The Ascendency of Capitialism

I. The Jazz Age--The Commodification of Culture



A. Jazz--the 1st World Music

1. Development--jazz developed from the synergistic relationship between African and European folk music traditions that also spawned other American music idioms like the blued (the first manifestation of this relationship), country music, much 20th century popular music, rock and roll--and all that followed.



a) War with Spain (1898)--the United States’ short-lived war with Spain netted the country its first overseas colonies (the Philippines, Puerto Rico, kind sorta Cuba), and to accompany the soldiers off to war there were numerous members of brass bands.



b) New Orleans--the largest US port on the Caribbean became the place where returning soldiers were mustered out of the Army--and where these military brass bands dumped their instruments, as well--creating an abundance of musical instruments in the city, and dropping the price for used instruments there considerably.



c) “Entertainment” Center--New Orleans was filled at the turn of the 20th Century with brothels and saloons, with a clientele ranging from sailors and dockhands to company executives--all interested in entertainment of one sort or another. New Orleans also had an abundance of Creole (mixed ancestry French/Spanish/African persons) who provided a cadre of musicians trained in European classical music, but familiar with the early blues music as well.

2. Dissemination--jazz might have remained a localized phenomenon, except for the criminalization of brothels in New Orleans, and Thomas Edison’s invention of the grammaphone.



a) Player piano--the earliest disseminator of jazz-style music was the ragtime rolls produced for player pianos the were in many middle-class homes just before the turn of the 20th century--this is the reason we know anything about how Scott Joplin and other “ragtime” composers sounded like. This also introduced some middle class kids to the sound of this newly emerging music.

b) Reform in New Orleans--closed many of the venues that New Orleans musicians had plied their trade in, and forced them to look elsewhere for paying musical jobs--mainly in cities that were seeing a large influx of African American migration in the United States, like St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, and New York; these cities became hot new centers for jazz music by the early 1920s.



c) Gramaphone--replaced the player piano in many homes, and because it was so much less money than a player piano, it came into much wider use. Its sale created a market for recorded music; although jazz was first a staple of the “race records” market, when it left the pressing plant the companies exercised no control over who bought it--including white kids in places like Davenport, Iowa like Leon “Bix” Beiderbecke



(1) Music was introduced to Europe by African American soldiers during World War I, some of whom chose to live there after the war ended--Paris was a particularly choice spot--because they did not face the level of every day discrimination there that they did in the United States.

(2) Jazz also provided the basis for the development of popular music in the United States and Europe, as “hot” jazz was “sweetened” for white audiences; the Paul Whiteman Orchestra was the best known example of this.



B. The Automobile Age



1. Development--no one person--or even one country--can be credited with the development of the automobile. Its development came about because of the developments in earlier related industries--particularly bicycle making, wagon making--and by engineering advances that made smaller engines more efficient and powerful.



a) Bicycles--manufacturing bicycles helped develop new metal working techniques, particularly the technique for hardening metals for use in manufacturing gears, and the use of hollow metal tubes for frames, proving to be both strong and lightweight. The bicycle industry also trained workers in these techniques.

(1) Bicycling was an international craze in the years before the invention of the automobile. Coventry, England was a major center of manufacturing (American centers of bicycling manufacturing--like Toledo--labeled themselves the “Coventry of America”); the current Tour de France is a reflection of the popularity of bicycle racing dating from this period.



2. Wagon-making--expertise in the manufacturing of wagons also informed the manufacturing process for building automobile bodies for years--into the early 1950s, in fact, when “uni-body” construction was invented (note the “woody” station wagon)



3. Smaller, more efficient engines--were the result of hundreds (thousands?) of “shade tree” mechanics tinkering and experimenting in their workshops, and through mounting the results on wagons and other vehicles and seeing what resulted--men like Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler in Germany, Charles and Frank Duryea and Ransom E. Olds in the United States, and Rene Panhard and Emile Levassor in France.



4. Henry Ford and the Popularly-Priced Automobile--Ford is largely responsible for popularizing the automobile. He accomplished this by utilizing two factors--by seeking manufacturing innovations to cut his cost of production (by 1924, when Ford had manufactured 50% of all vehicles then on the road, the Model T sold for $295--the equivalent of $3,660 in 2009), and by paying his workers an astounding $5/day--thereby helping create a market for his inexpensive car.

II. “The New Prosperity”

A. The New Economics--beginning in 1919, a rollback of gains labor unions had made during the labor shortage of the war years, coupled with the quashing of all dissent from those opposed to capitalist enterprise, created the atmosphere for the “Golden 20s.”

1. Political Backlash in the United States



a) Labor--in 1919, a variety of strikes were defeated around the country by governmental sanction of the use of strikebreakers; companies brought in strikebreakers, and local and state governments used their police powers to break up the massive pickets that unions used in response in the name of “law and order.”



b) Political dissent--1919 also saw the wholesale arrest of political dissenters, epitomized by the “Palmer Raids.” Repression of dissent began two years earlier, during the war, when federal, state, and local governments began vigorous enforcement of the Alien and Sedition Act. A.Mitchell Palmer, US Attorney General in 1919, attempted to distinguish himself as a leading presidential contender for the 1920 Democratic Party nomination by rounding and deporting the remaining “reds”; this proved to be a little too heavy-handed, however, even for patriotic Americans. The criticism Palmer received for these ill-considered, and illegal, raids ended his political career



(1) Mike Davis contends that the bombing of Wall Street in 1920 was in direct response to this affair.

2. The United States and World Finance--the cost--both in money and population--and the destruction of industrial infrastructure (particularly in German) shifted the balance of financial might from Great Britain and Germany to the United States.

a) Wall Street investment--investing had previously been the exclusive field for people rich enough to own banks; in the 1920s it became possible for smaller investors to move into The Market, investing their savings or, better yet, borrowing money “on the margin” (a promise to pay a certain price for a stock, then selling it when the price went up, pocketing the difference--without actually putting any money up).



b) Economists believed that, in fact, capitalism had “matured,” and that the “boom and bust” of the business cycle had been overcome.

c) A new financial tool was invented as well--”consumer credit”--that allowed the middle class (and those aspiring to move into the middle class) to buy goods like washing machines and especially automobiles. The automobile industry--outside of Ford--began to market cars as status symbols, since financing the purchase of an automobile allowed the consumer to buy “more car” than they could afford to pay cash for.
3. Some of the financial innovations in the US spread to Europe throughout the 1920s, allowing the middle class there to also indulge in an array of consumer spending.



Conclusion--This eased access to credit proved to be the engine to greater prosperity for many people of all economic classes--especially in the United States. But the prosperity this generated also encouraged people to take on a large amount of debt, and when the good times ended, it left many people over-extended financially, and the mountain of bad debt proved to have a long-term stranglehold on the economies of the world.