Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties

Lucy Moore “Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties,” 2010, The Overlook Press (Kindle), 400pp

This is a good book for anyone interested in the 1920s but not familiar with the details of this period in the U.S. following WWI and ending in The Great Depression. The author examines diverse events like Lindbergh’s flight, the Teapot Dome Scandal, and the founding of the New Yorker magazine, and many of the bizarre lifestyles of people like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda and the lifestyle these people led in Paris. Whenever I visit Paris I think of these people when not dwelling on characters involved in the French Revolution. What is not dwelled on in this book is the people that had to work for a living.

My Notes:

Loc 144: In January 1920 it became illegal throughout the U.S. to manufacture, transport, sell or possess—but not to purchase or consume—alcohol. Prohibition was not foisted upon an entirely unwilling population. When the national law was passed in 1919, thirty-three of the forty-eight states were already dry. Before Prohibition, alcohol had been a cheap high. In 1914, a highball might cost fifteen cents. Six years later a swanky speakeasy could charge $3—twenty times as much—for a glass of top-quality whisky and even at the bottom of the market that shot would cost about fifty cents (although it was free for the police).

Loc 178: It was still legal for doctors to prescribe liquor for medical problems. In 1921 drugstore owners withdrew over eight million gallons of “medicinal” whisky from federal warehouses, about twenty times the pre-Prohibition amount.

Loc 214: On average, an Italian-born laborer in New York in 1910 earned about $10 a week—roughly a third less than his “native-born_ American counterpart.

Loc 627: Harding supported a bill that would have made lynching illegal by federal rather than state law, although this move was rejected in 1922 by a block of Southern senators. However, while eighty-three people were lynched in 1919, by 1928 that number had fallen to eleven.

Loc 742: Just as the Gibson Girl had personified the 1890s, so Scot and Zelda Fitzgerald became the living embodiment of the generation he described and defined.

Loc 765: Before WWI women were arrested for not wearing corsets…(You can't make this stuff up).
In 1920, the poet Edna St. Vincent Milay summed up her appetite for life and adventure in “A Few Figs from Thistles”:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light.

Investment in films soared from $78 million in 1921 to $850 million in 1930.

…the candidates speeches leave the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea; sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and overwork. (William McAdoo commenting on Harding).

Harding’s mistresses had been paid off out of a secret account funded by the National Republican Committee. One woman demanded and received $20,000. Even on the night before his inauguration the President-elect had to be prevented from sneaking out of his room for an assignation.

Loc 1422: “One evening things went too far. A call-girl was either accidentally hit on the temple by someone throwing bottles or had a glass smashed in her throat by another girl, and died. Harding, who was present, was hustled away; when the dead girl’s brother tried to blackmail the President he was hastily put behind bars.

Loc 1720: By 1930 the car industry accounted for a tenth of America’s manufacturing wages and more than a tenth of all its manufactured goods.

Loc 2287: When the governor of Oklahoma instituted martial law to remove the Klan from his state, the Klan-dominated state legislature impeached him and removed him from office.

Loc 2419: In August 1925 the hooded Klansmen, 40,000 strong, marched down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue. At this time, a third of the Indiana male population were Klansmen. They elected Indiana’s governor and both its senators as well as most of its local officials; there was no county that did not have its own local branch. On parade nights policemen directed traffic in their robes. However, because of scandals involving Klan leaders, the membership in Indiana was less than 7,000 in 1928.

Loc 2738: Paris was wonderfully cheap: a dollar bought eight francs in 1919 and twenty-five in 1926.

Loc 3029: American Fundamentalists celebrated ignorance, preaching that simple faith was more important than all the learning in the world. Books, apart from the Bible, were violently mistrusted. If their contents were true, then they should already be in the Bible; if false, then reading them would imperil the souls.

Loc 3083: The Scopes trial in Dayton Tennessee was the first trial to be broadcast nationally. The ACLU raised a fund of $11 million for the Defense and engaged Clarence Darrow. Darrow warned: “We are marching backwards to the glorious age of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.” Others felt Bryan “was forced into religion as the only quasi-intellectual field in which mental backwardness and complete insensibility to ideas could be used as an advantage” The Butler Act which was behind the Scopes prosecution was not repealed until 1967.

Loc 3679: Jack Dempsey made half a million dollars in 1924; Babe Ruth only made $52,000 that year, over three times what the next highest-paid baseball player made. The September 1927 fight with Tunney was the first radio program to be broadcast worldwide.

Loc 3770: The Long Count: A recently introduced rule specified that when a boxer was knocked down, his adversary must retreat to a neutral corner before the referee began the count. Only after Dempsey had reluctantly allowed himself to be escorted to the corner did the official begin counting, buying Tunney additional time to recover from Dempsey’s blow. Tunney was actually down for between 14 and 17 seconds even though he got up at the referee’s count of 9. Tunney went on to win the fight on points.

Loc 3827: In 1928 the official minimum standard for a working class family was $2,500 per year. Inequalities in wealth were vast and increasing. America’s thirty-six-thousand richest families collectively received as much per annum as the twelve million families (or nearly half the population) who scraped by on less than $1,500.

Loc 3982: On the first working day after Labor Day 1929, market averages reached peaks that would not be bettered for twenty-five years. General panic ensued on Black Tuesday, October 29, when the market lost $14 billion in value.

Loc 4014: The crash did not cause the Depression. What it did was expose the weaknesses that underpinned the confidence and optimism of the 1920s—poor distribution of income, a weak banking structure and insufficient regulations, the economy’s dependence on new consumer goods, the over-extension of industry and the Government’s blind belief that promoting business interests would make America uniformly prosperous.