Entertainment, Cinema and the Jazz Age
A Country with Time on Its Hands
For the first time in American history, ordinary working people had spare cash and shorter working weeks. The average factory working week fell from about 60 hours in 1900 to under 50 by 1929. Cars and electric trams meant Saturday afternoons could be spent at a stadium, a cinema or a dance hall instead of at home. The cultural Boom — cinema, radio, jazz, spectator sport — was inseparable from the economic one. It also marked a clear split with older, rural America: city pleasures shocked the small towns covered in Lesson 5.
By 1929 about 100 million cinema tickets were sold each week (in a country of 120 million), 10 million households owned a radio, and around 60,000 spectators packed Yankee Stadium to watch baseball. Mass leisure had become a major American industry.
Cinema and Hollywood
Cinema began the decade silent and ended it talking. Hollywood was already the centre of the world’s film industry by 1920 because of its sunshine, cheap labour and lax regulation. Studios — MGM, Paramount, Warner Brothers — built a star system around actors like Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Rudolph Valentino and Clara Bow (the ‘It Girl’). Tickets cost ten cents in the cheaper neighbourhood theatres. By 1929 there were over 23,000 cinemas in the USA — more than there were post offices.
In 1927 Warner Brothers released The Jazz Singer, the first feature with synchronised dialogue. The arrival of talkies was a technological revolution: silent stars who could not adapt (Valentino had died, but many others) saw their careers vanish, while stars who could adapt, like Greta Garbo, survived and new performers like James Cagney rose. By the early 1930s silent films had almost disappeared.
The big studios signed actors to long contracts, controlled which films they made and even chose what they wore in public. They also owned chains of cinemas, so a Paramount film almost always played in a Paramount cinema. The 1922 Hays Office, set up after a series of Hollywood scandals (the trial of Fatty Arbuckle, the murder of director William Desmond Taylor), introduced a code that censored on-screen drinking, nudity and crime — a sign that the Boom in popular culture was already being pushed back against by older America.
Radio and the Living-Room Boom
Radio arrived in homes faster than any previous technology. The first commercial broadcast went out in November 1920 from station KDKA in Pittsburgh. Within a decade about a third of all American households owned a set, listening to news, music, comedy serials, baseball commentaries and political speeches. The first national network, NBC, launched in 1926. Advertisers bought slots during evening shows; political candidates began to record campaign messages. Radio shrank the country: a Texas farmer and a New York clerk could listen to the same programme on the same evening.
Jazz and the Soundtrack of the Decade
The 1920s are often called the Jazz Age, a phrase coined by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Jazz had grown out of the African-American communities of New Orleans and travelled north along the Mississippi to Chicago and on to New York’s Harlem with the Great Migration. Louis Armstrong (cornet and trumpet), Bessie Smith (blues vocals) and Duke Ellington (Cotton Club bandleader from 1927) became national stars. Dance crazes — the Charleston, the Black Bottom, the Lindy Hop — spread from speakeasies to college campuses to small-town high schools.
Jazz also exposed the racial divide. Black musicians played in clubs like the Cotton Club — but the audience was usually white-only, and many performers were paid less than the white-led bands. The Harlem Renaissance — a flowering of African-American writers including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston — ran in parallel, building a cultural confidence that civil rights leaders would later draw on.
Spectator Sports and Heroes
Sport became its own industry. Babe Ruth’s 60-home-run season in 1927 made baseball a national obsession; Yankee Stadium opened in 1923 with capacity for 60,000. The boxer Jack Dempsey’s 1927 rematch with Gene Tunney in Chicago drew boxing’s first $2 million gate. The aviator Charles Lindbergh became the most famous American alive after his 1927 solo flight from New York to Paris — ticker-tape parades met him in every major city. Newspapers built sports sections to feed the appetite; radio carried the play-by-play.
Cinema, radio and sport all needed a new kind of newspaper to feed them. The 1920s saw the rise of the American tabloid: the New York Daily News, founded in 1919, hit a circulation of over a million by 1925; the New York Daily Mirror and the New York Evening Graphic followed. Tabloids printed sport photographs, gossip about Hollywood stars, salacious court reports and confession features. The 1927 Snyder–Gray murder trial — a Long Island housewife and her lover convicted of killing her husband — was covered like a sporting fixture, complete with a smuggled photograph of Snyder’s electrocution that filled the entire Daily News front page. The papers helped invent the modern celebrity: an athlete, film star or accused murderer whose face the public would recognise from the news-stand. Older Americans complained that the press was sensationalising violence and immorality; younger urban readers loved it.
Mass culture was an urban phenomenon. Cinemas, jazz clubs and stadiums clustered in the cities. Rural America — the small farming towns of the South and Midwest — saw cinema as immoral, jazz as primitive and the Charleston as obscene. The 1920s were the decade in which a city/country culture gap opened up that would still matter politically a hundred years later.