Volume 42, Number 7 · April 20, 1995
Wonderful Town?
By Robert M. Adams
Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s
by Ann Douglas
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 606 pp., $25.00
Under the gleaming neon sign that reads HONEST JOHN, USED CAR SALESMAN you're sure of at least one thing. Nobody advertises himself or his product as 'honest' who doesn't have very good reason to know that people will expect the contrary. Ann Douglas of Columbia University titles her new book Terrible Honesty; she is referring to New York City in the decade of the 1920s. That decade began with the Volstead Act, which provoked widespread hypocrisy and atrocious lawlessness throughout the nation; it ended with the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression, which forced a profound reconsideration of all the values of the preceding decade. There were of course honesty and dishonesty aplenty during the 1920s, as there have been in every period of American history. Perhaps the eras that give us the greatest impression of outraged vociferous honesty were those that provoked it by the most shameless displays of dishonesty. Myself having lived through a lot of decades, including Ms. Douglas's mongrel Twenties, I am not instantly persuaded by the thesis that they were marked by unusual honesty, either private or public.
Review, 3288 words
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