F. Scott FitzBobo

Explains the Jazz Age to Squares.

Groucho Marx once remarked [when told that a swimming pool was off-limits to Jews]:

"My son is half-Jewish; can he wade in up to his waist?"

Why mention that?

Bear with me.

Today, fresh from his scarring breakup with that Now Very Unreasonable Cad Whose Name Will Not Be Spoken, Our Mr. Brooks hid his wounds by taking America up into his lap to tell us all a wonderful fable about why the Jazz Age was the apotheosis of American culture.

Because it encouraged amateur athletics, back when America was on the trolley, by golly!

But then, a buncha stuff happened...

(Stuff like the repeal of Prohibition, the collapse of the global economy, fascism nearly sweeping Europe into a permanent, mechanized Dark Ages, Franklin Roosevelt saving capitalism, World War II, the A-Bomb,
Harry Truman,
Doris Day,
Red China,
Johnny Ray,
South Pacific,
Walter Winchell,
Joe DiMaggio,
Joe McCarthy,
Richard Nixon,
Studebaker,
Television
North Korea,
South Korea,
Marilyn Monroe,
Rosenbergs,
H-bomb,
Sugar Ray,
Panmunjom,
Brando,
The King and I,
And The Catcher In The Rye,
Eisenhower,
Vaccine,
England's got a new queen,
Marciano,
Liberace,
Santayana goodbye,
Joseph Stalin,
Malenkov,
Nasser and Prokofiev,
Rockefeller,
Campanella,
Communist Bloc,
Roy Cohn,
Juan Peron,
Toscanini,
Dacron,
Dien Bien Phu Falls,
Rock Around the Clock,
Einstein,
James Dean,
Brooklyn's got a winning team,
Davy Crockett,
Peter Pan,
Elvis Presley,
Disneyland,
Bardot,
Budapest
Alabama,
Khrushchev,
Princess Grace,
Peyton Place,
Trouble in the Suez,
Little Rock,
Pasternak,
Mickey Mantle,
Kerouac,
Sputnik,
Chou En-Lai,
Bridge On The River Kwai,
Lebanon,
Charles de Gaulle,
California baseball,
Starkweather homicides,
Children of Thalidomide
Buddy Holly,
Ben Hur,
Space Monkey,
Mafia,
Hula Hoops,
Castro,
Edsel is a no-go,
U2,
Syngman Rhee,
payola and Kennedy,
Chubby Checker,
Psycho,
Belgians in the Congo
Hemingway,
Eichman,
Stranger in a Strange Land,
Dylan,
Berlin,
Bay of Pigs invasion...)

And so forth.

Then, after all of that, David Brooks was born.

Then, a band of insidiously anonymous "left-leaning historians" (or "pinkos", if you prefer) made fun of amateur athletics via their deviously unspecified "left-wing critique[s]".

Curse those incognito rascals and their unidentified opinions!

Then...Reagan! And the world was back to positively hitting on all sixes. with every quiff and Joe Brooks, every Reuben and high hat up to their lapels in mazuma at prosperity's own petting party, bub!

(Note: While not actually mentioned by name, Ronald Reagan was clearly the subtext of the entire article because he is Ronald Reagan, so how could he not be?)

Then, um, a buncha more stuff happened, including "Die Hard", the founding of Apple, mapping the human genome and "Die Hard II: Die Harder".

Then...David Brooks got a job-for-life at the New York Times for some reason and wrote a column about the good old days when wing-walkers and flappers and the Negro league walked the Earth.

The days when controversies over bobbed-hair could make their way into the brand new trans-Atlantic London and "Airplane" Chicago editions --

"As for rules forbidding bobbed hair, one supposed that nowhere in the vicinity of New York could there be found a firm that would employ only long-haired clerks and stenographers.
...
One well-known business woman said recently that bobbed hair and a well-made-up face increase both the happiness and efficiency of stenographers."

-- New York Times, September 24, 1926 (pdf)

-- of the New York Times, and the values of amateur culture which, according to Our Mr. Brooks, "served as a restraint on some of the more brutal forces of the day" were being carefully cultivated at various bastions of that genteel, amateur culture.

Like America's elite universities and country clubs.

Which, as it happened, were at that very moment working vigorously to beef up their rules to make sure that people like Our Mr. Brooks

How Harvard, Princeton, Yale Restricted Jews, Smarties, Blacks
By Robin D. Schatz - December 30, 2005 00:10 EST


Harvard, Yale and Princeton, up until the very early 1920s, had an exam-based system of admission. If you passed you were admitted. If you failed you were turned away. If you were in the gray zone, then they might admit you on conditions but basically, if you passed, regardless of your social background, you would be admitted.
...

That was precisely why the system was judged to be no longer viable because too many of the wrong students, the ``undesirable'' students -- that is, predominantly, Jewish students of East European background -- started to pass the exams.

So an entirely new system of admissions was invented with emphasis on such things as character, leadership, personality, alumni parentage, athletic ability, geographical diversity. They started, for the first time, to do interviews. They introduced photos. A lot of things, which we take for granted today, in fact, were introduced in this period and have endured to the present.

Schatz: What happened to Jewish admissions as a result?
...

Karabel: Well, at Harvard, the Jewish proportion of the freshmen class in 1925 had reached 28 percent and shortly thereafter, after a very protracted and bitter struggle, which lasted from 1922 really to 1926, Harvard imposed a 15 percent quota. At Yale, the proportion of Jews had reached toward 14 percent and in 1924, they imposed a 10 percent quota. At Princeton where the proportion of Jews had gotten only to 3.6 percent, they decided that that was excessive and they cut the proportion of Jews to 2 percent in 1924. That's in contrast to African Americans, who were totally excluded from Princeton until 1945.

could not come in and play.

"Convenient to Churches."
Epstein and Forster report, among other things, on a survey of clubs made by the A.D.L. in 1961. Out of 1,152 clubs in 46 states, plus the District of Columbia (total membership: 700,000), 555 clubs barred Jews completely, and 136 limited Jewish membership to small numbers. Of the country clubs, 72% practiced discrimination, compared with only 60% of the city clubs.

Ironic, no?

Actually, if you look around, you may notice that the Jazz Age values -- the "moral sensibility" -- Our Mr. Brooks pines for are being quietly embraced all around you.

Not everywhere, of course: the weapons of commerce and advertising that Our Mr. Brooks' brute capitalism has aimed at the heads of our children are immensely powerful and unimaginably well funded.

But in the corners and under the radar and, most importantly, outside the Villager Beltway Event Horizon, it's there...

It's there in Chicago's empty lots where immigrants from the remnants of the British Empire are hard at their cricket bats and rugby scrums.

It's there in parks and clearings and beaches of every size that are packed with people of all ages in all kinds of weather playing soccer, football and softball, cheerfully and mostly by the rules.

It's there at the Wheelchair World Series.

And it's there at "Y" every Saturday during swimming lessons, where -- among the all the splashing and laughing -- kids of every size, color and physical ability are quietly being instilled with the virtues of teamwork, fair play, tolerance, correct technique and physical activity.

Instilled, in other words, with that good ol' "moral sensibility".

And the cool thing about the YMCA in this Year of Our Lord 2011?

You no longer have to be young or male or even Christian to get in.



Meanwhile across town...

....Matt Taibbi is just giving away all of David Brooks' hard-won tradecraft to anybody who wanders past.

For free!