Setting the stage

The period under surveillance in this chapter divides with discomforting accuracy into two vastly contrasting national moods. America in the 1920s, retrospectively tagged as the Jazz Age (from F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1931 essay, ‘Echoes of the Jazz Age’), the Roaring Twenties or, more euphemistically, Prohibition, experienced a decade of unprecedented prosperity and self confidence. Republican presidents, for whom the business of America was business, led the country. Immigration, which had in the previous generation brought the parents of future songwriters to America, came to a virtual halt, and isolationism reigned as the prevailing sentiment. Women voted for the first time in the election of 1920 and the Smart Set began to explore social freedoms as well, such as public smoking, reading sex and confession magazines, applying make-up, bobbing their hair and wearing short skirts. As further manifestation of what contemporary social historian Frederick Lewis Allen called ‘a revolution in manners and morals’, both men and women sharply increased their alcohol consumption, imbibing in thousands of newly sprouting metropolitan speakeasies in Prohibition America. By the end of the decade radio became a family ritual, and sound films revolutionised an already popular entertainment and created new opportunities for musicals, both adapted from the stage and original. The 1920s introduced an exceptional generation of American playwrights (Eugene O'Neill, Maxwell Anderson), novelists (Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Fitzgerald), classical composers (Edgard Varèse, Aaron Copland) and jazz artists (Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington).