Miss Harris "The Roaring Twenties"

Molly Lorenz
Miss Harris
American History II
January 17th, 2008
Why The Roaring Twenties Is The Jazz Era
There is no one, specific, absolute answer to why the decade between 1920 and 1930 would be called “The Roaring Twenties” because there is no one thing that came out prominently in this time. New dances, methods, inventions, feats, architecture, movies, presidents, politics, women’s suffrage, prohibition, the KKK, the Harlem Renaissance, and Jazz all collaborated noisily into the twenties. Henry Ford’s cars roared, vacuum cleaners roared, building construction roars, the saxophone roared, illegally drunken men roared, Lucky Lindy’s airplane roared, everything roared during this time, which is what makes the Roaring Twenties so unique.
Personally, I think that the Roaring Twenties was about protest in every form. Unless you were a WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant) and male, you really did not have much to complain about-unless, of course, you used to drink, and the prohibition would not let you now, or that you had the horrors of the war still in your mind, thus you remained sober and somber. There was the desire to return to normalcy, as Harding promised up and down, but in truth, the American citizens were doing everything they could to revolutionize their lives. Children could go to school with kids their own age, high school drop-outs could get mindless jobs, fashion, poetry, literature, art, music, and dance were all being “improved” upon, and yet we were still not satisfied.
The women had suffrage, birth control, jobs, respect, and drunk husbands to protest about. White supremacists had pretty much everyones not already one of them to protest. Men had prohibition to protest. African-Americans had equality and respect to lobby for. Where the women tended to actually protest with signs, the most violent thing being destroying saloons, the white supremacists flogged and killed people, the men illegally buying or brewing beer, the blacks protested through art. Langston Hughes protested in his poetry, and musicians protested in their songs.
Much of the culture in The Jazz Era made the artist start out “black or ethnic and became steadily whiter and more Waspy as you succeeded” — which was true, especially in the case of jazz (Johnson 705). It was impossible to start with jazz being white, as jazz originated from a mixture of blues, folk, black spirituals, gospel spirituals, European ballads and slave-work songs. As the alto saxophones wailed, the clarinets sang, the trumpets proclaimed, the piano struck, and drums pounded, there was a roaring sound filling your ears— jazz.
Jazz was not just a man’s world, like most things were when women were not allowed to vote. “In 1922, for instance, women formed 85 percent of music students and 75 percent of concert audiences” (Johnson 701-702). Of course, with this overwhelming majority came protest in the form of “male abuse of the piano to produce rags was a protest against domestic discipline and feminine dominance” (Johnson 702). With jazz being played nationally, (albeit faster in the northeast part of the country), perhaps one of the few things that was all around the country equally then, it is no great mystery then, that the Jazz Era is synonymous with The Roaring Twenties.


















Johnson, Paul. A History Of The American People. New York City: HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 1997.