Read Online Forgotten Man, The by Amity Shlaes - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Amity Shlaes
Ads: Link
many others, for depositors would soon number 400,000. From the jewel trade to the wholesale meat business, immigrants were integrating into the New York economy. Among the Jewish families in the city throngs were kosher butchers named Schechter, in Brooklyn. In the late 1920s several banded together to open the Schechter Brothers wholesale poultry slaughterhouse.
Blacks were part of this story. Some were coming up in the great migration from the South—leaving the flood zone, giving up homes and, sometimes, land—to establish themselves in an entirely new place, northern cities. At the time, the step seemed wise. There was now a small black upper class in cities like New York, the old middle class in Harlem’s Strivers’ Row being joined by wealthy blacks. In the North, unlike the South, black children could attend school, and their parents had some choice of work. Black illiteracy decreased to 16.4 percent in 1930, from 45 percent in 1900. Fewer black babies died at birth—by half. Black life expectancy was rising. Most important, blacks were able to find work at about the same rates whites did. Data from the 1930 census would show black unemployment nationally standing slightly below white unemployment.
Coolidge of the party of Lincoln was not content with this. He wanted to see an end to lynchings in the South but was not clear whether Congress had the authority to reach over the states and do so. In December 1923 he said that “the congress ought to exercise all its powers of prevention and punishment against the hideous crimes of lynching.” But Congress was not inclined to act, and here his federalism seemed disingenuous.
The black impulse to strive, and black impatience at presidential hesitation, now found a strange expression: the cult of a self-taught preacher whom his followers called Father Divine. Father Divine had little education and, like other Baptist preachers, his own style of evangelizing. He did not speak his ideas as much as speak his way toward them. “God,” he would say, “is not only personified and materialized. He is repersonified and rematerializes. He rematerializes and he rematerialates.” Unlike the black nationalist Marcus Garvey, Father Divine taught that the salvation of blacks was through the Gospel of Plenty—through making it in Middletown, as it were. Here he was in line with Coolidge. Coolidge emphasized the economic progress of blacks when he spoke, arguing that equality would come after.
Father Divine also believed that it was destructive for blacks to think of themselves in racial terms—indeed, he himself refused torecognize racial differences and did not allow his followers to do so. In other words, heaven was not a black Middletown or a white one but simply a heaven of the middle class. Though Father Divine preached in churches like others, his most famous center in the 1920s and early 1930s would be his Sayville, New York, home. Seventy-two Macon Street was a sprawling house, in a town that was a model of conservative and white suburbanism. Father Divine called it his “heaven.” Contemporary journalists mocked Father Divine’s movement as a parody of the general culture of aspiration in the 1920s; certainly he provided a contrast to Garvey. But Father Divine’s followers, like the followers of Booker T. Washington before him, had a respectable purpose: to improve themselves as individuals. Father Divine used movement money to acquire as much property as possible, mostly in all-white neighborhoods. Through him, he believed, poor blacks would become part of the American people, great and anonymous.
Overseas, all these American successes were being noted. In 1927 Literarische Welt, a German periodical, quizzed eleven Berlin citizens chosen as typical to see if they recognized names on a list. All eleven knew who Thomas Edison was; ten knew Henry Ford. Only four knew who Joseph Stalin was. Edison himself knew whom he should thank for his own and America’s
Blacks were part of this story. Some were coming up in the great migration from the South—leaving the flood zone, giving up homes and, sometimes, land—to establish themselves in an entirely new place, northern cities. At the time, the step seemed wise. There was now a small black upper class in cities like New York, the old middle class in Harlem’s Strivers’ Row being joined by wealthy blacks. In the North, unlike the South, black children could attend school, and their parents had some choice of work. Black illiteracy decreased to 16.4 percent in 1930, from 45 percent in 1900. Fewer black babies died at birth—by half. Black life expectancy was rising. Most important, blacks were able to find work at about the same rates whites did. Data from the 1930 census would show black unemployment nationally standing slightly below white unemployment.
Coolidge of the party of Lincoln was not content with this. He wanted to see an end to lynchings in the South but was not clear whether Congress had the authority to reach over the states and do so. In December 1923 he said that “the congress ought to exercise all its powers of prevention and punishment against the hideous crimes of lynching.” But Congress was not inclined to act, and here his federalism seemed disingenuous.
The black impulse to strive, and black impatience at presidential hesitation, now found a strange expression: the cult of a self-taught preacher whom his followers called Father Divine. Father Divine had little education and, like other Baptist preachers, his own style of evangelizing. He did not speak his ideas as much as speak his way toward them. “God,” he would say, “is not only personified and materialized. He is repersonified and rematerializes. He rematerializes and he rematerialates.” Unlike the black nationalist Marcus Garvey, Father Divine taught that the salvation of blacks was through the Gospel of Plenty—through making it in Middletown, as it were. Here he was in line with Coolidge. Coolidge emphasized the economic progress of blacks when he spoke, arguing that equality would come after.
Father Divine also believed that it was destructive for blacks to think of themselves in racial terms—indeed, he himself refused torecognize racial differences and did not allow his followers to do so. In other words, heaven was not a black Middletown or a white one but simply a heaven of the middle class. Though Father Divine preached in churches like others, his most famous center in the 1920s and early 1930s would be his Sayville, New York, home. Seventy-two Macon Street was a sprawling house, in a town that was a model of conservative and white suburbanism. Father Divine called it his “heaven.” Contemporary journalists mocked Father Divine’s movement as a parody of the general culture of aspiration in the 1920s; certainly he provided a contrast to Garvey. But Father Divine’s followers, like the followers of Booker T. Washington before him, had a respectable purpose: to improve themselves as individuals. Father Divine used movement money to acquire as much property as possible, mostly in all-white neighborhoods. Through him, he believed, poor blacks would become part of the American people, great and anonymous.
Overseas, all these American successes were being noted. In 1927 Literarische Welt, a German periodical, quizzed eleven Berlin citizens chosen as typical to see if they recognized names on a list. All eleven knew who Thomas Edison was; ten knew Henry Ford. Only four knew who Joseph Stalin was. Edison himself knew whom he should thank for his own and America’s
Similar Books
