1920 (42 page)

INEVITABLY, THE VICIOUS CIRCLE, BASED
on so ephemeral a premise as attaining a few lines in the next day's newspaper, fell apart. Author Edna Ferber, a frequent member and the group's most commercially successful novelist, said that she knew it was over the day she strolled into the hotel after an absence of several months. She expected to sit and chat with her fellow jesters—and instead found a family of tourists at the hallowed table. She asked where they were from. They said “Kansas.” Ferber was
horrified.
Kansas!
she repeated silently and slunk out of the hotel, hoping not to be recognized. Said Frank Case sadly, “These things don't last forever.”

Nor did the friendships formed at the Round Table. With the bond of shared publicity having departed, the jokesters found that they had little to say to one another. They would pass on the street, or in the corridors of
The New Yorker
or some other publication, and nod, say hello, maybe utter a few banalities at each other. Seldom did they rise to the level of repartee. But with few exceptions, the old friends did not snipe at those with whom they used to lunch, did not hold grudges against those whom they believed to be FPA's favorites; they had simply lost their context and, thus, their reason for a deep cordiality. Which, as it turned out, wasn't so deep after all. FPA quickly found other people, other events, to write about, and wrote about them well, in a long and distinguished journalistic career.

YEARS LATER, LONG AFTER DOROTHY
Parker had read
Main Street
, seen
Beyond the Horizon
, and heard Aaron Copland, the homosexual Lithuanian Jew, begin to define American classical music with such promising early works as
Keyboard Sonatas 1-3
, the queen of the verbal hand grenade looked back on the Round Table. She could not hide her remorse.

These were no giants. Think who was writing in those days—Lardner, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway. Those were the real giants. The Round Table was just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were. Just a bunch of loudmouths showing off, saving their gags for days, waiting for a chance to spring them. There was no truth in anything they said. It was the terrible day of the wisecrack, so there didn't have to be any truth.

But it was also the day, not terrible at all, of the United States, well on its way to becoming a colossus beyond either conjure or compare. In 1900 it had laid 193,000 miles of railroad tracks; by 1920, almost 254,000. In 1900 it had produced 13,200,000 metric tons of pig iron; the 1920 total was 33,500,000. Between 1920 and the Great Depression, which
began gradually in 1929, the Gross National Product per capita grew a remarkable 4.2 percent a year, a rate it has never approached since in peacetime. And according to a Voice of America broadcast, “Americans had more steel, food, cloth, and coal than even the richest foreign nations. By 1920, the United States national income was greater than the combined incomes of Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, and seventeen smaller countries. Quite simply, the United States had become the world's greatest economic power.”

It had made some of its greatest strides toward that power in 1920, a year when it seemed as if Americans might be returning to the battlefield and that the battlefield might be their own back yards. It had been a year that whimpered as much as it roared, hinting, especially in some of its commodities markets, at the lean era of economic hardship soon to come. It was a year whose most scandalous, violent, and unsettling event, a bomb placed in a wagon hitched to a horse on Wall Street, remained unsolved as the new year approached, its meaning as mysterious as its perpetrators.

Or was it?

S
ATCHMO MIGHT STILL HAVE LIVED
in New Orleans, but his music continued to be on the move, as some of his emissaries in Chicago had since departed for New York. They began playing in Greenwich Village. They played in a few places in midtown, which wasn't nearly the wealth-riddled corporate neighborhood it is today. And they played in Harlem, where it seemed the whole world was spinning blissfully off its axis.

Armstrong himself was finally able to spread his new, jazzed-up jazz in 1920, as he took a break from playing his hometown clubs and whorehouses to take lead cornet for the Fate Marable Band on some Mississippi River steamboat excursions. “Fate was a very serious musician,” Armstrong later said of the man who taught him how to read music. “He defied anybody to play more difficult than he did. Every musician in New Orleans respected him.” Still, the cruises he played with Marable were the first times Armstrong had played so far from home, the boat paddling its way from the Delta to the Mississippi's headwaters in Minnesota. And
it was the first time he had played before so many people from different parts of the country.

The boat, the S.S.
Sidney
, rode the currents through ten states, and on quiet nights the music landed on banks where lovers strolled, and wafted inland toward the nearby cities and towns. Sometimes the breezes did not carry that far, but sometimes you could hear it on the outskirts of Minneapolis and next door in St. Paul, where Fitzgerald was writing his short stories that themselves seemed to have a horn wailing in the background. And the Fate Marable Band might have been heard in Dubuque, Iowa; Galena, Illinois; St. Louis; Memphis; and in Natchez and Vicksburg, Mississippi. An ad for the boat advertised the “Best dance music in the United States, 1500 couples can dance on the dance floor at one time.”

Armstrong enjoyed his time with Marable, but he knew Chicago was coming, and he was growing impatient. The city on Lake Michigan was for him what the green light at the end of the dock was for Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby.

He tried not to let his eagerness get the better of him and for the most part succeeded. He knew, as many people told him, that he was too good to be playing in whorehouses and on riverboats, even if Fate Marable was the bandleader. But why make a fuss? This was the way things happened, not only in music but in America's big corporations: Andrew Carnegie, after all, had started off as a telegraph boy at $2.50 a week. Of course, he was only fifteen at the time, while the trumpeter, aging fast, had recently celebrated his nineteenth birthday. When he finally went up north again, it would be a one-way trip, and it would be time for the transfer of power to begin. From Joe “King” Oliver to Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong. As he later said:

Knowin' that my tone was stronger than his [Oliver's], see, I would never play over [i.e., higher than] Joe. That's the respect I had for him, you know? But if he would have thought of it, he would have let me play the lead. You notice, all these records you hear more harmony … Joe's lead is overshadowed.

IN TIME, AND NOT MUCH
of it, the twenties would come to be known as “The Jazz Age,” with Satchmo on lead cornet and the libretto courtesy of
F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scott Joplin was dead, his previously popular ragtime was dying; some musical historians believe that his music's “ragged”—which is to say syncopated—melodies helped pave the way for the even more innovative sounds of jazz.

The word, like “profiteer,” was another new coinage of 1920, at least in polite, white society, where it was roundly scorned and “widely held to be a springboard for drug taking and promiscuity.” An article in the
Ladies Home Journal
asked: “Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?” The answer was in the righteous affirmative.

The derivation of the term is not certain. It may be the product of “a non-musical nineteenth century slang word, jasm, meaning energy, vigour or liveliness.” Historian Ethan Mordden, however, believes the word descended from a particular kind of liveliness, that it came “from black patois (to jass: to copulate).” Mordden not only traced the etymology of the word but defined the music as well as anyone could. He wrote that jazz

as popularly applied broadened out to include just about anything that one heard with a bass fiddle stalking below and a saxophone prancing above, the hot lick of musicians who hoisted “axes” (their word for their instruments). … They were soloists, these musicians, gadflies of tone living a code as hit or miss as that of the gangsters. Drugged, alcoholic, down and out when they weren't on the band—they respected only one truce, that of keeping to a steady tempo for the benefit of the dancers. No matter what the intention of a composer or lyricist—no matter how chaste or sophisticated—two seconds into any song they played, every song was jazz. That's how it was. … Jazz, it was said, made one lose control, but no: jazz was just something to hear while one lost the control that one was determined to lose anyway.

It was music for the lost generation, as Mordden explains, in that it broke all the rules—a mere two seconds into the tune and it became something different from what anyone had expected, unrelated to either the popular
or classical music of the past. Jazz was a dirge with an upbeat. It seemed to stand outside of history, in music's parallel universe.

Yet even those who disdained the very notion of a lost generation, who much preferred jassing to whining, the shadows of the Great War be damned!—even they found the new music irresistible. They could not ignore what they perceived as the infectious, improvisational merriment of the sounds—the energy sometimes so frantic that it seemed the instruments would break into pieces. To them, as to the members of the lost generation, it was the perfect accompaniment to the era, but for an entirely different reason. The former wanted to drown their sorrows in the music; the latter wanted to blast the very notion of sorrow out of existence. Somehow, depending on your vantage point, jazz was capable of doing both.

BUT CHICAGO WOULD NOT REMAIN
the capital of jazz for long. It might not even have still been the capital in 1920. The judgment, of course, is subjective, but the capital might in 1920 have been some 790 miles to the east, in Harlem, a city of almost 200,000 black men and women within the five largely white boroughs of New York City, population 5,621,000. Residents of the African-American enclave came from all over the world, running the gamut from high yellow to gleaming ebony. In 1920, the Harlem Renaissance is thought to have officially begun among them, and nothing like it had ever happened before. If the arts were exploding in the United States, Harlem was the epicenter, although geographically it was on the fringe, comprising the northern boundary of Manhattan.

The location had something to do with the musical outburst. John Kouwenhoven, a college professor and specialist in American popular culture, “trying to explain jazz, used an urban metaphor: the city's grid is comparable to jazz's basic 4/4 or 2/4 beat, and the skyscrapers are its solo improvisations … Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, and many others left Chicago for short or long periods of time to gig with New York bands and artists. … What better acoustic chamber could they have had than a city built
of
solid stone and
on
solid stone? (Chicago rests on mud …) Sounding much like [jazz musician and composer] Bix Beiderbecke, [New York architect] Raymond Hood pledged not ‘to build the same building twice.'”

Marcus Garvey had something to do with it. It was in Harlem that he settled when first coming to the United States, and it was because of him that biographer Elton C. Fax could write about the first day of August 1920:

Never before had that black community whirled with such excitement as, on the following day, it played host to a parade to end all parades. Marcus Mosiah Garvey, President of the Provisional Republic of Africa and President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, had called his organization's first International Convention.

Fifty thousand black delegates strutted along sun-drenched Lenox Avenue to the syncopated rhythms of twelve bands. Representing twenty-five lands, the marchers hailed from every state in the Union, from the West Indies, Central and South America, and Africa.

Further, believes historian Nathan Miller, it was part of Garvey's insistence on black pride that “Harlem was clean, it was prosperous, it was largely law-abiding. As a unique black city, it was shown off as an example of American democratic success.” And, as a result, it attracted not just the top jazz musicians to its nightspots, but audiences both black and white to revel in their innovative performances.

And
Crisis
magazine had something to do with the Harlem Renaissance. Founded by W. E. B. Du Bois, who was also a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the magazine was the first significant forum of its kind. Historian Michael E. Parrish writes that “Du Bois encouraged Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and countless other young black artists, who, lionized by wealthy white patrons, were said to represent the spirit of ‘the New Negro,' a somewhat condescending phrase which suggested that African-Americans had never before displayed intellectual distinction.”