While from a boxing point of view, Dempsey had been softened by the luxurious life he was leading, from a domestic point of view he was still too close to what Gallico called "the disgusting things that every prize-fighter needs in his trade." He could not leave behind the savagery that he had once relied upon to win, and that had brought him his success; but it terrified Estelle. That was why she put so much pressure on him to retire-and that, ultimately, was why their pa.s.sionate, turbulent marriage was doomed to failure.
For Gallico, Dempsey"s wildness only "added to the picture rather than detracted from it, because I like my prize-fighters mean. Cruelty and an absolute lack of mercy are an essential quality in every successful prize-fighter...His brutality and viciousness are carefully cultivated, fed, and watered like a plant, because they are a valuable business commodity." But the qualities Gallico so admired in Dempsey"s fighting were gradually being eroded by his comfortable new life. By the time Dempsey agreed to defend his t.i.tle in 1926 he had virtually retired, having fought professionally only twice (against Carpentier and Firpo) in the past five years.
The man Tex Rickard pitted against his 31-year-old world champion was Gene Tunney, a First World War veteran from Greenwich Village billed as the "Fighting Marine." As with Carpentier, this was a gladiatorial battle of opposites. Twenty-nine-year-old Tunney was a sensitive, intellectual type as compared to Dempsey"s vicious tough-guy. While Dempsey, in Tunney"s words, "depended on his wallop," Tunney was a highly disciplined, intelligent technician who relied on tactics and skills. Tunney"s wholesome public image blended "self-improvement, social idealism, and physical toughness" in contrast to the perceived hedonism and immorality of his era. Like Charles Lindbergh, Tunney managed to rea.s.sure his fans that old-fashioned values could coexist alongside the positive aspects of modernity and science. He attributed his success in the ring to his study of physiognomy, psychology and boxing technique. Where Dempsey was unruly, self-indulgent, pa.s.sionate and spontaneous, Tunney was controlled, disciplined, methodical . . . and just a little boring.
The mood had changed at Dempsey"s training camp from the louche, carefree days in Saratoga Springs. Kearns was noticeably absent and the rich and famous Dempsey was guarded by detectives night and day. His relationship with Estelle was strained and he was suffering from eczema and intestinal flu, both brought on by stress. His retinue made excuses for him as he failed to land punches on his sparring partner, telling one another that he was taking it easy on his friend-but the truth was that Dempsey was not in ring condition. Physically and mentally he was no longer the "jungle Fighter" of the old days, but because Rickard persuaded him he could beat Tunney, Dempsey carried on. Dempsey"s reputation alone ensured that he was the 4-1 on.
A confident Tunney arrived in Philadelphia in an airplane for the fight, smiling and waving for the crowds. Over 120,000 people had come to the Sesquicentennial Stadium on a dark, damp September night, among them W. R. Hearst, Babe Ruth, Norma Talmadge (Constance"s sister), Florenz Ziegfeld, Charlie Chaplin, and the usual gathering of Astors, Rockefellers, Whitneys and Roosevelts in the $27.50 ringside seats, along side the sports-writers and commentators. a.s.sociated Press a.s.signed first eight and then ten men to cover the contest; the New York Times New York Times devoted seven pages of its central section (rather than its sports pages) to its coverage of the fight. Gate receipts totaled nearly $2 million. devoted seven pages of its central section (rather than its sports pages) to its coverage of the fight. Gate receipts totaled nearly $2 million.
Tunney"s game plan was to psych Dempsey out before the fight by a demonstration of bluff self-belief. As they got ready to enter the ring, Tunney made an impatient Dempsey wait, taking as long as he could to bandage his fists. Once they started fighting Tunney hung back, allowing Dempsey to think he was afraid of him, waiting for the moment when a newly over-confident Dempsey would make a mistake that would allow Tunney to strike. Dempsey said later that he knew he was beaten from Tunney"s first blow. Out of fight-practice, flat-footed, his timing off, the champion lost on points in a unanimous decision by the judges.
In defeat, though, Dempsey discovered something he had never known before: the support of the crowd. Always in the past his audiences had booed him while they bet on him to win, but never until the Tunney fight had they taken him to their hearts. "Losing was the making of me," he said later. "I had never been cheered before."
Paul Gallico described the moment when Dempsey made the transition from "most unpopular and despised" of sportsmen to best-loved. In the early hours of the morning the former champion made his way back to his room at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel where his wife, who could not bear to watch him fight, was waiting for him. Estelle took him in her arms and touched his purple, shapeless face tenderly. "What happened, Ginsberg?" she asked, using her pet name for him. "Dempsey grinned out of the good corner of his mouth," wrote Gallico: ""Honey, I forgot to duck."" Gallico believed that this dichotomy between Dempsey"s self-effacing gentleness outside the ring and his toughness inside it was the key to his appeal. "How wonderful to be so quiet, so gentlemanly-and yet so terrible!"
Moved by the crowd"s reaction to his defeat, yet devastated by the loss of his t.i.tle, Dempsey returned to Hollywood. Babe Ruth, whom he had first become friends with in the early 1920s, sat him down and told him to fight to regain his t.i.tle. Spindly-legged Ruth, "a connoisseur of booze, food and dames," was another sportsman-entertainer who understood the importance of giving everything to a compet.i.tion. The following summer he would hit the still unbeaten record of 60 home runs in the season for the Yankees.
Rickard scheduled a rematch for 364 days after the two boxers" first meeting, for 22 September 1927, this time in Chicago. Dempsey"s final training camp was "the quietest and dullest of all," said Gallico. Estelle was heavily medicated, teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown; Dempsey just wanted to win.
Dempsey met the young heavyweight Jack Sharkey in an elimination round for the t.i.tle bout in July. He knocked Sharkey out cold in the seventh round. Damon Runyon was more impressed by the audience which included an Indian maharajah, the circus impresario John Ringling and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As Runyon made his way to his seat, he said, he "fell under the hurrying hoofs of fourteen kings of the world of finance, twenty-nine merchant princes, six bootleggers and five ticket speculators, all owners of estates on Long Island and of Rolls-Royce cars."
Given that the Dempsey-Tunney rematch was taking place in Capone"s Chicago, Rickard"s greatest challenge was finding a straight referee-and there are still questions about whether or not he managed to. Capone had been a fan of Dempsey"s since 1919, when he had offered him whatever he wanted to stage an exhibition fight at his private club. This time he offered to ensure Dempsey"s win. As Jack told it, when he refused, Capone sent him an extravagant bunch of flowers. The note read, "In the name of sportsmanship." Capone was rumored to have bet $45,000 on Dempsey to beat Tunney. It was said that $2 million was wagered on the fight in New York alone.
Just before ten o"clock on the evening of 22 September 1927, the honeyed baritone of Graham McNamee came over the wire: "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen of the radio audience. This is the night." Seventy independent stations across the country had bought rights to McNamee"s presentation of the fight; even the inmates of Sing-Sing prison had been given permission to listen. The fight was the first radio program to be broadcast worldwide, bringing in an estimated total audience of fifty million people. The trajectory of Dempsey"s career had run in parallel to the burgeoning radio industry. In 1920, when fewer than one house in ten thousand had a radio set, the first radio station received its license in Pittsburgh. Two years later, 576 stations were transmitting and the industry was worth $60 million annually. Tens of millions of Americans heard Dempsey floor Firpo in 1923.
Once again the huge audience of over a hundred thousand was packed with celebrities, many of them Dempsey"s friends from Hollywood, including Charlie Chaplin, the disgraced Fatty Arbuckle, W. R. Hearst, Gloria Swanson, Irving Berlin, Doug Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Auto-magnate Walter Chrysler was there, as was Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. Al Capone sat with Damon Runyon. The box-office take was $2.5 million.
Perhaps for the first time, the public were overwhelmingly pulling for Dempsey to win. Boxing fans had begun to tire of Tunney"s know-it-all att.i.tude, his use of over-long words, his self-regarding superciliousness; they were no longer impressed by the volume of Omar Khayyam"s poetry that he liked to carry around with him to show that he was something more than a mere boxer.
Dempsey was better prepared for this second fight, in better health and hungrier to win, but once again Tunney outboxed him, exploiting Dempsey"s raw, undisciplined style. Dempsey was losing on points when he knocked Tunney to the ground with a left hook to the chin in the seventh round. As he always had done, Dempsey instinctively stood glowering over his opponent, waiting for him to get up so he could knock him down again.
But a recently introduced (and not yet universal) rule specified that when a boxer was knocked down, his adversary must retreat to a neutral corner before the referee began the count. Only after Dempsey had reluctantly allowed himself to be escorted to the corner did the official begin counting, buying Tunney additional time to recover from Dempsey"s blow. Tunney, after a few seconds seeming fully alert as he sat on the canvas, waited to get back on to his feet until the count of nine, although he had actually been down for between fourteen and seventeen seconds; he knew as well as Dempsey did that there was no need to get up before the official count reached nine. This controversial decision became known as the Long Count.
Back up, Tunney retreated before Dempsey"s furious advance, well aware that all he had to do to win was wait. "Over his swarthy, blue-jowled fighter"s face there spread a look which will never leave me as long as I live," wrote Gallico of Dempsey as he sensed his victim slipping out of his grasp. "First it was the expression of self-realization of one who knows that his race is run, that he is old and that he is finished. And then through it and replacing it there appeared a glance of such bitter, biting contempt for his opponent that for the moment I felt ashamed for the man who was running away. With his gloves Dempsey made little coaxing pawing motions to Tunney to come in and fight. That was it. Don"t run. Come in and fight. This is a fight. For that is what Dempsey would have done."
Tunney easily won the next three rounds and retained his t.i.tle on points by the judges" unanimous decision. Dempsey knew why he had lost: Tunney was such a formidable opponent because he lacked (or could control) the "fighting instinct" by which most boxers are governed. He couldn"t be tricked into the attack, wouldn"t take a chance, wouldn"t play to the crowd-just relied on being able to evade and outlast his opponent.
Some observers suspected that both fights had been fixed, although few dared to say so publicly. Anyone betting on Tunney in either fight would have made a handsome profit. Both fighters had criminal connections. Leo Flynn, the manager with whom Dempsey had replaced Doc Kearns, was thought to be an a.s.sociate of Al Capone"s. Despite his clean-cut image, Tunney had borrowed large sums from the Philadelphia mobster Boo Boo Hoff. Having watched their first fight in Philadelphia, Ring Lardner said, "Tunney couldn"t lick Dempsey if Dempsey was trying."
After his loss there was nothing else for Dempsey to do but retire. Tex Rickard died in his arms in early 1929, having refused an operation for appendicitis. Later that year Dempsey and Estelle were divorced. For a while he promoted fights for Al Capone, but when Capone "started giving orders [about] who was going to win and who was going to lose-and naming the round," Dempsey quit.
The ballyhoo that had surrounded Dempsey abated and he managed to build a life after his boxing career. In the 1920s a hero one day could be a n.o.body the next, but Dempsey"s vulnerability, as much as his invincibility, had earned him a lasting place in American hearts. "Nothing ever went to Dempsey"s head-not his money, not his t.i.tle, and not the amazing change in his social position," wrote Paul Gallico. He always "remained unspoiled, natural and himself."
Dempsey continued to fight in exhibition matches, wrote about boxing technique and, in the 1930s, opened a bustling chophouse in New York. He was luckier than some other sporting celebrities: the college football hero Red Grange, who in 1925 had been paid $12,000 for his first professional game with the Chicago Bears and soon afterwards signed a $300,000 movie contract, was by 1930 working at a Hollywood nightclub.
Looking back on Dempsey"s extraordinary career a decade later, Paul Gallico said that though Dempsey overshadowed his age, "we were all part of the Dempsey cult and we were blinded by our own ballyhoo." Dempsey was a victim of the American dream just as much as a symbol of it, puffed up by his promoters, and the hunger of the decade for heroes, into an expendable commodity rather than a man.
"I have seen the coming of the million-dollar gate, the seventy-thousand-dollar horse-race, the hundred-thousand-dollar football game, the millionaire prize-fighter, and the fifty-thousand-dollar golfer. I have witnessed an era of spending in sport such as has never been seen before and which may not be matched again, when the box-office prize for a single ringside seat for a heavyweight championship prize-fight was fifty dollars, and fetched as high as two hundred and fifty dollars a pair from speculators," wrote Gallico. "And I have seen the bubble collapse as sharply and completely as did the great stock boom, and watched prize-fighting go downhill from a million-dollar industry back to the small-time money from which it came."
The Chrysler Building"s architect, William Van Alen, dressed as his creation, with his wife at the Society of Beaux Arts Arthitects ball, 1931.
14.
CRASH.
JACK DEMPSEY WAS JUST ONE OF MANY AMERICANS COASTING to easy wealth on the boom years of the 1920s. While salaries and prices remained largely static, production increased J steadily, costs fell and corporate profits rose by 62 percent, feeding a national sense of optimism. Certain niche groups like farmers and textile workers excepted, most people had more money to spend and, as vacations became more common and working weeks shorter, more time to spend it on each new product the advertisers told them they couldn"t live without: wrist-watches, Reader"s Digest Reader"s Digest subscriptions, nylon stockings, cigarette lighters, ice-cream bars, movie tickets and crossword puzzle books. subscriptions, nylon stockings, cigarette lighters, ice-cream bars, movie tickets and crossword puzzle books.
"Society obeyed the impersonal law of progress," wrote Malcolm Cowley. "Cities expanded relentlessly year by year; fortunes grew larger; more and more automobiles appeared in the streets; people were wiser and better read than their ancestors-eventually, by automatic stages, we should reach an intolerable utopia of dull citizens, without crime or suffering or drama."
In January 1929 Ladies" Home Journal Ladies" Home Journal published an article ent.i.tled, "Everybody Ought to be Rich" by John Jakob Raskob, self-made financier and former vice president of General Motors, reportedly worth $100 million in 1928, who listed his occupation in published an article ent.i.tled, "Everybody Ought to be Rich" by John Jakob Raskob, self-made financier and former vice president of General Motors, reportedly worth $100 million in 1928, who listed his occupation in Who"s Who in America Who"s Who in America as "capitalist." He advised readers to save $15 a month, invest it in the stock market-and find $80,000 in their bank accounts in twenty years" time. Anything felt possible; everything fed the mood of buoyancy. Even Lindbergh"s successful landing in Paris prompted the stock market to shoot up another few notches. as "capitalist." He advised readers to save $15 a month, invest it in the stock market-and find $80,000 in their bank accounts in twenty years" time. Anything felt possible; everything fed the mood of buoyancy. Even Lindbergh"s successful landing in Paris prompted the stock market to shoot up another few notches.
Herbert Hoover, campaigning for president in the summer of 1928, declared that America was closer "to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land" and that soon poverty would be "banished from this nation." His message was so popular that 58 percent of the electorate voted for him. But perhaps Hoover had not seen the figures showing nearly three-quarters of the population living at or below the official minimum standard for a working-cla.s.s family, $2,500 per year. Despite the illusory grandeur of Hoover"s ambitions and the general sense of prosperity and advancement throughout the country, inequalities in wealth were vast and increasing. America"s thirty-six-thousand richest families collectively received as much per annum as the twelve million families (or nearly half the population) who sc.r.a.ped by on less than $1,500.
Not everyone was as bullish on America-to quote one of the phrases Frederick Allen said characterized the boom philosophy-as Raskob and Hoover. The problem was that as the economy continued its apparently inexorable rise the doom-sayers and disbelievers seemed so patently mistaken. "I wish to record my utter inability to understand why a lot of folks don"t go broke," said the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, as early as 1926. "These consolidations and security flotations plus the building boom, beat my comprehension-unless there is a breakdown within a year." But despite Brandeis"s legal eminence, his prediction of a financial collapse was (to say the least) premature, and no one heeded his warning.
In 1927 Scott Fitzgerald was interviewed by the New York World New York World. "The idea that we"re the greatest people in the world because we have the most money is ridiculous. Wait until this prosperity is over!" His interviewer was shocked to confusion: "In a pleasant corner of the Plaza tea garden he sounded like an intellectual Samson prophesying the crumbling of its marble columns."
Fitzgerald was an admirer of the historian Oswald Spengler, who, in The Decline of the West The Decline of the West, published between 1918 and 1923, outlined his theory that the United States had reached a stage comparable to that of Rome in the centuries after Christ"s birth-achieving a flowering of civilization that was nothing more than the precursor of its own destruction. According to Spengler, the modern "Cosmopolis" was the high point of this last stage, "vast, splendid, spreading in insolence...Here money and intellect celebrate their greatest and their last triumphs."
The "greatest and last triumphs" Spengler was picturing may well have been skysc.r.a.pers, the radiant symbols of energy, wealth and modernity for 1920s America. As one successful building contractor put it in 1928, skysc.r.a.pers were "the most distinctively American thing in the world...[epitomizing] American life and American civilization...the spontaneous product of a virile and progressive people," requiring all their courage, daring and ingenuity. In that boom year Americans spent $6 billion constructing new buildings, with the epicenter of the real estate bubble on the tiny island of Manhattan. There was nowhere else to go there but up. Estate agents, like stockbrokers, could foresee no end to the soaring prices.
Oswald Spengler saw the huge proportions of the skysc.r.a.pers, and their lofty disregard for nature, as swaggering signs of over-confidence. As the city grows from "primitive barter center to culture-city and at last to world-city," he wrote, "it sacrifices first the blood and soul of its creators to the needs of its majestic evolution, and then the last flower of that growth to the spirit of civilization-and so, doomed, moves on to final self-destruction."
This fateful transition from barter-center to doomed cosmopolis was well under way. By 1920, less than half of the American population still lived on farms or in small rural communities. An ideological division between go-getting city-dwellers and upstanding country-dwellers was becoming more marked, but there was ambivalence on both sides. Urbanites were nostalgic for the simple peace of farm life; countrymen were lured into the city by promises of easy money and high living. Middletown exemplified this trend. Its population was steadily boosted throughout the period of the Lynds" study by people from nearby villages and farming communities, but its most successful citizens tended to leave for even bigger cities.
New York was the pinnacle of American urban culture, the place where the ambitious dreamer from every small town believed that he, too, could make it big. The approach by sea produced the most dramatic effect on hopeful newcomers. Langston Hughes described the thrill of his first glimpse of Manhattan"s towers "with their million golden eyes, growing slowly taller and taller above the green water, until they looked as if they could touch the sky!" John Dos Pa.s.sos watched the buildings grow denser, forming "a granite mountain split with knifecut canyons . . . Steel, gla.s.s, tile, concrete will be the materials of the skysc.r.a.pers. Crammed on the narrow island the million windowed buildings will jut, glittering pyramid on pyramid, white cloudsheads piled above a thunderstorm."
From 1857, when the first building with pa.s.senger lifts was successfully completed in New York, architects had been using new materials like iron, steel and gla.s.s to create structures of dramatic and astonishing height. The first steel-framed building, using a riveted skeleton, was built in Chicago by William Holabird in the late 1880s. By 1900 all the industrial components required to create skysc.r.a.pers-steel framing and riveting, cable suspension, concrete-were in use and buildings of twenty storys and more were under construction in New York and Chicago.
The birthplace of the skysc.r.a.per, the Chicago school of the late nineteenth century, was utilitarian, distrustful of historical allusion, powerful, simple and direct. Chicagoan architects created buildings to reflect the work that went on inside them. Form did not just follow function, but dramatized it. The skysc.r.a.per"s "dominant chord must be tall, every inch of it tall," wrote Louis Sullivan, a prominent Chicago architect, in 1896. "The force and power of alt.i.tude must be in it, the glory and pride of exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing."
Because America was such a new country, with no established architectural traditions of its own, designers at the start of the century were granted extraordinary freedom to create, unhampered by existing forms or "ign.o.ble history." Spurred onwards by America"s burgeoning industrial and financial wealth, architects proclaimed their clients" prestige, power and wealth through height, creative use of color and form and dramatic nighttime illumination.
In 1925, New York claimed 522 buildings of ten storys or more. Thirty new office buildings went up in the city the following year. By 1929, there were seventy-eight buildings above twenty stories and nineteen above forty. "The appeal and inspiration lie, of course, in the element of loftiness, in the suggestion of slenderness and aspiration, the soaring quality as of a thing rising from the earth as a unitary utterance," wrote Sullivan.
America was in thrall to these cathedrals erected to their new G.o.d, success. Elinor Glyn was content simply to enjoy her stay at the Ritz Tower in 1927, then the highest inhabited building in the world; two years later Harry Crosby was so overwhelmed by staying on the twenty-seventh floor of the Savoy that he tried to persuade his wife to jump out of their hotel window with him.
But some commentators thought the buildings were "appropriate to an age of complacency," their extraordinary steel frames plastered with a jumble of derivative architectural styles intended to exalt the businesses who paid for them rather than extend creative endeavor. "Up to the present all that we can call a modern style consists of misappropriated fragments of antiquity," observed the architectural critic Louis Mumford derisively in 1921.
Frank Lloyd Wright, largely unappreciated during the 1920s, bewailed the lack of integrity in modern architecture, calling skysc.r.a.pers a triumph of "business-building" and d.a.m.ning the rise of "the suburban house-parade . . . chateaux, manor houses, Venetian palaces, feudal castles and Queen Anne cottages." He called in vain for a new architecture that would "broaden, lengthen, strengthen and deepen the life of the simplest man."
In an era dominated by business interests, domestic architecture floundered, true architectural innovation replaced by flash and derivation. The sleeping-porch so beloved by George Babbitt was considered the height of suburban design ingenuity. Far more attention was paid to the construction of highways, bridges, motels, airports and petrol stations than to the millions of new residential areas sprawling out across the country.
Perhaps the most beautiful and whimsical of the skysc.r.a.pers of the building boom of the late 1920s was the chrome-topped Chrysler Building, designed by William van Alen for Walter Chrysler"s three-year-old Chrysler Corporation, soon to be renamed Chrysler Motors. Chrysler had just been voted Time Time magazine"s Man of the Year (the first Man of the Year, the previous year, had been Charles Lindbergh), and the car industry in general, and Chrysler Motors specifically, was thriving. The Chrysler Building, intended to be the tallest building in the world, was to be a monument to their success as well as the most breathtaking of advertising h.o.a.rdings. magazine"s Man of the Year (the first Man of the Year, the previous year, had been Charles Lindbergh), and the car industry in general, and Chrysler Motors specifically, was thriving. The Chrysler Building, intended to be the tallest building in the world, was to be a monument to their success as well as the most breathtaking of advertising h.o.a.rdings.
Chrysler asked Van Alen to create "a cathedral of modern industrial design." Van Alen was a proponent of Art Deco, embracing color, pattern and texture, as romantic and eclectic as he was modern and utilitarian. He had studied architecture in Paris between 1908 and 1911 at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and would attend the annual Society of Beaux-Arts Architects" Ball in 1930 triumphantly dressed as his lofty, shimmering creation. While other Art Deco buildings incorporated Gothic or Mayan motifs, Van Alen used a modernist, theatrical "machine aesthetic" for the Chrysler Building. His design embodied "the emblazonment of automotive progress," adorning the building with winged radiator caps and a frieze of stylized mudguards and hubcaps. The reflective chrome vertex was planned to seem to melt into the sky. But most mesmeric of all was the Chrysler Building"s height. From its uppermost point, wrote one visitor nearly sixty years after its completion, "the city below appears as dreamy, distant, and unnecessary as the mercury-colored sea must look to an enraptured diver."
Like the building itself, the four monumental murals in the lobby were designed to exalt the automotive industry and its commitment to progress and civilization. The first mural uses a single worker to signify strength; the second portrays the natural materials of energy and how man harnesses it; the third, representing craftsmanship, is a group of portraits of fifty laborers who worked on the building itself: masons, riveters and riggers; the fourth is a paean to transportation, picturing ocean liners, dirigibles, trains and Lindbergh"s Spirit of St. Louis- Spirit of St. Louis-but no cars. Surmounting them all is the image of a virtuous knight, symbol of the good faith and sense of responsibility felt by the worthy industrialist towards the people whose lives his products were transforming.
Workers began their excavations into Manhattan"s mica bedrock in November 1928 and the first steel billet was set five months later. In September 1929, as brokers and office workers returned from their Labor Day break, the building was topped and installation commenced of the chromium-clad dome, spire and eagle-headed and -winged finials. Van Alen"s technical ingenuity and engineering were long-lasting; seventy years later, when the building was restored, none of the spire"s cladding needed replacing. The building was also noteworthy for its safe working conditions. At a time when on average one laborer died for every floor that was erected above the fifteenth, not one of the 2,400 men who worked on the thousand-foot-tall Chrysler Building was killed in its construction.
When it was finished, Architectural Forum Architectural Forum hailed the Chrysler Building as "simply the realization, the fulfillment in metal and masonry, of a one-man dream, a dream of such ambition and such magnitude as to defy the comprehension and the criticism of ordinary man or by ordinary standards." It represented not just the triumph of industry, but the triumph of aspiration. hailed the Chrysler Building as "simply the realization, the fulfillment in metal and masonry, of a one-man dream, a dream of such ambition and such magnitude as to defy the comprehension and the criticism of ordinary man or by ordinary standards." It represented not just the triumph of industry, but the triumph of aspiration.
The first office workers began moving into the Chrysler Building in April 1930, the month before its official opening. By the time it had been completed, that July, it had a 65 per cent occupancy rate. Tenants included Henry Luce"s Time Incorporated empire (whose Time Time magazine had hailed Walter Chrysler as Man of the Year) and the oil company Texaco as well as Chrysler Motors itself. magazine had hailed Walter Chrysler as Man of the Year) and the oil company Texaco as well as Chrysler Motors itself.
Considering the economic background, the Chrysler Building was an incredible success. Even in 1935, 70 percent of its office s.p.a.ce was full. By contrast the nearby skysc.r.a.per that overtook it as the tallest building in the world in 1931, the 102-story Empire State Building, was a flop. Built by John Raskob as a direct challenge to Walter Chrysler"s building, it cost over $26 million to construct (as opposed to $14 million for the Chrysler Building) and its offices were less than a quarter full when it was finished in 1931. It was not until the 1940s that it began to make money. New Yorkers nicknamed it the Empty State Building.
Walter Chrysler commissioned the Chrysler Building at precisely the moment when the great "Bull Market" of the late 1920s was rising to its frenzied peak. It was no accident that the era"s monument to success should have been raised by a car manufacturer. The stock market"s dramatic rise in 1928 and 1929 was fueled by the ever-increasing profits and expansion of companies like General Motors and Chrysler Motors.
By the late 1920s the automotive industry paid nearly a tenth of America"s manufacturing wages and made over a tenth of all her manufactured goods. Intoxicated by their own aggrandizement, automotive bosses had ceased, according to one commentator, "to worry about the saturation point." Walter Chrysler triumphantly declared that he and his a.s.sociates were "making the first machine of considerable size in the history of the world for which every human being was a potential customer." "Our present progress is but a beginning," he told the Chicago Tribune Chicago Tribune in 1928. "We have but culled the first fruits." in 1928. "We have but culled the first fruits."
The Bull Market began in the spring of 1928 when General Motors" stock price rose dramatically against Ford"s, following the delayed introduction of the Model A. Observers realized that General Motors would profit from Ford"s slowness. John Raskob, then vice president and treasurer of General Motors, gave an interview in which he said he thought General Motors stock was undervalued. Its price rocketed ten points in a matter of days, accounting on Monday 5 March for a third of all stock trades.
Chrysler Motors stock was also soaring: the Maxwell Company stock which Walter Chrysler had bought for $16 when he took over the company in 1921, and which became the Chrysler Corporation four years later, was worth $563 in 1928. Financiers and industrialists like Raskob and Chrysler publicly p.r.o.nounced that selling stock was "selling America short"-not just foolish but unpatriotic and possibly unchristian.
In the same month that Raskob kick-started the boom, and the same month that Cadillac sales in New York reached an all-time high, speculator Billy Durant headed a pool which invested heavily in the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). RCA had recently been acquired by the young buccaneer Joseph Kennedy. Durant"s well-connected consortium included John Raskob, committing $1 million; Walter Chrysler, investing $500,000; the steel magnate Charles Schwab; Percy Rockefeller, nephew of John D.; Joseph Tumulty, former aide to President Wilson; and the wife of the head of RCA. They raised a total of $12 million and made $5 million in a week. RCA stock went up from $85 at the start of 1928 to $420 by the end of the year.
Durant, the former head of General Motors, reportedly made $100 million during the boom years. He headed a group of Midwestern stock speculators with backgrounds in the Chicago grain pit or the automotive industry who became known as the "prosperity boys"; the press called him "the leading bull."
Pools-essentially market manipulation-were a special feature of the suggestible 1920s Bull Market. In 1927 pools sold to the public $400 million worth of securities; the following year that number had almost doubled to $790 million. Techniques used to raise the price of pool stocks included hiring publicity agents to spread positive news about a company, paying financial journalists to promote specific stocks, distributing biased "tipster sheets" to investors and using prominent investors" celebrity glitter to lure in smaller fish. Unscrupulous business practices were the norm in a virtually unregulated industry. Phrases like, "The possibilities of that company are unlimited unlimited," and "Never give up your position in a good stock," were repeated like mantras.
In late 1928 the National City Bank created a pool for Anaconda Copper (a Montana mine owned by investor Percy Rockefeller"s father, William) and started pushing its stock, then priced at $40, even though underwriters knew that copper was fetching weak prices in Chile. The share price leapt to $128 in three months and at its peak in October 1929 was selling for $150. Anaconda Copper became one of the magic phrases of the boom years, whispered like a talisman from one gullible investor to the next. A huge number of Anaconda"s ill-informed small investors went bust while benefiting members of the $32 million pool, who included Percy Rockefeller, Billy Durant and John Raskob-a.s.sociates from the RCA pool of the previous year. They were involved in another type of shortselling speculation, later made illegal, known as "pump and dump," which was one of the great banking scandals of American history. In the trough of the Depression in 1932, Anaconda Copper stock was worth just $4.
When a Senate committee conducted what became known as the Bear Hunt in 1932, seeking evidence on which to base regulation of the stock market following the 1929 crash, the brash trader Matthew "Bear" Brush was asked if he had known about practices comparable to Al Capone"s in the Wall Street of the late 1920s. "Al Capone is a piker compared to that racket," Brush replied.
All America seemed caught up in what economist John Galbraith later called a "ma.s.s escape into make believe." Everyone talked stocks and shares: the market had replaced s.e.x as the national conversational obsession. Having grown accustomed to borrowing to finance buying a car or a washing machine, it was a short step to borrowing to invest in stocks that apparently could not lose value. Wall Street investment houses started opening branch offices in small cities-1,192 of them by October 1928-to capitalize on the national mania for buying stock. A traveling salesman told the business writer Edwin Lefevre that nine-tenths of the people he saw in city nightclubs as he traveled across country were spending uncashed stock-market profits. He was struck by the thought "that these people had acquired the worst habits of the idle rich, without the riches."
"The basic delusion was that we had entered a fourth dimension economic world," said the economics journalist Garet Garrett, looking back on the boom years from the perspective of the 1930s. Even the children in John Dos Pa.s.sos"s Manhattan Transfer Manhattan Transfer played at "stock exchange": "I"ve got a million dollars in bonds to sell and Maisie can be the bulls an" Jimmy can be the bears." Groucho Marx loved stock speculating. He took tips from elevator boys and pa.s.sed them on to his brothers. As he bustled over to his brokers" office to organize another transaction he chortled to himself, "What an easy racket." The psychic Evangeline Adams charged $20 for her financial advice newsletter. played at "stock exchange": "I"ve got a million dollars in bonds to sell and Maisie can be the bulls an" Jimmy can be the bears." Groucho Marx loved stock speculating. He took tips from elevator boys and pa.s.sed them on to his brothers. As he bustled over to his brokers" office to organize another transaction he chortled to himself, "What an easy racket." The psychic Evangeline Adams charged $20 for her financial advice newsletter.
But pundits crying, "Buy! Buy! Buy!" were choosing to ignore warning signs that the economy was slowing down-and in some cases had never been booming. The United States was sustaining the world"s slow post-war economy by investing dollars abroad but purchasing little in return. Farmers, untouched by urban prosperity, had been going bust in unprecedented numbers throughout the 1920s. In ten years Georgia"s bankruptcy rate had gone up 1,000 percent. Florida had never recovered from its property crash in 1926 after the Great Miami Hurricane. Seven hundred thousand people were displaced in the Southwest when the Mississippi River flooded in 1927. The Government had been encouraging people to use mortgages to buy their own homes but by 1926 the housing market was glutted. Mortgage indebtedness, which had more than doubled between 1922 and 1929, stood at $27.1 billion. Residential construction work abated and the automotive industry cooled off. Only the stock market continued to soar; by 1928 it was carrying the whole economy on its inflated shoulders.
Mini price collapses occurred in June 1928, December 1928 and March 1929, but each time the market recovered and carried on rising. Interest rates went up, but bankers defied the Federal Reserve to continue to provide affordable loans to one another, and the stock boom continued. On the first working day after the Labor Day long weekend, market averages reached peaks that would not be bettered for twenty-five years. Evangeline Adams predicted that the Dow could climb all the way to heaven.
But gradually the bears began to outnumber the bulls. As John Galbraith later wrote, panic began to rise "in dozens and then in hundreds and finally in thousands of b.r.e.a.s.t.s." And so the crash came, arriving "with a kind of surrealistic slowness-so gradually that, on the one hand, it was possible to live through a good part of it without realizing what was happening, and, on the other hand, it was possible to believe that one had experienced and survived it when in fact it had no more than just begun."
Some got out in time. Joe Kennedy was one of the clever ones. Having made a fortune from RCA and various other movie and property interests he sold quietly well before the crash, saying, "Only a fool holds out for top dollar." He was less successful handling his profligate mistress Gloria Swanson"s financial affairs. Gloria Productions brought out its last film in 1930, at about the time their affair came to an end.
Others refused to believe that a fall in prices was even possible. A Professor Dice published New Levels in the Stock Market New Levels in the Stock Market in the autumn of 1929. "Among the yardsticks for predicting the behavior of stocks which have been rendered obsolete are the truism that what goes up must come down, that the market will be at the end of a major advance after twenty to twenty-four months of climbing, that major declines will run from eleven to fifteen months, that stock prices cannot safely exceed ten times the net earnings." On October 15, the celebrity economist Irving Fisher declared that stock prices stood on "what looks like a permanently high plateau." On October 23, the Chrysler Building"s lofty silver dome was fitted into place. in the autumn of 1929. "Among the yardsticks for predicting the behavior of stocks which have been rendered obsolete are the truism that what goes up must come down, that the market will be at the end of a major advance after twenty to twenty-four months of climbing, that major declines will run from eleven to fifteen months, that stock prices cannot safely exceed ten times the net earnings." On October 15, the celebrity economist Irving Fisher declared that stock prices stood on "what looks like a permanently high plateau." On October 23, the Chrysler Building"s lofty silver dome was fitted into place.
The next day, on what became known as Black Thursday, after a slow but steady decline in prices the market plunged into free fall. Winston Churchill, visiting New York, watched the prices plummet from the visitors" gallery of the New York Stock Exchange. A group of elder statesmen from the financial world tried to arrest disaster by pouring millions back into the market as a show of faith, but succeeded only in staving off collapse for two days. General panic ensued on Black Tuesday, October 29, when the market lost $14 billion in value.
Groucho Marx"s broker called him that day. "Marx," he said, "the jig is up!" and put down the telephone. Groucho was philosophical. "All I lost was two hundred and forty thousand dollars . . . I would have lost more but that was all the money I had." His brother Harpo said his remaining holdings, post crash, "were probably worth a medium-size bag of jelly-beans."
Within two weeks the total value of the New York Stock Exchange was down by half. Nearly 13 million stocks changed hands in October and by the end of the month the market had fallen 43 points-the amount it had gained in the previous year. Plummeting stock and share prices lost their owners over $40 billion. Jack Dempsey lost $3 million.
"On the whole, the greater the earlier reputation for omniscience, the more serene the previous idiocy, the greater the foolishness now exposed," wrote John Galbraith some forty years later. It was a total, ruthless liquidation of the market. Speculators who thought they could outwit it lost heavily; among them was "the leading bull," Billy Durant. Generally speaking, customers fared worse than brokers, who sold their own stocks first and thus made smaller losses than their clients, and who also had access to longer grace periods from their lenders and cheaper credit.
It is a myth that streams of suicidal traders and investors leapt to their deaths from the skysc.r.a.pers that had once represented their success, but, as Galbraith commented, the public seized on accounts of suicides "to show that people were reacting appropriately to their misfortune." Everybody could see that the crash was not simply an economic disaster-it was a revolution that would affect the life of every single American, whether they had been actively involved in the stock market boom or not. Galbraith called it a "leveling process comparable in magnitude and suddenness to that presided over a decade before by Lenin."
The crash did not cause the Depression; that was part of a far broader malaise. What it did was expose the weaknesses that underpinned the confidence and optimism of the 1920s-poor distribution of income, a weak banking structure and insufficient regulations, the economy"s dependence on new consumer goods, the over-extension of industry and the Government"s blind belief that promoting business interests would make America uniformly prosperous. President Hoover, who had warned against over-speculation, was not to blame for the crash, but his response to it, over the next few years, was leaden and inadequate. Limited government was useless when confronted by a disaster on this scale.
The international situation had also been an important contributory factor. The United States was a creditor nation; it exported far more than it imported; its st.u.r.dy protectionism hindered poorer countries, especially in war-torn Europe, from rebuilding their economies. Ultimately, though, the shoddy market practice and excessive speculation that stimulated the boom and then brought America crashing to its knees was derived from Wall Street itself.
People saw the crash and the Depression as the inevitable result of the selfish debauchery of the 1920s. It was a punishment for their profligacy, a necessary correction. President Hoover said that his austere (but very rich) Financial Secretary, Andrew Mellon, commented simply, "They deserved it," when the boom broke. "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate," Mellon declared. He believed that letting economic events run their course would "purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people." But it would be a long time before the wrecks were picked up.
Over the next two decades, struggling to cope with unemployment, hunger, homelessness and war, there was little room in the American consciousness for the violet strains of a jazz orchestra floating on warm summer air. But something about the twenties-its energy and youthfulness, its "sparkling cynicism" alongside its overwhelming self-belief-has endured to this day.
Concluding an essay ent.i.tled "Echoes of the Jazz Age" in November 1931, as ever Scott Fitzgerald summed up his age best. "Now once more the belt is tight and we summon the proper expression of horror as we look back at our wasted youth. Sometimes, though, there is a ghostly rumble among the drums, an asthmatic whisper in the trombones that swings me back into the early twenties when we drank wood alcohol and every day in every way grew better and better, and there was a first abortive shortening of the skirts . . . and people you didn"t want to know said "Yes, we have no bananas," and it seemed only a question of years before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were-and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more."
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
CHAPTER 1 "YOU CANNOT MAKE YOUR SHIMMY SHAKE ON TEA".
The best near-contemporary account of Prohibition-and indeed the period as awhole-is the journalist Frederick Lewis Allen"s 1931 Only Yesterday Only Yesterday. Professor William Leuchtenberg"s 1958 The Perils of Prosperity The Perils of Prosperity is another cla.s.sic but with greater historical context. Among other books listed in the bibliography, I used Laurence Bergreen and John Kobler"s biographies for my portrait of Al Capone and Thomas Coffey"s 1975 is another cla.s.sic but with greater historical context. Among other books listed in the bibliography, I used Laurence Bergreen and John Kobler"s biographies for my portrait of Al Capone and Thomas Coffey"s 1975 The Long Thirst The Long Thirst and Herbert Asbury"s 1950 and Herbert Asbury"s 1950 The Great Illusion The Great Illusion for Prohibition. for Prohibition.
CHAPTER 2 "THE RHYTHM OF LIFE".
Kathy Ogren"s 1989 The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz is the most fascinating account of jazz in the 1920s. Louis Armstrong"s memoirs and Chris Albertson"s is the most fascinating account of jazz in the 1920s. Louis Armstrong"s memoirs and Chris Albertson"s Bessie Bessie, with its interviews with Bessie Smith"s niece Ruby, were invaluable. Nathan Huggins"s account of The Harlem Renaissance The Harlem Renaissance and Langston Hughes"s biography by Arnold Rampersad are good, although the best sources as ever are the primary ones: autobiographical writing, novels and poetry by Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude Mackay, even Carl Van Vechten, and the broader non-fiction writings and collections of Alain Locke and JamesWeldon Johnson. and Langston Hughes"s biography by Arnold Rampersad are good, although the best sources as ever are the primary ones: autobiographical writing, novels and poetry by Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude Mackay, even Carl Van Vechten, and the broader non-fiction writings and collections of Alain Locke and JamesWeldon Johnson.
CHAPTER 3 FEMME FATALE.
Throughout the book I relied heavily on Middletown Middletown, the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd"s cla.s.sic study of small town American life in the 1920s, but perhaps it is most relevant to the chapter on women and how their lives were changing during this period. Paula Fa.s.s"s 1977 examination of American youth in the 1920s, The d.a.m.ned and the Beautiful The d.a.m.ned and the Beautiful, was also useful. Anita Loos and Tallulah Bankhead, both emanc.i.p.ated and ambitious women who exemplified their age almost as much as Zelda Fitzgerald did, wrote memoirs. There have been several joint biographies of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, but as far as I know only one, published by Nancy Milford in 1970, on Zelda alone-though the Fitzgeralds" stories and novels are the best introduction to their lives.Other evocative popular novels of the period include Edith Hull"s The Sheik The Sheik, Katherine Brush"s Glitter Glitter, David Garnett"s Dope Darling Dope Darling and Warner Fabian"s and Warner Fabian"s Flaming Youth Flaming Youth.