The Year of Indecision, 1946 by Kenneth Weisbrode

Author:Kenneth Weisbrode
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-02-16T10:23:00+00:00

Chapter 8

New York City

The historian in me should have come awake in the almost monotonously beautiful countryside of New York.

—“The Easy Chair,” August 1946

Many of the New Deal’s best and brightest migrated in the 1930s to Washington, D.C., which had been readorned with proud neoclassical buildings, wider avenues, and brighter suburbs. During the war the migration continued, particularly from Wall Street as lawyers and bankers discovered a passion for public service. But Washington was a pale competitor, or really no competitor at all, at least in culture, to New York.

There are other cosmopolitan, polyglot cities—Chicago, for example, with its boosters and its immigrants—but Chicago was still of the heartland, superimposed upon the wider nation. It was and in a way still is the last great American city. New York is something else. New York did not look around its hinterland but inward and upward. For all its capacity to generate brilliance and treasure, and to lure so many talent seekers, it consumes as much as it produces, including “reputations, many of them fraudulent.” It lives for those who seek to live well, and to gain all the means necessary to do so.

New York was alluring but, to some, no doubt bewildering, the repository, real and imaginary, of all the flora and fauna of midcentury life found in the tales of Joseph Mitchell: rivermen, cops, barkeeps, old families and gypsies, rats, clams, and whiskey-sellers. It is the world’s microcosm, “a Constantinople, a great Bazaar.” It is all-American, therefore, so not really American at all, even perhaps “a European city,” as James Bryce once called it, “but of no particular country.”

It is said that decadence is the handmaiden of high culture, at particular times and places. Paris and the other cities had given way to New York in the forties. Think of Vienna in 1900, Paris in the 1920s, Berlin in the 1930s, Rome in the 1950s, or London in the 1960s. The 1940s belonged to New York. The shift had begun more or less in the 1920s, slowed during the Depression, then began again after the war. New Yorkers could almost smell the scent of the city’s renewed splendor. The foundation had been laid; the structure was already in place. A couple of decades earlier New York became such a capital for cultural exiles, especially African Americans and midwesterners; theirs and others’ movements exploded the city’s population. But in the 1930s one trend went in reverse. Hollywood attracted artists as well as their entourages; but just as wartime Washington never stood a chance of overtaking New York as a cultural magnet, Hollywood (we shall return there in our final chapter) succeeded by only a fraction. New York remained the growing mecca, attracting the cleverest provincials and enriching the locals, the purveyors and the consumers of cultural capital. So too with the other kind of capital, the liquid kind. The rich in America like to buy or bankroll vehicles of culture: studios, radio networks, newspapers, sports teams. But the most upwardly mobile,

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