Overview
"The Jazz Age is over," declared novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald in a May 1931 letter to his editor.1 Fitzgerald, a perceptive social observer and chronicler of this historical period, had himself coined the phrase "the Jazz Age" in 1922 to describe the exciting, flamboyant era he saw emerge in America after the end of World War I. Just nine years later, though, as the Great Depression deepened, he eulogized this era's passing in an essay he published in Scribner's magazine titled "Echoes of the Jazz Age." "The Jazz Age had had a wild youth and a heady middle age," he wrote. "But it was not to be. Somebody had blundered and the most expensive orgy in history was over."2
Even before Fitzgerald's obituary of the age appeared, the history and popular culture of the 1920s had already begun to fascinate Americans. The same year that "Echoes of the Jazz Age" was published, Frederick Lewis Allen completed his best-selling Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's (1931), one of the most influential accounts of the decade. Since then, a long parade of journalists, historians, and American studies scholars has written literally thousands of articles and books, each attempting to understand and explain the enduring significance of Jazz Age culture on American life.
Few eras in American history cast such a long shadow over the nation's collective imagination and popular culture as does the 1920s. Over the years, Hollywood directors have attempted to capture the decade in dozens of movies, including films about National Prohibition and gangsters (e.g., Brian De Palma's The Untouchables [1987]), changing sexual mores (e.g., Elia Kazan's Splendor in the Grass [1961]), and adaptations of period literature (e.g., Jack Clayton's The Great Gatsby [1974]). Documentary filmmakers have likewise explored the remarkable lives of such Jazz Age luminaries as Henry Ford, Babe Ruth, Greta Garbo, and Charles Lindbergh, in an effort to identify their lasting contributions to our national identity. Museums, libraries, and cable television channels regularly commemorate the works of Louis Armstrong, Charlie Chaplin, George Gershwin, Alfred Stieglitz, and other influential artists of the 1920s, whose creativity and genius laid the foundations for our own music, cinema, and art. Popular singers and musicians have re-recorded numerous 1920s standards—including Willie Nelson's "Blue Skies" (1977), Harry Connick Jr.'s "It Had to Be You" (1989), and Natalie Cole's "Stardust" (1996)—that now appeal to a whole new generation of music fans. Clearly, the legacy of the 1920s continues to exert considerable influence on our popular culture today.
The ongoing academic and popular fascination with the 1920s is also reflected in the myriad nicknames that the decade has collected. Besides Fitzgerald's famous moniker "The Jazz Age," the 1920s are also remembered as "The Roaring Twenties," "The Age of the Flapper," "The Dollar Decade," "The New Era," "The Lawless Decade," "The Dry Decade," "The Age of Ballyhoo," "The Era of Wonderful Nonsense"—and the list goes on. Yet these clever descriptions often distort our understanding of the complexities and tensions that marked this tumultuous era. The Jazz Age, according to popular conceptions, ranks as one of the most glamorous and exciting decades of the American 20th century, an era of flamboyance and prosperity best symbolized by flappers, Model T Fords, jazz bands, and bathtub gin. "To judge from some accounts," remarks historian David A. Shannon, "Americans did little else from 1920 until 1929 but make millions in the stock market, dance the Charleston and the Black Bottom, dodge gangster bullets, wear raccoon coats, and carry hip flasks."3 But these interpretations are, at best, only superficial representations that explain little about everyday life for actual Americans during the 1920s. Like watching The Untouchables, attending a Charlie Chaplin film festival, or listening to "It Had to Be You," nicknames and stereotypes tell us only a small part of a vast, complicated story.
Despite the ongoing attempts by scholars, artists, and popular audiences to unravel the meaning of the Jazz Age, a wholly satisfactory explanation proves elusive. One of the difficulties perhaps stems from the continuing disagreement over the era's precise periodization. Most historians actually define the Jazz Age as encompassing the years between November 1918, when World War I ended, and October 1929, when the stock market crashed. Others, however, date its origins even earlier—to the mid-1910s—when significant shifts in mass production, women's roles, and technology accelerated the transformation of American life. Then, too, some scholars extend the end of the Jazz Age to 1933, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the New Deal.
Nearly all scholars agree that most salient features of American popular culture during the 1920s resulted from a cascade of historical transformations that had begun at least by the 1890s and, in some cases, even earlier. Yet it is difficult to resist thinking of the Jazz Age as a series of unexpected surprises, as if one morning Americans awoke suddenly to find that the country had gone dry, women could vote, immigrants crowded the cities, jazz music dominated the airwaves, partyers danced the Charleston, and all the flappers had bobbed their hair. These and other defining characteristics of Jazz Age America did not spring forth fully formed in the 1920s. Nor was their appearance as sudden or surprising as we might think. Automobiles had been manufactured in the United States since the mid-1890s, for example, though admittedly not in significant numbers. Electrification of American homes and the development of gas stoves, refrigerators, and other appliances had long been under way by 1920. The temperance movement was more than a century old by the time National Prohibition went into effect in 1920, and the women's suffrage movement, which culminated in the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment, actually originated in the 1840s. Even women's bobbed haircuts had begun to appear prior to World War I. Americans living during the 1920s participated in and were undeniably affected by these social and cultural transformations, but they certainly did not invent them.
Yet certain aspects of life during the 1920s really were significantly different, including the extent to which the United States had become an urban nation. According to the 1920 U.S. Census, for the first time in the nation's history more than half of all Americans lived in cities or towns of 2,500 or more people. This trend would only accelerate over the course of the decade. New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, and other cities experienced spectacular growth throughout the 1920s, as some 19 million rural people moved to urban areas in search of economic opportunities, modern conveniences, and amusements unavailable on the farm. The nation's booming manufacturing sector spawned a consumer goods revolution, which produced an abundance of newfangled, mass-produced merchandise that dramatically transformed daily life for most Americans. At the same time, the rise of a powerful mass media created a national obsession with celebrity, and Hollywood stars, popular singers, and professional athletes became the new American idols. All these forces contributed to the emergence of a nationwide popular culture that had never before existed on such a grand and far-reaching scale. During the 1920s, when a small-town Missouri girl danced the Charleston to a Paul Whiteman record, tuned in to an episode of Amos ‘n’ Andy, or swooned at a Rudolph Valentino movie, she was sharing a common experience with millions of other people across the nation—an unimaginable occurrence only decades earlier. By the mid-1920s, even many rural and working-class families participated actively in this national popular culture that originated in large urban centers and then rippled out to even the most remote corners of the United States.
These social and cultural transformations, which had long been evolving, accelerated dramatically during the 1920s, but they also sparked a powerful ideological backlash. This conservative counterassault manifested itself in myriad ways, including the hysteria of the Red Scare, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, the ratification of National Prohibition, the passage of stricter immigration quotas, the rise of Fundamentalism, and the furor over the Scopes Monkey Trial, to name only a handful. Millions of Americans believed that secularism, consumerism, and changing tastes in fashion, recreation, and courtship were corrupting the nation's morals and standards of propriety. This conservative reaction to popular culture ignited a series of conflicts between traditionalists and modernists. For example, Fundamentalist ministers, who condemned any notion that challenged the literal interpretation of the Bible, feuded bitterly with liberal clergy, who reconciled modern science with their spiritual worldview. Older Americans squabbled with their children and grandchildren over everything from dating and jazz to daring hairstyles and short skirts in what we now recognize as the first significant "generation gap." Of course, relatively few people were wholly traditionalist or wholly modernist in their beliefs. Rather, the tensions between old and new value systems created a confusing cultural landscape that people negotiated differently, based on their own moral principles and political ideologies. So, for example, a person who hated jazz music and bobbed hair might love automobiles and Hollywood movies and see no inherent contradiction in this position.
The complexities of Jazz Age popular culture only heighten the rewards of studying this pivotal era, and everyone can take great pleasure in attempting to understand and explain the astounding significance of the 1920s.
Use the links on the top left and top right sides of the page to find out more about the news, films, movie stars, songs, books, Broadway shows, awards, fads, fashions, sports, and other elements of pop culture in the 1920s. Or, if you’d like, continue reading from The 1920s by Kathleen Drowne and Patrick Huber.
Notes:
- Malcolm Cowley and Robert Cowley, eds., Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1966), 173.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Echoes of the Jazz Age," in Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age, ed. Cowley and Cowley, 182, 183.
- David A. Shannon, Between the Wars: America, 1919–1941, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 94.
Adapted from Kathleen Drowne and Patrick Huber, The 1920s. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), xiii-xvii.