The 1920s was the decade when the Republican Party nominated Warren G. Harding for President and Calvin Coolidge for Vice President. In this decade World War I may have just finished up but its impressions still lingered on and the trial over evolution was just beginning. The Victorian Age of decency was crashing to a halt and sexuality was being spoken about with more liberty. People like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernst Hemingway, E.E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, and Langston Hughes lived this era, felt this era and wrote this era. They lived the segregation in the south through the post was drama, and through the social classes that were being defined more and more. In this decade literature was written and politics happened, and one way or another, literature reflected the politics of the 1920s.
It seemed that the more the world changed, the more the United States governed its people. The more the United States governed its people the more the people had to say about it; and oh what they had to say. Attitudes were formed and if a person’s social status wasn’t of Bourgeois, the norm for that time, then it was of the poor and no respectable person of that time was poor. It seemed that money helped define the social status and keep the people pf this decade segregated. People like Dorothy Parker and Langston Hughes, in response to the Bourgeois, headed up the Harlem Renaissance of African American writers. These writers had no trouble expressing their troubled times. They didn’t believe in the only good social status was the rich, white, American, male and they wanted to world to know that. They wanted the world to know that they were not poor by choice and they were not bad people, they were just people like everyone else. Langston Hughes wrote a poem Southern Gentle Lady that expressed the hard times that African American people went through in the 1920s. He speaks of “Southern gentle lady, do not swoon. They’ve just hung a black man in the dark of the moon.” In this section, he takes the typical African American woman working to feed her family and announces to her that in the shadow of the night they hung a man based on the color of his skin, and please don’t cry. He then says “They’ve hung a black man to the roadside tree in the dark of the moon for the world to see.” Again that in the shadows on the night a man was condemned for the color of his skin and he was hanging there for all the world to see, though the world was not allowed to see this act in progress. Lastly, he states “How Dixie protects its white womanhood. South gentle lady, be good! Be good!” establishing that again this act only happened due to the color of his skin and were he a white man the Dixie land of America would never have let this happen but because he was a southern black man he was left unprotected. Also that that southern gentle lady, while having every right to be mad at the times and the intolerable cruelty must rise above the hate and be good, as to not stoop to the white man's level. It is clear in Langston Hughes's poem that he was affected politically by Dixie’s ability to protect the white but not the black and therefore writing about how the American government in the 1920s still saw the black race as a separate but not yet equal part of the American society.
It then was said that, “Politics became an arena for defending traditional rural values. The revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s manifested itself in the political conflicts associated with Prohibition, which divided Americans according to race, religious beliefs, cultural practices, and residential local.” (American Decades 1902-1929, page 758) This proves the extent of the contempt toward the African American culture but also establishes political contempt during the 1920s for any individual or group that fell outside of tradition. This brought about the Lost Generation of white writers who, just like those of the African American race, expressed their same trials and tribulations with society, the prohibition, and their anti-war beliefs. This group consisted of writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernst Hemingway, and E.E. Cummings, just to name a few, who wanted the whole world to know what money on margin and world wars were really doing to the American Bourgeois and post-war veterans. F. Scott Fitzgerald presented us with characters such as Jay Gatsby, the man who made his money off bootleg booze to try and establish himself to win over Daisy only ending in Gatsby’s emotional and physical demise. Ernst Hemingway created Lady Ashley the “perfect product of the postwar world” whose main activities included “ having drinks, lovers and passionate moments”. She was in Hemingway’s mind the perfect reflection of a “hard-boiled flapper” she could drink anyone under the table and she could always explain why six cocktails grew where one grew before. She displayed all the attributes of a typical woman of the 1920s who enjoyed living the bohemian way of life because the American government felt it necessary to do away with alcoholic beverages. E. E. Cummings wrote The Enormous Room where he “suggested a philosophy of war compounded equally of resignation, hatred for all authority, and an almost abstract cynicism.” (Twentieth-Century American Literature, page 569) Many went on to say that this book was the “first to express for America the emotions of those artists, students and middle-class intellectuals who were to constitute the post-mortem war generation, and whose war experience was to transform their conception of life and art.” (Twentieth-Century American Literature, page 567)
It was plain to see that in the 1920s not all writers believed America needed to involve itself in wars to end all wars. They believed that politics was inflicting itself to heavily on the American people and that people from all over the world were taking advantage of the kind-hearted nature of the Statue of Liberty. John Dos Passos was one such writer who felt this way, he said that Americans from all over the world, came and turned our language inside out” and “took the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul.” He wrote the History of the Republic in which he proclaims that the Italian anarchists have inflicted and corrupted the entire labor force, politics, and the values of our great nation. He couldn’t believe that our government would back so heavily the Italian mob. In this decade World War I may not have made the world safe for democracy, but it did help lay the groundwork for a decade of American economic expansion. Gigantic houses out on Long Island like those in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and the stocks that bankrolled the travels for the characters in the Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway would not have been culturally correct if it weren’t for the economic boom in the 1920s. This decade was something to love, something to live, and something anyone who lived during it will never forget. This decade is showed so wonderfully through the writing of its time. Those who lived through this decade were impacted so much by the new technology beginning to surface due to the economic boom and the political debates that it is hard to understand this decade without understanding how the politics of this time affected people. The literature of this decade really captured those feelings and debates well. Therefore it is clear that the war to end all wars impacted everyone in this decade somehow and the political-economic system of buying on margin made almost everyone rich. It is also clear that the jobs created by the war and political incentive to move forward created the topics for a whole score of remarkable books capturing with great detail the roaring twenties. Now every time F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, or anyone of the many authors of that time are read it will be apparent just what was felt and going on it that incredible decade.
Works Cited:
It seemed that the more the world changed, the more the United States governed its people. The more the United States governed its people the more the people had to say about it; and oh what they had to say. Attitudes were formed and if a person’s social status wasn’t of Bourgeois, the norm for that time, then it was of the poor and no respectable person of that time was poor. It seemed that money helped define the social status and keep the people pf this decade segregated. People like Dorothy Parker and Langston Hughes, in response to the Bourgeois, headed up the Harlem Renaissance of African American writers. These writers had no trouble expressing their troubled times. They didn’t believe in the only good social status was the rich, white, American, male and they wanted to world to know that. They wanted the world to know that they were not poor by choice and they were not bad people, they were just people like everyone else. Langston Hughes wrote a poem Southern Gentle Lady that expressed the hard times that African American people went through in the 1920s. He speaks of “Southern gentle lady, do not swoon. They’ve just hung a black man in the dark of the moon.” In this section, he takes the typical African American woman working to feed her family and announces to her that in the shadow of the night they hung a man based on the color of his skin, and please don’t cry. He then says “They’ve hung a black man to the roadside tree in the dark of the moon for the world to see.” Again that in the shadows on the night a man was condemned for the color of his skin and he was hanging there for all the world to see, though the world was not allowed to see this act in progress. Lastly, he states “How Dixie protects its white womanhood. South gentle lady, be good! Be good!” establishing that again this act only happened due to the color of his skin and were he a white man the Dixie land of America would never have let this happen but because he was a southern black man he was left unprotected. Also that that southern gentle lady, while having every right to be mad at the times and the intolerable cruelty must rise above the hate and be good, as to not stoop to the white man's level. It is clear in Langston Hughes's poem that he was affected politically by Dixie’s ability to protect the white but not the black and therefore writing about how the American government in the 1920s still saw the black race as a separate but not yet equal part of the American society.
It then was said that, “Politics became an arena for defending traditional rural values. The revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s manifested itself in the political conflicts associated with Prohibition, which divided Americans according to race, religious beliefs, cultural practices, and residential local.” (American Decades 1902-1929, page 758) This proves the extent of the contempt toward the African American culture but also establishes political contempt during the 1920s for any individual or group that fell outside of tradition. This brought about the Lost Generation of white writers who, just like those of the African American race, expressed their same trials and tribulations with society, the prohibition, and their anti-war beliefs. This group consisted of writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernst Hemingway, and E.E. Cummings, just to name a few, who wanted the whole world to know what money on margin and world wars were really doing to the American Bourgeois and post-war veterans. F. Scott Fitzgerald presented us with characters such as Jay Gatsby, the man who made his money off bootleg booze to try and establish himself to win over Daisy only ending in Gatsby’s emotional and physical demise. Ernst Hemingway created Lady Ashley the “perfect product of the postwar world” whose main activities included “ having drinks, lovers and passionate moments”. She was in Hemingway’s mind the perfect reflection of a “hard-boiled flapper” she could drink anyone under the table and she could always explain why six cocktails grew where one grew before. She displayed all the attributes of a typical woman of the 1920s who enjoyed living the bohemian way of life because the American government felt it necessary to do away with alcoholic beverages. E. E. Cummings wrote The Enormous Room where he “suggested a philosophy of war compounded equally of resignation, hatred for all authority, and an almost abstract cynicism.” (Twentieth-Century American Literature, page 569) Many went on to say that this book was the “first to express for America the emotions of those artists, students and middle-class intellectuals who were to constitute the post-mortem war generation, and whose war experience was to transform their conception of life and art.” (Twentieth-Century American Literature, page 567)
It was plain to see that in the 1920s not all writers believed America needed to involve itself in wars to end all wars. They believed that politics was inflicting itself to heavily on the American people and that people from all over the world were taking advantage of the kind-hearted nature of the Statue of Liberty. John Dos Passos was one such writer who felt this way, he said that Americans from all over the world, came and turned our language inside out” and “took the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul.” He wrote the History of the Republic in which he proclaims that the Italian anarchists have inflicted and corrupted the entire labor force, politics, and the values of our great nation. He couldn’t believe that our government would back so heavily the Italian mob. In this decade World War I may not have made the world safe for democracy, but it did help lay the groundwork for a decade of American economic expansion. Gigantic houses out on Long Island like those in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and the stocks that bankrolled the travels for the characters in the Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway would not have been culturally correct if it weren’t for the economic boom in the 1920s. This decade was something to love, something to live, and something anyone who lived during it will never forget. This decade is showed so wonderfully through the writing of its time. Those who lived through this decade were impacted so much by the new technology beginning to surface due to the economic boom and the political debates that it is hard to understand this decade without understanding how the politics of this time affected people. The literature of this decade really captured those feelings and debates well. Therefore it is clear that the war to end all wars impacted everyone in this decade somehow and the political-economic system of buying on margin made almost everyone rich. It is also clear that the jobs created by the war and political incentive to move forward created the topics for a whole score of remarkable books capturing with great detail the roaring twenties. Now every time F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, or anyone of the many authors of that time are read it will be apparent just what was felt and going on it that incredible decade.
Works Cited:
- Peggy Whitley, Http://kclibrary.nhmccd.edu/decade20.html, May 2002
- Harold Bloom, Twentieth-Century American Literature, Volume 2-3, Pages 567-569
- Judith S. Baughman, American Decades 1920-1929, Volume 3, Page 758.