Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [20]
The easy physicality and emotional intensity of black culture both attracted white audiences and terrified them. An early account of the rise of jazz in New York began, “One touch of jazz makes savages of us all.” Doctors warned that jazz “intoxicates like whisky and releases stronger animal passions.” The Ladies’ Home Journal launched an anti-jazz crusade, condemning the decadence and immorality that jazz and modern dancing (with its “wriggling movement and sensuous stimulation”) were breeding in the young.
But the young didn’t care. Jazz was their music too. “If . . . we give up jazz we shall be sacrificing nearly all there is of gaiety and liveliness and rhythmic power in our lives,” wrote the white critic Gilbert Seldes proprietarily. Jazz expressed his generation’s “independence, our carelessness, our frankness, our gaiety.” Well-bred, well-off New Yorkers began coming to Harlem in their thousands to hear real jazz—and taste real life. If Puritanism was what had ruined American society, then Harlem, “a cultural enclave that had magically survived [Puritanism’s] psychic fetters” was just a cab ride away.
In this sense, according to the historian Nathan Huggins, the “creation of Harlem as a place of exotic culture was as much a service to white need as it was to black,” and its black inhabitants recognized this and resented it. Claude McKay called Harlem an “all-white picnic ground”; Langston Hughes said Harlem merely accepted “the role forced on it—that of bookie, bootlegger and bordello to white downtown.”
“It was a period when local and visiting royalty were not at all uncommon in Harlem,” wrote Hughes. “It was a period when Harold Jackman, a handsome young Harlem schoolteacher of modest means, calmly announced one day that he was sailing for the Riviera for a fortnight, to attend Princess Murat’s yachting party. It was a period when Charleston preachers opened up shouting churches as sideshows for white tourists. It was a period when at least one charming colored chorus girl, amber enough to pass for a Latin American, was living in a penthouse, with all her bills paid by a gentleman whose name was banker’s magic on Wall Street . . . It was the period when the Negro was in vogue.”
The most expensive and theatrical nightclubs in Harlem catered almost exclusively for white clients. Most of these speakeasies were little more than pastiches of a world still inaccessible to whites. In the real Harlem clubs like Lincoln Gardens, licorice-tasting gin cost $2 a pint and, when King Oliver and Louis Armstrong played, the “whole joint was rocking, tables, chairs, walls, people moved with the rhythm.” The Lincoln Gardens’ clientele had no need for the professional dancers provided by the touristy clubs to guide the uninitiated through the abandoned and demanding steps of the Cakewalk, the Black Bottom or the Monkey Glide.
White visitors went instead to what Hughes called “Jim Crow Clubs” like the Plantation Club, with its interiors based on an ante-bellum Southern plantation complete with a white picket fence round the dance floor and a real “black mammy” cooking waffles in a miniature log cabin at the end of the evening, or the Cotton Club, where revelers ate fried chicken and barbecued ribs against a backdrop of African sculpture, jungly vegetation and bongo drums. This was how Harlem sold itself to the white tourists from downtown: as a place of exotic, primitive sensuality and abandon—with reassuringly racist undertones.
Harlem’s inhabitants hated the flocks of white people swarming