Escape from Politics

Cathy Birkenstein-Graff Escape from Politics (on Chip Rhodes, Structures ofthe Jazz Age: Mass Culture, Progressive Education, and Racial Disclosures in American Modernism [New York: Verso, 1998]) George Jean Nathan, a theater critic in the 1920s who helped H.L. Mencken edit the sophisticatedly decadent journal, The Smart Set, boasted that, while the bombs were dropping in one of the first world war's most devastating battles, he was having a grand literary experience. On a day that some saw as the end of the world, Nathan explains, he worked on a chapter on aesthetics, then prepared and drank several excellent aperitifs .... The great problems of the world—social, political, economic, and theological —do not concern me in the slightest. If all the Armenians were to be killed tomorrow, and if half the Russians were to starve to death the day after, it would not matter to me in the least ... My sole interest lies in writing, (qtd. in Kazin 229) If you think the divorce of politics from culture is a recent development , think again. Certainly much of Nathan's confession here is intended to shock his readers' Puritan sensibilities. Yet the passage still illustrates what traditional literary scholars have seen as the dominant attitude of artists and intellectuals in the 1920s: one of escaping the struggle and flight of politics and history for the supposedly autonomous realm of the aesthetic. Critics from the 1930s and '40s such as Frederick Lewis Allen, Alfred Kazin, and Frederick Hoffman saw Twenties writers as disillusioned by the previous generation's political progressivism and its literary realism and naturalism. As a result, it is said, Twenties writers fled from politics to art, and from an increasingly commercialized America to an apparently real and authentic Europe. "The only place you could see life and death, i.e., violent death now that the wars were over," Hemingway wrote, "was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it" (qtd. in Kazin 314). It is this escape-from-history view of the so-called "moderns" that Chip Rhodes takes on in his insightful if cumbersomely-titled book, Structures of the Jazz Age: Mass Culture, Progressive Education, and Racial Disclosures in American Modernism. Rhodes's goal is to challenge this escape thesis, which he sees as still pervasive today, 348 the minnesota review by distinguishing between Twenties intellectuals and literary artists . He argues that while the escape thesis applies well to the decade's intellectuals, the decade's literary artists, and its novelists in particular, thematized and critiqued the very escapist tendencies attributed to them. Aself-declared Althusserian Marxist, Rhodes attempts to rethink the relationship of Twenties cultural productions to the period's political and economic landscape. Rehearsing material that has been around since Stuart Ewen's 1976 Captains of Consciousness, Rhodes explains that, with the decline of labor following the defeat of the great steel strike of 1919, the United States moved from a producerist to a more consumerist, mechanized economy. The rigorous discipline required by the period's rising Fordist, assemblyline modes of production was accompanied, paradoxically, by a shift away from an older, Franklinesque emphasis on discipline and frugality to a more dionysian license to consume and indulge. And indulge Americans , or at least middle-class Americans, did. Rhodes explains this "buying binge" in an interesting way. According to one economist he cites, the average household's ratio of savings to expenditures fell to 9 percent in the Twenties (86). Movies , cars, and nightclubs were among the nation's favored consumer items. In an engaging summary of the rise of the film industry, Rhodes shows how, to minimize risks and control profits, the "big eight" studios standardized their production and distribution processes . They employed the same stars repeatedly and turned increasingly to safe, formulaic scripts. They used strong arm tactics like "block booking," in which they forced out independents by compelling theater owners to run all of their films, or none at all. The studios also created opulent theater palaces, some with mirrored interiors, which encouraged even the most alienated Fordist workers to feel that, for a time at least, they were as regal as...