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The Brazen Age: New York City and the American Empire: Politics, Art, and Bohemia
A brilliant, sweeping, and unparalleled look at the extraordinarily rich culture and turbulent politics of New York City between the years 1945 and 1950, The Brazen Age opens with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s campaign tour through the city’s boroughs in 1944. He would see little of what made New York the capital of modernity—though the aristocratic FDR was its paradoxical avatar—a city boasting an unprecedented and unique synthesis of genius, ambition, and the avant-garde. While concentrating on those five years, David Reid also reaches back to the turn of the twentieth century to explore the city’s progressive politics, radical artistic experimentation, and burgeoning bohemia. From 1900 to 1929, New York City was a dynamic metropolis on the rise, and it quickly became a cultural nexus of new architecture; the home of a thriving movie business; the glittering center of theater and radio; and a hub of book, magazine, and newspaper publishing. In the 1930s, the rise of Hitler and World War II would send some of Europe’s most talented men and women to America’s shores, vastly enriching the fields of science, architecture, film, and arts and letters—the list includes Albert Einstein, Erwin Panofsky, Walter Gropius, George Grosz, André Kertész, Robert Capa, Thomas Mann, Hannah Arendt, Vladimir Nabokov, and John Lukacs. Reid draws a portrait of the frenzied, creative energy of a bohemian Greenwich Village, from the taverns to the salons. Revolutionaries, socialists, and intelligentsia in the 1910s were drawn to the highly provocative monthly magazine The Masses, which attracted the era’s greatest talent, from John Reed to Sherwood Anderson, Djuna Barnes, John Sloan, and Stuart Davis. And summoned up is a chorus of witnesses to the ever-changing landscape of bohemia, from Malcolm Cowley to Anaïs Nin. Also present are the pioneering photographers who captured the city in Berenice Abbott’s dizzying aerial views, Samuel Gottscho’s photographs of the waterfront and the city’s architectural splendor, and Weegee’s masterful noir lowlife. But the political tone would be set by the next president, and Reid looks closely at Thomas Dewey, Henry Wallace, and Harry Truman. James Forrestal, secretary of the navy under Roosevelt, would be influential in establishing a new position in the cabinet before ascending to it himself as secretary of defense under Truman, but not before helping to usher in the Cold War. With The Brazen Age, David Reid has magnificently captured a complex and powerful moment in the history of New York City in the mid-twentieth century, a period of time that would ensure its place on the world stage for many generations.
536 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 21, 2022
The inner front jacket of The Brazen Age says the book is about the culture and politics of New York City in the years 1945-1950, and if that sounds interesting to you, you should definitely read a different book, because The Brazen Age is a brazen mess. The author doesn't even attempt to stick to the stated time period. The writing is not exactly dazzling, being more an exercise in name dropping than providing any coherent narrative. Most of the content pertains to New York City, at least tangentially, until about the last 40 pages, when the author succumbs to complete demonic possession and writes an entirely different book about the Truman administration, the ill-fated Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, and the outbreak of the Korean War. I'm mystified as to how this book even got published. I'm only giving it 2 stars because a couple of chapters are at least interesting and coherently written. (My copy clearly identifies the author as David Reid, while Goodreads credits the book to Dave Reiding, so maybe the author really did experience an identity crisis!)
September 22, 2016
This is a very odd book. As I understood it, one is meant to learn about how the New York cultural scene between the end of the Second World War and the start of the Korean War represented some kind of false dawn for highbrow American culture -- one of those turning points of history where history failed to turn.
Instead, it was as if there were two books that had been edited together to make one. The first was turned into the central portion of this book, a history of 'America's Bohemia' (mostly Greenwich Village) prior to 1945. The second was turned into bookends around this first book, and describes Harry Truman's administration up to the outbreak of the Korean War, including his surprise re-election in 1948.
The book has its moments, but does not seem to live up to its title, unless one is to read the subtitles (why two?) as a list.
Instead, it was as if there were two books that had been edited together to make one. The first was turned into the central portion of this book, a history of 'America's Bohemia' (mostly Greenwich Village) prior to 1945. The second was turned into bookends around this first book, and describes Harry Truman's administration up to the outbreak of the Korean War, including his surprise re-election in 1948.
The book has its moments, but does not seem to live up to its title, unless one is to read the subtitles (why two?) as a list.
November 23, 2020
It was an interesting book. While it was fascinating to learn about the cultural scene of New York during the post WWII era, the book devotes a lot of time to the scene during the depression and WWII itself. Also, the book tends to jump around a lot and never sticks to a single linear path. While writing a cultural history can be different than a regular history, a solid timeline can be helpful. Another pet peeve in this book is the introduction and re-introduction of groups and phrases throughout the story. When things are mentioned for the first time, they need to be explained in full because nine times out of ten, I don't know what they are. Overall, a good book that could have been better with a little more organization.
November 14, 2016
The Brazen Age is a well written history, but history of what, I have no idea. As other reviewers pointed out, it's all over the place. it's sort of a history of post WWII New York, but there is a lot of early 20th century New York here too, along with some material in the Korean War. Very odd.
December 15, 2016
A shaggy book about a shaggy period. But for all that not a bad book.
I know I can be a bit of an asshole about book's structural issues; it's just what I see. And structurally, this book is a bit of a mess--in fact, it's a bit of a mess in some of the same ways that Richard Lingeman's "Noir Forties" was a bit of a mess. And that book's infelicities bothered me, while this one's just don't.
Reid nominally covers an even tighter period than Noir Forties: not the entire decade, but the post-war years until 1950. And a tighter geographic span, too, just New York, as opposed to all of America. But Reid's book, like Lingeman's, has trouble keeping its eye on the subject. He wanders all over the place, with fully a third of the book devoted to the period before 1940, ranging as far back as the European origins of New York.
It's an enjoyable read, though. The reason for the difference, I think, is that there is far less repetition. We do meet and re-meet some of the same characters, but in different situations, making different points. The wandering feels less indulgent because it is not dictated by personal memories or preferences, but the lineaments of the era. And Reid has a good eye for the telling anecdote and revealing quote. More simply put, he's a good storyteller, so if what the reader wants is story, then it is possible to sit back and enjoy, without worrying overly much where the narrative is going, where it's been, or why it is here, exactly.
The thesis, if that's the right word, is fittingly loose, allowing Reid to cram in all manner of subjects, as he finds them interesting or necessary. He says that New York became the world city, par excellence, in the 1940s because all of the other competitors--London, especially, but also Paris and Berlin--were destroyed by war, and their cultural avatars came to this place as a refuge, and so world culture was reconstituted here, and stayed here, mutatis mutandis, even after the war, as the refugees returned home and their cities were rebuilt, because of the advantage that New York had accrued.
The book opens with an extended political vignette, the re-election campaign of FDR in 1944--the reasoning for this opening not becoming clear until much later. Reid then dips back into history for an extended section, telling the history of New York from several different perspectives. One can definitely get antsy during this section, or one can choose to simply go with the flow. As with most of the book, Reid isn't really breaking new ground--this is a tertiary history--but he does make some novel connections, and he does string together the various elements into a comprehensive--if disjointed, which is a reflection of the actual times--image.
The book then turns its attention, finally, to the subject at hand, the construction of New York as a world city, built out of the remains of the New Deal, the dirty thirties, the grim resolve of the war, and the Atlantic crossings of culture--back and forth to Paris and London, especially, since the beginning of the 1900s. Reid takes time to look at the construction of the idea of New York in literature. And in photography. Between these two vistas, he shows New York--and by extension, America--in the years immediately following World War II to be something other than unified and happy: this was a period of intense labor and civil rights agitation, and the re-integration of so many soldiers back into civilian life was anything but easy.
He then takes up the subject of New York's Bohemian life, albeit this section--one of the longest--also spends the bulk of its pages on times before the 1940s, going as far back as Pfaff's and Melville and Whitman before coming up to date, though in a eulogizing mood: already by 1948 Bohemia was being remembered, not really lived. There is also a chapter on Gay New York.
The final two sections are closely connected, and make sense of the beginning as well as the book's title. Gore Vidal, who appears frequently in the book, wrote that he thought there was a brief period, after World War II and before the clamping-down of the Cold War, when the 20th century had not a golden age, but a not-too-brazen one: when the progressivism of the New Deal might have been rescued, when the arts flourished and might have continued to do so. Reid thinks so, too.
And so part of these sections is a requiem for this failed alternative. But Reid doesn't really trust that even if events had turned out differently they really would have been that different: the political and cultural impulses were going to be curtailed, in one way or another; mostly he just wishes that the curbing wasn't quite so brutal. If the Bohemian energy, if Bohemian adventurism, if skepticism of war, and the Cold War, could have been maintained, America might have continued shaggy a bit more, pen a bit more, rather than curdling into the complacency of the 1950s. Which is where Reid ends, with that complacency, with the Cold War going hot in Korea, and America, even as its sons were battling, and dying, and its government institutions were oriented around competition with the Soviets, ignoring the demands of public culture and retreating toward private entertainments.
Most interesting about the book, perhaps, though, is not Reid's loose argument and looser arrangement, but what those say about the period at issue. It's almost as if looking at this period was too difficult--like the shaggy thing is a monster, or a Lovecraftian creature of non-Euclidean dimensions. Reid constantly recurred to other time periods. And when he discussed the period, he discussed it not as it was, but as it was portrayed, in novels (he insisted several times that during this period novels *were* news) and photographs.
In its way, this is similar to Lingeman's decision to view the period through the lens of noir films. It's not that I think these modes of investigation are illegitimate--I don't--but that they are revealing despite themselves. The period is investigated, it is at a remove: through literature, through photos, through movies, not as it was experienced directly by the people themselves. We romanticize the era--the Greatest Generation--cut it out altogether--from V-J Day to Levittown--and even Vidal could only define it glancingly, as not-too-brazen.
The period itself remains hidden under all that shag.
I know I can be a bit of an asshole about book's structural issues; it's just what I see. And structurally, this book is a bit of a mess--in fact, it's a bit of a mess in some of the same ways that Richard Lingeman's "Noir Forties" was a bit of a mess. And that book's infelicities bothered me, while this one's just don't.
Reid nominally covers an even tighter period than Noir Forties: not the entire decade, but the post-war years until 1950. And a tighter geographic span, too, just New York, as opposed to all of America. But Reid's book, like Lingeman's, has trouble keeping its eye on the subject. He wanders all over the place, with fully a third of the book devoted to the period before 1940, ranging as far back as the European origins of New York.
It's an enjoyable read, though. The reason for the difference, I think, is that there is far less repetition. We do meet and re-meet some of the same characters, but in different situations, making different points. The wandering feels less indulgent because it is not dictated by personal memories or preferences, but the lineaments of the era. And Reid has a good eye for the telling anecdote and revealing quote. More simply put, he's a good storyteller, so if what the reader wants is story, then it is possible to sit back and enjoy, without worrying overly much where the narrative is going, where it's been, or why it is here, exactly.
The thesis, if that's the right word, is fittingly loose, allowing Reid to cram in all manner of subjects, as he finds them interesting or necessary. He says that New York became the world city, par excellence, in the 1940s because all of the other competitors--London, especially, but also Paris and Berlin--were destroyed by war, and their cultural avatars came to this place as a refuge, and so world culture was reconstituted here, and stayed here, mutatis mutandis, even after the war, as the refugees returned home and their cities were rebuilt, because of the advantage that New York had accrued.
The book opens with an extended political vignette, the re-election campaign of FDR in 1944--the reasoning for this opening not becoming clear until much later. Reid then dips back into history for an extended section, telling the history of New York from several different perspectives. One can definitely get antsy during this section, or one can choose to simply go with the flow. As with most of the book, Reid isn't really breaking new ground--this is a tertiary history--but he does make some novel connections, and he does string together the various elements into a comprehensive--if disjointed, which is a reflection of the actual times--image.
The book then turns its attention, finally, to the subject at hand, the construction of New York as a world city, built out of the remains of the New Deal, the dirty thirties, the grim resolve of the war, and the Atlantic crossings of culture--back and forth to Paris and London, especially, since the beginning of the 1900s. Reid takes time to look at the construction of the idea of New York in literature. And in photography. Between these two vistas, he shows New York--and by extension, America--in the years immediately following World War II to be something other than unified and happy: this was a period of intense labor and civil rights agitation, and the re-integration of so many soldiers back into civilian life was anything but easy.
He then takes up the subject of New York's Bohemian life, albeit this section--one of the longest--also spends the bulk of its pages on times before the 1940s, going as far back as Pfaff's and Melville and Whitman before coming up to date, though in a eulogizing mood: already by 1948 Bohemia was being remembered, not really lived. There is also a chapter on Gay New York.
The final two sections are closely connected, and make sense of the beginning as well as the book's title. Gore Vidal, who appears frequently in the book, wrote that he thought there was a brief period, after World War II and before the clamping-down of the Cold War, when the 20th century had not a golden age, but a not-too-brazen one: when the progressivism of the New Deal might have been rescued, when the arts flourished and might have continued to do so. Reid thinks so, too.
And so part of these sections is a requiem for this failed alternative. But Reid doesn't really trust that even if events had turned out differently they really would have been that different: the political and cultural impulses were going to be curtailed, in one way or another; mostly he just wishes that the curbing wasn't quite so brutal. If the Bohemian energy, if Bohemian adventurism, if skepticism of war, and the Cold War, could have been maintained, America might have continued shaggy a bit more, pen a bit more, rather than curdling into the complacency of the 1950s. Which is where Reid ends, with that complacency, with the Cold War going hot in Korea, and America, even as its sons were battling, and dying, and its government institutions were oriented around competition with the Soviets, ignoring the demands of public culture and retreating toward private entertainments.
Most interesting about the book, perhaps, though, is not Reid's loose argument and looser arrangement, but what those say about the period at issue. It's almost as if looking at this period was too difficult--like the shaggy thing is a monster, or a Lovecraftian creature of non-Euclidean dimensions. Reid constantly recurred to other time periods. And when he discussed the period, he discussed it not as it was, but as it was portrayed, in novels (he insisted several times that during this period novels *were* news) and photographs.
In its way, this is similar to Lingeman's decision to view the period through the lens of noir films. It's not that I think these modes of investigation are illegitimate--I don't--but that they are revealing despite themselves. The period is investigated, it is at a remove: through literature, through photos, through movies, not as it was experienced directly by the people themselves. We romanticize the era--the Greatest Generation--cut it out altogether--from V-J Day to Levittown--and even Vidal could only define it glancingly, as not-too-brazen.
The period itself remains hidden under all that shag.
December 9, 2017
very good survey of intellectual and cultural movements in NYC
February 4, 2016
David Reid obviously did his research and had a lot of information compiled for this book. However, it felt disjointed. After reading practically the whole first section I still wasn't quite clear about what time period this book was really covered. The prologue seemed to say it was the 1950s but the book really spanned the whole first half of the 20th century. It could have easily split into three books. Reid tried to cover so much that he really couldn't go into detail at times and would just abandon people almost as soon as he mentioned him. The subject matter is interested but I just don't think this book was particularly well done.
July 26, 2016
This book can best be described as mildly amusing.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews