Ghosts of the Jazz Age

ON OR ABOUT December 1910 human nature changed,’ wrote Virginia Woolf (‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, 1924). That’s not at all what she meant since human nature doesn’t change, and certainly not overnight. But in November 1910, Roger Fry and Clive Bell, along with Desmond MacCarthy, had organised the ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ exhibition at Mayfair’s Grafton Galleries. It was, indeed, the ‘First Post-Impressionist’ exhibition in London, as it came to be known, and would play a part in overhauling the world of Anglo-American letters.

Something had, after all, changed in the decade between 1910 and 1920, not without help from a Viennese neurologist. The Great War had been fought. Its consequences for Euro-American sensibility would, of course, need a little more time to fully manifest. Modernism, having begun before the end of the last century on the now blistered Continent, would soon peak in the British Isles. America and its Lost Generation would play catch-up. But what America did, in the end, and not exactly by design, was change everything. It exploded at home with the Roaring Twenties, gave the old continent its own golden or crazy decade, and made modernism a fact of everyday life. If 1919 ended an Occidental order of old, the 20th century began in or about 1920.

The Twenties would have roared with or without the fleeting Wilsonian Moment. But where the idealist Presbyterian academic, confronted with the cynicism (and pragmatism) of the real world (both old and new), never recovered, America merely lost its innocence. Or perhaps, it lost its innocence only in October 1929, when it all abruptly ended. In 1919, there were less than seven million cars in the US. By the time Crash would come, that figure would have risen to 23 million. Nor were radios to be found in 1919, except wireless sets with amateur operators. ‘Not until the spring of 1920 will Frank Conrad of the Westinghouse Company of East Pittsburgh… find that so many amateur operators are listening to them that a Pittsburgh newspaper has had the bright idea of advertising radio equipment “which may be used by those who listen to Dr. Conrad’s programs.” And not until this advertisement appears will the Westinghouse officials decide to open the first broadcasting station in history,’ Frederick Lewis Allen had recalled and recorded for himself and posterity in his immediate post-Crash classic Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s, originally published in 1931. The radio would be expensive but also a revolution. Commercial radio was the first mass broadcasting medium and a mass marketing platform.

The technological advancement, consumer goods and unprecedented general prosperity that came to define America of the 1920s found its biggest symbol in the soon-to-be-ubiquitous motor-car, or automobile. At a still more affordable level for all, there was cinema, or, say, cosmetics, which would no longer be looked down upon as accessories for prostitutes. But radio was the tool, and not without its own symbolic import, that would push consumption into homes. And yet, in 1919, few had seen it coming. ‘The shift from a wartime to a peacetime economy had severe effects. The high unemployment rate was largely the result of the tremendous influx of American soldiers into the civilian workforce. In 1920, approximately 1.6 million American veterans were suddenly looking for jobs. Factories focused on supplying the war had to retool their production or shut down. There had been a brief recession after Armistice Day, followed by a quick turnaround, but it became clear the effects of that recession still lingered’ (Edmund O. Stillman, The Roaring Twenties, 2015).

The turnaround began soon, in the middle of 1921. By 1922, the Twenties had begun roaring, with increased industrial output and consequent jobs, an automobile boom, etcetera. All of which led to increased spending and consumption. Stocks shot through the roof. And America began to flee from the farm to the firm, changing forever what had still been a provincial society. But even as the transformation sped itself up, the critical eye missed little. If the satire of Sinclair Lewis (the first American to win the literature Nobel) captured the moral hollowing out of small-town America and the foibles of the nouveau riche businessman in Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922), respectively, perhaps the definitive work on small-town America of the time remains Sherwood Anderson’s story cycle Winesburg, Ohio (1919). Few in the ‘Sahara of the Bozart’ perhaps read what HL Mencken had to say about them but the new highways, faster cars, the radio as well as the cinema, were slowly turning their quiet lives inside out. But they would have their revenge on the city yet.

THE NEW WOMAN became the human face of the Roaring Twenties. With the Nineteenth Amendment passed in 1920, states could no longer deny her the right to vote. Suffrage was won in the UK, Canada and much of continental Europe, too (Madras led in India in 1921, after the Montague-Chelmsford Reforms of 1919). But apart from voting, the flapper with her bobbed hair didn’t merely smoke, drink and dance, unlike the stereotype. Lewis Allen’s illustrative Mr and Mrs Smith (relatively well-to-do, single-income suburbanites of 1919-20) may have frowned upon her shortening dress long before it reached her knees, but they wouldn’t have cared for Coco Chanel either, although the corset was burnt and the last vestiges of Victorianism buried. (The Cole Porter song goes: ‘In olden days a glimpse of stocking/ Was looked on as something shocking,/ But now God knows,/ Anything Goes.’) It was the advent of the ‘modern woman’s wardrobe’. Suzanne Lenglen, who made a sport of the pastime called women’s tennis, would have scandalised them, to say nothing of the Dolly Sisters at the Moulin Rouge or Josephine Baker in her ‘banana skirt’ at the Folies Bergère. For, that was still Paris of the années folles. Unlike the Presbyterian idealist who had made the mistake of going where no American president had, the Smiths, like most of the sinful city and the insular small-town, would have had none of it, even if Mrs Smith by then might have succumbed to the charms of rouge.

‘It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess,’ F Scott Fitzgerald would reminisce in ‘Echoes of the Jazz Age’ (1931), once Black Thursday had ended the party on October 24th, 1929. Perhaps nothing had captured the body and spirit of what Fitzgerald would be credited with naming the Jazz Age as The Great Gatsby, published bang in the middle of the decade in 1925. Tom and Daisy could have been close counterparts to the Bright Young Things/People in London. But a bootlegger Gatsby wouldn’t have made the cut across the pond. Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, the perfect flapper, would become the icons of the age, as much as a Rudolph Valentino or the Gershwins. Yet, where ‘A Diamond as Big as the Ritz’ (1922) caught the need (and greed) for money and what it bought—luxury—self-made Gatsby’s native romanticism contrasted with Tom and Daisy and underscored the illusion behind the glamour and glitz. By the time Nick Carraway’s admonition about one’s inability to repeat the past would shatter dreams apart from Gatsby’s, Fitzgerald and his generation would be left with no boats but only the figurative current to beat on against, borne back ceaselessly into their memories.

When Holden Caulfield first appeared in print at end-1945, the Roaring Twenties were a distant memory. Holden, by the time The Catcher in the Rye was published as a novel in 1951, was already seen as middle-aged. For, he was America after the death of the American Dream. But another American dream had built itself a body by then, going back to the self-same decade when a Black poet laid claim to the legacy of Walt Whitman and proclaimed in 1926: ‘I, too, sing America… I, too, am America.’ As metropolitan America was catching on to the Charleston (or doing the Breakaway, the American Tango, or even the foxtrot) in the newly fashionable dance clubs, as a Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong were making jazz the common denominator of most of American popular music, a Langston Hughes or a Zora Neale Hurston, all intellectual offspring of Hubert Harrison and watched by WEB Du Bois, were flowering the literary contribution to an artistic and social ‘renaissance’ in Harlem, New York, which in its day was known as the New Negro Movement. (Incidentally, a masterwork of the Harlem Renaissance—for both its formal experiments and its refusal to speak uncritically of Blacks while not pandering to expectations of White readers vis-à-vis Black writers—not much read anymore, is Jean Toomer’s Cane, published in 1923.)

In May 1927, Charles Lindbergh (the anti-Semite re-imagined as America’s ‘Nazi’ president by Philip Roth in The Plot Against America, 2004) flew a single-engine plane solo across the Atlantic from Long Island to Paris. Lindbergh became an overnight hero and changed popular perceptions of flying (and aviation’s potential as an industry). In the Twenties of Art Deco (the Chrysler Building would be completed in 1930 but America had imported the architectural style wholesale from Europe and adopted it wholeheartedly) and the talking movie (purists may still say it was Al Jolson’s “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet” in 1927’s The Jazz Singer, but the first all-talking film was Lights of New York in 1928), sports and sportspersons made it very big.

In 1952, a Jewish-American writer would use baseball as the subject of his debut novel, surprising critics by his understanding of the sport. Bernard Malamud’s Roy Hobbs was, after all, modelled on Babe Ruth. Ruth, of the 60 home runs of 1927, was the biggest sporting icon of the Roaring Twenties, his closest rival being world heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey. With larger disposable incomes, and with more women working than ever before with or without families, people loved to pay to watch them. Along with Bill Tilden (tennis), Red Grange (American football) and Bobby Jones (golf), Ruth and Dempsey were the ‘Big Five’. One of the biggest legacies of the 1920s was the redefinition and commercialisation of sport.

Small-town America struck back, almost before the party began. Although the Eighteenth Amendment had been passed in January 1919, its enforcement had to await the Volstead Act (the National Prohibition Act). The ‘dry’ crusade had built up momentum in the Gilded Age. At the turn of the century, the Anti-Saloon League took up the mantle from conservative Protestants and social Progressives (as well as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union). Prohibition came into force in January 1920 and wasn’t without its nuances. While it prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages to protect and preserve public morality and haul back runaway souls, it didn’t ban private consumption of alcohol, and ended up bequeathing two names to history—Speakeasy and Al Capone.

By its own hand, the supposedly moral intent of Prohibition unleashed on America organised crime (apart from Capone, Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, to name a couple, also made big money from alcohol under Prohibition) and largescale low-level corruption, involving the police and the owners of speakeasies. The Twenties, with the hindsight of a century, appear a distinct study in contrasts. Social and political reform battled political conservatism; ‘rural’ battled ‘urban’; police and local authorities happily took bribes from speakeasies where gentlemen and ladies spoke passwords to enter, only to be forced to raid them when federal agents came calling.

No country was harder hit by the Wall Street Crash that dropped the curtain on the Roaring Twenties than Germany—dependent on the US to pay its reparations and run its economy—although the crisis triggered in America wouldn’t engulf Europe till 1931. Before the Nazis terrorised and tricked their way into power in January 1933, a little more than a month before FDR took over from a hapless Herbert Hoover, the 1920s in the Weimar Republic had been an era of unprecedented social and economic freedom. But the death of Gustav Stresemann, the man who rescued the Weimar economy from collapse, exactly three weeks before Black Thursday, was a portent—that the Goldene Zwanziger (Golden Twenties) were over. Mr Norris would soon be changing trains and saying goodbye to Berlin. For, the Golden Twenties were not merely the Charleston and the Bob, the cabaret made notorious by Anita Berber, or Expressionist films, or Marlene Dietrich. The Germany of Albert Einstein, Theodor Adorno, Karl Mannheim, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse (all of them Jewish or of Jewish lineage), the Germany of Thomas Mann, would be gone forever. In Paris, the années folles were over. In 1929, the Moulin Rouge was pulled down on the heels of La Cigale a year earlier. The Parisian joie de vivre, actually sustained by the mass culture of the street and music halls, or the radio of Maurice Chevalier—it was radio that had helped Mistinguett become the ‘highest-paid female entertainer’—would last a while longer.

The Twenties roared across the Atlantic and helped transform Eliot’s wasteland. But as Virginia Woolf had noted, the inside of the human mind was now fair game for writers and artists. James Joyce’s Ulysses was QED. When the going is good, no one asks where or how long. Because no one’s paying attention to the workings of the minds of others. When the Twenties roared, everyone thought the prosperity would last forever, the market could only go up. In the end, their own reckless speculation brought about the excess that triggered the panic that produced the self-fulfilling actions which crashed Wall Street. Like the hand of a cruel god, or a dream, it was all gone, overnight. And the real horror was still to come. As Delmore Schwartz, after WB Yeats, would write in 1935, ‘in dreams begin responsibilities’. Or, in other words, tread softly.

Postscript:

In 2022, TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Joyce’s Ulysses will be a century old. Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, too, saw its first English publication in 1922. In the middle of the next decade, The Great Gatsby and Mrs Dalloway (both 1925) will turn 100, as will The Magic Mountain (1924). A year later, it will be the turn of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), the novel that made his persona bigger than the man. And the decade will close with the centenary of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929). Some of us still read Guys and Dolls (1932) and revel in Damon Runyon’s slanguistic portraits of Broadway life in the 1920s (and ’30s). But we all enjoy Agatha Christie, whose debut novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published in 1920. It was only yesterday.

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