The Jazz Age

7 Key excerpts on "The Jazz Age"

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  U. S. History

  • P. Scott Corbett, Volker Janssen, John M. Lund, Todd Pfannestiel, Paul Vickery, Sylvie Waskiewicz(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Openstax

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 24 The Jazz Age: Redefining the Nation, 1919-1929 Figure 24.1 The illustrations for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tales of The Jazz Age, drawn by John Held, Jr., epitomized the carefree flapper era of the 1920s. Chapter Outline 24.1 Prosperity and the Production of Popular Entertainment 24.2 Transformation and Backlash 24.3 A New Generation 24.4 Republican Ascendancy: Politics in the 1920s Introduction Following the hardships of the immediate postwar era, the United States embarked upon one of the most prosperous decades in history. Mass production, especially of the automobile, increased mobility and fostered new industries. Unemployment plummeted as businesses grew to meet this increased demand. Cities continued to grow and, according to the 1920 census, a majority of the population lived in urban areas of twenty-five hundred or more residents. Jazz music, movies, speakeasies, and new dances dominated the urban evening scene. Recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, many of them Catholic, now participated in the political system. This challenged rural Protestant fundamentalism, even as quota laws sought to limit new immigration patterns. The Ku Klux Klan rose to greater power, as they protested not only the changing role of African Americans but also the growing population of immigrant, Catholic, and Jewish Americans. This mixture of social, political, economic, and cultural change and conflict gave the decade the nickname the “Roaring Twenties” or the “Jazz Age.” The above illustration (Figure 24.1), which graced the cover of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tales of The Jazz Age, embodies the popular view of the 1920s as a nonstop party, replete with dancing, music, flappers, and illegal drinking. Chapter 24 | The Jazz Age: Redefining the Nation, 1919-1929 693

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  A Companion to Europe, 1900 - 1945

  • Gordon Martel(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  PART V The New Age Passage contains an image Chapter Twenty-Two The Jazz Age THOMAS J. SAUNDERS “So, Vasia, what class do you consider yourself coming from?”

  “Frankly speaking – the dance-class !”1

  Cultural history thrives on the discovery of upheavals, collisions, and maelstroms. Its metaphors come frequently from nature and evoke the dramatic arts which constitute one of its objects of study. The “jazz age”; the “roaring twenties”; the “golden twenties”; the “crazy years” – each metaphor frames the era after World War I distinctively, even as together they signify cultural effervescence and revolt. The “jazz age” conjures images of exuberance and transgression – fast cars, wailing saxophones, seminude chorus girls, frenetic dancing, and celebrities from movies and sports. Beyond these individual associations it highlights three broad features of European popular culture after the war: first and foremost its newness, both in form and affront to traditional values; second, its indebtedness to (black) America; and third, its unprecedented shaping by music and dance. All three were refracted in the early Parisian performances of the black American dancer, Josephine Baker. Clothed only in a feather skirt, feather collar, and anklets, slithering off the back of a black man to perform with him a dance sauvage; or, naked but for a skirt of bananas, climbing monkey-like down a tree to dance provocatively for a white explorer in the jungle, Josephine became the premier icon of the European jazz age. The power of her appearance and her movements to subvert conventions of art, entertainment, and propriety has been paralleled to the impact of the world war in shattering the assumptions that governed the age of progress and marking the advent of modernity.2

  If Baker embodied the new and foreign, The Jazz Age can be represented as an epic clash between everything she stood for and the values and traditions of prewar Europe. This clash exhibits some convenient parallels with the political conflicts of the age. The recognized hub of modern culture was Weimar Germany, a republic in which all forms of censorship were initially abolished and whose capital led Europe’s new entertainment industry and became a byword for Americanization and artistic and sexual experimentation. National Socialists joined cultural conservatives indenouncing the fashions and values of The Jazz Age which they saw rampant in Berlin. Right-wing movements in other countries adopted similar positions. In Stalinist Russia, conservative social values and xenophobia likewise provoked resistance to forms of popular culture associated with America.

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  Dissent

  The History of an American Idea

  • Ralph Young(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • NYU Press

    (Publisher)

  Despite the booming economy of the 1920s, disillusion, insecurity, and uncertainty began to eat away at the nation’s psyche. The war had been a terrible shock. How could God have let it happen? The experience of the war—the carnage, the devastation, the surfacing of such inhumane brutality—was a profound challenge to all traditional values. The belief in God, the belief in progress, even the belief in science all came under attack. Darwin’s theory of evolution had laid bare the animal origins of humans, Nietzsche’s famous dictum that “God is dead” struck at the heart of religious faith, Freud’s analysis of the psyche and the tremendous hold the unconscious mind has on human behavior undermined the belief in human reason and rationality, and Einstein’s theory of relativity and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle showed that even science was open to question. All this buttressed the existential philosophers’ view that there is no meaning to life. In the 1920s it seemed that there was no certainty, no security, nothing to hold onto. Many Americans willingly embraced these modern ideas, but many others were aghast and steadfastly strove to return to a bygone, simpler era, when belief was not challenged. It is this conflict between a world of accelerating technological advances, automation, consumerism, changing social and gender relationships, and revolutionary philosophies challenging the existence of God on one side and the deeply entrenched conservatism that resisted the new trends on the other side that defined the decade. The Roaring Twenties, dubbed “The Jazz Age” by writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, was a vibrant, exciting decade characterized by this clash between traditionalism and modernism. It was an age of bifurcation. Dissent was everywhere. Liberal dissenters denounced the forces of reaction, while conservative dissenters denounced the forces that were taking the United States in a direction they did not want to go.

  Warren G. Harding, the new president, promised to return the country to normalcy. But normalcy was irretrievably in the past. While Europe was struggling to rebuild, the United States was experiencing an astounding rate of economic growth. Business expanded, exports rose, unemployment declined, wages increased, and Americans had a voracious appetite for new consumer products. And the most important product that drove all sectors of the economy from steel to petroleum, road building to home construction in new suburbs, was Henry Ford’s Model T. Aviation, advertising, radio broadcasting, and the cinema all boomed in the 1920s, while Americans filled jazz clubs to listen to African American music and dance halls to dance the trendy Charleston. And although the Eighteenth Amendment prohibited the sale of alcohol, rural bootleggers as well as urban crime bosses such as Al Capone provided booze illegally to anyone who wanted it. Americans flocked in huge numbers to speakeasies, where they consumed vast quantities of bootleg liquor. Nearly every American was a lawbreaker. The one good thing about Prohibition, as humorist Will Rogers reportedly quipped, was that it was better than no alcohol at all.

  * * *

  After more than a century of protest women found their horizons expanding. In most respects women’s position in society and especially in the family did not change drastically, but employment opportunities were opening up, and the “new woman” was beginning to emerge.

  Socially women’s role did change. After gaining the right to vote many young women rejected the old Victorian ways of thinking and acting and dressing and adopted a new, confrontational style. They discarded the restricting clothing their mothers had worn—the Victorian dresses that covered all parts of the body—in favor of knee-length, close-fitting, seductively suggestive dresses. They wore shoes with buckles intentionally left unbuckled so that the flaps would strike the ground as they walked, thereby calling attention to themselves (thus the term flapper

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  Beyond the Sound Barrier

  The Jazz Controversy in Twentieth-Century American Fiction

  • Kristin K Henson(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  “Jazz” emerged as a slang term with sexual connotations (like rock n’ roll decades later), and many different styles of American popular music were widely referred to as jazz. The term was associated with a distinctive Americanness that had been forged into fast, urban sophistication out of the “raw” materials of “down home” folk practices. The new music helped to establish American cultural independence from Europe as well as national and international markets for American cultural capital. In “Echoes of The Jazz Age,” Fitzgerald records his impressions of the prevailing attitudes of the twenties. He cites 1922, the year in which The Great Gatsby is set, as the year that marked “the peak of the younger generation” (15), one generation younger than his own. After that year, he claims, the social upheavals became more generalized and less of a matter of youthful rebellion. The result was “[a] whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure” (15). Interestingly, in the twenties “race” and “nationality” often were used as interchangeable words, as if nations could be defined by their monoracial character and as if those who were outside of the dominant race had no claim to nationality. This usage, therefore, linguistically constructed “American” as white and Anglo-Saxon. Still, Fitzgerald places an interracial cultural product, commercial jazz, at the center of the 1920’s hedonistic movement. “The word jazz in its progress toward respectability has meant first sex, then dancing, then music” (“Echoes,” 16), Fitzgerald asserts, and this observation indicates that he knew the changes in the implications of the word as it moved from folk expression to urban entertainment

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  The Jazz Image

  Seeing Music through Herman Leonard's Photography

  • K. Heather Pinson(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • University Press of Mississippi

    (Publisher)

  With improvements in sound reproduction, affordable music recording led the way for jazz to be heard nationwide. innovat ions in communication technologies, radio broadcasting, mass print media, and sound recording in the early twentieth century coincided with the rise of americ an colonialism. taylor atkins states: “Jazz, in fact, represented nothing more profoundly than the coevalness of modern time: as they listened and danced to jazz, people imagined that they were experi-encing modernity simultaneously with their counterparts in distant lands.” 15 By the start of World War i, “the nation had begun to experience intensi-fied economic change, human migration, and technological innovation.” 16 So, as ragtime represented the bustling sounds of the city with its rhythmic drive and strange new sound, the “hot” jazz of new orleans–based music and the “sweet” sounds of Lawrence Welk and Guy Lombardo carried jazz into the movements of the 1920 s. The Jazz Age completely changed the image of jazz as the vast major-ity perceived it. the soldiers returning from WWi symbolized the end of americ an innocence, but the increased prosperity of the 1920 s projected jazz into instant stardom. as with ragtime before it, “hot” jazz became a symbol to much of the country of modern innovation and city life with its fast pace and progressive sound. Jazz musicians bounced between evolving technical progress and their own harmonic innovation. other cultural trends helped launch jazz as an urban sound. an ever greater number of people— drawn by jobs in factory towns and cities, the bustle of movement from cars, planes, and trains, and the lighting of the night through electricity—began to go out in the evening for entertain-ment. 17 Much like the sexual and radical exploration of the 1960 s, the 1920 s 21 THE FORMATION OF THE JAZZ IMAGE IN VISUAL CULTURE was a time to embrace a bohemian lifestyle.

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  Jazz Age

  People and Perspectives

  • Mitchell Newton-Matza(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  African Americans in The Jazz Age Jamie J. Wilson 1 Perceptions of African Americans A popular misrepresentation persists regarding African Americans in the 1920s that stems at least partially from the term Jazz Age. The term con- jures ideas of carefree living, sipping gin in black neighborhood speakea- sies, American prosperity, and the expansion of creative artistic spaces for black Americans. These characterizations are only partially true, of course, and depending on them to discuss the position of black people in the United States during the 1920s obfuscates rather than illuminates the com- plicated political geography within which African Americans found them- selves. Most black folks during the 1920s were not living it up at rent parties or discussing poetry in literary salons. Although many did, in the decade after World War I, most were continuing on the path that genera- tions before them had tread. They were trying to fashion a life in a country that did not want them, a country that promised democracy to the world while denying citizenship to the children of those who built this country as slaves. The Great Migration African Americans were geographically, politically, and culturally in transi- tion during The Jazz Age. During World War I, more than 400,000 African Americans left the South for opportunities in northern industries, and dur- ing the 1920s, more than 800,000 continued what historians have called the Great Migration, a seven-decade-long movement out of the South that would not end until the 1970s. The Great Migration was an extension of the long road to freedom, respect, and full citizenship African Americans had begun and traversed centuries before during slavery, Reconstruction, and redemption. The reasons for migrating were as varied as the thousands of individuals who left. Some left for economic and political opportunities, and others fled for fear of legal and extralegal lynching, racial violence, and domestic abuse.

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  Palaces of Power

  The Birth and Evolution of London's Clubland

  • Stephen Hoare(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • The History Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 8

  The Jazz Age: ST JAMES’S IN THE 1920S AND ’30S

  I’ve danced with a man, who’s danced with a girl, who’s danced with the Prince of Wales. ‘It was simply grand,’ he said ‘Topping band’ and she said ‘Delightful, Sir,’ Glory, Glory, Alleluia! I’m the luckiest of females For I’ve danced with a man, who’s danced with a girl, who’s danced with the Prince of Wales. Lyrics by Herbert Farjeon 1927

  Following the First World War, life started slowly returning to normal for the shops, cafes, restaurants and hotels of St James’s and Piccadilly. In keeping with the spirit of the age, the area embraced popular culture. Women who had worked in factories and staffed the buses and public transport and who were soon to be given the vote were more visible on the streets. With long cigarette holder, beaded Charleston frock and bobbed hair, the 1920s ‘flapper’ shouted independence. The Great Depression which had spread to Britain after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 brought mass unemployment. In Britain 2 million workers had lost their jobs, mainly in the North, Wales and the Midlands. London did not escape its effects. What is sure is that The Jazz Age sparked a counterculture – a constellation of exciting new clubs and a night-time economy catering for a richer, more varied demographic than the traditional gentlemen’s club.

  Post-War Recovery

  The First World War had cast a very long shadow over Clubland. During 1914–1918 almost an entire generation of young officers had been killed in action. Where once fathers would have arranged for their sons to be elected to their club, the generational link was severed. It would take many years to recover. Membership of some clubs fell sharply as new members were insufficient to replace older members after their death.

  Some, however, view the interwar years as a golden age for members’ clubs. Where once men in uniform were seen around the clubs, now clubs reintroduced Edwardian formality and members were expected to wear full evening dress for dinner. Likewise servants, in many cases men too old to have fought in the war, donned livery in club colours. The old order could not continue. Harold Macmillan, Tory prime minister from 1957–1963, was one of the first politicians to sever the tribal ties between politics and Clubland. In marrying Lady Dorothy Cavendish in 1920, Macmillan had joined one of the foremost families in the land. His father-in-law, the 9th Duke of Devonshire, was a leading member of the Liberal-leaning Brooks’s and was the owner of the exclusive Pratt’s Club. Despite being a Tory, family connections trumped political affiliation as the highly clubbable Macmillan joined the duke’s inner circle. Although Macmillan subsequently became a member of the Tory Carlton Club, he was completely at home at Brooks’s, the Beefsteak, and Pratt’s Club.

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