Chapter 2 - Cultural context

Summary

With the exception of the 1960s, no decade inspires as much fascination as the 1920s. After nearly a century, its representative figures – whether Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977), Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974), or, of course, F. Scott Fitzgerald – remain American icons, while both the era's high art and its passing fads still serve as defining cultural reference points. Clothing lines and home decor collections evoke period fashions and design trends, and repercussions from the broader phenomena responsible for making the time so tumultuous (the expansion and proliferation of mass media, consumerism, sexual liberation) continue to be felt today. Unlike, say, the 1950s – which did not arouse much interest until the mid-1970s when a wave of post-Watergate retrospection prompted a pining for its (supposed) calm and simplicity – nostalgia for the Jazz Age was immediate. The decade had barely ended when Frederick Lewis Allen published his popular Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s, which catalogued a vibrant confluence of trends and milestones suddenly rendered remote by the Great Depression. That same year, Fitzgerald published his own assessment of the era, “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1931), which more mournfully recalls it as “an age of excess” during which “a whole race [turned] hedonistic, deciding on pleasure.” As this quotation suggests, the 1920s are remembered as a time of innocent indulgence when prosperity appeared limitless, impulses bore no consequence, and irresponsibility was a birthright.