Perilous Pop: Ragtime, Jazz and Progressive Social Thought in the Early 20 Century Press, 1900-1930 a DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO
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Perilous Pop: Ragtime, Jazz and Progressive Social Thought in the Early 20 th Century Press, 1900-1930 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Chani Marchiselli IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Dr. Mary Vavrus November, 2009 © Chani Marchiselli 2009 i Acknowledgements First, I want to thank my exceptionally patient committee: Dr. Ed Schiappa for his invaluable advice, Dr. Gil Rodman for the thoughtful responses and long phone calls, Dr. Ron Greene for introducing me to concepts that continue to inform my work. I am indebted to my advisor, Dr. Mary Vavrus for her persistence and her editorial skills. I also want to thank Dr. Karlyn Kors Campbell for teaching me how to write a rhetorical criticism. I am grateful for years of support from family: Dawne Belloise, Dennis Giacomo and Chris Dill. Finally, encouragement from friends and colleagues made my matriculation much more likely. I thank Drs. Roni Shapiro, Josh Gunn and Kristin Swenson for their emotional and intellectual contributions to this and other projects, and Dr. Christopher Swift for insisting that it really is better on the other side. ii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to my mother, Dawne Belloise, and to Dennis Giacomo iii Table of Contents Introduction 1 Prologue 1 Mass Music and Public Culture 3 Moral Panics and Jazz Literature 12 Chapter One: Progressivism 25 Introduction 25 Historiography Debates 25 Faith and Science 31 Progress and Culture 37 Conclusion 46 Chapter Two: Music, Paternalism and Progress 48 Introduction 48 The Piano 52 Music and Maternity 60 The Specter of the Savage 70 Progress and Paternity 79 Conclusion 85 Chapter Three: The Dangers of the Dance Hall 91 Introduction 91 The Working Girl and Industrial Culture 94 The Maternal Public 106 Promiscuous Spaces 113 Conclusion 126 Chapter Four: Modern Dancing 128 Introduction 128 Dangerous Intimacies 130 The Dance Reform Movement 139 Modern Dancing 148 Debauched Youth 160 Conclusion 164 Conclusion 167 Summary 169 Shortcomings and Implications for Future Research 180 Bibliography 186 1 Prologue “If music is bad for youth, it is calamitous for women.” 1 --Nietzsche When I started to research the jazz controversy as it appeared in the early twentieth century press, I expected to discover the usual complaints about how music contributes to youthful delinquency and to the moral demise of women and girls in particular. I intended to begin this introduction with the above quote, from which I would unravel complaints about the feminization of mass culture through the emblematic figure of the flapper. This dissertation, however, is no longer about flappers. I also imagined that a close study of those debates would confirm my assumptions about how mediated panics work: dominant groups circulate hyperbolic messages about the dangers of youth subculture, or the ill-effects of certain musical forms, and for various ideological purposes that should be obvious to the astute critic. But in the course of this project I encountered an incredibly thorny, complicated and sometimes obtuse set of historical texts that resisted easy efforts at critical analysis and skirted my best attempts to apply totalizing theories. Concerns about jazz involved not only musical sounds, but musical spaces, dance practices, subcultures—youthful and otherwise— 1 For Nietzsche, the popularization of opera and the unwelcome novelty of female audiences threatened the autonomous production of masculine art. He complains, for instance, that Wagnerian opera denigrated music by catering to the demands of “adoring women.” Composers admired by those feminine masses eventually and inevitably “condescend to the level of women,” by offering only sentimental narratives and scores fraught with “perpetual melody.” In an often overlooked postscript he also suggests that women swoon at the expense of their own social and cultural development. “Woman impoverishes herself in the Master,” he writes, “she becomes quite touching, she stands naked before him.” “Naked” and “parasitic,” woman is configured here as the vulnerable and vaguely sexualized muse of the popular. “The Case of Richard Wagner” is one early instance in which music’s purported effects on women equivocate specifically modern anxieties about the ways in which women affect music; feminine audiences challenged concepts of “high” art and by extension masculine cultural authority. (The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner , trrans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1967). For further elaboration, see Andreas Huyssen “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernisms ‘Other,’” in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism , (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 1986. 2 gender relations, miscegenation, factory labor, suffrage, bolshevism (really, bolshevism), “voodoo,” commercial leisure, and the demise of the bourgeois marriage, to name a few. Even more detrimental to organization and expediency, I made two “discoveries” in the course of this research that could not be ignored. First, as most music historians already know, the jazz panic started with ragtime. Though frequently separated in cultural histories, the two musical forms sometimes appear in tandem during the war years as conjoined threats to an already tenuous social order. In other words, the jazz panic entered and extended a pre-existing discourse about ragtime music. Moreover, many of the same critics who complained about ragtime reappeared in the popular press in order to lodge identical complaints against jazz. Second, then, recognizing the co-extension of these two controversies threw into relief one frequently overlooked but entirely relevant historical fact. The majority of complaints about early century pop music, at least as they appeared in the popular press, were issued by progressive reformers : Evangelicals involved in the social gospel movement, settlement house workers, recreation activists, dance reformers, social scientists, new professionals and activist judges. Although jazz historians occasionally make passing references to these activists, accounts of the panic generally ignore its sources. For me, this “discovery” raised a fascinating and novel set of research questions: why did progressive efforts, often aimed at improving urban conditions in the wake of industrialization, include these particular aesthetic forms and social practices? In what ways did music unsettle progressive attempts to establish or re-establish public order? How did ragtime and jazz pose an affront to the project of progress? This dissertation explores what I call the early century music controversy—debates about ragtime and jazz music and dance—as it appears in 3 the popular press and as it articulates the assumptions and contradictions of progressive social thought. Mass Music and Public Culture In her essay “Same as it Ever Was: Youth Culture and Music,” musicologist and historian Susan McClary points out that “diatribes against the music produced by or for the young pockmark the historical record as far back as Plato…” Indeed, traces of contempt for certain musical forms appear in The Republic and in Laws , where Plato bemoans Lydian flutes and lauds the authoritarian function of the military march. As McClary explains, Plato’s complaints about music and those subsequent in western history involve “twin threats—subversion of authority and seduction by means of the body.” 2 Plato warns that certain music “instills a thirst for liberty,” and that its appeals to the body circumvent the paternalist commands that otherwise hold subjects in place. Adversaries of syncopated pop music produced around the turn of the twentieth century certainly reiterate Plato’s denouncements. As dance music that originated in the social margins, both ragtime and jazz were said to make disruptive appeals to the body, suspend social restraints, and unsettle the previous century’s moral order. Unlike Lydian flutes, however, ragtime and jazz arrived in tandem with the advent of sound recording and reproduction technologies, as well as a suddenly prolific print media. Early century syncopated pop arguably qualifies as one of the first—if not the first—mass music and simultaneously, the first music culture(s) subject to the scrutiny of a well-circulated popular press. Hence, while moral panics about music clearly predate industrial 2 Susan McClary, “Same as it Ever Was: Youth Culture and Music,” in Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture , New York: Routledge, 1994, pg. 30). 4 modernity in the West, ragtime and jazz became the fulcrum for debates, not only about youth, but about mass media and their relationship to a changing public culture. Prior to the widespread consumption of records, phonographs and radios, the production of sheet music and piano rolls popularized ragtime and jazz music. As historian Reebee Garafalo explains, Tin Pan Alley’s ragtime songs descended from the popular culture of the printing press: “an inheritance that came from European colonization.” 3 The “recording industry” at this moment consisted of a loose collection of musicians and composers whose products alarmed not only “arbiters of taste,” but those who associated standardization—even in aesthetic forms—with the dehumanization and de-individuation of factory labor and mass consumption. Theodor Adorno, of course, offers the most famous example of that conflation between the perils of industrial standardization and mass music. In his “On Popular