The Baltimore Evening Sun

Friday, December 29, 1989

Other Voices: In the '20s and the '80s the Republican Party served as a cover for an irrational coalition between those most concerned over the loss of traditional values and those doing the most to destroy these values.

Robert S. McElvaine

We've been here before, folks

Reverberating echoes of the Roaring 20s

THE 1980's have been filled with eerie echoes from the "New Era" of the 1920s. As the 1990s approach, no one needs be reminded of why these echoes produce apprehension -- except perhaps Ronald Reagan, who often hailed the prosperity of the '20s without mention of what happened at the decade's end.

Both the 1920s and 1980s began with the election of a handsome, leading-man Republican whose looks seemed to qualify him more than his intellect. Warren G. Harding and Ronald Reagan each was said to "look like a president." The elections of 1920 and 1980 both amounted to repudiations of the policies of Democrats perceived to be idealists who had led the nation astray. The victorious candidates pledged to return the United States to its tried and true principles.

"Normalcy" was the term Harding coined; six decades later Ronald Reagan spoke of "bringing America back." It mattered not that both men were actually promising to restore a golden age that existed more in distorted popular memory than in reality.

In the roaring '80s, as in the Jazz Age of the '20s, there was a significant turning inward by large segments of the American populace. At the outset of both decades, people were tired of the crusades of the preceding periods -- progressivism and World War I in 1920; the civil rights movement, the Great Society and Vietnam in 1980. The general opinion was that enough sacrifices on behalf of others had been made, and there seemed to be little to show for it. Social concern gave way to self-absorption.

Both ages adopted a live-for-today mentality. The President's Research Committee on Social Trends found at the end of the '20s a "new attitude toward hardship as a thing to be avoided by living in the here and now, using installment credit and other devices to telescope the future into the present."

Gertrude Stein spoke for the decade: "The future is not important any more." Americans in the '80s have given this idea an even more selfish twist, running up unprecedented debts for our children to pay, while depleting fossil fuels that took millions of years to build up, thereby telescoping both past and future into a perindulgent, all-consuming "now."

The two decades found their justifications for self-indulgence wherever they could. In the '20s, a vulgarization of Freud provided a basis for hedonism. In the '80s, various "therapists" have informed us that thinking only of ourselves is proper, that we have, as a Barbara Streisand-

Barry Gibb song put it, "nothing to be guilty for." Advertisers presented the same message, from the ubiquitous beer commercial crowing, "Who says you can't have it all?" to the sneaker company's hedonistic call, "Just do it!" And such revered figures as Ivan Boesky offered '80s business students encouragement in egoism by telling them, "You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself."

But how could these cults of acquisition occur during two decades when Republican presidents proclaimed a return to "morals" and "family values"? Actually, in the '20s and '80s traditional values were observed far more in rhetoric than in reality. They were recited so frequently because people realized that these values were fading and hoped to find some security by clinging to platitudes which they themselves violated.

In the 20s and the '80s the Republican Party served as a cover for an irrational coalition between those most concerned over the loss of traditional values and those doing the most to destroy these values by marketing an ethic of voracious, selfish consumption -- the nation's big businessman. This odd coalition held together in both decades for the same reasons: The traditionalists failed to realized that the corporations were undermining their position. So the Republican Party appealed to the schizophrenia within many Americans, who wanted both the old values and the new ethic or self-indulgence.

The presidency of Calvin Coolidge, who followed Harding from 1923 to 1928, perhaps can be summed up in his terse statement: "This is a business country, and it wants a business government." It is no wonder, then, that Ronald Reagan replaced a White House portrait of Thomas Jefferson with one of Silent Cal. It is also no wonder that successful businessmen have been worshiped almost as much in the '80s as in the '20s. Lee Iacocca has become an icon of nearly the magnitude of Henry Ford. It is indicative of the materialistic tenor of each era that we revered the opinion of these men on subjects of which they were utterly ignorant.

In both decades the stock market became the locus of greed and scheming. In addition to the outright illegalities on Wall Street in both periods, the '20s saw the legal practice of buying on margin pushed beyond the limit. The '80s has had its equivalent in junk bonds and leveraged buyouts, schemes which leave practitioners extremely vulnerable in the event of a severe economic downturn. But the short-term thinking that dominated in both times encouraged such foolish risk-taking.

Not surprisingly, the hope of getting rich quickly permeated both decades. In the '20s gambling and land speculation soared. The mentality of our current age is nowhere more apparent than in the mad rush of people to buy tickets for huge lottery prizes.

In the last years of the '80s the echoes of the '20s have become even more audible. In the 1928 and 1988 elections, the country seemed to be torn between a desire to maintain Republican prosperity and a tiring of the conservative policies that party had instituted. This twin itch for continued prosperity and a more active government resulted in the 1928 and 1988 elections of the "progressive" Herbert Hoover and the "kinder and gentler" George Bush.

Each decade waged a losing war against a popular vice -- alcohol in the '20s, drugs in the '80s. Each decade featured "unspeakable music," jazz then, rock and rap now. With the 1928 signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war, and the recent crumbling of the Iron Curtain, each decade looked forward to world peace. And each decade cut taxes on the rich and saw the gap between haves and have-nots grow larger.

Malcolm Cowley, who died in this, the last year of the 1980s, once recalled his feeling at the end of the '20s. The decade had been, Cowley said, "An easy, quick, adventurous age, good to be young in; and yet coming out of it one felt a sense of relief as one coming out of a room too full of talk and people into the sunlight of the winter streets."

So it may be once more, as the '80s give way to the '90s.

Robert S. McElvaine is a professor of history at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss. He is the author of "Mario Cuomo: A Biography" and other books on politics and the Depression.