Twenties-Something

Gary Alan Fine from the July 1995 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

It seems clear that the ultimately successful effort against Prohibition supports the idea of a turn in America toward a masculinist culture. And yet the rapid passage of the 18th Amendment, the struggles over its enforcement, and the continued presence of prohibitionary impulses regarding other substances surely indicate that the victory was incomplete. Similarly, bringing women into the polity "masculinizes" them in the sense of giving them a distinct stake in the political process. But it also provides the ideology of gentility with a political base, presaging today's political gender gap: a point not to be lost on the primarily masculine libertarian movement.

Had Douglas showed a fuller recognition of the scene outside of New York (and urban areas in general), she might have exercised more interpretive prudence. What is happening in New York, important though it is for the growth of American culture, does not always map onto movements throughout the land. Douglas claims an American exceptionalism--a unique quality to American life, essentially a national character. Yet, to make this claim is to ignore the gaps between Southern religious revivalism, the spread of the Ku Klux Klan in the industrial heartland, the battles over Hollywood and its scandals in the Pacific West, and the remnants of progressivism and populism on the plains.

Certainly, New York is in part a microcosm of the rest of the nation, but it is also a distinctly different world: a world in which race, religion, and gender politics played themselves out in ways that much of the rest of the nation would find repugnant. To focus on Manhattan culture hardly explains the nationwide Republican ascendancy throughout the decade: To ignore the economic structure of the society downplays the effects of the remarkable years of prosperity: an economic record as significant--if less dramatic--as the crisis of confidence provoked by the Depression that followed. Good news always bows to bad.

Perhaps the greatest lesson of the '20s is in the possibilities of freedom. This lesson is drawn most dramatically in Douglas's description of the flowering of Harlem's African-American culture but is equally apparent in downtown literary cultures, and in laissez-faire politics. For a time, most Americans felt that freedom was theirs, without the burdens of a communal culture or intrusive government. It is a lesson with which we struggle every few decades, always to be reined in by those forces that suggest that others know best. Honesty can be terrible to the guardians of morality.