This is just one reason Eric Burns decided to write a whole book about the year 1920
... Recently, Salon spoke over the phone with Eric Burns, the award-winning media critic and former correspondent for NBC News, about his new book on the era, “1920: The Year That Made the Decade Roar.” In addition to discussing the parallels between our time and that of 95 years ago, we also talked about the glaring differences — and spent a moment or two on the phenomenon of Twitter, which, Burns wanted to make clear, he did not understand. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.
Why did you want to take a look at 1920 in particular?
I read a lot of American history and, like a lot of people who are interested in American history, I find the 1920s an especially interesting time. 1920 was the year of the first terrorist attack on U.S. soil, it was the only year in which there have been two amendments to the Constitution, Prohibition and the Women’s Vote; for the entire year, we had a female president— not elected, obviously; she was the de facto president, not the president de jure— because of Woodrow Wilson’s stroke. Isn’t it ironic that for the entire year of 1920, the year women got the vote, there was a woman running the country? Plus, I wanted to read something about [Charles] Ponzi around the time that Bernie Madoff was making the news and Ponzi’s entire career, from being a nobody to being a multimillionaire and then being in jail, that all happened over the course of about eight months in 1920.
I found that in concentrating on that year I found a tremendous amount of interesting material, largely material people didn’t know before, but also material that pointed to the present— for instance, there were debates in 1920 about Homeland Security after this terrorist attack. So the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like the perfect year. The only problem is that when you write about anything, you need a certain narrative flow, and events in a year don’t do that for an author’s benefit. I was able— and this was the difficult part— after a while, to find ways to tie some of the events together, to find connections between the events that I hadn’t seen before, to make it a story as opposed to a bunch of anecdotes.
How did that organizing process go? What did it look like? How did you arrive there?
1920 was the most revolutionary year we’ve ever had in the arts. As far as literature is concerned, it was the end of the notion that virtue is to be found in small-town America; it was the publication of “Main Street.” Warren G. Harding, who was elected president that year, just struck me as a character from “Main Street,” so I pointed out that there were similarities between the fictional people that Sinclair Lewis was writing about and Warren G. Harding who was voted once, after there had been 29 presidents, the 29th-best president in the United States. There were also various connections to be made between women getting the vote and how that was interpreted by women. What I mean by that is shortly after that, they were wearing more lipstick than ever before, smoking cigarettes in public, dressing in a way that suggested that their bodies were readily available for male usage. I was able to demonstrate that the idea was just to give women the right to vote, but it in fact, empowered some women to the extent that they decided that they would enjoy all of the freedoms of men.
It was really a matter of just immersing myself in the material. As far as the terrorist attack was concerned, I didn’t really have to try to make connections there. Readers would see them and I hope that they will see that this fighting a war not with a country but with people who have an ideology, but who live in a variety of countries— well, that’s happened before. I really enjoy an opportunity to point out to people that what seems new and startling, in fact, has been done before. ...