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Inside the 1924 Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Garden in New York
In a nation of immigrants—and there’s no nation that fits that description more than ours—the conflicts between the already-here and the strangers still arriving is, however oxymoronically, a recurrent constant. Indeed, this year marks the 100th anniversary of a high point of that conflict, in ways both bad and good.
This spring will mark the 100th anniversary of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which essentially closed off immigration from Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe in response to a ferocious backlash against the Catholics, Jews, and Slavs who’d already transformed American cities and threatened to similarly transform the entire nation, fatally diluting its ostensibly white Protestant essence. Leading this charge was the second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan, stronger this time in the North than the South (the state with the most Klansmen was Indiana), supplementing its racism with a huge dose of nativism.
And this summer will mark the 100th anniversary of the disastrous Democratic Convention of 1924, which was so polarized by this nativism that it droned on for two weeks and 103 ballots before it could find a presidential candidate acceptable to both its white Protestant hinterlands (the South and the West) and its religiously and racially polyglot big Eastern and Midwestern cities. Even before it turned to the balloting on its nominee, the convention had torn itself asunder over a platform plank that condemned the Klan. The front-runner going into that convention had been New York Gov. Al Smith, a liberal Catholic product of that most polyglot of all American neighborhoods, Manhattan’s Lower East Side. As it then required a two-thirds vote of the delegates to become the nominee, Smith duked it out with various Protestant alternatives until, finally, the exhausted delegates settled on a corporate lawyer no one had heard of, who went on to lose handily to Republican Calvin Coolidge in November.
America was undergoing a further transformation in the 1920s that made this nativist backlash all the more powerful: the political and cultural rise of its cities. The 1920 census was the first to show that more Americans lived in urban areas than rural ones (suburbs at that point had barely been invented). Worse still, the polyglot purveyors of urban values had invented new media—movies and the radio—that heedlessly transported those values to movie theaters and living rooms all across the land, sundering the inculcation of traditional values in the rural young, helping to prompt their move to the cities.
America’s cities had long been producing a distinct cultural product, ranging from vaudeville to novels, but at least at the level of “high” culture, it hadn’t been particularly celebratory of their ethnic diversity. In very different ways, writers like Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser looked at class differences. Herman Melville and Walt Whitman did celebrate diversity, but Melville located his more on ships and the docks than inland, and Whitman was both sui generis and way too early to figure in the conflicts of the 1920s.
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George Gershwin, left, with his brother Ira Gershwin, in an undated photo
But 1924 also marks the 100th anniversary of a landmark in the rise of the culture of American urban diversity—which is to say, I’d argue, the rise of modern American culture. One hundred years ago today at a concert in New York’s Aeolian Hall, a 26-year-old songwriter/pianist and a popular semi-jazz big band astonished their audience with the inaugural performance of the songwriter’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” The astonishment began at the very start of the piece, with a wailing, rising clarinet glissando that both heralded and was in itself a very new American sound, mixing the blue notes of klezmer with the blue notes of the blues, and a shifting, sometimes-syncopated, sometimes-not, propulsive rhythm that had come to the composer (George Gershwin, as if you didn’t know) while traveling from Boston to New York on a speeding train three weeks before the concert.
Gershwin himself was later to say that he had tried to put the new urban pulse of the nation and the synthesis of diverse cultures that New York embodied into the piece—which he had first thought to name “American Rhapsody” before his brother (and his great lyricist) Ira suggested “Rhapsody in Blue” instead. (For a brilliant account of the Gershwin-Gershwin collaboration, please read Deena Rosenberg’s Fascinating Rhythm.) He knew those diverse cultures in his bones: Due to their father’s ultra-local peregrinations, Ira once tallied 28 separate, sequential homes the family had moved in and out of (25 in Manhattan, three in Brooklyn) between George’s birth in 1898 and his 18th birthday in 1916.
Two years after the Rhapsody’s premiere, the critic (literary, not music) Edmund Wilson authored a novel, I Thought of Daisy, in which the classical standards of the critic and the sensual appeals of working-class New York battle it out in the protagonist’s mind. They are only resolved when he hears and is fascinated by some music by a songwriter named Harry Hirsch, who is clearly Wilson’s fictionalization of Gershwin. “Where had he got it?” the protagonist wonders.
From the sounds of the street? The taxis creaking to a stop? The interrogatory squeak of a streetcar? Some distant and obscure city sound in which a plaintive high note, bitten sharp, follows a low note, strongly clanged and solidly based? Of had he got it from Schoenberg or Stravinsky?—or simply from his own nostalgia, among the dark cells and raspings of New York, for those orchestras and open squares which his parents had left behind?
Had Gershwin stuck with the “American Rhapsody” name for the piece, he might well have been accused of some urban presumption (or some Jewish chutzpah); that would have been par for the course in 1924. But time would have confirmed that choice, too; the piece has become as emblematically American as “The Star-Spangled Banner” (and, of course, a gazillion times better as a piece of music). But there is, indeed, a welcome bit of presumption in the Rhapsody. It embodies, as every music critic at that performance was to note, what they termed a new and distinctly American sound, by which they really meant the sound of the nation’s rising and diverse cities.
In a sense, then, that opening clarinet yawp is of a piece with the opening line of The Adventures of Augie March, which Saul Bellow famously began with “I am an American, Chicago born,” in a novel that mixes the street slang of mishmash Chicago with high academic-ese and sets something of a template for the next several decades of postwar American writing.
An American, Chicago born. An American, New York born. An American, born or raised in the “Heights” of Manhattan, bringing rap to the Broadway mainstream in the celebration of immigrants that is Hamilton. We are urban, immigrants and immigrants’ children, some of us not Christian, some of us not white, whose claim to American-ness is as self-evidently valid—validated by our ongoing enrichment of America itself—as anyone’s.
And today, as 100 years ago, that claim, and the claims of other kinds of largely urban diversity, come complete with backlash.
