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Chapter 36 in The Humanities: Culture, Continuity, and Change by Sayre, H. M.

36.1Describe the Harlem Renaissance.

1. 36.2Discuss the International Style in architecture and its development as a response to skyscraper architecture in the 1920s.

2. 36.3Examine how both the idea of the new and a sense of place define American modernism.

3. 36.4Outline the characteristics of silent film in its “golden age.”

By the mid-1920s, both white and black Americans understood that New York’s Harlem neighborhood was alive with a new, vibrant sense of cultural possibility. This new cultural climate, which came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance, had been inaugurated by the mass migration of blacks out of the South into the North after the outbreak of World War I (see fig. 35.19). In 1914, nearly 90 percent of all African Americans lived in the South, three-quarters of them in the rural South. But lured by a huge demand for labor in the North once the war began, and impoverished after a boll weevil infestation ruined the cotton crop, blacks flooded into the North. In the course of a mere 90 days early in the 1920s, 12,000 African Americans left Mississippi alone. An average of 200 left Memphis every night. Many met with great hardship, but there was wealth to be had as well, and anything seemed better than life under Jim Crow in the South. They hoped to find a new life in the urban North, the promise of which African-American artist Aaron Douglas (1898–1979) captures in his painting Aspiration (fig. 36.1). A native of Topeka, Kansas, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Nebraska, where he had been the only black student in his class, Douglas arrived in Harlem in 1925. “My first impression of Harlem,” he would later write, “was that of an enormous stage swarming with humanity. … Here one found a kaleidoscope of rapidly changing colors, sounds, movements—rising, falling, swelling, contracting, now hurrying, now dragging along without end and often without apparent purpose. And yet beneath the surface of this chaotic incoherent activity one sensed an inner harmony, one felt the presence of a mysterious hand fitting all these disparate elements into a whole.”

In fact, what was happening in Harlem was happening in New York City as a whole. From Wall Street to Midtown, construction boomed, and the rapid pace of building mirrored the frenetic pace of New York City itself. Like the pre–World War I years, movement and speed defined the era. Until the stock market crash of 1929, New York was the center of world commerce. Uptown, in Harlem, nightlife thrived—in the clubs and cabarets, life seemed to continue 24 hours a day. Despite Prohibition, which had outlawed the production, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages in 1920, liquor was plentiful, and white socialites from downtown filled the Harlem jazz clubs, dancing the night away to the bands that catered to their sense of freedom—and the “outlaw” status that their willful disregard for Prohibition underscored.

It was, as one prominent writer of the era recognized, a Jazz Age—a world moving to its own beat, improvising as it went along, discovering new and unheard-of chords with which life might resonate. The stock market boomed, money flowed, and American industry thrived. And everywhere one looked, new buildings, new products, new creations, and new works of art competed for the public’s attention. Across the country in Hollywood, the film industry advanced the new, machine-created art that seemed to capture the spirit of the day. “Make it new” was the catchphrase of the era.

The Harlem Renaissance

1. 36.1 What was the Harlem Renaissance?

If the social roots of the Harlem Renaissance can be traced back to the Great Migration during World War I, the philosophical roots reach back to the turn of the century and the work of black historian and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963), whose The Philadelphia Negro (1899) was the first sociological text on a black community published in the United States. In 1903, in his book The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois had proposed that the identity of African Americans was fraught with ambiguity (Reading 36.1):

READING 36.1

from W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

[America] yields him no true self-consciousness. … It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in an amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

When in 1909 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded to advance the rights of blacks, Du Bois became editor of its magazine, The Crisis. His sense of the double-consciousness informing African-American experience (a double-consciousness that informs the very term “African American”) was often expressed in the magazine’s pages.

This double-consciousness is especially apparent in the work of Claude McKay (1889–1948), a poet who generally published in white avant-garde magazines and only occasionally in magazines like The Crisis. His poem “If We Must Die” was inspired by the race riots that exploded in the summer and fall of 1919 in a number of cities in both the North and South. The three most violent episodes of what came to be known as the “Red Summer” occurred in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Elaine, Arkansas, all started by whites, who were stunned when blacks fought back. A “Southern black woman,” as she identified herself, wrote a letter to The Crisis, praising blacks for fighting back: “The Washington riot gave me a thrill that comes once in a life time … at last our men had stood up like men. … I stood up alone in my room … and exclaimed aloud, ‘Oh I thank God, thank God.’ The pent up horror, grief and humiliation of a life time—half a century—was being stripped from me.” McKay’s poem expresses the same militant anger (Reading 36.2):

READING 36.2

Claude McKay, “If We Must Die” (1919)

If we must die—let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot. If we must die—oh, let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe; Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Ironically, years later, during World War II, British prime minister Winston Churchill would use the poem, without acknowledging its source—probably without even knowing it—to rally British and American troops fighting in Europe. That Churchill could so transform the poem’s meaning is indicative of its very doubleness. Written in sonnet form, it harks back to the genteel heroism of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” (see Chapter 35), and yet it was, in its original context, a call to arms.

McKay’s book of poems, Harlem Shadows, was one of the first works by a black writer to be published by a mainstream, national publisher (Harcourt, Brace and Company). Together with the novel Cane (1923) by Jean Toomer (1894–1967), an experimental work that combined poetry and prose in documenting the life of American blacks in the rural South and urban North, it helped to launch the burst of creative energy that was the Harlem Renaissance.

“The New Negro”

Perhaps the first self-conscious expression of the Harlem Renaissance took place at a dinner party, on March 21, 1924, hosted by Charles S. Johnson (1893–1956) of the National Urban League. The League was dedicated to promoting civil rights and helping black Americans address the economic and social problems they encountered as they resettled in the urban North. At Johnson’s dinner, young writers from Harlem were introduced to New York’s white literary establishment. A year later, the Survey Graphic, a national magazine dedicated to sociology, social work, and social analysis, produced an issue dedicated exclusively to Harlem. The issue, subtitled Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro, was edited by Alain Leroy Locke (1886–1954), an African-American professor of philosophy at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He was convinced that a new era was dawning for black Americans, and wrote a powerful introduction to a new anthology. In his essay, sometimes referred to as the manifesto of the New Negro Movement, Locke argued that Harlem was the center of this new arena of creative expression (Reading 36.3):

READING 36.3

from Alain Leroy Locke, The New Negro (1925)

[There arises a] consciousness of acting as the advance-guard of the African peoples in their contact with Twentieth Century civilization … [and] the sense of a mission of rehabilitating the race in world esteem from that loss of prestige for which the fate and conditions of slavery have so largely been responsible. Harlem, as we shall see, is the center of both these movements. … The pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem . … The New Negro … now becomes a conscious contributor and lays aside the status of beneficiary and ward for that of a collaborator and participant in American civilization. The great social gain in this is the releasing of our talented group from the arid fields of controversy and debate to the productive fields of creative expression. … And certainly, if in our lifetime the Negro should not be able to celebrate his full initiation into American democracy, he can at least, on the warrant of these things, celebrate the attainment of a significant and satisfying new phase of group development, and with it a spiritual Coming of Age.

In Locke’s view, each ethnic group in America had its own identity, which it was entitled to protect and promote, and this claim to cultural identity need not conflict with the claim to American citizenship. Locke further emphasized that the spirit of the young writers who were a part of this anthology would drive this new Harlem-based movement by focusing on the African roots of black art and music, but they would, in turn, contribute mightily to a new, more inclusive American culture.

Among the many poems and stories published in the Survey Graphic and The New Negro was “Heritage” by Countee Cullen (1903–46) (fig. 36.2).

Fig. 36.2

Carl Van Vechten, PORTRAIT OF COUNTEE CULLEN IN CENTRAL PARK

1941. Gelatin silver photographic print.

The photographer, Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964), was a white journalist and novelist who actively promoted black artists and writers in the 1920s. His popular 1926 novel Nigger Heaven, named after the top tier of seats reserved for blacks in a segregated theater, was white America’s introduction to Harlem culture, although the black intelligentsia almost unanimously condemned it for its depiction of Harlem as an amoral playground.

Credit: Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Cullen was the adopted son of Frederick Cullen, pastor of the Salem Methodist Episcopal church in Harlem, and his wife, Carolyn, both of whom had strong ties to the NAACP and the National Urban League. Cullen later described his life in their household as a constant attempt at “reconciling a Christian upbringing with a pagan inclination.” “Heritage” investigates that tension. The poem is both typical and something of an anomaly in Cullen’s work. He longed to write poetry that succeeded not by force of his race but by virtue of its place in the tradition of English verse. In its form, the poem is completely traditional: rhymed couplets and iambic tetrameter (the first foot in each line is truncated—that is, the short syllable of the iambic foot has been dropped, leaving only the long syllable). But in its subject matter—Cullen’s sense of his own uncivilized Africanness—its concerns are entirely racial (Reading 36.4).

READING 36.4 Countee Cullen, “Heritage” (1925)

Although it has been criticized for its romantic depiction of Africa, Cullen’s poem remains a powerful statement of Du Bois’s sense of African-American double-consciousness. As cultural historian Houston Baker, Jr., has described it in Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic, “The entire poem is placed in a confessional framework as the narrator tries to define his relationship to some white … being and finds that a black impulse ceaselessly draws him back.”

This theme of “doubleness” was underscored when the poem appeared in Survey Graphic. There it was illustrated by photographs of African statues and masks, reproduced from the collection of the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Albert C. Barnes, who had made his fortune from the development of an antiseptic drug, was particularly noted not only for his collection of modern art, including Matisse’s Bonheur de vivre (see fig. 34.5), but also for his early and vigorous collecting of African art. In an article for the Survey Graphic, entitled “Negro Art and America,” Barnes wrote:

The renascence [sic] of Negro art is one of the events of our age which no seeker for beauty can afford to overlook. It is as characteristically Negro as are the primitive African sculptures. As art forms, each bears comparison with the great art expressions of any race or civilization. In both ancient and modern Negro art we find a faithful expression of a people and of an epoch in the world’s evolution.

This kind of support from the white establishment was central to the cultural resurgence of Harlem. Many of New York’s whites also supported the uptown neighborhood’s thriving nightlife scene. Prohibition, and the speakeasies it spawned, had created in Harlem a culture of alcohol, nightlife, and dancing, and with them, the loose morality of the party life, indulged in particularly by the white clientele to whom the clubs catered.

Langston Hughes and the Poetry of Jazz

As the young poet Langston Hughes (1902–67) later put it, “Negro was in vogue.” Hughes was among the new young poets that Locke published in The New Negro, and the establishment publishing house, Knopf, would publish his book of poems, The Weary Blues, in 1926. Twenty-two years of age in 1924, Hughes had gone to Paris seeking a freedom he could not find at home (see Continuity & Change, Chapter 35). He was soon writing poems inspired by the jazz rhythms he was hearing played by the African-American bands in the clubs where he worked as a busboy and dishwasher. The music’s syncopated rhythms can be heard in poems such as “Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret” (Reading 36.5):

READING 36.5

from Langston Hughes, “Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret” (1925)

Play that thing, Jazz band! Play it for the lords and ladies, For the dukes and counts, For the whores and gigolos, For the American millionaires, And the school teachers Out for a spree. … … You know that tune That laughs and cries at the same time … … May I? Mais oui, Mein Gott! Parece una rumba. Play it, jazz band!

African Americans like Hughes had been drawn to Paris by reports of black soldiers who had served in World War I, in the so-called Negro divisions, the 92nd and 93rd Infantries, that they had encountered no racial prejudice. Something approaching jazz was introduced to the French by Lieutenant James Reese Europe, whose 815th Pioneer Infantry band played in city after city across the country. They played a combination of standard band music, dance music, and tunes subjected to some degree of “ragging.” In fact, he was the principal composer for the white society dancers Vernon and Irene Castle, and his music helped propel the foxtrot into great popularity. But most important, the band experienced something they never had in the United States—total acceptance by people with white skin. But Harlem, largely because of the efforts of Du Bois, Johnson, and Locke, soon replaced Paris in the African-American imagination.

Hughes began writing poems almost directly out of high school, and by the mid-1920s, his was considered the strongest voice in the Harlem Renaissance. His poems narrate the lives of his people, capturing the inflections and cadences of their speech. In fact, the poems celebrate, most of all, the inventiveness of African-American culture, especially the openness and ingenuity of its music and language. Hughes had come to understand that his cultural identity rested not in the grammar and philosophy of white culture, but in the vernacular expression of the American black, which he could hear in its music (the blues and jazz especially) and its speech. “The Weary Blues,” below, reflects Hughes’s lifelong interest in the spoken or sung qualities of African-American vernacular language and its roots in musical idiom. The other two poems, from later in his career, reflect the challenges faced by African-American society, their simultaneous hope and despair in relation to American culture as a whole (Reading 36.6).

READING 36.6 Langston Hughes, Selected Poems

Zora Neale Hurston and the Voices of Folklore

The writer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) felt the same way. Slightly younger than many of her other Harlem Renaissance colleagues, while still an undergraduate at Howard University she attracted the attention of Hughes when she published a short story, “Spunk,” in the black journal Opportunity. She transferred to Columbia, where she finished her degree under the great anthropologist Franz Boas, undertaking field research from 1927 to 1932 to collect folklore in the South. Her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), takes place in a town very much like her native Eatonville, Florida, where she was raised. Its narrator, Janie Crawford, has returned home after being away for a very long time. The townsfolk, particularly the women, are petty, unwelcoming, and gossipy.

The Quilts of Gee’s Bend

From the outset, Hurston’s writing concerned itself primarily with the question of African-American identity—an identity she located in the vernacular speech of her native rural South and in the stories of the people who lived there. Hurston’s mastery of the dialect and the nuances of African-American speech is unsurpassed. She recognized in this vernacular language something distinctly modern.

In fact, in the isolated community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, an indigenous grassroots approach to textile design had been flourishing since perhaps the late nineteenth century, although it would remain completely unknown until William Arnett, a collector and scholar of African-American art, rediscovered the community and its continuing quilt-making tradition in the late 1990s. Surrounded on three sides by the Alabama River, and open to the world on the other only by an often impassable road, Gee’s Bend was almost completely isolated, and over the years, its quilters had developed a distinct aesthetic sensibility that they had passed on from one generation to the next. In 2006, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, organized an exhibit of quilts made by four generations of Gee’s Bend women that rivaled in every way the inventiveness and freedom of modern abstract art. In Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt, Arnett describes the quilts in terms that evoke jazz, that other vernacular form of African-American expression that rose to prominence in the Harlem Renaissance (and which will be discussed in a moment). The quilts are distinguished, he writes, by their preference for “asymmetry, strong contrast, and affective color changes, syncopation and pattern breaks, and an improvisational flair.” They take on, especially, the shapes and rhythms of the improvisational rural architecture of Gee’s Bend itself, in which, in the case of Jessie T. Pettway’s Bars and String-Pieced Columns (fig. 36.3), random scraps of odd-shaped wooden slats might be nailed across a frame of two-by-fours. As the quilts have traveled around the United States since 2006, it has become clear that a new and unique vernacular modernism has developed independently of the mainstream art world.

Fig. 36.3

Jessie T. Pettway, BARS AND STRING-PIECED COLUMNS

All That Jazz

By the time of the Great Migration, jazz had established itself as the music of African Americans. So much did the music seem to define all things American that the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) entitled a collection of short stories published in 1922 Tales of the Jazz Age, and the name stuck. By the end of the 1920s, jazz was the American music, and it was almost as popular in Paris and Berlin as it was in New York, Chicago, and New Orleans. It originated in New Orleans in the 1890s, probably the most racially diverse city in America, particularly in the ragtime piano music of Scott Joplin and others (see Chapter 32). But it had deep roots as well in the blues.

The Blues and Their “Empress,” Bessie Smith

If syncopated rhythm is one of the primary characteristics of jazz, another is the blue note . Blue notes are slightly lower or flatter than conventional pitches. In jazz, blues instrumentalists or singers commonly “bend” or “scoop” a blue note—usually the third, fifth, or seventh notes of a given scale—to achieve heightened emotional effects. Such effects were first established in the blues proper, a form of song that originated among enslaved black Americans and their descendants.

The blues are by definition laments bemoaning loss of love, poverty, or social injustice, and they contributed importantly to the development of jazz. The standard blues form consists of three sections of four bars each. Each of these sections corresponds to the single line of a three-line stanza, the first two lines of which are the same. In his 1925 poem “The Weary Blues,” Langston Hughes describes listening to a blues singer in a Harlem club (see Reading 36.6 for the entire poem):

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, I heard a Negro play. Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light He did a lazy sway … He did a lazy sway … … … Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor. He played a few chords then he sang some more— “I got the Weary Blues And I can’t be satisfied. I got the Weary Blues And I can’t be satisfied. I ain’t happy no mo’ And I wish that I had died.”

The last lines are the standard blues form (expanded by Hughes to six instead of three lines for the sake of his own poetic meter).

Early blues artists whose performances are preserved on record include Ma Rainey (1886–1939) and Robert Johnson (1911–38). But perhaps the greatest of the 1920s blues singers was Bessie Smith (1892–1937), who grew up in Tennessee singing on street corners to support her family (fig. 36.4).

Fig. 36.4

Carl Van Vechten, BESSIE SMITH

The Blues and Their “Empress,” Bessie Smith

If syncopated rhythm is one of the primary characteristics of jazz, another is the blue note . Blue notes are slightly lower or flatter than conventional pitches. In jazz, blues instrumentalists or singers commonly “bend” or “scoop” a blue note—usually the third, fifth, or seventh notes of a given scale—to achieve heightened emotional effects. Such effects were first established in the blues proper, a form of song that originated among enslaved black Americans and their descendants.

The blues are by definition laments bemoaning loss of love, poverty, or social injustice, and they contributed importantly to the development of jazz. The standard blues form consists of three sections of four bars each. Each of these sections corresponds to the single line of a three-line stanza, the first two lines of which are the same. In his 1925 poem “The Weary Blues,” Langston Hughes describes listening to a blues singer in a Harlem club (see Reading 36.6 for the entire poem):

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, I heard a Negro play. Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light He did a lazy sway … He did a lazy sway … … … Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor. He played a few chords then he sang some more— “I got the Weary Blues And I can’t be satisfied. I got the Weary Blues And I can’t be satisfied. I ain’t happy no mo’ And I wish that I had died.”

The last lines are the standard blues form (expanded by Hughes to six instead of three lines for the sake of his own poetic meter).

Early blues artists whose performances are preserved on record include Ma Rainey (1886–1939) and Robert Johnson (1911–38). But perhaps the greatest of the 1920s blues singers was Bessie Smith (1892–1937), who grew up in Tennessee singing on street corners to support her family (fig. 36.4).

Fig. 36.4

Carl Van Vechten, BESSIE SMITH

n.d. Black-and-white negative, 4" × 5".

Van Vechten’s collection of photographs and documents pertaining to the Harlem Renaissance remains one of the era’s most important documentary records.

Credit: Courtesy of the Library of Congress

In 1923, when she was 29 years old, she made her first recording, and audiences were stunned by the feeling that she brought to her performances. She was noted particularly for the way she added a chromatic note before the last note of a line, so that, in her “Florida-Bound Blues” (Listening Guide 36.1), for instance,

becomes

The additional note might be delivered quickly, or it might be stretched out, adding an extended sense of dissonance and anguished tension to the blues form. When, by the early 1930s, audiences began to prefer a smoother approach to the blues, Smith’s popularity waned. Nor did she fit the more acceptable image of the light-skinned, white-featured black entertainer. Traveling from one-night stand to one-night stand in honky-tonks across the Deep South, she died in an automobile accident in 1937.

Listening Guide 36.1

Bessie Smith, “FLORIDA-BOUND BLUES”

The Blues and Their “Empress,” Bessie Smith

If syncopated rhythm is one of the primary characteristics of jazz, another is the blue note . Blue notes are slightly lower or flatter than conventional pitches. In jazz, blues instrumentalists or singers commonly “bend” or “scoop” a blue note—usually the third, fifth, or seventh notes of a given scale—to achieve heightened emotional effects. Such effects were first established in the blues proper, a form of song that originated among enslaved black Americans and their descendants.

The blues are by definition laments bemoaning loss of love, poverty, or social injustice, and they contributed importantly to the development of jazz. The standard blues form consists of three sections of four bars each. Each of these sections corresponds to the single line of a three-line stanza, the first two lines of which are the same. In his 1925 poem “The Weary Blues,” Langston Hughes describes listening to a blues singer in a Harlem club (see Reading 36.6 for the entire poem):

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, I heard a Negro play. Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light He did a lazy sway … He did a lazy sway … … … Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor. He played a few chords then he sang some more— “I got the Weary Blues And I can’t be satisfied. I got the Weary Blues And I can’t be satisfied. I ain’t happy no mo’ And I wish that I had died.”

The last lines are the standard blues form (expanded by Hughes to six instead of three lines for the sake of his own poetic meter).

Early blues artists whose performances are preserved on record include Ma Rainey (1886–1939) and Robert Johnson (1911–38). But perhaps the greatest of the 1920s blues singers was Bessie Smith (1892–1937), who grew up in Tennessee singing on street corners to support her family (fig. 36.4).

Fig. 36.4

Carl Van Vechten, BESSIE SMITH

n.d. Black-and-white negative, 4" × 5".

Van Vechten’s collection of photographs and documents pertaining to the Harlem Renaissance remains one of the era’s most important documentary records.

Credit: Courtesy of the Library of Congress

In 1923, when she was 29 years old, she made her first recording, and audiences were stunned by the feeling that she brought to her performances. She was noted particularly for the way she added a chromatic note before the last note of a line, so that, in her “Florida-Bound Blues” (Listening Guide 36.1), for instance,

becomes

The additional note might be delivered quickly, or it might be stretched out, adding an extended sense of dissonance and anguished tension to the blues form. When, by the early 1930s, audiences began to prefer a smoother approach to the blues, Smith’s popularity waned. Nor did she fit the more acceptable image of the light-skinned, white-featured black entertainer. Traveling from one-night stand to one-night stand in honky-tonks across the Deep South, she died in an automobile accident in 1937.

Listening Guide 36.1

Bessie Smith, “FLORIDA-BOUND BLUES”

Swing: Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club

The same year that Armstrong recorded “Hotter Than That,” Duke Ellington, born Edward Kennedy Ellington in Washington, D.C. (1899–1974), began a five-year engagement at Harlem’s Cotton Club (fig. 36.5). The Cotton Club itself was owned by a gangster who used it as an outlet for his “Madden’s #1 Beer,” which, like all alcoholic beverages, was banned after National Prohibition was introduced in 1920. The Club’s name was meant to evoke leisurely plantation life for its “white only” audience who came to listen to its predominantly black entertainers.

Fig. 36.5

THE COTTON CLUB

Ellington had formed his first band in New York in 1923. His 1932 “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” (Listening Guide 36.3) introduced the term swing to jazz culture. (A particularly clear example of a “blue note” can be heard, incidentally, on the first “ain’t” of the first chorus of “It Don’t Mean a Thing.”) Swing is characterized by big bands—as many as 15 to 20 musicians, including up to five saxophones (two altos, two tenors, and a baritone)—resulting in a much bigger sound. Its rhythm depends on subtle avoidance of downbeats, with the solo instrument attacking the beat that occurs either just before or just after it. By the time Ellington began his engagement at the Cotton Club, commercial radio was seven years old, and many thousands of American homes had a radio. Live radio broadcasts from the Cotton Club brought Ellington national fame, and he was widely imitated throughout the 1930s by bands who toured the country. These included bands led by clarinetist Benny Goodman, soon known as “the King of Swing”; trumpeter Harry James; trombonist Glenn Miller; trombonist Tommy Dorsey; pianist Count Basie; and clarinetist Artie Shaw. These bands also featured vocalists, and they introduced the country to Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Peggy Lee, Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, and Ella Fitzgerald.

Jazz influenced almost every form of music after 1920. Debussy imitated rag in his 1908 Golliwog’s Cakewalk. Stravinsky composed a Ragtime for Eleven Instruments in 1917. The American composer George Gershwin incorporated jazz rhythms into his 1924 piano and orchestra composition, Rhapsody in Blue, and his 1935 opera Porgy and Bess incorporated jazz, blues, and spiritual in a way that revived musical theater and paved the way for the great musicals of the 1940s and 1950s. In fact, Porgy and Bess has been staged and recorded both by jazz greats—Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald—and by professional opera companies, bridging the gap between popular art and high culture as few works before it ever had.

The Visual Arts in Harlem

The leading visual artist in Harlem in the 1920s was Aaron Douglas (see fig. 36.1). When he arrived in Harlem in 1925, his first major work was as illustrator of a book of verse sermons by the Harlem Renaissance poet and executive secretary of the NAACP James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938), God’s Trombones: Seven Sermons in Verse. Like his friend and colleague Zora Neale Hurston, Johnson was interested in preserving the voices of folklore, specifically folk sermons. “I remember,” Johnson writes in the preface to God’s Trombones, “hearing in my boyhood sermons that … passed with only slight modifications from preacher to preacher and from locality to locality.” One of these was the story of “The Prodigal Son,” updated to reflect life in the streets of 1920s Harlem (Reading 36.7):

READING 36.7

from James Weldon Johnson, “The Prodigal Son” (1927)

And the city was bright in the night-time like day, The streets all crowded with people, Brass bands and string bands a-playing, And ev’rywhere the young man turned There was singing and laughing and dancing. And he stopped a passer-by and he said: Tell me what city is this? And the passer-by laughed and said: Don’t you know? This is Babylon, Babylon, 10That great city of Babylon. Come on, my friend, and go along with me. And the young man joined the crowd. … And the young man went with his new-found friend, And bought himself some brand new clothes, And he spent his days in the drinking dens, Swallowing the fires of hell. And he spent his nights in the gambling dens, Throwing dice with the devil for his soul. And he met up with the women of Babylon. 20Oh, the women of Babylon! Dressed in yellow and purple and scarlet, Loaded with rings and earrings and bracelets, Their lips like a honeycomb dripping with honey, Perfumed and sweet-smelling like a jasmine flower; And the jasmine smell of the Babylon women Got in his nostrils and went to his head, And he wasted his substance in riotous living, In the evening, in the black and dark of night, With the sweet-sinning women of Babylon. 30And they stripped him of his money, And they stripped him of his clothes, And they left him broke and ragged In the streets of Babylon. …

Douglas’s illustration (fig. 36.6) makes the timeliness of Johnson’s poem abundantly clear. His two-dimensional silhouetted figures would become the signature style of Harlem Renaissance art, in which a sense of rhythmic movement and sound is created by abrupt shifts in the direction of line and mass.

Fig. 36.6

Aaron Douglas, ILLUSTRATION FOR “THE PRODIGAL SON,” IN JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, GOD’S TROMBONES: SEVEN SERMONS IN VERSE

927. University of North Carolina Library.

Douglas’s inclusion of the fragment of a dollar, the tax stamp from a package of cigarettes (at the bottom right), a playing card, and the fragment of the word “gin” all reflect his awareness of French Cubism.

Credit: Illustrations by Aaron Douglas, from God’s Trombones by James Weldon Johnson, copyright 1927 The Viking Press Inc., renewed © 1955 by Grace Nail Johnson. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC. Art © Heirs of Aaron Douglas/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

By the mid-1930s, Douglas was the most well known of the Harlem Renaissance artists. In 1934, through the Works Progress Administration, created by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (see Chapter 37), he painted a set of four murals, Aspects of Negro Life, for the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library, today the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and in the 1930s the intellectual hub of Harlem. Two years later, on the occasion of the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas, he painted four more for the Hall of Negro Life, the finale of which was Aspiration (fig. 36.7). The mural depicts the progression of African Americans out of slavery, represented by the shackled arms that rise out of the bottom of the painting, out of the South, and toward the promise of the industrial North. The figures on the plinth, upon which a globe stands, hold symbols of education and promise—a compass and T-square and a chemistry beaker in the hands of the males, while the seated woman holds a book.

Fig. 36.7

Aaron Douglas, ASPIRATION

1936. Oil on canvas, 92" × 42". Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. Museum purchase, Gift of Mrs. Paul Wattis 1999.421-k.

The five-pointed stars that radiate from the center of the painting symbolize both Texas (the Lone Star State) and the North Star, which was a symbol of freedom to slaves before the Civil War.

Credit: FAMSF, museum purchase, the estate of Thurlow E. Tibbs Jr., the Museum Society Auxiliary, American Art Trust Fund, Unrestricted Art Trust Fund, partial gift of Dr. Ernest A. Bates, Sharon Bell, Jo-Ann Beverly, Barbara Carleton, Dr. And Mrs. Arthur H. Coleman, Dr. and Mrs. Coyness Ennix Jr., Nicole Y. Ennix, Mr. and Mrs. Gary Francois, Dennis L. Franklin, Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell C. Gillette, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Goodyear, Zuretti L. Goosby, Marion E. Greene, Mrs. Vivian S. W. Hambrick, Laurie Gibbs Harris, Arlene Hollis, Louis A. and Letha Jeanpierre, Daniel and Jackie Johnson Jr., Stephen L. Johnson, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Lathan, Lewis & Ribbs Mortuary Garden Chapel, Mr. and Mrs. Gary Love, Glenn R. Nance, Mr. and Mrs. Harry S. Parker III, Mr. and Mrs. Carr T. Preston, Fannie Preston, Pamela R. Ransom, Dr. and Mrs. Benjamin F. Reed, San Francisco Black Chamber of Commerce, San Francisco Chapter of Links Inc., San Francisco Chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity, Dr. Ella Mae Simmons, Mr. Calvin R. Swinson, Joseph B. Williams, Mr. and Mrs. Alfred S. Wilsey, and the people of the Bay Area, 1997.84. Art © Heirs of Aaron Douglas/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

But, as Douglas well knew, the realization of such aspiration was hard won. The jazz clubs that were so central to African-American culture in Harlem were, in fact, restricted to white customers—blacks could enter only as performers or waiters. Access to satisfactory housing was extremely limited as whites created de facto white-only neighborhoods. Except in Harlem, landlords in New York City were unwilling to rent to black tenants, and as early as 1920, a one-room apartment in Harlem rented to whites for $40 and to blacks for between $100 and $125. These high rental expenses led to extreme population density—in 1920s Harlem, there were over 215,000 people per square mile (by way of comparison, today there are fewer than 70,000 people per square mile in all of Manhattan).

These were realities that Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) did not shy away from representing. He moved to Harlem in 1930 at age 13 and was trained as a painter at the Harlem Art Workshop, where he studied Aaron Douglas’s work. “Without the black community in Harlem, I wouldn’t have become an artist,” he later said. When he was just 23 years old, he created a series of 60 paintings narrating the history of the Great Migration (see fig. 35.19). He conducted his research for the series at the 135th Street Library, with Douglas’s murals ever in his view. Among the paintings are images of race riots, including the East St. Louis riots of 1917, the bombing of black homes, overcrowded housing, and tuberculosis outbreaks, but he also saw the same kind of hope and aspiration as Douglas, as is evident in his illustration of three girls writing on a chalkboard at school (fig. 36.8). Using the same angularity and rhythmic repetition of forms that Douglas introduced, the intellectual growth of the girls, as each reaches higher on the board, is presented as a musical crescendo in a syncopated, four-beat, rhythmic form where the first beat, as it were, is silent and unplayed.

Fig. 36.8

Jacob Lawrence, IN THE NORTH THE NEGRO HAD BETTER EDUCATIONAL FACILITIES

Skyscraper and Machine: Architecture in New York

1. 36.2 What is the International Style in architecture and how did it develop as a response to skyscraper architecture in the 1920s?

After World War I, New York experienced a building boom outstripped only by the growth of its population. The skyscraper, a distinctly American invention, was first developed in Chicago, where Louis Sullivan took the lead (see fig. 32.26), but it found its ultimate expression in New York. There, skyscrapers were usually commissioned by corporations as their national and international headquarters (map 36.1).

The skyscraper was above all a grand advertisement, a symbol of corporate power and prestige that changed the skyline of New York and became a symbol for the city around the world. The Singer Building of 1902 was followed by the Metropolitan Life Tower (1909), the Woolworth Building (1913), the Shelton Towers (1924), the Chrysler Building (1930) (fig. 36.9), the Empire State Building (1931), and the RCA Building (1933). Each strove to be the world’s highest, and briefly was, until it was succeeded, often within a matter of months, by the next.

Fig. 36.9

William van Alen, CHRYSLER BUILDING

New York 1928–30.

The building’s steel crown, shown in this detail, was understood to be an emblem of the new technological ascendancy of not just the Chrysler Corporation, but America itself.

Credit: Scott W Baker/Alamy

Walter Chrysler’s Chrysler Building was, for instance, pure advertisement. The site was opposite Grand Central Station on 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue, at the very heart of Manhattan. Chrysler informed William van Alen, his architect, that he expected the building to be the tallest building in the world, “higher than the Eiffel Tower.” Van Alen’s former partner, H. Craig Severance, had already broken ground for the Bank of Manhattan Trust Building at 40 Wall Street (today the Trump Building), and the two entered into a fierce competition. When Severance’s building was completed, just months before Van Alen’s, it was, at 71 stories and 927 feet tall, the tallest structure in the world. Then Van Alen surprised everyone. He had secretly constructed a 185-foot spire inside his building. At the last minute, he hoisted it up through the roof and bolted it in place. The Chrysler Building was now a staggering 77 stories and 1,046 feet tall.

The first six floors of the crowning spire were reserved for Walter Chrysler’s private use. They included an observation deck and a lounge displaying his personal tool box, consisting of the forged and tempered steel tools that Chrysler had made by hand when he was 17 years of age and that he referred to as the “tools that money couldn’t buy.” The exterior of the spire was crowned with a stainless steel crest, punctuated by triangular windows in radiating semicircles (designed to evoke Chrysler hubcaps). At night, the windows were lit, which added a new graceful, arcing form to the increasingly rectilinear horizon of the New York cityscape.

Within a year, the Empire State Building became the world’s tallest building, at 102 stories and 1,250 feet high. But aside from its sheer size, the Chrysler Building’s decoration was what set it apart. It was self-consciously Art Deco, a term coined in the 1960s after the 1925 Arts Décoratifs exhibition in Paris to describe a style that was known at the time as Art Moderne, noted for its highly stylized forms and exotic materials. And among the most exotic of these materials in the late 1920s was stainless steel, first patented in the United States in 1915. Not only was the spire’s crown clad in the material, from the sixty-first floor of the Chrysler Building, giant Art Deco stainless steel eagles, replicas of Chrysler’s hood ornaments, pointed their beaks outward like gargoyles (fig. 36.10).

Fig. 36.10

Margaret Bourke-White, CHRYSLER BUILDING: GARGOYLE OUTSIDE MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE’S STUDIO

1930. Gelatin silver print, 1215/16" × 9¼".

One of the most important photographers of the day, Bourke-White would become one of Life magazine’s most important contributors (the magazine’s first cover was shot by her in 1936). This shot was taken from her studio in the Chrysler Building.

Credit: Margaret Bourke-White/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

The Machine Aesthetic

Perhaps more than anything else, the Chrysler Building is a monument to the technology and the spirit of the new that technology inspired. Around the thirty-first floor, Chrysler hubcaps were placed in brickwork shaped like tires. It was part and parcel of a machine aesthetic that dominated the day, most fully articulated by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (1902–81), director of the new Museum of Modern Art in New York, and his curator of architecture, Philip Johnson (1906–2005), in an exhibition entitled “Machine Art.” The subject of enormous press coverage when it opened in 1934, the exhibit featured springs, propellers, ball bearings, kitchen appliances, laboratory glass and porcelain (including boiling flasks made from Pyrex, a new durable material that would transform modern kitchenware), and machine parts displayed on pedestals. Crowds thronged to the museum to see the 402 items Barr and Johnson had chosen. All of these objects were defined by their simple geometric forms, symmetry, balance, and proportion—in short a new, machine-inspired Classicism.

Earlier in the century, Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) had proposed that modern art—and his own photography in particular—should concern itself with revealing the underlying geometries of the world. At a small New York gallery, named simply 291, after its address at 291 Fifth Avenue, Stieglitz had hosted Matisse’s first one-person show outside of France. He then mounted two more shows of Matisse’s work, in 1910 and 1912. Stieglitz had also been the first in the United States to exhibit Picasso, showing more than 80 of his works on paper in 1911.

Stieglitz valued both artists for the attention they paid to formal composition over and above any slavish dependence on visual appearance. He valued, in other words, the conceptual qualities of their work as opposed to their imagery. This is perhaps surprising for a photographer, but describing the inspiration of his own 1907 photograph The Steerage (fig. 36.11), he would later recall:

There were men, women and children on the lower level of the steerage [the lower class deck of a steamship] … The scene fascinated me: A round straw hat; the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right; the white drawbridge, its railings made of chain; white suspenders crossed on the back of a man below; circular iron machinery; a mast that cut into the sky, completing a triangle. I stood spellbound for a while. I saw shapes related to one another—a picture of shapes, and underlying it, a new vision that held me …

Fig. 36.11

Alfred Stieglitz, THE STEERAGE

1907. Photogravure, 133/16" × 10⅜".

Stieglitz first published this photograph in Camera Work in 1911.

Credit: Library of Congress

The photographers and painters Stieglitz championed—including Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), whom he would later marry—were all dedicated to revealing these same geometries in the world. In Camera Work, the photography magazine he published from 1903 to 1917, Stieglitz reproduced modern paintings and similarly modern photographs such as Abstraction, Porch Shadows by Paul Strand (1890–1976) (fig. 36.12). Strand’s image is an unmanipulated photograph (that is, not altered during the development process) of the shadows of a railing cast across a porch and onto a white patio table turned on its side. Its debt to Picasso and Braque’s Cubism was not lost on the magazine’s audience.

Fig. 36.12

Paul Strand, ABSTRACTION, PORCH SHADOWS

1916. Silver-platinum print, 1215/16" × 95/8". Inv. Pho1981-35-10.

When Stieglitz published this photograph in the last issue of Camera Work, June 1917, he called it “the direct expression of today.”

Credit: © Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive

In 1925, Stieglitz moved into an apartment on the thirtieth floor of the 36-story Shelton Towers (see map 36.1), and from his window, he began to photograph the city rising around him—the grids of buildings under construction, the rhythmic repetition of window and curtain wall, the blocks of form delineated by the intense contrast of black and white in the photographic print (fig. 36.13). In the skyscraper, he believed he had discovered the underlying geometry of modernity itself.

Fig. 36.13

Alfred Stieglitz, FROM MY WINDOW AT THE SHELTON, NORTH

1931. Gelatin silver print, 9½" × 79/16". The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Ford Motor Company Collection. Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987 (1987.1100.11).

The Shelton Towers, on Lexington Avenue between 48th and 49th Streets, was built in 1924. At 36 stories, it was the tallest building in the world, a record soon surpassed, as this photograph, taken from Stieglitz’s suite on the thirtieth floor, suggests.

Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence

The International Style

Stieglitz lived in the Shelton Towers for 12 years, and from his window, he witnessed a building boom like none other in the history of architecture. In the second half of the 1920s, the city’s available office space increased by 92 percent. By the early 1930s, after buildings begun before 1929 were completed, the available space increased by another 56 percent. The building frenzy took place in an atmosphere of intense debate among architects themselves. On one side were the traditionalists whose decorative style was epitomized by the Woolworth Building (fig. 36.14). Writing about its neo-Gothic facade, architect Cass Gilbert (1859–1934) described it as follows: “A skyscraper, by its height … a monument whose masses must become more and more inspired the higher it rises. … The Gothic style gave us the possibility of expressing the greatest degree of aspiration … the ultimate note of the mass gradually gaining in spirituality the higher it mounts.” From the modernist point of view, Gilbert’s building represented the height of absurdity, and “Woolworth Gothic” became synonymous with bad taste, but building after building continued to emulate the Woolworth’s emphasis on decorative styling.

ketch elevation, December 31, 1910. Graphite on paper.

Gilbert’s sketch captures the building’s Gothic spirituality even better than actual photographs of the finished building, which was completed in 1913.

Credit: Courtesy of the Library of Congress

On the other side of the debate were those who advocated an austere, clean modernism that revealed its plain geometries. This new architecture would come to be known as the International Style, after Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and Philip Johnson curated another show, in 1932, two years before the “Machine Art” exhibition, called the “International Exhibition of Modern Architecture,” with an accompanying catalog titled The International Style: Architecture since 1922. From the curators’ point of view, a new “controlling” architectural style had emerged in Europe after the war without regard to national tastes or individual concerns (its European manifestations are discussed in Chapter 37). The principles of this new International Style were related to the machines they also admired: pure forms (“architecture as volume rather than mass”) without “arbitrary applied ornament” (a slap at Louis Sullivan’s Chicago School of architecture), and with severe, flat surfaces in its place. The American chosen to represent the style was Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959).

It was Barr who insisted that Wright be included in the exhibition. His colleague Philip Johnson regarded Wright as old-fashioned, of no serious worth, and stylistically inconsistent with the International Style. Wright, in turn, despised both the International Style and Johnson. But he was included because he was a former student of Louis Sullivan and because Europeans considered him the leader of modern architecture. What Wright had done, they understood, was to open up the interior of the building, to destroy the boxlike features that traditionally defined a room.

In his early architecture, like the Robie House (figs. 36.15 and 36.16), Wright had employed many of the same principles that guided architects of the International Style—open interior spaces, steel-frame construction, concrete cantilevers that extended over porches to connect exterior and interior space, a raised first floor to provide for privacy, and walls consisting entirely of windows. But his inspiration was nature—his sense of place—not the machine. He called houses such as the Robie House “Prairie Houses,” because in their openness and horizontality they reflected the Great Plains. The materials he employed were local—brick from local clays, oak woodwork, and so on.

Fig. 36.15

Frank Lloyd Wright, ROBIE HOUSE

Credit: © 2017 Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, AZ/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Furthermore, Wright believed that each house should reflect not just its region but also its owner’s individuality. He abhorred the uniformity that the International Style promoted. This is especially evident at Fallingwater, the house at Bear Run in Pennsylvania that he designed in 1935 for Pittsburgh entrepreneur Edgar Kaufmann, owner of the largest men’s clothing store in the country (fig. 36.17). Wright thought of Fallingwater as consistent with his earlier Prairie Houses because it was wedded to its site. But this site was distinguished by the cascades of Bear Run, falling down over a series of cliffs. Wright opened a quarry on the site to extract local stone and built a three-level house literally over the stream, its enormous cantilevered decks echoing the surrounding cliffs.

Fig. 36.17

Frank Lloyd Wright, FALLINGWATER (KAUFMANN HOUSE)

allingwater, finally, for Wright had to be in harmony with its site, not some white industrial construction plopped into the landscape. “I came to see a building,” Wright wrote in 1936, “primarily … as a broad shelter in the open, related to vista; vista without and vista within. You may see in these various feelings, all taking the same direction, that I was born an American, child of the ground and of space.” Wright’s stunning and original design suggests a distinctly American sensitivity to place (see the Architectural Panoramas of the first and second floors).