I had to abandon this draft and write something I liked even less, but I hate wasting efforts. Read

In the final scene of the 1939 film The Roaring Twenties, the ingenue Panama Smith, regarding the corpse of James Cagney's Eddie Bartlett with the film's final words - “He used to be a big shot.” It is not that the Roaring Twenties is a truly descriptive document of the 1920's as recalled late in the following decade. It is after all a fairly straightforward Gangster movie. But it speaks, in those final lines and in its title, to what must have seemed a world more distant than the mere decade that separated the film from its subject. We speak now of the 1920's and sometimes fall into the fashion of calling them the Roaring 20's. How much louder must that roar have been during the hangover of the 1930's. It's not without cause that Americans in the dirty thirties looked back at the 1920's as a time of prosperity, indeed one of the most prosperous times of all. But as historians we have at our disposal stronger tools of discernment than pure memory and (sometimes misplaced) nostalgia. We have documents and facts, numbers and those can be spun to form a better image than that of the high hill as spied from the gutter that Cagney's great film suggests.

It is sometimes desirable and usually easy to categorize times, places, even whole segments of populations using generalizations. It is not accurate to do so, and accuracy is vital in the retelling and relating of history. Our purpose as scholars is not to recapitulate the assumptions but to challenge them and to prove or disprove them by those challenges. By searching deep into the facts and numbers that have been preserved for posterity we can, and really should overcome the general vision of a nostalgic past and describe a no less vibrant, no less magnificent, but altogether more accurate version of a bygone time. It's fair to ask why accuracy is important in reporting the past. A general view of a single decade seems adequate when compared with our characterizations of entire centuries and even millenniums as we study more and more remote times – why should we be concerned with the accuracy of this one period and not allow the generalization to go unchallenged? Very simply, because we have at our disposal the knowledge to do so, and having that knowledge we are compelled to tell the story as many ways as possible with as many facts as we can find. The 1920's encompassed many trends, many new developments socially and technologically, and these all roared together, and often enough against one another. If we are to call the 1920's roaring well we had best apply our knowledge to catalog and describe as many of the voices in the roar as we can find.

More than any other contributor to the Roar of the 1920's we have to examine the role and function of Industry and especially its rise to dominance. Industry, we might generally refer to as the manufacture of goods in an urban setting. Note that the generalization is perhaps palatable enough for the dictionary but that it doesn't give us much sense of the meaning of Industry, and it certainly does not give us a clue as to what was being manufactured. It is what was being manufactured that promoted the great changes that the 1920's provided for the United States.

First and foremost of all US manufacturing was steel¹, and steel it would remain, but that steel was produced in such profusion because of the car. E.B.White would say “Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.” in 1940², having experienced for years the marvel of the American Automotive industry. That industry was not begun by Henry Ford but if it had a father it was him, and he founded his family in Detroit. In 1900 Detroit was home to 285,000 souls, by 1930, expanding monstrously under the power of the automobile it would make room for one and a half million people. If everything in life was somewhere else, it seems that a good deal of it had abruptly moved to Detroit. It is daunting to imagine such an accelerated rate of growth, such boom in population.

The boom was fueled by a boom in industry that was fueled by the automobile and led by Ford and General Motors. The Automobile had a magnifying, multiplicative effect on industry throughout the mid-west. Rubber, glass, electrical parts, steel and on and on – all were produced and shipped to Detroit for their final assembly, all required infrastructure of their own in order to be produced, sold and shipped. All working in the perfect commercial harmony envisioned by Smith in his story of the pin-makers each industry creating prosperity in turn providing an opportunity for a new industry to arise in service of the enriched worker's wants.³ Smith's observance, centuries prior, that the pin-maker's work would be made more efficient:

This great increase of the quantity of work which, in consequence of the division of labour, the same number of people are capable of performing, is owing to three different circumstances; first to the increase of dexterity in every particular workman; secondly, to the saving of the time which is commonly lost in passing from one species of work to another; and lastly, to the invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labour, and enable one man to do the work of many.⁴

By adopting the assembly line Ford had magnified the potential of any worker who he could employ and the great boom in Detroit and the rest of the Mid-West would roar on.

Each industry expanded to fulfill rising needs, and each industrialist who could seize the opportunity grew rich. This cycle of new, booming cities and new material wealth, best exemplified by the car, is fodder for the fiction of the time. In The Great Gatsby we find among Fitzgerald's characters several archetypes for the classic vision of the Roaring Twenties, Tom, the idle rich scion of midwestern manufacturing wealth , the less idle and less rich Nick, the flappers Daisy and Jordan, but we find another character too, one that Fitzgerald isn't shy about describing:

I’d seen it. Everybody had seen it. It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hat-boxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory, we started to town.⁵

The description is of course of Gatsby's car, no less important to the story and no less a character in it than any of the human characters. The car is important to the plot, in the same way that Wolfsheim, Daisy or the aggrieved auto-mechanic are, that is to say – there is no story without them. The same is true of the Mid-Western industrial boom.

To be sure the automobile was the apex of this manufacturing wave⁶, but as the automobile provided Americans with jobs, it also provided them with new forms of leisure, recreation and the ability to seek out work further and further afield. Helen and Robert Lynd make extensive mention of the automobile among other innovations in the realm of leisure, and report on the great significance it had in the lives of the people of Middletown. They analyze as well the role of the movies, the telephone and the phonograph and give a cursory description of the, then new, phenomenon of the radio – but the automobile remains at the apex of what was becoming American family life. People worked to have a place to live and a car to park in the drive, but when pressed they often gave priority to the car over the house.

But what can we say about this great boom? The car had emerged as the apogee of American manufacturing efforts, and that emergence had fueled a great rise in production as well as demand. But what was life like, not for the industrialist or their idle children (so poisonously depicted by Fitzgerald) but for the mass of people who bought these cars and who's labor contributed to the automobile in the first place? Here, in examining these lives, our authors deconstruct the image of the 1920's so magnified by the decade that followed. The Lynds depict the people of the Midwest as being tenuously related to their industrial occupations. Only a generation removed from the farm, and perhaps made redundant in agriculture by the same industrial products that they had begun to build.

1Rauchway 13

2White 132

3Smith I.1.11

4Smith I.1.5 – italics added for my own emphasis.

5Fitzgerald Chapter 4

6Rauchway 13