"A Mind Full of Fabulations"

Flapper truly is a madcap chronicle of just about everything Jazz Age! Not simply a story of sex and the “new woman,” though the sub-title might suggest otherwise, Joshua Zeitz’s latest work of non-fiction takes a thorough and comprehensive look into history. Popular culture from the turn of the 20th century to pre-WWII; from Muncie, Indiana to Hollywood to Harlem: Zeitz has covered it.

Zeitz begins by introducing us to the quintessential flapper herself, Zelda Fitzgerald. He crowns her and her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald as the royal couple of the Jazz Age. Though the story is dedicated to the emergence of a “new woman:” one who throws off the tenets of her traditional upbringing in order to support herself in America’s cities; who rejects the corset and opts instead for the loose, modern garb of the suffragettes; a daring, attractive, open-minded, self-aware, and adventurous (albeit, sometimes dangerous) young woman, Zeitz continually brings the story back to the era’s most melodramatic couple. By pairing the trajectory of the Fitzgeralds' rise and fall with the changes taking place nationwide, the reader gets a big-pictures story of the 20’s, mirrored by the personal lives of two of its greatest characters.

Literature, music and the personalities of the Roaring 20’s have always fascinated me so I really enjoyed that this book offers so many interesting and hilarious details. This is an entertaining study of how cultural, social and economic shifts reshaped the nation and made room for this new generation of girls.

A few interesting points:

The evolution of urban societies in the 20’s:
"The mass entry of women into the workforce was part of a longer trend toward industrialization and urbanization, a process that reached its crescendo in 1920, when the Census Bureau announced that the United States was no longer a nation of small farmers. For the first time ever, more Americans (51 percent) lived in cities than in the countryside. Though the Census Bureau counted any municipality with more than 2,500 residents as “urban,” most of the country’s new urban majority lived in cities with more than 100,000 residents. In real numbers, the change is staggering. Between 1880 and 1920, the number of people living in cities with a population of at least 8,000 jumped from 6.2 million to 54.3 million"!

New social trends:
Flapper describes the dramatic increase of patents each year (“It took more than 100 years for the U.S. patent office to issue its millionth patent in 1911; within 15 years, it had issued its two-millionth.”), the decline in the national birth rate (from 7.04 in 1800 to 3.17 in 1920), and the money for “non-essentials” that flooded the market throughout a period of steady economic prosperity.

Consumerism and a new, modern self-image:
Through this prosperity and the beginnings of what would become an enthusiastic culture of consumerism, came department stores. These stores distributed catalogues to every rural family so that they, too, could enjoy the novelty of modern appliances, canned produce, European fashion trends, and participate in the nation-wide whole-life make-over. Advertising companies began to sprout up, eager for the opportunity to “appeal to the anxieties of urban Americans who lived in proximity to one another and experienced the daily angst of anonymity and public scrutiny.” As an example, after a company came up with the idea of halitosis as the technical term for bad breath (it didn’t originally come from the AMA) and invented mouth wash, they saw sales of Listerine – formerly only used on cuts and scrapes – “skyrocket by 33 percent after just one month of the add campaign.” Here is the campaign:

Always a bridesmaid, never a bride….Edna’s case was a really pathetic one. Like every woman her primary ambition was to marry….Most of the other girls of her set were….And as her birthdays crept gradually toward the tragic thirty-mark, marriage seemed further and further away….Listerine.

And so it went with all sorts of new disorders: “dandruff, athlete’s foot, body odor, face wrinkles, dry or oily hair, acne, rough skin. Beneath every imperfection lurked a disastrous end – a lost job, a lost love, a missed opportunity. And for every danger there was a cure….”

I loved reading about the details of the emergence of not just a new generation of rowdy and sexually-charged young women, but a new identity as a nation. The elements that shaped young people’s lives were not simply about a new generation but about fundamental shifts toward modern life and a new century. It’s all very exciting and the flapper, sexy and loud all night drink and dance-machine that she is, was only a part of the excitement.

Finally, Zeitz’s depiction of the stock market crash, like the Fitgeralds’ celebrity coming to its terribly un-glamorous end, is thoughtful without being onerous or patronizing. Although one can certainly find the short-sightedness and excess of the era, there has also been so much enduring beauty, sophistication and fun from the 20’s: Jazz, 52nd Street and the Charleston; The New Yorker, Lois Long and Harold Ross; the Rose Room and its literary critics at the famous Algonquin “Round Table;” the automobile; Madison Avenue, the reinvention of women’s fashion (with the help of Coco Chanel), Conde Nast; Hollywood, movies and celebrity; Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn and innovations in dance; hundreds of patents for amusement parks alone! Zeitz brings all of these historical details together easily and exuberantly.

Interestingly, Flapper opens with a quote from Willa Cather: “The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts….” Although it isn’t exactly clear if Ms Cather thinks that the dramatic reinventions of the early 20th century are for better or worse, it is, at least, remarkable! One thing that is made clear is Zeitz's feelings on the matter: “The flapper was, in effect, the first thoroughly modern American.”