Echoes of the Jazz Age
[22] During this period, the zeitgeist of the Jazz Age "bore him up, flattered him and gave him more money than he had dreamed of, simply for telling people that he felt as they did, that something had to be done with all the nervous energy stored up and unexpended in the war.
[27] With his book royalties declining precipitously and his short stories no longer selling as easily to slick magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire amid the economic downturn,[28] Fitzgerald became keenly aware that one historical era had ended and another begun.
[30] Perkins suggested that Fitzgerald should write at least one article reflecting upon and eulogizing the era—some kind of "an elegy that would remind the public of his previous cultural influence as a writer and simultaneously fix a point in his mind from which he could begin a new phase of [literary] career".
[23] In contrast to social conservatives and isolationist politicians who insisted that World War I spawned the Jazz Age,[6] Fitzgerald instead pinpoints the 1919 May Day Riots as the actual starting point when young Americans read newspaper accounts of how mounted police officers brutally suppressed peaceful veterans.
[23] The excessive use of force by police officers against the demobilized war veterans triggered a wave of cynicism among younger Americans, and they questioned whether their country was any better than the despotic regimes in southern Europe.
"[1] Although Fitzgerald pinpoints the Jazz Age as beginning in Spring 1919, he asserts that the societal transformations which occurred had their roots as far back as 1915 before the country had formally entered World War I.
This was the generation whose girls dramatized themselves as flappers... Due to the above confluence of technological innovations and cultural trends, Fitzgerald argues that Prohibition in the United States had no effect whatsoever on the libertinism of the Jazz Age and claims the rampant hedonism would have occurred regardless.
[36] Echoing Voltaire's belief that books have a dominant influence on social behavior,[11] Fitzgerald ascribes the blithe spirit of the Jazz Age to the literary works of the period.
"[42] By 1931, a mere two years into the Great Depression, the carefree era known as the Jazz Age now seemed as distant to economically impoverished Americans as the antebellum period before World War I.
[42] Fitzgerald deems this outcome as inevitable since the bygone era had existed on "borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand dukes and the casualness of chorus girls.
"[42] After recognizing the inevitability of the era's abrupt end, Fitzgerald concludes the essay with a wistful coda about lost opportunities and lost youth:[43] "Sometimes, though, there is a ghostly rumble among the drums, an asthmatic whisper in the trombones that swings me back into the early twenties when we drank wood alcohol and every day in every way grew better and better, and there was a first abortive shortening of the skirts, and girls all looked alike in sweater dresses, and people you didn't want to know said "Yes, we have no bananas," and it seemed only a question of a few years before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were—and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more.
The Minneapolis Star interpreted Fitzgerald's essay to mean "that the raucous blatancy of jazz has been supplanted by the dulcet strains of violin music, that hip-flanks are no longer toted by thrill-hunting youngsters, that the emphasis on long skirts and rounded silhouettes in women's styles has come a more measured and cultivated mode of living.
As a social conservative, Mizener selectively highlighted passages by Fitzgerald which stated that "good instincts, honor, courtesy, and courage" as well as those "eternal necessary human values" were inadequately provided by the hedonistic Twenties.
