Carter, Paul A. Another Part of the Twenties. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.
The “myths” of the 1920s, it seems, began growing almost before the decade was over
and were compounded by the monumental events of the 1930s and 1940s. Carter was concerned
that the history of the twenties did not match the experiences of the twenties, so his goal was to
revisit some of the popular themes of this time period—the flappers, prohibition, republican
government, and the like—and show that there were “other” viewpoints that made this era as
complex as others in American history. The style of the book is somewhat unusual; it jumps
between themes and ideas rather quickly, but that, strangely enough, is also part of its refreshing
appeal.
Carter begins with a fascinating rural-urban exploration involving the experiences of
George McGovern, Ray Bradbury, and two other novelists, to show that the stereotypical ruralurban dichotomy of the 1920s was not quite as extreme as has been shown. The mathematical
magic of statistics, wherein a community of 2,499 was a village and 2,500 was a large urban
center, and the fact that “modern” roads did not truly match later standards, is evidence that the
author uses to highlight that though Main Street may have been the target of Sinclair Lewis’ jabs
at rural America, in actuality the distinctions between modern city life and old-fashioned country
life were much more blurred than has been passed down in popular lore.
In a similar manner, Carter treats topics like views of war and religion, pointing out that
the United States of the 1920s held a wide variety of views on such subjects and cannot be neatly
placed in the boxes of “isolationist” or “fundamentalist-modernist”. An especially fascinating
chapter treated Albert Einstein’s first visit to America and the various reactions to his scientific
theories. While the theory of relativity became part of the standard debate within educational
circles in the nation, and while Einstein’s personal quirkiness made him appealing to many,
others saw his incomprehensible theory as incompatible with open, common sense democracy
and condemned the scientist and his work. A resulting challenge of these critiques of Einstein in
the 1920s was to make science both practical and profitable.
To treat the subject of women’s rights in the 1920s, Carter focuses first on Wyoming
governor Nellie Tayloe Ross. Though the decade was heralded as a “breakthrough” for women
politically, the unsuccessful reelection of Ross and the fact that it was 1975 before another
woman governor was elected, shows the persistence of male prejudice in 1920s politics. The
exception to the rule of “flapper independence”—more an image than a universal reality—was
the swimming of the English Channel in 1926, in a better time than previous men, by Gertrude
Ederle. Even such a triumph by a woman, however, was often translated into traditional notions
of women’s inner beauty and outward sex-appeal, pointing out the contradictory notions of
women’s position in society.
A chapter on 1920s advertising was intriguing, although Carter’s claim that the
have/have-not tension created by ads may have contributed to the urban riots of the 1960s seems
a bit of a stretch. In a final section on Republican government, one might also challenge the
author’s claim that the Harding scandals were not examples of true “political” corruption, but he
does, once again, point out that the assumed “business” governments of the three 1920s
administrations were not as straightforward as has been assumed—and, like the other topics he
treats, it is the challenging of those assumptions that makes Carter’s book such a contribution to
this area of history.