The 1920s vs the 2020s

When I give presentations about the Roaring Twenties, I can’t help but compare that decade to the present. There are so many, many similarities, it’s almost as if we are re-living that era. Now comes an editorial in the Richmond Times-Dispatch saying much the same thing. It’s not too long. have a look:

The 1920s are remembered as the Roaring Twenties. How will our ’20s be remembered? Guess we have to live through them first, but it’s worth looking back at the last decade with this name. Those ’20s turned out to be consequential years that still shape our lives today.

The 1920s began, as our own will, with a presidential campaign. The winning candidate that year promised a “return to normalcy” — a word that earned Warren Harding jeers from grammarians but a landslide victory from voters. We’ll see in November what version of “normalcy” today’s voters prefer.

That election was also the first in which women were allowed to vote; the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified just in time. In this year’s centennial of women’s suffrage, we now have a woman presiding as U.S. House Speaker — for the second time — and a woman four years ago received more votes for the presidency than her rival (just not enough electoral votes). When the General Assembly convenes Wednesday, we’ll see a record number of women in the state legislature —11 out of 40 in the state Senate and 30 out of 100 in the House of Delegates. Moreover, Virginia will see its first women (all Democrats) as House speaker (Eileen Filler-Corn of Fairfax), House majority leader (Charniele Herring of Alexandria) and chair of the Senate Finance Committee (Janet Howell of Fairfax).

The 1920s might seem quaint to us now, but at the time they felt like an unsettling break from tradition and a headlong rush into modernity. We remember flappers stylistically, but more substantively the 1920s saw first-wave feminism, the Harlem Renaissance and what at the time was an unprecedented openness about homosexuality — at least in urban centers such as New York and London, Paris and Berlin.

Then, as now, technology drove social change. Cars were mass-produced. Telephones become commonplace household items; by decade’s end nearly 41% of American homes had one. The rural-urban divide of the ’20s involved electrification; today it’s broadband internet. Robert Goddard blasted off his first liquid-fueled rocket in 1926; today we’ve ridden rockets to the moon and are talking about sending people to Mars. Charles Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic in 1927; today planes crisscross the globe as a matter of routine. Alexander Fleming discovered something he called penicillin in 1928; medicine today cures diseases we scarcely knew existed a century ago.

Jazz wasn’t invented in the ’20s, but the ’20s became the jazz age. It’s still with us, just not as the dominant musical genre. Movies boomed; vaudeville died. By the decade’s end, movies had evolved, too — silent films were history, “talkies” were in. It’s hard for most people to name a sports figure from before the ’20s but everyone knows the name Babe Ruth. He joined the New York Yankees a century ago this year. The National Football League played its first season in 1920, albeit under a different name.

All that sounds like progress and — unless you were a Boston Red Sox fan who regretted the Ruth trade — it was. The ’20s, though, were not an unyielding arc bending toward progress. The ’20s saw a dark surge of racism across America, partly in response to decades of large-scale immigration and the domestic migration of African Americans from the South to the North. The Klan saw its membership soar; by some estimates by 1924, some 1.5 million to 4 million people were members of that hateful organization. The ’20s also saw a wave of Confederate nostalgia, powered both by the Civil War generation dying off and a reaction to the social changes people saw around them.

The ’20s saw the advent of prohibition. That era passed, but today we’re dealing with a different sort of prohibition as states begin to loosen the laws banning marijuana. In Virginia, Attorney General Mark Herring has proposed the state eventually legalize cannabis. It was in the 1920s that American states first began banning marijuana, culminating with a federal ban in 1937.

In Virginia, the 1920s saw a new political era take shape. Harry Byrd was elected governor in 1925 on a promise of building roads — the demand for better roads was a direct consequence of all those cars being mass produced in Detroit. There had been a dominant political organization of conservative Democrats before him; under Byrd it became more formally known as the Byrd Machine and it ruled Virginia with an iron grip until the 1960s.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” Mark Twain is supposed to have said. A century ago in the ’20s, we were dealing with the rights of women and minorities, vast technological and social changes, immigration, intoxicating substances and a state dominated by one political party. In our ’20s, we still are.

— Adapted from The Roanoke Times

Who was Lois Long?

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Lois Long was only twenty-three when she started writing for the new magazine, the New Yorker. The Vassar-educated daughter of a Congregational minister, Lois must have horrified her parents with her wild flapper ways. The stereotypical “minister’s daughter,” she covered the city’s nightlife scene with its speakeasy lifestyle, mixed race crowds, drinking and dancing, and flappers. But she didn’t use her real name–she signed her columns “Lipstick”–so maybe Daddy never knew . . . I got some good tidbits for my novels from her writing: for example, her choice of words and slang and her descriptions of the customers and speakeasies.

Click here to see the excellent Ken Burns 7-minute film about Lois Lang that includes some of her biting commentary on New York speakeasies.

SLEUTH: What sort of word is that?

What do you think of when you hear the word “sleuth?” I think of Nancy Drew.

That made this post on Merriam-Webster’s word origins site pretty interesting, especially for someone like me who writes mysteries.

The etymology of SLEUTH:

“They were the footprints of a gigantic hound!” Those canine tracks in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles set the great Sherlock Holmes sleuthing on the trail of a murderer. It was a case of art imitating etymology. When Middle English speakers first borrowed sleuth from Old Norse, the term referred to “the track of an animal or person.” In Scotland, sleuthhound referred to a bloodhound used to hunt game or track down fugitives from justice. In 19th-century U.S. English, sleuthhound became an epithet for a detective and was soon shortened to sleuth. From there, it was only a short leap to turning sleuth into a verb describing what a sleuth does.

Examples of SLEUTH

“Farmer would go sleuthing in the archives of Arizona State University’s Center for Meteorite Studies to find evidence of an undiscovered landfall in Canada, and Ward could build a rig that trailed an 11-foot metal detector behind a combine, which is how they unearthed $1 million in pallasite fragments from several square miles of Alberta farmland.”
— Joshuah Bearman and Allison Keeley, Wired, January 2019

“For more than five decades, Morse has sleuthed out long-lost family trees for a living. From his home base here in Haywood, Morse travels the world tracking down missing heirs.”
— Becky Johnson, The Mountaineer (Haywood County, North Carolina), 20 Nov. 2018

Tap Dancing History

I stumbled across this interesting video. Don’t worry-it’s short. Have a look. Tap Dancing History

 

 

Prohibition Abroad

We forget sometimes (or I do, at least) that alcohol prohibition was not solely an American phenomenon. I was reminded of that recently, as I traveled through Central Asian countries of Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. In each country, our guides mentioned the prohibition era of 1985-1987, when Gorbachev launched a campaign that seems to have been partial prohibition. Prices on alcohol were raised and sales were restricted, but more serious than that, existing wineries and breweries were shut down and farmers were forced to cut down their grape vines. It sounded a lot like the 1920s in America. One of our guides said that his grandmother had to cut down her vines, but since the prohibition was rescinded after only a couple of years, the roots hadn’t been dug up and the vines came back, giving Grandma back her home-made wine production. Since Prohibition lasted 13 years in the U.S., farmers here weren’t as fortunate.

Russia (pre-Soviet Union) did have a go at complete prohibition back in 1914 when World War I broke out. In an effort to make sure soldiers didn’t drink, they banned all sales of alcohol, except in restaurants, which allowed the tiny number of rich Russians to continue consuming whatever they wanted. Predictably, it had about as much success as Prohibition in the U.S., which is to say, very little.

Today, I was glad to see, the secular countries of Central Asia have no such restrictions on alcohol. Wine, beer, and liquor is sold in bars and clubs and restaurants and hotels, and we were able to visit two active wineries. We enjoyed tasting the local wines whenever possible, even though they were not generally the sort I like. Central Asians prefer sweet red wines and don’t make or drink much white–I like my wine dry, red and white.

As an aside, if you are trying to come up with an unusual, safe, and fascinating trip, consider Central Asia. The best country is Uzbekistan. Its cities–Tashkent, Bokhara, Khiva, and Samarkand–have magnificent sights. The only drawback (besides the sweet red wine) is the distance.

George Will’s history lesson touches my books

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you’ve read THE IMPERSONATOR, you may remember a character who is running for public office named Henry. Henry is a bigot, typical of Oregonians (and many other Americans, it should be said) in the 1920s, who rails against Catholics, the Japanese, and private schools (because some were Catholic). Henry mentions that the current governor is a friend of the Ku Klux Klan, as is Henry himself.  In my third book in the series, RENTING SILENCE, the main character Jessie goes on a vaudeville tour in Indiana and comes up against serious threats from the KKK–but she can’t get help because the town’s entire police force are Klansmen. Some readers thought these portrayals were inaccurate–that the Klan was only in the South.

History books seldom go into enough detail to mention that the Klan was stronger in Indiana and Oregon than it was in parts of the South, but it is true. So I was delighted when conservative columnist George Will wrote about this in last week’s column. Here’s the excerpt:

In the Twenties, however, Oregon was a national leader in a different flavor of nonsense, as historian Linda Gordon recounts in “The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition.” The Klan’s revival began in 1915 with the romanticizing of it in the film “Birth of a Nation,” adapted from the novel “The Clansman” by Thomas Dixon. He was a John Hopkins University classmate and friend of Woodrow Wilson, who as president made the movie the first one shown in the White House. Wilson was enraptured: “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

The resuscitated Klan flourished nationwide as a vehicle of post-World War I populism. It addressed grievances about national identity — pre-war immigration (too many Catholics and Jews) had diluted Anglo-Saxon purity — and disappointment with the recalcitrant world that had not been sufficiently improved by, or grateful for, U.S. involvement in the war.

Gordon, who grew up in Portland, says: “Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, and extending through the mid-twentieth century, Oregon was arguably the most racist place outside the southern states, possibly even of all the states.” By the early 1920s, “Oregon shared with Indiana the distinction of having the highest per capita Klan membership” because the Klan’s agenda “fit comfortably into the state’s tradition.”

In 1844, Oregon territory banned slavery — and required African-Americans to leave. Prevented by federal law from expelling African-Americans, Gordon says it became the only state to ban “any further blacks from entering, living, voting or owning property,” a law “to be enforced by lashings for violators.” The state offered free land, but only to whites. It imposed an annual tax on non-whites who remained. Oregon refused to ratify the post-Civil War Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments (not doing so until 1959 and 1973, respectively).

In 1920, Oregon’s population was 0.006 percent Japanese (they came after the federal government banned Chinese immigration in 1882), 0.3 percent African-American, 0.1 percent Jewish and 8 percent Catholic. To make living difficult for Japanese, Gordon says, the state “banned immigrants from operating hospitality businesses.” In 1923, only one state legislator voted against barring immigrants from owning or renting land. In advance of today’s progressive hostility to private schools competing with government schools, Klan-dominated Oregon — it was primarily hostile to Catholic schools — banned all private schools. In 1925, in Pierce v. Society of Sisters (Gov. Walter Pierce was a Democrat and, Gordon says, “an ardent Klan ally”), the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down this law.

Interesting, huh? Thanks, George Will, for elaborating on this subject.

The Girls in the Picture: Book Review

I just finished the new book by Melanie Benjamin titled The Girls in the Picture, a fictionalized version of the lives of two women who were massively influential in the development of both silent movies and talkies: Mary Pickford and Frances Marian. Mary Pickford was the stage actress who moved into silent movies in her teens, when they were little more than one-reel “shorts” filmed in New York. “Little Mary” became the first international movie star and is credited with inventing modern screen acting techniques. Although she never went to school, she had a brilliant mind (“a man’s brain,” as it was called then) and became a sharp businesswoman and the founder of United Artists. She was also probably the richest woman in the world at one point. Frances Marian wasn’t quite the star that Mary was, but she wasn’t an actress either–she was a writer who penned “scenarios” for silent films and later wrote scripts for talkies. She and Mary were close friends from their early days, although they drifted apart during middle age.

The book is written from the first-person POV of Frances Marian, in alternating chapters, one about Mary, the next about Fran. Mary’s chapters are written in third person. I wondered why. The effect was to make Fran the effective narrator, and a stronger character than Mary.

As a historian focusing on the 1920s for my own novels, I’ve done tons of research into the era, so I had to smile when I read the author’s note at the end describing her research. She and I have studied the exact same histories, biographies, and autobiographies, which perchance explains why I found every detail in her story so familiar. I commend the thorough research job she did. She also did a good job trying to explain some of the unexplained aspects of these women’s lives, such as why Mary Pickford became such a recluse and what happened to destroy her marriage to Douglas Fairbanks. There are only so many pages in a novel, so the story focuses on the early years when the two women worked together and were close friends. Once they reach middle age, the story pretty much ends. I wish the author had not had to leave out the two children Pickford adopted, and I would like to have read more about Douglas’s death, Lottie’s and Jack’s deaths, and many other important events in their later lives, but maybe she’s planning a sequel!

If you like silent films and enjoy learning more about the famous names of that era–Charlie Chaplin, Lilian Gish, Fred Thomson, W.D.Griffith, Marie Dressler, and Adolph Zukor, to name a few–you’ll enjoy this book. Although I already knew tons about Mary Pickford, I knew much less about Fran Marian. I think that’s why I enjoyed those chapters the most, because I was learning something about a woman who made a significant contribution to the art of film-making, one that isn’t widely acknowledged or even known today. These two were the two most important women in the history of movies. It’s about time someone wrote a book about them!

Need Christmas Present Idea?

Need a Christmas present or hostess gift for someone who likes to read? Consider giving a journey back into the Roaring Twenties via my Roaring Twenties mysteries, set in 1924 with a vaudeville and silent movies backdrop. The first in the series, THE IMPERSONATOR, won the national award for Best First Crime Novel in 2012, the second, SILENT MURDERS, had a terrific review in the New York Times. 

Find them in your local bookstores, libraries, or online at amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.

Take one missing heiress, an unscrupulous uncle, and a young vaudeville performer fallen on hard times; add several murdered girls, a mysterious Chinese herbalist, and a handsome bootlegger; then move from the seamy world of Prohibition-era vaudeville to Oregon’s rugged coast, and what do you have? A formula for suspense, as Jessie finds herself torn between her deceitful charade and her determination to find out what really happened to the girl she is impersonating.

 

 

In the second Roaring Twenties murder mystery, Jessie trades her nomadic vaudeville life for a modest but steady job in the silent film industry. She quickly learns that all Hollywood scorns the Prohibition laws: studio bosses rule the police and gangsters supply speakeasies everywhere with bootleg hooch and Mexican dope. When a powerful director is murdered at his own party and Jessie’s waitress friend is killed for what she saw, Jessie takes the lead in an investigation tainted by corrupt cops. Soon tangled in a web of drugs, bribery, and greed, she finds herself a prime suspect as the bodies pile up.

The third in the Roaring Twenties mystery series takes Jessie from silent films back into the world of vaudeville to track down a performer with something to hide. At the request of her silent film star boss, Mary Pickford, Jessie uses her vaudeville talents to investigate the murder of an extra by a Hollywood actress already sentenced to death for the crime. Her inquiries lead to the discovery of a blackmailer and more than a dozen actors facing ruin or even death if their secrets are exposed. If the convicted actress is innocent, then who killed the blackmailer?

The fourth book begins in the fall of 1925 when a projectionist is gunned down in the theater booth. The killer flees to the balcony and vanishes. Jessie’s investigation succeeds where the police fail, thanks to her vaudeville skills and connections. A killer seeking revenge for an Old World massacre is targeting a group of Balkan immigrants, one by one. Jessie deduces the reason the killer is never apprehended—but fails to spot the killer until it’s almost too late. A young deaf girl whose mother has gone missing plays a significant role.

 

 

 

 

STOLEN MEMORIES, below, is not part of the Roaring Twenties series, although it is set in that decade, in France and England.

A brutal attack along the banks of the Seine leaves a young Englishwoman close to death in a Paris hospital without a memory in her head. She soon comes up against a vengeful husband who accuses her of the theft of priceless art, the French gendarmes who have linked her to a murder on the Riviera, and a scorned lover who is trying to kill her. The husband, who believes his wife’s amnesia is faked, spirits her away to an ancient chateau in the French province of Champagne, where prehistoric dolmens and standing stones dot the fields and caves hewn out of limestone are used for more than storing wine. For weeks he tries threats, bribery, and hypnosis to pry the truth out of her. As her memory returns piecemeal–some corroborating, some clashing with what she is told–she struggles to establish her identity. But who is trying to poison her and bury her in an avalanche of slate? Who is laying a trap for her deep within the wine caves of Champagne? The story takes place in 1928 against a backdrop of pagan ritual and an early Christian midsummer festival known as the Fires of John the Baptist.

 

 

Vaudeville Travel

I spend a good deal of time in my mysteries dealing with vaudeville travel practices, because travel–especially train travel–was such an integral part of every vaudeville performer’s life. Performers paid for their own tickets. It was their single most costly expense they had, more than hotels or food. Most tried to leave town after the final performance on their last day, which would usually be late Saturday night, so they could sleep on the train and save the money for a hotel that night, and so they could arrive the next morning in time for rehearsal. 

Performers called each train ride a “jump.” They jumped to the next town on their itinerary. But booking agents were not arranging these jumps with any thought to efficiency, so often performers had to “back jump” or go in the opposite direction or re-trace their route. And railroad travel was unpredictable. Trains were often delayed by snow, landslides, or strikes, meaning the performers missed their next gig and a day’s or week’s pay. 

Here’s something I learned that doesn’t make it into my novels–trains in the 1920s were faster than they are today. Incredible? Yes, but true. Why? Less rail capacity and poorer rail quality, plus the dominance of freight travel over passenger travel.  Read this for more. 

A New Museum in Switzerland

Heading to Switzerland any time soon? There’s a new museum you might like to see. (I sure would.) They’ve taken Charlie Chaplin’s old home, located in a small lakeside town 50 miles from Geneva, and turned it into a museum–a fine museum, according to the New York Times article (attached), with re-creations of some of his more famous sets and of course, his films.

In my Roaring Twenties mysteries, Charlie Chaplin appears occasionally as the best friend of Douglas Fairbanks. They were inseparable for many years, until circumstances moved them apart. Fairbanks died quite young (56) in 1939; Chaplin lived to be 88 and died in 1977. Although he was English by birth and made Hollywood his home for decades, he spent the greatest portion of his life in Switzerland.

I’m going to be in eastern France next year, near the Swiss border. I think I’ll try to make this a side trip.