The Birth of Modern America, 1914 - 1945. John McClymer

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      Portrait of Louise Brooks from the film Diary of a Lost Girl, the epitome of the “flapper.”

      Source: PictureLux / Alamy Stock Photo. Brooks began as a professionally trained dancer, became a showgirl in the “Ziegfeld Follies,” had a featured role in a Broadway musical, starred in several silent films, and then went to Germany, where she made Pandora’s Box, a film so controversial it was not shown in the United States until the 1980s.

      Pre‐war beauties, and women generally, had very long hair, often reaching to the small of the back, which they wore up. “Letting your hair down” was a prelude to intimacy. The flapper wore her hair short, a cut nicknamed the “bob.” The “Gibson Girl” had an hourglass figure, i.e., full bosom and hips and a “wasp waist.” Corsetry was the key. The flapper favored shifts, dresses that did not disclose curves. Women with full busts purchased breast restrainers to attain the ideal boyish figure. Dresses had come to the ankle. With the war and shortages of fabric, they rose to mid‐calf. The flapper wore dresses that came to the knee. She sometimes rolled her stockings below the knee, something likely to scandalize her mother, who considered that “fast,” i.e., indicating sexual availability. She did not wear a corset.

Another way to appreciate how rapidly cultural change arrived is to study popular music. It had been dominated by ballads largely based on European models, on the one hand, and comic ditties written for minstrel shows, on the other. This changed with Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” (1899), the iconic masterpiece that captivated the nation in the pre‐WWI era. Ragtime drew upon several musical traditions, including minstrel songs, marches, and the syncopated rhythms that African American musicians were experimenting with in the 1890s, especially in Chicago and St. Louis. Joplin’s song took its name from a “social club” (aka brothel) in Sedalia, Missouri, where he briefly worked as a piano player. Joplin claimed Chopin as a major influence. Like Chopin, he sought to create popular music that would nevertheless reach the level of high art. Virtually no one at the time took Joplin’s ambitions seriously, not with every composer trying to copy his tunes, not with every amateur piano player struggling to play them. Now Joplin’s work is seen as indeed in the same class as Chopin’s.

      Jelly Roll Morton’s music takes us to the transition from ragtime to jazz (originally jass). The word ragtime comes from “ragged time,” the fact that the right and left hands of the pianist play different tempos. Jass is a more mysterious term. Some theorize that it comes from “jasmine,” an inexpensive perfume supposedly favored by whores in New Orleans’ famed red‐light district, Storyville. The fact that “jass” and then “jazz” were African American slang terms for sexual intercourse lends some credibility to the theory. Jelly Roll always claimed that his nickname did not refer to any fondness for the pastry. It was, he boasted, his signature move in making love. His “Black Bottom Stomp” is a good example of early jazz. The Black Bottom was a popular dance of the day, one that openly proclaimed its origins in the African American community.

      The emergence of the “modern young woman” and the increasing influence of African Americans on American culture were highly controversial aspects of a far more general set of changes – modernization.

      1920 also marked several major transitions. According to the Census, for the first time a majority of Americans lived in cities. The census defined urban as any place with a population of 2,500, so many “cities” were actually small towns. Nonetheless, urbanization was quite real. Cities attracted residents because that was where people could find work, entertainment, and a kind of freedom. But cities could also be frightening. There was crime and corruption, temptations of all sorts. There was anonymity; some considered it a boon, others a bane.

      Diversity flourished in cities. People spoke dozens of languages, practiced dozens of religions, ate scores of cuisines. In the biggest cities, like Chicago or Philadelphia, clubs openly catered to homosexuals. There were notorious neighborhoods, like the Bowery in New York, where tourists and natives alike could find ways of satisfying any appetite. There were theaters. Revivalist Billy Sunday claimed that more sinners fell because of the theater than from drinking.

Sunday’s discomfort with modernity was widely shared. We can see it in the battles over what he called “Old Time Religion” and the related struggles among Protestants over the “fundamentals.” We can see it in the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan. We can see it in the campaigns to censor films and plays. We can see it in the decade‐long controversy over the one‐piece bathing suit for women. We can see it in efforts to outlaw the teaching of evolution. The list of battles in an ongoing, seemingly unending, culture war goes on and on. We will look at these and several others.

      Underlying the culture war lay a fundamental question: Whose country was this? One answer, supposedly based on scientific research, was offered by the “science” of eugenics.