Chapter 5

The ‘Golden Twenties’

The ‘new era’, the ‘Jazz Age’, the ‘Golden Twenties’—this was how
media and mainstream politicians extolled the United States of the
1920s. It had emerged from the war as the world’s biggest economy,
prospering while Britain and Germany tore at each other, buying up
many of Britain’s overseas investments and continuing to grow until
output in 1928 was twice what it had been in 1914.
The growth was accompanied by a seemingly magical transfor-
mation in the lives of vast numbers of people. The inventions of the
1890s and early 1900s, which had previously been restricted to small
minorities of the rich, now flooded into mass use—the electric light,
the gramophone, the radio, the cinema, the vacuum cleaner, the re-
frigerator, the telephone. Henry Ford’s factories were turning out the
first mass produced car, the Model T, and what had been a rich man’s
toy began to be seen in middle class streets, and even among some sec-
tions of workers. Aircraft flew overhead with increasing frequency, and
reduced the time of the cross-continental journey from days to hours
for the fortunate few. It was as if people had been plucked overnight
out of darkness, silence and limited mobility into a new universe of
instant light, continual sound and rapid motion.
The phrase ‘Jazz Age’ gave expression to the change. There had
always been popular musical forms. But they had been associated
with particular localities and particular cultures, since the mass of
the world’s peoples lived in relative isolation from one another. The
only international or inter-regional forms of music had been ‘classi-
cal forms’, provided for relatively mobile exploiting classes, and some-
times religious forms. The growth of the city in the 18th and 19th
centuries had begun to change this, with music and dance halls,
singing clubs and printed sheet music. However, the gramophone
and radio created a new cultural field receptive to something which
expressed the rhythms of the industrial world, the tempo of city life
and the anguish of atomised existence in a world built around the

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market. Jazz, or at least the watered down jazz that formed the basis
of the new popular music, could take root in this. It was created out
of a fusion of various African and European ‘folk’ idioms by the former
slaves of the American South as they toiled to the dictates of com-
modity production. It was brought North with a huge wave of mi-
gration from the cotton and tobacco fields to the cities of the world’s
most powerful capitalism. And from there it appealed to millions of
people of all sorts of ethnic backgrounds and in all sorts of countries,
carried forward on the tide of capital accumulation.
All this happened as recession and unemployment became a mere
memory and people began to take ‘prosperity’ for granted. The US
economist Alvin H Hansen expressed the prevailing wisdom when
he wrote in 1927 that the ‘childhood diseases’ of capitalism’s youth
were ‘being mitigated’ and ‘the character of the business cycle was
changing’.147 Another economist, Bernard Baruch, told an interviewer
for the American Magazine in June 1929, ‘The economic condition of
the world seems on the verge of a great forward movement’.148
The conflicts of the past also seemed a distant memory to the
middle classes. The defeat of the steel strike in 1919 had destroyed
any will by the American Federation of Labour trade union organi-
sation to expand beyond the narrow ranks of skilled workers. A series
of police actions ordered by attorney-general Palmer and future FBI
boss J Edgar Hoover had smashed the old militants of the IWW and
the new militants of the Communist Party. Workers who wanted to
improve their own position saw little choice but to put faith in the
‘American Dream’ of individual success—as future Trotskyist strike
leader Farrell Dobbs did when he voted Republican, planned to open
a shop and aspired to be a judge.149 Leading economists, businessmen
and political figures such as John J Raskob, chair of the Democratic
National Committee and director of General Motors, declared that
‘everybody ought to be rich’ and claimed they could be if they put a
mere $15 a week into stocks and shares.150
There even seemed hope for the poorest groups in US society. Im-
poverished white ‘dirt farmers’ from Appalachia and black sharecrop-
pers from the South flooded to look for work in Detroit, Chicago and
New York. These were the years of the ‘Harlem Renaissance’, when even
the Northern ghetto could seem like a beacon of hope to the grand-
children of slaves. There was still immense black bitterness and anger.
But it was channelled, in the main, through the movement of Marcus

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Garvey, who preached a programme of black separation, black capitalism

and a ‘return to Africa’ which avoided any direct conflict with the US
system. For those who did not look below the surface of events the
‘American Dream’ seemed to be accepted everywhere in one form or
another as the number of people buying and selling stocks and shares
grew to record proportions.
The arrival of the new era and the Jazz Age was delayed in Europe.
In Germany the crisis of 1923—when it seemed either socialist revo-
lution or fascist rule was on the agenda—was followed by a brief spell
of savage deflation. But then loans from the US (the ‘Dawes Plan’) gave
capitalism a new lease of life. Industrial production soared to over-
take the level of 1914, and political stability seemed restored. Elections
in 1928 returned a Social Democratic coalition government, while
Hitler’s Nazis only received just over 2 percent of the poll and the
Communists 10.6 percent. In the summer of 1928 Hermann Müller,
leader of Germany’s Social Democrats, could exude confidence: ‘Our
economy is sound, our system of social welfare is sound, and you will
see that the Communists as well as the Nazis will be absorbed by the
traditional parties’.151
Britain had gone through a major social crisis two and half years after
Germany. The chancellor of the exchequer, Winston Churchill, was
determined to symbolise the restoration of British power by fixing the
value of the pound at its pre-war level against the dollar. The effect
was to increase the cost of Britain’s exports and lead to increasing un-
employment in core industries. The government set out to offset the
increased costs by a general cut in wages and an increase in working
hours, starting with the mining industry. The miners’ union refused to
accept this, and its members were locked out in May 1926. Other
union leaders called a general strike in support, only to call it off after
nine days, abjectly surrendering despite the effectiveness of the action,
and allowing the employers to victimise activists and destroy basic
union organisation in industry after industry.
Once the Ruhr crisis and the general strike in Britain were out of the
way, the tone of the new era in the US began to influence mainstream
thinking in Europe. The middle classes could benefit from the new
range of consumer goods produced by the mass production industries,
and it seemed only a matter of time before these spread to sections of
workers. And if the US could escape from economic crisis, so could
Europe. In Germany Werner Sombart echoed Hansen in stating, ‘There

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has been a clear tendency in European economic life for antagonistic

tendencies to balance each other, to grow less and finally to disap-
pear’.152 Not to be left out, Eduard Bernstein argued that his prophesies
of the peaceful transition of capitalism towards socialism were being ful-
filled. It would be absurd to call the Weimar Republic a ‘capitalist re-
public’, he wrote. ‘The development of cartels and monopolies had
brought about an increase in public control, and would lead to their
eventual metamorphosis into public corporations’.153 Even in Britain,
where unemployment continued to plague the old industrial areas, the
Trades Union Congress celebrated the first anniversary of the miners’
defeat by embarking on a series of talks with major employers, known
as the Mond-Turner talks. The aim was to replace conflict by ‘co-
operation…to improve the efficiency of industry and raise the workers’
standard of life’.154 A minority Labour government took office with the
support of the Liberals in 1929.
The belief that capitalism had achieved long term stability af-
fected the ruling group inside Russia. In 1925 its two increasingly
dominant figures, party general secretary Joseph Stalin and theoreti-
cian Nicolai Bukharin, took this belief to justify their new doctrine
that socialism could be achieved in one country. Capitalism had sta-
bilised itself, they claimed, making revolution unlikely.155 Taking up
the terminology of the German Social Democrat Hilferding, Bukharin
argued that the West had entered a stage of ‘organised capitalism’,
which permitted rapid economic expansion and made crises much less
likely.156

The birth of the new

If middle class public opinion and popular culture seemed to recover
some of their pre-war optimism in the mid-1920s, the recovery was
precarious. A generation of young men in Europe had seen their il-
lusions trampled in the mud of Flanders, and it was not easy to forget
this. The atmosphere was closer to cynical self indulgence than reborn
hope.
This found its reflection in the ‘high art’—the painting, sculpture,
serious music and literature—of the period. Even before the war
there had been a minority challenge to the comfortable belief in
steady progress. The mechanisation of the world already seemed
double-edged—on the one hand displaying an unparalleled power

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and dynamism, and on the other tearing to shreds any notion of

human beings ordering their own lives. Philosophical and cultural
currents emerged which questioned any notion of progress and gave
a central role to the irrational. These trends were encouraged as de-
velopments in theoretical physics (the special theory of relativity
in 1905, the general theory of relativity in 1915 and Heisenberg’s ‘un-
certainty principle’ version of quantum physics in the mid-1920s) un-
dermined the old mechanical model of the universe. At the same time
the popularity of psychoanalysis seemed to destroy the belief in
reason, once so important for Freud himself.157
Artists and writers attempted to come to terms with the novelty
of the world around them by a revolution in artistic and literary forms.
The ‘revolution’ was based on an ingrained ambiguity—on both ad-
miration of and horror at the mechanical world. What came to be
known as ‘Modernism’ was born. Characteristically the emphasis was
on formalism and mathematical exactness, but also on the discor-
dance of clashing images and sound, and dissolution of the individ-
ual and the social into fragmented parts. High culture up until the
mid-19th century (the Hungarian Marxist critic Georg Lukács argued
that 1848 was the key date) had centred on attempts by middle class
heroes and heroines to master the world around them, even if they
were often tragically unsuccessful.158 The high culture of the period
after the First World War centred on the reduction of individuals to
fragmented playthings of powers beyond their control—as, for ex-
ample, in Kafka’s novels The Trial and The Castle, in Berg’s opera
Lulu, in T S Eliot’s poem The Wasteland, in Dos Passos’s trilogy USA,
in the early plays of Bertolt Brecht and in the paintings of Picasso’s
‘analytical Cubist’ phase.
Yet the internal fragmentation of works of art and literature which
simply reflected the fragmentation around them left the best artists
and writers dissatisfied, and they tried with varying degrees of success
to fit the pieces into some new pattern which restored a place for hu-
manity in a mechanical world. The difficulty of doing so within a re-
ality which was itself fragmented and dehumanised led many to draw
political conclusions. Already by the 1920s Italian ‘Futurists’ had em-
braced the blind irrationality of fascism and Russian Futurists had
embraced the Russian Revolution’s rational attempt to reshape the
world. Through much of the decade most Modernists tried to evade
a choice between the two through a self conscious avant-gardism

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which deliberately cut them off from popular culture, even if bor-
rowing some of its idioms. They may not have shared in the illusions
of those years, but they did little to publicly challenge them. How-
ever disillusioned with the ‘Golden Twenties’, their Modernism still
took its assumptions for granted.
The world had been through a dozen years of war, revolution and
colonial rising. But by 1927 the consensus in international ruling
class circles was that the trauma was over. There were not too many
dissenters when US president Coolidge declared in December 1928,
‘No Congress of the United States has met with a more pleasant
prospect than that which appears at the present time.’ Few people had
any inkling of the horror to come.

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