Sensations

Introduction: Two Dogs

On January 20, Dr. Curtis Welch examined a three-year-old boy in Nome, Alaska, and confirmed what he had been dreading since two Inupiaq children had died the previous month with symptoms he'd misread as tonsillitis. It was diphtheria. Welch had ordered antitoxin the previous summer, but the shipment never arrived before the harbor froze, and the only serum in his hospital was expired. Nome held about 1,400 people, with several thousand more Alaska Natives in the surrounding region who had little natural immunity to the disease at all. The port was iced shut. Early aircraft could not fly in Arctic whiteout. The nearest usable antitoxin sat in Anchorage, and from there the only route to Nome ran 674 miles by rail to Nenana and then straight across the territory by dog sled, through ice cold temperatures and dangerous conditions.

The relay that followed involved twenty mushers and roughly 150 dogs, organized in a matter of days and run in blizzard conditions that periodically erased the trail entirely. Leonhard Seppala, Alaska's most decorated musher, drew the longest and most dangerous leg: out from Nome to meet the incoming serum, then back again across the open ice of Norton Sound, a shortcut that saved a day but risked the entire team through fracturing sea ice in total darkness, with his lead dog Togo — twelve years old, past what anyone would have called his prime — reading footing no human could see. Seppala's dogs alone covered 261 miles, more than double what any other team ran. He handed the package off at Golovin, seventy-eight miles from town, and it passed through two more mushers before reaching Gunnar Kaasen for what was meant to be the last ordinary leg of the relay.

Kaasen never got the word that the next musher was sleeping. Blinded by the storm, missing the turnoff to his scheduled rest stop entirely, he decided to keep going rather than wake anyone, and his dogs — with a young, largely untested leader named Balto out front — carried the serum the final fifty-three miles into Nome, arriving at 5:30 in the morning on February 2. The relay had covered 674 miles in 127 hours and a half. Within days the outbreak was contained. It remains, unglamorously, one of the cleaner successes in the history of public health logistics: a problem, a deadline, a relay of exhausted men and animals who made the deadline.

What happened next belonged to an entirely different set of laws. Kaasen gave reporters a vivid account of trusting Balto through conditions so blind he'd lost sight of his own dogs, and by February 5 the New York Times was already proposing a monument. New Yorkers took the suggestion literally: a statue was commissioned within weeks, sculpted over the summer, and unveiled in Central Park that December with newsreel cameras rolling and Kaasen standing beside the dog it depicted. Balto had run fifty-three miles on a leg widely regarded, even by his own musher, as the least perilous stretch of the entire route. Seppala, who owned Balto and had specifically judged him unfit to lead, watched Togo's 261 miles across cracking ice vanish from the story almost as fast as it had happened, replaced by a name the wire services simply found more printable than the alternative. He spent the rest of his life saying so, without much effect. The statue still stands. Its inscription credits "the sled dogs" generally, without naming which one did the work the caption implies.

Part I: The Trial of the Century

Tennessee's Butler Act, signed into law that March, made it a crime to teach in any state-funded school "any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible." Governor Austin Peay signed it mostly to please a rural legislature, and said as much afterward — he doubted it would ever be enforced. Within weeks the American Civil Liberties Union had placed an advertisement in Tennessee papers looking for a teacher willing to be arrested for it, and in the town of Dayton, a coal-company manager named George Rappleyea saw an opportunity that had nothing to do with theology. Dayton's population had fallen by half in a decade as its mining industry collapsed, and Rappleyea convinced a handful of local boosters, meeting at Robinson's drugstore, that a spectacle staged in their courthouse might do what nothing else had: put Dayton back on the map. They recruited John Scopes, a twenty-four-year-old football coach who occasionally substituted in biology, walked him through the state-mandated textbook's chapter on evolution, and had him teach it, then confirm to a grand jury that he had. Scopes was never sure he'd actually covered the material. It hardly mattered. He wasn't the point; the town was.

What followed outran every intention behind it. The ACLU had wanted a quiet test case to challenge the law's constitutionality. Dayton had wanted tourists. What arrived instead was the largest media event the country had staged to date: more than two hundred reporters, two from London, twenty-two telegraph operators sending out some 150,000 words a day over wire strung for the occasion, and — for the first time in American history — a criminal trial broadcast live, coast to coast, by Chicago's WGN at a cost of a thousand dollars a day. Main Street filled with tents, food stalls, itinerant preachers, and vendors selling stuffed toy monkeys; a sideshow exhibited two live chimpanzees and a man billed as evolution's missing link. Banners strung across the street told visitors to read their Bibles and asked where they intended to spend eternity. None of this had been about biology to begin with, and by the time the trial opened on July 10, it was even less so — a courtroom drama assembled less to determine a fact than to be watched determining one.

The two lawyers who arrived to run it were themselves a kind of casting decision. Clarence Darrow, the country's most famous defense attorney and an avowed agnostic, joined Scopes's defense specifically to take on William Jennings Bryan — three-time Democratic presidential nominee, tireless populist orator, and by 1925 the most visible face of American Christian fundamentalism, which had been organizing for years against the teaching of evolution in public schools. Judge John Raulston, mindful of both the heat and the likelihood that the crowd would collapse the courtroom floor, opened proceedings each day with prayer and eventually moved the trial outdoors altogether. He also ruled, early on, that the actual scientific merits of evolution and the constitutionality of the Butler Act were both off the table; John Scopes, not Tennessee law, was what stood accused. It left the defense with almost nothing to argue except the one thing the judge had just forbidden.

Darrow found his opening anyway, on July 20, in a maneuver that had no real precedent: he called Bryan himself to the stand, as an expert witness on the Bible, for the prosecution. Bryan agreed to it against his own lawyers' advice, apparently confident he could out-argue an unbeliever on his own ground in front of the largest audience he would ever have. For two hours, in the open air on the courthouse lawn, Darrow walked him through the text's more literal claims — a whale swallowing a man, a day the sun stood still, the age of the earth as reckoned from the begats of Genesis — and Bryan, cornered, began allowing that a "day" in Genesis might not mean twenty-four hours after all, a concession that satisfied no one: not the biblical literalists who'd made him their champion, not the modernists who'd hoped to embarrass him, and, it seems, not even Bryan, who ended the exchange accusing Darrow of trying the Bible rather than the case, an accusation that happened to be exactly true. The jury took nine minutes to convict Scopes and Raulston fined him a hundred dollars, later thrown out on appeal on a technicality having nothing to do with evolution, God, or Dayton.

Bryan did not get to enjoy whatever vindication he felt. He stayed in Dayton after the trial ended, exhausted by the summer heat and the exertion of the cross-examination, and died in his sleep five days later. H. L. Mencken, who had covered the entire circus for the Baltimore Sun with open contempt for the town and its spectators — dismissing them as rubes and Bryan as a demagogue past his prime, in dispatches that did as much as anything to fix Dayton's reputation in the national memory — allowed, in the days after Bryan's death, that the man had at least believed what he was selling. The trial was less as an argument that was won by either side than as a spectacle that outgrew the argument entirely, replayed for a national audience that had tuned in for the theater and gotten, almost by accident, a preview of a fight over what public schools were allowed to teach as true that would still be unsettled a century later. The Butler Act itself stayed on the books in Tennessee for another forty-two years.

Part II: The Roaring Twenties

None of the three works that would come to define the Jazz Age most vividly to later generations were received, in 1925, as anything like definitive. One was a commercial disappointment; its author considered his masterpiece but never lived to see it redeemed. One didn't yet have the name by which the world knows it. The third was, at the time, simply the funniest and most expensive comedy anyone had made — a hit, certainly, but not yet a monument. The Roaring Twenties, as a coherent cultural idea, is largely a retrospective persuasion job: a set of scattered, unevenly received artifacts that a later audience decided, collectively, to read as the definitive portrait of an era. 1925 produced the raw material. It did not yet know what it had produced.

F. Scott Fitzgerald finished The Great Gatsby convinced it was the best American novel yet written, and told his editor so. Published by Scribner's on April 10, it drew a handful of admiring notices — Fitzgerald's fellow writers, Edith Wharton and T.S. Eliot among them, recognized something new in it — but the daily press was largely unimpressed, one paper dismissing it outright as a dud, another finding it clever but immature. It sold under 20,000 copies by autumn, a sharp falling-off from Fitzgerald's two previous novels, and never earned back the advance he badly needed. He spent the rest of the decade watching it languish and the rest of his life believing himself, by most measures, a failure; when he died in 1940 at forty-four, unsold copies from the second printing were still sitting in Scribner's warehouse. The novel's canonization took a world war: distributed free to American soldiers by the Council on Books in Wartime in 1945, it found the mass audience Fitzgerald had wanted and never gotten. Everything the book is now credited with capturing — the hollowness under the party, the doomed reach for something just out of grasp across the water — was, in 1925, a private conviction of the author's that almost nobody agreed with yet.

That April, while Gatsby was quietly disappointing its publisher, Paris opened the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, a six-month showcase of new design that France had been planning, on and off, since before the war. Sixteen million visitors passed through pavilions of geometric ornament, sunburst motifs, and lacquered exotic wood — designed explicitly to reassert French taste as the standard the rest of the world should follow, at a moment when French industry badly needed exactly that kind of confidence restored. It worked, as spectacle: department stores built entire pavilions to lure visitors inside, Le Corbusier staged a minimalist provocation that scandalized the official jury and made his career, and the style on display would go on to shape skyscrapers, ocean liners, and cinema facades for the next fifteen years. What the exposition did not do, in 1925, was produce the name by which we now know it. "Art Deco" wasn't coined until 1966, when a retrospective exhibition compressed the exposition's own title into a catchier label and handed the whole movement its brand forty years after the fact. Visitors walking the Seine that summer would have called it simply the modern style, or the new style, or nothing in particular — a fashion, not yet a period.

Only Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush, which premiered at Grauman's Egyptian Theatre on June 26, arrived already certain of what it was. Chaplin had spent eighteen months and nearly a million dollars on it, the most expensive comedy of the silent era, restaging the Klondike's Chilkoot Pass with hundreds of hired extras trudging a snow path cut into a Colorado mountainside for a single establishing shot. He built the film's two most famous sequences — the Lone Prospector boiling and eating his own leather shoe with the gravity of a man savoring a holiday dinner, and the dream sequence in which two dinner rolls, speared on forks, perform a small delicate dance under his tilted, oversized face — out of an idea he'd carried for years: that the Donner Party's cannibalism and starvation, restaged as farce, could be genuinely, painfully funny without losing its horror underneath. It cost him twenty pairs of licorice boots and three days of retakes, and it worked so completely that Berlin audiences once made a theater rewind and replay the roll dance on the spot. Chaplin would say, for the rest of his career, that of everything he made, this was the film he wanted to be remembered by. Unlike Fitzgerald, he got his wish immediately; unlike the exposition in Paris, he never needed anyone to give the thing its name.

Taken together, the three make an uneven record of a decade already being sold to itself. Chaplin's shoe dinner persuaded an audience in real time that laughter and starvation could sit in the same frame without canceling each other out. Fitzgerald and the Paris exposition both persuaded audiences of something, eventually, but not the audiences or the timeline either man or the fair's organizers had in mind: Fitzgerald's green light took a world war to reach the readers who would make it a national scripture, and French design needed four decades and a stranger's christening before it became a period style with a name people could put on a coffee mug. The "Roaring Twenties" as a shorthand — glittering, doomed, gorgeously ornamented — is built out of exactly this kind of delayed and partial persuasion: a case argued in 1925 to an audience that would not fully agree until long after the case's authors were no longer around to hear the verdict.

Part III: Failures of Diplomacy

The trouble began, as these things often do, with a man sent to modernize a place that had not asked to be modernized. Captain Gabriel Carbillet, the French administrator installed over Jabal al-Druze in 1923, pursued road-building, land reform, and forced labor with the confidence of someone who assumed resistance meant backwardness rather than a functioning society being rearranged without its consent. By the summer of 1925 the region's Druze leadership had had enough of him and of the high commissioner, General Maurice Sarrail, who compounded the insult that July by inviting a delegation of Druze notables to Damascus for talks and then imprisoning them there. It was, among a colonized population that took hospitality and its violation seriously, exactly the wrong mistake to make. Fighting broke out within days, at the Battle of al-Kafr on July 21, and on August 23 the Druze leader Sultan al-Atrash formally declared revolution against France.

What began as a regional grievance became, within six weeks, something considerably larger. Nationalists from Damascus's People's Party, who had been organizing against the French mandate on entirely separate grounds since its imposition five years earlier, forged an alliance with al-Atrash and helped found a National Provisional Government in Jabal al-Druze, with al-Atrash as president. The rebellion spread north to Homs and Hama and west into southern Lebanon, and for a stretch that autumn it looked, to at least one prominent British observer touring the region, as though the French position in Syria might genuinely collapse. French troop levels in the mandate had been allowed to fall to their lowest point since the occupation began — fewer than 15,000 men, against a Syrian population that had just found common cause across a sectarian and regional divide the French administrative structure had been specifically designed to keep separate. An early Druze column advancing on Damascus itself was only stopped outside the city by air attack and a cavalry charge.

The French response, once reinforcements arrived from Morocco and Senegal, was to make an example rather than negotiate one. On October 4 and 5, a rebel assault on Hama led by the Ottoman veteran Fawzi al-Qawuqji triggered a heavy French bombardment of the city and the deaths of several hundred people, mostly civilians, before local notables brokered a withdrawal. Two weeks later, after rebel bands entered Damascus itself, the French evacuated their troops from the old city, sent in tanks, and then, over three days from October 18 through 20, shelled it from the ground and the air. Casualty figures vary by source, but the reported death toll ran into the thousands, whole neighborhoods were reduced to rubble, and the images that made their way out of the city — a modern colonial power leveling an ancient one it claimed to be civilizing — did more damage to the moral premise of the French mandate than any single rebel victory had managed.

It was, in fact, damage that traveled. The League of Nations' Permanent Mandates Commission, whose ordinary business consisted of reviewing dry annual reports from mandatory powers with polite skepticism, was flooded that year with telegrams and petitions from the Syrian diaspora — Rio de Janeiro, Berlin, Detroit, Lahore — demanding intervention. In a rare assertion of what limited authority it actually held, the Commission refused to accept France's submitted report for 1925, which covered only the calm months before the revolt began, and insisted on a full accounting of the bombardments and a timeline for restoring peace. For a moment there was even talk, in Geneva and in the press, that the mandate itself might be revoked. Nothing of the kind happened. The Commission had no army, no sanctions, and no mechanism beyond embarrassment to compel a mandatory power to change its conduct, and France, having weathered a bad season of international opinion, went on to hold Syria for another two decades, through further uprisings, until the Second World War forced its hand instead.

The same institution, the same year, was managing an entirely different negotiation in western Europe — the diplomatic groundwork, initialed at Locarno that October and signed in London that December, by which Germany, France, Belgium, Britain, and Italy agreed to guarantee their mutual borders and settle future disputes by arbitration rather than force. It would earn its architects the Nobel Peace Prize and, for a few years, a genuine reputation as the moment the postwar order finally stabilized. What Locarno did not do was extend the same guarantee eastward. Germany signed arbitration treaties with Poland and Czechoslovakia alongside the main pact, but pointedly refused to accept their borders as inviolable the way it had accepted its western ones, and neither Britain nor Italy would commit to defending them if Germany changed its mind later. The Polish delegation left the conference aware of exactly what had been bought and at whose expense: peace in the west, purchased in part by leaving the question of the east conspicuously, deliberately open. The contrast with Syria is not incidental. Locarno worked, to the extent that it did, because its signatories were great powers negotiating with each other as equals, each with something to lose by walking away from the table — though even among equals, the guarantee only extended as far as the parties found it convenient to offer it. Syria was not a negotiation between equals; it was a mandate being administered by a power answerable, on paper, to the League, and in practice to no one who could actually make it stop shelling a city. The League could ask France to explain itself and could decline to rubber-stamp the explanation it received, and did both. It could not do anything further, and both France and the Druze understood that perfectly well long before the guns went quiet. Two forms of the same institution's authority, tested in the same twelve months, arrived at two entirely different answers to the question of whether an international body could actually make a great power keep its word — and even its clearest success quietly excluded half of Europe from the promise.

Part IV: Declarations of Intent

On February 27, in the same Munich beer hall where his armed coup had collapsed within a day fifteen months earlier, Adolf Hitler refounded the Nazi Party. He had been out of Landsberg prison a little over two months, freed nine months into a five-year sentence, and he arrived at the relaunch banned from public speaking in nearly every German state — a legal silencing that would hold, in most of the country, for close to two more years. It left him, for the moment, a politician who could organize but could not orate, which is presumably part of why he spent that spring finishing the manuscript he'd begun dictating in his cell. Volume One of Mein Kampf went on sale July 18, an initial print run of ten thousand copies from the party's own publishing house. By year's end it had sold 9,473 of them — a respectable number for an obscure political pamphlet, and nothing like the readership its author believed his ideas deserved.

What those 9,473 buyers got, underneath the rambling four-hundred-page autobiography of a failed Austrian art student, was not vague grievance but an itemized plan, stated plainly enough that nobody could later claim the warning hadn't been printed. Germany's defeat in the war, Hitler argued, had nothing to do with the battlefield and everything to do with betrayal at home — Marxists, Social Democrats, and above all Jews, whom the book cast as a single organized force working to weaken the German racial body from within through finance, media, and sexual corruption. The remedy he proposed was not reform but replacement: a state organized entirely around racial purity, with the "impure" identified and removed from national life by whatever means proved necessary, and a foreign policy aimed frankly at conquering Lebensraum — living space — to Germany's east, in Russia and Ukraine specifically, since he considered the German people entitled to more territory than their borders currently allowed and considered Slavic populations there an obstacle rather than a people. It was, in outline, the entire program that would be executed between 1939 and 1945: the eastward war of conquest, the racial state, the industrialized removal of Jews from German life escalating eventually to their extermination. None of it was hidden or coded. It was simply ignored, because in 1925 it arrived attached to a man who had just come out of prison for a coup that collapsed in an afternoon, leading a party still legally muzzled in most of the country, underselling even Fitzgerald’s poor showing for The Great Gatsby in the same twelve months. The agenda was legible from the first printing. What was missing, for another eight years, was anyone with the power to take it literally.

Nine thousand miles east, an ideology with considerably less patience for slow persuasion found its opening by accident. Trouble had been building in Shanghai's Japanese-owned cotton mills since February, when a labor dispute over wages and working conditions spilled into open strikes across more than twenty factories. In mid-May a Japanese foreman killed a Chinese worker named Gu Zhenghong during a confrontation on the factory floor, and the killing became a rallying point: a memorial service on May 24 drew a large crowd, and Shanghai Municipal Police, worried about the mounting unrest, arrested several student organizers in the days that followed. On the morning of May 30, thousands of students, workers, and ordinary residents marched toward the British concession on Nanjing Road to demand the students' release. Police under British command — a mixed force of Chinese and Sikh constables, taking orders from British officers — opened fire on the crowd, killing thirteen and wounding dozens more.

The shooting did what neither the mill dispute nor the earlier strikes had managed on their own: it turned a labor grievance into a national one. Word of the killings spread by telegraph within days, and general strikes shut down Shanghai and then spread to Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and cities across the country, with foreign businesses brought to a near standstill by the resulting boycotts. The Chinese Communist Party, which had numbered a few hundred members that spring, found itself at the center of a movement it had not engineered and could barely keep pace with; by the time the unrest began to subside that autumn, party membership had grown past twenty thousand. The timing mattered as much as the shooting itself. Sun Yat-sen, the Nationalist Party's founding leader and the figure both the Nationalists and the Communists had rallied around during their uneasy alliance, had died of cancer that March, leaving the movement's leadership genuinely open just as the incident on Nanjing Road handed it a cause large enough to fight over. Mao Tse-tung would later call it China's Bastille; whether or not the comparison holds, the incident did for Chinese communism roughly what Hitler's own failed putsch had done for him two years earlier — not the moment of triumph, but the moment a fringe movement discovered how much larger its potential audience actually was.

Neither event looked, from inside 1925, like the opening chapter of anything in particular. A German politician published a rambling, badly organized memoir-manifesto that almost nobody read and that his own party's publishing house had to discount to move. A labor dispute in a Shanghai cotton mill escalated, as labor disputes sometimes do, into a shooting and then a strike, and a communist party that had been struggling to attract members for years suddenly had more of them than it knew what to do with. What both events actually represented — an ideology of racial nationalism finding its foundational text, and an ideology of class revolution finding its first mass Chinese audience — would not be legible as such for years, in Hitler's case not until he'd spent most of a decade climbing back from the margins he occupied in 1925, and in the Chinese Communist Party's case not until it had survived a near-annihilation at Nationalist hands two years later and rebuilt itself almost from nothing. Both ideologies would go on to cause the deaths of tens of millions of people across the following two decades. In 1925, one was an unread pamphlet, and the other was a strike that outran the small party trying to lead it.

Coda: New Images

By the autumn of 1925, John Logie Baird had already tried the crowd once. In March he'd staged a three-week run of demonstrations at Selfridge's department store on Oxford Street, shoppers gathering to watch his apparatus throw crude moving silhouettes across a screen — fingers wiggling, black shapes shifting against light, nothing yet recognizable as a face. It drew attention and it drew skepticism in roughly equal measure, and it was, by any technical standard, still a toy. The image Baird actually needed — something with tone, shading, the gradations that make a picture look like a person rather than a shadow — wouldn't come together in a room full of witnesses. It came together on October 2, in a rented attic on Frith Street, with nobody present but Baird himself.

He'd been experimenting for months, and that afternoon the apparatus simply worked: the head of a ventriloquist's dummy he called Stooky Bill appeared on the receiving screen with actual light and shadow, thirty crude scan lines at five pictures a second, but unmistakably a face rather than a silhouette. Baird's first instinct was not to call the press. It was to see whether the machine could do the same thing with a living person, and the only living person within reach was William Taynton, a twenty-year-old office boy working downstairs, whom Baird fetched in his slippers with no explanation beyond asking him to sit in front of a contraption for a minute. Taynton became, by that accident of proximity, the first human being ever televised in recognizable tone and shade. There was no reporter, no photographer, no wire dispatch. The actual invention of television, as opposed to its announcement, happened in front of an audience of two, one of whom had been dragged upstairs on a whim.

The announcement came later, and came differently. Baird spent the rest of the year promoting what he called, in the hobbyist press, "true television," building toward a formal demonstration for the Royal Institution and a reporter from the Times — a carefully staged unveiling that would not actually take place until January 26 of the following year. That version of the story is the one that made the papers: scientists in a room, a journalist taking notes, an invention certified as real by the presence of the right witnesses. But the thing itself, the actual moment the picture came together, happened months earlier, unwitnessed, unannounced, and almost accidental — closer in spirit to a private experiment succeeding than to a public event being staged.

It would not stay private forever.