Fire and Ice

In 1920, the year in which “Fire and Ice” was published, the world and the United States underwent major social and political changes. Frost witnessed a remarkable time in scientific discovery, and Frost maintained an ambivalence toward modern science. “Fire and Ice” is an example of how Frost’s scientific interest in the natural world and its science stretched from the smallest atoms to the larger universe, spanning disciplines ranging from biology, physics, and astronomy. New and improved products such as magnetic tape, cellophane tape, and foam rubber were developed during the decade. Rocket scientist Robert H. Goddard stated that spaceflight was impossible; The New York Times heavily criticized Goddard’s claims.

On January 16, 1920, the League of Nations formally met for the first time; in November 1920, it would hold its first general assembly in Geneva, Switzerland. At its height, the League consisted of 58 members, but the United States never joined. In September of 1920, the Wall Street Bombing occurred. At the time and until the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995, the Wall Street Bombing was the worst terrorist attack on American soil. The attack resulted in the deaths of 38 people. As a result of a series of bombings in 1919, Mitchel Palmer, the then-attorney general of the United States, embarked on a campaign to deport foreign radicals that threatened America. 1920 marked a year of heightened raids on communists and anarchists, and many were arrested in a single swoop. The raid’s organizer was a young lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover, head of the Bureau of Investigation’s General Intelligence Division.

For women in the United States, 1920 ushered in the women’s right to vote, though the women’s suffrage movement traces its origins to 1638 when Margaret Brent, a successful Virginian businesswoman, demanded the right to vote in the state’s House of Burgesses. By 1920, every state west of the Mississippi River granted women the right to vote. The last “yes” needed for the Nineteenth Amendment’s ratification fell to Tennessee, which, on August 18, 1920, voted in favor of the amendment by a vote of 50-49. Also in 1920, the Bill of Rights was amended twice. The Eighteenth Amendment prohibited alcohol in the United States. The amendment became the most openly ignored regulation to ever exist in American history.

In terms of literature, 1920 became the year of the “Lost Generation.” This generation consisted of a group of expatriate writers who, after World War I, lived in Europe and became a revolutionary, driving force in American literature. The year saw the publication of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, a skewering critique of small-town America; and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise and Flappers and Philosophers. Ernest Hemingway also rose to fame after F. Scott Fitzgerald introduced Maxwell Perkins, famed Scribner’s editor, to Hemingway’s short stories.