Anything Goes

Weeks, R. B., ed., Commonwealth vs. Sacco and Vanzetti Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1958

Another fundamental social change revealed by Lindbergh’s flight and his extraordinary personal popularity was the introduction of the idea of modern celebrity.

Nature was seen not as a treasure to be conserved and husbanded, but as a resource to be used up

Established in 1923, Air Union ferried passengers – 75 per cent of whom were Americans in these early years – across the English Channel. It merged with Air Orient in 1933 to form Air France. Early flight conditions were an unsettling combination of discomfort and luxury: passengers were expected to be up at dawn to catch their planes and even the shortest flights might make numerous emergency landings en route, but they were lavished with caviar while on board.

‘Nothing could exceed the brilliancy of such inventions as joy-ride, high-brow, road-louse, sob-sister, frame-up, loan-shark, nature-faker, stand-patter, lounge-lizard, has-foundry, buzz-wagon, has-been, end-seat-hog, shoot-the-chutes, and grape-juice diplomacy,’ he wrote admiringly of his countrymen’s newly invented words in The American Language in 1919. ‘They are bold; they are vivid; they have humor; they meet genuine needs.’

both Perkins and Fitzgerald edited Hemingway’s ‘careless’ and ‘unpublishable’ manuscript heavily to produce the pared-down power of the final version. ‘Nowadays when almost everyone is a genius, at least for a while, the temptation for the bogus to profit is no greater than the temptation for the good man to relax,’

When Fitzgerald moved to Paris in 1924 and met Ernest Hemingway he lost no time in letting Perkins know about his discovery. ‘This is to tell you about a young man named Ernest Hemmingway [Fitzgerald never learned to spell Hemingway’s name], who lives in Paris, (an American) writes for the transatlantic Review + has a brilliant future… I’d look him up right away. He’s the real thing.’

for the first time Europe-based Americans were beginning to get a sense that they were transplanting their own materialistic, progress-obsessed culture to Europe as much as absorbing that of Europe themselves. Writing in Harper’s magazine in March 1929, the historian Charles Beard spoke out against the Americanization of Europe: ‘prose against poetry; dollars against sacrifice; calculation against artistic abandon’.

‘We have been forced to live in an atmosphere of “tomorrow we die,” and so, naturally, we drank and were merry.’

in the South, black artists travelled on their own trains and performed in their own tents, rather than in public halls, from which they were banned.