Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [223]
On the other hand, the arts reached us directly. My mother and aunts shimmied and foxtrotted, and we listened to recognizably American music even when produced by English bands and vocalists. Radio and gramophone brought us Jerome Kern and Gershwin. ‘Jazz’, as then commonly understood – syncopated rhythmic music with saxophones and lacking bowed strings – was already the sound of urban middle-class leisure in the twenties. It meant America, and because of what the USA symbolized, it meant modernity, short hair for women and the age of machines. The staff of the Bauhaus had itself photographed with a saxophone. And so, when I came to England and was converted to jazz by my cousin Denis, this time to the real thing, the gates opened not only on a new aesthetic experience, but on a new world. Like Alistair Cooke, one of my predecessors as editor of Granta, who was then beginning his career as a lifetime commentator on the US with a radio series I Hear America Singing, I also discovered America by ear.
Jazz was as good an introduction to the USA as any, because in Britain at least the sound and its social significance – a very 1930s phrase – went together. To be a jazz-fan was not only, and for obvious reasons, to be against racism and for the Negroes (this was the era before they wanted to be described as Black and then African-American), but to gobble up all information about the USA even faintly relevant to jazz: and very little about the country was not relevant in some way. So all fans collected an endlessly fascinating bric-a-brac of facts about the USA, from the names of American cities, rivers and railroads (Milwaukee, the wide Missouri, the Aitchison, Topeka and Santa Fe) to the names of gangsters and senators. In the 1930s reputations could be made simply by knowing facts about the USA. Denis Brogan, a hard-drinking and eventually not quite so hard-working Glaswegian, teaching politics in Cambridge, was an expert on two countries, but he made his radio reputation – and he was one of the first media dons in Europe – not as a very knowledgeable historian and observer of France, but as the sort of man who could name all the state capitals of the United States and the title of every song by Irving Berlin.
The image of America is so powerful and all-embracing that it is easy to suppose that it has barely changed over what we now know to have been ‘the American century’. But for those of us who became conscious of it in the 1930s, especially if we were on the left, it was in some respects quite different. For one thing, it was not dominated by envy. We began thinking about America at the only moment when the US economy was not a triumphant model of wealth and productive potential for the rest of the world. In the decade of the Great Depression we no longer saw the world of Gatsby but that of The Grapes of Wrath. In the 1920s and early 1930s America was a by-word for the hard-faced pursuit of profit, for injustice, for ruthless, unscrupulous and brutal repression. But F. D. Roosevelt’s USA not only disclaimed this reputation; it turned it sharply to the left. It visibly became a government for the poor and the unions. What is more, Roosevelt was passionately loathed and denounced by American big business, that is to say by the very people who more than any others represented the evils of capitalism to us. It is true that, as usual, the Communist International, stuck in its ultra-sectarian phase, took its time to recognize what was obvious to everyone else and denounced the New Deal, but by 1935 even it had come round. In short, in the