Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [52]
Many flourished under this regime, but some groups were thrown into unrelieved poverty. Farmers, who had enjoyed 16 percent of the national income during the war years, by 1929 found themselves with a share of less than 9 percent. New methods of transporting, processing and storing food meant that wheat and corn prices dropped. Modern women in thrall to silk stockings and nylon no longer wanted to wear cotton and wool. Instead of raising profits, the increasing mechanization of farming created worldwide markets—and worldwide competition. The value of farmland dropped by nearly a quarter over the twenties, while the value of town land doubled; bankruptcies and suicide rates among farmers rose. Feeling excluded from the country’s new urban and industrial wealth, rural Americans bitterly resented the Republican single-interest Government. “Farmers have never been rich,” said Coolidge flatly. “I don’t believe one can do much about it.”
Apart from in farming areas, from 1921 onwards the economy—and the parallel exaltation of business over the interests of workers—rose steadily. By the mid-1920s Robert and Helen Lynd recorded that in Middletown, which they described as “an aggressive industrial city” dominated by glass, metal and automobile factories, public opinion no longer sided with organized labor, and trade unions had all but disappeared.
Perhaps because industry was expanding rapidly, the workplace had become increasingly impersonal. Bosses took less time to get to know their workers individually and manual workers especially derived scant satisfaction from their labors. President Coolidge saw factory work differently. “Those who build a factory build a temple of worship,” he intoned. “Those who work in a factory, worship there.”
This glorification of “business methods” and the pursuit of “success” became almost a religion. Government and society reflected back at each other their rapacious zeal for making money. Clubs like the Rotarians, founded in 1905, and the Kiwanis, founded in 1915, promoted this aggressively optimistic idea of collective achievement, encouraging men to “sell themselves,” to be “boosters not knockers,” as a patriotic and spiritual duty. Women founded their own clubs with mottoes like “Progress,” as often devoted to the improvement of their towns as their own social lives. In 1929 there were 1,800 Kiwanis clubs nationwide; 150,000 men worldwide were Rotarians by 1930. Even God was commandeered into promoting the new gospel. Jesus was said to have been “the first Rotarian.” Henry Ford called machinery “the new Messiah.”
Adman Bruce Barton’s self-help book, The Man Nobody Knows, depicted Jesus as the “founder of modern business” and became the best-selling title in the United States in 1925 and 1926. Barton, a minister’s son, made Jerusalem sound like Sinclair Lewis’s Zenith and Jesus a latter-day George Babbitt. Not only was Jesus a “go-getter” and “the most popular dinner guest in Jerusalem” (no doubt because of his ability to turn water into wine) but he was also a great executive who had “picked twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.”
Selling in particular was seen as a distinctively American trait, a unifying characteristic in a country still searching for a sense of its destiny in the wider world. The journalist Mark Sullivan called “the passion to sell . . . the impelling power in American life.” An apocryphal story of the times told of a company said to give an annual banquet for its salesmen. Every year, the best performer would sit down to a lavish feast; the second-best achiever would be served the same dinner, but without oysters; and so on down the line to the least effective man, who dined on beans and crackers.
Salesmen were the “angels and evangels” of Coolidge prosperity, persuading people not simply to buy what they needed—but what they hadn’t yet dreamed they wanted. “Consumption