America Grapples with the First Decade of Jazz

I think it’s safe to say that most of us jazz enthusiasts are viewed by the youth of today as amusing yet hopelessly insulated from any moral harm the music we love could ever hope to cause us. Yet in its initial decade of existence, jazz brought about much anxiety to the guardians of the culture and social fabric. Some held such worry where even the most bland of jazz bands were still a gaggle of Neros fiddling—albeit with pep and pluck—while a civilization burned to the ground. At least one prism in which we can use to view the public’s worries towards the new musical and social trends is via the press at that time.

In America’s newspapers often the association between jazz and moral corruption were made by using both legitimate and tenuous connections. One such instance employing both approaches was the case of Julie Rector. In September 1924 it was reported that this woman who was one of Chicago’s best “colored shimmy shakers” was fined $200 in a Chicago Morals Court for conducting an “obscene and indecent show” while a jazz band played at a Southside “black and tan” club. The establishment called the Entertainers’ Café had been raided by police two months previous to the ruling and subsequently shut down. Reports of the incident alternated in describing Rector as a “shimmyite” or a “muscle dancer.” She and another dancer brought their act into the court room, they with their “muscular gyrations” reportedly bringing “a smile to the faces” of the unnamed number of progressive reformers who were behind the effort stop the act.

The shimmy had become a popular shoulder-shaking dance thanks to such compositions as “Shim-Me-Sha-Wabble” (Spencer Williams), “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate” (A.J. Piron), and “Everybody Shimmies Now” (Eugene West/Joe Gold/Edmond Porray) but was also considered obscene by those concerned with societal devolution.

One witness in the courtroom drama, a chemist named Leslie Lewis, testified, “Someone gave [Rector] a quarter and she danced, whirling until her skirts were at the level with her knees. More tips came. Soon her body and head were leaning far back and her dress caroming well above her waist. As she danced, she rotated the central portion of her body to music.”

A government inspector named Jessie Binford testified, “I saw couples clinging together, their lips glued to each other and pressed tightly together, as they swayed heavily back and forth to the strains of the jazz. At times the man chewed at the neck of his partner.” One reporter wrote that Binford concluded that jazz was just a “medley of barnyard sounds, the crowing of roosters, the bleating of sheep, the barking of dogs, all syncopated together and served with the beating of tom toms by a Colored orchestra. Only a Colored man can put the right punch in jazz.”

Judge Arnold Heap’s ruling is a piece of salacious literature in itself, he stating, “There is no grace or beauty in jazz…[it] smacks of the barbarism of the jungle. The very music was obscene. The evil genius of [the club] has artfully combined the grossness of primitive sensuality with the gilded refinement of modern licentiousness…The floor was already crowded. This left a maximum of one person to every square foot of dance floor. They couldn’t do anything that even pretended to be dancing…The actions of the patrons, both colored and white, were beastly.”

Heap concluded with, “Socrates was forced to drink hemlock because of trumped up charges that he corrupted the youth of the city. Such importance did the Athenians place on the virtue of their young men. If such entertainments are tolerated it means the debauching of society, the corruption of the community and the destruction of the moral stamina of the nation.”

Also in 1924, the mining community of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania that “appeared upon the map as the anti-jazz capital of America.” This all because of its mayor Dan Hart who found that jazz’s “jerky rhythm is anathema and its effect upon humans insidious and virulent.” The mayor claimed that the banning of jazz would help alleviate much misery for his constituents, he observing, “I keep in close touch with the courts. Looking over the records I find that most of the trouble between men and girls nowadays is started at some dance where they do those sensuous, wild savage dances to the tune of jazz…Here we have a mining community. The men are vigorous, muscled, primal…They come out of the mines and wander to the dances.”

In case anyone should have thought that Mayor Hart was a conservative prude who wanted to ban fun, he claimed himself not a “reformer” but a “most liberal” man and a member of the Democratic Party, his support for the local miners to enjoy “good beer” even on Sundays presented as proof. “Jazz has done more harm than drink ever did,” Hart warned. “It is designed for naked wriggling savages.”

“Tell the people I’m not a nut,” continued Hart, while reminding the public that he himself was a writer, he having composed The Parish Priest and other popular theater plays of the day. According to the ordinance itself, the purpose of the fines for those violating the ban of playing jazz in the public space was to “encourage the rendition of classical music.” One man sympathetic to Hart’s crusade was the Metropolitan Opera’s Otto H. Kahn, who delivered a backhanded compliment to the soon to be banned musical style by arguing that, “Jazz has its place as an effort to express artistic inspiration. The same is true of the baboon’s howling. It had to precede Demosthenes’ oration on the crown.”

Hart’s personally written ordinance was not without pushback, some according to one reporter responding with both “staccato laughter and crescendo denunciation.”

In that same year jazz was blamed for causing a wedge among some members of churches. The Methodist Episcopal church voted to lift a ban on such amusements as dancing and attending theater performances. Fort Worth, Texas’ W.M Short voiced his opposition to the measure, he arguing that, “Sunday theaters are working a great hardship on the churches. Dancing is one of the great causes of divorce.” Another member Dr. George Elliot disagreed, he countering that, “Religion must appeal to the conscience and it is the conscience of men that must be treated…Preachers now will stand in their pulpits not with a policeman’s club but with the shepherd’s crook in their hands.”

Could the flapper be tamed into becoming a good wife? Columnist Cynthia Grey thought not, she declaring, “She may look like a harem queen but she insists upon freedom in great slices. Like a monument to her, the great apartment-hotel has reared itself in every city in America, so that she shall not break her pointed fingernails doing housework. The efficiency-flat with its in-a-dor bed, its doll-house kitchen and its maid service is a tribute to her helplessness… Some of them are mothers…that is, they have given birth to their babies but not much care afterward…Yes indeed, the married flappers will have a marvelous time in their own way. And they will be dressed for the part, much as a chorus girl is decorated with silk and metal and paint to fit in with a stage setting.”

One newspaper commentator lamented in 1924 on how the term “jazz” had finally entered scholarly dictionaries and that they were not pleased with the definition being, “A form of syncopated music played in discordant tones on various instruments.” The commentator felt that a revision was in order, they offering as a substitute, “The music is full of shrieks, screams, moans, and explosions. The leader usually adopts a suitable idiotic attitude. With a cap set on one side of his head he prances around, rolls his eyes, and twists his face into all kinds of simian contortions. The inspiration for all this was found among exited savages.”

With the linking of jazz to uncivilized, animalistic behavior, one paper reported that a chimpanzee that had escaped from a sideshow wandered around Long Beach, California, before its ears caught hold of the sounds of a jazz group. The creature entered a dance hall and made its way through the terrified fleeing patrons and musicians. Becoming fascinated with the band’s drum set, the chimpanzee reportedly began amusing himself with the contraption. The proprietor of the dancehall was not amused, he vowing to sue the ape’s owner for running off all of his customers.

In addition, several southern California universities and colleges conducted experiments on a variety of species exposing them to different types of music. Their findings: while waltzes put some of the animals to sleep, jazz “angered the tigers; the baboon danced to a tune built up on a once-prevalent scarcity of bananas; the brown bear went into a tantrum when confronted with a moaning saxophone…And Mary, the ape, smoked cigarettes through the whole two-hour performance.”

While there were plenty of lighthearted stories presenting a negative view of jazz, some stories linked to the music form took a more serious tone, warning of consequences far graver than theoretical moral corruption or animals made wild. A judge in Emporia, Kansas warned that “The majority of crimes of today are committed by boys under 21…The average home is nothing more than a place to eat and sleep. It has ceased to be a shrine for moral and religious training. Jazz life, cheap reading, and cheap thinking are the chief characteristics of modern people.”

Another was the case of Andrietta Hildebrand, a 19-year-old girl in San Francisco who ran away from her parents’ home to escape their restraint. For three years Hildebrand both worked as a telephone operator and “participated in so many jazz parties that even some of her companions on these affairs had advised her to call a halt.” At the end of the girl’s three-year excursion, she was unemployed and living alone in an apartment, no one aware on how the girl was able to financially support herself. The girl’s life song came to an end at her apartment on an evening where she held a jazz party. In the end, she was found dead, strangled, a bullet hole in her heart and wound in her temple caused by an iron spike. A man named Harry MacDonald described by the police as “mentally peculiar” was charged for the crime. MacDonald claimed not to have killed Hildebrand whom he claimed to have loved but did admit to have a “dream phantasy” of the girl “lying in a welter of blood in her tiny apartment.” The accused also turned out to be a poet, he using the pseudonym “Lonesome Harry” and penning a tribute to the dead Hildebrand from his prison cell. Entitled “Could those lips but tell,” the poem ended with the lines:

“Poor little Butterfly

So bruised and so broken

Your beautiful body crushed of its breath;

Those cold, purple lips hold the words that UNSPOKEN

Are sending me up to the Gallows—and death.”

“The days of jazz music are gone and as there is nothing else for me to do, I have decided to hang myself,” wrote one Kurt Kranzler before he committed suicide. Kranzler had been a jazz drummer in Berlin but was fired from his band for “dominating the band’s performances by too lusty application of his drumsticks and cymbals.” The distraught musician was “found hanging by a strap taken from his bass drum” he had fitted onto a tree in Grunewald.

Jazz nearly claimed another life when one motorist in Texas became “beguiled” by a jazz band he heard playing as he drove by a dance hall. Slowing down, a rock was thrown from some unknown assailant which broke the driver’s jaw and knocked out several teeth, he reportedly almost bleeding to death until he received care at a local hospital. Apparently the local police were either uninterested in the incident or unsure of their abilities as that they told the driver to take his complaints about his injury to state officials.

The most sensational of the stories linking jazz to mortal destruction was the 1925 case of “Jazz baby,” “jazz slave,” and “broken butterfly” Dorothy Ellingson. The then 16-year-old San Franciscan girl with noted “rust colored bobbed hair” had been dedicating much of her waking life to the enjoyment of the jazz lifestyle since she was 14. Entries into her diary included accounts such as, “Met Mary and Keith at the New Shanghai…We had a wonderful time, pep, jazz. Went to the beach, got drunk as usual” and “Went to work. Was late on the job. Had an argument with the boss. Quit. No more work for me. I am through if I keep this night life up.” Ellingson’s life choices ultimately led to her and her mother engaging in a heated argument over the girl’s behavior, the result being the murder of the latter by the former. After committing the matricide, Ellingson attended a jazz party where she became “very friendly” with a jazz drummer named Emil Kreuter. After being found by police lodging at a boardinghouse under an assumed name, Ellingson confessed to shooting her mother, explaining that she held no “deep seeded-grievance” against the woman who gave her birth.

As a trial approached, Ellingson lashed out against the comparisons of herself with fellow youthful murderers Leopold and Loeb, who while inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of the Übermensch murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks with a chisel to the head. “My case is not like that of Leopold and Loeb! I wouldn’t have Clarence Darrow for my attorney on a bet.” While in jail it was noted that Ellingson enjoyed reading the many letters and other gifts (including fruit) sent to her, many from religious groups pleading that she repent to avoid Hell. “I tried to read the Bible today but I just can’t,” the girl concluded, it later revealed she preferred the poems of Alfred Tennyson to scripture.

With many in the public perplexed on how Ellingson who was from such a respectable family turning out to be a murderer, at least one “expert” did not blame jazz. A “character analyst” named Edna Purdy Walsh claimed that the blame could be laid on Ellingson’s diet, the expert explaining, “The poor girl was fed white bread and given booze to drink, when what she needed was phosphorous. Deprived of her vitamins, murder was the inevitable outcome.” Another doctor concurred with Walsh’a analysis, they adding, “I defy anyone to find in our jails anyone with a truly well-nourished nervous system.”

Ignoring the white bread explanation, Ellingson’s attorney used the defense strategy of “jazz insanity,” arguing that the murder transpired because of the girl’s “jazz crazed” mind and that her mental illness should be viewed as a “germ that may be segregated and eliminated from society just as an ordinary disease germ.” Mentally disturbed or not, Ellingson certainly played the part during the trial, she shifting between various physical displays. One reporter noted, “The girl crouched a little lower in her chair, held her haggard face a little more completely under her flower-rimmed hat and resumed her ceaseless tugging at the leather handbag she carries in her gloved hands.” During the closing statements, the girl at one point shouting at her own attorney, “Anyone could get up and tell those lies…You better get out of my sight before I choke you.”

After a stay at asylum where she was judged to be “sane,” Ellingson rejoiced and said she looked forward to putting forth her newest claim that a “dope-fiend” physician named Jimmy Lamarr was the actual killer. Ultimately Ellingson was convicted for the crime and served 7 years in San Quentin. During her imprisonment, she was reported to have been visited by 66 people claiming to be her aunt, 45 cousins, 28 sisters and 9 fathers. When a woman claiming to be Ellingson’s murdered mother stopped by for a chat, the warden put a stop to the parade of masquerading visitors. In 1933 not long after she had completed her sentence and was given her freedom, Ellingson was in the courts again, this time for stealing jewels and clothes, which police found hidden under her mattress.

In spite of the negative associations and frame ups, there were positive portrayals and defenses of jazz music. The artform was used to sell many products that were not necessary directly related to the musical phenomenon. There was a Birmingham, Alabama-based farm supply company line entitled “Jazz Feed,” it boasting a variety of top shelf mash and scratch all while featuring as its logo a gaggle of instrument playing chickens. A confection company promoting their “Jazz Land Chocolate” boasted, “Boys, if you want to make dreams come true, buy her a box of Jazz-Land today.” The Chrysler motor company also attempted to draw potential customers to its new line of Maxwell motorcars by linking their technology with the sounds of the modern era. One gimmick included inviting the public to dealerships to witness “Maxee” a “Talking Maxwell” vehicle that in addition to talking also answered questions, read palms, flirted and, most importantly, played jazz.

At least one church embraced the music form for an evening of fun. A 1919 story highlighted an Ohio Presbyterian church’s Bible class for young men who met at a private home and played a kind of “Jack Horner pie” where each member was given a random musical instrument. The class members instantly became a jazz band and “played old time tunes in a fearful and wonderful way to the joy of all present if not to the neighbors.”

Responding to the attitude by some critics of societal suicide that jazz was implementing and that “The finest flowers grow in the rottenest soil,” Millard S. Binney listed how as of the mid-’20s America had become an incredibly productive and prosperous nation, despite its obsession with dances and parties. “Jazz is synonymous with pleasure but it is more. It is a bugle-call to arouse us to action; a reveille to awaken our slumbering senses…Jazz is not ruining the world. As a steady diet, it lacks nutriment and is bad for the system; but as a tonic, it possesses a very real and a very healthful kick.”

Silent film star Dorothy Davenport attempted to answer the question on whether the jazz-loving flapper would ultimately make a good wife. Davenport predicted that yes, when it was time for such responsibilities the flapper would not only welcome keeping a home and raising children but that, “she is going to be better equipped to guide [her] children over some of the rapids of life than was even her own mother. She is certainly going to know how to chum with those children of her own as they grow to manhood and womanhood. She is going to be tolerant and patient and interested in the things that interest them.”

Magistrate of the New York Woman’s Court, Jean J. Norris, expressed her admiration for the modern jazz woman, especially those who chose to fashion themselves in the way they prefered. “Girls today have courage. Some call it license and freedom. Women bobbed their hair in the face of opposition that took the form of ridiculing the ‘bob’ as masculine. Men took this method—assailing the feminity [sic] of girls who bobbed their hair—yet in the face of that, girls went on bobbing…Oh, how I hate corsets. Yes, I hate them. Therefore, how can I deplore the modern tendency of girlhood to go corsetless. I love the spectacle of a slim young thing, dancing in her youth and joy. Dancing with her shingle-bobbed hair prettily marcelled, her trim ankles glistening in silk hose, no corset on her young body.” Mrs. Norris concluded her assessment of the jazz butterflies as, “Better as an individual—more of a mate to man. Better in spirit—independent, not cowed and subservient. Better in brains—look at what she is achieving in the business world. Better in health—neither cultivating nor paying attention to petty ills and ailments. Better in beauty—preserving and abetting it. Better in morale—facing life with understanding, facing facts with courage, trying to be happy.”

Popular columnist O.O. McIntyre dismissed the paranoia against jazz by not only listing some of the major names in higher musical culture that had began championing the music—including Alma Gluck and Sergei Rachmaninoff— but pointing out that the artform had transcended much of its initial dubious associations. McIntyre viewed bandleader Paul Whiteman as one of the genre’s redeemers. In early 1924, Whiteman had put on a concert in New York City that according to McIntyer showed “that what people dislike about jazz is the brothel opprobrium of the name and that jazz is in reality of symphonic worth.” According to McIntyre, “About twelve years ago a jazz band consisted of a cornet, trombone, clarinet, piano, and drum. These perfectly legitimate instruments were in bad company. They were played amid the din of anvils, buckets, kettles, cowbells, and other hardware for soggy denizens of boozieries.” Whiteman’s version of jazz managed to subdue the “vulgarities” and made it a music uniquely American that all its citizens could be proud of.”

And finally Marie Manning, using the nom de plume Beatrix Fairfax, admitted that some destructive and illegal behavior were occurring to the soundtrack of jazz music but this was the moral failure of society’s elders and law enforcement married with the lack of restraint exercised by the individual, which was common among the young people of any given age. “Jazz in itself is not immoral,” Manning opined. “Those who condemn it are but echoing an older generation who solemnly declared when the waltz was introduced that it would ruin love, marriage and morals. Yet now the waltz generally is recognized as harmless. Jazz had brightened many young hearts, brought young people happily together, aided Cupid in selecting life partners, as well as partners for the dance. Over-indulgence in jazz, like overindulgence in all the good things of human life, is undesirable. But in its time and place jazz is a merry, harmless pastime…Worth-while girls everywhere are, if need be, sacrificing social life rather than submit to prevalent degrading social conditions. Young men will quickly fall into line when they find girls are in earnest in not wanting the petting party, the drunken orgy, the promiscuous kiss.”

Manning concluded with sound advice to jazz lovers then and now. “A merry heart gives the gay, glad courage we all need. And certainly, jazz brings a merry heart. So, let’s open our hearts and homes to jazz and banish the evils that have too often accompanied it.”

Sources: Alaska Daily, Bismark Tribune, Cody Enterprise, Evening Herald, Golden Standard, Nogales International, Omaha Morning Bee, Perrysburg Journal, San Antonio Light, Seattle Enterprise, Seattle Star, Washington Times, and Worcester Democrat.