Dan Snow's History Hit - Will This Be the New Roaring 20s?

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

Our impressions of the Roaring 20s are a time of economic growth, social change and in some cases wild debauchery, but were the Roaring 20s really a thing and what were they really like? As lockdown restriction ease are we due another similar period a hundred years later? Professor Sarah Churchwell joins Dan on the podcast with the exciting possibility that we might all be in store for another period of wild socialising, but only when it's safe to do so!

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. A question that I only get asked about three times an hour is, are we all set for another roaring 20s? As we escape blinking from the confines of our own basements and cellars into this brave new world, are we going to be looking at another decade of wild partying? Or are our impressions of that wild decade just made up and based on watching Leonardo DiCaprio in The Great Gatsby?

Were the Roaring Twenties a thing? What were they like? And might we get another piece of it a hundred years later, by coincidence, as we hopefully begin to return to a more normal life after this pandemic. I've got one of the more brilliant people that I have on this podcast regularly, Professor Sarah Churchwell. She's Chair in the Public Understanding of Humanities at the University of London.

She's written about the 1920s. You've heard her on this podcast before. We talked about American fascism and whether it's useful or right to refer to that in its historical context. And Nash joins me again to talk about the 20s. And it turns out they were a bit of a thing and, you know, we might see a bit of a repeat. So it's exciting stuff. This will get you in the mood as we come out of the Easter weekend, as we move here in the UK anyway, towards loosening of the restrictions and the US as restrictions have been loosened in many

states this might get us back in the mood for wild licentious socializing only when it's safe to do so folks listen to your public health authorities if you wish to listen to other podcasts that Sarah Churchwell's been in well then we got plenty right over on historyhit.tv our digital history channel the Netflix for history oh we've got so much exciting over on HistoryHit.tv, our digital history channel, the Netflix for history. Ooh, we've got so much exciting stuff coming up for you. I can't wait to tell everyone about it. Hey, over there, you get to watch lots of documentaries on history.

You get to listen to Professor Sarah Churchwell and many other wonderful historians. It's got it all. It's a history lover's paradise. It's like the 1920s, every day on HistoryHit.tv. But in the meantime, enjoy Professor Churchwell. Sarah, thank you very much for coming back onto this podcast.

Thanks for having me. Now, this is the question that everyone's walking around at the moment, asking me, asking you, asking anyone with any connection to history. So I've come to the oracle herself. Are the Roaring Twenties like, was it a thing? Or is it just made up? It's a really good question. And actually, you're the first one to put it to me in exactly those terms about whether, you know, did they see it as the Roaring Twenties? And as you say, was it a thing? It was a thing. And they did see it as a thing. By the early to mid 1920s, they were referring to it as the Roaring Twenties. And they very much felt that, and I mean, by about 1924, it was a kind of popular phrase.

So they very much felt that something was in the air and that there was a change in the energy in the zeitgeist. And that it was worthy of giving a name, like the Jazz Age, like the Roaring Twenties. That it was an epoch and that it had kind of discernible characteristics and that there had been a kind of rupture and that in the late teens, and of course, the First World War was the obvious breaking point. But also, as we've all just learned ourselves, the end of a pandemic was also a breaking point. And they saw this kind of clear sense that, and in America, all kinds of things changed in the early 1920s. So there was this clear sense that things were starting over and

that they were ready to roar. I've got to say, Sarah, I feel ready to roar. Obviously, it was pandemic, but the First World War as well. I mean, they were bouncing back from a heck of a lot. Yeah, absolutely. And so look, I mean, yeah, the First World War is the obvious one, right? And it's the one that's always been understood as the starting point of the Roaring Twenties. So if anybody had asked, if we'd had this conversation two years ago, I don't think we would have even, we might have mentioned the Spanish flu. And I always tended to bring it into the American context because the United States entered the war so late and its casualties were so much fewer, you know, its death rate was so much lower. And America did lose more citizens to the Spanish flu than it did to the war. So our experience of the First World War was different. But with all of that said, it was always a given that it was after the First World War, the war to end all wars, the war to make the world safe for democracy, all of the kinds of expectations and the weight that had been put in the transatlantic context on that war. And then the kinds of revolutions, the social and cultural revolutions that it brought about and political revolutions that it brought about,

like we all know, I mean, the Bolshevik revolution was happening at the same time, right? I mean, so the ways in which there were these major, major political upheavals that had repercussions globally, and certainly in the United States and in Britain, where people were talking about the Roaring Twenties, there were huge upheavals. But I think what's interesting to me now is that we've now been reminded by our own upheaval to add the pandemic to that list. When you look back at the Roaring Twenties, is it artistic and cultural? Is it like an elite? Is it like the way that initially the 1960s were kind of elite opening up? Or is this something that was reflected on Main Street as well across America in terms of economic, in terms of material advances, like the economic health of America? I mean, is this something that was genuinely a

national event? Well, it was certainly a national event, but it wasn't necessarily in the ways that we're used to thinking of it in terms of the cliches and the kind of stereotypes that we have. And I take the most obvious one, the boom, right? Everybody thinks of the roaring 20s as roaring because there was an economic boom. You just referred to that. And the idea that, you know, after the war, everything exploded and the stock market took off. That was true by the kind of pushing up to the mid 1920s. It started in about 22, started to gain traction in 23, 24. But when you're actually talking about the very beginning of the era, when they were indeed starting to think about

the jazz age and this idea that something was looking different in the 20s. There was no economic boom in the US. There was actually a deflationary recession. All my references are to Scott Fitzgerald, as you know. And Scott Fitzgerald later called it a baby recession, in that it was a short-lived recession, but it was a sharp one. And of course, as we all know, when you live through a recession, you don't know when it's going to end. So it's only in retrospect that it looks like it was, you know, short lived. The point is, at the beginning of the 1920s, even for the elites, there was great, great uncertainty. There was an enormous amount of concern in the U.S. about the so-called Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the first Red Scare. We're

used to thinking about McCarthyism in the 1950s, but that was the second red scare. And the first red scare in 1919 was very serious as well. There were also major race riots in 1919, incredibly important, again, to the current context. I mean, we're talking indeed as the trial of the policeman who killed George Floyd gets underway in the US. So there were similar kinds of social and political upheavals happening in the U.S. And at the beginning, it was a time of great uneasiness. This idea that everybody just had this party and they were ready, like it was all great and they were making all this money and everybody was ready to have fun. That didn't take hold for several years. And then it became pretty

hysterical pretty quickly. In terms of how it felt on Main Street, I think the revolution was much more of a social revolution. And the things we Street, I think the revolution was much more of a social revolution. And the things we need to remember about the real kind of point of demarcation in the US that marked the beginning of the 1920s was that two constitutional amendments were passed in 1920. And think about how big that is. Remember how hard it is to pass a constitutional amendment in the US and how much people talk today about the kinds of, you know, even ending things like the filibuster or trying to get statehood. To pass two amendments in a given year actually gives you an indication of how much change was already happening.

And those two amendments, of course, which both came into law in 1920, were the passage of the Volstead Act, which began prohibition, which came into law in January 1920, and then women getting the vote, which came into law in August 1920. So what you have is a year in which kind of the nation takes two sharp turns in opposite directions, right? One towards progressivism and one towards authoritarianism. And that was one of the things that really marked the change on Main Street was women having the vote. That marked the change for real people's lives long before any talk of the stock market, you know, taking off began. And of course, prohibition changed things culturally in huge ways, not just in terms of how much you drank, but in terms of Americans' relationship to the law. And of course, what would become the explosion of organized crime, of, you know, the violence of Al Capone, all the famous gangsterism that took hold again in the mid to later 1920s. All of that stuff is kind of starting to percolate, I guess, from the beginning. And

that's what people were aware of. And our kind of crude ideas about the boom, again, they didn't take hold until later, and they were sort of the least of it as far as ordinary Americans were concerned. Now, you and I, we like to look at everything in our lives in terms of the kind of high politics of it. Like, you know, your and my ability to go out and have fun in a pub is often linked to the performance of progressive candidates in the polls in the US, for example, right? So, but to what extent was this kind of roaring 20s? You mentioned the politics there, the Red Scare. Do you see this as something that does follow the kind of big political changes?

Or is there something cultural going on that is actually independent from those things? Whether it's new music, new forms of art that actually, dare I whisper, aren't dependent on the kind of plate shifting in DC? Yeah, it's a really good question. And I think that in the case of the 20s, you're really looking at a really interesting interaction between the two. And if anything, maybe that tension was productive, because on the one hand,

or, you know, creative tension, because for the society, because on the one hand, as you've just suggested, it was, you know, a huge efflorescence of American creative arts and particularly of indigenous art forms. It was the moment in which American culture as an idea, as something we might start to think about in American high culture, was born. Up until that point, the United States, American artists had very much had a conscious inferiority complex in regards to, in relation to Europe. The cultural conversations of the time were very consciously asking the question of whether America had an art form that was worthy of the name. Was there such a thing as American literature? Was there such a thing as American

painting? And D.H. Lawrence's classic book, Studies in Classic American Literature, came out in 1922, and he called American literature a false dawn. It was something that hadn't yet started. And yet we look back on it and we see, you know, this explosion of amazing American art. And we think jazz, and we think the Harlem Renaissance, and we think modernist painting, we think O'Keeffe, we think Stieglitz, we know what they were doing. But at the time, there were all of these questions about, did America have what it takes, as it were, to stand up on the world stage? And these were questions that American artists were consciously asking each other. It very much shapes the cultural kind of conversation and debates of the time.

If you actually go in and look at the, dig into the periodical culture, into their correspondence. Scott Fitzgerald, as a young man at this time, was writing his friends, you know, saying, I think we might have an American art, and then saying, I know you think that sounds ludicrous, but I think we could be the cultural center soon, you know. And so that's exactly what was starting to happen in the 20s on the artistic side was this sense that American art was gaining momentum and gaining confidence, and they were ready to start making those kinds of claims. And that, particularly in the case of literature, that, you know, England in particular was going to have to sit up and take notice and listen to what was said, that the influences were beginning to be shared much more. There was a circulation and a traffic of ideas that was starting to circulate after the war. And of course, transatlantic travel became easier,

boats were faster, people could go back, and it was also less expensive, people go back and forth. And obviously, as you know, everybody who's listening to this knows, so many Americans, like Fitzgerald and Hemingway, made their way to Europe, particularly to Paris, but then they made their way back, and they would go back and forth. It isn't the case that they just left and lived in exile. So those influences were very much kind of starting to pervade American culture and society, and in particular, even, you know, into popular art and popular culture. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the Roaring Twenties. More after this.

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It was a Republican era from 1920 till FDR was elected in 1932, 12 years of Republican governance and a Republican governance that was, as it would be today, very friendly to business to the point of being friendly to corrupt business. It was a wildly deregulated market. It was an anything goes market. That phrase absolutely applies to the 1920s. So you have on the one hand, this very conservative political moment and pro-business moment and very conservative in terms of its racial politics. This was the moment of America's most restrictive immigration practices. This is the moment when America first as a slogan takes off. It was associated with eugenics. So white supremacism was very front and center. And of course, it's also the time of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. So it's a very long answer, but it's a complex time, right? But maybe that, in a nutshell, actually kind of encapsulates it most

clearly is that on the one hand, you have the Harlem Renaissance. And on the other hand, you have the second Ku Klux Klan. And those are happening at exactly the same time. And that's what the Roaring Twenties was like. So I'm sure lots of people are asking you, when it comes to looking at the individual sources and what these artists are saying and thinking, and consumers of art, there's lots of people that I talk to at the moment seem to be conflicted between being a bit scared about getting back out there and re-engaging and getting things in the diary

and kind of going, I'm going to go and do the things that I took for granted for too long. You know, I'm going to travel and take time off and visit amazing places because I'm now aware that this might not go on forever. The shutters might come down. Were there similar conversations going on back in the 20s? Yeah, absolutely. And again, particularly in the United States, I think, and I'm going to

have reference to Fitzgerald again here, because I think that he articulates it so well. And there were other people who certainly expressed this idea, but you know, he just kind of puts it beautifully for us in his famous essay, Echoes of the Jazz Age, which he wrote in 1931, looking back on the decade. And in that essay, he says that it was a decade marked by the restless energy in America that had not been expended in the war. And that's a line that's easy to skip over. I paraphrase there, that's not the exact line. He put it more beautifully than that. But that's the gist of it. And the point is, is that it's easy to miss that. But whereas in Europe, there's that sense of devastation and exhaustion and bitterness and horror and trauma, and how do we rebuild? In the US,

everybody had geared up for that kind of conflict, but we entered so late that there was the sense that everybody had built up to something. And then that was almost anticlimactic, if you can say such a thing about the First World War. Certainly for somebody like Fitzgerald, it was because he never even saw combat. So he was in the army and then didn't get shipped overseas. And he was one of many that he knew who had an experience like that. So the sense that you're completely geared up for it, and then nothing happens, and that energy had to go somewhere. And so in the US, there was this sense that all the doors blew open, and they were just ready to do whatever it was that they wanted to do. And that was the kind of sense of the young generation taking over because they were still certainly, they felt

betrayed by the older generation. They felt betrayed by the promise that this was the war to end all wars when clearly it wasn't. They could see the betrayals of the Treaty of Versailles. They were warning of the problems that that was likely to create. Writers like Walter Lippmann writing in Vanity Fair and the New Republic, you know, in the early 1920s saying this settlement is not going to work. This is going to create huge problems in Europe and therefore huge problems for America. So they were anxious. They could see just as well as, you know, as educated Europeans could that this was really problematic. And their response was, you know, was absolutely carpe diem. It was absolutely

live fast and die young, grab it while you can. And prohibition in the US wildly exacerbated that. It just kind of made it exponentially more powerful. It became even more daring. For us, it will be daring and exciting to have a hug and have a pint when I see in the pub. But if that was illegal, that would be like super exciting. Exactly. Exactly. And it was this amazing experiment in backfiring, right? I mean, if you ever want to look at a great social experiment that backfires, just look at what happened with prohibition. Because one of the first things that it did was, you know, it had never been socially acceptable for women to drink in public in the US any more than it had been in the UK. And with prohibition, which was supposed

to make drinking less socially acceptable, it made it more socially acceptable. And suddenly young women were drinking in public for the first time. And of course, it came along with the 19th Amendment, with getting the vote, with this sense of new independence. It also came along with new kinds of sexual independence, reproductive rights, well, not reproductive rights yet, but reproductive conversations were happening and basically new reproductive products, you know, reproduction control was available more widely. You could get condoms in drugstores, which you hadn't been able to, you know, do before. Women could get diaphragms, which they hadn't been able to do before. And indeed, you know, abortions became more widely available in urban centers as well. So there was this sense of new sexual freedom,

of new economic freedom, of new economic freedom, of new political freedom. And then you throw in a prohibition against drinking, you know, and we're seeing this today. I mean, it's really, I think, you know, really dangerous. And so I want to be clear that I'm not in any way suggesting that we should glamorize or romanticize it in this way. But people are talking about, you know, kind of and have been talking about kind of speakeasy parties during this pandemic, during lockdown. Right. But there the speakeasy was just that you were having a drink when you weren't supposed to. Now it is, you know, potentially obviously spreading a pandemic. So that sense of the glamour of the illicit is still very much with us.

People thinking that that will make it even cooler. Yeah. Unfortunately, this time around, you might end up killing your grandma. Exactly, exactly. So I guess I want to finish up by saying, you know, historians are always really cautious with parallels and say, it's just like the 1920s. Now that we've had fun with it

and we've talked and I've learned a huge amount about the 1920s, is it useful? Is it useful? Is it just annoying when your friends ask if it's going to be about the 1920s? Or is this a kind of useful conversation to have to think about the next few years and obviously think about what happened at the end of the 20s? I mean, we should probably always be on

guard for that, massively unregulated markets destroying the economy. But is this a useful conversation? Well, I think it is, or I probably would have said I was too busy for it, to be honest with you, Dan. And it's not just because I get to talk about my pet subject and Fitzgerald, my pet rider and everything. It's because I actually, you know, I do think this is a useful conversation because the parallels are very strong. Not that history is circular, not that it will predict what happens. Of course not. Already, the way the pandemic has played out is completely different, right? They didn't have a global lockdown. So the differences are very, very obvious and very, very stark. But the broad parallel about human nature is often what we can take from history. And that's where I think that

there is a lot to be learned from here. And to that point that we began with, of just that sense of unreleased energy and people kind of running amok. And that may look like fun in retrospect, but there's also an edge of hysteria to it and an edge of huge anxiety that undergirds it that might lead to a great creative outpouring again. That would be an upside for us if our roaring 20s can lead to a great creative outpouring. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we had another Harlem Renaissance or its equivalent somewhere else in the world? If we had another explosion of modern art where something was really reinvented in that way, if those energies could head in that direction. And of course, it was a great progressive outpouring as well in a lot of ways. So there's lots to try to learn from in terms of thinking

about how we might harness that energy more constructively, which again, I think is one of the lessons we try to take from history is see where we're in parallel positions or at a crossroads. You know, if we go that way, it might go wrong. And maybe we try that way just to see. And so, you know, I think that we are on the cusp of another roaring 20s. And I don't make these kinds of parallels all that lightly. It won't play out the same way. Of course not. But are we likely to open the doors and roar as soon as lockdown ends? I think, you know, pretty obviously everybody is ready to roar. Thank you so much for roaring on this podcast as ever, Sarah. It's totally brilliant. How can people stay in touch with your writing and your brilliant thought?

Oh, well, that's very kind of you. Thank you. I actually did have an essay on some of these topics in the New York Review of Books last year about Fitzgerald, of course, if anybody's interested. And, you know, as ever, I'm kind of tweeting and stuff, but I'm trying to finish a book, which is set, it's a little bit later, it's in the 30s. You'll be amazed to hear I've moved slightly further afield, trying to get that done. So I don't think anything particularly new in the pipeline until that's finished. Well, thank you very much for coming back on. Thanks for having me. I feel we have the history on our shoulders.

All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, a bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that.

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