Exile's Reign

“The Mysticism of Money”: that was the brassily alliterative title of a 1922 essay published by Harold Loeb in Broom, the magazine he co-founded and bankrolled. Contemporary American culture, Loeb observed, had positioned commerce as its new religion. Europeans made money as a means to old-school ends; Americans had started to make it for the sake of making it. This was strange and unsettling, but the upside was an emerging metropolitan culture of startling energy — as Loeb put it, “vigorous, crude, expressive, alive with metaphors, Rabelaisian.” You could object to the economic system underpinning this boom, its inequities and vulgarities, but there was no denying its vitality.