1920 (45 page)

The latter was “a pillar of the Harlem intellectual community, [who] urged African American composers to create ‘jazz classics,' not the ‘trashy type' of jazz played in clubs and cabarets. Hot jazz and blues would never be viewed as ‘great Negro music,' he confidently predicted.”

Shortly after taking up residence at Howard, Locke found that he had attracted a groupie in the student Langston Hughes, who had not yet worked for Woodson, not yet begun to bus tables. One summer, Hughes and Locke went to Europe, and the student ended up following the professor everywhere, learning all that he could from his polymathic idol. Locke enjoyed the adoration; it is not every man of his vocation who becomes a Valentino to a student. Historian and researcher David Levering Lewis informs us that

Locke was as much in his element in Paris as on the Howard campus. He turned the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume into classrooms for Hughes. Seated in the Parc Monceau, his favorite, or strolling through the Luxembourg gardens, discoursing in French with hyper-literate Frenchmen and Francophone colonials, the little professor mesmerized his long-pursued companion with what seemed an incomparable display of learning, urbanity, and empathy. They had a “glorious time,” and later in the summer met again in Venice.

When he wasn't enlightening Hughes, Locke was writing some of the most influential essays of the Harlem Renaissance. As historian Lewis notes, Locke “observed that European artists had already been rejuvenated at the African fountain. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque found in African sculpture the insight that led them into cubism. And sculptors like Constantin Brâncu
i and Wilhelm Lehmbruck were liberated through African sculpture to powerful restatements of human form. If they can, why can't we? Locke asked.”

It was a few years later, in 1920 or close to it, that a controversial phrase entered the African-American vocabulary: “the new Negro.” It was he who was most responsible for the Harlem Renaissance. It was he whose example would inspire and thereby elevate the old Negro. And it was he who must, through his demeanor and accomplishments, lead to the new Caucasian, inspire him to accept the black man as an equal, not just artistically but in all ways.

Did Alain Locke coin the phrase? Probably not; at least, he never claimed to have done so. But he certainly made frequent use of it, as it suited his purposes to perfection. In his widely read essay “Enter the New Negro,” Locke first offered a plaint for the scarcity of black culture—“The Negro mind reaches out as yet to nothing but American events, American ideas”—and then followed with a prescient warning about what might happen if the scarcity did not become a plenitude—“The only safeguard for mass relations in the future must be provided in the carefully maintained contacts of the enlightened minorities of both race groups.”

The essay was all the talk among enlightened minorities of both races, who believed in carefully maintaining contacts. But they were, as Locke acknowledged, only minorities, and too small in number in 1920 to influence the violence and injustice that lay ahead for the races.

It was partway through a later, equally controversial essay that Locke found it appropriate to quote a few lines of poetry.

We have tomorrow

Bright before us

Like a flame.

Yesterday, a night-gone thing

A sun-down name.

And dawn today

Broad arch above the road we came.

We march!

Langston Hughes could not have been more proud.

AMONG OTHERS, THE NATION'S LEADING
philosopher, William James, brother of the novelist Henry, kept an eye on Harlem in 1920, trying to understand the significance of events beyond the obvious. He succeeded to a remarkable extent. In fact, believes Ann Douglas, it might be said that James

laid the philosophical basis for the American preference for popular culture over elite and self-consciously difficult art, for the choice of culture of politics that gave the Harlem Renaissance its point of origin. His notion of American culture of a plural and heterogeneous affair of simultaneous affects, collaboratively improvised out of what he called “the will to personate,” was a viewpoint congenial to black aims and achievements; what the syncopated black ragtime music of the 1890s and 1900s was to Euro-American classical music, the quicksilver and irregular Jamesian discourse was to traditional Western thought.

IT WAS NOT THE GREAT
migration of African-Americans from Southern cotton fields to Northern industry that first improved relations between blacks and whites in the United States. It was not the integration of baseball that deserves the credit. Nor was it the
Brown v. Board of Education
decision or Lyndon Johnson's Civil Rights Act a decade later. It was, rather, the black musicians and other artists and thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance and the white audiences who paid ever more attention to what was being sung and played and written that planted the seeds, admittedly slow to grow, for the civil-rights movement—all the way back in 1920. Art was the common denominator between the races: different kinds of art, surely, but causing the same basic impulses, the same tugs of humanity between black and white, the same responses to life at its most basic, the same pumping of juices from head to toe, the same responses to the primitive and the civilized alike. The music, the novels, the poems, the essays—they were the start of it all. The Harlem Renaissance is remembered by too few Americans today, but the feelings that radiated from it are still a monument that stands in the center of our cultural square.

All that is missing is the name of Paul Robeson carved into the base.

T
HE ICONIC IMAGE OF
1920, however, was a white woman, a vapid young thing with daringly short hair, daringly short skirts, and daringly bold and unladylike habits. Heavy on the lipstick and rouge, light on the self-restraint and traditional manners. And around her neck, perhaps, a long strand of fake pearls that she had tied into a loop, whirling the end of it around in circles like a child's toy as, fueled by bootleg alcohol, she whirled herself around the dance floor, frantic and loose-limbed and uninhibited in her contortions, exerting herself with “a hint of sexual frenzy that many an anxious elder found alarming”—and doing so long into the night.

In real life, she was a presence. As a symbol, she was a delusion. There could be no greater misrepresentation of the year, no greater irony when we think of the troubled, cold-hearted revolutionary period that had now begun, than what so many of us see in the mind's eye when the era is recalled to us.

HAVING WON THE RIGHT TO
vote, a number of women believed that they had in the process won the right to redefine the very notion of femininity. Geoffrey Perrett summarizes:

Before the First World War women were arrested for smoking cigarettes in public, for using profanity, for appearing on public beaches without stockings, for driving automobiles without a man beside them, for wearing outlandish attire (for example, shorts, slacks, men's hats), and for not wearing their corsets. Women accused of such offenses against public order and common decency were summoned before the courts, not only of small towns, but of big cities such as Chicago.

In less than a decade these prosecutions stopped, simply because they seemed as absurd as they were futile.

Also absurd, at least according to some who observed the behavior of women in 1920, were the lengths to which some of them went to pursue a redefining of their societal roles.

“The girl who jumped on to a table at a Harlem nightclub,” writes Lucy Moore, “and started swinging her arms wildly above her head as the [music] played was a type of woman America had never seen before. The word ‘flapper' described a chick desperately flapping her wings as she tried to fly, although she had not yet grown adult feathers.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it also described “a young woman, esp. with an implication of flightiness or lack of decorum.”

What Moore does not tell us is that the word seems to be of late nineteenth-century British origin and referred to a prostitute.

There was no more obvious, or popular, means for a flapper to lose her decorum publicly than to do the Charleston, one of the most popular dances of the time. In his book
From Harding to Hiroshima
, Barrington Boardman describes the moves.

Originating with Southern blacks, this fast fox-trot had four hundred different steps, and instructions for the basic moves were as follows: “You have to learn to toe in … then stand on
the balls of your feet, pigeon-toed … your body swings from side to side … the knees knock when they come together … make it snappy.” Most adults considered the dance overly physical and lacking in grace, and it would be banned by many colleges.

THE OTHER TWO MOST POPULAR
dances of the decade, just starting to catch on in 1920, were the Black Bottom, “which involved hopping forward and backward and slapping the rump,” and whose name alone was enough to bring a chuckle in Harlem and to be considered a breach of etiquette elsewhere; and, second, the Varsity Drag, more of an upper-class Caucasian specialty. Sometimes a young woman might find herself spinning so crazily to the latter that, although she could not actually flap her wings, she
could
flap her skirt—in some cases part way up the thigh!

Everyone!

Down on your heels

Up on your toes

Stay after school

Learn how it goes

Everybody does the varsity drag! …

Babe:

It's hotter than hot!

Newer than new!

Meaner than mean!

Bluer than blue

Gets as much applause as waving the flag!

It was madness, claimed the many who were offended by the new American woman, freedom run amok—and not the kind of actions truly representative of the era, nor the kind of actions representative of most of the era's young women, who comported themselves just like their mothers and older sisters did. It was true: flappers were a minority of the female population. But in their eye-popping aberrations, they hoped to catch the eye of a wealthy young man watching from the back of the speakeasy. Or,
if not that, perhaps they would catch the lens of a photographer who, even back then, could not resist one of journalism's fundamental principles: blowing the atypical out of proportion to attract readers and viewers. Unfortunately, too many historians, relying on these photographs and accompanying news reports as firsthand sources, began the long, gradual process of distorting the truth of the year. The extraordinary became the norm, the norm too dull to be newsworthy.

Many of these footloose women were loose in other ways as well. They had already been drinking with men; now they went further. The title character in Willa Cather's
A Lost Lady
, Marian Forrester, could hardly believe it, expressing her bewilderment to a young male admirer:

“And tell me, Niel, do women really smoke after dinner now with the men, nice women? I shouldn't like it. It's all very well for actresses, but women can't be attractive if they do everything men do.”

“I think just now it's the fashion for women to make themselves comfortable before anything else.”

Mrs. Forrester glanced at him as if he had said something shocking. … “Don't men like women to be different from themselves? They used to.”

It had nothing to do with what men wanted: at issue was what
women
wanted. And as Perrett previously pointed out, they were no longer being arrested for public displays of puffery. In fact, “There was a huge increase in the number of female cigarette smokers,” so much so that cigarette manufacturers were turning out
sixteen times
as many of their products in 1920 as they had in 1900. The reason, overwhelmingly, was the newly enfranchised voter.

After writing the preceding in
The Smoke of the Gods: A Social History of Tobacco
, I cited the work of psychoanalyst A. A. Brill, who came to a conclusion that he summarized as follows: “More women now do the same work as men do [the result of their having taken over previously male-dominated jobs during the war]. Many women bear no children; those who do bear have fewer children. Feminine traits are masked. Cigarettes,
which are equated with men, become torches of freedom. Then, perhaps catching himself, realizing that he sounded insufficiently Freudian for the era, he shifted gears. ‘Smoking,' he said, ‘is a sublimation of oral eroticism; holding a cigarette in the mouth excites the oral zone.'”