A New Morality

Figure 1. The flapper look, seen here in “Flapper” by Ellen Pyle for the cover of The Saturday Evening Post in February 1922, was a national craze in American cities during the 1920s.

Many Americans were disillusioned in the post-World War I era, and their reactions took multiple forms. Rebellious American youth, in particular, adjusted to the changes by embracing a new, more liberated morality. Many young women of the era shed their mother’s modest standards and adopted the dress and mannerisms of a flapper, the Jazz Age female stereotype of one seeking an endless party. Flappers wore short skirts, short hair, and more makeup, and they drank and smoked with the boys. Flappers’ dresses emphasized straight lines from the shoulders to the knees, minimizing breasts and curves while highlighting legs and ankles. The male equivalent of a flapper was a “sheik,” although that term has not had the same staying power in the American vernacular. At the time, however, many of these fads became a type of conformity, especially among college-aged youths, with the signature bob haircut of the flapper becoming almost universal in both the United States and overseas.

Changing Sexual Mores and Social Customs

As men and women pushed social and cultural boundaries in the Jazz Age, sexual mores changed and social customs grew more relaxed. “Petting parties” or “necking parties” became the rage on college campuses. Psychologist Sigmund Freud and British “sexologist” Havelock Ellis emphasized that sex was a natural and pleasurable part of the human experience. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, launched an information campaign on birth control to give women a choice in the realm in which suffrage had changed little—the family. The popularization of contraception and the private space that the automobile offered to teenagers and unwed couples also contributed to changes in sexual behavior.

Flappers and sheiks also took their cues from the high-flying romances they saw on the big screen as well as the confessions printed in movie magazines of immorality on movie sets. In the titillating language of the newly ascendant marketing industry, movie posters of the day promised: “Brilliant men, beautiful jazz babies, champagne baths, midnight revels, petting parties in the purple dawn, all ending in one terrific smashing climax that makes you gasp.”

Figure 2. Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie is emblematic of the mixture of high-class society, popular art, and virtuosity of jazz.

The Emergence of Jazz

New dances and new music characterized the Jazz Age. Born out of the African American community, jazz was a uniquely American music. The innovative sound emerged from a number of different communities and from a range of musical traditions such as blues and ragtime. By the 1920s, jazz had spread from African American clubs in New Orleans and Chicago to reach appreciative audiences in New York and abroad. One New York jazz establishment, the Cotton Club, became particularly famous and attracted large audiences of hip, young, White flappers and sheiks to see Black entertainers play.

Black Exclusion

Eager to hear “real jazz,” White people journeyed to Harlem’s Cotton Club and Smalls Jazz Club. Next to Greenwich Village, Harlem’s nightclubs and speakeasies (quasi-secret venues where alcohol was publicly consumed) presented a place where sexual freedom and boisterous nightlife thrived. Unfortunately, while headliners like Duke Ellington were hired to entertain at Harlem’s venues, the surrounding Black community was usually excluded. Furthermore, Black performers were often restricted from restroom use and relegated to using the service door for entry. As the first period of the Jazz Age came to a close, several Harlem Renaissance artists went on to produce important works indicating that this musical art form was but one component in African Americans’ long history of cultural and intellectual achievement.

The “New Woman”

The Jazz Age and the proliferation of the flapper lifestyle of the 1920s should not be seen merely as the product of postwar disillusionment and newfound prosperity. Rather, the search for new styles of dress and new forms of entertainment like jazz was part of a larger women’s rights movement. The early 1920s, especially with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing full voting rights to women, was a period marked by the expansion of women’s political power. The public flaunting of social and sexual norms by flappers represented an attempt to match gains in political equality with gains in the social sphere. Women were increasingly abandoning Victorian-era norms as they broadened the concept of women’s liberation to include new forms of social expression such as dance, fashion, and women’s clubs. Many also sought a place in college classrooms and in the professions.

Nor did the struggle for women’s rights through the promotion and passage of legislation cease in the 1920s. In 1921, Congress passed the Promotion of the Welfare and Hygiene of Maternity and Infancy Act, also known as the Sheppard-Towner Act, which earmarked $1.25 million for well-baby clinics, nursing resources, and natal education programs. This funding dramatically reduced the rate of infant mortality. Two years later, in 1923, Alice Paul drafted and promoted an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) that promised to end all sex discrimination by guaranteeing that “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.”

Voter Participation Declined and the ERA Stalled

Yet, ironically, at precisely the time when Progressives were achieving many of their key goals, the larger movement was winding down. As the heat of Progressive politics grew less intense, voter participation from both sexes declined over the course of the 1920s. After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, many women believed that their main task was accomplished and they dropped out of the movement. As a result, the proposed ERA stalled (the ERA eventually passed in Congress almost fifty years later in 1972, but then failed to win ratification by a sufficient number of states), and, by the end of the 1920s, Congress even allowed funding for the Sheppard-Towner Act to lapse.

The growing passivity regarding women’s rights was happening at a time when an increasing number of women were working for wages in the U.S. economy—not only in domestic service, but in retail, healthcare, education, business offices, and manufacturing. Beginning in the 1920s, women’s participation in the labor force increased steadily. However, most were paid less than men for the same work based on the rationale that they did not have to support a family. While the employment of single and unmarried women had largely won social acceptance, married women often suffered the stigma that they were working for “pin money,” or frivolous discretionary income.

Figure 3. The multi-talented Adelaide Hall and Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson in the musical comedy “Brown Buddies on Broadway,” 1930.

The Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro

It wasn’t only White women who found new forms of expression in the 1920s. African Americans were also expanding their horizons by embracing the concept of the “New Negro.” The decade witnessed the continued Great Migration of African Americans to the North, with over half a million fleeing Jim Crow in the South. Life in the northern states, as many African Americans discovered, was hardly free of discrimination and segregation. Even without Jim Crow, businesses, property owners, employers, and private citizens often practiced de facto segregation, which could be quite stifling and oppressive. Nonetheless, many southern Black people continued to move north into segregated neighborhoods that were already bursting at the seams, because the North, at the very least, offered two avenues to Black self-betterment: schools and the vote.

New York City and the Harlem Renaissance

New York City was a popular destination of Black Americans during the Great Migration. The city’s Black population grew 257 percent, from 91,709 in 1910 to 327,706 by 1930 (the White population grew only 20 percent). Moreover, by 1930, some 98,620 foreign-born Black people had migrated to the United States. Nearly half made their home in Manhattan’s Harlem district. The Black population of New York City doubled during the decade. As a result, Harlem, a neighborhood at the northern end of Manhattan, became a center for Afro-centric art, music, poetry, and politics. Political expression in the Harlem of the 1920s ran the gamut, as some separatist leaders advocated a return to Africa, while others fought for inclusion and integration. Harlem originally lay between Fifth Avenue and Eighth Avenue and 130th Street to 145th Street. By 1930, the district had expanded to 155th Street and was home to 164,000 people, mostly African Americans.

Continuous relocation to “the greatest Negro City in the world” exacerbated problems with crime, health, housing, and unemployment. Nevertheless, it brought together a mass of Black people energized by race pride, military service in World War I, the urban environment, and, for many, ideas of Pan-Africanism or Garveyism (discussed shortly). James Weldon Johnson called Harlem “the Culture Capital.” The area’s cultural ferment produced the Harlem Renaissance and fostered what was then termed the New Negro Movement.

The Cotton Club and Jim Crow

Figure 4. Cotton Club Advertisement.

‘I learned from Ethel Waters, Duke Ellington, Adelaide Hall, the Nicholas Brothers, the whole thing, the whole schmear. [The Cotton Club] was a great place because it hired us, for one thing, at a time when it was really rough [for Black performers].’ — Lena Horne

 

The Cotton Club was a New York City nightclub from 1923 to 1940. It was located on 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue (1923–1936), then briefly in the midtown Theater District (1936–1940). The club operated under a policy of racial segregation in the Prohibition era. Owney Madden, who bought the club from heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson, intended the name Cotton Club to appeal to White people, the only clientele permitted until 1928. The Cotton Club at first excluded all but White patrons although the entertainers and most of staff were Black. Exceptions to this restriction were made in the case of prominent White entertainment guest stars and dancers. The club made its name by featuring top-level Black performers and an upscale, downtown audience. It featured many of the greatest African American entertainers of the era, including Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, and Ethel Waters.

The New Negro

Alain Locke did not coin the term “New Negro,” but he did much to popularize it. In the 1925 book The New Negro, Locke proclaimed that the generation inclined to subservience was no more—“we are achieving something like a spiritual emancipation.” Bringing together writings by men and women, young and old, Black and White, Locke produced an anthology that was of African Americans, rather than only about them. The book joined many others. Popular Harlem Renaissance writers published some twenty-six novels, ten volumes of poetry, and countless short stories between 1922 and 1935. Alongside the well-known Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, female writers like Jessie Redmon Fauset and Zora Neale Hurston published nearly one-third of these novels. While themes varied, the literature frequently explored and countered pervasive racial stereotypes and offered a nuanced, realistic account of Black life in America.

The New Negro found political expression in a political ideology that celebrated African Americans’ distinct national identity. The explosion of Black self-expression found multiple outlets in politics. In the 1910s and 1920s, perhaps no one so attracted disaffected Black activists as Marcus Garvey. Garvey was a Jamaican publisher and labor organizer who arrived in New York City in 1916. This Negro nationalism, as some referred to it, proposed that Black Americans had a distinct and separate national heritage that should inspire pride and a sense of community. An early proponent of such nationalism was W. E. B. Du Bois. One of the founders of the NAACP, a brilliant writer and scholar, and the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard, Du Bois openly rejected assumptions of White supremacy. His conception of Negro nationalism encouraged Africans to work together in support of their own interests, promoted the elevation of Black literature and cultural expression, and, most famously, embraced the African continent as the true homeland of all ethnic Africans—a concept known as Pan-Africanism.

Marcus Garvey and the United Negro Improvement Association

Garvey took Negro nationalism to a new level. Like many Black people, the Jamaican immigrant had become disillusioned with the prospect of overcoming White racism in the United States, and in the aftermath of the postwar riots, he promoted a “Back to Africa” movement. To return African Americans to a presumably more welcoming home in Africa, Garvey founded the Black Star Steamship Line. He also built the largest Black nationalist organization in the world, the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which attracted thousands of primarily lower-income working people. UNIA members wore colorful uniforms and promoted the doctrine of a “negritude” that reversed the color hierarchy of White supremacy, prizing Blackness and identifying light skin as a mark of inferiority. Headquartered in Harlem, the UNIA published a newspaper, Negro World, and organized elaborate parades in which members, known as Garveyites, dressed in ornate, militaristic regalia and marched down city streets. Intellectual leaders like Du Bois, whose lighter skin put him low on Garvey’s social order, considered the UNIA leader a charlatan.

Inspired by Pan-Africanism and Booker T. Washington’s model of industrial education, and critical of what he saw as Du Bois’s elitism, Garvey sought to promote racial pride, encourage Black economic independence, and root out racial oppression in Africa and the Diaspora (the term for the dispersion of Black peoples in the world beyond Africa). The organization criticized the slow pace of the judicial focus of the NAACP as well as its acceptance of memberships and funds from White people. “For the Negro to depend on the ballot and his industrial progress alone,” Garvey opined, “will be hopeless as it does not help him when he is lynched, burned, jim-crowed, and segregated.”

In 1919, the UNIA announced plans to develop the Black Star Steamship Line as part of a plan that pushed for Black Americans to reject the political system and “return to Africa” instead. Most of the investments came in the form of shares purchased by UNIA members, many of whom heard Garvey give rousing speeches across the country about the importance of establishing commercial ventures between African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and Africans.

Garvey was eventually imprisoned for mail fraud and then deported, but his legacy set the stage for Malcolm X and the Black Power movement of the 1960s. He inspired the likes of Malcolm X, whose parents were Garveyites, and Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana. Garvey’s message, perhaps best captured by his rallying cry, “Up, you mighty race,” resonated with African Americans who found in Garveyism a dignity not granted them in their everyday lives. In that sense, his movement was typical of the Harlem Renaissance.