Scandal, crime and innovation, the fascination of 1920s New York

Former Reuters correspondent Jules Stewart, now a prolific book writer, and his co-author Helen Crisp, a healthcare writer and editor, presented the talk based on their book Strike up the Band – New York City in the 1920s.

Crisp highlighted how the 1920s, particularly in its trend-setting epicentre, New York, continues to fascinate us a century later.

The era brought sweeping innovation in women’s fashion, architecture, music and dance as well as the wide repercussions of Prohibition. It also ushered in a change in social relations between men and women with the beginning of dating rather than “walking out”.

Office innnovation created many new jobs for women, including as “Hello Girls” working on huge telephone switchboards where they were considered to be more personable and have more nimble fingers and levels of concentration than men, Crisp said.

The era was bookended by the deadly Spanish flu -- the biggest modern pandemic up until then, which killed 30,000 people in New York – and the stock market crash of 1929 followed by the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Crisp described how New York turned into a city of clubs, theatres and jazz bands, all encouraged by Prohibition in 1920 which spawned an estimated 32,000 illegal speakeasies, so called because patrons had to whisper the password to get in.

The clubs and speakeasies made jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington famous.

Prohibition also paved the way for the rise of Italian mafia gangs headed by characters like Joe Masseria, boss of New York’s five families, and Charles “Lucky” Luciano. Gang warfare and liquor smuggling led to many murders, not just of gangsters but police, Prohibition agents, watchmen and bystanders.

The 1920s also laid many of the seeds of modern life, including skyscrapers, car ownership, home radio, jazz, the movies and the beginning of spectator sports, with stars like Babe Ruth and prize-fighter Jack Dempsey becoming household names.

Criminal gangs and club owners stockpiled huge quantities of liquor before Prohibition became law in 1920, but when it ran out, some began using industrial alcohol to produce often lethal brews, especially after authorities ordered the addition of wood alcohol in a mistaken belief this would discourage its use. Apart from death, the adulterated spirits could cause blindness and paralysis, particularly among the poor who could not afford purer spirits.

The era produced some extraordinary successes among women who came to New York to make their fortune. The nightclub queen Mary “Texas” Guinan started singing on Broadway, then became a nightclub singer and manager. She earned the present-day equivalent of $6 million in less than a year.

Guinan hired the best chorus girls and was famous for her greeting to punters: “Hello suckers, come on in and leave your wallet at the bar.”

Bobbed hair, short skirts and dancing the Charleston marked out the most trendy and liberated young women, who were known as “flappers”, seen as an impetuous, reckless woman personifying youth, Crisp said.

Zelda Fitzgerald, an early example of an “influencer”, was dubbed the “First American Flapper” and written about and promoted by her husband the novelist Scott Fitzgerald.

Another scandalous figure was the actress and dancer Peggy Hopkins Joyce, an early example of the modern phenomenon of someone who was famous for being famous.

Her scandalous love life included marriage to four very wealthy men and she was mentioned in songs by Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, as well as the novel “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”

She obtained a huge divorce settlement of $600,000 after her third marriage.    

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