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That Jazz! An Idiosyncratic Social History of the American Twenties
That Jazz An Idiosyncratic Social History of the American Twenties Author:Ethan Mordden Irreverent, iconoclastic, McLuhanesque -- here is a fresh and original look at the American twenties. Things happened in the twenties at a greater rate than ever before, though America wanted only isolation and calm. There was a jumble of information, a bombardment of facts and figures. The salesmanship of the burgeoning mass media combined with... more » the blossoming gossamer dreams that came to life at the movie theaters. All this produced jazz, a music and yet much more.
Ethan Mordden makes jazz the metaphor of that age: intrusive, spontaneous, self-serving, at times compulsive. Mordden demonstrates how jazz became a symbol of a new national ethos, a hungry amoral searching, an ethos carried farthest in the news media's use of "focus" -- a simplistic reduction of events of personalities to a single meaning, a totalism of cynical salesmanship. Charles Lindbergh became America's last individual hero because he strenuously resisted that public relations manipulation.
Jazz, the electronic media, and the last great hero -- Lindbergh -- stand at the heart of this book, but That Jazz! also considers the other major events and people of the time. Politicians, artists, sports heroes -- from Woodrow Wilson to Gertrude Stein to Babe Ruth -- Mordden includes all these personalities in his selective but encompassing vision of the American 1920s.« less