9 9 F. SCOTT FITZGERALD’S STUNNING ESSAY “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1931) looks back on the early 1920s as years when “a whole race”—first the young, then everyone else—fell under the erotic spell of jazz and went “hedonistic, deciding on pleasure.” Soon “people all the way up to fifty, had joined the dance.” Eventually, and Fitzgerald implies inevitably, fun lovers started vanishing “into the dark maw of violence”—insanity, murder, suicide. Fitzgerald’s perspective is typical of his elite white peers, who often presented fun as a prelude to catastrophe. It also makes for a tidy, boom-and-bust story. If the twenties were (in his words) “the most expensive orgy in history,” a party fueled “by great filling stations full of money” that roamed from Palm Beach to the French Riviera, then it follows from this ruling-class reasoning that the end was near when the rich turned neurotic (somewhere around 1927); nearer still when they had to travel with “citizens” who had the “human value of Pekinese, bivalves, cretins, goats” (around 1928); and that the whole kaleidoscopic soap bubble had to pop with the great crash of 1929. Jazz may have turned the ignition, but money, by this argument, filled the tank.
And there’s truth to it. America’s excesses during the “age of play” fattened the movie, music, games, sports, tobacco, and travel industries. Bootlegging gave the crime syndicate unprecedented new power. Already-rich rentiers like Harry Crosby reached scary heights of extravagance and danger. And during its meteoric rise in 1929, the stock market itself became a source of excitement that attracted many first-time lower-to-middle-class gamblers. Hence, in the story of 1920s prosperity, the great crash was a cultural climax—what Crosby recorded in his diary as “exciting story millions lost in an hour suicides disorder panic.” The big losers were bankers and celebrities, and as usual their failures filled the tabloids. But as John Kenneth Galbraith cautioned, “only one and a half million people, out of a population of approximately 120 million and of between 29 and 30 million families, had an active association of any sort with the stock market. And not all of these were speculators.” At least in the short term, John Q. Public was largely untouched.
By the same token, then, the mass of Americans who embraced the twenties’ vogue for witty, acrobatic, joyous revolt didn’t need buckets of cash to do so. They didn’t require biplanes and Stutz Bearcats. Like Pinkster revelers and argonauts before them, they fashioned their fun from what they had at hand—they bobbed their own hair, staged their own stunts, bubbled their own bathtub gin. It was the fun of improvised participation, and superstar tramps like Charlie Chaplin and Clara Bow inspired even the lowliest of citizens to join in. This latest iteration of American fun wasn’t born of Gilded Age luxury. It was born of Buddy Bolden’s reckless innovations, it was an all-hands showdown with Plymouth Plantation, and it emboldened crowds for any eventuality. This will to party was the twenties’ cultural legacy, the playful one, that handily survived the crash of ’29. Speculators jumped hand in hand from skyscrapers, and broken-down celebrities slipped away into asylums (Chaplin and Bow included), but once it had been released onto an eager mainstream, the risky, rebellious fun of the people stumbled its way through the economy’s rubble. When speculators went bust, big-time bootleggers, whose business kept bubbling, snatched up their half-million-dollar yachts for a song (for as little as $5,000 apiece) and “decorated them with pretty girls in bathing suits.” Prohibition was repealed in 1933, but the struggle for a pious America raged on. Dance marathons—which had only grown longer, wilder, and more dangerous since their inception in the early twenties—were widely banned in 1934. And that year the Hays Office finally got serious.
IN THE EARLY 1930s, with the advent of sound, movies were more salaciously fun than ever, assisted in large part by a pair of Brooklyn bonfires—Clara Bow (returning from her breakdown as a hot-tempered, whip-cracking, half–Native American gambling addict in the border-crossing talkie Call Her Savage), and the censors’ bête noire herself, Mae West, whose 1933 film debut, She Done Him Wrong, based on her Gay Nineties comedy Diamond Lil, did to Hollywood what she had done to Broadway: dragged it through the seamy underworld, once again bedeviling viewers with a gleefully unrepentant Bowery madame, this time Lady Lou. Kindled by West’s sulfurous legal history, bellowed by gusts of rave reviews, and promoted with an actual stunt still shot in which the famed evangelist Billy Sunday gamely threatens her with a barroom chair, She Done Him Wrong’s brushfire swept the nation, engulfing even southern and remote midwestern markets. It was also nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.
Variety called West “as hot an issue as Hitler.” For now she had a formidable opponent. There was a new pastor in the parish, Catholics, who had stopped playing along with the studios’ ruse. Following the Catholic Church’s uproar against MGM’s 1927 picture The Callahans and the Murphys, which comprised a shameless stream of Irish-American slurs, Hays had deputized U.S. Catholics to form the Legion of Decency, tasking them with writing the 1930 Production Code. Later known as the Hays Code, these new rules held films to high moral standards: criminals had to be detestable, crimes had to be punished, and only intimations of marital sex were permitted, and never between members of different races or (it didn’t even need to be stated) same-sex partners. Until 1933 and Mae West’s unprecedented onscreen eroticism, the Code—like the 1920s Formula—was distorted and ignored by its enforcers. But as Marybeth Hamilton puts it, despite the Hays Office’s attempts to make Lady Lou into a contemptible cartoon, “West’s acting style had subverted all [their] efforts to veil Lou and her surroundings in comedy.” Her character was real, born of the streets, and her effect was terrifically seductive—especially to young women, which of course was the Legion’s greatest fear.
That same year, Henry James Forman’s hand-wringing book, Our Movie-Made Children, tried to arm priests, parents, and reformers with evidence that impressionable girls—especially reform-school girls—had been aroused and damaged by Hollywood eros. Forman opens fire on the youth who provide him testimonials. He smirks at the “young Negro high-school girl” for wanting to “possess” Clara Bow’s “It.” He makes examples of “tots” who identified with “robbers” over “coppers” and eventually went on to join “the racket.” American kids were blazing out, having fun, and Forman blamed Hollywood: “When a girl tells of learning to handle a cigarette like Nazimova, to smile like Norma Shearer, to use her eyes like Joan Crawford, she is not necessarily an immigrant’s daughter. She is merely a daughter of Eve.” But the apparent foreigners and de facto whores were, to judge from these testimonials, mostly self-confident adolescents who, like Clara Bow herself, were finding their comfortable place in the crowd: “ ‘I have learned from the movies,’ a high school girl boldly announces, ‘how to be a flirt, and I found out at parties and elsewhere the coquette is the one who enjoys herself the most.’ ” They have learned from motion pictures how to banter, talk back, and “hug,” and as one boy reports, “how to kiss a girl on her ears, neck and cheeks, as well as on her mouth.” Kids were getting a sexual education and, yes, they were using it—as were at least 33 percent of the five hundred students who took Forman’s survey. (He suspected the actual percentage was higher.) He scorns the “sixteen-year-old girl” who “so pertinently, so pathetically” calls such acquisitions “talents,” but fairly clearly she is no Mae West. She is just reporting what her peer group values. Unlike Bowery b’hoys who did their demagogues’ bidding, many of Forman’s “movie-made children” come across as lively, thoughtful citizens: some speak critically of the movies’ strong influence, others see movies as helpful primers for fine-tuning what they would probably do anyway—which is to say, have the kinds of taboo fun that had been defining American youth for over a decade. Forman sniffed that some parents even “may desire this species of schooling for their daughters.” But parents who took Forman’s anxious position went on the rampage.
Responding to public outcry, fearing reprisals, but still determined to cash in on West, Paramount severely vetted Mae West’s sexuality—making her next heroine, in I’m No Angel (1933), a gold digger instead of a nymphomaniac. The Hays officials were delighted by the results, and fan magazines joined the general humbug, touting West herself as a humble church lady, but her mounting success was her greatest threat—to men in particular, as Hamilton argues. It was her brazen attitude, not her canned characters, that was causing all the damage. Girls filled the theaters at women-only viewings and took to imitating her walk and talk. A new generation of self-sufficient flappers, less dependent than ever on (often financially strapped) men, took notice that pleasure, pluck, and slang could be slung and shot like John Wayne’s pistols. This threat wasn’t lost on the Hays Office, who well knew their public’s double standard: “The very man who will guffaw at Mae West’s performance as a reminder of the ribald days of his past will resent her effect upon the young, when his daughter imitates the Mae West wiggle before her boyfriends and mouths ‘Come up and see me sometime.’ ” Hence, though she stayed onscreen throughout the decade, West became the Hays Office’s pet project. When they responded to Catholic pressure in 1934 and began to apply the Code in earnest, her trademark ruffian was reformed as the heroine of schlock morality tales.
The Great Depression shared a calendar with the golden age of Hollywood, an era of glitzily luxuriant escapism when Fred Astaire glided with Ginger Rogers, the Three Stooges and Marx Brothers redefined silly, and Busby Berkeley mastered the mass human ornament. This decade of the Dust Bowl, soup lines, and Hoovervilles deserved to be soothed by such crowd-pleasing frivolity. Yet its best filmic statement on Jazz Age fun looked economic misery full in the face. Modern Times, Chaplin’s 1936 masterpiece, and his extravagant farewell to the silent era, butts the same Tramp who braved the Yukon up against the worst the thirties could dish out: factory drudgery, workers’ revolt, unemployment, abject poverty. First called Commonwealth, then The Masses, it reflected the auteur’s growing anti-capitalist stance. Defiant as ever—in a movie whose tagline is “humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness”—his Tramp takes refuge in ridiculous play and lives on the constant lam from the cops. A portrait of Marx’s original reified laborer, the Tramp develops a manic repetitive-stress injury from tightening bolts on Electro Steel Corp.’s assembly line. After bodily rotating through the machinery’s cogs, he emerges a pranking and sex-crazed imp who cranks random levers until the turbines blow and squirts oil from a can into the factory president’s face.
In and out of asylums and jail, in and out of work, he falls in love with a fellow rebel, “a gamin child of the waterfront” played by the flashing-eyed Paulette Goddard. They escape together from a police wagon, knocking a cop unconscious along the way. A Bonnie and Clyde of puckish fun, the Tramp and the Gamin pursue their happiness on the fringes of law and civil society. Exploiting his temporary job as a department store night watchman, they freeload at the lunch counter and cut loose in the fourth-floor toy department, where, blindfolded and roller-skating backward, the Tramp cuts breathtaking capers along an unguarded ledge. Compromising their dream of a middle-class home, they call her shanty along the docks “paradise” despite its tin-can tableware and collapsing walls, floors, and furniture. When at last they get their break as performers in a dinner theater—the Gamin as a dancer, the Tramp as an outlandish singing waiter (Chaplin’s mockery of his first speaking role)—cops apprehend the Gamin for vagrancy and send them packing once again. In earlier versions, to placate the Hays Office, Chaplin sent his Gamin to the convent. In the final version, they march off into the sunset—poor and pursued but defiantly smiling.
ONE LEADING LIGHT of the Harlem Renaissance wouldn’t publish her first book until long after Harlem had fallen out of vogue. Zora Neale Hurston, by many accounts, lived in constant pursuit of “fun”—or what she herself called “the terrific kick that comes from taking a chance.” This self-proclaimed “Queen of the Niggerati” contributed to The New Negro and was a founder of Fire!!. She cut a spirited image on the 1920s scene—whether crashing swanky hotels dressed as an “Asian Princess” or speaking out against Marcus Garvey’s anti-Americanism. But she didn’t make her name as a folklorist and novelist until deep into the Great Depression. What she uncovered then was a cultural revelation. In contrast to Dorothea Lange’s dismal photographs and Steinbeck’s downtrodden Joad family, Hurston’s treasure trove of jokes, tales, songs, and novels showcased, among many other features, the fun of rural southern blacks—a population too low on the national class ladder to have been helped by the boom or even hurt by the crash.
Though Hurston frequently lied about the year of her birth (somewhere between 1891 and 1903), it is known that she grew up in all-black Eatonville, Florida, “a city,” as she characterized it, “of five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools, and no jail house.” Her father was the town’s sometime mayor who thought blacks shouldn’t have “too much spirit,” but her mother told her to “jump at de sun,” advice driven home by the many dancers, drinkers, fighters, partiers, and athletes she so admired around town. Among this fun-loving population, she held the cutthroat storytellers on Joe Clark’s porch in highest regard. Only the threat of a hickory switch could get her to leave before a story’s climax. For young Hurston their stories shone like fact. In addition to the rattlesnakes, gators, and bears that added thrills to Eatonville’s daily life, “God, Devil, Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Sis Cat, Brer Bear, Lion, Buzzard, and all the wood folk walked and talked like natural men.” Even decades later, when she studied at Barnard under the famed anthropologist Franz Boas, her childhood enthrallment with jokes and folktales shaped the way she thought, worked, and played. Langston Hughes himself (swallowing his lingering bitterness over a plagiarism dispute) remembered her as the “most amusing” of the “niggerati” and cited her “side-splitting anecdotes, humorous tales, and tragicomic stories” as proof. In her pursuit of such folklore in the 1930s, she got down to the root-ball of Jazz Age fun.
It was while working for Boas—and later for the Guggenheims, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and her rich white “godmother,” Charlotte Osgood Mason (whose primitivist demands didn’t irk her as much as they did Hughes)—that Hurston kept returning to the Deep South, and later the Caribbean, and sharpening her techniques for collecting materials. After her initial failure in 1927, when Boas scolded her for gathering old news, she learned to exploit her southern charm and, most important, her secret weapon: being black, she could penetrate the “feather-bed of resistance” that kept out white colleagues like Boas and John Lomax.
Learning to suppress her “carefully accented Barnardese,” Hurston went native in Polk County, Florida. She packed a revolver, frequented job sites and jook joints, nearly got herself killed by a bluesman’s ex-lover, and spent years getting acquainted with the humor and hoodoo that inform her (uneven) first novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), her folklore collection Mules and Men (1935), and most of her writing to follow. The fun she saw there eased even the hardest of lives. Lumberjacks were “poets of the swinging blade” and phosphate miners “Black men laughing and singing.” Railroad workers, swinging hammers, sang a steady chant:
Oh, let’s shake it! Hank!
Oh, let’s break it! Hank!
Oh, let’s shake it, Hank!
Oh, just a hair! Hank!
Orange pickers manned their ladders, “singing, laughing, cursing, boasting of last night’s love” and didn’t “say embrace when they [meant] they slept with a woman.” And at night in the “jooks” the rhythm kept rolling and the people kept “balling,” the sexually inflected black slang term that Hurston translated as “having fun”: “Dancing the square dance. Dancing the scrunch. Dancing the belly-rub. Knocking the right hat off the wrong head, and backing it up with a switch-blade.” The dancing and joking, often tinged with violence, sometimes erupted into the dozens—that “risky pleasure,” Hurston calls it, of trading verbal blows about an enemy’s family members until the weakest and least witty eventually lose their cool. Clarence Major calls the dozens a “test” of “emotional strength.” Dozens were likewise the forte of Lorenzo Staulz, Buddy Bolden’s profane vocalist who could challenge his whole audience to verbal jousts. This cousin to cutting contests, this ancestor to rap music’s chest-bumping rivalry, becomes in Hurston’s writing the razor’s edge of fun. Its graceful slices, dodges, and parries sharpen the wits, strengthen the self, and delight any onlookers—right up to the brink of violent collapse. “If you have no faith in your personal courage and confidence in your arsenal, don’t try it.”
In Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), widely regarded as one of the most important twentieth-century American novels, it’s the dozens that sets Janie, the protagonist, free. Confined in her marriage to Joe Starks, Eatonville’s big-talking mayor (a combination of Hurston’s father and what she called “Negrotarian” race leaders like DuBois), Janie is “classed-off” from all of Eatonville’s fun—its storytelling sessions, its “contest[s] in hyperbole,” its hilarious funeral for Matt Bonner’s mule. Only when she hears Joe mocking her aging body does she sling the razor tongue of a Ma Rainey or Bessie Smith. Verbally, she does “the thing that Saul’s daughter had done to David.” She castrates him in front of the other men:
“Talkin’ ’bout me lookin’ old! When you pull down yo’ britches, you look lak de change uh life.”
“Great God from Zion!” Sam Watson gasped. “Y’ll really playin’ de dozens tuhnight.”
“Wha—whut’s dat you said?” Joe challenged, hoping his ears had fooled him.
“You heard her, you ain’t blind,” Walter taunted.
“Ah ruther be shot with tacks than tuh hear dat ’bout mahself,” Lige Moss commiserated.
Joe Starks, never recovering his pride, ultimately withers and dies. After a brief mourning period, Janie lets down her hair and meets a fun young drifter who goes by Tea Cake—based on a twenty-three-year-old undergraduate with whom Hurston had an affair. Eatonville scorns him for being beneath Janie’s station, but she loves him for asking her to play checkers—or go fishing, attend barbecues, or just fool around. Uninterested in Janie’s class or money, he takes her into his world of migrant workers in the Everglades, or what they call “the Muck.” Down off her pedestal and among the vibrant crowd—America’s least-valued crowd of “permanent transients with no attachments”—Janie discovers an unlikely paradise of “pianos living three lifetimes in one” and “Blues made and used right on the spot.” Free to be herself within this civil society of “dancing, fighting, singing, crying, laughing, winning, and losing,” she finally gets to join the fun.
IN MODERNIZING FOLK CULTURE, Buddy Bolden & Company had gotten it ready for war. They had weaponized it. For the “age of play” wasn’t an easygoing time. It staged some of America’s great social struggles—between drinkers and drys, blacks and whites, women and men—and often these struggles came to blows. But even in this age of outsize personalities who spoke their minds and strutted their stuff, the technologies of fun, born of slave society, taught everyday Americans to spin their conflicts into pleasurable collisions. The stock market crashed, and the flood of rich slummers soon dried up in Harlem, but jazz, and its joyous revolt, just kept growing.
Throughout the 1930s, swing dancers goaded jazz bands to grow bigger, blow louder, and new copycat Savoys sparked urban dance scenes all across the country. But Cat’s Corner, in Harlem, was still the engine room. In the late 1930s it was ruled by King Leon James, a tall, lanky member of the Jolly Fellows street gang and winner of the Harvest Moon jitterbug contest. Even on the jumpingest Saturday nights, the corner stayed empty until the King strolled in with his chain-swinging, coin-flipping entourage. The scuffle started at the base of the pecking order (the “scrubs”) and always ended with the King himself, after which followed a respectful intermission.
One night, when the King had finished his set, a seventeen-year-old scrub named Albert Minns swept his partner into Cat’s Corner. He imitated the King’s new moves like a pro (plagiarism that was punishable by broken bones), but then he added trickier moves of his own, flying acrobatics like the “back flip,” “over the head,” and “snatch”—moves that eventually got “the Lindy off the ground” and anticipated the marvels of 1980s break dancing. The stunt was certain to earn a drubbing by the other Jolly Fellows—had the King not been so duly impressed. The prank’s success, if nothing else, showed the power of audacity within the Savoy hierarchy. It helped, of course, that Minns could dance. The two were combining efforts within a year, and Al Minns himself went on to rule Cat’s Corner. The fame Shorty Snowden originally brought to the Savoy had hardened into landmark, legend, so much so that a mock-up of the ballroom was erected at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, where the Lindy Hop was canonized.
The Lindy or the “jitterbug” wouldn’t take hold until 1936, the year it was associated with the white clarinetist and bandleader Benny Goodman—the year, that is, that jazz became “swing.” The word spread fast: suddenly the jitterbug whipped and flipped on screens, stages, and dance floors nationwide. Around this same time, the flamboyant street culture that had gotten its start at Harlem’s Savoy was changing the dancing and dressing styles of America’s inner-city youth—in particular, young African-American “hepcats” and Latin American pachucos and pachucas. Loyal to their idol Cab Calloway, the men in these subcultures wore sleek, wide fedoras and flashy two-tone round-toe shoes. The men crafted loose and flowing suits, the women long skirts and flapping cardigans, all of which dramatized the Lindy’s power and grace. The dance and its styles were a proud performance—of strength, invention, high spirits, talent—and it coursed from the Savoy and L.A.’s Diana Ballroom to the high streets and sidewalks of America’s cities. Possibly as a nod to Cab Calloway’s scat singing, they self-identified as “zoot suiters.” But they were no stooges, no Bowery b’hoys—though black ones “conked” their long hair with slickening products in a style reminiscent of the old soap locks. Perfecting Buddy Bolden’s dance-music tradition, they gave to jazz as much as they took: moves, style, attitude, jive. No “movie-made children,” these kids were the authors of popular culture.
In an age when Hollywood was marshalling its forces to wipe “miscegenation” off the silver screen, swing dance was proving more effective than ever at bringing races and ethnicities together—close together. Malcolm X, who had been a zoot suiter at the Savoy in the early 1940s, looked back on its electric, multiracial fun: “I just about went wild! Hamp’s band wailing, I was whirling girls so fast their skirts were snapping. Black girls, brownskins, high yellows, even a couple of the white girls there. Boosting them over my hips, my shoulders, into the air.… Circling, tap-dancing, I was underneath them when they landed—doing the ‘flapping eagle,’ ‘the kangaroo,’ and the ‘split.’ ” The historian Luis Alvarez explores the pleasure and tension generated by swing dancers’ racial mixing. In Los Angeles, major dance halls represented a full sample of the region’s complex demographics: blacks, whites, Mexicans, Filipinos, Chinese, and Japanese. “Many zoot suiters,” he writes, “broke public taboos against integration and racial mixing by socializing together and participating in [overtly diverse] public events”; the results themselves were often mixed—dancing, competing, sometimes rumbling—but the building up and breaking of tension was engineered into this subculture’s fun, its “sheer enjoyment,” eros dancing and tangling with thanatos.
Sandra Gibson throws the legendary Al Minns in the Savoy Ballroom’s Cat’s Corner, 1939. (Courtesy of Cornell Capa, Magnum Images.)
Throughout New York City, not just in Harlem, swing bands drew radically diverse crowds: “every couple, almost,” Dizzy Gillespie (who zooted, too) said, “was a mixed couple one way or the other. That was the age of unity.” Swing was especially popular, he observed, among black and white Communist Party members. But larger society didn’t share that love. In the early 1940s, when their subculture gained force and their styles and attitudes became more visible, zoot suiters and pachuco/as took it from all sides. Zoot suits themselves, constructed of ample fabric, were declared illegal in 1942—for hoarding textiles during wartime. Disliked by whites, disowned by adults who hated their flash, zoot suiters inhabited, as Shane White and Graham White have shown, the abject new category of “juvenile delinquency.” Even J. A. Rogers, the journalist who touted jazz’s “joyous revolt” in Alain Locke’s New Negro anthology, decried zoot suiters in 1943 as the “revolt of callow youth against convention and authority.” Zoot suiters strutted the worst of jazz’s “morally anarchic spirit.”
Their racial mixing was also seen as a threat, as unpatriotic, disgusting, enraging, especially by white U.S. soldiers and sailors, who were often forbidden to attend jazz clubs. Indeed, in May 1943, when city health authorities ordered the Savoy shut down, claiming its “role in facilitating the spread of venereal disease among servicemen,” investigative reporting by the local black press unearthed a different motive: “Mixed Dancing Closed Savoy Ballroom.” Their case was sound. In comparison with the downtown sex clubs and brothels that somehow eluded the authorities’ notice, the Savoy, as they put it, looked like a “Christian youth center.”
Later that same month, a long-running tension between zoot suiters and service members (often with the assistance of cops) erupted into the so-called Zoot Suit Riots—just the latest wave of race riots to spread throughout Los Angeles County. Having long been ridiculed by soldiers and sailors as femmes, cowards, and national enemies, a group of Mexican-American zoot suiters clashed with eleven service members in L.A.’s Alpine neighborhood, breaking the jaw of one of the sailors. On June 4, following a few similar clashes, two hundred or more sailors entered East L.A. in a fleet of taxicabs, armed with bludgeons and patrolling for zoot suits. They attacked the first boy they saw and unleashed four days of unchecked violence against randomly identified Mexican Americans and blacks, many of whom were beaten and stripped naked—whether they wore zoot suits or not.
THIS EXUBERANT ERA WAS grimly bookended between the Red Summer of 1919 and the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 (or possibly the 1958 closing of Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom)—but certainly not the crash of 1929. When it is reviewed not for its evidence of economic prosperity but for, as Fitzgerald’s catchphrase implies, its aerobatics of playful rebellion, the Jazz Age gets its due as a coming-out party for the fiercest exponents of American fun. Morals were loosened, wits sharpened, boundaries busted, the citizenry widened. The voices of long-muffled women and minorities rang out louder and more joyfully than anyone’s. Bodies that had been suffocated for decades by Victorian ruffles, bustles, and “character” were suddenly half naked, inebriated, and jitterbugging in public.
If F. Scott Fitzgerald was determined to read fun as a prelude to disaster, as a chancre in the rose of civilization, then the Zoot Suit Riots may fit his vision: their victims were bold young men and women who pushed too hard against American standards at an intensely conservative and patriotic time. In their opponents’ view, they courted disaster. Their clothes were outrageous, their colors too loud. Their walk was too cocky, their talk too ethnic, and their gymnastic dancing just asking for it. Strutting their pleasure and cultural difference, they drew civic fire in a time of war, when the dominant culture enforced a campaign against racial enemies in the Pacific and ideological ones in Europe. The zoot suiters’ fun was a threat, an affront, to the steamrolling myth of white American sameness that was rising to prominence at that time. To this extent, their risky fun was the perfection of 1920s popular culture. Theirs was the playful resistance of outsiders who claimed and flaunted their brilliant contributions—of Buddy Boldens and Louis Armstrongs, of Clara Bows and Mae Wests, of Shorty Snowdens and Bessie Smiths. It was the ludic defiance of Chaplin’s Tramp in the face of destruction natural and social. To the same extent, from the streets to the dance floors, their fun was the perfection of radical 1920s social mixing, of Thomas Morton’s original vision for Merry Mount that began to take shape by the grace of jazz. Zoot suit culture, with all its contests and conflicts, boasted a civility that the Bowery b’hoys lacked. It sported a style that touted the individual and highlighted racial discrepancy—but it welcomed everyone into the fight. The America it boasted was defined by struggle. The fun it promoted was passed around among agile individuals and swinging throngs. And the danger it presaged was the boys from Plymouth coming to chop that Maypole down.
So they did, but it wasn’t disastrous.
For joyous revolt had carved a riverbed that is deeper and wider now than ever.