had no difficulty in providing enough food for a growing population, America was primarily an urban nation.
Total immigration for 1927 was 323,885, while the number of those emigrating was 75,122. The effects of laws limiting immigration and favoring those from Northern and Western Europe, at the expense of those from Southern and Eastern Europe, began to impact the size and nature of the American population. Of the immigrants who entered the country in 1927, most were Mexican, German, Irish, English, Scotch, Scandinavian, and Hebrew. The majority of immigrants described themselves as unskilled laborers and tended to stay close to the places where they disembarked. The states receiving the most immigrants included New York, Texas, Michigan, California, Massachusetts, Illinois, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Arizona.
America's population grew by only 1,545,000 from July 1925 to July 1928, compared with 1,800,000 between 1920 and 1925. Among the reasons America's population grew more slowly were the overall decline in immigration and the growing popularity of birth control. With an average of 2.41 children per family, America, by 1927, had entered into a period of much slower natural increase. "This is something new in our experience," wrote one demographer, "and will require many adjustments.... We are no longer as young as we once were."
By 1927, life expectancy had risen to 59 years, a ten-year increase from 1900. However, suicide, especially among American youth, was a growing concern. In 1925, there were 12.1 suicides per 100,000 people in the United States; by 1932, that number had grown to 17.4. In New York City, the suicide rate during this period was somewhat higher: 14.4 per 100,000 in 1925, and 21.3 in 1932. In 1927, the suicide rate was 13.3 for the country as a whole and 15.7 for the City of New York. Infant mortality was lower than in any previous year, with greater declines reported in rural areas as compared with urban areas. The decline in deaths from pneumonia, influenza, and tuberculosis, important killers in the earlier 1920s, helps explain the decline in the death rate for 1927. Death from cancer, however, showed a marked increase.
Between 1916 and 1926, marriages per 100,000 people declined from 93 in 1916 to 66 in 1926. Divorce, on the other hand, increased steadily from 113 per 100,000 in 1916 to 154 in 1926. The term "companionate marriage" entered the vocabulary via former judge Ben Lindsey. This form of marriage allowed for divorce by mutual consent by a couple who postponed having children until they were sure they wished to stay married.
Havelock Ellis, the sex guru of the 1920s, applauded the greater economic independence of women and the greater freedom between the sexes before marriage. He concluded that "even if it has sometimes led to license, [sexual intimacy] is not only itself beneficial but the proper method of preparing for a more intimate permanent union." In his view, the greater facility of divorce encouraged more satisfactory marriages. Ellis went on to express gratification over the growing use of contraception as a means of family planning and limiting excessive population growth. He declared, "To the United States ... belongs the honor of being first, among great nations, to assert, virtually, the international importance of birth control."
Despite a failure rate of about 50 percent, the rubber condom grew in popularity and about two million were used daily. According to research completed in 1927, the pessary used together with contraceptive jelly was more successful in preventing births. Ellis deplored the continuing practice of preferring spinster teachers over married ones. "There cannot be the smallest doubt," he wrote, "that women who have had sex experience of their own and children of their own are incomparably better fitted to deal with the special difficulties of children than those who have not." While Ellis was ahead of his time, his views gave encouragement to the growing independence of women, the use of family planning, and the abandonment of the prejudice against married women in teaching and in other professions.
As never before, the 118 million people who lived in America in 1927 were bombarded by the bewildering possibilities of the airplane, the motion picture, telephone, radio, and, above all, the automobile. On January 7, 1927, Walter S. Gifford, president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, and Sir Evelyn Mournay, Secretary of the British Post Office, spoke to each other by telephone thereby inaugurating the first commercial transatlantic telephone hookup. Thirty-one additional calls were made that day. These startling inventions fueled the economic boom of 1927. As reported in Motor magazine, there were 22,342,457 automobiles registered. In the United States there was one car to every five persons as compared with one car to 43 persons in Britain, one to 325 in Italy, and one to 7,000 in Russia. Paved highways were rapidly being built. Yet, by 1927, one could drive on paved highways only from New York to St. Mary's, Kansas. After that, dirt roads made soft by rain could be a problem as a car could easily get stuck in mud up to its hubcaps. Moreover, gasoline stations and rest stops were few and far between. The Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 offered money to states that would organize highway departments and match federal grants. In 1906 local governments were providing 96 percent of all highway funds; by 1927 they were providing only 53 percent while the states spent 37 percent, and the federal government 10 percent. Thus, automobiles were subsidized through federal monies to a far greater extent than were the railroads in the previous century.
In a national automobile show of that year one could find such models still being made today as the Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Dodge, Lincoln, Oldsmobile, and Pontiac. Among those once-popular names no longer in production were the Auburn (production halted in 1936), Chandler (1928), Essex (1928), Hudson (1957), Hupmobile (1941), Packard (1958), Pierce-Arrow (1938), Rickenbacker (1927), Studebaker (1965), and Stutz (1934). The cars were cheap, even for the time. An ad featuring a Chrysler "50" in the Saturday Evening Post of May 7, 1927, asked, "Where can you find so much for $750?" Among the advertised features were a car that could do 50 miles an hour, reach 5 to 25 miles in eight seconds, and get 25 miles to the gallon. Some families who lacked indoor toilets and baths boasted an automobile. In New York, California, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Michigan, there were more than a million cars each.
But the hit of the year was the introduction toward the end of 1927 of Ford's Model "A." In 1927, half the cars on the road were Model "T" Fords, about ten million of them, some of which were brown but most black. When on December 2 Ford introduced the Model "A," a million people tried to see the new automotive phenomenon on the first day. Those who got close enough to see it found that the Model "A" had a self-starter. No need to wrench shoulder joints cranking up as one did with the Model "T." The gas tank was in front of the windshield, the dash had a speedometer, a gas gauge, and an ammeter. While the Model "A" was more powerful than the Model "T," what caught the fancy of the prosperous was that to meet the competition from General Motors and Chevrolet, the Model "A" was now available in different colors—red, green, yellow, and blue. Even the distinguished philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr was impressed, "Henry made a lady out of Lizzy," he said, that is, the "Tin Lizzy" as the Model "T" had affectionately been called.
In 1927, there were 21,716 automobile-related deaths. Mechanical failures, poor roads, and a paucity of road signs contributed to the high death rate. "In proportion to the number of vehicles today and the number of miles they were driven, the percentage is not as high today as it was then."
Despite the growing use of the automobile, trolley mileage was still near its 1917 peak. There were plenty of financial backers for the electric railways who insisted that the modernized trolley provided more comfortable transportation than the automobile or the bus. But trolley usage had declined by four percent and many of the electric railway companies sought to keep themselves solvent by incorporating bus service into their transportation network. While the death of the trolley, as Mark Twain put it in another context, was greatly exaggerated, nevertheless, its future remained bleak.
The automobile was not alone in spearheading the Coolidge prosperity. Coolidge was the first president to speak to the nation by radio. From a standing start in 1920, when there was no radio broadcasting to the public, sales of radios grew in 1927 to $425.6 million so that by 1927, one-third of American households owned one.
Labor-saving household appliances proliferated, including the wall-mounted can opener, toasters, vacuum cleaners, heating pads, refrigerators, coffee percolators, waffle irons and washing machines. The American was indeed a "consumer in wonderland."
Telling Americans about the wonders of the new labor-saving, fun-providing, status-creating products was the responsibility of a growing advertising business, which employed some 600,000 people. Industry spent well over a billion dollars advertising the fruits of the assembly line in newspapers and magazines, through direct mail solicitation, on radio, and in outdoor advertising on street cars and elsewhere. The Saturday Evening Post was the most prominent advertising medium of the times. The journal's average weekly circulation was two and a half million, which seemed to justify the $6,000 cost for a full-page advertisement in black-and-white. Of the more than 200 pages in each issue, three-fifths were taken up with advertising. The Post declined ads for liquor and cigarettes.
The "Average Man"
Since they spent such vast sums on advertising, American companies wanted to know more about the masses of people to whom they were trying to sell something. What did they want? How much would they pay? What did they need? How can they be motivated to spend their money? To provide some of the answers to these questions, Kenneth M. Goode (1880-1958), an advertising authority, and Harford Powel Jr. (1887-1956), a publicist, sought to provide the facts they thought advertisers needed to make their pitch to the American public. As one can see from the following, these advertising authorities had no illusions about the sophistication or intelligence of the masses of Americans.
"In the United States are about 118,000,000 people. Dropping the 5,500,000 who can't read or are in jails or hospitals, we have 112,500,000 left. Subtracting 23,000,000 million boys and girls under fourteen, we find, roundly, 90,000,000 still within range of ordinary advertising artillery.... This 90,000,000 contains, therefore, all the 'sales resistance'."
Goode and Powel indicated that of every 100 American children, 36 were not attending school at all while 54 were in elementary school. There were seven out of every hundred attending public high school, three in public night and vocational schools, two entering college but only one remaining to graduate. "This means, first that only 64 per cent of the youth of America, coming customers, are at school at all. Even this 64 per cent does not receive a complete public-school education. Their schooling averages only seven and one-half years. College and university education reaches but two Americans in every hundred; and of those two, only one completely." The authors concluded, "Although the various 'Alpha' intelligence tests rate the college freshman above the average man on the street, we don't find even the college graduate ... any great highbrow."
Among the examples of how little American consumers know, the Goode and Powel study found that fewer than 500 out of 1,047 students queried in Knoxville, Tennessee, knew where to locate the District of Columbia, while 95 percent did not know what the electoral college was. One student said, "It's a college where you take what you want." The authors feared that the growing popularity of film and radio threatened the reading of serious literature. "The mental standard for the moving-picture producer is the intelligence of the fourteen-year-old child." "The average normal American," believed the advertisers, "celebrates his twenty-fifth birthday by shutting shop mentally and refusing to accept any new ideas." The result, they concluded, was that advertising copy aimed anywhere above the comprehension of an eighth-grade school child, about twelve to fourteen years of age, cut the readership in half.
Americans "go to the movies every other week; and about one in four listens to the radio perhaps an hour a day. They like dark blue as a color and lilac as a scent. Writing themselves, they use a vocabulary generally fewer than a thousand words although each can understand, in reading, maybe six times as many. In their aggregate action the element of intellect is practically negligible."
As if to confirm this rather dim view, Harry L. Hollingworth, a Columbia University psychologist, concluded that the average American was "superstitious, ill-educated, conventional and mentally equal to a fourteen-year-old...." Conceding that the "average man" is an abstraction, nevertheless, tests administered by the Army to some four million soldiers and those given to employees in life insurance companies, police departments, colleges, and universities, indicated that:
• At the age of fifty-three or earlier the average man dies.
• The average man weighs 150 pounds and is 67 inches tall.
• In an age when brain weight is considered a measure of intelligence, the 1,300 gram weight of the average man, while weighing more than twice the weight of the great apes, is nothing to boast about.
• The average man's vocabulary includes about 7,500 words. If he has a whole minute for the problem, he will correctly answer when asked how many pencils can be bought for fifty cents if two pencils cost five cents.
• The average American leaves school at the eighth grade. He has a smattering of local geography and knows a little about history and a few elementary facts about physiology. He has no general knowledge of civics, science, politics, or literature.
• Following his father's example, the average man is a Methodist Democrat or a Baptist Republican. In industry he is likely to drift into the skilled trades but is not likely to have an occupation superior to that of his father.
• The average man does not take a great interest in religion, although he has concrete ideas about morality.
• Although the average man is often the victim of quacks, mediums, and salesmen who wish to sell him unsound investments, he "has great influence in determining what the next generation will be like."
Advertisers noted that the average current annual income, divided evenly among men, women, and children, was $770. "No advertiser can go far wrong calculating his per-family average at $75 a week—with two people working to produce it." Women and youth became primary consumers in society, with women responsible for four out of every five sales. "Whether married or getting pay for their work, women are the nation's purchasing agents."
Rural America
"The American farmer," wrote William Allen White, "cut off his whiskers when he began cranking his car ... He shaves as often as a lawyer.... When he goes to town in his Sunday suit, the American farmer looks no different from the merchant or the clerk, the doctor or the teacher." The typical farmer had an education at about the sixth-grade level and had three or four children who attended school about seven months each year. While he owned a mortgaged farm, the farmer of 1927 was no peasant.
Rural America was becoming more prosperous and less remote. A survey of more than four hundred rural homes showed that one in four had been repainted within five years, and three in four had all the floors finished or covered with carpets or linoleum. "The sagging window shutter, the peeling paint, the scuffed and splintered soft-wood floors of a previous generation, were almost as rare as the floorless log cabins of Lincoln's day." Almost two farm houses in five had furnaces; one in ten running hot water; 15 percent modern bathrooms; three-fourths sinks with drains in the kitchen.
In Edgar County, Illinois, a marketing survey described a prosperous type of farm community. Two-thirds of homes had phonographs and half had radios. "The aerial is already more familiar than the windmill." There were nearly a million radio sets and ninety broadcasting stations, which relieved the isolation of farm work and offered weather data and better farming techniques.
Rural Free Delivery made it possible for the farm family to receive as much reading matter as the typical urban family. Ray F. Pollard, county farm bureau agent for Schoharie, New York, personally visited over one hundred farms in one hundred school districts to gain information on farmers' reading habits. He found they read 132 different newspapers and magazines. The average farmer in the area he canvassed received 9.82 "papers," 2.75 agricultural notices or leaflets, 1.87 weeklies, and 1.58 communications from farm organizations. At the end of 1925, the rural circulation of the New York Times was estimated to be 75,205 daily. Two-fifths of rural households had telephones to link them with the world. On December 31, 1926, the fiftieth anniversary of the telephone, there were an estimated 17.5 million telephones in the United States, serviced by 50 million miles of telephone wires and 300,000 employees. Approximately 20 billion telephone conversations were completed annually.
However, the average rural household was still not as comfortable as its urban counterpart. The availability of electricity was limited, with the result that only about 9 percent used electric lighting, while 20 percent used gas, acetylene, or gasoline, and most of the rest still used the traditional kerosene lamp. Even in prosperous Edgar County, Illinois, only 15 percent had lighting superior to the kerosene lamp. The telephone was a party line, with the number of rings determining for whom calls were intended. Most farmers still depended upon the old wash tub—83 percent of farm households had no bathrooms and 85 percent had no sewage disposal whatsoever. Kitchens generally had ice boxes, not electric refrigerators. Half of farmer households had no cupboards and dishes, as pots and pans lay on the kitchen table. The mail order catalogue was ubiquitous and goods were ordered from it on the installment plan, Even though the farmer was not as well endowed with the labor-saving devices now readily available to his cousin in the city, "the automobile, the telephone, and the radio ended the traditional isolation, and the new machinery in both barn and kitchen reduced the burden of physical labor. Edwin Markham's 'Man with the Hoe' had become a small capitalist with a power plant."
The farmer was rapidly becoming a business person. He was no longer merely a grower of wheat or a herder of cattle. He was in the wheat, cattle, or dairy industries and was concerned with "overhead, fixed charges, net income, quantity production, and turnover." While work animals furnished more power than oil, steam, or electricity, reliance upon these animals was declining rapidly. As the horse population declined from 20 million in 1914 to 15 million in 1928, the number of tractors used on farms increased from 80,000 in 1918 to 853,000 ten years later.
Despite these gains, farmers grew uneasy. They knew they were not sharing in the general prosperity of 1927. Their urban relatives who had abandoned the farm to become doctors, lawyers, or merchants in the city appeared to be faring much better. Farmers knew their numbers were dwindling but were determined to hold on to political power by dominating the state and local government. But there was more on the mind of rural Americans than their economic well-being.
Among the reasons for concern was that the farm population was no longer quite so homogeneous as it once was. While in urban Illinois, for example, two out of three people were foreign born, in rural areas seven out of ten people were natives. They were white and Protestant and wanted to keep it that way. Although rural America's reservations about immigrant newcomers may have been no greater than those of city natives, white urban America prided itself on its ability to cope with diversity, the rest of the country still sought to hold that diversity at bay.
According to a report in the New York Times on February 13, 1927, there were 75,000 Jews on farms and many additional ones were seeking land. The Jewish Agricultural Society was frustrated in its attempt to satisfy the needs of all their co-religionists who sought to settle on the land and farm it. Of 885 applicants for farm land in 1927, only 80 bought property, as most could not afford to make the investment. The average cost per farm exclusive of livestock and equipment was $6,570, a sum Jewish immigrants could not raise.
Rural America was also uneasy about what appeared to be happening to their youth. Not only were many leaving the farm, but youthful behavior was becoming increasingly shameful. As one author wrote: "Recently I sat in a first-class hotel in a small city. Sitting across from me in the lobby was a girl in her teens. On each side of her sat a young man with an arm around her. She lolled back against the settee in a too-short skirt, her highly colored complexion was bought at a store and she was smoking a cigarette. Ten years ago the hotel manager would have unceremoniously driven the girl out of the hotel. Today the incident is so commonplace that no one paid any particular attention to it."
But placing blame was not easy. Had the home become too lax? Were parents too permissive? Did the automobile provide too much opportunity for girls and boys to pet, or neck, or even "go all the way?" Did the automobile make society too mobile, thereby eroding the discipline associated with roots in one community? Why was religion no longer as powerful as it once appeared to be, and why did religious leaders appear to have less influence over youthful behavior than they once did?
While rural Americans could not provide the answers to these imponderables any more than could urban Americans, nevertheless they pushed two solutions. In the first instance, they proved influential in curbing immigration. In the second instance, rural Americans lobbied intensely for passage of Amendment XVIII to the Constitution in 1919, which prohibited the sale, use, and distribution of intoxicating beverages. There is little evidence, however, that these measures either raised the morality or improved the character of rural or urban Americans.
Table of Contents
| Prologue | ix | |
| Chapter 1 | The Year in Review (January 1: New York Celebrates the Arrival of 1927) | 1 |
| Chapter 2 | The Coolidge Prosperity (February 11: "Happy Birthday Mr. Edison") | 33 |
| Chapter 3 | The State of the Union (March 4: Congress Adjourns and Will Rogers Comments) | 62 |
| Chapter 4 | America and the World (April 7: Television Is Demonstrated) | 95 |
| Chapter 5 | Crime in America (May 18: Bath, Michigan, Is Scene of Most Violent School Bombing in American History) | 129 |
| Chapter 6 | Race in America (June 27: Mr. Hoover Moved to Tears as Negro Children Serenade) | 153 |
| Chapter 7 | The New Woman and the New Man (July 4: Celebrations Neither Safe nor Sane) | 171 |
| Chapter 8 | Religion Old and New (August 7: International Peace Bridge Is Open) | 197 |
| Chapter 9 | Health and Education (September 24: Cigarettes May Kill 60 Percent of Infants of Mothers Who Smoke: AMA Disagrees) | 221 |
| Chapter 10 | That's Entertainment (October 10: Earl Carroll, Imprisoned for Allowing a Model to Bathe Nude in Tub of Champagne, Is Paroled) | 241 |
| Chapter 11 | Writers and Readers (November 5: "Big" Bill Thompson, Chicago's Mayor Threatens to Burn Library Books) | 279 |
| Chapter 12 | Yesterday's Tomorrows (December 17: Entire Crew of Submarine Perishes) | 303 |
| Suggestions for Further Reading | 321 | |
| Index | 323 |