Modern Mind

mothers revealed constantly that, particularly among the business group, they were concerned with certain other factors.’ Chief among these was the ability to earn a living. And in fact the Lynds found that Middletown was far more concerned with money in the 1920s than it had been in 1890. In 1890 vicinage (the old word for neighbourhood) had mattered most to people; by the 1920s financial and social status were much more closely allied, aided by the automobile. 29
    Cars, movies, and the radio had completely changed leisure time. The passion with which the car was received was extraordinary. Families in Middletown told the Lynds that they would forgo clothes to buy a car. Many preferred to own a car rather than a bathtub (and the Lynds did find homes where bathtubs were absent but cars were not). Many said the car held the family together. On the other hand, the ‘Sunday drive’ was hurting church attendance. But perhaps the most succinct way of summing up life in Middletown, and the changes it had undergone, came in the table the Lynds presented at the end of their book. This was an analysis of the percentage news space that the local newspapers devoted to various issues in 1890 and 1923: 30

     
    Certain issues we regard as modern were already developing. Sex education was one; the increased role (and purchasing power) of youth was another (these two matters not being entirely unrelated, of course). The Lynds also spent quite a bit of time considering differences between the two classes in IQ. Middletown had twelve schools; five drew their pupils from both working-class and business-class parents, but the other seven were sufficiently segregated by class to allow the Lynds to make a comparison. Tests on 387 first-grade (i.e., six-year-old) children revealed the following picture: 31

     
    The Lynds showed some awareness of the controversies surrounding intelligence testing (for example, by using the phrase ‘intelligent test’ in quotes) but nonetheless concluded that there were ‘differences in the equipment with which, at any given time, children must grapple with their world.’
    The Lynds had produced sociology, anthropology – and a new form of history. Their pictured lacked the passion and the wit of
Babbitt,
but Middletown was recognisably the same beast as Zenith. The book’s defining discovery was that there were two classes, not three, in a typical American town. It was this which fuelled the social mobility that was to set America apart from Europe in the most fruitful way.
    Babbitt’s Middletown may have been typical America, intellectually, sociologically and statistically. But it wasn’t the only America. Not everyone was in the ‘digest’ business, and not everyone was in a hurry or too busy to read, or needed others to make up his mind for him. These ‘other’ Americas could be identified by place: in particular Paris, Greenwich Village, and Harlem, black Harlem. Americans flocked to Paris in the 1920s: the dollar was strong, and modernism far from dead. Ernest Hemingway was there for a short time, as was E Scott Fitzgerald. It was an American, Sylvia Beach, who published
Ulysses.
Despite such literary stars, the American influx into the French capital (and the French Riviera) was more a matter of social than intellectual history. Harlem and Greenwich Village were different.
    When the British writer Sir Osbert Sitwell arrived in New York in 1926, he found that ‘America was strenuously observing Prohibition by staying sempiternally [everlastingly] and gloriously drunk.’ Love of liberty, he noted, ‘made it almost a duty to drink more than was wise,’ and it was not unusual, after a party, ‘to see young men stacked in the hall ready for delivery at home by taxicab.’ 32 But he had an even bigger surprise when, after an evening spent at Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt’s ‘Fifth Avenue Chateau,’ he was taken uptown, to A’Lelia Walker’s establishment on 136th Street, in Harlem. The soirées of A’Lelia, the beneficiary of a fortune that stemmed from a formula to ‘de-kink’ Negro hair, were famous by this time. Her apartment was lavishly decorated, one room tented in the ‘Parisian style of the Second Empire,’ others being filled, inter alia, with a golden grand piano and a gold-plated organ, yet another dedicated as her personal chapel. 33 Here visiting grandees, as often as not from Europe, could mix with some of the most intellectually prominent blacks: W. E. B. Du