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By Root 299 0

in the privacy of a movable parlor. At the ocean they kissed in the seaside bathhouses where burlesque postcards were sold. Women sheared their hair, smoked cigarettes, and drove automobiles. Young women bared arms and shoulders to the sun and waves. The power of the female form inspired gawkers, shocked or aroused. There was alcohol, dancing, suggestive songs. Lousia and Eugene, like many Americans, could deny “the problem of the young” until F. Scott Fitzgerald raised the banner for wanton youth in 1920 in This Side of Paradise, revealing that most nice girls in fashionable cities had kissed many boys. Yet at the seashore in 1916 there was ample evidence of the new freedoms to worry them. The dissolution of the formal nineteenth-century world they knew was first revealed at the beach, as if the restive ocean were the agent of change and the shoreline the advance guard.

The most shocking development was in the water, where the rising hems of swimming costumes became a battle line drawn by the Victorian establishment. In that summer of 1916, there was a cultural revolution over the ideal female form—the cover-all Victorian skirt-and-trouser bathing costumes gave way to lithe, form-fitting swimsuits, and the modern American image, practical and sensual, was born. The appearance of languorous female arms, legs, and calves as public erotic zones roused a national scandal. On Coney Island, police matrons wrestled women in the new clinging wool “tube” suits out of the surf. In Chicago, police escorted young women from the Lake Michigan beach because they had bared their arms and legs. In Atlantic City, a woman was attacked by a mob for revealing a short span of thigh. The American Association of Park Superintendents stepped into the fray with official Bathing Suit Regulations, requiring trunks “not shorter than four inches above the knee” and skirts no higher than “two inches above the bottom of the trunks.” Police took to the beaches with tape measures and made mass arrests.

Louisa, reading the newspaper, worried about the potential ruckus awaiting at the Jersey shore. Atlantic City—the glittering sea metropolis of four hundred hotels and fifty thousand guests only ten miles south of tiny Beach Haven—was a seat of the rebellion, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin reported. Under the headline “Startling Hosiery Fad Rules the Beach,” the Bulletin noted that ladies wore bathing socks rolled down instead of up, exposing the knee. This moment was a turning point in American fashion; once that line was crossed, more flesh and less fabric became the style of the twentieth century. “The very modish thing . . . is reminiscent of the Highland laddies in the wee kilties, which permit the air of Heaven to play freely on their braw limbs,” the Bulletin noted. “The mode is popular among the damsels who have dimples in their knees . . . The lifeguards are primed to remonstrate if the craze continues. ‘It draws too many sharks,' they explain.”

It was Dr. Vansant's masculine privilege to read the Public Ledger uninterrupted each morning at breakfast. Sometimes he retired to his Morris chair in the library, a cozy, dark, wood-paneled room decorated specifically for the man of the house, who had time for the leisure of reading. Here were displayed his fine old books, his busts of Shakespeare and Aristotle, his collection of minerals (to illuminate his interests in learning, history, and the natural sciences), his humidor, and his stack of Saturday Evening Posts to be perused as he sat by the small fireplace, swept clean of the ashes from December's chill. The furniture and objets—heavy wooden European pieces, silver ice bucket with carved lion's-head handles—expressed the grandeur of the past.

The newspaper lay on the ottoman, raising a dusty smell of lead ink, and Dr. Vansant could not have been blamed if he lifted the broadsheets with trepidation. Big headlines, photographs, advertising, telegraph dispatches from Europe—it was all new, as startling as the messages it conveyed. The narrow columns of gray nineteenth-century type had never revealed