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Unlock This CourseIn the 1920s many Americans had more spare money and a little more spare time than ever before. Businesses saw a chance to sell them fun. The result was a leisure industry: cinemas, record companies, radio stations, dance halls and sports stadiums, all earning money from people's free time. Entertainment was no longer local. It was sold across the whole country.
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Going to the pictures was cheap and exciting. Hollywood in California became the centre of the film industry, and grand 'picture palaces' opened in towns and cities. Film stars such as Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Rudolph Valentino became famous across the country. By the end of the decade tens of millions of Americans went to the cinema every week.
The biggest change came in 1927 with The Jazz Singer, the first feature film with synchronised speech and song. Within a few years silent films were finished and talkies had taken over.
Regular radio broadcasting began in the USA in 1920, when station KDKA in Pittsburgh reported the results of the presidential election. Stations quickly opened across the country. Families could now hear music, news, plays and sport without leaving the sitting room. Radio shows were paid for by advertising, which you can read about in the lesson on consumerism and advertising. In 1926 the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) linked stations into a network, so the same programme could reach listeners in many states at once. By 1929 millions of homes had a radio.
Jazz began with African American musicians in cities such as New Orleans. As many black Americans moved north, jazz spread to Chicago and New York. Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington became stars, and records and radio carried jazz into homes across the country. People began to call the decade 'the Jazz Age'.
Jazz made people want to dance. Dance halls filled up, and new fast dances such as the Charleston became a craze, especially among young people. Many parents and church leaders thought the dances were too wild.
Sport became big business. Huge crowds paid to watch, and the new Yankee Stadium opened in New York in 1923. Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in 1927. Boxing stars such as Jack Dempsey drew enormous crowds and money. Radio let millions follow big games from home, so sports stars became national heroes.
As more families owned cars, leisure became more mobile. Families could take Sunday drives and trips to the countryside or the coast. Young couples could get away from watching parents, which worried many older people.
Critics said jazz and the new dances were bad for young people. Anne Shaw Faulkner, who led the music department of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, wrote in the Ladies' Home Journal in 1921 that jazz had an 'evil influence'. Others, such as the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, saw jazz as part of a restless, exciting new age. You will meet both writers in the exam question below.
Study Sources A and B.
Source A (From an article, 'Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?', by Anne Shaw Faulkner, head of the Music Department of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, published in the Ladies' Home Journal, August 1921)
Welfare workers tell us that never in the history of our land have there been such immoral conditions among our young people, and in the surveys ... regarding these conditions, the blame is laid on jazz music and its evil influence on the young people of to-day.
Source B (From an essay, 'Echoes of the Jazz Age', by the American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, looking back on the 1920s, published in Scribner's Magazine, November 1931)
The word jazz in its progress toward respectability has meant first sex, then dancing, then music. It is associated with a state of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of big cities behind the lines of a war ... The people over thirty, the people all the way up to fifty, had joined the dance.
How far does Source A support the evidence of Source B about the effects of jazz on American society in the 1920s? Explain your answer. [8 marks]
The sources agree that jazz was linked with loose behaviour. Source A says that surveys laid 'the blame' for 'immoral conditions' on jazz, and Source B says jazz has meant 'first sex, then dancing, then music'. Both treat jazz as a powerful force linked with loose behaviour and with young people's morals.
However, they differ in tone and in who was affected. Source A is hostile and says jazz had an 'evil influence on the young people'. Source B is not condemning. It describes jazz as moving 'toward respectability' and as part of a 'state of nervous stimulation', so it sees the music as a sign of the age, not its cause. Source A is only about the young, but Source B says 'people over thirty ... all the way up to fifty, had joined the dance'.
Overall, Source A only partly supports Source B. They agree that jazz was linked with immorality, but A blames jazz for corrupting the young, while B shows it as a wider change in which older people joined in too.
What lifts it to the top level: it uses short quotations from both sources for agreement and for difference, cross-refers them point by point, and ends with a judgement on how far A supports B.
Plan three paragraphs: what the sources agree on, what they differ on, then 'how far'. Quote a few words from each source every time. Answers with only agreement or only difference cannot reach the top levels.