David
Reid borrows the title of his rambling “interpretive historical essay”
about 20th-century New York cultural iconography from an observation
Gore Vidal made in The New York Review of Books decades ago.
Except for a brief interregnum, Vidal wrote,
the United States had been at war from Dec. 7, 1941, until Aug. 15,
1973. “Between 1945 and 1950,” Vidal declared, “the empire turned its
attention to peaceful pursuits and enjoyed something of a golden or at
least for us not too brazen an age.”
Mr. Reid, an essayist, author and editor (“Sex, Death and God in L.A.”), explores the fulcrum of this age of genius in “The Brazen Age: New York City and the American Empire: Politics, Art and Bohemia” (Pantheon Books, $30).
His
book actually opens in 1944, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
punishing four-borough campaign motorcade, and his purview extends well
beyond the three years, 10 months and 10 days defined by Vidal to
encompass the trial of Max Eastman, the socialist editor of The Masses,
for sedition during World War I, and the Beat generation in the early
1950s.
In between, the author introduces readers to a standing-room-only salon in which Weegee,
the photographer, waxes rhapsodic about the newspaper PM (“You could
tell PM readers on sight. They looked like people from another planet
waiting for someone to take them back to their leader … which, of
course, was PM”); C. Wright Mills, the Columbia sociologist, describes
militant labor leaders as “the new men of power”; and Simone de Beauvoir
writes curiously of “something in New York that makes sleep useless.”
Roughly
half of Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential vote was cast in New York,
which, Mr. Reid argues, is where the cultural Cold War began, where
genius mattered to the public intellectuals and private wannabes and
where Louis Simpson, a classmate of Allen Ginsberg at Columbia, tossed
his wristwatch out a window “because we are all living in Eternity now.”
Boxing has always been a vehicle for ethnic succession, and Mike Silver focuses on the first half of the 20th century in “Stars in the Ring: Jewish Champions in the Golden Age of Boxing:A Photographic History” (Lyons Press, $29.95).
“Getting
knocked down and picking yourself up to continue the battle,” Mr.
Silver, a sports historian, writes, “can be seen as a metaphor for
life’s ups and downs.”
From
1901 to 1939, he writes, 29 Jewish boxers were recognized as world
champions (about 16 percent of the total) and more than 160 were ranked
as top contenders in their divisions. By 1928, he writes, “Jewish boxers
comprised the single largest ethnic group among title contenders in the
10 weight divisions.”
Mr.
Silver affectionately recalls an era when boxing rivaled baseball in
popularity, when Benny Leonard was “the first Jewish-American pop
culture icon” and about which Philip Roth could write with authority:
“In my scheme of things, Slapsie Maxie was a more miraculous Jewish
phenomenon by far than Dr. Albert Einstein.”
