Republic of Words: The Atlantic Monthly and Its Writers, 1857–1925

28. The Turbulent Twenties, I

The Turbulent Twenties, I images of flappers tossing back bootlegged gin seem to capture the spirit of the 1920s, but the decade that began after the infamously named “Red Summer” of racial violence, and a world mourning war deaths in the millions, also witnessed the Fifteenth Regiment, nicknamed Harlem’s Hell Fighters, marching through the heart of Manhattan to the beat of drum major Bill (“Bojangles”) Robinson. F. Scott Fitzgerald would have been the first to admit that no book, evenhisownGreatGatsby,couldwhollycommunicate the mercurial spirit of a decade that conformedtostereotypesnomorethanourowndoes . The Dow Jones Industrial Average reached one hundred points in 1920, and in the same year the Volstead Act outlawed the sale of alcohol and police arrested the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti for murder. Although the influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 had decreased the lifespan of an average American by ten years, men in 1920 could expect to live about fiftythree years and women slightly longer. The average family might afford an automobile, with a Ford costing slightly less than three hundred dollars, or about a third of a teacher’s annual salary. But notwithstanding peace and prosperity , the editors of the Atlantic recognized a crisis , in which the historic socioeconomic divide along class and racial lines now extended to the generations. If the magazine were to survive, it needed to appeal to flappers, college students, and returning veterans.1 28 The band began its music, and I saw A hundred people in the cabaret Stand up in couples meekly to obey The arbitrary and remorseless law Of custom. theodore maynard, “Jazz,” Atlantic, January 1922 The Turbulent Twenties, I [ 251 ] Still edited by Ellery Sedgwick, the Atlantic developed what might be called a split personality as it tried to bridge the distance between defiant youth and bewildered maturity. The generational gap was nowhere more apparent than in a chatty new feature called The Contributors’ Column, which the editors placed immediately after the long-running Contributor ’s Club. Although the juxtaposition of the two features, filling seven to twelve pages of any given issue, blurred their boundaries, there were differences . The Club tended toward amusing anecdotes with liberal social messages, while the Column focused on the magazine itself. The Column underscored the magazine’s tendency toward self-mythologizing, realized in “The Atlantic’s Bookshelf”—announcing books from the Atlantic Monthly Press, directed by Sedgwick—and “Atlantic Shop-Talk,” a potpourri of information that might include circulation figures or references to the magazine in other periodicals. The March 1922 issue noted the use of newspapers as texts and credited a contributor. Unlike the Club, which featured the work of contributors, the Column—simulating the day when readers mingled with authors in the Tremont Street office— offered the opinions of subscribers and an anonymous but more personal entity called “the editors.” Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed that the Atlantic was a notion, a vague idea or impression that relied on the vanity and loyalty of its readers . For many of its aging subscribers, it was also a family tradition that made them part of a self-identified American meritocracy. A Civil War veteran recalled for readers of the Column the day he fled his burning camp near Nashville with some hardtack and a copy of the Atlantic. People in their late seventies joked about young relatives referring to bound volumes of the magazine as “novels.” A woman living on a dairy farm wrote to say that she used to think the magazine too highbrow. Now, having inherited a cache of back issues, she credited the magazine with making her, a middle-aged mother of four boys, feel “an essential part of life” (April 1922).2 Her testimony must have provided cold comfort in a decade when the Saturday Evening Post’s circulation exploded from 2,000 in 1899 to 1 million in 1903, and a landmark 3 million in 1936. Ellery Sedgwick nevertheless prided himself on having increased circulation from a mere 6,000 in 1898 to 84,000 in the early 1920s.3 By 1924, a Time article (21 July 1924) on Sedgwick placed circulation at 117,352.4 On the principle that controversy sold magazines, the editors of the r e p u b l i c o f w o r d s [ 252 ] Atlantic emphasized changes in American manners and mores. Verbal battles between the generations figured predominantly in the easygoing Column, with its casual standard of...