A. Scott Berg on the 1920s and Al Jolson’s Afro-Jewish Balancing Act

THE CUTTING EDGE Two young women do the Charleston on a rooftop ledge at Chicago’s Sherman Hotel., Photograph © Underwood & Underwood/Corbis.

He was known in his time, quite simply, as “the World’s Greatest Entertainer.” Born Asa Yoelson in 1886 in Lithuania, this cantor’s son became the dominant voice of the 1920s: as Al Jolson, he popularized the new sound that had engulfed America and engaged the world—jazz. For the entire decade, Jolson held center stage, selling songs to his audiences with a combination of raw energy and schmaltz.

F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed credit for christening the 20s “the Jazz Age,” and he said that decade began when the demobilized American soldiers who had just won the greatest international conflict in history found that “something had to be done with all the nervous energy stored up and unexpended in the War.” The new president, Republican Warren G. Harding, urged a return to “normalcy,” but the nation was feeling its oats and wanted to sow some.

The phenomenal performances of Al Jolson provided much of the soundtrack of the Jazz Age. Wearing the burnt-cork mask of blackface minstrelsy, he found stardom presenting the popular songs of the day—with their Jewish Mitteleuropean strains and throbbing African-American rhythms. But Jolson’s act was more than his resonant baritone. When performing, he pulled out all the stops—displaying dazzling footwork in his white socks and black shoes and clapping his gloved hands. Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre built a runway down the center of its orchestra seats so that “Jolie” could slide right into the audience on his knees, his arms outstretched. In the show Sinbad in 1921, he presented two songs about homecomings that would forever be his trademark: George Gershwin’s “Swanee” (the most popular song of the decade) and Irving Caesar’s “My Mammy.”

With people settling into postwar lives, disillusionment took hold. Gertrude Stein called the young adults “a lost generation,” many of whom created a second flowering of American literature. F. Scott Fitzgerald personified the era, living its high life and recording it. Ernest Hemingway captured a distinctly American sound in his writing, though he set his early novels in Europe, both during the war and after. William Faulkner’s first novel described the hardships of returning soldiers. On the home front, Willa Cather won a Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for a novel about a Nebraskan killed at Cantigny. Sinclair Lewis—with his stark evocations of Midwestern social sterility, religious hypocrisy, and Babbittry—became the first American author to win the Nobel Prize. Three of Eugene O’Neill’s 15 innovative plays in that decade won Pulitzer Prizes. By 1927 even the Broadway musical—until then nothing more than silly plots in service of the latest tunes—assumed a seriousness of its own with Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s adaptation of Edna Ferber’s socially conscious Show Boat. Its highlight, “Ol’ Man River,” became a timeless anthem of the plight of the black man, which white singers—Jolson among them—would adopt.

America’s music removed some barriers between the segregated races. Whites flocked to the Cotton Club in Harlem, where Duke Ellington reigned. The most popular songs of the 20s included Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues,” Bessie Smith’s “St. Louis Blues,” and Ethel Waters’s “Am I Blue?” As a renaissance of writers in Harlem expressed, there was good reason to sing the blues. The Ku Klux Klan enjoyed a revival in the 1920s, and racial discrimination was as pronounced as ever.

With Prohibition in effect, the scent of “bathtub gin” perfumed the air with sin, even illegality. An underworld of organized crime arose, replete with bootleggers and speakeasies. By 1925, 10 million Model T’s had been sold, creating a less restrictive culture, especially for the nation’s “flaming youth,” who took liberties enjoying “mobile privacy.” Uncorseted, women wore looser dresses, their hemlines rising to scandalous heights.

Commercial radio broadcasting began in 1920, and within 10 years, almost half of America’s households could tune in. During this “Era of Wonderful Nonsense,” Jolson offered such sunny ditties as “April Showers,” “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along,” and “California, Here I Come.” A new dance sensation put Charleston, South Carolina, on the map—an infectious expression of joy that involved crazy legs, swinging arms, and twisting ankles. The decade throbbed to what Ira Gershwin called “Fascinatin’ Rhythm”; and in such works as “Rhapsody in Blue” (1924) and “An American in Paris” (1928), his brother George ushered jazz into the concert hall.

In 1927 Warner Bros. gambled on adding sound to its motion pictures, bettering its odds by signing superstar Jolson to appear in its first “talkie”—The Jazz Singer, the story of a cantor’s son who wants to be an entertainer. Jolson came on-screen and sat down at a piano, banging out and belting an uptempo rendition of Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies,” and the fate of silent films was sealed.

Technology now enabled the world to share events instantaneously and simultaneously, and Americans found themselves commandeering the world’s headlines. Most celebrated of all was the photogenic 25-year-old Charles Lindbergh, who piloted a single-engine plane nonstop from New York to Paris that year. Americans dominated the world’s golf courses, tennis courts, and boxing rings; and in late 1929, the site was cleared for the construction of the Empire State Building, which would become the tallest edifice on the planet. And as Herbert Hoover became president on the Republican promise of “a chicken in every pot,” Al Jolson aptly sang “I’m Sitting on Top of the World.”

What started as a boom ended with a crash. Between Thursday, October 24, 1929, and the following Tuesday, the New York Stock Exchange suffered the worst decline in its history—losing a third of its value. It would take a quarter of a century for the economy to recover. Jolson kept working during that period, but younger crooners became the voices of their eras. He died in 1950, far from forgotten but, sadly, never to re-create his former success. Perhaps his most genuinely dramatic recording was his rendition of the anthem for the 30s, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”

In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway wrote of several Americans who became expatriates in Paris in the 20s, among them Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda. One day she said, “Ernest, don’t you think Al Jolson is greater than Jesus?” Only later did Hemingway attribute the comment to her incipient insanity. At the time, coming from the quintessential flapper in the midst of the Roaring 20s, it made perfect sense.
