All That Jazz: Progressive Educators and the Antijazz Movement

• In Event: Roundtable Session 18.
  In Roundtable Session: Citizenship and Social Norms in the Progressive Era

Abstract

Research into public opinion toward jazz in the 1920’s and 1930’s have demonstrated that anti-jazz opinions were quite often explicitly racialized, a fear of the musical Other. Whites were also critical of the perceived drop in musical values. Jazz was seen as the bastard child of European harmony and African rhythms, often discussed using blatantly racist terminology. A 1921 article in Ladies Home Journal reflected widespread disgust with the genre by rhetorically asking if America was “dancing, via the jazz route, hellward?”
Arguments to ban jazz in schools took their own unique form. Like the public at large, music educators similarly feared the perceived decline in musical standards. School music programs, it was argued, needed to combat jazz’s influence, a place to learn. The responsibility of educating the next generation made the issue of morality, or lack thereof, even more prominent in the case of jazz and schools. In this paper, I use jazz as a lens to thematically understand attitudes among educators about how responsive schools should be to cultural changes in society. I argue school officials initially responded to this emergent genre with a mix of shock and disgust. Schools music programs, it was argued throughout much of the 1920’s, needed to be the standard bearers of good musical taste. More specifically, I will examine the arguments to keep jazz out of schools.
Indeed, teachers in the 1920’s made two general arguments to defend their aversion toward jazz and justify its exclusion from schools. The most popular method was comparative. Music being compared to jazz was not mentioned, and did not need to be. B. B. Cobb, the superintendent of schools in Waco, Texas, simply described jazz as “unspeakable,” while other genres, presumably Western art music, were “beautiful.” School administrators and music educators were also worried about sense of moral jazz would engender in children. They pointed to the perceived morality, or lack thereof, that would supposedly accompany jazz into schools and into their students’ lives. School music teachers worried that expanding the school music education canon to include jazz would lead students to drink, dance and, as one high school teacher wrote, “dress immodestly.” Critics of jazz in schools were ultimately concerned about what types of attitudes and behaviors the music would lead to in supposedly impressionable children. This focus on jazz will help illuminate differing concepts of morality between Progressive Era students and educators.

Author

• Jacob Hardesty, Indiana University