Summary: Today we will consider trends in 1920s popular culture, including national advertising and business culture, new technologies of mass communication, and the bizarre popular appetite for pseudo-events and hero-worship. We will relate such national trends to the short fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I. Introduction: The 1920s as an era of rapid cultural change

II. Advertising and Business Culture

A. Madison Avenue's nationwide influence

1. advertising industry's exponential growth

2. reverence for the "ad man" in 1920s American culture

a. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (1985)

b. ad men as "apostles of modernity"

3. strategies and effects of advertising

a. use of celebrity endorsements, promise of social reward,s threats of social embarassment (we'll look at some examples)

b. redefined popular aspiration by offering seductive vision of new era of consumption

[W]hen all is said and done, advertising . . . creates a dream world: smiling faces, shining teeth, school girl complexions, cornless feet, perfect fitting [underwear], distinguished collars, wrinkleless pants, odorless breath, regularized bowels, . . . charging motors, punctureless tires, perfect busts, shimmering shanks, self-washing dishes-backs behind which the moon was meant to rise.

B. Business culture

"America stands for one idea: Business. . . . Thru business, properly conceived, managed, and conducted, the human race is finally to be redeemed." Independent (1921)

1. high regard for business magnates and the new world of material comfort they created

2. Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows (1925)

III. Technologies of mass communication

A. Mass-circulation magazines

1. Saturday Evening Post

2. Reader's Digest (offered traditional, pro-business views in a standardized format, simple prose)

3. Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild (standardization of "middle-brow" taste)

B. Radio [see image]

1. radio era begins in 1920

2. rapid consolidation and commercialization of radio

a. NBC formed in 1926, CBS in 1927

b. "All over the nation, Americans laughed at the same jokes, hummed the same tunes, and absorbed the same commericials."

C. Movies [see image] (we'll address this more next time)

1. New opulence of moviegoing in the 1920s -- opulent theaters, grand productions

2. increased popularity of movies after sound introduced: The Jazz Singer, 1927

3. movie industry undergoes process of consolidation and standardization similar to that of film

a. MGM, Warner Brothers, Columbia dominate industry by 1930

b. issue in an era of predictable plots and typecast stars

4. complexity of audience response to film: Mary Ryan, "The Projection of a New Womanhood" (1981)

a. mass-produced fantasies shaped popular behavior and values, especially of the young

b. but moviegoers interpreted films in complex ways

The magic of these movies, and their meaning to the historian, lie as much in the anxieties which precede the domestic denouement as in the happy ending itself. Movie fantasies have a double-edged quality, are both "dreams and nightmares" as Raymond Dugnat puts it. At times the nightmares constitute the direct and central themes of the movies; more often, particularly in women's films, fearful visions provide the cutting edge of the romance itself. Imbedded in the images and plots of the movie moderns are a prevalent set of tensions, unfulfilled promises, and unhappy endings for minor characters. These tragic subplots provided the essential dramatic tension in the films of the twenties. Many women lost out in the marriage competition, and not even the most optimistic melodrama tied up every female character in a neat wedding knot. (Ryan, 512)

D. Pseudo-events, Hero Worship, and Identity Formation in an Era of Rapid Cultural Change

1. Miss America Pageant, Atlantic City, 1921

2. Lindbergh's solo flight from New York to Paris, 1927 [see image]

E. Limitations and Possibilities of Mass Culture

1. promoted cultural standardization and uniformity of thought

2. also broadened horizons, forged a national culture

IV. Literary Responses to 1920s Culture

A. 1920s a decade of tremendous literary and cultural ferment

B. Many writers critical of old moral pieties and new business pieties of the 1920s

1. Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Parker, and many others

2. Fitzgerald's relationship to the "jazz age"

C. "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" as a commentary on the business pieties, rampant materialism, and cultural impoverishment of the "jazz age"

1. Recalls the Lynds' comment that "More and more of the acitivities of life are coming to be strained through the bars of the dollar sign."

2. geographic symbolism: Hades on the Mississippi River, St Midas' School near Boston, and the Washingtons' Montana estate

3. John T. Unger's relationship to the materialism and pro-business outlook of the 1920s

4. The Washingtons as exemplars of the superrich

5. Unger as a social climber whose illusions of individuality are dashed

6. Religious symbolism of the story

a. authentic spirituality is replaced by worship of riches

b. Washington's attempt to bribe God, followed by John, Kismine, and Jasmine's expulsion from Paradise

D. "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" as a further exploration of materialism and moral impoverishment of the "jazz age"

1. Generational conflict and youth consciousness

2. Shallowness of youth

3. Fitzgerald's commentary on the flapper

V. Conclusion: Fitzgerald's stories are ironic commentaries on the cultural changes that I have outline in this lecture. Just as the relation between film and society is complicated, so too is the relation between literature and society. Fitzgerald's characters are representative figures, but the values they represent were by no means shared by a majority of Americans in the 1920s. Even in an age of cultural standardization and relative unformity of thought, diversity and difference were the most salient characteristics of American culture and society in the decade after World War I.