October 25, 1920: The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton, is published by D. Appleton & Company. It wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, beating out Main Street by Sinclair Lewis.
Born in New York in 1862, by 1920, Wharton had already published several novels, including The Touchstone in 1900, The House of Mirth in 1905, Ethan Frome in 1911, The Custom of the Country in 1913; and a few books of poetry, the 1st in 1878, when she was only 16. But The Age of Innocence was the book that made her reputation. She died in 1937, at her country home in France, with an unfinished novel, The Buccaneers.
The Age of Innocence didn't just make her a literary legend, it invented American nostalgia, a longing for a time that seemed more innocent, less complicated, less stressful than the present day, because the person thinking so was a kid and didn't have any responsibilities at the time. For the grownups of the time, it didn't seem so innocent or so simple.
The novel was set in New York in "The Gilded Age," the 1870s, a time of opulence -- if you ignore the depression that began with the Crash of 1873. In her autobiography, Wharton wrote that The Age of Innocence had allowed her to find "a momentary escape in going back to my childish memories of a long-vanished America... it was growing more and more evident that the world I had grown up in and been formed by had been destroyed in 1914." Meaning, with the coming of World War I. She followed it in 1924 with Old New York, set between the 1840s and the 1870s, including the pre-Civil War years.
So The Age of Innocence precedes Gone with the Wind, which took place earlier. But what about The Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith's 1915 classic, and hideously racist, Civil War era silent film? And the book it was based on, The Clansman, published in 1905 by Thomas Dixon? Didn't they harken back to a supposed better, simpler time? Yes, but they didn't catch on throughout the country the way The Age of Innocence did.
The Age of Innocence has been filmed in 1924 (silent), 1934, and 1993.
The term "Gay Nineties" began to be used in the 1920s, and it is believed to have been created by the artist Richard V. Cutler, who first released a series of drawings in the original version of Life magazine titled "the Gay Nineties," and later published a book of drawings with the same name.
Nostalgia for the 1890s lasted into the 1940s and the trauma of World War II, with movies like Abbott & Costello's The Naughty Nineties (in which they did their "Who's On First?" routine), and American soldiers in France introduced to the idea of Paris and La Belle Epoque -- never mind that 1890s France was the time and place of the Dreyfus Affair.
World War II also began nostalgia for the 1920s, "The Roaring Twenties," with people wanting to think of the time before The War and the Great Depression. The opposition to the Vietnam War of the 1960s led to patriots (or "patriots") wanting to think of the apparently united and definitely victorious time of World War II, with the song "The Ballad of Green Berets" hitting Number 1, and the film Patton winning the Oscar for Best Picture.
But that Vietnam War wasn't even over when nostalgia for the peaceful, groovy, ignore the Cold War and the Red Scare, 1950s began, with "oldies concerts," and the film American Graffiti. With the fighting stopped, but U.S. troops still in the country, Happy Days began.
Not to be outdone, Hair, the Hippie musical staged at the height of the Vietnam War, was filmed in 1979. It may have been too soon for the 1960s nostalgia wave to kick in. But the abuses of the Reagan Administration of the 1980s made people want JFK and the music of the Sixties back. And both George W. Bush and Donald Trump -- with his stupid "Make America Great Again" slogan -- wanted to bring back the Reagan Eighties.
"The Good Old Days," or "The Age of Innocence" if you prefer, is a myth. It always was.
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October 25, 1920 was a Monday. Baseball season ended 13 days earlier, when the Cleveland Indians beat the Brooklyn Robins in the World Series. Football was in midweek. Professional basketball barely existed, and hockey was out of season. So there were no scores on this historic day.
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