The Reign of Saturn

Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America

By Donald Miller

Simon & Schuster, 2014

“New York was an empire city,” Donald Miller writes at the beginning of his massive, spellbinding new work of history, Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America:

… but like ancient Rome, a brawling, deeply divided one, with most of its recent arrivals living in tightly defined ethnic communities, where tribalism ran strong. Tens of thousands of these immigrants had yet to be assimilated, preferring to fall back on the languages and customs of their homelands. An astounding two million New Yorkers, over a third of the total population, were foreign born, and nearly three-quarters of all New Yorkers had at least one parent born abroad. Jimmy Walker’s New York had more Italians than Rome, more Irish than Dublin, more Germans than Bremen, and more Jews than London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, and Leningrad combined.

It’s a very human start to what is the most effulgently personality-oriented New York history since Ann Douglas’s 1995 book Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. Instead of focusing on social or political trends, Miller turns his attention to those millions of immigrants who flowed into his empire city from all parts of the world; in fact, the book opens with a “Cast of Characters” listing not only his major dramatis personae but also where they came from. Whether it’s New Yorker writer Lois Long (Stamford, Connecticut) or heavyweight champion boxer Jack Dempsey (Manassa, Colorado) or civil engineer Clifford Holland (Somerset, Massachusetts) or the great Babe Ruth (Baltimore, Maryland), the point is clear: for every enterprising native like Anne Harriman Vanderbilt or legendary Mayor Jimmy Walker, there were ten Grand Central Station hopefuls arriving satchel in hand and eager to change everything.

Perhaps inevitably then, places like Grand Central Station (“a purely capitalist project,” he calls it) become characters themselves in Miller’s story, especially since so many of them either had their births or reached their fruitions during the “Jazz Age” epoch he chronicles. Their sheer, staggering dimensions suit his taste for the grand canvas, as when writing about Grand Central itself:

Twenty-five miles of sewers, along with many more miles of gas and water lines, were removed or replaced, and nearly two hundred buildings demolished on additional land the railroad purchased for the project. Over a million and a half cubic yards of rock and granite were cut or blasted with dynamite, and enough earth was removed to fill cars of a train extending from Manhattan to Omaha. At times, nearly ten thousand workers were on the construction site, toiling round-the-clock.

(Of Manhattan’s signature breed of architecture, he’s equally evocative: “Skyscrapers,” he writes, “are the largest and costliest habitable structures on earth, some of them with daytime populations equal to that of small cities”).But the heart of this sprawling book is the human element, which Miller highlights as smoothly and illuminatingly as the American Civil War historian Shelby Foote, or the World War II historian Richard Evans. When he tells his readers the story of the mighty Holland Tunnel’s construction, for instance, he makes sure to include the touching fact that crowds of people were allowed to walk through the newly-completed tunnel when it was opened on November 12, 1927, and that they were “singing as they strolled and playfully shouting to hear the echo of their voices.”Supreme City is divided into five parts, each highlighting a different field of innovation or endeavor, from city construction to women’s rights to show business and the jazz legends who made the Jazz Age, and the whole thing is opened with a short prologue called “The Jimmy Walker Era” that’s worthy of being anthologized all on its own. “Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of New Yorkers, firmly believe that they are among Jimmy’s closest friends,” wrote the great hack journalist Alva Johnston, quite rightly, and more so even than most of his other colorful characters, New York’s roguish mayor seems to appeal to Miller the raconteur:

The Catholic Church in New York City had for years been outraged by Walker’s sexual escapades with actresses and chorus girls. During Walker’s first term, the archbishop of New York, Patrick Joseph Cardinal Hayes, son of sternly orthodox immigrants from County Kerry, Ireland, sent a prominent layman to censure Walker for “bringing shame” on both his wife and the church of his ancestors. Walker – forever his own man, giving orders, rarely taking them – would not be lectured to; he named two esteemed Catholics, benefactors of the church, whose sexual conduct was no better than his own. “You go back and tell the cardinal to take care of his two altar boys and I’ll take care of myself.”

It’s a fitting introduction: Miller follows it up with a long portrait gallery of personalities every bit as strong and memorable as Walker, from jazz titan Duke Ellington (from Washington, D.C.) to scandalous boxing promoter “Tex” Rickard (from Sherman, Texas) to Broadway showman supreme Flo Ziegfeld (from Chicago, Illinois). Miller has researched his three dozen principal characters to the last stiffed cabbie and discarded mistress, but despite the fact that the feet of his cast are universally shod in clay, Miller seems to love them all. He captures them in all their Chaucerian multiplicity – this human parade is the strongest element of a book filled with such elements – and for all their faults, he makes them somehow likeable.Likeable and mutable: it’s uncanny how so many of Miller’s people, through dint of will and mouth, seem to halfway transmute themselves into the roads, theaters, tunnels, harbors, parks, and towers that embodied the burly striving of the era. A case in point would be Walter Chrysler (from Wamego, Kansas), the blunt and foul-mouthed automotive tyrant who in the 1920s conceived a passion to put his signature on the emerging skyline of his adoptive city. He funneled a geyser of money and manpower into the erection of a building he wanted to tower over all others, setting a rigorous work-pace (but also going to extraordinary lengths to guard the safety of his crews) and sticking his nose into every aspect of it:

As his skyscraper went up, the still vigorously fit fifty-three-year old auto king would climb all over it, inside and out, barking orders and poking into everything. He got “the greatest thrill of his life,” he said, watching his skyscraper leap out of the ground. Throughout the construction process, he hosted a number of Manhattan luncheons to honor his laborers and supervisor, who developed a real affection for him. “Bluff, sanguine, gregarious, he commands respect,” said a writer for The New Yorker. “You cannot be with him and not like him as a man.”

The “race for the sky” embodies in miniature the mania of competition that made the Jazz Era so seedily singular, and Miller narrates it with gusto, telling the story of how the Bank of Manhattan at 40 Wall Street erected a “lantern” story to their own skyscraper in October 1929, making it 925 feet tall, clearly beating the Chrysler Building’s 845-foot height. This galled Chrysler, who had a secret steel spire constructed, and when he had it raised atop his building on October 23, 1929, the Chrysler Building – at 1,046 feet, became “the highest structure ever built, 105 feet taller than its downtown rival, higher even than the Eiffel Tower.”

It wasn’t all heights, of course. This was also the age of the huckster – foremost among them being the aforementioned Flo Ziegfeld, who had grand instincts for public spectacles but who also backed his share of duds. Even in such cases, the wonderful sangfroid of the period shines through, as in the case of Ziegfeld’s stage program showcasing European strongman Eugene Sandow, who was commissioned to fight a lion in front of a paying audience in San Francisco. When the lion proved cowardly and huddled in a corner, the crowd cried foul. “I did not see any of this,” Ziegfeld coolly remarked. “I was in Oakland with the money. Some subtle sense had warned me not to linger for the denouement.”

One theme that runs through a surprising amount of Miller’s book is teamwork: many of these fiercely individualistic geniuses gravitated toward each other. Engineers find publicists, mayors find ward bosses, Chrysler found groundbreaking photographer Margaret Bourke-White to publicize the birth of his beloved building. Jack Kriendler and Charlie Berns teamed up to become legendary restauranteurs, and Berns summed up their chemistry succinctly: “Jack supplied all the looks and charm, while I supplied only brains.”

This teamwork theme comes to its climax in the book’s final and most charming chapter, “A Bag of Plums,” which deals with the freewheeling, three-martini lunch old world of New York book publishing. The cautionary tale in this chapter is the figure of Horace Liveright, the boozy roué and would-be Broadway impresario who (along with his own psychic teammate, Albert Boni, who brought the brains to Liveright’s looks and charm) ran the Boni & Liveright publishing house and oversaw the Modern Library book series. Liveright created an environment in his offices of Bohemian decadence; he was fond of impulsive buys and scattershot author payments, but the gentlemanly chaos of his financial affairs eventually undid him (he sold the lucrative Modern Library to sharp young shark Bennett Cerf in order to pay off some outstanding personal debts). He and the long-suffering Boni, sauntering along in the easy handshake-agreement mind-set of postwar languor, were unprepared for the new tactics of Douglas’s “mongrel Manhattan” – tactics in fact embodied by the founders of Donald Miller’s own publishing house, Max Schuster and Richard Simon (another looks-and-brains combo), who established their firm in 1924 with new attitudes firmly in place:

Their publishing plan was risky in the extreme. They had not a single book or author under contract. Instead of signing up writers, they would come up with ideas and “find people to carry them out.” This became the governing philosophy of their firm; they would adhere to it unvaryingly for nearly a decade. Simon called it “planned publishing.” They would exploit current fads and trends and publish books with a straightforward commercial appeal, combining these, whenever possible, with works of literary merit. “Made” books, they called them.

In an interesting tonal shift, Miller chooses to end his exuberant tome with a dazed, down-and-out Liveright dwindling and finally dying in ratty-sleeved obscurity. It’s a subtle warning, in a way, a foreshadowing of the great crash awaiting all this gaudy excess – and the no-nonsense war-business decade to follow. The brief and gorgeous long decade Miller bring so vividly to life glitters before us like setting sunlight on high Manhattan glass. He catches the dirt and the laughter, the daring, the insane chances, the new technological marvels and even the beauty, and for 700 pages that read as fast as 50, he makes us want to live there. The result is certainly one of the best histories ever written of the second greatest city in the United States.