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MASS MEDIA & THE JAZZ
AGE
MOVIES
o Movies – wildly popular mass medium
o 1910-1930  5,000 theaters rose to 22,500
o Late 1930s  100 million Americans seeing movies each week
o 4th largest business in the country
o 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?