Authors: John Beckman
This rollicking new underground wasn’t limited by region; its subway
tracks ran nationwide and picked up whoever wanted a ride. Transgression alone was the ticket price. The writer
Carl Van Vechten,
Jazz Age impresario, wrote regarding “
the matter of cocktail parties” that “since the laws were passed prohibiting the sale of liquor, it could be said that more were held in one day in Manhattan than in a month elsewhere.” Maybe so. But his cultural elite, centered on Greenwich Village, didn’t have a monopoly on pleasure. Though many of their number had fled the Midwest (Van Vechten hailed from Cedar Rapids, Iowa), and though small-town contributions to Jazz Age fun were snobbishly dismissed as escapist and hypocritical by the ascendant bohemians of the Jazz Age, America’s underground party life—with its cocktail-induced lurid behavior—reached even the remotest American communities, where popular support for Prohibition held strong. “
Of the 113 establishments licensed to sell soft drinks in Sheboygan, Wisconsin,”
Daniel Okrent writes, “the two that actually confined themselves to nonalcoholic beverages went out of business.”
So, sure, Americans everywhere broke the law to drink, and for many transgression became a virtue. It was fetishized, as it had been in the 1820s, as a noble sort of liquid democracy that enabled community and set people free. It was a lawless tongue waggled in the faces of the Dry Crusaders’ electoral victory. Much as their forebears getting drunk and waltzing in the diggings may look frivolous in contrast to the European revolutions of 1849, the Wild Wets’ drinking moonshine and dancing the
Charleston look silly in contrast to the temperance activists’ century-long effort to bring about the Volstead Act. But as the historian
David J. Goldberg rightly claims, America was falling on apathetic times, and “
in a decade that saw a declining interest in politics, Prohibition was one of the few issues that aroused strong emotions.” It reheated the cooling public sphere. Drys argued America was safer and even more prosperous for being dry—as they had been predicting for decades. Wets argued that their “personal liberties” had been violated. Neither side backed down, and the press fairly crackled with joy.
But even among the most apathetic wets a revolution was afoot, whether most of them knew it or cared. While petty crime, prostitution, and murder were among the waste products of this hard-drinking
national demimonde, and while
bohemians gloated over their own caricatures of bloodless, dullard Puritans, everyday folk in every region were learning to have some antiquarian fun—the fun of being assertive, of taking big risks, of rubbing themselves up against other mischievous citizens. Was this politics? Whatever else it was, it was—in
flapper-speak—the cat’s particulars.
TWO ENTRENCHED VALUES
of early American democracy—individualism and communitarianism—were loosened up and mingled in the 1920s public sphere. The
cult of celebrity, of soaring individuals, which arguably originates in the 1820s with the rising frenzy over Edwin Forrest, had seized upon the national imagination.
Movie stars, musicians, and athletes reigned supreme, and tabloids and
fan
magazines gave fans a sense of participation in, ownership over their lives’ minutiae—the Fitzgeralds’ escapades,
Charlie Chaplin’s every quirky move—and they inspired adoring mimicry. These stars’ public sightings caused mob sensations that today are common only among pubescent girls. In 1927, when a soft-spoken midwesterner named
Charles Lindbergh had flown in obscurity from America to France, which was experiencing
Les Années Folles
of its own, the American poet
Harry Crosby was there at Le Bourget airport to witness five hundred thousand fans mob his plane: “
C’est lui Lindberg, LINDBERG! [
sic
] and there is pandemonium … thousands of hands weaving like maggots over the silver wings of the Spirit of Saint-Louis and it seems as if all the hands in the world are touching or trying to touch the new Christ and that the new Cross is the Plane.”
Flight and celebrity—the twin peaks of 1920s individualism—apotheosized Lindbergh, and all of the world’s crowd wanted a relic.
Pranks, antics, and breathtaking stunts decorated 1920s newspapers; rash individualism was on full display, as was a full-scale assault on traditional ideas of taste and safety. As if emboldened by the racy new improvisational techniques with which
King Oliver (Bolden’s successor) had transformed early
jazz—rhythms, scales, and novelty sounds that were ugly and aggressive by
any
musical conventions—citizens everywhere were going solo, “playing hot.” The most daring Americans jitterbugged
on the edges of skyscrapers, tightrope-walked over city canyons, and performed a quirky sample of death-defying capers (fox-trotting, human-pyramid building, even tennis playing) high above the world on the wings of biplanes. Indeed, if the term “Roaring Twenties” derived from the new abundance of loud, fast, and relatively cheap cars—impressive sources of power and liberty for recently horse-saddled Americans—then the fact of
flight
soared in the popular imagination as the acme of fun and freedom. Europeans,
Ann Douglas notes, still suffered from the shock of aviation warfare, but in far-off America airplanes glowed with heroism and adventure. “
Only in America could you get mass-produced piggy banks, purses, fans, clocks, lamps, and (a rarer item) coffins shaped like airplanes.”
As the twenties roared on, aerobats aped the hazards of war, making mortal danger look like child’s play: aileron rolls, the simplest trick of all, involve a manually guided flipping of the plane. Flick, snap, and barrel rolls, however, call for all-out leaps of faith, requiring the pilot to gain enough forward velocity to throw the plane into autorotation, a state wherein the plane spins freely on its own. But hammerheads, or stall turns, are probably the most breathtaking of all: for this stunt, the pilot cuts the gas at the top of the climb, lets the plane flip back over, and shoots it toward the earth like a diving missile.
It must have been the hammerhead that Harry Crosby had in mind when he dreamed of diving his plane into Manhattan. But in his fantasy he doesn’t pull back from the spiral. The Boston Brahmin poet wrote to his parents in 1929 that he “
like[d] looping the loop and other aerial acrobatics” and that “there might come a crash but there is no crime in an explosion whereas there is I think a crime in ending life the way so many do with a whimper.” He had survived a shelling at Verdun in which, according to
Geoffrey Wolff, “
his ambulance was vaporized,” leaving behind “a young man’s untouched body and gravely injured imagination.” As
Malcolm Cowley writes of Crosby, “
Bodily he survived, and with a keener appetite for pleasure.” Crosby and his wife, Caresse, the more esteemed writer of the two (and the inventor at nineteen of one of the first modern bras), were low-level aristocracy on the American expatriate literary scene and best known for running the Black
Sun Press. His appetite for sex, drugs, and luxury were extraordinary for any man, but exemplary of American trends at the time. Harry Crosby was nobody’s democrat. An avowed “
aristocrat” and “anarchist,” and the spoiled nephew of steel magnate
J. P. Morgan, Crosby was the portrait
of 1920s hedonism, of the moguls and celebrities who sailed above the crowd and became symbols of dissolution and excess. While he never lived his dream of crashing into Manhattan, he satisfied another long-held violent fantasy when, in the final months of 1929, amid a spree of drinking, drugs, gambling, adultery, shooting, and aerobatics, he killed himself and his mistress in a room at the Ritz.
In vivid contrast to Crosby’s murderous egotism was the crowd-pleasing showmanship of Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, the first African American to receive a pilot’s license. Ann Douglas describes this avatar of
Buddy Bottley as “
a glamorous and charismatic man, a sheik-type, black America’s more sophisticated version of
Rudolph Valentino.” A lover of jazz who neither drank nor smoked, this anti-fascist, pan-Africanist flier was called the “Lindbergh of his Race.” Though he encountered rivalry, even sabotage, among a few of his
Harlem neighbors, this Garveyite claimed racial identity as the primary motive behind his flamboyant stunts. He cut a swell image, swooping Harlem rooftops and parachuting into the city (once dressed like the devil and playing the saxophone), but because of his persistent difficulty getting financial backing he always flew a rickety craft. Julian was the exception that proved the rule: flight, while the gold standard of American fun, was a pleasure set apart for the elite.
For all the raging cult of personality, however, communitarianism, in a range of crowd pleasures, was just as characteristic of the era: it took the far-flung form of national trends (mah-jongg, crossword puzzles, bridge) and the more intimate forms of marathons and dance parties, which, unlike the mass spectacles and
spectator sports also on the rise during this period, demanded lively participation from their multitude. A transcontinental footrace, commandeered by the stunt promoter
C. C. Pyle, made its way eastward from California. A multiplex marathon in Madison Square Garden featured everything from twenty-four-hour talkers to round-the-clock rocking-chair rockers. Most notable, of course, were the
dance marathons across the country that could drag on for weeks. But if marathons gave pleasure in diminishing returns, ultimately pleasing only victors like
Vera Sheppard (whose story begins this book), the new dances themselves—the black bottom, tango,
Charleston,
jitterbug
—never failed to satisfy.
Jazz dance in particular was the chuffing locomotive pulling the boxcars of 1920s fun.
Kathy J. Ogren’s excellent
Jazz Revolution
traces the broiling “controversy” between jazz’s prudish 1920s opponents and the broad cross-section of easier-going Americans who were galvanized by this intensely sociable music. In attempting to explain the latter, she details the “
participatory” qualities of jazz and their well-known roots in the earliest black folk culture—the “call and response” relations between the musicians, the “cutting contests” between soloists, the “bucking contests” between jazz bands, and the ongoing dialogue between crowd and bandstand. She argues that this black-identified form of music eventually grew so general that it “helped white Americans with diverse social backgrounds”—those who were bold enough to enjoy it—“explain their world.” What she calls “
Jazz emotions” were radical attitudes that helped people to break through “physical—and social—barriers” and opened new channels for community.
The musician and musicologist
Roger Pryor Dodge, regretting the 1940s jazz trends toward purely improvisational bebop, praised early jazz as “
dance-based music” that “completely drains the human system.” One of the music’s “strong supports,” he argued, was “the pulse of a mob moving in time.” To be sure, the most prominent jazz musicians had built upon
Buddy Bolden’s dance-driven example. They migrated in the teens from New Orleans to Chicago and ultimately in the twenties to New York City, never forgetting that dancers were their raison d’être. The two cultures riffed off one another and shared a spirit of competition. Dicky Wells recounts the “Trombone” and “
Saxophone Supper[s]” that would take place at the informal
Hoofer’s Club below
Big John’s bar in New York: “All musicians would be sitting around the walls, all around the dance floor, maybe there would be forty guys sitting around there. The floor was for dancers only, and they would be cutting each other, too, while we were cutting each other on the instruments.”
Vocalists had always ruled the musical stage, but by the mid-1920s, instrumentalists—especially
Louis Armstrong with his Hot Fives and Sevens—were achieving unprecedented star status. Building on Bolden’s showmanship and Jelly Roll Morton’s virtuosity, Armstrong turned improvisation into a world-class art form. He soared to levels of creative prowess that teased and mocked his earthbound rhythm section. He injected individualist braggadocio—egomaniacal ecstasy—into what was at base a communitarian music. He shared the studio with vocalists, including
Bessie Smith, whose “Reckless Blues,” as
Gary Giddens and
Scott DeVeaux demonstrate, kept her “
in control” and made Armstrong “alert to every gesture.” He also squared off against his
own
astonishing voice. But at his best it was his horn playing that stole the show. It swooped aerobatically in and out of the clouds, “
compet[ing],” as the composer
Gunther Schuller puts it, “with the highest order of previously known musical expression.”
But then the
dancers
refused to be grounded. It was during the mid-twenties that they too went solo, “played hot.” Much as early
jazz songs required constant negotiation between the soloist and the rhythm section, so did new dances inspire both soaring personal freedom and deeply erotic social interaction, the extremes of individualism and collectivism.
EARLY JAZZ DANCE HAD
always left room for grace notes and novelties: hand flicks, eye rolls, kicks, and shimmies were all part of its essential pleasure. Rare couples dances like the
breakaway and the
Charleston already let partners split apart for a few bars and indulge in some lunatic expression, usually some kind of modified two-step, but they always returned to their basic steps, which, like the accompaniment itself, could be as strict and uniform as the waltz.
Perry Bradford’s 1919 “Original
Black Bottom,” however, which had flopped years before as the “Jacksonville Rounders’ Dance” (“rounders” were pimps), was a single-dancer “challenge dance”—again, in the tradition of dancing for eels—that anticipated much zanier things to come. Sharing its rhythm with the original Charleston—which wouldn’t gain wide acceptance until 1923, when it was featured in the all-black musical
Runnin’ Wild—
the black
bottom adorned a simple box step with early, slinky African-American moves—mooches, slides, hobbles, and twists that drove average Americans wild.
The 1924 instructional film
Let’s Do the Black Bottom
provides a spurious history lesson that tries to be both flattering and comical to whites, who it also suggests invented the dance: “—funny how they got the Black Bottom idea—someone strayed from the Great White Way to the great open spaces and saw—” two black boys struggling in the mud, mimicking a cow doing the same. The film features a white girl in a modest white dress giving a plodding demonstration of stamps, double-stamps, and a stiff-legged strut. Strangely, it suggests she started the craze. “They heard her music,” a panel reads, and the film insinuatingly cuts to two gleefully dancing black girls, to a dancing traffic cop, and to some startling footage of construction workers kicking and swaying on a skyscraper’s beam. “All the world will soon be imitating that cow stuck in the mud.” This latest effort in the long white campaign to appropriate African-American culture paled, however, in face of fact: all the world
was
learning the dance, and America’s soaring new pleasure was black.