Just Finished Reading: Anything Goes – A Biography of the Roaring Twenties by Lucy Moore (FP: 2008) [355pp]

There is most definitely something about the 1920’s. It was very much an age of excess after the privations and horrors of the Great War which were exacerbated by the deaths of the Spanish Flu that accompanied its end. The fact that the 20’s roared to the extent they did had much to do with the inevitable reaction to 5 years of mass death.

This often fascinating look at the era focuses very much on the American experience rather than taking a more global look at things. It is a rather well-trodden path but one that does bare repeating both for its well-known highlights as well as those many factors that slipped past the casual historian. There is, naturally, the crazy idea of Prohibition and its inevitable opportunity for crime to get truly organised to provide alcohol to the millions of people who still wanted it. There is the frenetic sound of Jazz and the shimmy of the Flappers who danced to it. There was the Harlem Renaissance centred in New York that looked forward to growing emancipation and recognition of Black Americans. There was the growing literately scene exemplified by people like F Scot Fitzgerald (who popularised the idea of a ‘Jazz Age’) and its links with the burgeoning influence and power of Hollywood and the beginnings of media fuelled Celebrity culture. There was the clearly out of his depth President Warren G Harding who asked on arriving in the Whitehouse if there was some sort of instruction book to tell him what to do. This, no doubt, after his election committee staff heaved a collective sigh of relief that none of his affairs had become public before inauguration. It was the era of Big Business when regulations fell like leaves in Autumn, profits boomed and the Stock Market rise was confidently predicted to go on forever (spoiler alert – it didn’t). But it was also the age of civil unrest, of fear of the foreigner, the anarchist and the Bolshevik: after all the Russian Revolution of 1917 was fresh in everyone’s memory and the Russian Civil War was still ongoing. Likewise is was a time of resurgence for organisations like the KKK which gained widespread membership across the US. It was an age of hope and looking towards the future – exemplified by figures like Charles Lindbergh and looking back to a more comfortable past – exemplified by the stage managed Scopes ‘Monkey Trail’. Finally the era fuelled on excess crashed along with the Stock Market in 1929 showing, if it still needed to be highlighted, that the age did nothing at all half-heartedly.

It was undoubtedly a strange time for everyone who managed to live through it. The most interesting things I took from the narrative was both how different things were 100 years ago at (arguably) the start of the modern era as well as how much was both recognisable and familiar. Many of the themes we are struggling with today on both sides of the ‘pond’ were either present and accounted for or just visible in the background – from identity politics (both racial and gender), to political incompetence and corruption, to the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots. Little it seems is new under the sun. This was both an easy and informative read and I think just about everyone will pick up something new about this largely familiar epoch. Definitely an interesting slice of American history. Recommended.