Jazz Age
The Jazz Age was a feature of the 1920's, when jazz and
dance became popular. This occurred particularly in the United States, but also in Britain, France and elsewhere. Jazz
played a significant part in wider cultural changes during the period, and its
influence on pop culture continued
long afterwards. Jazz music originated mainly in New Orleans, and is/was a
fusion of African and European music. The Jazz Age is often referred to in
conjunction with the phenomenon referred to as the Roaring Twenties.
The Great Depression
In October 1929 the stock market crashed, wiping out 40 percent of the paper values of common stock. Even after the stock market collapse, however, politicians and industry leaders continued to issue optimistic predictions for the nation's economy. But the Depression deepened, confidence evaporated and many lost their life savings. By 1933 the value of stock on the New York Stock Exchange was less than a fifth of what it had been at its peak in 1929. Business houses closed their doors, factories shut down and banks failed. Farm income fell some 50 percent. By 1932 approximately one out of every four Americans was unemployed.
The core of the problem was the immense disparity between the country's productive capacity and the ability of people to consume. Great innovations in productive techniques during and after the war raised the output of industry beyond the purchasing capacity of U.S. farmers and wage earners. The savings of the wealthy and middle class, increasing far beyond the possibilities of sound investment, had been drawn into frantic speculation in stocks or real estate. The stock market collapse, therefore, had been merely the first of several detonations in which a flimsy structure of speculation had been leveled to the ground.
The presidential campaign of 1932 was chiefly a debate over the causes and possible remedies of the Great Depression. Herbert Hoover, unlucky in entering The White House only eight months before the stock market crash, had struggled tirelessly, but ineffectively, to set the wheels of industry in motion again. His Democratic opponent, Franklin D. Roosevelt, already popular as the governor of New York during the developing crisis, argued that the Depression stemmed from the U.S. economy's underlying flaws, which had been aggravated by Republican policies during the 1920s. President Hoover replied that the economy was fundamentally sound, but had been shaken by the repercussions of a worldwide depression whose causes could be traced back to the war. Behind this argument lay a clear implication: Hoover had to depend largely on natural processes of recovery, while Roosevelt was prepared to use the federal government's authority for bold experimental remedies.
The election resulted in a smashing victory for Roosevelt, who won 22,800,000 votes to Hoover's 15,700,000. The United States was about to enter a new era of economic and political change.
Francis Scott Key Gerald
Fitzgerald, Francis Scott Key (1896-1940) was a star-spangled Princetonian of the Class
of 1917. The poet Robert Browning once wrote that the legend inside his heart
was ``Italy.'' With Fitzgerald it would probably have been ``Princeton.'' He
entered this earthly paradise in the fall of 1913 from the Catholic Newman
School in Hackensack, squeaking past his entrance examinations that September
by the narrowest margin, and hurling himself into extracurricular activities
with so much enthusiasm that he barely survived his first two years.
After three months as
a junior, he withdrew because of ill health and poor grades. Following nine
months of rustication and recuperation at home in St. Paul, Minnesota, he
re-entered as a beginning junior in the fall of 1916. He managed to complete
that academic year and one month of his senior year before withdrawing again to
enter Officers Training in October 1917. The fact that he was never graduated
failed to expunge and indeed probably enhanced his golden memories of Princeton,
Cottage Club, Princeton football, the Triangle Club, The Nassau Lit, and
the Tiger, to say nothing of the look and feel of Prospect
Street in all seasons, and the mossy spires and gargoyles of the neo-Gothic
campus.
Apart from Princeton,
two great forces guided his tragically abbreviated life. One was writing, which
enthralled him in childhood, took up many college hours, supported and harassed
him in maturity, and continued to engage his devotion until his dying day. The
other was his romance with Zelda Sayre, a southern belle from Montgomery,
Alabama, whom he coveted, courted, and at last married, sharing with her a
characteristically hectic life in America and Europe during their great heyday
of the 1920s. It was a manner of life that his chief biographer, Arthur Mizener
has called ``at once representative and dramatic, at moments a charmed and
beautiful success to which he and Zelda were brilliantly equal, and at moments
disastrous beyond the invention of the most macabre imagination.''
This Side of Paradise, which Scribner's published March 26,
1920, and advertised in the Daily Princetonian as a ``Story
about a Princeton Man,'' shows Fitzgerald making all he could of his years at
Princeton. Dean Gauss once wrote of Fitzgerald that he had ``a truly Apollonian
profile like the head on some Greek medallion.'' The same might have been
written of Amory Blaine, Fitzgerald's handsome and insouciant hero, who invents
his way through various love affairs and much bad poetry and indulges his
awakening brain with high intellectual bull sessions. However banal the novel
may seem today, it set Fitzgerald off and running, and he became a regular
contributor of short stories to The Smart Set, The Saturday Evening
Post, and Scribner's Magazine.Selections from these appeared
in Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz
Age, which helped to stamp Fitzgerald forever as a chief spokesman for
the roaring twenties, while his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, accurately
summarized in its title if not in its substance the present and future course
of his life with Zelda. There was also a satirical play, The Vegetable:
or From President to Postman, published in 1923. Two further
short-story collections, All the Sad Young Men and Taps
at Reveille, appeared in 1926 and 1935.
Fitzgerald's best work
in fiction owed little or nothing to Princeton. The Great Gatsby (1925),
generally regarded as his finest novel, eschewed the Princeton scene in favor
of Long Island and New York City. Tender Is the Night (1934)
borrowed its title from Keats and its locale and characters from Fitzgerald's
experiences on the French Riviera in the middle 1920s. Behind the stories of
Gatsby's longing for Daisy Buchanan and Dick Diver's for the beautiful Nicole,
one can discern some of the tragic implications of Fitzgerald's love for Zelda,
the gradual advance of whose mental illness darkened the last years of their
marriage. From time to time he overcame his overdrinking and worked with some
success as filmwriter in Hollywood, where he gathered the material for his
final though unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon. This was
posthumously published in 1941 under the editorship of Edmund Wilson '16, with
whom Fitzgerald had collaborated on ``The Evil Eye'' for the Triangle Club
twenty-five years earlier, and whom he always revered as his ``intellectual
conscience.'' Besides Wilson, the best critics of Fitzgerald's work have nearly
all been Princetonians, with biographies by Arthur Mizener '30, and Andrew
Turnbull '42, and critical studies by Henry Dan Piper '39, and Robert Sklar
'58. Turnbull also edited a volume of Fitzgerald's letters.
Zelda Fitzgerald
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (July 24, 1900 – March 10, 1948),
born Zelda Sayre in Montgomery Alabama, was an American
novelist and the wife of writer Francis Scott Fitzgerald.
From early adolescence Zelda was a
formidable presence in Southern society, outshining all other belles as the
star in ballet recitals and elite country club events. Shortly after finishing
high school, she met F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance, but was
unimpressed and agreed with her family on his limited financial prospects to
provide for a family. With his professed infatuation, a light flirtation
evolved into a lengthy long distance courtship of weekly letters, with
Fitzgerald aware of her uncommitted dating of other men. Determined to obtain
financial security, and thus Zelda, Fitzgerald increased his writing from
articles to his first book. On March 20, 1920, Scribner's Sons agreed to
publish his novel This Side of
Paradise and Fitzgerald
immediately cabled Zelda, who agreed to travel to New York to marry and live
with him. The couple wed in New York on April 3, 1920, and later moved to
Europe. While Scott received acclaim for The Great Gatsby and his short stories, and the couple
socialized with literary luminaries like Ernest Hemingway,
their marriage was a tangle of jealousy, resentment and acrimony. Scott used
their relationship as material in his novels, even lifting snippets from
Zelda's diary and assigning them to his fictional heroines. Seeking an artistic
identity of her own, Zelda wrote magazine articles and short stories, and at 27
became obsessed with a career as a ballerina, practicing to exhaustion.
The strain of her tempestuous marriage,
Scott's increasing alcoholism,
and her growing instability presaged Zelda's admittance in 1930 to the Sheppard Pratt sanatorium in Towson, Maryland , where she was
diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
While there, she wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, Save Me The Waltz, which was published in 1932. Scott was furious that she
had used material from their life together, though he would go on to do the
same, as in Tender Is The Night, published in
1934; the two novels provide contrasting portrayals of the couple's failing
marriage.
Back in America, Scott went to Hollywood
where he tried screen writing and began a relationship with the
movie columnist Sheilah Graham.
In 1936, Zelda entered the Highland Mental Hospital. Scott died in
Hollywood in 1940, having last seen Zelda a year and a half earlier. She spent
her remaining years working on a second novel, which she never completed, and
she painted extensively. In 1948 she died when the hospital in which she was
residing caught fire. Interest in the Fitzgeralds resurged shortly after her
death: the couple has been the subject of popular books, movies and scholarly
attention. After a life as an emblem of the Jazz Age, Roaring Twenties,
and Lost Generation,
Zelda Fitzgerald posthumously found a new role: after a popular 1970 biography
portrayed her as a victim of an overbearing husband, she became a feminist
icon.
What is a bootlegger?
According to the urban dictionary, a bootlegger is a person who sells alcohol off hours.
Orriginally a bootlegger was a person who smuggled contraband onto a ship in
the long boots made of waxed leather used to keep dry when entering and exiting
small boats used to get to and from a ship at anchor. Contraban was hidden
inside the boots in order to sneak it onto the ship.
