Is It Really Just the 1920 s All Over Again
People Really Want a "Roaring '20s" Party Decade After the Pandemic
Could we become one?
A quick weblog post from April 2020 started things off early, making the prediction that subsequently our pandemic finally ends, we'd have a second Roaring '20s. "100 years ago: An election, a virus and a weep from disillusioned youths," ran a headline in the Washington Post in October for a story cartoon suggestive comparisons betwixt the two decades that are separated by a hundred years of history. Equally we limped into 2021, the comparisons picked upwards. "The 1920s Roared Subsequently a Pandemic, and the 2020s Will Try," ran a headline in Bloomberg Businessweek in Jan, the same calendar month Marker published "Volition the 2020s Really Get the Adjacent Roaring Twenties?" Information technology's a fun thought and a good joke: "There'southward been a crash in the matrix and they lost the 2020 files so there just using 1920s as filler," laughed ane commenter on TikTok.
Fun thoughts aside, however, my "hmm" reflex at historical comparisons is strong, and it's been further honed by the "Is this fascism?" wars of 2016–21. At least one historian of the 1920s whom I reached out to for an interview for this piece said that the prediction of a "new '20s" was then strained as to be not worth exploring. Steve LeVine, focusing on points of economic comparison in that piece in Marking, also thought: Probably not. LeVine points out a few key reasons the "new '20s" idea might not work—there were a lot more young people in the United States and so than now; a reprise of the earth-irresolute inventions and discoveries of the 1920s would be a big surprise to those economists who believe that we take been in an invention dry spell since the 1970s. In his Businessweek piece, Peter Coy largely agrees, writing, "In all probability … the U.S. will continue to wrestle with 'secular stagnation' … an aging population, wearisome labor force growth, and weak need for credit." Robert Gordon, an economist Coy interviewed, looked at the numbers and argued that the side by side decade's productivity growth could not possibly brainstorm to equal that of the 1920s.
These experts make strong cases, and they satisfy my natural instinct not to get there. Merely I remain very interested in the reasons the '20s entreatment to our imagination right now. Of course, it's the alcohol, the sexual practice, and the parties. But it's also a decade with a very strong identity—and I recall that helps. Writing in the periodical American Speech in 1951, Mamie J. Meredith argued that the '20s boasted the most nicknames "of any period in our national life." To make the bespeak, Meredith pulled a list out of periodicals: "Golden Twenties," "Gaudy Twenties," "Easy Twenties," "Bonanza Twenties," "Boisterous Twenties," "Tempestuous Twenties," "Bloody Twenties" (referring to the era's very public gang-related killings), "Naughty Twenties."
I'd debate that Meredith'southward point nearly the decade's exceptionality still holds: How many other twentyth century decades take a nice little permanent descriptor like Roaring? Information technology helps that almost of these are good adjectives, evoking a time you lot'd probably like to live through once more—but even the slightly dangerous-sounding ones conjure up something specific. That definiteness offers an appealing sense of certainty to the weary and existentially burned-out person living through this downwardly period between the Trump era, COVID, and whatever's side by side. The descriptors also conjure up a sense of national unity and happy monoculture—"we're all living through the Boisterous Twenties"—which is, of form, an illusion (inequality! the rural-urban carve up! racial oppression!), only has a lot of appeal for us in the fractured America of 2021.
Anyhow, let'southward get to that fun. A very joyful book to read about the decade is Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday: An Breezy History of the 1920s, which Allen—a blueblood journalist and editor at Harper's—published in 1931. The volume chronicles all of the move and motion that makes the decade sexy, and doesn't seem to miss a fad. Among the fleeting obsessions Allen catalogs are "the sudden and overwhelming craze for Eskimo Pie" that made the toll of cocoa beans go up by half; the rage for the positive-thinking guru Émile Coué; the obsessive news coverage of the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamen; the popularity of the novelty song "Yep! We Have No Bananas"; crazes for the foxtrot, the crossword puzzle, mahjong, and, of form, Charles Lindbergh. Allen sees this whole thing as an incomprehensible whirl, marveling at the fickle nature of the public'south interest, but this sounds like group joy at a glacial pace compared with our ain lightning-quick meme culture. Possibly that's another reason the history compels. Imagine a fad lasting for a year—or even half a year, as the 1920s "crazes" did? Wouldn't that exist restful?
Allen is too really good at describing parties—or, at least, the ones the middle class and upper grade attended. The historian wrote about how women taking upwardly smoking had "strewed the dinner table with their ashes, snatched a puff between the acts, invaded the masculine sanctity of the club auto, and forced department stores to place ornamental ash-trays betwixt the chairs in their women's shoe departments." In what I think may exist the all-time passage in the book, Allen described the way 1920s partygoers stepped all over every previous genteel convention:
during this decade hostesses—even at small parties—plant that their guests couldn't be bothered to speak to them on arrival or departure; that "gate-crashing" at dances became an accepted practice; that thousands of men and women made a signal of not getting to dinners within an 60 minutes of the appointed time lest they seem comparatively blasé; that house parties of flappers and their wide-trousered swains left burning cigarettes on the mahogany tables, scattered ashes light-heartedly on the rugs, took the porch cushions out in the boats and left them at that place to be rained on, without amends
The horror! The horror! Invite me to your political party! I will non leave the cushions out, I hope.
"Possibly by remembering the twenties merely every bit an enchanting series of novelties or the crude reconsideration of a simpler by, we preserve the illusion of our own unproblematic innocence," mused historian Paula Fass in the introduction to her book The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s. When I spoke with Fass recently, she wanted me to make certain to include the story of the reactionary cultural politics of the 1920s in this piece—to stress the fact that all of this gaiety didn't happen in a vacuum. A white mob burned the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921; the Clearing Act of 1924 severely restricted entry of immigrants from Asia and Southern and Eastern Europe; and this was the decade of the resurgent (or "Second") Ku Klux Klan. The Klan, Fass pointed out, operated out of motives of racism and xenophobia, but also out of generalized backlash to what Allen called "the Revolution in Manners and Morals." "The KKK was reacting to changes in behavior in women—infidelity, premarital sexual activity, wearing short skirts. Things that are emblematic of our picture of the 1920s provoked a lot of negative response at the fourth dimension," Fass said.
I draw the "fun" parts of Only Yesterday because they're wonderful, only also to make a bespeak about the origin story we've learned about the mood of the '20s. Looking back at Allen's work from the vantage point of 1986, historian David Chiliad. Kennedy argued that the biggest failing of the book was its lack of historical depth: "Rarely did Allen forge an explanatory chain whose links ran back more securely into the past than 1917." And indeed, Allen seemed to blame World War I for every ash-covered carpet and scarred dining table. Young people who had been overseas and seen so much blood were not ready to conform, Allen wrote: "They found themselves expected to settle down into the humdrum routine of American life as if zippo had happened, to accept the moral dicta of elders who seemed to them still to exist living in a Pollyanna land of rosy ideals which the war had killed for them. They couldn't do it, and they very disrespectfully said so." The war loomed large, and it was clearly difficult for Allen, writing only a decade and change out from Armistice Day, to come across whether some of these big changes had deeper roots.
I call up a lot of us know that the comparison between that fourth dimension and this one cannot fly. But we plough to the 1920s because it's incommunicable to imagine how COVID will alive on in our lives. Remember when we were still surprised at the idea that people "forgot" the 1918–19 pandemic? When COVID felt so huge to us that we couldn't imagine it getting smaller in the rearview? I can't believe I ever wondered. The past yr has taught me that for Americans, our pathological optimism can move mountains. At the end of her book American Pandemic, historian Nancy Bristow argues that the people in the throes of flu amnesia in the 1920s were engaged in "a process common in the nation's history"—the "drowning-out" of "narratives of anguish with the noise of public optimism." Imagine, Bristow writes, how the "sense of opportunity and progress would accept sounded to someone who had lost a mother, a brother, a wife, a son." This was the hidden 1920s—a decade of private grief. It'southward the only part I know for certain we'll be doing over again.
crothersnuied1997.blogspot.com
Source: https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/04/roaring-1920s-post-pandemic-history-covid.html
0 Response to "Is It Really Just the 1920 s All Over Again"
Postar um comentário