The effects of depression and war reduced both the physical glamor and the prestige and self-confidence of the glittering giant of the twenties. Only at the mid-century, when an economic upswing prompted large-scale new construction, and the location of the United Nations in the metropolis underlined New York's position as a world capital, did the city's dynamism exert again its customary spell.
The impact of the depression engrossed the attention of commentators of the thirties, especially between 1931 and 1935. Queues of unemployed; men, obviously of good background, selling apples at the street corners; the destitute sleeping in Central Park--sights such as these convinced European visitors that reputedly invincible New York had been harder hit by the crisis than many parts of Europe. They noted the seeming paralysis at the wharves, the stores for rent and sales at broad reductions, the half-empty skyscrapers-"tombstones of capitalism . . . with windows," as one observer wrote, referring to the R.C.A. Building which was rising skyward in the thirties. On a Saturday night in 1931, a French visitor counted less than 300 spectators at the Roxy theatre, where "a year ago . . . it was necessary to stand in line an hour" for one of its 3,000 seats.
New York's reaction to the depression, as observed by contemporaries, revealed the city, as always, to be a "sounding board for extremes." In some quarters optimism died hard; for many New Yorkers could not believe that "the age of gold" was past. On the other hand, numerous young intellectuals were "going over to Communism," responsible English observers reported. Books on radical subjects were prominently displayed, "even on Fifth Avenue"; and visitors listened to talk of proletarian revolution at Union Square. In Ivan Kashkin's New York, an anthology of vignettes depicting the sordid side of Manhattan published in Moscow in 1933, the Empire City was called "the stronghold of both capitalism and Communism in America. . . . the center from which the American workers are being rallied to defend their proletarian fatherland." At the other extreme, Wall Street brokers--in an "unhappy and unchastened mood"--were heard contending that the New Deal was a dangerous experiment for which they would have to pay the bill. In the opinion of M. Philips Price, veteran British correspondent and member of Parliament, Franklin D. Roosevelt's program was unpopular with both the "revolutionaries" and the "reactionaries" in the city; but the average New Yorker was "prepared to give the President a chance for the next year or two."
Conditions had improved by the mid-thirties, to judge from the comment of J. B. Priestley, who came to the city in September 1935 to supervise the production of a play. The bread lines and applesellers had disappeared, famous dance bands had returned to the supper clubs, and new shows were opening. Vera Brittain, revisiting New York late in 1937, missed "the atmosphere of stringency and strain" which had overwhelmed the visitor in 1934. In its place was "a consciousness of sufficiency without ostentation," which she considered closer to "sane normality" than the "boastful affluence" of the middle twenties. The demands of World War II, which began to be felt by the close of the thirties, erased most of the unemployment that had plagued New York in the depression decade.
The city had fewer advocates in the depressed thirties than at any other time in its often criticized career. As if emboldened by its momentary defenselessness, English visitors called it hard, ugly, vulgar, and blatant--an "iridescent harlot of the nations," as the critic John Cowper Powys put it, with her "dazzling tiara" and "trailing, unwashed skirts." For J. B. Priestley, all the frustrations of life were magnified amid "so much steel and concrete and gasoline vapour." A New Zealand visitor of 1938 found New Yorkers, in the mass, "only a shade less impersonal than the automatic traffic lights"; and to L. P. Jacks, Oxford professor and Unitarian clergyman, this characteristic of the city made everybody "a nonentity to everybody else" and brought "all men down to the zero level of value." The French writer, Odette Keun, was repelled by the griminess of the elevateds, the filth of the subways, and the cheap commercialism of Broadway. New York was an "excruciating city" to two Soviet visitors in 1935, with its "bad food," "smelly streets," and "hellish, screeching" traffic. In the opinion of the expatriate writer Henry Miller, even the "progressive" features of this "most horrible place on God's earth" helped to make life in America a loathsome "air-conditioned nightmare." So common was criticism of the city that Sinclair Lewis concluded in 1938 that "it would be as iconoclastic to praise New York as to damn the Y.M.C.A."
No comments:
Post a Comment