The white reception of Jazz in America.

Anderson, Maureen

It came almost like a start of terror, like a sudden awakening, this shattering storm of rhythm, these tone elements never previously combined and now let loose upon us all at once. (Darius Milhaud)

From 1917 to 1930, white America was forced to realize that a new form of music, jazz, rising on radio waves and appearing in clubs worldwide, was here to stay. At the same time, articles analyzing, judging, appraising, and condemning jazz flooded into publication. Titles such as "Unspeakable Jazz Must Go" (see McMahon), "Students in Arms Against Jazz," "Why 'Jazz' Sends Us Back to the Jungle," and "The Jazz Problem" (see Wilson) appeared in mainstream publications and revealed the political and racial endeavors of hostile white critics. By asserting in 1925 that jazz "is a release of all suppressed emotions at once" (Rogers 30), J. A. Rogers created a description that whites would expand on in order to label jazz in Harlem culture as primitive and evil. Jazz served in several ways as a precursor to fifties' be-bop and rock-'n'-roll, eighties' pop, and nineties' rap. Principal among them is that jazz critics, like critics of these later musical forms, were often diabolical in their attacks on the music. Motivated by political and racial concerns, many jazz critics during the Harlem Renaissance publicized their dislike of jazz music in order to express their dislike of African Americans.

In striving to analyze and to understand the concepts of jazz music white critics often hid behind black stereotypes in order to explain the increased fascination the world had with jazz. Some, in utter contempt, wrote that jazz plagiarized and then mutilated the works of classical, white composers. Still other critics maintained that jazz was dangerous, unhealthy, or, even worse, a form of bayou voodoo. In an attempt to understand jazz, many publications resorted to asking professionals why Europeans liked jazz, since jazz was acclaimed in Europe as a form of musical liberation. Magazines turned to composers, doctors, educators, and even the black populace to explain jazz. Stunningly, what remains consistent in the reports on jazz is not the ultimate dislike of the music, but the political and social dislike of the black population. In sum, the articles on jazz that appeared in mainstream magazines between 1917 and 1930 reveal the racial prejudice that white jazz critics had against African Americans. As magazines first began to recognize jazz, between 1917 and 1920, critics' principal aim appeared innocently enough to be asking what, exactly, jazz was. Yet, delving deeper into the language of early articles, one soon discovers that the explanations of jazz are also the signs of aggression by white critics against the recently emancipated black man. Popular publications such as Literary Digest and Current Opinion linked jazz immediately to slavery and Africa and, shortly thereafter, disqualified any claim jazz might have to being a serious musical genre. For example, in the Literary Digest article "The Appeal of Primitive Jazz" (1917), the critic begins by analyzing the word jazz but finishes with an outright racial manifesto against the black man. (1) Jazz, the article begins, is "a strange word, an adjective descriptive of a band" (26), but the article then goes on to explain what sort of "band" might be called a "jazz":

 The groups that play for dancing,
 when colored, seem infected with the
 virus that they try to instill as a stimulus
 in others. They shake and jump
 and writhe in ways to suggest a return
 of the medieval jumping mania. The
 word, according to Walter Kingsley,
 famous in the ranks of vaudeville, is
 variously spelled jas, jass, jaz, jazz, and
 jascz; and is African in origin.

The switch from Africa to slavery is a short leap for this writer, since shortly after asserting the word's African origin, the article links the word to slavery:

 In old plantation days, when slaves
 were having one of their rare holidays
 and the fun languished, some West-Coast
 African would cry out, "Jaz her
 up," and this would be the cue for fast
 and furious fun. No doubt the witchdoctors
 and medicine-men on the
 Kongo used the same term at those
 jungle "parties" when tomtoms
 throbbed and the sturdy warriors gave
 their pep an added kick with rich
 brews of Yohimbin bark. (28)

The distinction between jazz and African tribal music disappears in this critique. Accordingly, black American men and women and Africans become interchangeable as the article reduces the black jazz musicians to "witch-doctors and medicine-men."

The author, instead of meditating on how jazz, slavery, and Africa are interlinked, jumps immediately to linking Africa to the music itself. Describing the music, the article says that jazz "is the delirium tremens of syncopation. It is strict rhythm without melody. To-day the jazz bands take popular tunes and rag them to death to make jazz." After establishing that this African-originated music is "delirium" and "without melody," the article is able to cast the jazz player as a "contemporary savage" (26) rather than any kind of serious musician. Consider, for example, how the following passage casually drops the word savages in place of the word musicians: "The music of contemporary savages taunts us with a lost art of rhythm. Modern sophistication has inhibited many native instincts" (26; italics mine). Not content simply to label the jazz musician as a "savage," the author, in the second sentence above, designates the musician as a person without "modern sophistication," which would have "inhibited" his/her "native" or black "instincts."

Soon after, the writer points to the "rhythmic aggressiveness" of jazz and the musician's "retarding and acceleration" of swing (26). While this description could be said to suggest the tempo of the music, the categorization of the jazz artist as a "savage" lacking "modern sophistication" that would tame his music implies that the root words aggressive and retard here refer to the musician. Consequently, the jazz player emerges not as a talented artist but as a stereotypical model of a black man in the early 1900s. More specifically, the black jazz artist with his "savage," "aggressive," and "retard[ed]" personality resembles Gus, from the 1914 motion picture The Birth of a Nation, a racial stereotype that portrays black men as hostile, ignorant, and aggressive, and a person whose only goal is to rape white women. By the time of the article's publication in 1917, three years after the release of The Birth of a Nation, this stereotype was thoroughly integrated into and reinforced by the white man's perception of the black man and his music.

But even this level of racist stereotyping isn't enough. The author goes on to describe the places where jazz is played as "wonderful refuges of basic folk-lore and primeval passion" where "wild men and wild women have danced to jazz for gladsome generations" (27), and he begins his conclusion by combining all of the racial implications of the foregoing passages into Vachel Lindsay's poem "The Congo," essentially reducing jazz musicians to a couple of drunken animals that bang on tables and empty barrels:

 My own personal idea of jazz and
 its origin is told in this stanza by
 Vachel Lindsay:

 Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
 Barrel house kings with feet unstable,
 Sagged and reeled and pounced on
 the table,
 Pounded on the table;
 Beat an empty barrel with the handle
 of a broom,
 Hard as they were able,
 Bo[o]m, boom, BOOM,
 With a silk umbrella and the handle
 of a broom,
 Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay,
 BOOM. (29)

The writer never thoroughly explains the poem, but allows it to illustrate his sentiments regarding the jazz musician. The "fat black bucks" are obviously drunk and making "boom[s]" by banging on barrels and tables. In addition, the "bucks" are "pounc[ing]" on furniture, implying that they are more like monkeys or wild animals than sane and intelligent humans. Furthermore, the "black bucks" not only bang with "the handle of a broom," but also "a silk umbrella" (29). While Lindsay's work and "The Congo" are still celebrated by critics as rhythmic and representative of American culture and of the era, the poem is and continues to be, as T. R. Hummer suggests, "poetry in blackface" (66).

Considering the author's evocation earlier in the article of the racial stereotype Gus, applied to the jazz musician, the reader does not need much more to infer where, exactly, the "silk umbrella" originated. After all, the wild "black bucks," as "Barrel house kings," would not have access to a "silk umbrella" unless, as the poem suggests, the "bucks" had taken it from a genteel white woman. The implication is clear: According to this writer, the black jazz musician is, at base, a violent animal who bangs on barrels and likes to rape white women and take their "silk umbrellas" for jungle instruments.

Finally, moving from bad to worse, the writer closes his article with the warning a friend had given him that seems to top the preceding racial stereotypes and their demeaning implications. "'Mumbo Jumbo,'" the friend advises him, "'is the god of jazz; be careful how you write of jazz, else he will hoodoo you'" (29). The line is perhaps meant to be a playful reference to the conclusion of Lindsay's poem:

 "Be careful what you do,
 Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the
 Congo,
 And all of the other
 Gods of the Congo,
 Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you,
 Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you,
 Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you."

But the line also reinforces the writer's racist characterization of black musicians. Considering that the article proceeds from defining the word jazz to characterizing jazz musicians and all black men as hostile, animalistic rapists, the implication behind "Mumbo Jumbo" is twofold. First, the critic belittles jazz as "Mumbo Jumbo," or nonsense, thereby eliminating any kind of musical talent from the process of composing or playing jazz. Second, after describing jazz as an African tribal ritual, the author suggests that not only jazz, but the entire black population, is pagan, and therefore unworthy.

Between the years 1917 and 1920, the Literary Digest was not the only publication to print articles by writers who used a discussion of jazz to express their hostile attitudes toward African Americans. Indeed, the early Literary Digest article seems to have inspired other racist, white critics, for it is often directly quoted in subsequent articles. For example, in 1918, the article "Why 'Jazz' Sends Us Back to the Jungle" picks up where "The Appeal of Primitive Jazz" left off. Instead of slyly hiding behind the facade of a serious article on jazz, the writer of "Why 'Jazz'" leaps directly into a racial censure of jazz with his opening line: "One touch of 'Jazz' makes savages of us all" (165). Like the Literary Journal article, the Current Opinion critique asserts that the word jazz is "African in origin." In addition, the author of "Why 'Jazz'" quotes from the "witch doctors" and "medicine men" section of "The Appeal of Primitive Jazz." The article soon continues to expand on what the previous article asserts and in precisely half of a magazine page leaps from claiming that jazz "is an attempt to reproduce the marvelous syncopation of the African Jungle" to describing black jazz "dancers" in Chicago as individuals who like "smoke, and fresh bullock's blood, and the smell of stock-yards" and who "lik[e] jazz because it lends itself to intimate close dancing." Here jazz is not simply derived from "the African jungle," but also attracts dancers that like "bullock's blood" and "intimate close [or sexual] dancing" (165). The movement to use jazz as a cover for racial propaganda was begun within a handful of articles in the early 1900s just as Harlem and other urban centers were beginning to usher in the first monumental wave of black culture in America.

At the beginning of jazz's worldwide popularity, the black musicians that these articles seek to stereotype as horrible, racial brutes did not remain ignorant of the wave of criticism that sought to debase black music and culture. In response to the Literary Digest article of 1917, a musician published an intelligent and thought-provoking rejoinder in that same magazine in April of 1919 under the title "A Negro Explains 'Jazz.'" Like the previous articles, the musician defines the origin of the word jazz, but in doing so the writer asserts that not only is jazz American in origin but it also has nothing to do with slavery, Africa, or any of the perpetuated stereotypes. In addition, the author makes clear that he's not only American, but an American soldier in the face of all of the criticizing "bishops":

 The Latest International Word seems
 to be "jazz." It used to be used exclusively
 in British papers to describe the
 kind of music and dancing--particularly
 dancing--imported from
 America, thereby arousing discussions,
 in which bishops do not disdain to
 participate, to fill all the papers. While
 the society once "ragged," they now
 "jazz." In this country, tho[ugh] we
 have been tolerably familiar with the
 word for two years or more, we still
 try to pursue its mysterious origins.
 Lieut. James Reese Europe, late of
 Machine-Gun Battalian of the 15th
 Regiment, tells Mr. Grenville Vernon,
 of the New York Tribune, that the word
 comes from Mr. Razz, who led a band
 in New Orleans some fifteen years ago
 and whose fame perpetuated [the
 word jazz] in a somewhat modified
 form. (28)

At once, the author makes clear by his examination of the word jazz that he is directly responding to the previous articles that probe racial stereotypes in order to explain away jazz music. The author also emphasizes the important role black men play in the ongoing world war. The author then proceeds to affirm that "a higher plane of music may be attained by negroes," even if "white audiences seem to find it too discordant." Asserting that the best music has "negro influences" that "sprin[g] from the soil," the writer explains that "Mr. Tires, for instance, writes charming waltzes, but the best of these have in them negro influences" (28).

"A Negro Explains 'Jazz'" addresses each racist tenet implied in the earlier articles while also justifying jazz as a real and serious musical form. Like previous articles, "A Negro Explains 'Jazz'" moves from talking about jazz to addressing the character of the black man. Yet unlike previous articles that attempt to explain the black man as a racial stereotype, this author asserts the real heroism of black men in the military during World War I. The writer explains how he formed a band for his colonel and that "the men who now compose the band ... are all fighters as well as musicians, for all have seen service in the trenches" (29). In this way, the writer brings jazz into American culture and away from African drumbeats, and, at the same time, he raises the black race from being portrayed as savages to being conscious, intelligent, talented soldiers that are loyal citizens to their country.

Though the talented author of "A Negro Explains 'Jazz'" might have pacified the racist white crowds, the article actually fired up even more angry sentiment toward jazz and the black race. Between April and August of the same year, the infamous Red Summer of 1919 had swung into full force. Only four months after "A Negro Explains 'Jazz,'" the August 1919 edition of Current Opinion included a hostile response to "A Negro Explains 'Jazz,'" complete with a blackface cartoon. Current Opinion's "Delving into the Genealogy of Jazz" vigorously reasserts the racial stereotypes "A Negro Explains 'Jazz'" had sought to counter. Following a by-now familiar pattern, the author of "Delving" begins with the word jazz. "Just what is Jazz?" he asks. "In striving to answer this query, I can not hope to imitate the admirable brevity of the word." Yet in the very next sentence, the writer offers a blunt and callous estimation of the art form: "Jazz is ordered and calculated noise." What appears to be a softer consideration of the form follows in the next paragraph: "Certain it is that our dough-boys, fresh from the trenches, with days and weeks of grim endeavor and physical strain behind them, turned to the Jazz furnished by their bands and found in it relaxation and solace and cheer which enabled them to forget what was past and to abandon themselves wholeheartedly to the joyous hilarity of the present moment" (97). A deeper look at this quotation makes it clear that the author's intent is not benign.

The writer of "Delving," instead of complimenting jazz, is, in fact, hurling an insult at the author of "A Negro Explains 'Jazz.'" It is the "doughboys," or white soldiers, that have come "fresh from the trenches"; black soldiers are not included in any of the "grim endeavor[s]" or "physical strain[s]" of the battlefield. The jazz bands are also "their bands"--the white soldier's bands--phraseology which implies ownership not only of the bands but also of the black musicians within the bands. Furthermore, the writer implies that the white soldiers must be excused for enjoying jazz since, after the white soldier's "physical strain," he must "find relaxation and solace and cheer" in order to "forget what was past."

As the article develops, the critic's insults continue and eventually transform into threats. The writer of "Delving into the Genealogy of Jazz" seems intent on disqualifying the author of "A Negro Explains 'Jazz'" not only as a musician but also as a genuine soldier. Jazz, to this critic, is a random assemblage of war-like noises. The writer asserts that, because the author of the previous article is black and a musician, he is not a real soldier; the only real war he participates in is jazz, as a member of a "motley army of noise producers." The writer continues to describe jazz as an attempt to mimic the sounds of war:

 The howitzers of Jazz band's artillery
 are stationed in the "traps." Under this
 heading we find all the instruments of
 percussion, such as the big drum, the
 snare drum, cymbals, triangle, wooden
 blocks played upon with drum-sticks,
 xylophone, cowbells, rattles, whistles
 for the production of various weird
 noises, and a host of other implements,
 often the personal conceptions of the
 individual players of the traps. The
 trombones may represent field guns,
 while the clarinets, oboes, saxophones,
 alto horns and cornets, furnish the
 rapid-fire batteries. The range being
 point-blank, it is easy to see why the
 effect of "drum-fire" is complete!

This, we are told, "creates an extremely comical result" (97). Thus jazz, according to this writer, is not so much a form of music as it is an imitative and unworthy form of noise production.

The author's next ploy is to compare jazz to "Siamese music," an Eastern form of music that he has found "absolute[ly] unintelligibl[e]." Upon hearing this music, he was "astounded, for there in this Siamese music, in spite of the strange Oriental idioms, from an Occidental's harmonic standpoint, was the very essence of--Jazz!" He finds the comparison hilarious. After this racial joke, the writer directly insults the jazz legend Jasbo Brown, a "negro musician" who, when "he was sober," played "orthodox music, but when he imbibed freely of gin, which was his favorite pastime, he had a way of screaming above the melody with a strange barbaric abandon." This assault completed, the author characterizes jazz as a "ragged combination of letters that suggests bumping and snorting, wind and banging blinds, broken glass and devil-may-care back of it all," and he labels jazz musicians "monkeys," expressing the hope that jazz will eventually "disappear" (98).

Having insulted jazz, jazz musicians, and the black race, the writer, in closing, makes a direct threat. He shows his disapproval of Chicago's love for jazz, asking, "If one municipality has lost its esthetic sense, has it no respect for the feelings of others? Shall the popcorn of Chicago blow over all the lot?" The "popcorn" analogy continues in an uglier vein:

 This is a fair metaphor, too. Put a
 whole band in a giant popper, hold it
 over the glowing coals of an ample
 crater, and, shaking well, command it
 to make some jolly music--the production
 would be meticulously true to
 Jazz form. (98)

The grotesque analogy devolves into a complete dehumanization of jazz artists as well as the black populace. Given that the Red Summer of Chicago was at its height in the month of this article's publication, the analogy ceases to describe jazz, but instead, under the guise of discussing jazz, describes a lynching:

 The wheezes of the scorching horns;
 the popping of overheated drumheads;
 the groans and pleadings of the musicians,
 with now and then a pure silvery
 note from a thoro[ugh]bred piper
 who cared not a rap that he was to be
 roasted for his art; the ravings of the
 crowd looking on; dervishes and holy-rollers
 expressing themselves; the
 chuckles of a few cannibals; and over
 all the rancous imperturbability of old
 horse fiddles.... That would be a
 Chicago Jazz band. (98)

In the writer's analogy, the black jazz band is burned alive with "wheez[ing]," "popping," "groans and pleadings," a "crowd looking on," accompanied by "old horse fiddles." The threat to black jazz musicians is clear and well publicized. The writer ends his analogy with a map of where lynchers might find black jazz bands. More specifically, after the grotesque description of a lynching, the writer uses the word jazz to signify the black population:

 So far many parts of the East have
 been spared. Washington is almost
 free, New York is rent in spots. Boston
 is only slightly Jazz. But the Middle
 West is in the throes--it may never
 know it until consciousness returns.
 (98)

This writer has provided a picture, a map for his fellow racists to follow in identifying black populations in America in 1919. Yet even after targeting the country's black populace, the writer is still not done. He ends the article with a horrifying racist joke, reducing, once again, the black man to an inhuman and ignorant savage. The joke, about a foolish black musician who uses a car part as a musical instrument, is not worth repetition, but suffice it to say that this article, which begins as a response to another article on jazz, becomes, by its conclusion, a terrifying piece of racist propaganda.

The August Current Opinion article is not about jazz, but is a call to arms for white men to rise up against the black race and black soldiers returning from World War I. The racial hostility of the article was not restrained within the pages of popular magazines when, in 1917, a white mob entered East Saint Louis and killed hundreds of black residents. That same year, after a black battalion rioted following white harassment in Houston, Texas, the U.S. Army court-martialed a group of black soldiers and hanged thirteen without the benefit of an appeal. "Delving into the Genealogy of Jazz" appeared in the midst of the terrifying "Red Summer" of 1919, a year in which at least eighty-three black men, women, and children were lynched and hundreds more killed, injured, or made homeless by racial violence. Racial tension in Chicago erupted on July 27 with thirty-eight dead, five hundred and thirty-seven injured, and over a thousand families made homeless. With the Ku Klux Klan newly revived and racial hatred seething in all major cities, north and south, race riots erupted well into the winter months of 1919 in Washington, DC; Knoxville, Tennessee; Longview, Texas; Arkansas; Chicago; and Omaha. The hostile Current Opinion article made its mark, striking the discussion about jazz from popular magazines for the whole next year while America's black and white populations took up arms, ropes, and hate against each other.

Another article concerning jazz did not appear in a mainstream American magazine until 1921, once more reducing jazz to animals pounding on empty wine barrels. And the black artist was not allowed to offer a response in the popular press during the 1920s. By 1921, the black presence in popular, now white, magazines was limited to racist cartoons and bad jokes. Blacks would move their voices into alternative publications that by this time included The Crisis, The Liberator, and The Masses. Indeed, between 1921 and 1930, while the Harlem Renaissance jazz culture was well on its way, flourishing in New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and Saint Louis, and gaining international attention as a major part of American culture, the racial innuendoes in articles on jazz continued. Current Opinion had been bought by the Literary Digest, while Ladies' Home Journal would assume a major role in the discussion. In addition, the views of racist writers, including physicians, began to appear on the pages of The Etude and The New Republic. The racist periodical circle was complete, and the attempt to continue a discussion the authors believed would disenfranchise jazz music and stigmatize jazz musicians and the black race as savage had gained real momentum. By 1921, popular opinion pieces ceased to wonder what jazz was and instead asserted that it was a known danger. Writers regularly positioned themselves as experts on the moral, psychological (Freud), and physical hazards that they believed jazz produced.

Anne Shaw Faulkner's "Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?" which appeared in the August 1921 issue of Ladies' Home Journal, revives many of the racial stereotypes found in articles by previous white critics of jazz. But unlike previous articles that followed an investigative trail into jazz only to discover racial stereotypes and motivation to hate African Americans, Faulkner never completely links blacks to jazz. Instead, the racial message is implied by key words used in previous articles on jazz. For example, Faulkner opens her article with a seemingly simple, yet deeply layered, sentence: "We have all been taught to believe that 'music soothes the savage beast,' but we have never stopped to consider that an entirely different type of music might invoke savage instincts." This opening might be said to be introduce the question of whether jazz is appropriate for people to listen to. Yet considering the author's repetition of the word savage and keeping in mind what earlier articles had testified was "savage" and bestial, the author's implication is pointed. According to earlier articles on jazz, the words savage and beast were used to refer directly to the jazz musician as a representative of the black race. Thus, what might at first seem like a gentle question quickly turns into a racist justification for not allowing jazz to "invoke" its audiences (16). If one returns to the first line of the Current Opinion article "Why 'Jazz' Sends Us Back to the Jungle"--"One touch of 'Jazz' makes savages of us all'--we see reflected a real fear among white racists that jazz could, in fact, "Send Us Back to the Jungle," or, more specifically, make whites as "savage" as they believed blacks were.

This fear of "savage" culture was palpable in 1920s' America. In 1911, Charles B. Davenport published his Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, a kind of social Darwinist tract which asserted that different races occupy different levels on the evolutionary scale. According to Stephen J. Gould, eugenics is scientific racism:

 ... the early twentieth century's most
 influential social crusade with an
 allegedly scientific foundation: the
 eugenics movement['s] stated aim ...
 [was] "improving" America's hereditary
 stock by preventing procreation
 among the supposedly unfit (called
 "negative eugenics") and encouraging
 more breeding among those deemed
 superior in blood-line ("positive
 eugenics"). The abuses of this movement
 have been extensively documented
 in many excellent books covering
 such subjects as the hereditarian theory
 of mental testing and the passage of
 legislation for involuntary sterilization
 and restriction of immigration from
 nations deemed inferior in hereditary
 stock. (22)

According to eugenicists, the Anglo-Saxon race was superior biologically and higher on the evolutionary scale than were African Americans. In the 1920s, the idea of eugenics went so far as to place entire white families on display at county fairs as examples of the superior race while minority women were often sterilized.

Eugenicist politics not only perpetuated mass murder by Hitler in order to promote his ideal Aryan race, but also motivated white Americans to justify killing and segregating African Americans, Jews, Irish immigrants, American Indians, and many others (Gould 24). Interracial marriages, consequently, were made illegal. Likewise, the panic of biological supremacy merged with racial hatred to create dangerous and irrational fears of the "savage." Davenport's book was, in the minds of white racists, justification for their fear and oppression of the black man. According to Davenport, behavior and physical characteristics were clear signifiers of biological make-up and position on the evolutionary ladder. If a white man or woman were to be "invok[ed]" to display that individual's "savage instincts," then the person's position on the Darwinian ladder would be jeopardized (Faulkner 16). (2)

Considering this fear of "savage instincts," and of the black population in general, it isn't surprising to see Faulkner maintain "that America is facing a most serious situation regarding its popular music." The "serious situation," of course, is the plight of whites, especially white American youth, becoming, in some sense, too black. And Faulkner claims to have supporting evidence: "Welfare workers tell us that never in the history of our land have there been such immoral conditions among young people, and in the surveys made by organizations regarding these conditions, the blame is laid on jazz music and its evil influence on the young people of to-day." Thus, not only does Faulkner indicate the existence of "immoral conditions," a Davenport signifier of an inferior race, but she also singles out jazz as "evil." Indeed, after using jazz dance as an example of the evil manifested in young whites, she closes her article with what she clearly intends to be a rhetorical question: "Can music ever be an influence for evil?" (16). Faulkner's "contribution," if we may call it that, to the early white literature on jazz is that she provides a new insult toward jazz, jazz musicians, and perhaps the entire black populace by suggesting that all three are evil, as well as inferior.

Over the next few years, other writers would repeat Faulkner's question, but in 1924, many authors joined together to respond rather directly to her query. Around this time, the Moore v. Dempsey case (1923) overturned convictions in courts where blacks had been systematically eliminated from juries. In addition, the Harlem Renaissance was flourishing and gaining sufficient popularity among both white and black populations that racist sentiments would once more appear with a special virulence in the popular press. The struggle for racist white critics, of course, was how to cope with and curtail the popularity of jazz. The Etude, a popular magazine on music, continued the discussion in 1924 with a special number that seems to pull all of the racist heavyweights into one issue in order to debunk jazz as a serious musical form. In the August 1924 Etude, the article "Where Is Jazz Leading America: Opinions of Famous Men and Women In and Out of Music" contains the reactions of a variety of white professionals toward jazz and jazz culture. Given that an increasing number of jazz musicians were by this time white, we see some more textured responses to the music. In some contexts, jazz is no longer seen as so severe a problem and may even be enjoyed, yet black jazz music remains "savage" and "evil." For example, George Ade is at once willing to call jazz "a collection of squa[w]ks and wails" and to observe that, "if [the] Paul Whiteman boys play 'jazz,' then I am in favor of that particular variety of 'jazz'" (515). In other words, if the white Whiteman plays jazz, Ade finds it pleasing. But if black artists play jazz, the music becomes objectionable--or, if we are to take him literally, black artists' efforts yield only noise, not music. Ade's reference to Paul Whiteman has especially severe racist implications, since, true to his name, Whiteman only hired white musicians while billing himself as "The King of Jazz."

As reviews from the famous continue, similar sentiments are voiced. Lt. Com. John Philip Sousa states that "jazz, like the poor, are [sic] ever with us" (520). Dr. Frank Damrosch offers his scathing opinions of jazz in order to comment on the black race: "Jazz is to real music what the caricature is to portrait," and its creators were savages whose evil is adversely affecting the white populace. "If jazz originated in the dance rhythms of the negro," Damrosch remarks, "it was at least interesting as the self-expression of a primitive race. When jazz was adopted by the highly civilized white race, it tended to degenerate it towards primitivity." Like Faulkner, Damrosch proceeds from a position of racial and cultural superiority, and believes that whites somehow degrade themselves by enjoying or playing jazz. Damrosch's critique recalls the ideas of Davenport and other early white writers on jazz, especially when he characterizes the black musician as infantile and animalistic: "When a savage distorts his features and paints his face so as to produce startling effects, we smile at his childishness; but when a civilized man imitates him, not as a joke but in all seriousness, we turn away in disgust" (518). Like previous articles on jazz, the tenor of "Where Is Jazz Leading America" becomes progressively racist as it moves toward its conclusion. In its final segment, the article includes a disclaimer against any of the voices that readers might in some way have construed as pro-jazz or pro-African American: "Please don't imagine that The Etude has gone 'Jazz-Mad.' We are merely discussing the problem because it has become a vital question all over the world" (italics mine). After designating jazz as a "problem," the entry concludes by listing future articles where "in fearless words the real truth about the odious origin of jazz" will be told (520).

The August 1924 issue of The Etude continues its attack on jazz with Henry Fink's "Jazz--Lowbrow and Highbrow." Fink categorizes different kinds of jazz not by musical difference, but by race. Following the established racist convention, the article begins with a review of the definition of the word jazz, noting that "the word jazz is African in origin" and "lowbrow jazz--is African." Fink explains that jazz must be African since "wild African tribes as described by explorers and missionaries" with "their drums and gongs and rattles" produce "musical orgies rather than performances," which is the way Fink sees jazz. As the article continues, Fink adds a new dimension to the history of racist jazz reviews by offering a detailed analysis of why, when white people play jazz, it is jazz music, but when black people play jazz, it is jungle noise. Fink begins his discussion in a way that at first seems relatively benign, stating that "we must ... be on our guard not to assign a Negro origin to everything we hear that is boisterous and barbaric." At this point, an enlightened reader might be a bit encouraged by the fact that Fink intends not to limit the designation "boisterous and barbaric" only to African Americans. However, as Fink continues, it becomes clear that his willingness to proclaim the music of non-African Americans "boisterous and barbaric" is premised on the perception that the playing of certain white jazz musicians seems to him too black. "When ... [the white musician] put his tomato can on the end of his cornet it seemed as though the music, with its strange quivering pulsations, came from another world (one can guess which world)" (527).

As Fink continues, he removes the black musician's claim on jazz and asserts that jazz, as an innovative form of music, is white. For instance, Fink initially observes that "the banjo is an African instrument," but then adds that only Paul Whiteman's band can really play it. Fink then continues to explore several instruments he considers jazz instruments. The saxophone, he states, "an essential ingredient of a jazz band," is "not African." Likewise, "the trombone, too, is not African" (527). And since jazz instruments are not African, the jazz music played on the instruments cannot possibly be African American. In fact, Fink so easily interchanges the word African for every black man, woman, and child that the entire black populace is reduced to representing primitive tribes that have only just arrived in America in the 1920s from uncivilized jungles. Consequently, everything the black race represents in America is excluded from being truly American. Indeed, Fink so removes the black race from jazz that by the end of his article he can safely assert that "there is nothing African about it" (527).

From defining jazz on their own terms, to insulting and threatening black artists, to eventually stealing from the black race, the jazz critics of the 1910s and the 1920s are racists in print. From the 1910s until 1960 and beyond, in more articles than can be treated here, writers use the topic of jazz music in order to express a dislike of African Americans. Consider, for example, the 1923 article "Jazz and Its Effects," written by a teacher who discusses the purportedly harmful effects jazz has on the learning capabilities of white students. Alternatively, observe the 1926 article "The Jazz Problem," which addresses its own racist views under the auspices of criticizing jazz music (Wilson). Or consider how many white musicians of the 1920s made jazz their own by hiring only whites and playing for white audiences, operas, and movies. Yet, however many Paul Whitemans and Finks try to remove jazz from its African American origins, it remains an accomplishment not only of Harlem culture, but of African American culture as a whole. Fink concludes his article with the assumption that, once the horrors of World War I have dissipated, jazz will eventually fade and be replaced by "high-brow" classical music. He even goes so far as to state that individuals who assert that jazz has a future are wrong: "I do not know anything in the world quite so foolish as the attitude of these so-called futurists." And he continues by mocking jazz fans who claim that "in ten to twenty years," jazz "will be liked. Little do they know the public!" (528).

Luckily for fans of jazz in the decades that followed, Fink was wrong. Not only was he wrong about jazz, but just as previous writers asserted behind the cover of jazz that the black race was savage, primitive, and ignorant, Fink was wrong in his estimation that the black American musician was nothing more than an African savage. Instead, jazz/blues is, and remains, America's only original contribution of a new form to the musical world as well as a wholly African American form.

Notes

(1.) If the title "The Appeal of Primitive Jazz" doesn't imply in and of itself the racial stereotypes that underlay this purportedly thoughtful article on jazz, consider the title of the article that immediately follows: "Make a Scrapbook for Sammy," an article that offers a step-by-step description of how to create a collection of "American"--i.e., racial--jokes for "the boys in France" (30). After all, the article suggests, American "men must have American jokes" (30).

2. Even today, an ongoing battle still exists in the scientific community surrounding eugenics. Eugenicists believe that people are products of their biological make-up, particularly products of specific hereditary genes that determine not only anatomy but also "complex facets of personality." Racism in eugenics becomes apparent when eugenicists do not include social influences on an individual, maintaining that, regardless of education, influences, or life experiences, people are biologically predetermined to be amoral or less intelligent (Gould 25).

Works Cited

"The Appeal of Primitive Jazz." Literary Digest Aug. 1917: 26-29.

"Delving into the Genealogy of Jazz." Current Opinion Aug. 1919: 97.

Faulkner, Anne Shaw. "Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?" Ladies" Home Journal Aug. 1921: 16-40.

Fink, Henry T. "Jazz--Lowbrow and Highbrow." Etude Aug. 1924: 527-28.

Gould, Stephen J. "The Internal Brand of Scarlet." Natural History 107.2 (1998): 22-33.

Hummer, T. R. "Laughed Off: Canon, Kharakter, and the Dismissal of Vachel Lindsay." Kenyon Review 17.2 (1995): 56-97.

"Jazz and Its Effects." Etude Aug. 1924: 531.

McMahon, R. "Unspeakable Jazz Must Go." Ladies Home Journal Dec. 1921: 34.

Milhaud, Darius. "The Jazz Band and Negro Music." Living Age Oct. 1924: 169-73.

"A Negro Explains 'Jazz.'" Literary Digest Apr. 1919: 28-29.

Rogers, J. A. "Jazz at Home." The New Negro. Ed. Alain Locke. 1925. New York: Simon, 1992. 216-24.

"Students in Arms Against Jazz." Literary Digest Mar. 1922: 35.

"Where Is Jazz Leading America?: Opinions of Famous Men and Women In and Out of Music." Etude Aug. 1924: 517-20.

"Why 'Jazz' Sends Us Back to the Jungle." Current Opinion Sept. 1918: 165.

Wilson, E. "The Jazz Problem." New Republic Jan 1926: 217-19.

Maureen Anderson is currently teaching and working on her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Illinois State University with a focus on oppressive rhetoric, particularly rhetoric that has led to acts of violence. Recently, she completed an essay on Mercy Otis Warren that will be included in the collection of biographical essays in the upcoming Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poetry.