America and the World in 1925, a talk by Richard Kezirian, Ph.D., at the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation Fall Festival 2025

Introduction

2025 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Robinson Jeffers’ Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems, and the completion of Hawk Tower. At this year’s Fall Festival, we explored the enduring legacy of these two milestones and celebrated the recent designation of Tor House as a National Historic Landmark. At the Lectures and Talks given on October 4th, we began with three presentations that provided a wide-ranging review of what was happening globally in 1925, in Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA, and at Tor House. This first talk by Professor Richard Kezirian provided the audience with the historical highlights of 1925. We will be posting the next two talks soon. Enjoy!

I am deeply honored to be invited by the Tor House Foundation Board of Trustees to speak at this wonderful celebration honoring Robinson Jeffers. Let me begin my story of the year 1925 with a look at key people and important developments in the United States and the world.

The decade began with Henry Ford turning out a new car every ten seconds and, in an outpouring of energy, 120 million people were hoping to buy them, on credit, if necessary. They thronged the roads in 25 million new cars. When they weren't driving, they were talking. In the mid-twenties there were 50 million telephone conversations a day; by 1927, 40 percent of the homes had telephones. By 1927, every third home had a radio. In cities, two thirds had electricity. Nonetheless, as we zero in on the year 1925, the Big Money, as John Dos Passos called it, began to encroach on justice and freedom as a reason for America's being.

Calvin Coolidge was president of the United States in 1925. “I want to be of use in the world,” he told his father, “and not just get a few dollars together.” His political philosophy, as historian Donald McCoy put it at the time, was “something for everybody so long as it did not cost much.”

As governor of Massachusetts in 1919, he was a mild progressive unknown outside the state. In one day, he vaulted into national fame, and he did it with one sentence that related to the Boston police strike then taking place: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time,” The strike was broken and his abrupt telegram to labor leader Samuel Gompers on September 14, 1919, containing the famous phrase, turned disastrous negligence—he had been slow to act earlier upon that conviction—into a national triumph.

As a state legislator and governor of Massachusetts, Coolidge had supported the six-day work week, a child-labor law, the direct election of U.S senators, a minimum wage for women, women’s suffrage, workman’s compensation and a state income tax. Yet he was not an activist President because he revered the Tenth Amendment, which decrees that all powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states or the people. Nor did he believe that sometimes capitalism needed to be housebroken, not even in the wild 1920s. As a result, federal government policy during his administrations neglected regulation of the business world, especially in banking and the stock market, with results that are very familiar to you.

In fact, Coolidge and unsuspecting Congresses contributed to the central cause of the Great Depression—the maldistribution of income—that culminated with 71% of the U.S. population at or below the minimum standard of living by 1928. Tax cuts for the wealthy were passed in 1921, 1924, 1926 and 1928. And some of the highest tariffs in our history were passed in the 1920s—crowned by the Hawley-Smoot Tariff of 1930. Simply put, there was a loss of balance between productive capacity and consumption capacity that was not finally remedied until WW II.

Powerful social forces converged on Dayton, Tennessee in the summer of 1925 where populist majoritarianism and traditional evangelical faith led by William Jennings Bryan battled with scientific secularism and modern concepts of individual liberty promoted by Clarence Darrow in what is known as the Scopes Trial. The trial revolved around John Thomas Scopes teaching evolution to his high school students, contrary to the state of Tennessee’s laws.

Bryan emphasized three main points: Evolution theory lacked scientific proof; Teaching it to school students undermined their religious faith and social values; And the Bible-believing majority should control the content of public-school instruction. “How can teachers tell students that they came from monkeys and not expect them to act like monkeys,” Bryan added.

Darrow maintained that evolution provided a better basis for morality than traditional Christian concepts of eternal salvation and damnation by observing: “No one can feel this universal evolutionary relationship without being gentler, kindlier, and more human toward all the infinite forms of beings that live with us and must die with us.”

Moving on to another aspect of the American scene, Al Capone was a notorious figure in 1925. Capone got his picture in the Chicago Tribune for the first time in May 1924 when he walked into a bar and emptied a six-shooter into the head of a gangster called Joe Howard. Three men saw him do it but between the murder and the inquest, two were overcome by amnesia and one went missing. By 1925, Capone held the city in thrall. He gave flamboyant press conferences with the injured innocence of a businessman doing his best to provide a service in a wicked world.

In foreign policy, America was still paranoid about anything to do with the League of Nations and was notably absent when the enemies of World War I got together at the Swiss Chalet lakeside city of Locarno in 1925 to guarantee the boundaries of Western Europe, but significantly, not eastern Europe. Though the League of Nations was the brainchild of President Woodrow Wilson, the United States never joined the League of Nations, nor did it sign the peace treaties that ended WW I. This was tragic, for the Treaty of Versailles was a sincere and morally valid attempt at peace and the United States was the only country after the war strong enough to enforce it. The key problem was that later statesmen forgot the reasons for Versailles and left a strong but defiant Germany free to rearm.

So, while the period immediately after Locarno was termed the “Locarno Honeymoon,” like in the U.S., ominous developments were taking place below the rosy surface. Whether economic recovery in Europe followed the British, German, or French pattern, it remained fragile and precarious.

In 1925, intrinsic weaknesses characterized the democratic Weimar Republic. It was born of defeat and plagued with the stigma of Versailles. There was the matter of proportional representation, which led to thirty political parties maneuvering for power in the Reichstag. There was a strong central state tradition in German history. The social base in Germany was susceptible to Nazi ideology: 35% to 40% peasant; Small middle class; Divided working class; Industrialization was late, rapid and compressed in Germany, and occurred at an early state in the social structure where ethnic and social tensions still had not been resolved, and were exacerbated by the role of the state, big banks, big cartels and individual entrepreneurs.

Though the Nazi’s Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 had failed, Hitler’s imprisonment, basically in a resort with visitors coming to see him and feeding his ego, led to the publication in 1925 of Mein Kampf. His program, Lebensraum, was already catching fire with the German people, waiting only for the Great Depression, which vaulted him into power.

In Russia, Lenin’s death in 1924 led to the rise of Stalin. By 1925, Stalin was well on his way to consolidating his position. The shift of the communist party in Russia into a bureaucratic machine favored Stalin. His firm hold on the Party’s organization was his real base of power, holding positions that the “stars” of the Russian Revolution loathed to be bothered with: Commissar of Nationalities; Commissar of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate; General Secretary of the Central Committee; Chief of the General Secretariat. Stalin’s appointment to so many posts caused no controversy within the party; no one else seemed so well suited to perform the unwanted drudgery of party administration.

It was Stalin who then made the party into the model monolith that lasted to 1991 by supervising the entire membership of the Communist Party, appointing reliable men to key positions in the lower echelons, and keeping them alert and docile. It was not long before all those “stars” of the Revolution were killed: Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Tomsky, and Bukharin.

Turning to a broader theme characterizing the 1920s, there was a dark and emotional backlash against the flood of immigrants that had come into our country between 1890 and 1910. They numbered 15m. and they represented populations that had not been here before, Central and Eastern Europeans, as well as Chinese and Japanese here in the West. It was the greatest proportion of immigrants to native population, 14.8%, until today. (15.6%). Very few spoke English. NYC had more Italians than Rome, more Jews than Warsaw, more Irish than Dublin, more black people than any city in the world. The surge of nativism and scapegoating was predictable, as it has characterized every social reaction to massive immigration in our nation.

The Ku Klux Klan was revived in Georgia in 1915 and had recruited 4.5m “white male, native-born Gentile citizens” by 1925. Its hates now were not just black people, but Catholics, Jews, and immigrants, and it was the Midwest, rather than the South, where it was the strongest. Klan governors were elected in Oklahoma and Oregon, and the Klan all but took over the state of Indiana. Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans, a dentist, said they were proud to be “hicks, rubes and drivers of second-hand Fords.”

There is an insight in this story for us today, as there was for Robinson Jeffers in his time. Times of change are the times when we are most likely to learn. This nation was founded on change. We should embrace the possibilities, as Jeffers did, in these challenging and exciting times and hold to a steady course, because we know what we have been through in the past, and we know who we are. Winston Churchill in his great speech in the darkest hours of the Second World War, when he crossed the Atlantic, reminded us: “We haven’t journeyed this far because we are made of sugar candy.”

As a witness to the events of the 1920s and in the year 1925, Jeffers would have confirmation of the truth of his outlook on our world and of those worlds to come. The man who built Tor House and Hawk Tower wasn’t made of sugar candy either.