The Brazen Age: New York City and the American Empire: Politics, Art, and Bohemia

by David Reid

Overview

A brilliant, sweeping, and unparalleled look at the extraordinarily rich culture and turbulent politics of New York City between the years 1945 and 1950, The Brazen Age opens with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s campaign tour through the city’s boroughs in 1944. He would see little of what made New York the capital of modernity—though the aristocratic FDR was its paradoxical avatar—a city boasting an unprecedented and unique synthesis of genius, ambition, and the avant-garde. While concentrating on those five years, David Reid also reaches back to the turn of the twentieth century to explore the city’s progressive politics, radical artistic experimentation, and burgeoning bohemia.
 
From 1900 to 1929, New York City was a dynamic metropolis on the rise, and it quickly became a cultural nexus of new architecture; the home of a thriving movie business; the glittering center of theater and radio; and a hub of book, magazine, and newspaper publishing. In the 1930s, the rise of Hitler and World War II would send some of Europe’s most talented men and women to America’s shores, vastly enriching the fields of science, architecture, film, and arts and letters—the list includes Albert Einstein, Erwin Panofsky, Walter Gropius, George Grosz, André Kertész, Robert Capa, Thomas Mann, Hannah Arendt, Vladimir Nabokov, and John Lukacs.
 
Reid draws a portrait of the frenzied, creative energy of a bohemian Greenwich Village, from the taverns to the salons. Revolutionaries, socialists, and intelligentsia in the 1910s were drawn to the highly provocative monthly magazine The Masses, which attracted the era’s greatest talent, from John Reed to Sherwood Anderson, Djuna Barnes, John Sloan, and Stuart Davis. And summoned up is a chorus of witnesses to the ever-changing landscape of bohemia, from Malcolm Cowley to Anaïs Nin. Also present are the pioneering photographers who captured the city in black-and-white: Berenice Abbott’s dizzying aerial views, Samuel Gottscho’s photographs of the waterfront and the city’s architectural splendor, and Weegee’s masterful noir lowlife.
 
But the political tone would be set by the next president, and Reid looks closely at Thomas Dewey, Henry Wallace, and Harry Truman. James Forrestal, secretary of the navy under Roosevelt, would be influential in establishing a new position in the cabinet before ascending to it himself as secretary of defense under Truman, but not before helping to usher in the Cold War.
 
With The Brazen Age, David Reid has magnificently captured a complex and powerful moment in the history of New York City in the mid-twentieth century, a period of time that would ensure its place on the world stage for many generations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101870662
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/22/2016
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	544
File size:	33 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

DAVID REID is the editor of Sex, Death and God in L.A. and coeditor of West of the West: Imagining California. His essays, articles, reviews, and inter- views have appeared in Vanity Fair, The Paris Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and in several anthologies, including The Pushcart Prize XII. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Read an Excerpt

In March 1946 the young French novelist and journalist Albert Camus traveled by freighter from Le Havre to New York, arriving in the first week of spring. Le Havre, the old port city at the mouth of the Seine, had almost been destroyed in a battle between its German occupiers and a British warship during the Normandy invasion; huge ruins ringed the harbor. In his travel journal Camus writes: “My last image of France is of destroyed buildings at the very edge of a wounded earth.”
 
At the age of thirty-two this Algerian Frenchman, who had been supporting himself with odd jobs when the war began, was about to become very famous. By 1948, he would become an international culture hero: author of The Stranger and The Plague, two of the most famous novels to come out of France in the forties, and of the lofty and astringent essays collected in The Myth of Sisyphus.
 
Camus’s visit to the United States, sponsored by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs but involving no official duties, was timed to coincide with Alfred A. Knopf’s publication of The Stranger in a translation by Stuart Gilbert, the annotator of James Joyce’s Ulysses. In the spring of 1946 France was exporting little to the United States except literature. Even most American readers with a particular interest in France knew of Camus, if at all, as a distant legend, editor of the Resistance newspaper Combat and an “existentialist.”
 
Reviewing The Stranger in the New Yorker, Edmund Wilson, usu­ally omniscient, confessed that he knew absolutely nothing about exis­tentialism except that it was enjoying a “furious vogue.” If there were rumored to be philosophical depths in this novel about the motiveless murder of an Arab on a North African beach, they frankly eluded him. For Wilson the book was nothing more than “a fairly clever feat”—the sort of thing that a skillful Hemingway imitator like James M. Cain had done as well or better in The Postman Always Rings Twice. America’s most admired literary critic also had his doubts about Franz Kafka, the writer of the moment, suspecting that the claims being made for the late Prague fabulist were exaggerated. But still, like almost every­one else, especially the young, in New York’s intellectual circles Wilson was intensely curious about what had been written and thought in occupied Europe, especially in France.
 
“Our generation had been brought up on the remembrance of the 1920s as the great golden age of the avant-garde, whose focal point had been Paris,” William Barrett writes in The Truants, his memoir of the New York intellectuals. “We expected history to repeat itself: as it had been after the First, so it would be after the Second World War.” The glamorous rumor of existentialism seemed to vindicate their expectations. Camus’s arrival was eagerly awaited not only by Partisan Review but also by the New Yorker, which put him in “The Talk of the Town,” and Vogue, which decided that his saturnine good looks resembled Humphrey Bogart’s.
 
Although a brilliant travel writer, Camus was not a lucky traveler. When he was young and unknown, he blamed poverty for cramping his journeys, and when he was older and could afford more, he was a martyr to celebrity, always dreading its exposures and demands right up to the day he went to Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize. Travel made him anxious, which he concluded was the proper state for a traveler, and often physically sick. As he records in his diary, after a sociable crossing, he came down with the flu just in time to arrive in New York.
 
On March 27, around noon on a gray, windy day, as his ship entered the Narrows, his first glimpse of New York was of Coney Island, a dismal sight under a flat painted sky. In the distance, the skyscrapers of Manhattan rose out of the mist. “Deep down, I feel calm and indif­ferent, as I generally do in front of spectacles that don’t move me.” Anticlimactically, his ship rode at anchor for the night.
 
“Go to bed very late. Get up very early. We enter New York harbor. A terrific sight despite or because of the mist. The order, the strength, the economic power are there. The heart trembles in front of so much admirable inhumanity.”
 
“Order” manifested itself at once. At the dock, Camus found himself singled out for sustained scrutiny. “The immigration officer ends by excusing himself for having detained me for so long: ‘I was obliged to, but I can’t tell you why.’ ” The mystery was dispelled many years later. Alert to the left-wing politics of Combat, the FBI had opened a file on him, and passed on its suspicions to the Immigration Services.
 
Feeling weak from his flu, Camus was welcomed by two journalists from France and a man from the French consulate. The crowded streets alarmed him. His first impression of New York was of “a hideous, inhuman city. But I know that one changes one’s mind.” He did note the orderliness of things confirmed by how smoothly the traffic moved without policemen at intersections, and by the prim gloves worn by garbagemen. That night, crossing Broadway in a cab, his flu made worse by a bad hangover (he had stayed up drinking until four the night before), feeling “tired and feverish,” Camus was “stupefied by the circus of lights.”
 
###
 
Bright lights, big city had been the New York formula for a century. On his first visit, in 1842, Charles Dickens found the gaslights of lower Broadway as brilliant as those of London’s Piccadilly, but he also discovered New York could be a strangely dark and vacant place—catacombesque—and secretive, like the oysters that its citizens devoured in such prodigious quantities. The streets were often empty except for pigs that foraged at all hours. The slums, like the infamous Five Points, to whose low haunts the great man was escorted by two policemen, were as noisome as any in London.
 
In the 1870s and ’80s, gaslight began yielding to electricity. The Bowery, with its popular theaters, was the first district to be lit by Edison’s eerie new light, followed by the stretch of Broadway from Twenty-fourth Street to Twenty-sixth. A commercial visionary from Brooklyn named O. J. Gude seized on electricity for display advertising. In 1891 Madison Square was astonished by a giant sign advertising a Coney Island resort (“Manhattan Beach Swept by Ocean Breezes”). Verbally inventive too, Gude coined the phrase “Great White Way.” The most wondrous electric advertisement in New York was a fifty-foot pickle in green lightbulbs advertising Heinz’s “57 Varieties.” This “pioneer spectacle,” as Frederick Lewis Allen hails it in The Big Change, stood at the intersection of Fifth Avenue, Broadway, and Twenty-third Street, since 1902 the site of the Flatiron Building. In 1913, Rupert Brooke came to marvel at the gaudiness of Times Square. At street level, the effect was disconcerting. “The merciless lights throw a mask of unradiant glare on the human beings in the streets, making each face hard, set, wolfish, terribly blue.” Above, the street was filled with wonders. Brooke could not help noticing an advertisement starring two bodies electric, “a youth and a man-boy, flaming and immortal, clad in celestial underwear,” who boxed a round, vanished, reappeared, and fought again. “Night after night they wage this combat. What gods they are who fight endlessly and indecisively for New York is not for our knowledge.”
 
City lights were mostly white in the 1920s. “For anyone interested in period detail, there were almost no colored lights then,” Gore Vidal recalls in his essay “On Flying.” “So, on a hot, airless night in St. Louis, the city had a weird white arctic glow.” In the 1930s, the planners at the New Deal farm agencies expected an influx of urbanites to flee the stricken cities for a new life in the countryside: the prospective exurbanites were called “white-light refugees.” In time, of course, the refugees came, only the process was called suburbanization. Neon light, first imported from France before the First World War by a West Coast automobile dealer, Earle C. Anthony, remained unusual for a long time even in New York. Edwin Denby, the dance critic and poet, remembered “walking at night in Chelsea with Bill [de Kooning] during the depression, and his pointing out to me on the pavement the dispersed compositions—spots and cracks and bits of wrappers and reflections of neon-light—neon-signs were few then—and I remember the scale in the compositions was too big for me to see it.”
 
Throughout the Jazz Age and the Depression the white and many-colored lights of Broadway blazed, now concentrated in Times Square, where they advertised Four Roses whiskey, Camel cigarettes, Planters Peanuts (“A Bag a Day for More Pep”), Coca-Cola, the Astor Hotel. It took the blackouts during the war to dull the blaze, but by 1946 even the more prolonged dimout was becoming a distant memory. New York had resumed its old habits of brilliance.
 
“I am just coming out of five years of night,” says Camus in his journal, “and this orgy of violent lights gives me for the first time the impression of a new continent. An enormous, 50-foot-high Camel billboard: a G.I. with his mouth wide-open blows enormous puffs of real smoke. Everything is yellow and red.”

Table of Contents

Contents
 
Introduction xiii
 
PROLOGUE The Last Hurrah of Franklin D. Roosevelt 1
 
PART I Empire and Communications
1 City Lights 37
2 Cultural Capital 42
3 The Greater City 58
4 Babylon Revisited 68
5 Wandering Rocks 83
 
PART II City of Refuge
1 Exiles and Émigrés 93
2 The City at War 112
 
PART III Words, Words, Words
1 Books Are Bullets 119
2 New York Discovers America 131
3 Limousines on Grub Street 137
4 Scenes of Writing 142
 
PART IV That Winter—and the Next
1 A Fractious Peace 155
2 New York Observed 162
3 Soldier’s Home 170
 
PART V The City in Black and White 183
1 Berenice Abbott’s Village in the City 193
2 Gottscho’s Oz 212
3 Weegee’s Dark Carnival 215
 
PART VI Greenwich Village: Ghosts, Goths, and Glimpses of the Moon
1 Bohemia Was Yesterday 229
2 Conciliating Nobody: The Masses and the Villagers 245
3 Brightness Falls 268
4 Another Part of the Forest 304
5 Culture and Anarchy: “The Sublime Is Now” 319
 
PART VII 1948: The End of Something
1 Verdict 345
2 Conference at the Waldorf: The End of Something 373
 
PART VIII Days Without End 387
 
Acknowledgments 437
Notes 441
Selected Bibliography 475
Index 479

Editorial Reviews

…sprawling, roving, panoramic and omnivorous…The Brazen Age not only tells stories but also channels voices. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin and Albert Parry weigh in often. In his own prose Reid sounds like Wilson and Kazin, sharing their capacious curiosity and emulating their stylistic momentum, epigrammatic solemnity and wryness…Reid…becomes a historian of New York's historians, a literary commentator's literary commentator, a gossip's gossip. He is willing to sacrifice the force of a point to include contradictory eloquence. Sensibility, not argument, organizes many sections. Readers who live for iron theses should probably dip a toe in and see. But in our current marketplace of ideas, where pivotal singularities sell books—the one event, disease or invention that reputedly changed everything forever—this wide-ranging intensity, free from inflated claims, is refreshing.

The New York Times Book Review - Eric Bennett

"The Brazen Age is a mesmerizing political, artistic, and intellectual story of New York in the forties…David Reid is an extraordinary historian who writes like a novelist…[and] brings [the era] to life."  
—The Washington Book Review
 
“The pages of The Brazen Age are sprawling, roving, panoramic and omnivorous… [they] are stuffed with everything: a history of skyscrapers, a tally of Franklin Roosevelt’s cocktails, a shard of Truman Capote’s wit, a litany of best-selling authors you’ve never heard of but want to look up.  [Reid] not only tells stories but also channels voices…In his own prose Reid sounds like [Edmund] Wilson and [Alfred] Kazin, sharing their capacious curiosity and emulating their stylistic momentum, epigrammatic solemnity and wryness…[He] becomes a historian of New York’s historians, a literary commentator’s literary commentator, a gossip’s gossip…this wide-ranging intensity is refreshing." 
—Eric Bennett, The New York Times Book Review

“A truly great book. David Reid’s narrative is magnificently rich and complex, but his thesis is simple: with Europe’s metropolises in ruins in 1945, New York became the melting pot of global avant-gardes, the primate city of both an age and an empire. Like Diego Rivera’s great destroyed mural at Rockefeller Center, The Brazen Age magically captures the clamoring convergence of genius, power, and revolt—of dreams, manifestoes, and defeats—that made Manhattan the central power plant of late modernity.”
—Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

“[An] exhilarating account…New York City in the 1940s. [With] chapters on iconic New York individuals (Berenice Abbott, Weegee), Superstars (Einstein, Toscanini, Brecht, Stravinsky), politics (the 1948 elections, leftist magazines), and bohemia (Greenwich village). Brilliant…a historical tour de force…Reid delivers his rich history with a bang.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
 
“Reid goes in-depth to detail the culture, media, politics, iconic individuals and strange intersections of a city teeming with life. It's a great read.”  
—San Jose Mercury News

“A brilliant, sweeping and unparalleled look at the extraordinarily rich culture and turbulent politics of New York City between the years 1945 and 1950…Reid has magnificently captured a complex and powerful moment in history.”
—Bookreporter
 
“Utterly masterful…a book rich with the colorful personalities of postwar America. [Reid] infuses his narrative with such energy [and] wit that it all hangs together marvelously as a cultural adventure story.”
— Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Monthly
 

 

From the Publisher

03/15/2016
New York City is an entity unto itself. Even during World War II, a time when citizens of several countries were uniting in ways previously unexplored, New York operated under its own set of rules. Reid (Sex, Death and God in L.A.) writes about "the brazen age" of New York, beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt's last campaign trip through the city in 1944. The author covers a lengthy period of history with a large cast of characters, making it difficult to keep track of pertinent details. While the narrative describes the art, bohemia, and politics of 20th-century New York, the lack of chronological order means it can be hard to differentiate between sections. VERDICT This study will appeal to readers seeking a history of New York from the beginning of the 20th century to the end of the 1940s, although the attempt to cover several areas means it may not be as comprehensive as some readers would prefer.—Rebecca Kluberdanz, New York P.L.

Library Journal

★ 2016-02-18
No less than Paris in the 1920s, New York City in the 1940s was the center of the world, according to this exhilarating account of the city during that decade. Journalist and editor Reid (Sex, Death and God in L.A., 1992, etc.) begins his rich history with a bang, describing the city's boroughs through the eyes of a gaunt, ailing Franklin Roosevelt during a daylong, 50-mile 1944 electioneering tour in an open car in a cold rain to refute Republican claims that he was ailing. The purpose of the tour, writes the author, was "to demonstrate in the most vivid possible way that…he was alive and laughing." At his death six months later, great world cities not in ruins after World War II were exhausted, but New York flourished. At the time, journalist John Gunther praised NYC as "the incomparable, the brilliant star city of cities, the forty-ninth state, a law unto itself, the Cyclopean paradox, the inferno with no out-of-bounds, the supreme expression of both the miseries and splendors of contemporary civilization, the Macedonia of the United States." This efflorescence benefitted from a flood of European exiles fleeing fascism. Superstars (Einstein, Toscanini, Brecht, Stravinsky) aside, the average American and America's government felt little sympathy, but this represented the greatest transplant of talent since Greek scholars fled to Italy after the 1453 fall of Constantinople. Movie and theater attendance began declining after 1945, but it remained the golden age of print. New York had more than 15 daily newspapers and dozens of smaller ones, and the nation's largest department store, Macy's, contained the nation's largest bookstore. Having read or seen nearly every artifact of this period, Reid delivers his opinion in a score of unrelated but brilliant chapters on iconic New York individuals (Berenice Abbott, Weegee), groups (returning soldiers, homosexuals), politics (the 1948 elections, leftist magazines), and bohemia (Greenwich village again and again). A historical tour de force.

Kirkus Reviews