Throughout the summer and early fall of 1912 readers of Musical
America, a monthly magazine devoted to classical music and
of special interest to opera aficionados, were treated to a heated
debate between columnist Arthur Farwell and a series of correspondents
who criticized his stand on ragtime, the reigning popular music
of the era. Farwell, while expressing no great
love for the syncopated pastiche pouring forth from Tin Pan Alley,
argued that ragtime was created by and for the masses and served,
therefore, a legitimate function in bringing pleasure to the working
class millions. 1. “Popular
music,” argued Farwell, “is not forced upon the people;
it is created out of their own spirit…what right has the
man of culture to pass judgment upon the goodness or badness of
ragtime, of popular music as a whole – in short, to make
out a case against the popular song?” (24). Disagreeing,
his critics pronounced ragtime unequivocally “bad;”
for them, popular music was a consequence of America’s ever
more disparate distribution of resources. Money-grubbing capitalists,
they argued, forced popular music down the throats of an ignorant
and exhausted proletariat. Rudolph Bismarck Von Liebich, replying
to Farwell’s assertion that popular music represented the
needs and desires of its consumers, wrote:
With the advent of the machine age, when the giant tools of production
(machines, factories, railroads) are owned by the few for their
private gain and the worker is compelled to beg for work, which
may at any time be denied him, he has no heart for song. Music
as a spontaneous means of self-expression is no longer for him.
He accepts songs like his clothes, made for one reason only –
profit; and songs and clothes alike are shoddy, to his dire and
tragic impoverishment. (26)
George Hamlin, primarily concerned with the aesthetic qualities
of ragtime and its caustic effects on consumers, charged:
Trash is always trash no matter in what form it exists. It is
always worthless and often noxious unless disposed of. Mr. Farwell
overlooks the fact that there is music of a depraved nature that
is malevolently conceived and has a wide and powerful influence;
that this music is at present rife in every part of the United
States. (36)
While Farwell’s defense of ragtime’s modest virtues
makes for interesting reading, early twentieth century polemics
against popular music, such as those quoted above, are far more
intriguing because they indict it as both a source of social disintegration
and as a symptom of the dehumanizing industrial order relentlessly
transforming America into a spiritually empty, impersonal realm
where nothing was safe from the commodifying effects of the market.
The contentious debate carried out in the pages of Musical
America was echoed incessantly throughout the American popular
press (though rarely in the explicitly Marxian formulation espoused
by Von Liebich) of the era. An analysis of the discourses created
in reaction to the popular music of the early twentieth century
allows us to grasp more clearly how certain Americans resisted
what they perceived to be the final dissolution of a pre-capitalist,
nineteenth century paternalistic mentality.
As the modernizing forces of industrial capitalism and bureaucratic
rationality molded early twentieth century America into the world’s
foremost manufacturer of consumer goods, many Americans paradoxically
perceived this transformation as engendering social chaos rather
than order and stability. In the eyes of America’s traditionalist
middle-class, the nation was socially and culturally descending
into a primitive morass of irrationality, a tribal barbarism guided
not by the cherished achievements of the European Enlightenment
but by the lowest common denominator of the mass market. They
were appalled by the seething, heterogeneous mob of urban working
class America, swollen to appalling dimensions by decades of immigration
from Eastern and Southern Europe, which they believed threatened
to swamp the remaining citadels of bourgeois culture in a torrent
of ignorant sentimentality designed to satiate only the most vulgar,
unrefined corporeal impulses. As one commentator baldly stated,
“One thing is certain: the voice of the people is not the
voice of culture and art” (Smith 183). Yet, there was no
denying that the voice, or choices, of the masses in a dollar-directed
nexus increasingly determined the tenor of American culture. Indeed,
the nineteenth century dictum attributed to master huckster P.T.
Barnum, “Give the people what they want,” found its
fruition in early twentieth century consumerism. This culture
of the popular, both arising from and directed at the masses,
was widely recognized as a sphere central to the struggle to define
and direct the evolution of American society. Of course, not only
did few Americans agree on what it was the people wanted, but
many disdained Barnum-style populism altogether and advocated,
instead, that they knew best what it was Americans needed (whether
the masses themselves knew it or not). Film historian Charles
Musser identifies these traditionalist advocates of a restrained
moral conservatism with the “semi-official, elevated Protestant
culture and its stamp of social responsibility and respectability”
(9). Their fight to defend a culture of learned gentility against
the tyranny of the marketplace and the teeming masses who drove
it (and were driven by) are plainly evident in the contentious
discourses surrounding the era’s most popular musical genres:
ragtime and early jazz, both of which represented America in its
most modern guise: urban, restless, pleasure-seeking, pragmatic,
and avowedly materialist.
The emergent “culture industry” that manufactured
and distributed popular music came to fruition in the mid to late
1890’s and increasingly challenged traditionalist values
thereafter. Tin Pan Alley’s entertainment entrepreneurs
fashioned commercial amusements not in correspondence with the
venerated models of “high” European classicism, but
for an ever-expanding working-class audience demanding immediate
and uncomplicated pleasures. This gradual turn away from entertainments
justified by their ostensibly “uplifting” didacticism
and towards modern amusements, such as ragtime and early jazz,
did not occur in the absence of opposition, of course. Traditionalists
vociferously resisted this trend in, among other places, the pages
of the early twentieth century press. The resulting confrontation
between modern and traditionalist discourses was described by
a period sociologist as a battle between “warring sides
of human nature – appetite and will, impulse and reason,
inclination and idea” (Musser 9). The character of discourses
generated in response to popular music depended primarily upon
an author’s impression of the emerging, mass-marketed American
culture: modernity as indicative of profound cultural degradation
or modernity as the triumph of the people’s will over an
exclusionary, elitist tradition.
Although jazz is musically distinct from ragtime,
traditionalist discourses opposing the spread of popular music
made little or no distinction between them. 2.
For most, “jazz” was simply a new label applied, around
the end of the First World War, to the ragtime menace they had
been combating for a generation. Therefore, an analysis of opposition
to early popular music should not commence in 1917, with the abrupt
explosion of jazz into the national consciousness, but should
instead view opposition to ragtime and early jazz as constituting
an unbroken discursive continuum stretching back into the final
few years of the nineteenth century (1896 is often acknowledged
as the beginning of the ragtime era). Therefore, utilizing the
turn-of-the-century as a starting point and continuing into the
mid-1920’s, this paper will examine both affirmative responses
(popular music as triumph) to ragtime and early jazz as well as
oppositional discourses (popular music as cultural degradation)
that sought to arrest and reverse the burgeoning popularity of
these early mass-marketed musics. Oppositional discourses will
constitute the primary subject of analysis, however, because the
unqualified acceptance of ragtime and early jazz in contemporary
America contrasts so starkly with the fervent disapproval that
greeted their initial appearance. This sharp discontinuity between
past and present perceptions provides a unique opportunity to
examine fears about modernity, the maturation of industrial capitalism,
and the growing hegemony of the market in the first three decades
of the twentieth century.
Both ragtime and early jazz have long-since been incorporated
into national memory as benign, wholly inoffensive artifacts worthy
of cultural veneration and early twentieth century predictions
that they might become “the much vaunted music of the future”
appear quaintly prescient (Sherlock 639). While today relatively
few Americans are intimately familiar with these genres, no one
feels, upon hearing a snippet of ragtime, as though their aesthetic
sensibilities have been assaulted. “Alexander’s Ragtime
Band” fails to generate fears of moral degeneracy, and American
teenagers are quite unlikely to draw any parallels whatsoever
between the music of Irving Berlin and Eminem. In contrast, fervent
denunciations of popular music as a harbinger of cultural decline
were common in the early twentieth century popular press. Ragtime,
for instance, was often described as a “virulent poison”
or “malarious epidemic” to which the nation’s
youth were especially susceptible (“Musical Impurity”
16). Detractors condemned ragtime and early jazz with an intensity
reminiscent in tone and content to that which greeted rock 'n’
roll in the 1950’s and rap in the 80’s and 90’s.
Indeed, early twentieth century popular music never denoted “innocence”
for contemporaries. Both enthusiasts and detractors agreed that
ragtime and early jazz were culturally potent, powerfully affecting
consumers. Traditionalist opponents contended “ragtime was
an insult to public taste; that popular music was a degradation
to the cultured mind; that it provided entertainment for the MASSES
[sic] only, and that its very sound was obnoxious to the refined
and cultivated instincts of the better class of Americans”
(Meyer 3), while popular music’s modernist champions countered
that, “If any musician does not feel in his heart the rhythmic
complexities of ‘The Robert E. Lee,’ [an enormously
successful ragtime number about a steamboat named after the iconic
Confederate general] I should not trust him to feel in his heart
the rhythmic complexities of Brahms” (“Ragtime Wrangling”
69).
The insistent, syncopated rhythm pulsating through the music seemed
to compel men and women into joyously promiscuous interaction
on dance floors throughout America, a development that critics
feared would contribute to the moral degradation of (white) Americans.
Traditionalists denounced popular music not only because the working
class masses preferred it to the high culture cultivated by America’s
“better classes,” but also because it became increasingly
clear that their own sons and daughters were very often attracted
to these highly rhythmic, racialized musics that, according to
the May 1900 edition of The Musical Courier, exploited
the “lowest, basest passions” (“Rag-Time Rage”
20). As one exasperated observer reported, “Our girls will
spend hundreds of dollars taking grace lessons and as soon as
a ragtime piece of music starts up, they will grasp a strange
man in any outlandish position that will often put the lowest
creature to shame“ (Peiss 103).
Opponents objected not only to popular music’s savage, primal
rhythm but also to its often-uncouth lyrics. While even ragtime
enthusiasts conceded that ragtime lyrics might often be meaningless,
critics charged Tin Pan Alley wordsmiths with cranking out messages
that were unequivocally toxic. They objected to “young men
and ladies of the best standing” delighting in popular songs
that referenced “a nauseating twaddle about ‘hot town,’
‘warm babies,’ and ‘blear-eyed coons’
armed with ‘blood-letting razors’” along with
a whole host of other objectionable images (“Musical Impurity”
16). How do we account for the intensely negative reaction of
so many to a music that would not only eventually be proudly embraced
as distinctively American, but harmless as well? Ultimately, opposition
to early twentieth century popular music was rooted in the unsettling
effects that mass market commerce, with which popular music was
intimately linked, produced in traditional social hierarchies
and power relations. Oppositional discourses represented a quixotic
attempt by America’s old bourgeoisie to maintain their positions
of influence and authority in a modernizing, dollar-directed world
that increasingly regarded them as both irrelevant and antiquated.
Such an argument does not, however, imply that race was absent
from discourses surrounding ragtime and early jazz. Indeed, the
growing popularity of ragtime and early jazz parallels the institutionalization
of legalized segregation and the growing stream of African-Americans
migrating from the rural South into Northern urban centers like
Chicago. Most Americans assumed without question that ragtime
and jazz were primarily of African-American origin. In the early
days of the ragtime craze, a 1903 article reported, “There
can be little doubt that ‘Rag-time’ is a genuine creation
of Negro blood” and this perception was rarely challenged
in mainstream periodicals (“Musical Possibilities”
11). For white critics, however, the “blackness” of
popular music was simply another avenue through which to disparage
it. Locating the origins of jazz in Africa itself, the Ladies
Home Journal claimed, “Jazz originally was the accompaniment
of the voodoo dancer, stimulating the half-crazed barbarians to
the vilest deeds. The weird chant, accompanied by the syncopated
rhythm of the voodoo invokers, has been employed by other barbaric
people to stimulate brutality and sensuality” (Faulkner
16). The ever-growing popularity of this music alarmed those who
feared the growing influence of cultural forms associated with
African-Americans. By 1913, the prevalence of popular music in
American consciousness seemed so widespread as to prompt this
letter to the editor of the Musical Courier:
SIR – Can it be said that America is falling prey to the
collective soul of the Negro through the influence of what is
popularly known as “rag time” music? Some sociological
writers of prominence believe so; all psychologists are of the
opinion. One thing is infallibly certain: if there is any tendency
toward such a national disaster, it should be definitely pointed
out and extreme measures taken to inhibit the influence and avert
the increasing danger – if it has not already gone too far.
(Kenilworth 22)
Interestingly, bourgeois critics did not condemn all “black”
music. African-American “folk” music (spirituals and
plantation chants) was often approved of and accorded a guarded
acceptance alongside the cherished masterworks of Beethoven, Mozart,
and Brahms (among others). It is likely that many white critics
deemed African-American folk music “safe” because
it represented a time when Blacks “knew their place”
at the bottom of the social hierarchy under slavery; they likewise
approved of the oft-religious themes.
As a critic patiently explained, Americans, in their enthusiasm
for “manufactured” popular music, failed to appreciate
“the wealth and beauty of the true Negro songs” from
the antebellum era. Indeed, she went on to argue that
Side by side with the too highly civilized white race the Negro
must in time have eliminated from him all his God-given best instincts
and so fail utterly. For are they not already ashamed of their
old African music? They should be taught that slavery, with its
occasional abuses, was simply a valuable training in their evolution
from savagery, and not look upon their bondage and their slave
music with shame. (Murphy 1730)
The middle class African-American response to such racial discourse
was complex. African-Americans were integral to the formation
and expansion of both ragtime and early jazz, yet their relationship
to American popular music was ambivalent and contested. While
white critics readily assigned an African origin to the popular
music they so despised, black writers sought to complicate such
assumptions. “I do not see why this music should be put
upon the shoulders of the Negro solely,” argued the editor
of the Negro Music Journal, “for it does not portray
his nature, nor is its rhythm distinctly characteristic of our
race” (“Our Musical Condition” 138).
Popular music in all its permutations was often subject to sweeping
condemnations by these arbiters of Black middle-class propriety.
As Kevin Gaines argues, “Virtually all but the most unchurched
and bohemian black elites were unable to distinguish the aesthetically
ambitious ragtime piano compositions of, for example, Scott Joplin,
from humiliating coon songs and minstrel characters” (76).
Instead, critics struggled to maintain a strict separation between
classical music, with its connotations of learning and respectability,
and popular forms associated, unfairly or not, with demeaning
racial stereotypes.
Racism as entertainment was nothing new, of course. The blackface
minstrel show, which bequeathed its rhythms and representations
to ragtime and the vaudeville music hall, delighted white audiences
for much of the nineteenth-century. Since the antebellum era,
minstrelsy had demeaned blacks and effectively equated bourgeois
morality with whiteness (Gaines 67). Beginning in the 1890’s,
however, the power of mass-marketed popular music to spread and
further reinforce racist stereotypes was of increasing concern
to uplift-minded African-Americans. The Negro Music Journal
explicitly referenced the rapidly expanding music industry
when it maintained the races bore equal culpability for the popularity
of ragtime: “The whole country is responsible, both black
and white. Neither side can be excused for the part it has played
in creating, publishing, and distributing this low and degrading
class of music. Publishing houses in all parts of the country
have, with few exceptions, published this music more or less“
(“Our Musical Condition” 138).
In response to the power of the music publishing and vaudeville
industries, many middle-class African Americans believed that
achievement in “legitimate” cultural endeavors, like
opera, which demanded “high-class performance and artistic
execution” rather than the “droll song and dance”
associated with popular music and minstrelsy held the promise
of disrupting vicious racial stereotypes. As the Colored American
Magazine argued, in favor of cultivating an appreciation
of opera, “At these gatherings the refined and cultured
of our race assemble, and from them the Caucasian learns that
all of the Negro race are not ragtime characters, but that a great
number of us possess a discriminating and cultivated taste for
the fine arts” (“Drury” 507).
Ultimately, the black bourgeoisie’s rejection of popular
music was rooted in an effort to de-emphasize perceived racial
differences and achieve a semblance of social equality by carefully
identifying their cultural aspirations with those cultivated by
the white middle-class. It sought to demonstrate African-Americans’
essential sameness with those who despised their growing aspirations.
Unlike a later generation that would embrace jazz within a wider
celebration of their uniquely African-American heritage, the early
twentieth-century black bourgeoisie, in pursuit of an uplift ideology
emphasizing class over race, disavowed popular music and instead
overwhelmingly sought to distinguish themselves in cultural endeavors
deemed legitimate by “the better sort” of whites.
African-American discourse in middle-class periodicals echoed
white assumptions that classical music embodied universal values
that edified, enriched, and purified its adherents while ragtime
and jazz were, in contrast, repugnant productions imposed upon
ignorant consumers by a venal horde of unscrupulous music publishers.
They consistently argued that a livable, civilized future lay
in venerating tradition rather than in embracing the latest novelty
manufactured to amuse the masses. For both Black and White traditionalists,
the past denoted a realm safe from the vacuous mob and the market
that privileged its unenlightened choices.
Traditionalists stridently rejected the argument justifying the
worth of ragtime and early jazz based on their widespread and
ever growing appeal in the mass marketplace. Furthermore, critics
refused to accept the notion that even if popular music truly
arose from, and in response to, the people themselves, that this
qualified it as a legitimate cultural production. Traditionalists
strove to refute modernist arguments such as the following:
“The people” have created their popular music precisely
to their need and their taste. As to its having a deteriorating
effect on them, vulgarities and all, such a claim is absurd in
view of the fact that it is not the music which makes the people,
but the people who make the music to suit them. (“Ethics”
225)
Traditionalists countered,
Because there is a large demand for yellow newspapers, burlesque
shows, saloons, gambling houses, and other dens of the underworld,
could we with justice say that these things are created by and
for the public, and are, therefore, creative and good? (“Dangers”
8)
In short, according to traditionalist discourse, it did not matter
if popular music arose spontaneously from the people themselves
because the masses were ignorant and immoral. Like children let
loose in a candy store, they clamored to stuff themselves with
that which made them ill. When modernists argued that “you
may take it as certain that if millions of people persist in liking
something that has not been recognized by the schools, there is
vitality in that thing,” the obvious retort was that mass
popularity denoted nothing but the power of money-hungry sensationalists
to exploit the venality of the masses (“Ragtime Wrangling”
69). According to such discourse, popular music was but one of
a host of media that prostituted itself in pursuit of the widest
audience possible. Inevitably, this appealing to the lowest common
denominator of the masses supplied
The editor with his dozen reports of murder and sexual laxity
flashing from the front page of his morning paper; the novelist
and dramatist with their liberal laxative of filth and crass sugaring
of sentiment; the minister with his vulgarity and hypnotism; the
music master with his ragtime - all these bow the knee to Baal.
These men, however, insist that they are expressing the true American
feeling by giving the people what they want. (“Will Ragtime”
407)
Such was the fruit of pandering to the masses. Not only did the
market valorize the charlatan, the demagogue, and the acquisitive
materialist but, more alarmingly, it simultaneously degraded legitimate
cultural forms, such as Western classical music, as it nourished
the vulgarity of the masses.
Traditionalist discourse argued that popular music contributed
directly to the decay and neglect of the music the old bourgeoisie
held most dear - the symphonic masterpieces of European classical
composers. As early as 1900, the Musical Courier reported
that "rag-time - a ragweed of a music - has grown up everywhere
in the Union and its vicious influences are highly detrimental
to the cause of good music" (“Rag-time Rage”
20). Almost thirty years later, critics were still vainly declaiming
against popular music, asserting that jazz was a ”rhythm
without music and without soul…undoubtedly it stifles the
true musical instinct, turning many of our talented young people
from the persistent, continuing study and execution of good music”
(“Damrosch” 26). This strand of traditionalist discourse
argued that popular music positively hindered a “musically
uncultured person in gaining an appreciation of higher music…ragtime
has dulled their taste for pure music just as intoxicants dull
a drunkard’s taste for pure water and so fascinates them
that they cannot even listen to higher music, much less enjoy
it” (“Dangers” 8). According to traditionalists,
a veneration of “higher music” was essential to developing
one's moral, spiritual, and intellectual nature. Of course, the
elevated character of classical music could not be grasped without
the proper training; to grasp it required assiduous and respectful
study. “By music,” clarified one
music teacher, “I mean that which demands much time and
thought; the music of artistic cultivation, of humble ambitions,
prayerfully and earnestly followed; of obedience to teachers;
of self denial” (“Music Versus” 42). A devotee
had not only to be carefully trained to properly appreciate classical
music but he or she must also be shielded from the infectious
degradation of popular entertainment forms. 3.
As an 1899 Etude editorial entitled, “The
Invasion of Vulgarity In Music,” argued:
This cheap trashy stuff [ragtime] cannot elevate even the most
degraded minds, nor could it possibly urge any one on to greater
effort in the acquisition of culture in any phase…If you
are endeavoring to cause an elementary musical mind to appreciate
Beethoven, you must not let him escape you and visit a vaudeville
show, even for a single night, or you will find yourself the next
day set back weeks in your work. (Weld 52)
While the cultivation of an elevated character capable of appreciating
“higher music” required cloistered, diligent study,
indulgence in popular music required no great intelligence or
aesthetic effort on the part of the listener.
Music teachers and other traditionalists invested in the maintenance
and promotion of classical music decried the increasing influence
of popular music over America’s youth. As the German composer
Dr. Karl Muck proclaimed in 1916, “What you call here ragtime
is poison. It poisons the very source of your musical growth,
for it poisons the taste of the young” (qtd. in “Ragtime
Wrangling” 68). Teachers echoed Dr. Muck’s trepidations.
Their very livelihoods seemingly threatened, instructors despaired
that popular music and mass entertainment in general discouraged
the serious, long term, and expensive dedication required for
achievement in classical music. Many young Americans abandoned
such spiritually strenuous aspirations. In a 1922 article entitled,
“Music Versus Materialism,” a music teacher decried
the effects of the “amusement-mill of our suburban community
life” which left young music students profoundly ignorant,
superficial, conformist, and dismissive of anything (like music)
not immediately and obviously practical to material ambitions.
According to this author, the attitude of America’s young
music student now amounted to a petulant complaint, “What
good is all this high-class music, anyhow, except just to harrow
up your feelings? Let’s play something lively and cut out
the sob stuff!“ Again, the decline of classical tradition
and civilized life in America more broadly, was attributed to
shallow pragmatism and an overweening preoccupation with material
success:
[T]he scion of the new democracy…not only does he frankly
prefer rag-time to Beethoven, he is no longer ashamed of the fact.
And he has taken a new stand – he absolutely refuses to
practice. He is going to be an electrical engineer, anyhow, so
what’s the use of bothering with five finger exercises and
all that sort of foolishness?
Ultimately, traditionalists argued, ragtime and jazz were detrimental
to the future greatness of American classical music because the
public’s insatiable appetite for popular music allowed no
appreciation for the geniuses who, undoubtedly, labored unrecognized
in their midst. “It is my firm belief,” argued a respondent
in the Musical America debate of 1912, “that many
an undiscovered Beethoven, Wagner and Liszt has trashy music to
thank for his obscurity. Musical nature may become truly perverted,
just as a highly imaginative reader may injure his brain by constant
perusal of ‘cheap, trashy’ fiction” (Hamlin
36).
The traditionalist idea that ragtime and jazz “perverted”
an individual’s musical nature was rooted not only in a
despair for the future of classical music but also in the perception
that popular music seemed to possess a unique power over the physical
bodies of its consumers. In this respect, traditionalist and modernist
discourses were in substantial agreement. No one disputed the
notion that ragtime and jazz were aimed at the body, rather than
the intellect (as was claimed for classical music). They differed
fundamentally, however, on whether popular music’s corporeal
power was destructive or liberatory. For instance, while the Ladies
Home Journal argued that “those moaning saxophones
and the rest of the instruments with their broken, jerky rhythm
make a purely sensual appeal…they call out to the low and
rowdy instinct“ (McMahon 34), the Ragtime Review
countered, “The fact remains that ragtime is the most popular
music in the world today – the kind that makes your feet
shuffle and the mouth pucker – that makes you forget your
troubles and worries and feel at peace with the entire universe”
(“What Is Ragtime?” 8). Both agreed that the irresistibly
syncopated rhythms of popular music, bypassing one’s mental
faculties and moral sensibilities, left listeners “powerless”
to resist the appeals it made to the body. Although the earliest
published accounts of ragtime often focused on professional entertainers,
recounting “a distinct rhythm and mode, so to speak, throughout
the Negro melodies… [which] lend themselves to the dance
which usually accompanies the popular song when sung on the stage,”
writers soon began to describe the dramatic (and often unsettling)
effects of popular music on its listeners (“Music Halls”
536). In 1903, a music professor intending to dispassionately
observe ragtime music at a masquerade ball instead found himself
caught up in the energy:
Suddenly I discovered that my legs were in a condition of great
excitement. They twitched as though charged with electricity and
betrayed a considerable and rather dangerous desire to jerk me
from my seat. The rhythm of the music, which had seemed so unnatural
at first, was beginning to exert its influence over me.
He concluded, “The continuous reappearance and succession
of accentuations on the wrong parts of the bar and the unnatural
syncopations impart somewhat of a rhythmic compulsion to the body
which is nothing short of irresistible” (“Musical
Possibilities” 11). While the discourses emanating from
social commentators concurred with the professor that popular
music possessed the distinct ability to operate directly upon
the body, opinion was sharply split regarding the consequences
of this power. Modernists associated the enjoyment of popular
music with a healthy ability to express emotion and experience
pleasure. American composer Howard Brockaway opined, “It
is fairly well established that only an oyster can resist the
appeal of syncopated rhythm” (“Delving” 97).
While traditionalist discourse agreed that popular music had the
power to manifest itself directly on the body it argued, unsurprisingly,
that this was a wholly destructive rather than a liberating influence.
Giving oneself over to the power of syncopated rhythm resulted
in the abdication of moral restraint and, consequently, the destruction
of all civilized decorum.
Beginning in the early 1910’s, traditionalist discourse
identifying popular music with the abandonment of moral restraint
in favor of a primitive hedonism began to appear more frequently.
The impetus for much of this discourse was undoubtedly the dance
craze that swept America around this time. Musical America
approvingly reprinted the reaction of a Polish conductor visiting
America in 1912, “Day and night you Americans tingle tangle
and jingle jangle ragtime band stuff with [dances like the] grizzly
bear, tom cat and turkey trot. This is not music; this is madness.
Awful. Terrible!” (“Ragtime Is Madness” 43).
Ragtime and jazz were responsible, according to traditionalist
discourse, for compelling Americans into modern dances that were
“as much a violation of the seventh commandment as adultery”
(“Pulpit” 894). Traditionalists regularly claimed
Americans, having had enough of these immoral dances and the popular
music that propelled them, were on the verge of a moralistic crusade
to purge the nation of these vices. In 1913, for instance, the
Literary Digest reported, “Police, church, and
school authorities everywhere are stirred to conference and action
over the demoralization that is plainly evident though the incoming
of these indecent dances which are sweeping over the country like
an epidemic” (“Carnality” 102). To their dismay,
however, the appeal of popular music and the new dances only continued
to grow, especially with the jazz phenomenon that gripped America
near the end of World War One. By 1921, the Ladies Home Journal
argued, in an article hopefully entitled, “Back To
Prewar Morals” (conveniently forgetting that, in the opinion
of many, America’s prewar morality had been little better
than a cesspool), “In so far as jazz dancing relaxes morality
and undermines the institution of the family, it is an element
of tremendously evil potential” (13). Whether its target
was ragtime or jazz, however, traditionalist discourse consistently
recognized the corporeal appeal of popular music. The elevated,
spiritual tone of classical music simply could not compete with
popular music for the hearts and minds (and feet) of the masses.
Although traditionalist discourses condemned ragtime and jazz
for their relentless assault upon the American body, critics also
argued that the damage inflicted by popular music went far beyond
the dance madness denounced from the bench as “a series
of snakelike gyrations and weird contortions of seemingly agonized
bodies and limbs” (“Judge Rails” 15). Some critics
preached that ragtime and jazz ultimately produced mental degeneration
or hysteria in their listeners. Popular music not only made Americans
lose control of their bodies and their better judgment on the
dance floor, but it actually rendered them mentally unstable.
The earliest denunciations of popular music had characterized
it as a “dangerous epidemic,” and by the twentieth
century’s second decade it was increasingly associated with
the degeneration of mental health. Critics tied the appeal of
popular music and its relentless, hypnotic beat to the increasingly
frenetic rhythm of modern American life. A 1911 article in the
New York Times approvingly quoted a visiting German music
professor’s opinion that ragtime would “eventually
stagnate the brain cells and wreck the nervous system” (“Music
in America” 10), while in a 1913 article entitled “Ragtime:
The New Tarantism” (the original tarantism being a wild
dancing mania, prevalent in thirteenth-century western Europe
and supposedly incited by the bite of a tarantula), Francis Toye
opined, “I believe that it [ragtime] is a direct encouragement
to hysteria…in a society where the social needs and restraints
of modern civilized life unite with subtle hereditary nervous
defects to make hysteria as common as it is’” (Toye
654-655).
Critics often fused a smattering of psychoanalytic hearsay with
a facile authority borrowed from the scientific realm to “prove”
that popular music was mentally degenerative. As the Ladies
Home Journal asserted, “That it [jazz] has a demoralizing
effect upon the human brain has been demonstrated by many scientists.”
This article went on to claim that a number of scientists, working
with the insane, had discovered that “the effect of jazz
on the normal brain produces an atrophied condition on the brain
cells.” Ultimately, it concluded, jazz music inhibited a
patient’s ability to distinguish between “good and
evil, between right and wrong” (Faulkner 16). The orchestra
leader at the Napa State Hospital wrote an article for The
Metronome to warn, “I can say from my own knowledge
that about fifty percent of our young boys and girls from the
age of 16 to 25 that land in insane asylums these days are jazz
crazy” (Guilliams 59). While many commentators stopped short
of charging popular music with directly causing mental illness
or hysteria, they asserted, alternatively, that popular music
contributed to an emotional malaise increasingly infecting Americans.
After informing readers that he did not approve of jazz because
it was “doing a vast amount of harm to young minds and bodies
not yet developed to resist evil temptations” the author
of an editorial in the January 1925 edition of Etude
went on to approvingly quote an “expert” in these
matters, the “eminent” Dr. M.P. Schlapp. “We
are headed for a smash in this country if we keep on the way we
are going,” reported Dr. Schlapp. “Our emotional instability
is the product of immigration, automobiles, jazz and the movies”
(qtd. in “Is Jazz the Pilot” 7). Attempts to associate
popular music with a generalized sense of psychological fragility
reflecting the tenor of modern American life were increasingly
common throughout this period.
Beginning in the second decade of the century, both modernists
and traditionalists began to identify popular music as broadly
evocative of the economic and cultural transformations remolding
America. The most obvious example of this trend, of course, identifies
the 1920’s as the “Jazz Age.” Despite the inability
of this label to accurately characterize the complexities of an
entire historical era (in the sense that all such labels are inadequate),
Americans of the early twentieth century often did just this,
utilizing images and attitudes associated with popular music to
define the times in which they lived. The associations authors
chose to take from popular music and apply to the nation more
generally, of course, depended upon their stance toward industrial
modernity and the marketplace. For those who embraced America’s
consumerist promise of unlimited abundance and liberatory technology,
the frenetic liveliness of ragtime and early jazz provided an
apt metaphor. Despite its earlier appropriation of “plantation”
and “darkie” images, ragtime was not often associated
with the quiet repose of rural retirement or contemplation. Instead,
it was “the perfect expression of the American city, with
its restless bustle and motion, its multitude of unrelated details,
and its underlying rhythmic progress toward a vague Somewhere”
(“Great American” 317). As The Ragtime Review
claimed in December of 1914:
[Ragtime] is the music of the hustler, of the feverishly active
speculator; of the “skyscraper” and the “grain
elevator.” Nor can there be any doubt about its vigor –
vigor which is, perhaps, empty sometimes and meaningless, but,
in the hands of competent interpreters, brimming over with life.
(“Why Ragtime” 3)
The energy of popular music was associated with the creative forces
rapidly binding the continent together, increasing the speed with
which goods and information could be transferred across the nation
and delivered swiftly to the benefit of consumers, fulfilling
their rapidly multiplying desires. In a lyrical description of
popular music’s evocation of a pragmatic, modern America,
Grace Hodsdon Boutelle wrote that the rhythm of ragtime existed
in every factory and mill, on the elevated and in the subway.
It sings in the wireless and flies in the aeroplane. It blossoms
in the fertilized desert and flows in the toil-created waterways.
It streams, visible and splendid as flying banners, along the
skyline in New York Harbor. Here is architectural syncopation,
if you like, an accent withheld here, anticipated there, nothing
happening exactly according to the traditional rhythm of architecture,
yet this very freedom demonstrates its loyalty to the basic
law of building – that law which demands that skyscraper
or government shall definitely meet the needs and coherently
express the purpose of its builders. (qtd. in “Ragtime
Wrangling” 69)
With the conclusion of the First World War, jazz displaced, or
mutated out of, ragtime but the images utilized in popular discourse
remained essentially unchanged. “Jazz,” wrote the
Etude, “has come to stay. It is an expression of
the times, of the breathless, energetic, superactive times in
which we are living and it is useless to fight against it”
(“Where Is Jazz” 595). For champions of modernity,
popular music represented the fierce creative energy of an industrializing,
urban America, the ceaseless enterprise of its people, and the
mountain of desirable consumer goods it showered upon them.
Like modernists, traditionalists increasingly appropriated images
associated with popular music in order to broadly characterize
the tenor of American life and society. The connotations employed
by traditionalists, obviously, were quite different. Traditionalists
recognized the profound changes reshaping America, but they chose,
in contrast to modernist discourses, to use popular music to emphasize
the indecision, indeterminacy, and fragmentation of modern life.
As Americans became ever more responsive to the dictates of the
market, traditionalist discourses reflected a perception that
the cultural authority of the old middle class was slipping away,
along with the standards of conduct they espoused. The “cheap,
trashy” music so popular with the masses was supposedly
indicative of a malaise infecting all of American life. Careful
scrutiny of ragtime music, for example, allegedly revealed that
“every one of the songs is insidiously perverting; they
are indicative of relaxitive morality, of disparagement of the
marital tie…of the entire moral code“ (“Remarks”
22). After the end of World War One, many authors were convinced
that the nation had lost its traditional moral restraints and
much of this discourse, in fact, referenced the war as an explanation
for the “jazz spirit” apparently affecting the nation.
Discussing the rage for jazz which gripped the nation with the
end of World War One, the Ladies Home Journal explained
in 1921, “There is always a revolutionary period of the
breaking down of old conventions and customs which follows after
every great war; and this rebellion against existing conditions
is to be noticed in all life today. Unrest, the desire to break
the shackles of old ideas and forms are abroad” (Faulkner
16). The Journal, unsurprisingly, foresaw only disaster
in Americans’ desire to “break the shackles of old
ideas,” but, by identifying these urges with a transitional
period following the tribulations of war, it was able to claim
that jazz signified only a temporary period of readjustment; America
would see a “Return to Pre-War Morals” soon enough.
Jazz, however, did not immediately disappear, and three years
later the Etude still found it necessary to declaim,
“Jazz is one of the inevitable expressions of what might
be called the jazzy morale of mood of America…when America
regains its soul, jazz will go, not before - that is to say, it
will be relegated to the dark and scarlet haunts whence it came
and wither unwept it will return, after America’s soul is
reborn” (“Where is Jazz” 595).
Mass-produced popular music, of course, never
disappeared from American life, and the genres that eventually
displaced ragtime and jazz, such as rock 'n’ roll and rap,
would have been just as upsetting, if not more so, to the traditionalists
who denounced Tin Pan Alley’s ubiquitous creations.
4. Hopes that America’s “jazz
spirit” was only a peculiar manifestation of the post-war
era were bound to be disappointed because the transformations
so often signified by popular music had begun long before and
were tied to the growth of industrial capitalism in America, rather
than to a temporary upset of social relations caused by a year
and a half of America’s participation in The Great War.
The garish materialism denounced by traditionalists could not
be reversed by their fervent denunciations of cultural decay,
and the popular music they so detested grew in popularity along
with the burgeoning consumer culture of the 1920’s. These
changes could be resisted but not overturned by appeals for Americans
to return to an orderly, pre-capitalist past sanctified and largely
created in traditionalist discourse. For traditionalists, popular
music symbolized the lamentable and growing hegemony of the market
and its ability to commodify all that it touched. A 1921 article
in Ladies Home Journal encapsulated many of their fears
about modern capitalism’s omnipresence in one short passage
that evoked popular music, mass amusements, the displacement of
traditional religion, the vulgar materialism of the masses, the
frenetic rhythm and mental confusion of modern life, and the visceral
power of advertising images to permeate modern consciousness.
Describing a stroll through Manhattan in search of immoral jazz
dens, John R. McMahon wrote, with Beat-like intensity, “We
walked up Broadway encompassed with a fierce jazz of light, barbaric
in color, savage in gyrating motion, stupefying the optic nerves
and conveying to the brain confused messages of underwear, chewing
gum, and automobile parts. It seemed an appropriate vestibule
to the temple of the modern dance” (“Back To Pre-War
Morals” 13).
Notes
1. The literal and metaphoric center of the modern
popular song industry, beginning in the early 1890’s and
continuing through the middle of the twentieth-century, was an
area originally located on New York City’s West 28th Street
known as Tin Pan Alley.
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2. According to one observer in 1920, however,
”the jazz” was simply ragtime speeded up and “raised
to the Nth power” (“Jazz and Ragtime” 200).
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3. Interestingly, one of the most successful popular
composers in American history disdained acquiring any formal musical
training whatsoever. According to author E.M. Wickes, Irving Berlin
once said that “he feared to study music, as he had an idea
that the knowledge of music-construction and its laws would have
a tendency to kill his originality and spontaneity” (“The
Birth” 893). Berlin reportedly composed all of his songs
in F-sharp, constructing million-selling melodies using only the
black keys on the piano.
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4. The conviction that popular music was literally
everywhere constituted a prevalent theme in traditionalist discourse.
In the article touching off the popular music debate in Musical
America, for instance, a music teacher by the name of Minna
Kaufmann argued, “In these songs, which are heard everywhere,
one gets a very good idea of the state of mind and feeling of
the public…The language used in the verses is always the
‘catchy’ kind. You can’t avoid quoting some
of the songs, because the verses are made up of everyday expressions
twisted into other and often unsavory meanings. These songs are
especially bad for children, yet it is impossible to keep them
in ignorance of them, for the bands, the phonographs and street
singers proclaim that this is the kind of music the public wants
and pays for” (“The Case” 13).
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