conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know a description for a book titled A History of the American People about Times</a, History, Jews</a with the genre: New, Used & Rental Textbooks, Humanities? Start with the sentence 'the author, whose previous works include the distinguished <a href="/exec/obidos/ISBN=0060922834/${0}">Modern Times</a> and <a href="/exec/obidos/ISBN=0060915331/${0}">A History of the Jews</a> , has produced an epic that spans the history of the American people over the past 400 years'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author, whose previous works include the distinguished <a href="/exec/obidos/ISBN=0060922834/${0}">Modern Times</a> and <a href="/exec/obidos/ISBN=0060915331/${0}">A History of the Jews</a> , has produced an epic that spans the history of the American people over the past 400 years. The prolific narrative covers every aspect of U.S. history, from science, customs, religion, and politics to the individual men and women who have helped shape the nation. His detailed, provocative examinations of political and social icons, from Lyndon the author to Norman Rockwell, are especially strong. the author's text is intelligent and rich with detail, and yet extremely accessible for anyone interested in a reinterpretive analysis of America's past.
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conversations.value: Do you know the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A History of the American People
  It is important to grasp that downward mobility was, initially, only a tiny fracture in the smooth monolith of America's upwardly mobile society. Jazz, for instance, was an elite taste in the 1920s. Not until it was simplified, purged, and made respectable by the white bands of Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey (becoming 'swing' in the process) did it begin to conquer the masses from 1935 onwards. Then in the 1940s came bop, with black players like Charlie Parker (alto sax), Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet), Thelonious Monk (piano), and singers like Ella Fitzgerald, doing bebop. There followed 1950s cool, hard bop, soul jazz, rock in the 1960s, and in the 1970s blends of jazz and rock dominated by electronic instruments. And all the time pop music was crowding in to envelop the various styles and traditions in the phantasmagoria of commercial music geared to the taste of countless millions of easily manipulated but increasingly affluent young people. And, from the worlds of jazz and pop, the drug habit spread to the masses as the most accelerated form of downward mobility of all.145
  All this was a cloud no bigger than a child's hand in the 1920s, where critical attention was focussed more on the rise of the American musical, itself a melting-pot amalgam of the Viennese operetta, the French boulevard music-play, the English Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera and music hall--The Beggar's Opera of 1728 was the ultimate ancestor--plus the all-American ingredients of burlesque, minstrel-show, vaudeville (and jazz), becoming in the process a completely new and hugely attractive art-form. The prewar talents of Berlin and Jerome Kern were joined, after the end of the war, by a host of newcomers, some of them close to the genius level: in addition to Gershwin, Richard Rogers, Howard Dietz, Cole Porter, Vincent Youmans, Oscar Hammerstein, Lorenz Hart, and E. Y. Harburg. Together they brought the American musical to full flower: Gershwin's Lady Be Good!, the first mature example, opened on December 1, 1924 in the Liberty Theater, starring Fred Astaire and his sister Adele. It was an outstanding event of a Broadway season that included forty musicals, such as Kern's Sitting Pretty, Irvin Berlin's Music Box Review, Youmans' Lollypop, The Student Prince, and Sissie and Blake's Chocolate Dandies.146 Twenties New York did not quite have the cultural reclame of Weimar Germany at this time but it was the place where the native creator had the widest range of opportunities and where the expatriate artist was most likely to find the freedom, the means, and the security to express himself.
  The keynote of the 1920s musical was joy, springing from an extraordinary exuberance in the delight of being alive and American. The central paradox of the 1920s--probably the most enjoyable decade in American history--was that America, having voluntarily saddled itself with Prohibition, took to partying on a scale never seen before. Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961), who fought his way to the top of the young writers' league during the decade, coined the phrase, soon universal: 'Have a drink.' The Twenties also saw the emergence into open society of a secret drink, first made in California (probably San Francisco) in the 1860s, of gin, sweet vermouth, and angostura. In 1920s New York it was made with minute quantities of dry vermouth and rechristened the Dry Martini. Bernard de Voto called it 'the supreme American gift to world culture.' H. L. Mencken thought it 'the only American invention as perfect as a sonnet.' If not sonnets, then ingenious verses were written to it, including a notable one by Ogden Nash and a quatrain by the 1920s Egeria, Dorothy Parker: 'I like to have a Martini / Two at the very most. / After three I'm under the table. / After four I'm under the host.'
  Warren Harding did not drink Martinis, however; he drank whiskey. And he chewed tobacco. As Thomas Edison put it, 'Harding is all right--any man who chews tobacco is all right.' (This was said with general male approval. Yes; the Twenties are a long time ago now.) In his own humdrum way, Harding shared in the general joy of the time. He took the press into his confidence and, as he got to know reporters, called them by their Christian names. When he moved, he liked to surround himself with a vast traveling 'family,' many invited on the spur of the moment, who occupied ten cars in his presidential train. He would ask people up to his bedroom for what he called a 'snort' and twice a week he invited his intimates over for 'food and action' (action meant poker). Commerce Secretary Hoover, a stuffed shirt (quite literally; he never wore anything else after 6 P.M.) was the only one who declined to play: 'It irks me to see it in the White House.'147
  Yet Harding usually emerges from polls of American citizens and professional historians alike as the least respected of the presidents. He illustrates the adage, demonstrated under Grant and proved again and again in the second half of the 20th century: 'A president cannot be too careful.' Harding was careless in his choice of friends and colleagues. Or, to put it another way, he was generous and unsuspicious. The only specific charge of dishonesty brought against him personally was that the sale of the Marion Star was a fix. This was decisively refuted in court, the two men who brought suit collecting $100,000 in libel damages. But Harding made one colossal error of judgment: appointing Albert Fall, the florid Senator for New Mexico, his Interior Secretary. In believing Fall honest he was in good, or at least in numerous company. The Senator sported a handlebar mustache and wore a flowing black cape and broad-brimmed stetson, the very picture of old Southern--Western 'normalcy.' He was so popular that, when his nomination went before the Senate for approval, it was confirmed by immediate acclamation, the only time in American history a Cabinet member has received such a vote of confidence.150 Harding's second error was believing his Attorney-General, his old Ohio campaign-manager Harry Daugherty, who promised the President he would screen him from the influence-peddlers who swarmed up from his home state. 'I know who the crooks are, and I want to stand between Harding and them,' was Daugherty's boast--which proved an idle one.151
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conversations.value: Do you know another paragraph?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: It was one of the characteristics of America in the 1920s that its chief executive for much of the decade preached and practiced this public philosophy. Virtually everywhere else, the trend was towards the expansion of government, greater intervention, and more power to the center. Of those who came to power at the same time as Coolidge, all the most notable were dedicated to expanding the role of the state. Mussolini, supreme in Italy from 1922, put it bluntly: 'Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.' Stalin, in power from 1923, began his great series of five-year plans for the entire country. The new nation-creators of the 1920s, Kemal Ataturk, President of Turkey from 1923, Chiang Kai-shek, ruler of China from 1925, Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia (1926), and Reza Shah of Persia (1925) all took government into corners of their countries it had never before penetrated. Even Poincare of France and Baldwin of Britain were, by Coolidge's standards, rampant interventionists. Coolidge took a critical view of his masterful Cabinet colleague, Herbert Hoover, who was by training a mechanical engineer and by political instinct a social engineer. Coolidge felt that Hoover was itching to get his hands on the levers of power at the White House so that he could set the state to work to hasten the millennium. He referred to Hoover with derision as the 'Wonder Boy' and, after he had left office, said of his successor: 'That man has offered me unsolicited advice for six years, all of it bad.' It is possible, though unlikely, that if Coolidge had known in advance that the interventionist Hoover was sure to take over the leadership of the Republican Party, he would have run for another term.166
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last three paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In fact, Twenties prosperity was a growing solvent of class and other barriers. Next to automobiles, it was the new electric industry which fueled and reflected the boom. Expenditure on radios rose from a mere $10,648,000 in 1920 to $411,637,000 in 1929, and total electrical product sales tripled in the decade to $2.4 billion.177 The mass radio audience (followed by the talkies) brought about the Americanization of immigrant communities and a new classlessness in dress, speech, and attitudes. Sinclair Lewis, revisiting 'Main Street' on behalf of the Nation in 1924, found two working-class, small-town girls wearing 'well-cut skirts, silk stockings, such shoes as can be bought nowhere in Europe [at the price], quiet blouses, bobbed hair, charming straw hats, and easily cynical expressions terrifying to the awkward man.' One of them served hash. 'Both their dads are Bohemian; old mossbacks, tough old birds with whiskers that can't sling more English than a musk-rat. And yet, in one generation, here's their kids--real queens.'178 The Twenties marked the biggest advance for American women of any decade, before or since. By 1930 there were 10,546,000 women 'gainfully employed' outside the home; the largest number, as before, were in domestic/personal service (3,483,000) but there were now nearly 2 million in clerical work, 1,860,000 in manufacturing, and, most encouraging of all, 1,226,000 in the professions.179 Equally significant were the liberated housewives, the 'Blondies,' to whom their appliances, their cars, and their husband's high wages had brought leisure for the first time.
  The coming of family affluence was reflected in the decline of radical politics and their union base. A 1929 survey quoted a union organizer: 'The Ford car has done an awful lot of harm to the unions, here and everywhere else [in America]. As long as men have enough money to buy a second-hand Ford and tires and gasoline, they'll be out on the road and paying no attention to union meetings.'180 In 1915, 1921, and 1922 the unions lost three key Supreme Court actions, and their 1919 strikes were disasters. The American Federation of Labor membership dropped from a high of 4,078,740 in 1920 to 2,531,261 in 1932. 'Welfare capitalism' provided company sports facilities, holidays with pay, insurance and pension schemes, so that by 1927 4,700,000 workers were covered by group insurance and 1,400,000 were members of company unions. The American worker appeared to be on the threshold of a hitherto unimaginable middle-class existence of personal provision and responsibility which made collective action increasingly superfluous.181
  Reflecting this growth and prosperity, the United States had achieved a position of paramountcy in total world production never before attained during a period of prosperity by any other state: 34.4 percent of the whole, compared with Britain's 10.4, Germany's 10.3, Russia's 9.9, France's 5.0, Japan's 4.0, 2.5 for Italy, 2.1 for Canada, and 1.7 for Poland. The likelihood that Europe, followed by Asia, would soon begin to lean towards what Andre Siegfried called 'America's original social structure' increased with every year the world economy remained buoyant. Granted another decade of prosperity on this scale, the history not just of America but of the entire world would have been vastly different and far more fortunate. But that was not to be. After the election of Herbert Hoover, and during the interregnum in Washington, President Coolidge was asked for a decision on long-term economic policy. He snapped, 'We'll leave that to the Wonder Boy.'