Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [124]
In 1927 Scott Fitzgerald was interviewed by the New York World. “The idea that we’re the greatest people in the world because we have the most money is ridiculous. Wait until this prosperity is over!” His interviewer was shocked to confusion: “In a pleasant corner of the Plaza tea garden he sounded like an intellectual Samson prophesying the crumbling of its marble columns.”
Fitzgerald was an admirer of the historian Oswald Spengler, who, in The Decline of the West, published between 1918 and 1923, outlined his theory that the United States had reached a stage comparable to that of Rome in the centuries after Christ’s birth—achieving a flowering of civilization that was nothing more than the precursor of its own destruction. According to Spengler, the modern “Cosmopolis” was the high point of this last stage, “vast, splendid, spreading in insolence…Here money and intellect celebrate their greatest and their last triumphs.”
The “greatest and last triumphs” Spengler was picturing may well have been skyscrapers, the radiant symbols of energy, wealth and modernity for 1920s America. As one successful building contractor put it in 1928, skyscrapers were “the most distinctively American thing in the world…[epitomizing] American life and American civilization…the spontaneous product of a virile and progressive people,” requiring all their courage, daring and ingenuity. In that boom year Americans spent $6 billion constructing new buildings, with the epicenter of the real estate bubble on the tiny island of Manhattan. There was nowhere else to go there but up. Estate agents, like stockbrokers, could foresee no end to the soaring prices.
Oswald Spengler saw the huge proportions of the skyscrapers, and their lofty disregard for nature, as swaggering signs of over-confidence. As the city grows from “primitive barter center to culture-city and at last to world-city,” he wrote, “it sacrifices first the blood and soul of its creators to the needs of its majestic evolution, and then the last flower of that growth to the spirit of civilization—and so, doomed, moves on to final self-destruction.”
This fateful transition from barter-center to doomed cosmopolis was well under way. By 1920, less than half of the American population still lived on farms or in small rural communities. An ideological division between go-getting city-dwellers and upstanding country-dwellers was becoming more marked, but there was ambivalence on both sides. Urbanites were nostalgic for the simple peace of farm life; countrymen were lured into the city by promises of easy money and high living. Middletown exemplified this trend. Its population was steadily boosted throughout the period of the Lynds’ study by people from nearby villages and farming communities, but its most successful citizens tended to leave for even bigger cities.
New York was the pinnacle of American urban culture, the place where the ambitious dreamer from every small town believed that he, too, could make it big. The approach by sea produced the most dramatic effect on hopeful newcomers. Langston Hughes described the thrill of his first glimpse of Manhattan’s towers “with their million golden eyes, growing slowly taller and taller above the green water, until they looked as if they could touch the sky!” John Dos Passos watched the buildings grow denser, forming “a granite mountain split with knifecut canyons . . . Steel, glass, tile, concrete will be the materials of the skyscrapers. Crammed on the narrow island the million windowed buildings will jut, glittering pyramid on pyramid, white cloudsheads piled above a thunderstorm.”
From 1857, when the first building with passenger lifts was successfully completed in New York, architects had been using new materials like iron, steel and glass to create structures of dramatic and astonishing height. The first steel-framed building, using a riveted skeleton, was built in Chicago by William Holabird in the late 1880s. By 1900 all the industrial components required to create skyscrapers—steel framing and riveting, cable suspension, concrete—were