Word: 20s
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...certainly a shift from Modernism, but to where? Apparently, to "Manhattanism"-that fantasy-laden, Promethean language of shaped towers that produced the great monuments of the '20s and '30s: Rockefeller Center, Empire State, the Chrysler Building. As the architect Rem Koolhass has argued in his brilliantly suggestive book, Delirious New York (Oxford, 1978), these were the definitive fantasy-structures of American capital, the cathedrals of a "culture of congestion" that finds its apogee in the 1,244 blocks of Manhattan Island. No glass slab could hope to be as rich in imagery as the work of an architect like Raymond...
...assault on Joan, with Anne Bancroft tentatively booked to play Bad Mama. Broadway has not escaped the trend, and there are plans for plays based on the lives of Dorothy Parker, United Mine Workers Czar John L. Lewis, Singer Josephine Baker and Marie Dressier, a star of the '20s...
There are doubtless many reasons. An odd but important one is that the '60s lasted too long. As folklore, decades seldom observe the calendar's nice limits. The '20s actually began with the adoption of Prohibition; the '30s, launched by the 1929 crash, did not end until 1941, when the U.S. entered the big war. The election of Dwight Eisenhower as President in 1952 began the time consistently, if imperfectly, remembered as the quiet '50s. The furies and griefs that are recalled as the essence of the '60s began...
Once gone, and often before, every decade migrates into the vocabulary of folklore. There it persists as a sort of handy hieroglyph for conjuring up popular memories of a time. So it is that "the '20s," as a phrase, evokes not only The Great Gatsby but more social lore than the entire text of the novel. Similarly, to allude to the '30s, the '40s, the '50s or the '60s is to speak volumes. In contrast, the '70s have not, so to speak, learned to talk...
...late '20s, Golda became active in Histadrut, the Jewish labor federation; in 1940 she was named head of its political department. After World War II, with all signs pointing toward an end to Britain's mandate over Palestine, David Ben-Gurion, head of the Jewish Agency, dispatched Golda to the U.S. to raise money for arms that the new Jewish state would need. She minced no words. As she told a Chicago assembly of fund raisers: "You cannot decide whether we will fight or not. We will. You can only decide one thing: whether or not we shall...