A year ago, The Times introduced a series of essays about the transformative year 1919, beginning with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s observation, in his essay “The Crack-Up,” that a first-rate intelligence could hold two opposed ideas at the same time. That seemed a fitting way to assess the United States at a pivotal moment, with half the country rushing headlong into the Jazz Age and the other half trying to turn back the clock toward simpler times.
As it turned out, Fitzgerald did not crack up, at least for some time. As the 1920s got underway, the world was his oyster. He became the voice of “a new generation … grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought.” But for one of those gods — Fitzgerald’s fellow Princetonian Woodrow Wilson — the world was indeed falling apart as the new decade began.
A year earlier, Wilson had been the people’s champion, striving to complete peace talks with Germany and make the world safe for democracy via “self-determination.” But the negotiations had been difficult, and the resulting Treaty of Versailles was an imperfect vehicle, favoring some peoples over others. To make matters worse, Wilson’s own people rejected it, through a series of Senate votes. Even as the League of Nations was coming into existence, in the second week of January, Wilson was clinging to hopes that the Senate might reverse itself.
It was not to be, in part because Wilson was no longer the bold leader he once was. The man who had done more than any other to evangelize for the new order was a shell of his former self. He had suffered a series of debilitating strokes during his fall campaign to raise support for the treaty. Afterward, inside the White House, he saw almost no one, barely able to speak, with the left side of his body paralyzed, his mouth slack. He had lost much of his vision and could barely read a sentence. A wheelchair was needed for even the simplest trip from one part of the house to another. A friend, the journalist Ray Stannard Baker, described a visit in late November. “It was dreadful,” he wrote, “a broken, ruined old man, shuffling along, his left arm inert, the fingers drawn up like a claw, the left side of his face sagging frightfully. His voice is not human: it gurgles in his throat, sounds like that of an automaton.”
If Wilson’s body seemed to be struggling against itself, the same could be said of the country at large.
Yet these facts were kept secret from the American people, a form of deception that did not exactly vindicate Wilson’s vision of a new world of “open covenants, openly arrived at.” His wife, Edith, became a gatekeeper to his sickroom, and in effect a co-president during the final 16 months of his presidency. She may have wielded more power than any woman to that point in American history (or since), though that was not the way progress was supposed to happen.
If Wilson’s body seemed to be struggling against itself, the same could be said of the country at large, deeply divided as the new decade began. The long year of 1919 had unleashed a tremendous energy, as the doughboys came home and young people began to plot out their futures. But in spite of a universal patriotism, if often felt as if two different versions of America were jousting at each other.
In the cities, particularly in the East, the Midwest and the Northwest, Americans embraced modernity. In the South, large sections of the West and rural areas, they resisted it. That created the strange spectacle of a country that was both for racial progress and against it; proud of America’s enlarged role in the world and resentful of it; enlightened on the progress of women and determined to keep women in their place. Even when there were victories — the 19th Amendment, for example, which granted female suffrage — it was usually possible to blunt their impact. Mississippi finally ratified the amendment … in 1984.
Nor was The New York Times always on the right side of history. On Jan. 13, 1920, its editors issued a withering critique of the recent experiments in rocketry by Robert Goddard and predicted that it was foolish to think of someday reaching the moon. Fifty years later, after men had done just that, it would retract the error, with one of its all-time most famous corrections.
The ’20s began with more of a whimper than a roar, to judge from January’s headlines. Prohibition went into effect on Jan. 17, to the amazement of many, caught flat-footed by such a radical experiment in social control. Wilson’s secretary of the interior, Franklin Lane, complained in his diary, “The whole world is skew-jee, awry, distorted and altogether perverse.” By the end of the decade, the campaign against sin would have achieved none of its goals. Instead, as any reader of Fitzgerald knew, a tidal wave of cocktails was just beginning, along with the criminal syndicates ready to supply them.
On Jan. 29, 1920, The New York Times reported that an influenza pandemic seemed to be spreading, only a year after the one that had killed roughly 50 million people around the world. In New York City alone, 5,589 cases were reported in a single day, with 67 dead from influenza and 118 from complications of pneumonia. Fortunately, this virus turned out to be a milder strain than its predecessor. But in other ways, the problems of 1919 lingered.
To a degree, these divisions could be papered over as veterans raced to build the American Century, freed from wartime exigencies. Two young men who befriended each other in France were Walt Disney and Ray Kroc. A billion hamburgers later, it’s obvious that something special was in the air as they returned to a country ready to embrace its appetites.
As Disney understood, they were ready for new story lines as well. A specific way in which the military rules were relaxed related to the emerging technology of wireless communication. During the war, both sides had quickly learned the effectiveness of radio, and in the United States, the Navy was especially visionary in pursuing new lines of research for ships and submarines seeking to communicate across long distances. But to protect this new domain, the government had restricted amateur activity. (Some historians have speculated that if radio had come along a few months earlier, it might have spared Woodrow Wilson the need to canvass across the country — and perhaps spared his life as well.)
For a time, the full extent of radio’s power remained unclear, as various pioneers wandered in the ether.
As 1920 began, that was all changing. After the restrictions were removed, thousands of amateur radio operators began to tinker at home with new sets, and a new company sprang into existence, ready to harness the wireless. On Jan. 5, The Times announced the creation of the Radio Corporation of America; within a few short years, radio would transform the country. Ironically, it would empower both sides of the cultural divide, from jazz listeners to fundamentalists, the latter quite adept at putting this modern tool to work in the fight against modernity.
For a time, the full extent of radio’s power remained unclear, as various pioneers wandered in the ether. A Times headline on Jan. 29 revealed that one of them, Guglielmo Marconi, was picking up strange signals and wondered if Mars was trying to communicate with Earth. In the utopian dawn, a leading American businessman and government official, Herbert Hoover, tried to argue that radio communication should be kept free of advertising, as a kind of public service. In 1922, he said it was “inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service … to be drowned in advertising chatter.” Later that year, the first radio ad ran, sponsored by a real estate developer.
As thousands of Americans bought home sets, it became clear that this new device would transform politics as well. A pioneer station in Pittsburgh, KDKA, would be the first to cover a presidential election, in November 1920.
Even in the dark days of winter, a hundred years ago, there were stirrings as both Democrats and Republicans schemed to replace the sick man in the White House. Wealthy men like William Randolph Hearst and Henry Ford were said to have their eye on the grand residence, but most of the action was inside party circles, as B-list candidates tried to step up their game.
At the beginning of the year, one of the least likely was a Republican senator from Ohio, Warren Harding, who needed to run for higher office because of a strong chance that he would not be re-elected to Congress. Harding’s private life was a mess — he had legions of affairs and had impregnated one of his girlfriends, a young woman named Nan Britton. When her daughter was born in 1919 (confirmed to be Harding’s by DNA testing in 2015), it might have ended most presidential careers. But Harding had a talent for coming up with bland phrases that spoke to the country’s desire to begin a new era, less complicated. One was “normalcy,” an invented word that perfectly encapsulated what many Americans longed for. Another was “America First.”
‘Normalcy’ turned out to mean an administration that would be ruined by scandal and greed, much of it tied to a powerful new force, Big Oil.
Throughout 1920, this anti-Wilson would rise up as the original wasted away. Still, commentators worried about what it meant to retreat so quickly from the world, with no plan. Harding seemed to have no ideas about anything. One of America’s shrewdest observers was the journalist H.L. Mencken, the so-called Sage of Baltimore. From that city, close to Washington but not of it, Mencken could ridicule both sides of the widening divide, and did, skewing fundamentalists and Eastern eggheads alike. But he worried about the transparent incapacity of a man like Harding. Mencken could be cruel and predicted that if the trend continued of electing candidates with no clear qualification, the White House would soon be “adorned by a complete moron.” As it turned out, “normalcy” meant an administration that would be ruined by scandal and greed, much of it tied to another powerful new force, Big Oil, engorged with money and influence after helping the war effort.
But there would always be boats against the current, as Fitzgerald put it; that is the nature of American politics. The excesses of one side inevitably lead to the rise of the other, and back again, with tidal regularity. As the Republican wave was cresting, a young Democrat was trying to position himself as a candidate for higher office, and on Feb. 1, he gave an immodest speech, boasting of his wartime achievements. In fact, they were considerable. Franklin Roosevelt had not served in the war, but as assistant secretary of the Navy, he had been quite close to the development of radio during the war; he would profit from the radio again, later in his career.
It has been a long time since the winter of 1920, but the old fault lines are still visible, not only in the United States but around the world. In Turkey, neo-Ottoman ambitions are emerging as the country seeks to enlarge its influence in Libya and everywhere else the sultans once held sway. In Russia, a new czar is all too happy to undermine the West’s quaint belief in Wilsonian self-determination.
Should the United States try to solve these and all of the other vexing problems out there? It has become fashionable to denounce Wilson’s idealism in the century since his crack-up. Obviously, he tried too much, too fast and destroyed himself in the process. But to inhabit a world with no ideals of any kind seems like an invitation to a different kind of crack-up and a return to the earlier history that we were delighted to escape from in 1919.
In the long century since, Americans faced a dizzying array of problems, new and old. When they worked together, they generally solved them. When they retreated into ideological extremes, they generally did not. In “The Crack-Up,” Fitzgerald diagnosed the problem, then offered a formula. If enough readers could “see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise,” then there was always a chance for a new decade to live up to its glittering potential.
Sources: Frederick Allen, “Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen Twenties”; Alfred Balk, “The Rise of Radio, from Marconi through the Golden Age”; Erik Barnouw, “A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States”; F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up”; H.L. Mencken, “A Mencken Chrestomathy”; Daniel Okrent, “The Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition”; Patricia O’Toole, “The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made”; David Pietrusza, “1920: The Year of Six Presidents.”
Ted Widmer is a distinguished lecturer at Macaulay Honors College, City University of New York. His next book, “Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington, will be published in April.”
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What Will the Next Decade Bring? The 1920s Offer an Answer - The New York Times
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