Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [130]
The international situation had also been an important contributory factor. The United States was a creditor nation; it exported far more than it imported; its sturdy protectionism hindered poorer countries, especially in war-torn Europe, from rebuilding their economies. Ultimately, though, the shoddy market practice and excessive speculation that stimulated the boom and then brought America crashing to its knees was derived from Wall Street itself.
People saw the crash and the Depression as the inevitable result of the selfish debauchery of the 1920s. It was a punishment for their profligacy, a necessary correction. President Hoover said that his austere (but very rich) Financial Secretary, Andrew Mellon, commented simply, “They deserved it,” when the boom broke. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” Mellon declared. He believed that letting economic events run their course would “purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.” But it would be a long time before the wrecks were picked up.
Over the next two decades, struggling to cope with unemployment, hunger, homelessness and war, there was little room in the American consciousness for the violet strains of a jazz orchestra floating on warm summer air. But something about the twenties—its energy and youthfulness, its “sparkling cynicism” alongside its overwhelming self-belief—has endured to this day.
Concluding an essay entitled “Echoes of the Jazz Age” in November 1931, as ever Scott Fitzgerald summed up his age best. “Now once more the belt is tight and we summon the proper expression of horror as we look back at our wasted youth. Sometimes, though, there is a ghostly rumble among the drums, an asthmatic whisper in the trombones that swings me back into the early twenties when we drank wood alcohol and every day in every way grew better and better, and there was a first abortive shortening of the skirts . . . and people you didn’t want to know said ‘Yes, we have no bananas,” and it seemed only a question of years before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were—and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CHAPTER 1 “YOU CANNOT MAKE YOUR SHIMMY SHAKE ON TEA”
The best near-contemporary account of Prohibition—and indeed the period as awhole—is the journalist Frederick Lewis Allen’s 1931 Only Yesterday. Professor William Leuchtenberg’s 1958 The Perils of Prosperity is another classic but with greater historical context. Among other books listed in the bibliography, I used Laurence Bergreen and John Kobler’s biographies for my portrait of Al Capone and Thomas Coffey’s 1975 The Long Thirst and Herbert Asbury’s 1950 The Great Illusion for Prohibition.
CHAPTER 2 “THE RHYTHM OF LIFE”
Kathy Ogren’s 1989 The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz is the most fascinating account of jazz in the 1920s. Louis Armstrong’s memoirs and Chris Albertson’s Bessie, with its interviews with Bessie Smith’s niece Ruby, were invaluable. Nathan Huggins’s account of The Harlem Renaissance and Langston Hughes’s biography by Arnold Rampersad are good, although the best sources as ever are the primary ones: autobiographical writing, novels and poetry by Hughes, Zora Neale