Charleston in the Roaring Twenties

   by Harlan Greene

Had you visited Charleston in the 1920's, the city would have differed markedly from the one known today. Charleston was poor, the tourist industry was just beginning; there were blatant poverty, cruel racism, dirt and brick streets. It was possible to see vestiges of the ante-bellum past (and even meet those people who had helped the city secede and had fought for the Confederacy.) But all was not old and backward-looking. There was a cultural renaissance going on, and people all over the country were taking notice.

It had begun quietly in a house on Legare Street when two young men, one a native and the other a recuperating World I War veteran, turned to their mentor, suggesting they start a poetry society. The older writer, John Bennett, had been helping native DuBose Heyward and veteran Hervey Allen with their writing. A society would benefit everybody, they believed. It was launched in 1920, just as H. L. Mencken, the most popular wit and critic of his day, spoke of the "Sahara of the Bozart;" he called the South a cultural wasteland where symphony orchestras were as scarce as metaphysicians. It was a place of boors and racists only, he decreed joyfully.

He'd have to eat his words in just a few years; for the Poetry Society founded in Charleston led to numerous other things. It launched the career of nationally known poets and brought the famous to lecture and live in the city. Artists, too, painted, etched and portrayed what they saw—an old city on the verge of the modern approaching. The Charleston Renaissance, as it was called, was as quick, as sudden, and as dizzyingly vivid as a Charleston spring. Two of its writers received Pulitzer prizes in these years—Robert Lathan for editorial writing, Julia Peterkin for fiction. DuBose Heyward wrote the novel Porgy; it went to Broadway and then to opera halls all over the world on wings of music provided by George Gershwin. Yet at the same time the one black artist in the city, Edwin August Harleston, also the founder of the city's first chapter of the NAACP, was denied a showing of his work in a city building. The city saw the erection of the stunningly modern Cooper River Bridge in 1929, and it passed the first preservation zoning laws in the country in 1931. It seemed not to know which way to go—backwards, or forward; and there were many false starts in both directions, like someone just learning to drive trying to switch gears. The ironies and complexities of the roaring twenties—an age when the dance the Charleston, named for the city, was all the rage—came into sharp focus here. It was the era that the Charleston we know today began to take shape—a cultural, but very self-conscious city, caught between tourism and authenticity, between art and artifice, sin and sincerity. The term "America's Most Historic City" was coined by Mayor Tom Stoney to market the city.

Just as the country today is still dealing with the clash of ideas that dominated the cultural and political stages then, so we in Charleston are living out the changes begun in the 1920s. It was a time when youth shocked and mocked old age, when technology seemed to be on the brink of changing civilization, when old and new collided, like hot and cold fronts do, creating storms of change and criticism. It was a time when battles we are still fighting today were just beginning.

There is much yet to be written and understood about Charleston (and the country) in these evocative years. All is not known by any means. Inquiries are welcome . . . but be forewarned, once you start your investigation, you may be hooked for years. . . .