Babbitts and Bohemians from the Great War to the Great Depression by Elizabeth Stevenson

Author:Elizabeth Stevenson [Stevenson, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, Law, Intellectual Property, General
ISBN: 9781560009603
Google: m_GpngEACAAJ
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published: 1998-01-15T16:13:16+00:00

10. Dwight Morrow at the White House on December 2, 1925, after presenting to President Coolidge the judgment of the special aircraft board of which he was chairman that the nation did not need an air force and had nothing to fear from air attack. Morrow functioned beautifully within the horizons of the decade, helping to make it seem to work. As ambassador to Mexico, he initiated the “good neighbor” policy before that policy had a name.

The flapper fascinated because she flouted respectability. But respectability usually caught up with her. There was another type of the time who fascinated because he really broke through the crust of respectability and showed the hellishness down below. This was the garish gangster. He exerted a strong pull of half-denied interest upon the solid middle group, for he showed in his awful, destructive, yet sometimes stylish and purposeful activity traits in human nature that everyone felt the tug of, but usually denied.

The age was held spellbound by the gangster, but in most of the territory of the twenties, the gangster was an exotic, seldom seen, only talked about. He was rampant in restricted areas. In Chicago he was most blatant. Solid citizens in comfortable beds had no reason, or so it seemed, to fear him. (Poor folks feared him, those out of the swing of the general prosperity.) He attracted as well as terrified. The point has been made that the gangster, in his perfected and organized form, was the businessman as the businessman wished to be but dared not be, without restrictions or aims but those of power alone. He was therefore a caricature in burning-bright and ruthless shape of what all the good, small men praised and desired in success. But this is to make Babbitt into a bigger, freer creature than he was. Babbitt was the middling mover and servicer of society, not the maker and organizer and producer. The real makers and producers were larger, more unhampered men whom the Babbitts did not really know at all, although they flattered themselves that they modeled themselves upon such men. What the gangster meant to the good, tight, well-behaved middling Babbitt was an extension of personality. Superficially, Babbitt deplored the fact that such people existed, but he never exerted himself to control the gangster till the end of the period; then his own world and the gangster’s both ended.

A dying gangster, shot by rivals in Chicago, kicked at the hospital attendant who was helping to carry him on a stretcher, aiming at the face of the man who represented society to him, saying, “Take that, you dirty son of a bitch.” This was his “valediction”; and, once pronounced, “he fell back and died.”4

Gangster dominance in certain areas showed in an uncontrolled violence. Gang-killings in Chicago accelerated:

1924-16 men shot to death

1925-46 men shot to death

1926-76 men shot to death

In these particular killings only six men were brought to trial. All were acquitted except one, who certainly went out of his way to be offensive: “Sam Vinci, who pushed public settlement of quarrels a little too far.

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