American Fun Read online

  In the Jeffersonian spirit of hedonism and rebellion, the wets (or “Wild Wets,” as they were punningly known) felt no obligation to honor a law that denied their self-defined right to pursue happiness. A rebel front comprising all ages, classes, races, and gender identifications attacked the new law from every angle and rallied around their fight for freedom. The playwright Dwight Taylor remembered this revolutionary sentiment being especially fervent in the literary world: “Our national heritage of freedom seemed in jeopardy, drinking became a patriotic duty, and the average American writer’s reaction to the passing of the Eighteenth Amendment was to embark on a prolonged Boston Tea Party, in which he very often found himself acting like an Indian. Some of the outstanding editors and publishers of the period were enthusiastic leaders in the revolt.” Even the socially conservative William Randolph Hearst, who once campaigned in San Francisco for “wholesome and decent fun,” touted the values of old-school rebellion, saying of Prohibition: “If the American people had had respect for all laws, good or bad, there would have been no Boston Tea Party.” Like the original Sons of Liberty, the wets used action, publication, and antics to demonstrate their right to play.

  Bootlegging became a common hobby. Accessory stores opened nationwide, offering the necessary equipment and ingredients to fire up a bathtub distillery. All generations got in on the act. Often when their parents were sent up the river, children kept the home fires burning. Doctors padded their incomes writing prescriptions for alcohol. Even the American Medical Association, which in 1917 had declared prescriptions for alcohol had “no scientific value,” changed their minds in 1922 and named twenty-seven medical uses for it. (In New York, counterfeit prescriptions sold for twenty-five to thirty dollars.) One of the law’s biggest loopholes was sacramental wine. Protestants (who had voted in the act to begin with) usually used grape juice in their services; rabbis and Catholic priests could make a solid case—for purchasing a case. Few actual rabbis are believed to have abused the law, but its ambiguous wording allowed the non-rabbinical to don hats and beards and procure enough wine to supply fictitious congregations. With millions in agreement that the law was absurd, transgression itself became a stylish sort of fun and encouraged an epidemic of nervy pranks. An ambitious little still, with a running capacity of 130 gallons, was found bubbling away “on the farm of Senator Morris Sheppard, the author of the Eighteenth Amendment.”

  Some drys, for their part, got in on the fun. Harry S. Warner inverted popular wet rhetoric, calling Prohibition “the liberation of the individual from the illusion of freedom that is conveyed by alcohol.” Izzy Einstein, a trickster detective of the Prohibition Commission, allegedly disguised himself as a rabbi and a jazz musician to nab bootleggers and crash speakeasies. But even without the formidable opponents of Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and the rest of the syndicate, the drys were playing a losing game. “Stills were everywhere,” wrote the ever-colorful Herbert Asbury, “in the mountains, on the farms, in small towns and villages, and in the cities. In New York, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and other cities with large foreign populations the pungent odor of fermenting mash and alcoholic distillate hung over whole sections twenty-four hours a day.”

  Speakeasies were the staging area for the revolt. From exclusive nightclubs like New York’s ‘21’ to the nation’s dives and roving gin parties, houses and their patrons shared the risks and taboos of resisting Prohibition. Whereas more “respectable” houses just violated the act, while enforcing erstwhile drinking ages, the majority welcomed anyone (except the cops) and offered the full menu of illegal vices—gambling, drugs, prostitution, cockfights. In the moral murk of the underground, it was hard to draw the line between fun and crime—a confusion that was often blamed on the liberal mixing of race, class, and gender. But mix people did. “Homosexuality, transvestitism, and interracial relationships,” the historian Michael A. Lerner writes of New York’s speakeasy culture, were no longer “discreetly hidden and visible only to those who actively sought them out” but rather “part of the amusement for every thrillseeker who ventured into the city’s nightlife.” A government survey of 373 New York speakeasies declared that 52 of them were “respectable” while the remaining 321 were veritable brothels where “hostesses” and other women employees were “connected with the business of commercialized prostitution.” George E. Worthington, in a 1929 article for the Survey, distinguishes between the “disreputable night club” of his contemporaries “and its forerunners in the long history of maisons de tolérance,” San Francisco’s traditional upper-crust bordellos: “To it come all classes and conditions of people.” Another report suggested that most of Detroit’s “vices” emanated from its socially open speakeasies: “Narcotics are said to be distributed among them, crime plots are hatched there, and there among the criminals mingle the members of respected families. I doubt,” observes the author, Ernest W. Mandeville, “if the influence of one class on another, in this case, is an uplifting one.”

  This rollicking new underground wasn’t limited by region; its subway tracks ran nationwide and picked up whoever wanted a ride. Transgression alone was the ticket price. The writer Carl Van Vechten, Jazz Age impresario, wrote regarding “the matter of cocktail parties” that “since the laws were passed prohibiting the sale of liquor, it could be said that more were held in one day in Manhattan than in a month elsewhere.” Maybe so. But his cultural elite, centered on Greenwich Village, didn’t have a monopoly on pleasure. Though many of their number had fled the Midwest (Van Vechten hailed from Cedar Rapids, Iowa), and though small-town contributions to Jazz Age fun were snobbishly dismissed as escapist and hypocritical by the ascendant bohemians of the Jazz Age, America’s underground party life—with its cocktail-induced lurid behavior—reached even the remotest American communities, where popular support for Prohibition held strong. “Of the 113 establishments licensed to sell soft drinks in Sheboygan, Wisconsin,” Daniel Okrent writes, “the two that actually confined themselves to nonalcoholic beverages went out of business.”

  So, sure, Americans everywhere broke the law to drink, and for many transgression became a virtue. It was fetishized, as it had been in the 1820s, as a noble sort of liquid democracy that enabled community and set people free. It was a lawless tongue waggled in the faces of the Dry Crusaders’ electoral victory. Much as their forebears getting drunk and waltzing in the diggings may look frivolous in contrast to the European revolutions of 1849, the Wild Wets’ drinking moonshine and dancing the Charleston look silly in contrast to the temperance activists’ century-long effort to bring about the Volstead Act. But as the historian David J. Goldberg rightly claims, America was falling on apathetic times, and “in a decade that saw a declining interest in politics, Prohibition was one of the few issues that aroused strong emotions.” It reheated the cooling public sphere. Drys argued America was safer and even more prosperous for being dry—as they had been predicting for decades. Wets argued that their “personal liberties” had been violated. Neither side backed down, and the press fairly crackled with joy.

  But even among the most apathetic wets a revolution was afoot, whether most of them knew it or cared. While petty crime, prostitution, and murder were among the waste products of this hard-drinking national demimonde, and while bohemians gloated over their own caricatures of bloodless, dullard Puritans, everyday folk in every region were learning to have some antiquarian fun—the fun of being assertive, of taking big risks, of rubbing themselves up against other mischievous citizens. Was this politics? Whatever else it was, it was—in flapper-speak—the cat’s particulars.

  TWO ENTRENCHED VALUES of early American democracy—individualism and communitarianism—were loosened up and mingled in the 1920s public sphere. The cult of celebrity, of soaring individuals, which arguably originates in the 1820s with the rising frenzy over Edwin Forrest, had seized upon the national imagination. Movie stars, musicians, and athletes reigned supreme, and tabloids and fan magazines gave fans a sense of participation in, ownersh
ip over their lives’ minutiae—the Fitzgeralds’ escapades, Charlie Chaplin’s every quirky move—and they inspired adoring mimicry. These stars’ public sightings caused mob sensations that today are common only among pubescent girls. In 1927, when a soft-spoken midwesterner named Charles Lindbergh had flown in obscurity from America to France, which was experiencing Les Années Folles of its own, the American poet Harry Crosby was there at Le Bourget airport to witness five hundred thousand fans mob his plane: “C’est lui Lindberg, LINDBERG! [sic] and there is pandemonium … thousands of hands weaving like maggots over the silver wings of the Spirit of Saint-Louis and it seems as if all the hands in the world are touching or trying to touch the new Christ and that the new Cross is the Plane.” Flight and celebrity—the twin peaks of 1920s individualism—apotheosized Lindbergh, and all of the world’s crowd wanted a relic.

  Pranks, antics, and breathtaking stunts decorated 1920s newspapers; rash individualism was on full display, as was a full-scale assault on traditional ideas of taste and safety. As if emboldened by the racy new improvisational techniques with which King Oliver (Bolden’s successor) had transformed early jazz—rhythms, scales, and novelty sounds that were ugly and aggressive by any musical conventions—citizens everywhere were going solo, “playing hot.” The most daring Americans jitterbugged on the edges of skyscrapers, tightrope-walked over city canyons, and performed a quirky sample of death-defying capers (fox-trotting, human-pyramid building, even tennis playing) high above the world on the wings of biplanes. Indeed, if the term “Roaring Twenties” derived from the new abundance of loud, fast, and relatively cheap cars—impressive sources of power and liberty for recently horse-saddled Americans—then the fact of flight soared in the popular imagination as the acme of fun and freedom. Europeans, Ann Douglas notes, still suffered from the shock of aviation warfare, but in far-off America airplanes glowed with heroism and adventure. “Only in America could you get mass-produced piggy banks, purses, fans, clocks, lamps, and (a rarer item) coffins shaped like airplanes.”

  As the twenties roared on, aerobats aped the hazards of war, making mortal danger look like child’s play: aileron rolls, the simplest trick of all, involve a manually guided flipping of the plane. Flick, snap, and barrel rolls, however, call for all-out leaps of faith, requiring the pilot to gain enough forward velocity to throw the plane into autorotation, a state wherein the plane spins freely on its own. But hammerheads, or stall turns, are probably the most breathtaking of all: for this stunt, the pilot cuts the gas at the top of the climb, lets the plane flip back over, and shoots it toward the earth like a diving missile.

  It must have been the hammerhead that Harry Crosby had in mind when he dreamed of diving his plane into Manhattan. But in his fantasy he doesn’t pull back from the spiral. The Boston Brahmin poet wrote to his parents in 1929 that he “like[d] looping the loop and other aerial acrobatics” and that “there might come a crash but there is no crime in an explosion whereas there is I think a crime in ending life the way so many do with a whimper.” He had survived a shelling at Verdun in which, according to Geoffrey Wolff, “his ambulance was vaporized,” leaving behind “a young man’s untouched body and gravely injured imagination.” As Malcolm Cowley writes of Crosby, “Bodily he survived, and with a keener appetite for pleasure.” Crosby and his wife, Caresse, the more esteemed writer of the two (and the inventor at nineteen of one of the first modern bras), were low-level aristocracy on the American expatriate literary scene and best known for running the Black Sun Press. His appetite for sex, drugs, and luxury were extraordinary for any man, but exemplary of American trends at the time. Harry Crosby was nobody’s democrat. An avowed “aristocrat” and “anarchist,” and the spoiled nephew of steel magnate J. P. Morgan, Crosby was the portrait of 1920s hedonism, of the moguls and celebrities who sailed above the crowd and became symbols of dissolution and excess. While he never lived his dream of crashing into Manhattan, he satisfied another long-held violent fantasy when, in the final months of 1929, amid a spree of drinking, drugs, gambling, adultery, shooting, and aerobatics, he killed himself and his mistress in a room at the Ritz.

  In vivid contrast to Crosby’s murderous egotism was the crowd-pleasing showmanship of Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, the first African American to receive a pilot’s license. Ann Douglas describes this avatar of Buddy Bottley as “a glamorous and charismatic man, a sheik-type, black America’s more sophisticated version of Rudolph Valentino.” A lover of jazz who neither drank nor smoked, this anti-fascist, pan-Africanist flier was called the “Lindbergh of his Race.” Though he encountered rivalry, even sabotage, among a few of his Harlem neighbors, this Garveyite claimed racial identity as the primary motive behind his flamboyant stunts. He cut a swell image, swooping Harlem rooftops and parachuting into the city (once dressed like the devil and playing the saxophone), but because of his persistent difficulty getting financial backing he always flew a rickety craft. Julian was the exception that proved the rule: flight, while the gold standard of American fun, was a pleasure set apart for the elite.

  For all the raging cult of personality, however, communitarianism, in a range of crowd pleasures, was just as characteristic of the era: it took the far-flung form of national trends (mah-jongg, crossword puzzles, bridge) and the more intimate forms of marathons and dance parties, which, unlike the mass spectacles and spectator sports also on the rise during this period, demanded lively participation from their multitude. A transcontinental footrace, commandeered by the stunt promoter C. C. Pyle, made its way eastward from California. A multiplex marathon in Madison Square Garden featured everything from twenty-four-hour talkers to round-the-clock rocking-chair rockers. Most notable, of course, were the dance marathons across the country that could drag on for weeks. But if marathons gave pleasure in diminishing returns, ultimately pleasing only victors like Vera Sheppard (whose story begins this book), the new dances themselves—the black bottom, tango, Charleston, jitterbug—never failed to satisfy. Jazz dance in particular was the chuffing locomotive pulling the boxcars of 1920s fun.

  Kathy J. Ogren’s excellent Jazz Revolution traces the broiling “controversy” between jazz’s prudish 1920s opponents and the broad cross-section of easier-going Americans who were galvanized by this intensely sociable music. In attempting to explain the latter, she details the “participatory” qualities of jazz and their well-known roots in the earliest black folk culture—the “call and response” relations between the musicians, the “cutting contests” between soloists, the “bucking contests” between jazz bands, and the ongoing dialogue between crowd and bandstand. She argues that this black-identified form of music eventually grew so general that it “helped white Americans with diverse social backgrounds”—those who were bold enough to enjoy it—“explain their world.” What she calls “Jazz emotions” were radical attitudes that helped people to break through “physical—and social—barriers” and opened new channels for community.

  The musician and musicologist Roger Pryor Dodge, regretting the 1940s jazz trends toward purely improvisational bebop, praised early jazz as “dance-based music” that “completely drains the human system.” One of the music’s “strong supports,” he argued, was “the pulse of a mob moving in time.” To be sure, the most prominent jazz musicians had built upon Buddy Bolden’s dance-driven example. They migrated in the teens from New Orleans to Chicago and ultimately in the twenties to New York City, never forgetting that dancers were their raison d’être. The two cultures riffed off one another and shared a spirit of competition. Dicky Wells recounts the “Trombone” and “Saxophone Supper[s]” that would take place at the informal Hoofer’s Club below Big John’s bar in New York: “All musicians would be sitting around the walls, all around the dance floor, maybe there would be forty guys sitting around there. The floor was for dancers only, and they would be cutting each other, too, while we were cutting each other on the instruments.”

  Vocalists had always ruled the musical stage, but by the mid-1920s, instrumentalis
ts—especially Louis Armstrong with his Hot Fives and Sevens—were achieving unprecedented star status. Building on Bolden’s showmanship and Jelly Roll Morton’s virtuosity, Armstrong turned improvisation into a world-class art form. He soared to levels of creative prowess that teased and mocked his earthbound rhythm section. He injected individualist braggadocio—egomaniacal ecstasy—into what was at base a communitarian music. He shared the studio with vocalists, including Bessie Smith, whose “Reckless Blues,” as Gary Giddens and Scott DeVeaux demonstrate, kept her “in control” and made Armstrong “alert to every gesture.” He also squared off against his own astonishing voice. But at his best it was his horn playing that stole the show. It swooped aerobatically in and out of the clouds, “compet[ing],” as the composer Gunther Schuller puts it, “with the highest order of previously known musical expression.”

  But then the dancers refused to be grounded. It was during the mid-twenties that they too went solo, “played hot.” Much as early jazz songs required constant negotiation between the soloist and the rhythm section, so did new dances inspire both soaring personal freedom and deeply erotic social interaction, the extremes of individualism and collectivism.