MASS MEDIA & THE JAZZ AGE

MOVIESo Movies – wildly popular mass mediumo 1910-1930 5,000 theaters rose to

22,500o Late 1930s 100 million Americans seeing

movies each week

o 4th largest business in the countryo 1927 o 1st film with sound was The Jazz Singer

o Movies w/sound called “talkies”

NEWSPAPERS

• Helped create a common culture• 1920s – newspapers increased both in size

and in # of readers• 1914-1927 use of newsprint doubled in

the US• Papers getting bigger, but # of papers was

declining• Newspaper chains owned by an individual

or company bought up established papers and merged them

• 1923-1927 # of chains doubled and total # of papers they owned rose by 50%

• William Randolph Hearst gained control of newspapers in more than 20 cities– his life and quest for power were the basis

for one of the most popular motion pictures ever, Citizen Kane

RADIO Barely existed until the 1920s 1920 – experiment by Frank

Conrad of the Westinghouse Company tried sending recorded music and baseball scores over the radio = SUCCESS!

Began broadcasting regularly and became KDKA

Tremendous growth and by 1922, more than 500 stations were on the air Americans eagerly bought radios to listen in

To reach more people, networks linked individual stations together (NBC)

JAZZ CLUBS• Jazz Arrives – grew out of African-American music of the

south• Harlem – 500 jazz clubs• Cotton Club, Connie’s Inn, and Saratoga Club all gave

shows for mostly white visitors• Jazz musicians included The Jelly Roll Morton Band,

Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, and Duke Ellington

DUKE ELLINGTON (1899-1974)

• 17 years old – supporting himself playing in clubs in Washington at night and painting signs during the day• 1923 moved to New York, formed a

band,and played at the Hollywood Club

• Greatest genius was as a bandleader, arranger, and composer

• Works included “Mood Indigo,” “Solitude,”

“In a Sentimental Mood,” “Blue Harlem,” and “Bojangles”

OTHER ARTISTS• Painting – Edward Hopper and Rockwell Kent showed

the rougher side of life; Georgia O’Keeffe painted natural objects

• Literature – Sinclair Lewis, a Muckraking novelist, attacked American society w/savage irony– Targets included the small town, the prosperous

conformist, the medical business, and dishonest ministers

– Refused a Pulitzer in 1926, but won and accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, which was a first for an American

• Eugene O’Neill, playwright – wrote dark, poetic tragedies out of the material of every day life

THE LOST GENERATION • Set of writers in the 1920s who believed they were lost

in a greedy, materialistic world that lacked moral values

• Some flocked to Greenwich Village, others became expatriates as they were discontented with American society

• Most prominent were John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, Hart Crane, E.E. Cummings, Ernest Hemingway (made the term “Lost Generation” famous), F. Scott Fitzgerald

• Fitzgerald was part of both the Lost Generation world and the flapper world

• Some think he had a part in creating the flapper culture with his novel This Side of Paradise published in 1920

• 1925 – The Great Gatsby – focused on the wealthy, sophisticated Americans of the Jazz Age (he found the rich to be self-centered and shallow)

THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

For African-Americans, Harlem was the cultural center of the US James Weldon Johnson, the leading writer of the Harlem group lived in two

worlds, the political and the literary executive secretary of the NAACP most famous work is 1927s God’s Trombones

Alain Locke (The New Negro) celebrated the blossoming of African-American culture

Other important writers of the Harlem Renaissance were Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West, and Langston Hughes

the most studied Harlem writer today Leading poets of the Harlem Renaissance were Claude McKay and

Countee Cullen

CLOSE

In no less than one paragraph, write a summary of your notes

AND THEN answer the following: What influence do film and radio have on current popular culture?