SENSATION-MAD

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 51, 28 August 1926, Page 20

SENSATION-MAD

AMERICA IN THE LOOM OF

PLEASURE,

Amorica, despite her many virtues, despite her humanncss and virility, is, to-day, a sensation-crazed country. Out of. this kaleidoscopic continent, which revels in a luxury unknown to Babylon, and in an insatiable craving for sensation of which even Rome never dreamed, two pictures stand out (writes ShawDesmond, in the "London Magazine"). They are New York and Florida—the Alpha and the Omega of the loom of XJleasure along with the flying shuttle of American life rushes' to and fro. Magnificent Pullmans, furnished with everything that money can buy, from a barber's shop to an alligator pear, rush backwards and forwards, day and night, between New York and Florida. The millions made in New York are sent flying into Florida, then to be scattered at the hand of a Fortunatus; and the millions made overnight in Florida "real estate" are, sometimes, taken back to New. York, there to be poured out in a golden stream in an Unceasing round of that sensation, which itself is the only antidote to sensation that the pleasure-driven American knows. Superb liners, some of them 25,000 tons, laden to the bulwarks with a heterogeneous mass of millionaires and ministers; bootleggers and Senators, Congressmen and 'confidence men," beautiful women of both worlds, speculators and society debutantes, the finest chefs and the most perfect cuisines to be had for money, "million-dollar" bands.with music that might lure the angels out o:f the star-spangled ■ skies above, steer spaciously through the night to the throb-throb of the propellers and the throb-throb of tho ukulele and the drum —Florida boundl From out of the hell that is modern New York with the grind and tear of the underground subways and mazy streets on the Manhattan Kock to which the city of seven millions is clamped, pour an unending stream of human beings to the El Dorado of the south, where fortune and pleasuro beckon. From all over Amer loa- tired men and harassed women, witk little children dragged at their tails, are hurrying F6rd flivvers, by tram,, even on foot, to Florida. This trek, after money and. the pleasure that money can. bring is going on all over the money-mad continent day and night —although in to-day's America there is no night, at-least not in the cities, where the glaring, electric suns turn night into day. I have seen the blackbirds in Pershing square, Los Angeles, uncertain when to roost because of the pitiless glare of the electric suns that nng the garden at night.