The Roaring '20s, Then and Now
Tales of irrational exuberance from the Jazz Age to present day...
“I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”
~Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
“It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess and it was an age of satire.”
~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, Echoes of the Jazz Age
Surveying the extravagantly appointed dining room, thronged by cheerful revelers and dashing, bow-tied waitstaff, one could be forgiven for thinking the Great Covid Panic of 2020 was but a cruel figment of an overactive imagination, a crack in the matrix designed to test our powers of credulity.
To our left sat a pair of silver-winged businessmen who spoke enthusiastically of “retargeting” and “strategic alignment” and “increased visibility.” To our right, a stylish younger couple ordered cocktails and settled in for their gooey-eyed rendezvous. Overhead, a swirling crystal chandelier drew gasps of delighted approval from newcomers as they quaffed champagne from their own sparkling flutes.
Ingenuity, Arts and Industry
Perhaps it was the mood set by that afternoon’s river architecture tour (a must when visiting the Second City), or the heady effects of our own libation of choice (a classic, Parisian-style Sidecar) but we could not help harkening back to the Roaring Twenties, with all the glitz and glamour of that bygone era. What might the past be able to teach us about the future, we wondered. For if history does not repeat, goes the old saying, it does occasionally rhyme…
One hundred years ago the USA was still in the ascendency, en route to becoming one of the world’s great superpowers. She had emerged triumphant from WWI, whereas the great European empires – The Hapsburgs (Austro-Hungarians), Ottomans (Turks), Romanovs (Russians) and Wilhelms (Germans) – were left more or less in ruins. Then, as now, the pandemic of the day, the Spanish Flu, was also waning. It must have looked like nothing but blue skies ahead for the Americans as, along with New York City, Chicago led the nation’s inspired reach for the heavens.
Characterized by the exuberance of the era, the 1920s was a period of full faith in the social and technological progress of mankind. With the wind in her sails, America led the world in industry, innovation and production. The world’s largest economy grew more than 40% during that single decade, and per-person GDP rose from less than $6,500 to over $8,000. Stocks began the decade with the Dow Jones Industrial Average at just over 72 points. The index would more than quintuple, in nominal terms, over the epic bull run which took off in 1923. In 1925, a quarter of American families owned a car. By 1929, nearly a quarter of all American citizens owned one. In 1926, the Air Commerce Act authorized commercial airlines. From 1926 to 1929, the number of people flying in planes increased from 6,000 annually to 173,000.
Whichever way one looked, everything was up, up and away!
So it was during the Jazz Age that many of this city’s most iconic buildings were completed, including; the neo-gothic Tribune Tower (1922 – command post of the Chicago Tribune newspaper); the adjacent Wrigley Building (1924 – headquarters of the chewing gum empire); the armchair-like Civic Opera Building (1929); the towering Art Deco-style Palmolive Building (1929 – home to Palmolive-Colgate-Peet Corporation), with its beacon added and named for aviator Charles Lindbergh a year later; and our own personal favorite, the old Carbide and Carbon Building (1929 – headquarters of the first company to develop the dry cell battery), now refurbished and renamed the Pendry Chicago Hotel.
Though all stand as monuments to American ingenuity, arts and industry, it is the latter we find of particular note. As the rumor goes, it was erected in staunch (if symbolic) defiance of the federal government’s prevailing governance regarding the “manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors.” Clad in dark green and gold terra cotta, and topped in 24 karat gold leafing, the bold structure resembled – you guessed it – a 37-story champagne bottle. To this day the Carbide and Carbon Building stands as a giant middle finger to the government, plonked right in the middle of Capone’s Chicago, during the very height of prohibition.
And to that, we say: Cheers!
Ceres, Most Bounteous Lady…
Looking around the Adalina dining room, a sea of unmasked faces toasting to the new and bright future, it’s hard not to think about the go-go epochs of yore. But then, we remember our tour guide’s haunting words from earlier in the day…
“Take another look across the skyline. You see all the buildings constructed during the thirties and forties?”
The collective necks strained sorely upward… in vain.
The mighty Merchandise Mart and the Ceres-topped Chicago Board of Trade Building (both completed in 1930) were among the last of the city’s ambitious projects to touch the sky before the long lull that followed. After the Great Crash of 1929, the ‘30s and ‘40s belonged to depression and war. In place of innovation, industry and the pursuit of beauty came destruction, demolition and the reckoning of debts long due.
Not until the clean and simple lines of Mies van der Rohe’s Lake Shore Drive apartments (1951) picked up on the International Modernist movement, more than two decades later, was the pall finally lifted. Van der Rohe’s “skin and bones,” minimalist architecture was characterized by a simple philosophy: Less is more.
As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1931, reminiscing over an era of excess he himself helped define, “Now once more the belt is tight and we summon the proper expression of horror as we look back at our wasted youth.”
Regards,
Joel Bowman
Chicago Il. ~ USA
Joel, you write:
“The mighty Merchandise Mart and the Ceres-topped Chicago Board of Trade Building (both completed in 1930) were among the last of the city’s ambitious projects to touch the sky before the long lull that followed. After the Great Crash of 1929, the ‘30s and ‘40s belonged to depression and war. In place of innovation, industry and the pursuit of beauty came destruction, demolition and the reckoning of debts long due.”
If you haven’t already read Mark Thornton’s “The Skyscraper Curse” (2018), you may download it free from the Mises Institute website. The pdf version can be found at https://bit.ly/3Ig2YNk. Thornton is an economist of the Austrian school. Here is a passage from his book’s “Introduction”:
“Skyscrapers are essentially part of the boom phase of the cycle. The cause of both is artificially very low interest rates and artificially very easy credit conditions. This cause results in new record-breaking skyscrapers, a boom in the economy, and eventually a substantial economic crisis — the skyscraper curse.”
Given the recent boom in building very tall buildings in New York City, it appears that Thornton’s thesis may soon get vindicated again.
I always look forward to reading your essays—even those that paint pictures of the economic and social catastrophes that surely lie ahead.
Having just returned from Chicago, and reveling in the memories of said boat tour, this piece hits particularly close to home. Well done.