The Louis Armstrong Hot Five in 1925, with Armstrong on the left and his wife, the pianist Lil Harden, on the right. Despite Hardin’s classical training the quintet played without sheet music.
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ONE WINTER NIGHT IN 1926, HALFWAY THROUGH HIS SET, a terrified Fats Waller found himself being bundled into a car at gunpoint and driven off at high speed. Shortly afterwards the pianist arrived at the Hawthorne Inn in Cicero, where a private party was in full swing. Capone’s men had decided to bring Fats as a twenty-seventh birthday present to their jazz-loving boss. For three days champagne flowed, showgirls cavorted and cocaine was almost certainly sniffed; when he was in prison Capone’s nasal septum was found to be perforated, a sign of extensive cocaine use. When the party juddered to a halt three days later, an exhausted Waller was sent home, his pockets stuffed with thousands of dollars lavished upon him by a delighted Capone.
Saxophonist Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow recalled that Al was grinning and good-natured in jazz clubs, always surrounded by seven or eight “trigger men” having a noisy good time, “but gunning the whole situation out of the corners of their eyes” and stopping anyone from leaving or entering. Capone’s bodyguards would pass out tips of $50 or $100 to the hat-check girls, waiters and musicians on his behalf. His favorite songs, as befitted a tough guy, were sentimental numbers. Al Capone prided himself on making crime into an efficient business, and part of this meant leaving behind the casual racial prejudice that characterized so much of early-twentieth century American life. Most criminal gangs were strictly segregated by race and religion, but Capone valued loyalty and motivation more highly than the color of a man’s skin. One by-product of Capone’s color-blindness was that during the twenties Chicago became the center of America’s flourishing jazz scene. All the greats of the era—Waller, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Jelly Roll Morton—played in Chicago, often in Capone’s clubs with an enthusiastic Capone in the audience.
Fats Waller came to Chicago from New York—he was born and bred in Harlem—but his friend and fellow musician, Louis Armstrong, had followed an established path when in 1922 he left New Orleans, heading north up the Mississippi River. Between 1910 and 1920, 50,000 Southern blacks had emigrated to Chicago to work in the new factories there. Hundreds of thousands more left the farms of the deprived South for Detroit and New York and other northern industrial centers where their labor would help build modern America. Chicago’s African-American population more than doubled during the 1920s.
Born at the turn of the century, Louis Armstrong had grown up on the streets of New Orleans, working at various odd jobs like delivering coal to the whores who stood in the drafty doorways of their “cribs” in skimpy lingerie, beckoning clients in. In his early teens, Armstrong saved fifty cents a week to buy his first blackened horn, “an old tarnished beat up ‘B’ Flat cornet” that cost $5 from a pawnshop. “From then on, I was a mess and Tootin’ away,” he remembered years later.
New Orleans was a city throbbing with music, where a wealth of vibrant traditions—the mournful energy of the freed slaves’ blues; the calypso rhythms of the West Indies; the syncopated beat of plantation banjo music, known as ragtime; the mysticism of Negro spirituals; the lyricism and sophistication of the Creole tradition; and the local love of marching brass bands—fused on the streets into an entirely new type of music. Young musicians like Armstrong learned and played by ear, constantly listening to and adapting each other’s playing, their lyrics reflecting the call-and-response cadences of words and phrases they heard on the street, improvising all the time. Just because they lacked the restrictions of sheet music and scales didn’t mean that hard work wasn’t important. Playing well was an expression of discipline and dignity as well as an exuberant overflow of natural talent and creativity. It was a complete immersion in the art: the music was inside them, rather than on a page, and they responded to it with a fluidity and instinctive inventiveness that no formal training could ever replicate.
The place where this emerging musical form thrived was Storyville, the tenderloin district, where in 1902 alongside its two hundred brothels and eight hundred saloons were eighty-five jazz clubs. “Lights of all colors were glittering and glaring, music was pouring into the streets from every house,” remembered the pianist Jelly Roll Morton. As a mixed-race Creole, he played in brothels in downtown Storyville, stone-built mansions in which white whores wore fine gowns and diamonds in mirror-lined rooms and might make $100 a night. Uptown, where Armstrong played, was the black area, poorer and rougher but full of life, where the girls charged fifty cents. Apart from the prostitutes and their madams, Storyville was populated by men—pimps, crooked policemen, punters and musicians.
Alcohol flowed but if someone wanted cocaine or opium, Chinatown or a lax drugstore was never more than a few blocks away. In 1914 the United States Government banned the non-medical use of cocaine and opiates, and criminalized hard-drug users, but cocaine, heroin and morphine were still relatively easily obtainable, either by prescription or from illegal importers.
Storyville brought musicians like Armstrong and Morton money, respect and autonomy that they could have earned in no other way. When the district was closed down by the police in 1917, as Jelly Roll observed, the madams could find new premises but the jazzmen were forced on to the streets. Most headed for Chicago, where by the mid-1920s there were over ten thousand nightclubs and bars playing music. New York, with its five hundred dance-halls and eight hundred cabarets, many in Harlem, was another target for aspiring black musicians. Armstrong first left New Orleans in 1919, to play his trumpet on showboats on the Mississippi, returned home in 1921 and left again, this time for good, in 1922. In New Orleans as a boy he had run errands for bandleader Joe “King” Oliver’s wife; now Oliver gave him his first place on a Chicago stage.
The quality of the music staggered Armstrong, who had believed New Orleans was the capital of jazz: the musicians around him in Chicago were so inspiring, “I was scared to go eat because I might miss one of those good notes.” Success came quickly. In 1923 and 1924 Armstrong spent some time in New York, playing in Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra and making his recording debut.
Bessie Smith, “the Empress of the Blues,” also made her first record in 1923. “Downhearted Blues” sold 780,000 copies in six months. “She looked like anything but a singer…tall and fat and scared to death,” said Frank Walker, who supervised her first session at Columbia Records. But as soon as he heard her hypnotic voice, utterly original and self-assured, his doubts about her appearance vanished. “I had never heard anything like the torture and torment she put into the music of her people. It was the blues, and she meant it.”
Smith came from Chattanooga, Tennessee, and at seventeen had begun touring with Fats Chapelle’s Rabbit Foot Minstrels, where the great blues singer Ma Rainey took her under her wing. Together they barnstormed through the gin mills, brothels and honky-tonks of the Deep South. By the time she was twenty-four, Bessie had earned her first solo spot in a revue called Liberty Belles.
Her star quality was unmistakable. “She was the blues from the time she got up in the morning until she went to bed at night.” But it was typical of Smith that she didn’t think of her songs or performances as an art form: they were just something she did. When the poet Langston Hughes, meeting Bessie after a show in Baltimore in the mid-1920s, asked her about the artistry of her music, she replied that all she knew was that the blues had put her “in de money.” Bessie “was tall and brown-skinned, with great big dimples creasing her cheeks, dripping good looks—just this side of voluptuous, buxom and massive but stately too, shapely as an hour-glass, with a high-voltage magnet for a personality. When she was in a room her vitality flowed out like a cloud and stuffed the air till the walls bulged,” remembered Mezz Mezzrow, who met her in Chicago. “She livedevery story she sang; she was just telling you how it happened to her.” All through the twenties, Bessie was a wanderer, touring with her band, the Harlem Frolics, in her own seventy-eight foot, two-story Pullman railroad car. It was like a traveling family circus, with Bessie’s brother Clarence and niece Ruby performing alongside her, and her husband Jack Gee sulkily handling their affairs, though Bessie never trusted him to be her manager. Everyone slept in the carriage, which also carried their marquee, sets and instruments and had its own bathroom, complete with flush toilet. In the kitchen-car Southern food like fried pigs’ feet and stews were washed down with homemade corn liquor—the type of soul food Smith sang about in “Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer.”
Themes of travel and transience, of rootlessness and alienation, have been part of musical cultures throughout history and across the world, but for blues and jazz in particular, formed by the experiences of the slave trade, of slavery itself and the Underground Railroad north, they express a profound sense of being uprooted and transplanted, of longing for a home that no longer exists and may never be reached again. Langston Hughes echoed them in “Blues Fantasy”:
Got a railroad ticket,
Pack my trunk and ride.
And when I get on the train
I’ll cast my blues aside.
Another blues refrain is unhappiness in love. Bessie Smith’s songs of lust, longing and betrayal were powerful because they were real. In the writer Carl Van Vechten’s words, when she sang it was like watching “a woman cutting her heart open with a knife until it was exposed for us all to see, so that we suffered as she suffered.”
Handsome Jack Gee was jealous of his wife’s success and hated her family, but he loved spending Bessie’s money. In 1924, when Smith was the best-known and highest-paid black star in the world, earning perhaps $1,500 a week, they were still together but Jack was frustrated by his lack of control over his wife. No matter how often he beat her up Bessie still sought her pleasures where she pleased, slept around, drank voraciously and sometimes disappeared for days at a time. Bessie’s sexual appetite was notorious. Her usual seduction technique was to lavish a member of her team—a handsome young dancer in her chorus, a piano player, her musical director, even a chorus girl—with expensive gifts. Bessie’s niece Ruby said, “She always liked them younger than she was, and it didn’t matter if they were men or women, as long as they could show her a good time—like I said, Bessie loved a good time.” Chasing away the blues they played was something of a jazzman’s specialty, on stage and off. Most musicians were heavy drinkers. Ruby said Smith never left a party “until all the liquor was gone.” Her drinking was inseparable from her personality and her performance: “She was good-hearted and big-hearted, and she liked to juice, and she liked to sing her blues slow,” said the jazz musician Buster Bailey.
Many others were regular pot-smokers, or addicted to cocaine or morphine. “Tea [marijuana] puts a musician in a real masterly sphere, and that’s why so many jazzmen have used it,” wrote Mezzrow. “You hear everything at once and you hear it right. When you get that feeling of power and sureness, you’re in a solid groove.”
The one addiction they all shared was jazz itself. Jelly Roll Morton observed that although Creoles saw music as a career path, black musicians played in the African tradition—for the sheer joy of it. Something of this passion communicated itself to the audience and back from them to the band in a constantly renewing cycle of energy.
Even when Louis Armstrong was playing shifts at two clubs a night, when he left work he would stay up till morning jamming with friends. On his nights off, Mezzrow loved going to the De Luxe café on Chicago’s South Side to watch Alberta Hunter singing, “He may be your man but he comes to see me sometime.” Hunter thought people only came to see her costar, Twinkle Davis, because of her wonderful legs, but Mezzrow liked the sly sexiness of her lyrics, a blues hallmark:
Baby, see that spider climbin’ on that wall,
Baby, see that spider climbin’ on that wall,
He’s goin’ up there for to get his ashes hauled.
Like crime for Capone, music gave these artists the chance to transform their lives. Doing what they loved brought them undreamt-of rewards: ermine coats, diamond rings, flowing champagne, big shiny cars. Still, despite the sums they earned and the respect they received from their peers, black musicians lived in an almost entirely segregated world. Their ties to the mobsters who owned the clubs in which they worked and often supplied them with the alcohol and drugs on which they depended were inescapable. When Louis Armstrong changed managers halfway through the twenties he was forced to hire bodyguards to protect himself from gang violence.
In 1959 Richard Wright wrote in an introduction to a book about the blues that while its themes may have been negative—experiences of work and transit, bad luck, race, tragic home and family lives, submerged guilt, sexual betrayal, lost love—its message was paradoxically positive. “The most astonishing aspect of the blues is that, though replete with a sense of defeat and downheartedness, they are not intrinsically pessimistic; their burden of woe and melancholy is dialectically redeemed through sheer force of sensuality, into an almost exultant affirmation of life, of love, of sex, of movement, of hope. No matter how repressive was the American environment, the Negro never lost faith in or doubted his deeply endemic capacity to live.” Blues and jazz reminded people—especially black people—of their instinct to survive.
Musicians were not the only African-Americans who felt optimistic in the 1920s. Moving to the cities, learning to read and write, buoyed up by having participated in the war effort, becoming conscious of the injustices of racism—all these things stimulated a new sense of self-respect and a determination to create an America in which black men and women could live as equals alongside whites. Activists, historians, philosophers and writers began to believe, in the words of Alain Locke, the first black Rhodes Scholar, that a coming of age beckoned. “By shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro problem we are achieving something like a spiritual emancipation,” he wrote.
The two great figures of the early civil rights movement were the dapper Harvard scholar W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and editor of its magazine, Crisis, and Marcus Garvey, a bombastic Jamaican immigrant whose United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) fought to instill “black pride” in its millions of members.
The middle-class, mixed-race Du Bois was an intellectual, a novelist and a poet as well as a civil rights activist. At the start of his career, he had called for greater tolerance and understanding between the races and worked extensively with whites, believing that their change of attitude was just as important as a shift in black outlook. He hoped that education would be the key to racial equality. “By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive for the rights which the world accords to men,” he urged, encouraging victims of discrimination to fight prejudice in the law courts instead of on the streets. His aim was an integrated America in which race no longer mattered. But, bitterly disillusioned by the racial hatred he had observed towards black soldiers fighting for America during the Great War, throughout the 1920s Du Bois became increasingly alienated from white America.
Garvey, by contrast, was a separatist from the start. Self-doubt, he said, “was the cause of the Negro’s impotence” and the most debilitating legacy of slavery. He taught black people that their dark skin was not a mark of their inferiority, but “a glorious symbol of national greatness.” The nation he was referring to, though, was not the United States but Africa. Although Garvey never actually went to Africa, the dream of founding a Negro homeland there was his guiding motivation.
In August 1920, Garvey’s UNIA gathered in Harlem for its first international convention. Delegates, including fabulously dressed African tribal chiefs, came from twenty-five countries. On 2 August the UNIA processed through Harlem to the music of brass bands. Black Cross nurses in their starched uniforms marched proudly alongside African Legion soldiers in immaculate navy-blue trousers, swords hanging at their sides. That night, Garvey addressed 25,000 people at Madison Square Garden. “We do not desire what has belonged to others, though others have always sought to deprive us of that which belonged to us,” he said. “If Europe is for the Europeans, then Africa shall be for the black peoples of the world.”
This was Garvey’s zenith. Despite the passion and sincerity of his message and his inspirational qualities as a visionary and propagandist, Garvey’s own ambitions undid him. Having declared himself leader of an as-yet-unformed African nation in 1922, complete with his own personal bodyguard and an aristocracy made up of his followers, the following year he was convicted of fraud and imprisoned. He served his time in an Atlanta prison, was deported back to Jamaica in 1927, and died in Holland in 1940.
But Garvey’s failure to achieve his goals could not diminish the hope his message had engendered in millions of black Americans. This new sense of possibility was fueled by the flowering of Harlem. The townhouses and apartment blocks of north Manhattan had been built during successive late nineteenth-century construction booms for a well-off white population that never arrived. From 1904 a black businessman, Philip Payton, began bringing black tenants into this unfashionable neighborhood.
For its new inhabitants, Harlem represented opportunity—a freedom from old fears and restraints. Anything suddenly seemed possible in a place where black people could live and prosper according to their own rules. As James Weldon Johnson, the historian of what became known as the Harlem Renaissance, said, Harlem was “a city within a city, the greatest Negro city in the world.” Harlem was a place where black tenants paid rent to black landlords, where black workers were paid not by white masters but by their own bosses, where the goods sold in shops were for black customers, not white ones. Here, black people could flourish by providing services that they needed. Mrs. Mary Dean, known as Pigfoot Mary, grew rich from the profits of her fried chicken and pigfoot stand on the corner of Lenox Avenue and 135th Street.
C. J. Walker, whose parents had been slaves, became (according to the Guinness Book of World Records) the first female millionaire, black or white, making beauty products aimed at the black market. Her most successful treatments were straighteners and growth stimulants for kinky hair, but she emphatically refused to sell skin-whitening creams. As powerfully as did any of Marcus Garvey’s speeches, she taught people to take pride in their blackness. Madame Walker’s tall, big-hearted daughter and heiress, A’Lelia, was “the joygoddess of Harlem’s 1920s.” Wearing a silver turban that showed off her gleaming dark skin, she threw Harlem’s best parties in her extravagantly decorated brownstone townhouse.
Writers and artists met in the novelist Jesse Fauset’s more modest apartment. Drink flowed more temperately there and the conversation, guided by the plump and gracious Fauset, was of a higher tone than at Miss Walker’s—and sometimes conducted in French. Here met the older intellectuals who believed, like Du Bois, Locke and the historian James Weldon Johnson, that high culture would act as a “bridge across the chasm between the races.” Regardless of their background, they reasoned, artists were less likely to be enchained by prejudice, fear and superstition than ordinary people. This meant that a shared cultural ground might be the starting point for the broader tolerance and emancipation they dreamed of.
And as Locke observed, the very suffering endured through the centuries by black men and women torn from their homeland and living in slavery had given the black artist a unique tragic vision. “Out of the depths of his group and personal experience, [the Negro artist] has to his hand almost the conditions of a classical art.” Ironically, though, white writers like Eugene O’Neill and Sherwood Anderson were better able to use this motif of the black man as the representative of universal suffering than black writers who were determined not to portray themselves as victims.
Instead these artists sought out a distinctive “Negro” culture of which they could be proud—freeing themselves from the tyranny of white, Western ideals of beauty, morality and truth by searching out their own heritage in African art, folk traditions and tribal lore and building a distinguishing racial identity. As one historian of the Harlem Renaissance writes, “Without distinct Negro character, there could be no Negro genius.” Denying the differences between the races meant denying the past, thought many; it was better to seek out differences and celebrate them.
Music was one area where black artists effortlessly outshone their white counterparts on their own terms. Negro spirituals were recognized as containing not just the self-pity of a craven people, but glimpses of salvation and eternity. Du Bois, who studied them extensively, ascribed to them a mystical force which bound black people together emotionally. Spirituals were, he said, a powerful expression of their collective experiences.
Jazz, blues and popular dance music were another irresistible expression of black pride. Although white musicians tried to imitate black musicians they could not capture their elusive spirit. They “studied us so hard that you’d think they were in class,” said Alberta Hunter. “And what could wedo? Only thing we could do was to do those numbers even better—which we did.”
Harlem’s first hit of the Jazz Age was 1921’s exhilarating revue Shuffle Along, which starred Florence Mills and featured a then-unknown Josephine Baker in its chorus, and attracted sellout audiences of spellbound whites. “Talk about pep!” wrote one—evidently white—reviewer. “These people make pep seem something different to the tame thing we known further downtown.” Despite its success with whites, what marked out Shuffle Along was that it was written, produced and performed, in Harlem, by black people: for the first time they were creating their own image, rather than reflecting a white view of them.
But the frivolity and indeed the very popularity of shows like Shuffle Along made some black intellectuals dismiss the new music as irrelevant to their cause. When the poet Claude McKay reviewed Shuffle Along for The Liberator magazine he made a point of praising its all-black production because some black radicals “were always hard on Negro comedy . . . hating to see themselves as a clowning race.” At best they viewed it as folk art, at worst as something whose sensuality and exuberance demeaned blacks and trapped them in unwelcome stereotypes. High art and literature would unite the races and prove that all were equal, not energetic dances with silly names or mournful songs about lost love.
But a few pioneers did recognize the importance of jazz. “Originally the nobody’s child of the levée and the city slum,” wrote J. A. Rogers in Alain Locke’s 1925 anthology, The New Negro, jazz was becoming, alongside the dollar and the movie, a symbol of “modern Americanism,” and the only difficulty lay in determining whether it was “more characteristic of the Negro or of contemporary America” as a whole.
If spirituals and the blues represented the tragedy of black culture, argued Rogers, then jazz was its comedy. “The true spirit of jazz is a joyous revolt from convention, custom, authority, boredom, even sorrow—from everything that would confine the soul of man and hinder its riding free on the air… It is the revolt of the emotions against repression.”
Rogers recognized the uniquely urban, modern quality of jazz. “With its cowbells, auto horns, calliopes, rattles, dinner gongs, kitchen utensils, cymbals, screams, crashes, clankings and monotonous rhythm it bears all the marks of a nervestrung, strident, mechanized civilization. It is a thing of the jungles—modern man-made jungles.”
He emphasized jazz’s musical importance, quoting Serge Koussevitsky, the director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who described jazz as “not superficial, [but] fundamental.” Composers Darius Milhaud, Eric Satie and Georges Auric were jazz fans. The conductor Leopold Stokowski summed up its appeal: “Jazz has come to stay because it is an expression of the times, of the breathless, energetic, superactive times in which we are living, it is useless to fight against it . . . [Negro musicians] are pathfinders into new realms.”
While Rogers acknowledged that jazz clubs attracted lowlife —drinkers, gamblers and prostitutes—on balance he considered that “those who dance and sing are better off even in their vices than those who do not.” More importantly, jazz served a vital function as a social leveler. It made people more natural with each other, less artificial, and gave hope to those who believed that old restrictions upon society might one day fade away entirely. “This new spirit of joy and spontaneity may itself play the role of reformer.”
Johnson also took pride in the fact that the black contribution to American cultural and artistic life, in music, dance, the theater, in literature, had helped “shape and mold and make America…It is, perhaps, a startling thought that America would not be precisely the America that it is today except for the powerful, if silent, influence the Negro has exerted upon it—both positively and negatively.”
Black artists, he wrote, were “bringing something fresh and vital into American art, something from the store of their own racial genius: warmth, color, movement, rhythm, and abandon; depth and swiftness of emotion and the beauty of sensuousness.” Johnson acknowledged that some white Americans saw black Americans as a burden. On the contrary, he argued, black people had much to contribute to society as a whole. Johnson believed that the black man “is an active and important force in American life; that he is a creator as well as a creature; that he has given as well as received; that he is the potential giver of larger and richer contributions.”
The greatest poet of black America in the 1920s was Langston Hughes, although he would have hated to have been described as a “black” artist: he wanted recognition for his talent, not his skin color. Hughes rejected the idealized image of Africa as a salve for his dissatisfaction with his place in the world. “I did not feel the rhythms of the primitive surging through me,” he wrote. “I was only an American Negro—who had loved the surface of Africa and the rhythms of Africa—but I was not Africa. I was Chicago and Kansas City and Broadway and Harlem.”
Instead he found in the cadences of jazz and slang a vocabulary that reflected his American heritage, rather than harking back to a lost Africanness or trying to imitate the western canon. Hughes’s first volume of poetry, published in 1926, was called The Weary Blues and was inspired by the themes of the music he loved and the Harlem streets where he heard it played. As he wrote in “Lenox Avenue: Midnight”:
The rhythm of life
Is a jazz rhythm,
Honey.
Hughes identified less with Western poets than with black jazzmen, whom he saw as wandering troubadours like himself. He understood that it was their music, as much as his poetry, that would transform American society.
“Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand,” he wrote. “Let Paul Robeson singing ‘Water Boy’ and Rudolph Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle class to turn from their white, respectable, ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”
Black pride and growing demands for equality and respect were threatening to many whites who preferred America’s black population to be cowed and submissive. The archconservative senator Henry Cabot Lodge had Claude McKay’s defiant poem, “If we must die, let it not be like hogs” read out to the Congressional Record as evidence of the unsettling new spirit rising up among American blacks.
Pseudo-scientific works like Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color of 1920 warned that America was being swamped by “colored” races. It was Stoddard whom Tom Buchanan, in The Great Gatsby, misremembered as “this fellow Goddard”: “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.” Stoddard quoted the scholarly Du Bois as an example of the threat posed to whites by blacks. “These nations and races, composing as they do a vast majority of humanity, are going to endure this treatment just as long as they must and not a moment longer. Then they are going to fight, and the War of the Color Line will outdo in savage inhumanity any war this world has yet seen. For colored folk have much to remember and they will not forget.”
Madison Grant, chairman of the New York Zoological Society and a trustee of the Museum of Natural History, wrote the foreword to Stoddard’s book, using spurious scientific and historical claims to back up Stoddard’s racial prejudices and prophesy disaster if white men did not safeguard their position of racial dominance. Allowing the races to mingle, or even permitting “brown, yellow, black or red men” to share in Western European democratic ideals, said Grant, would be “suicide pure and simple, and the first victim of this amazing folly will be the white man himself.” “Oh,” wrote Claude McKay, “I must keep my heart inviolate / Against the potent poison of your hate!”
But despite the racism still deeply entrenched in American society, changes had started to take place. The work of anthropologists and sociologists studying foreign and “primitive” cultures discredited eugenicist literature that sought to demonstrate the inherent inferiority of blacks and other unwanted immigrants. President Harding—for whom Duke Ellington’s father worked in the White House as butler—urged educational and economic support for blacks, proposed an interracial committee to find ways to improve race relations and, in a brave speech in Birmingham, Alabama, in October 1921, was the first President to call for an end to lynching.
Harding supported a bill that would have made lynching illegal by federal rather than state law, although this move was rejected in 1922 by a block of Southern senators. But gradually the South grew ashamed of its violence and, while eighty-three people were lynched in 1919, by 1928 that number had fallen to eleven. Harding’s efforts on behalf of blacks were especially poignant because rumors of his having unacknowledged black ancestors had threatened his presidential chances during his campaign of 1920.
And yet, even while one section of the nation was seeking fresh ways to stamp down what they saw as the threat represented by a newly confident black population, another group found itself strongly drawn to black culture. Bohemian white Americans found themselves envying their black countrymen’s spontaneity, vitality and sexual liberation. The art of Picasso and Modigliani exalted the purity and innocence of African primitivism; the theories of Freud told people that they were unhappy because they were repressed. To be black, and thus (so the theory went) less restrained by social artifice and civilization, was to be somehow more purely human, more elemental.
The easy physicality and emotional intensity of black culture both attracted white audiences and terrified them. An early account of the rise of jazz in New York began, “One touch of jazz makes savages of us all.” Doctors warned that jazz “intoxicates like whisky and releases stronger animal passions.” The Ladies’ Home Journal launched an anti-jazz crusade, condemning the decadence and immorality that jazz and modern dancing (with its “wriggling movement and sensuous stimulation”) were breeding in the young.
But the young didn’t care. Jazz was their music too. “If . . . we give up jazz we shall be sacrificing nearly all there is of gaiety and liveliness and rhythmic power in our lives,” wrote the white critic Gilbert Seldes proprietarily. Jazz expressed his generation’s “independence, our carelessness, our frankness, our gaiety.” Well-bred, well-off New Yorkers began coming to Harlem in their thousands to hear real jazz—and taste real life. If Puritanism was what had ruined American society, then Harlem, “a cultural enclave that had magically survived [Puritanism’s] psychic fetters” was just a cab ride away.
In this sense, according to the historian Nathan Huggins, the “creation of Harlem as a place of exotic culture was as much a service to white need as it was to black,” and its black inhabitants recognized this and resented it. Claude McKay called Harlem an “all-white picnic ground”; Langston Hughes said Harlem merely accepted “the role forced on it—that of bookie, bootlegger and bordello to white downtown.”
“It was a period when local and visiting royalty were not at all uncommon in Harlem,” wrote Hughes. “It was a period when Harold Jackman, a handsome young Harlem schoolteacher of modest means, calmly announced one day that he was sailing for the Riviera for a fortnight, to attend Princess Murat’s yachting party. It was a period when Charleston preachers opened up shouting churches as sideshows for white tourists. It was a period when at least one charming colored chorus girl, amber enough to pass for a Latin American, was living in a penthouse, with all her bills paid by a gentleman whose name was banker’s magic on Wall Street . . . It was the period when the Negro was in vogue.”
The most expensive and theatrical nightclubs in Harlem catered almost exclusively for white clients. Most of these speakeasies were little more than pastiches of a world still inaccessible to whites. In the real Harlem clubs like Lincoln Gardens, licorice-tasting gin cost $2 a pint and, when King Oliver and Louis Armstrong played, the “whole joint was rocking, tables, chairs, walls, people moved with the rhythm.” The Lincoln Gardens’ clientele had no need for the professional dancers provided by the touristy clubs to guide the uninitiated through the abandoned and demanding steps of the Cakewalk, the Black Bottom or the Monkey Glide.
White visitors went instead to what Hughes called “Jim Crow Clubs” like the Plantation Club, with its interiors based on an ante-bellum Southern plantation complete with a white picket fence round the dance floor and a real “black mammy” cooking waffles in a miniature log cabin at the end of the evening, or the Cotton Club, where revelers ate fried chicken and barbecued ribs against a backdrop of African sculpture, jungly vegetation and bongo drums. This was how Harlem sold itself to the white tourists from downtown: as a place of exotic, primitive sensuality and abandon—with reassuringly racist undertones.
Harlem’s inhabitants hated the flocks of white people swarming through their streets in the evenings, staring at them as if they were “amusing animals in a zoo. The Negroes said, ‘We can’t go downtown and sit and stare at you in your clubs. You won’t even let us in your clubs.’ But they didn’t say it out loud—for Negroes are practically never rude to white people,” wrote Hughes. “So thousands of whites came to Harlem night after night, thinking the Negroes loved to have them there, and firmly believing that all Harlemites left their houses at sundown to sing and dance in cabarets, because most of the whites saw nothing but the cabarets, not the houses.”
The most prominent and influential white promoter of black culture was Carl Van Vechten, a collector and connoisseur of the new and the exotic. In the early 1920s Van Vechten became friends with James Weldon Johnson, an expert on Negro spirituals, and captivated the party-loving heiress A’Lelia Walker. He championed the blues as a serious art form in Vanity Fair; he worked to bring talented black writers into the literary mainstream.
Langston Hughes met Van Vechten properly in 1926. In less than three weeks, Van Vechten had secured him deals with Vanity Fair magazine and the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, and went on to write the glowing introduction to Hughes’s first volume of poems. Van Vechten “never talks grandiloquently about democracy or Americanism. Nor makes a fetish of those qualities,” observed Hughes with gratitude. “But he lives them with sincerity—and humor.”
Harlem became Van Vechten’s passion, but Harlem was ambivalent about Van Vechten. Du Bois and his future son-in-law, the poet Countee Cullen, found him subtly patronizing while Claude McKay “was eager to meet a white man who bothered to be subtle in his patronizing.”
Though she usually avoided the white world, as a favor to a friend, Bessie Smith agreed to attend one of Van Vechten’s parties downtown. When she arrived, Van Vechten archly offered her “a lovely dry martini.” Deliberately abrasive, Smith replied that she didn’t know about dry martinis, or wet ones either—she wanted a large whisky. She downed the first drink she was given in one and immediately demanded another. Then she sang, in the voice Van Vechten described as being “full of shouting and moaning and praying and suffering, a wild, rough, Ethiopian voice, harsh and volcanic, but seductive and sensuous too . . . the powerfully magnetic personality of this elemental conjure [sic] woman with her plangent African voice, quivering with passion and pain, sounding as if it had been developed at the source of the Nile.”
Finally, drunk, Bessie took her leave. When bird-like Mrs. Van Vechten tried to kiss her goodbye, she screamed, “Get the fuck away from me!” and stalked out of the apartment, with Van Vechten’s congratulations on her magnificent performance floating unnoticed and uncared-about in her wake.
Although his 1926 novel Nigger Heaven sought to portray blacks without prejudice or stereotype, Van Vechten was derided for arguing that blacks “civilized” themselves at their own spiritual cost. “We are, for the most part, pagans, natural pagans,” declared one character. But when Johnson reviewed Nigger Heaven in Opportunity magazine, he argued that his friend’s understanding of black culture was authentic and valuable. “If the book has a thesis it is: Negroes are people, they have the same emotions, the same passions, the same shortcomings, the same aspirations, the same graduations of social strata as other people,” he wrote. Johnson was only too aware that this in itself would be a revelation to many white Americans.
Regardless of the merits or demerits of Van Vechten’s literary take on Harlem, no one who knew him denied that he sincerely respected black culture—but even with Van Vechten there was a sense that Harlem provided him with an outlet for dark desires that he could not reveal in his normal life. Van Vechten threw most of the parties for which he was celebrated at the downtown apartment he shared with his wife, but he also kept a second apartment in Harlem of which she knew nothing. Here, in black-painted rooms lit by red lights, Van Vechten surrendered himself to his fantasies, entertaining strapping young men on red velvet cushions.
Other white tourists slumming in Harlem were fascinated by the ease with which social and sexual taboos were flouted there. Drugs as well as moonshine were freely available on Harlem’s streets. Certain clubs were frequented by exquisitely beautiful transvestites—“some women wished they could look so good,” remembered Ruby Smith. Beverley Nichols, the visiting English journalist, was taken to a shabby Harlem speakeasy where no one thought it remarkable that four white boys and two black boys, all dressed as girls, all drunk, sat flirting and preening and powdering their noses at one table, while nearby a group of debutantes drank champagne and women dressed as men danced cheek-to-cheek on the smoky dance floor. This louche atmosphere was what his friend Van Vechten had enticingly described to Nichols as “shi-shi with an undercurrent of murder.”
Ironically, although the white writer Scott Fitzgerald coined the phrase the Jazz Age, the people and places he described were only dimly related to the mysterious rhythms of Bessie Smith or the poetry of Langston Hughes. This colonization of jazz and the blues by white, collegiate, prosperous America was in some ways a betrayal of its original spirit and the new confidence of black culture, but it also represented jazz’s irresistible allure to American youth of all backgrounds. Modern, liberated, open-minded, sophisticated, urban—jazz was a symbol of the changes sweeping through America during the 1920s. As Mezz Mezzrow put it, “A creative musician is an anarchist with a horn, and you can’t put any shackles on him . . . Freedom and jazz are synonymous.”