Andare, Partire, Tornare ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Only Yesterday Hey, sherrydarlin has updated twice in recent memory! *g* Go read, she's doing an interesting internship at Jubilee USA. She's the one that's going to save the world - I just want to save some of its stuff. Some notes on the book I'm reading on the 1920's - some of them seem interesting in light of the State of the Union speech that is playing as I type. The book begins with an interesting "day in the life" of a typical family of 1919. What is fascinating is that how much has changed by 1924, and again by 1929. Talking of the wife of his couple, he says "Her hair is long, and the idea of a woman ever frequenting a barber shop would never occur to her. If you have forgotten what the general public thought of short hair in those days, listen to the remark of the manager of the Palm Garden in NEw York when reporters asked him, one night in November, 1918, how he happened to rent his hall for a pro-Bolshevist meeting which had led to a riot. Explaining that a well-dressed woman had come in a fine automobile to make arrangements for the use of the auditorium, he added, 'Had we noticed then, as we do now, that she had short hair, we would have refused to rent the hall.' In Mrs. Smith's mind, as in that of the manager of the Palm Garden, short-haired women, like long-haired men, are associated with radicalism, if not free love." The author, Allen, notes that this is the era of the rise of the KKK, and the crumbling of Woodrow Wilson - who, despite wartime popularity, linked his power too much to his beloved League of Nations. Too idealistic and not sufficently practical, it died and took Wilson's health with it. A shorter, although equally nasty Red Scare swept the country, with dissenters unable to speak for fear of being thought radical and unamerican. A woman named Katharine Fullerton Gerould wrote an article in Harper's in 1922, where she said "America is no longer a free country, in the old sense; and liberty is, increasingly, a more retorical figure....No thinking citizen, I venture to say, can express in freedom more than a part of his honest convictions. I do not of course refer to convictions that are frankly criminal. I do mean that everywhere, on every hand, free speech is choked off in one direction or another. The only way in which an American citizen who is really interested in all the social and political problems of his country can preserve any freedom of expression, is to choose the mob that is most sympathetic to him, and abide under the shadow of that mob." Unions were reviled as Communist, and the police strike in Boston was broken by a sour faced governor of Massachusetts who denied the right of anyone to "strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, at any time." This man, Calvin Coolidge, would ride this into the White House. He would become famous and popular, but not for his actions, but rather for not doing *anything*. That was what the public wanted. The Red scare faded as a more specific sociological problem grew in the public mind, that being The Problem of the Younger Generation. That's an interesting topic in itself, so I think I'll wait until another entry to tackle it. Jazz babies, petting parties, no corset - horrors! 9:06 p.m. - 2003-01-28 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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