America Compared: Cultural Change in the 1920’s

Summer Clark

The Movies

A "revolution in manners and morals", swept through middle-class America in the 1920's, fueled by postwar prosperity, new attitudes toward sexuality, Prohibition, and the automobile. Protestant cultural consensus spurred the crusade to restrict immigration, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in northern cities, and calls to censor perhaps the most visible transgressor of the Victorian moral code-the movies. Both fans and detractors agreed that the movies played a central role in freeing middle-class manners and morals from their Victorian confines. But even those who tested the warm water of passion often kept one foot on the solid ground of Victorian morality.

American Jazz in France Jazz developed in the late nineteenth

century out of a long tradition of African American musical expression that included work songs, marches, dance music, and spirituals. Only when white orchestras adapted or imitated jazz in the late 1930's did jazz become popular with America's mass public. However, European audiences were far more receptive. The jazz craze of Paris in the late 1920's and the cultural exchange it represented formed one episode of a larger transatlantic cultural shift. Because jazz was American, it symbolized the "Americanization" of France that took off in the 1920's thanks to the influx of American tourists, the invasion of the French market by American products, and the cultural inroads of American movies.