Anything Goes

Anything Goes

Review by Geoffrey Wawro

Like our age, the “roaring twenties” were propelled by a flood of borrowing and speculative bubbles in securities and real estate. Like our age, the air hissed unexpectedly out of the bubbles, leaving millions destitute. The similarities do not end there.

The twenties, Lucy Moore discovers, were the hinge period in modern U.S. history when “America threw off the chains of New England virtue” and embraced a carnal sensualism, materialism and indulgence. Weary of war and Woodrow Wilson’s earnest do-gooding at home and abroad, America threw itself into a whirl of self-indulgence. All of the cultural markers we take for granted today emerged then: celebrity culture, movie stars, professional sports, up-tempo music, big cities, booze, drugs, air travel and mass production.

Like the Jazz Age itself, the book dances blithely through the decade. Moore shows how hedonists like Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, whose transatlantic romance was raucous even for the times, defined the age of cads and flappers. Even normal folks slacked off; in the ‘20s, Americans started taking weekends off, and started spending more and saving less.

Industrial titans like Henry Ford and Walter Chrysler stamped the nation with a dangerous complacency; their prosperity and solidity were so evident that a crash seemed impossible. Lured by rising asset values, ordinary Americans bought stocks, but also land. Florida, Moore explains, was discovered and “developed” (in the real estate sense) in this period, as Americans poured money into get-rich-quick land schemes.

For all the bounce of the Jazz Age, the politicians seemed flat. Wilson’s soaring ambitions were replaced by no-nonsense Republican “normalcy.” Although Harding was nominated in part to attract first-time female voters, he was quite staid and dull. He is remembered chiefly for his long-running affair with a friend’s wife as well as his Teapot Dome scandal. There, in the Navy’s Wyoming oil patch, the president transferred the oil fields from the Navy to the Interior Secretary, who promptly leased them to the Sinclair Oil Company at good rates in exchange for bribes. Yet, Moore assures us, that skullduggery was just another symptom of the modern age and the jettisoning of “New England virtue.”

There is so much more in this book. America soared vertically in this period, as skyscraper buildings became the American emblem. Lindbergh shrank the world, by flying non-stop from Long Island to Paris in 1927. Amid all of the exuberance, Prohibition hung over the nation like a wet blanket, driving people into “speakeasies” and opium dens. Moore shows how the Volstead Act merely redirected alcohol revenues from merchants and governments to criminals like Al Capone, who bootlegged his way to a fortune, running clandestine liquor operations from Canada to Key West.

Lucy Moore paints a marvelous picture of the 1920s, sketching in the chief political, economic, cultural, social, commercial and technological trends in a brisk readable book that captures the greatness and vulnerability of America. If virtue was lost in that fizzy decade, it has hardly been regained in the years since.

Hardcover: 352 pages

Publisher: Overlook Press ( March 04, 2010 )

Item #: 23-9262

ISBN: 9781590203132

Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.25 x 0.88 inches

Product Weight: 16.0 ounces