The Jazz Age - 1914-1932
The Jazz Age represented the “African Americanization” of dance music, and American culture more generally. It was also a time of growing racial and cultural polarization, as the mainstreaming of African-American culture coincided with a great resurgence of the Ku-Klux Klan.
The quick change from a war-tlme to a peace-time basis left the public mind in a state of fiux. The World War had tended to upset old standards and implanted in their stead new ideas and new theories. Millions of men and women had been uprooted from their homes and communities, with their well-ordered course of life, and thrown into a strange new world and strange surroundings. Even the Army had been mobilized along new lines. While conscriptions and enlistments were local in character, the boys were distributed throughout the Army as a whole, with no home associates. There was a decided breaking down of home ties, marital relations, and the old stories of morality. The war period had also brought to the fore new methods in business. Industry had been drifting toward quantity or mass production, but the war caused it to assume major proportions.
The Jazz Age is the name given to the era in American history between the end of the Great War and the start of the Great Depression. Prior to the Great War, the primary form of dance music was ragtime. Jazz music in particular was born in New Orleans, home to a hybrid racial community of white, Creole, and African American communities, with strong influences of French culture. During the Roaring Twenties, music in particular underwent drastic changes that represented the cultural evolution occurring during that decade.
The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald termed the 1920s "the Jazz Age." With its earthy rhythms, fast beat, and improvisational style, jazz symbolized the decade's spirit of liberation. At the same time, new dance styles arose, involving spontaneous bodily movements and closer physical contact between partners.
In fact, the 1920s was a decade of deep cultural division, pitting a more cosmopolitan, modernist, urban culture against a more provincial, traditionalist, rural culture. The decade witnessed a titanic struggle between an old and a new America as well as the rise of a modern consumer economy and mass entertainment. All of these themes were played out in the nation's music.
The 1920s was a decade of exciting social changes and profound cultural conflicts. For many Americans, the growth of cities, the rise of a consumer culture, the upsurge of mass entertainment, and the so-called "revolution in morals and manners" represented liberation from the restrictions of the country's Victorian past. Sexual mores, gender roles, hair styles, and dress all changed profoundly during the 1920s. But for many others, the United States seemed to be changing in undesirable ways. The result was a thinly veiled "cultural civil war," in which a pluralistic society clashed bitterly over such issues as foreign immigration, evolution, the Ku Klux Klan, prohibition, women’s roles, and race.
The 1920s was the first decade to have a nickname: “Roaring 20s" or "Jazz Age." It was a decade of prosperity and dissipation, and of jazz bands, bootleggers, raccoon coats, bathtub gin, flappers, flagpole sitters, bootleggers, and marathon dancers. It was, in the popular view, the Roaring 20s, when the younger generation rebelled against traditional taboos while their elders engaged in an orgy of speculation. But the 1920s was also a decade of bitter cultural conflicts, pitting religious liberals against fundamentalists, nativists against immigrants, and rural provincials against urban cosmopolitans.
The widespread prosperity of the 1920s ended abruptly with the stock market crash in October 1929 and the great economic depression that followed. The depression threatened people's jobs, savings, and even their homes and farms. At the depths of the depression, over one-quarter of the American workforce was out of work. For many Americans, these were hard times.
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