The Dying World of 1925: Addendum

The Quiet Intermission

“I wonder how many revolutions will be required before grown-up people learn not to say to children, 'I had those same ideas when I was your age.”

—Max Eastman

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The Quiet Intermission

For most of my life, the early 20th century occupied a curiously liminal space within my memory. Given the stature of the Great Depression and World War II, I assume this is fairly common. Indeed, if the history of the United States were captured in a single epic film, the period would likely serve as a quiet intermission, somewhere between the glorious reign of Lady Columbia and the imperial rule of Uncle Sam—accompanied by cheerful music.

I already had some familiarity with the period, just enough to keep me out of trouble. As a child, I was obsessed with baseball’s golden age, and as an adult, I gravitated to the Great War. But it wasn’t until I delved into the works of prominent anti-communists of the 1940s and 1950s, that I began to appreciate the era’s complexity.

That appreciation deepened when I first read Witness by Whittaker Chambers, whose harrowing break with communism both terrified me and moved my soul. I was shocked to discover that he had grown up in a conservative, middle-class home, and his characterization of the seemingly glamorous 1920s as paralyzed and decaying contradicted everything I thought I knew about the decade. For conservatives today, the 1920s still represent the triumph of capitalism and limited government—the last gasp of an old-fashioned conservativism that was swept away by FDR. But Chambers, a former Coolidge Republican, is merciless in his assessment, directly linking the period’s godlessness to the rise of American communism.

From there my interest grew as I discovered other renegades like James Burnham, John Dos Passos, Louis Fischer, Sidney Hook, and Max Eastman, who also cut their intellectual chops in the 1920s.

Though all but one remained lifelong atheists, their writings still conveyed a raw spiritual pain. Most likened their first encounter with communism to a religious conversion. Max Eastman, the son of Congregational ministers, dubbed it the “Marxian religion,” while Whittaker Chambers insisted it was the world’s “second oldest” faith, beginning with the serpent who said, “Ye shall be as gods.” And how can we ignore a title like The God That Failed: A Confession?

I believe Granville Hicks, another disaffected communist, was correct when he called communism a “real absolute” and “perhaps the only absolute.” Until the last century, religion alone claimed that mantle. But somewhere along the way, perhaps in the not-so-distant past, everything changed. It depends on who you ask, of course, but each turning point cited tends to be bloody and miserable: 1789, 1848, 1917, 1945?

Compared to the rest of the developed world, Americans are unusually religious. Both Democrats and Republicans still profess their faith on the campaign trail, and the government continues to invoke God in official functions and, most tellingly, on the face of the almighty Dollar. Yet beyond boilerplate and slogans, I have to wonder, what do most people really believe? Does it matter?

These same questions, I have found, also preoccupied the 1920s. They absorbed believer and skeptic alike, who seemed to agree on only one thing: that there was a God-shaped hole in the heart of every American, and unless something filled it quickly, the country, if not the world, was doomed. After that, it was every man for himself: traditionalists retreated to the past, progressives consulted science, and others, stirred by visions of class struggle and revolution, tried to birth a new order—even if it meant committing espionage for a foreign power.

Most people today view the collapse of the Soviet Union as a final rebuke to Marxism. And yet, nearly 40 years later, communist countries, including major geopolitical rivals like China, persist. The American Communist Party lives on, too, claiming 20,000 members nationwide; a far cry from its 1947 peak of 75,000, but significant, nonetheless.

And yet, maybe this staying power has less to do with communism and more to do with the conditions necessary for it to thrive. To better understand this, we must take a close look at the early 20th century, when even the most ordinary Americans were talking about the death of God and the rise of Lenin.

Americans see communism as a foreign conspiracy. They treat Marxism like an exotic disease, something accidentally contracted abroad or deliberately injected into the nation’s bloodstream by scheming immigrants. Others consider it nothing more than a gangrenous appendage of the Comintern—Soviet Union gone, problem solved. Now, there’s some truth to all of this, but it still misses the deeper forces at work. Otherwise, how do you explain communism’s appeal to an all-American, Ivy League-educated Whittaker Chambers, Max Eastman, or Alger Hiss?

Regardless of its origins, this strange germ, as Whittaker Chambers revealed in Witness, can only infect the sick and dying. And with the breakdown of traditional faith and social order in the early 20th century, America’s spiritual immune system seems to have faltered, leaving the nation weak and exposed.

As Chambers put it, “The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God,” and it was a vision already entertained by millions, long before Lenin arrived at Finland Station in 1917.

This is the quiet intermission in America’s great historical epic, and by the time we pass through the dying world of 1925, the nation is just eight years away from revolution (more on that later).