Greenwich Village: From Bohemian to Capitalist

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I don't mean to say that big business deliberately plotted to render the nation extravagant, pleasure worshipping, and reckless of tomorrow. Though it laid no plots in advance, American business was quick enough to use the situation, to exploit the new markets for cigarettes and cosmetics, and to realize that, in advertising pages and movie palaces, sex appeal was now the surest appeal. The Greenwich Village standards, with the help of business, had spread through the country. Young women east and west bobbed their hair and were not very self-conscious when they talked about taking a lover. The conversations ran from mother fixations to birth control while they smoked cigarettes between the courses of luncheons eaten in black-and-orange tea shops just like those in the Village. The "party," conceived as a gathering together of men and women to drink gin cocktails, flirt, and dance to the phonograph or radio, had become one of the most popular American institutions. It developed out of the "orgies" celebrated by the French 1830 Romantics, but it was introduced into this country by Greenwich Villagers — before being adopted by salesmen from Kokomo and the younger country-club set in Kansas City.

Wherever one turned the Greenwich Village ideas were making their way: Even the Saturday Evening Post was feeling their influence. It allowed drinking, petting, and unfaithfulness to be mentioned in the stories it published, and its advertising columns admitted one after another of the strictly pagan products — cosmetics, toilet tissues, cigarettes. Yet still it continued to thunder against Greenwich Village and bohemian immorality. It even nourished the illusion that its long campaign had been successful. On more than one occasion it announced that the Village was dead and buried. "The sad truth is that the Village was a flop," the magazine announced in the autumn of 1931. Perhaps it was true that the Village was moribund — of that we can't be sure, for creeds and ways of life among artists are hard to kill. If, however, the Village was really dying, it was dying of success. It was dying because it became so popular that too many people insisted on living there. It was dying because women smoked cigarettes on the streets of the Bronx, drank gin cocktails in Omaha, and had perfectly swell parties in Seattle and Middletown — in other words, because American business and the whole of middle-class America had gone Greenwich Village.

Excerpted with permission from Exile's Return (Viking, 1931).

Part of Utne Reader cover story, November/December 1997.

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