Popular entertainment in the Jazz Age
Hollywood and the Silent Movie Era
The 1920s transformed entertainment in the United States, creating a mass popular culture that had never existed before. At the centre of this transformation was the cinema. By the early 1920s, going to the pictures was the most popular leisure activity in America, with approximately 80 million cinema tickets sold every week by 1929 — in a country with a total population of around 120 million. Hollywood had become synonymous with glamour, escapism and modernity.
Silent films had been entertaining audiences since the 1890s, but the 1920s produced the first true film stars whose fame was genuinely national. Charlie Chaplin, whose “Tramp” character was recognised across America and around the world, became one of the highest-paid performers of the decade. Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino were household names. The arrival of the talkies in 1927 revolutionised the industry all over again.
The first major “talkie” was The Jazz Singer, released in October 1927, starring Al Jolson. Within two years, silent films had almost completely disappeared. Talkies gave Hollywood a new commercial advantage: English-language dialogue made American films especially influential in Britain and other English-speaking markets.
Cinema did more than entertain — it spread a common culture across a vast and diverse nation. Movie stars set fashion trends that millions of women copied. Fans wrote to studios in their thousands, creating the world’s first celebrity culture on an industrial scale. For many immigrants and rural Americans who had moved to cities, cinema was an affordable and accessible window onto a glamorous world far removed from their daily lives.
Cinema also attracted controversy. Religious groups and social conservatives worried about the moral messages of some films — particularly those that showed women in revealing clothing, portrayed extramarital romance, or glorified crime. In 1922, the film industry appointed Will Hays to clean up Hollywood’s image. The “Hays Code” of the early 1930s would eventually introduce strict censorship, but during the 1920s films remained relatively uncensored and controversial.
Jazz: The Music of the Age
Jazz was the music that gave the 1920s its nickname. Originating in African American communities in New Orleans, jazz combined blues, ragtime and improvisation to create music that was spontaneous, rhythmic and irresistibly danceable. By the early 1920s, jazz had spread from New Orleans up the Mississippi to Chicago and New York, carried by African American musicians including Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington.
Louis Armstrong, who moved from New Orleans to Chicago in 1922, became the most celebrated jazz musician of the decade. His trumpet playing and improvisational style defined what jazz sounded like. Duke Ellington brought jazz to the prestigious Cotton Club in Harlem, New York, where from 1927 onwards his orchestra played to wealthy audiences and was broadcast nationally on radio. The Harlem Renaissance produced not just music but poetry, visual art and literature that challenged racial stereotypes and demanded recognition of Black Americans’ cultural contributions.
The Harlem Renaissance was a flourishing of African American culture centred in Harlem, New York, during the 1920s. Duke Ellington’s Cotton Club residency from 1927 was broadcast nationally on radio, introducing jazz to millions of white Americans and making it the defining sound of the Jazz Age. Jazz was controversial: many conservatives condemned it as immoral and associated with Black culture.
Radio, the Gramophone and Mass Media
The spread of radio was one of the most dramatic changes of the decade. The first commercial radio station in the United States, KDKA in Pittsburgh, began broadcasting in November 1920. By 1929, there were approximately 600 radio stations in America and over 10 million radio sets in American homes. For the first time, millions of people could hear the same news, the same music and the same sporting events simultaneously — a revolution in shared national experience.
Radio and the gramophone together drove the commercial popularisation of jazz. Record sales boomed in the early 1920s; by 1927, Americans were buying approximately 100 million records a year. Jazz, popular songs and classical music all competed for listeners. The gramophone brought professional-quality music into working-class homes that could never have afforded concert tickets. Dancing to recorded music became a new social activity, and the Charleston dance craze of 1923 swept across the country.
Speakeasies — the illegal bars of the Prohibition era — were important cultural spaces as well as criminal enterprises. Many speakeasies featured jazz bands and dance floors, and they were among the few spaces where Black and white Americans could socialise together. In this sense, Prohibition inadvertently created the conditions for a blurring of racial boundaries that the rest of 1920s society vigorously maintained. The speakeasy also became closely associated with the flapper lifestyle — young women who dressed in short skirts, cut their hair short, wore make-up and drank and smoked publicly in defiance of social convention.