20. Townsend Scudder, quoted in Kobler, Trial of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, 56.
21. Quoted in Kobler, Trial of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, 58.
22. Ruth Snyder, quoted in Kobler, Trial of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, 60.
23. New York Times, January 15, 1927, quoted in Kobler, Trial of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, 64–65.
24. Damon Runyon, “A Chilly-Looking Blonde and Her Paramour,” in These Were Our Years: A Panoramic and Nostalgic Look at American Life between the Two World Wars, ed. Frank Brookhouser (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), 208.
25. Charles Merz, “Bigger and Better Murders,” Harper’s Monthly, August 1927, 341.
26. John R. Brazil, “Murder Trials, Murder, and Twenties America,” American Quarterly 33, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 163–164.
27. Bernard McFadden, quoted in Brazil, “Murder Trials, Murder, and Twenties America,” 164.
28. According to John R. Brazil, the trial was a media circus in which “a special switchboard manned by 28 operators, 60 specially leased telegraph wires, 200 correspondents (including 16 from the staid New York Times), and more than 50 photographers kept the newspapers supplied with material. In the 24 days of the trial 12,000,000 words went out over the telegraph wires, ‘enough, if put into one newspaper,’ said the Associated Press, ‘to fill 960 pages. . . . Words enough if put into book form to make a shelf of novels 22’ long.’” Brazil, “Murder Trials, Murder, and Twenties America,” 164.
29. Brazil, “Murder Trials, Murder, and Twenties America,” 164.
30. Silas Bent, “The Art of Ballyhoo,” Harper’s Monthly, September 1927, 492–493.
31. Brazil, “Murder Trials, Murder, and Twenties America,” 170–171.
32. Alexander Woolcott, Long, Long Ago (New York: Viking, 1943), 122, cited in Brazil, “Murder Trials, Murder, and Twenties America,” 167.
33. Brazil, “Murder Trials, Murder, and Twenties America,” 168.
34. Maurine Watkins, “Mrs. Gaertner Has ‘Class’ as She Faces Jury,” Chicago Tribune, June 4, 1924, reprinted in Maurine Watkins, “Chicago”: With the Chicago Tribune Articles That Inspired It, edited and with an introduction by Thomas H. Pauly (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 149.
35. Maurine Watkins, “Select Jury to Pronounce Fate of Beulah Annan,” Chicago Tribune, May 23, 1924, reprinted in Watkins, “Chicago,” 137.
36. Maurine Watkins, “Mystery Victim Is Robert Law; Hold Divorcee,” Chicago Tribune, March 12, 1924, reprinted in Watkins, “Chicago,” 116.
37. Maurine Watkins, “Woman Plays Jazz Air as Victim Dies,” Chicago Tribune, April 4, 1924, reprinted in Watkins, “Chicago,” 122–123.
38. Maurine Watkins, “Beulah Annan Awaits Stork, Murder Trial: Jail Women Wonder ‘What Jurors Think About,’” Chicago Tribune, May 9, 1924, reprinted in Watkins, “Chicago,” 134.
39. Thomas H. Pauly, introduction to Watkins, “Chicago,” xxvii.
40. Chicago Post, September 12, 1927, quoted in Watkins, “Chicago,” xxvii.
41. Chicago Herald Examiner, September 19, 1927, quoted in Watkins, “Chicago,” xxvi–xxvii.
42. Walter Lippmann, “Blazing Publicity: Why We Know So Much about ‘Peaches’ Browning, Valentino, Lindbergh and Queen Marie” (1927), in Vanity Fair: Selections from America’s Most Memorable Magazine; A Cavalcade of the 1920s and 1930s, ed. Cleveland Amory and Frederic Bradlee (New York: Viking, 1960), 121.
43. Ibid., 122.
44. Walter Lippmann, “The Causes of Political Indifference Today,” in Men of Destiny (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 20. Henceforth cited in text.
45. Grantland Rice, “The Golden Panorama,” in Sport’s Golden Age: A Close-Up of the Fabulous Twenties, ed. Allison Danzig and Peter Brandwein (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948), 1.
46. Ibid., 7.
47. Robert Lipsyte, SportsWorld: An American Dreamland (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Company, 1975), 170.
48. Ibid., 170–171.
49. Ibid., 172.
50. Ibid., 173.
51. Paul Gallico, The Golden People (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 25.
52. Ibid., 77.
53. Ibid., 186.
54. Ibid., 191.
55. James P. Dawson, “Boxing,” in Danzig and Brandwein, Sport’s Golden Age, 40.
56. Gallico, Golden People, 78.
57. James Crusinberry, quoted in Mark Inabinett, Grantland Rice and His Heroes: The Sportswriter as Mythmaker in the 1920s (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), 29.
58. Gene Tunney, “My Fights with Jack Dempsey,” in The Aspirin Age, 1919–1941, edited by Isabel Leighton (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1949), 154. Henceforth cited in text.
59. Jack Dempsey, quoted in Randy Roberts, Jack Dempsey: The Manassa Mauler (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 232.
60. Roberts, Jack Dempsey, 237.
61. Tex Richard, quoted in Roberts, Jack Dempsey, 250.
62. Roberts, Jack Dempsey, 255–256.
63. Jack Dempsey to Dan Daniel, quoted in Roberts, Jack Dempsey, 259.
64. John Kieran, quoted in Roberts, Jack Dempsey, 262.
65. Quoted in Mel Heimer, The Long Count (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 233.
66. Elliott J. Gorn, “The Manassa Mauler and the Fighting Marine: An Interpretation of the Dempsey-Tunney Fights,” Journal of American Studies 19 (1985): 32.
67. Ibid., 35.
68. Ibid., 37.
69. Ibid., 39.
70. Ibid., 43.
71. Michael Oriard, King Football: Sport and Spectacle in the Golden Age of Radio and Newsreels, Movies and Magazines, the Weekly and the Daily Press (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 68–69.
72. Grantland Rice, “Notre Dame’s Cyclone Beats Army,” New York Herald Tribune, October 19, 1924, quoted in Lipsyte, SportsWorld, 171.
73. Estimates of attendance vary between 115,000 to 120,000, but no accurate account exists.
74. The first clause in Knute Rockne’s contract with the Wilson Athletic Equipment Company, 1927, quoted in Murray Sperber, Shake Down the Thunder: The Creation of Notre Dame Football (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 232.
75. “Annual Report of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching,” 1924, quoted in Sperber, Shake Down the Thunder, 183.
76. G. Edward White, Creating the National Pastime: Baseball Transforms Itself, 1903–1953 (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1996), 117–118.
77. H. I. Phillips, quoted in Leo Trachtenberg, The Wonder Team: The True Story of the Incomparable 1927 New York Yankees (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1995), 2.
78. Background information on Babe Ruth comes from Robert W. Creamer, Babe: The Legend Comes to Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974); John G. Robertson, The Babe Chases 60: That Fabulous 1927 Season, Home Run by Home Run (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1999); and Ken Sobol, Babe Ruth and the American Dream (New York: Ballantine Books, 1974).
79. David Quentin Voigt, America through Baseball (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1976), 112.
80. Patrick Trimble, “Babe Ruth: The Media Construction of a 1920’s Sports Personality,” Colby Quarterly 32, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 46.
81. No copy of this film exists. The description is from Kenneth W. Munden, executive ed., The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States: Feature Films, 1921–1930 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1971), 31.
82. Grantland Rice, The Tumult and the Shouting: My Life in Sport (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1954), 112–113.
chapter four. seeking respectability: modern media and traditional values
1. Allene Talmey, Doug and Mary and Others (New York: Macy-Masius, 1927), 33.
2. Booton Herndon, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks: The Most Popular Couple the World Has Ever Known (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 1.
3. Herndon, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, 228.
4. Cecil B. DeMille, “The Screen as a Religious
Teacher: How the Much-Discussed Filming of The King of Kings, the New Religious Drama, Was Produced with Reverence and Accuracy,” Theatre, June 1927; reprinted in notes to The King of Kings, directed by Cecile B. DeMille, Criterion Collection DVD (2004), booklet included with the DVD, 31.
5. W. C. DeMille and Cecil B. DeMille, quoted in Robert S. Birchard, The King of Kings, in notes to The King of Kings, Criterion Collection DVD, booklet included with the DVD, 17.
6. Cecil B. DeMille, radio broadcast, Los Angeles, KNX, July 11, 1927, quoted in Birchard, King of Kings, 20.
7. DeMille, “The Screen as a Religious Teacher,” 33.
8. Advertisements, included on The King of Kings, Criterion Collection DVD.
9. “Hundreds of Police Battle to Keep Crowds in Check,” Los Angeles Examiner, May 19, 1927.
10. Los Angeles Times, May 15, 1927, quoted in David Karnes, “The Glamorous Crowd: Hollywood Movie Premieres between the Wars,” American Quarterly 38, no. 4 (Autumn 1986): 560.
11. Grauman’s advertisement, Los Angeles Times, May 19, 1927.
12. Cecil B. DeMille, quoted in Welford Beaton, “Industry Fashioning Weapon of Defense,” Film Spectator 3, no. 7 (May 28, 1927), 3.
13. “Invitation to the Organizational Banquet of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, May 11, 1927,” quoted in Pierre Norman Sands, A Historical Study of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (1927–1947) (New York: Arno Press, 1973), 38–39.
14. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Annual Report, 1929, 49, quoted in Sands, Historical Study, 85.
15. Sands, Historical Study, 86.
16. Cecil B. DeMille, as quoted in Birchard, King of Kings, 16.
17. For a much more complex interpretation of The Jazz Singer, see Michael Rogin, “Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His Voice,” Critical Inquiry 18 (Spring 1992): 417–453.
18. Kathy J. Ogren, The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 7.
19. For a fuller discussion of these ideas, see Rogin, “Blackface, White Noise.”
20. Sampson Raphaelson, The Jazz Singer, ed. Robert L. Carringer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 122.
21. The Jazz Singer, directed by Alan Crosland (Warner Brothers, 1927).
22. For a full discussion of this process, see Court Carney, Cuttin’ Up: How Early Jazz Got America’s Ear (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009).
23. Ibid., 73.
24. Laurence Bergreen, Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life (New York: Broadway Books, 1997), 200.
25. Ibid., 258.
26. For a fuller discussion of Peyton’s writings and attitudes, see Carney, Cuttin’ Up, 64–68.
27. Paul Whiteman and Mary Margaret McBride, Jazz (New York: J. H. Sears, 1926), 3.
28. Ibid., 257.
29. James Weldon Johnson, God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (New York: Viking Penguin, 1927; repr., 1990), 11. Citations are to the 1990 edition and are henceforth given in the text.
30. Alain Locke, “The Negro Spirituals,” in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1925; repr., New York: Touchstone, 1997), 199. Citations are to the Touchstone edition.
31. Ibid., 200.
32. John Wesley Work, Folk Song of the American Negro (Nashville, Tenn.: Fisk University Press, 1915), 93.
33. J. A. Rogers, “Jazz at Home,” in Locke, The New Negro, 216. Henceforth cited in text.
34. Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Nation, June 23, 1926, reprinted in The Harlem Renaissance: A History and an Anthology, ed. Cary D. Wintz (Maplecrest, N.Y.: Brandywine Press, 2003), 151.
35. Langston Hughes, “Song for a Dark Girl,” in Fine Clothes to the Jew (New York: Knopf, 1927), reprinted in Wintz, Harlem Renaissance, 162.
36. Hughes, “Negro Artist,” 151.
37. Rudolph Fisher, “The Caucasian Storms Harlem,” American Mercury, August 1927, reprinted in Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology, ed. Venetria K. Patton and Maureen Honey (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 96.
38. Shuffle Along, a musical in two acts; book by Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles; music by Eubie Blake; lyrics by Noble Sissle. Produced by Nikko Production Co. at the 63rd Street Music Hall, May 23, 1921.
39. Barry Singer, Black and Blue: The Life and Lyrics of Andy Razaf (New York: Schirmer, 1992), 100.
40. Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 257.
41. Mark Tucker, Ellington: The Early Years (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 198.
42. Duke Ellington, “My Hunt for Song Titles,” Rhythm, August 1933, quoted in John Edward Hasse, Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 90–91.
43. Duke Ellington, quoted in Robert Levi, booklet notes to the Duke Ellington recording Reminiscing in Tempo, Columbia Legacy CK 48654 (1991), 6, quoted in Hasse, Beyond Category, 90.
44. Ellington, “My Hunt for Song Titles,” 92.
45. The historiography on radio is vast, with many studies focusing on a single aspect, such as the development of radio technology, the radio industry, or radio programming. See Erik Barnouw, A Tower in Babel: A History of Radio Broadcasting in the United States to 1933 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966); Tom Lewis, Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio (New York: Edward Burlingame Books/HarperCollins, 1991); Susan Douglas, The Invention of American Broadcasting, 1899–1922 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Robert W. McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977); J. Fred MacDonald, Don’t Touch That Dial! Radio Programming in American Life from 1920 to 1960 (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1979); Susan Smulyan, Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American Broadcasting, 1920–1934 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994); and Daniel J. Czitrom, Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982).
46. Frederick V. Hunt, Electroacoustics: The Analysis of Transduction, and Its Historical Background (New York: American Institute of Physics, for the Acoustical Society of America, 1982), 81.
47. John P. Wolkonowicz, “The Philco Corporation: Historical Review and Strategic Analysis, 1892–1961” (master’s thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1981), 10.
48. For a fuller explanation of the court cases and their consequences, see Jora R. Minasian, “The Political Economy of Broadcasting in the 1920s,” Journal of Law and Economics 12, no. 2 (October 1969): 391–403.
49. For more on the Radio Act of 1927, see Louise Benjamin, “Working It Out Together: Radio Policy from Hoover to the Radio Act of 1927,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 42, no. 2 (1998): 221–236; and Mark Goodman and Mark Gring, “The Ideological Fight over Creation of the Federal Radio Commission in 1927,” Journalism History 26, no. 3 (2000): 117–124.
50. Lewis, Empire of the Air, 181.
51. Guglielmo Marconi, “Where Is Radio Going?” Saturday Evening Post, December 3, 1927, 48.
52. “Electioneering on the Air,” New Republic, September 3, 1924, 9.
53. Virgil E. Dickson, quoted in Clayton R. Koppes, “The Social Destiny of Radio: Hope and Disillusionment in the 1920s,” South Atlantic Quarterly 68 (1969): 367.
54. Fritz Reiner, quoted in Koppes, “Social Destiny of Radio,” 367.
55. For a fuller discussion of the perceived potential of radio in the early 1920s, see Koppes, “Social Destiny of Radio,” 363–376.
56. Robert W. McChesney, “Media and Democracy: The Emergence of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States, 1927–1935,” OAH Magazine of History, Spring 1992, 34–40.
57. Smulyan, Selling Radio, 68.
58. For more on independent radio in Chicago in the early 1920s, see Lizabeth Cohen, “Encountering Mass Culture at the Grassroots: The Experience of Chicago Workers in the 1920s,” American Quarterly 41, no. 1 (March 1989): 6–33; and Derek W. Vaillant, “Sounds of Whiteness: Local Radio, Racial Formation, and Public Culture in Chicago, 1921–1935,” American Quarterly 54, no. 1 (March 2002): 25–66.
59. Vaillant, “Sounds of Whiteness,” 52.
60. “Radiocasting on a National Scale,” Literary Digest, October 2, 1926, 13.
61. Quoted in Literary Digest, October 2, 1926, 13.
62. Quoted in Literary Digest, October 2, 1926, 13.
63. Melvin Ely, The Adventures of Amos ’n’ Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 55.
64. For more detail on the creation and marketing of Sam ’n’ Henry, see Ely, Adventures of Amos ’n’ Andy.
65. Vaillant, “Sounds of Whiteness,” 38.
66. Edgar H. Felix, Using Radio in Sales Promotion: A Book for Advertisers, Station Managers, and Broadcasting Artists (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1927), 1. Henceforth cited in text.
67. For a fuller discussion of these seven characteristics, see Felix, Using Radio in Sales Promotion, 98–105.
conclusion. the search for american culture
1. H. H. Hemming and Doris Hemming, translator’s introduction to André Siegfried, America Comes of Age: A French Analysis, trans. H. H. Hemming and Doris Hemming (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927), vi.
2. Siegfried, America Comes of Age, 348. Henceforth cited in text.
3. Walter Lippmann, “Empire: The Days of Our Nonage Are Over,” in Men of Destiny (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 215. Henceforth cited in text.
4. Edith Wharton, Twilight Sleep (New York: Scribner, 1927; repr., 1997), 116–117. Citations are to the 1997 edition.
5. Barbara Haskell, Charles Demuth (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1987), 195.
6. Charles Demuth to Alfred Stieglitz, August 15, 1927, quoted in Haskell, Charles Demuth, 195.
1927 and the Rise of Modern America Page 26