The peak before the fall: Jazz, glamour, Gatsby and a short-lived Golden Age

Hindustan Times

30-05-2025

One of the most consequential figures of the Jazz Age, arguably, was a now-forgotten man named Wayne Bidwell Wheeler.
He was the driving force behind the National Prohibition Act of 1919. When the consumption of alcohol was made illegal, prohibitionists argued this would help cure a host of ills ranging from domestic violence and political corruption to alcoholism itself.
What the Act famously did was help shape crime in the United States, and create a new and profitable field of business: the covert distillation, transport and distribution of alcohol.
The most famous of these bootlegger-millionaires was Al Capone, who controlled much of the illegal activity conducted in Chicago between the years of 1925 and '31.
He ran breweries and brothels, but was also hailed as a modern-day Robin Hood for his charitable contributions. When the Great Depression hit in 1929, Capone organised one of the city's biggest soup kitchens, feeding about 2,200 people three times a day.
Capone was unique among the mobsters of his era for a couple of other reasons too: he readily employed black people; and he was a fan of jazz.
There is a story about how he once asked Johnny Dodds to play a song. When the clarinetist said he didn't know it, Capone reportedly tore a $100 bill in two, gave one half to Dodds, and said he would get the other half when he learnt to play it.
Another time, a group of Capone's henchmen more-or-less kidnapped the jazz pianist and singer Fats Waller as a birthday present for their boss. Waller stayed with Capone for three days. He was given all the food he could eat, plied with endless glasses of champagne, and was reportedly paid $100 a song. Waller left Capone's company unharmed, and thousands of dollars richer.
The eccentricities and the sense of excess and debauchery in F Scott Fitzgerald's classic, The Great Gatsby (1925), draws directly from this world.
Fitzgerald was about 22, a young soldier on leave for the weekend, when he visited the Seelbach hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, in the late-1910s. There he met a man named George Remus, who had started out as a criminal lawyer (in both senses of the phrase), and was now a millionaire bootlegger.
Remus bought bonded liquor from before Prohibition and distributed it under the guise of medicinal use. His men then staged hijackings of their own delivery trucks, so they could resell the same alcohol at a much higher price.
Remus also ran his own distilleries in Cincinnati, moving this booze around through tunnels. And he threw lavish parties, featuring scantily clad dancers and gifts of diamond stick pins and new cars for guests.
In that other classic, Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 film The Godfather, one sees more of how Prohibition changed the face of organised crime in the US.
Salvatore Maranzano organised the Italian-American mob into five families: the Maranzano, Profaci, Mangano, Luciano and Gagliano. He then declared himself 'the boss of all bosses'. He was promptly murdered in a hit ordered by Charles 'Lucky' Luciano, who then set up The Commission, a governing body made up of members of the five families of New York, and representatives from other parts of the country.
Meanwhile, crime was merging with a new wave of music in New York City.
The original bootlegger of the era wasn't Capone. It was likely a man named Arnold Rothstein. When Prohibition hit, he invested in speakeasies, and smuggled Scotch whisky into the country in his own fleet of freighters. The character Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby was based on Rothstein.
The speakeasy was where one went to have a drink. Some of these establishments were seedy, others were fashionable. Some managed to be both. New York's 21 Club saw visitors such as Humphrey Bogart and Joan Crawford. It remained fashionable even after Prohibition ended, in 1933.
Similarly, Harlem's Cotton Club started off as an outfit where the gangster Owney Madden could sell liquor to the people of Harlem and ended up being one of the most fashionable places in New York — and the heart of the Harlem Renaissance. New Yorkers, regardless of race, crowded there to see the likes of Duke Ellington (1899-1974) and Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) perform.
These fashionable clubs attracted a new kind of woman: the Flapper. She challenged ideas of what a woman should be — in her clothing, behaviour, attitudes to sex and liquor. She had her own slang in which a divorced woman was a fire alarm, and engagement rings were handcuffs.
The Jazz Age may have come to an abrupt halt in 1929, with the great Wall Street crash and the onset of the Great Depression (which would drag on for 10 years, and be followed by World War 2).
But by this time, culture had become a thing of the masses. Gender roles had been altered forever. So had art. Music. Movies.
The world had changed. And would change again.
(K Narayanan writes on films, videogames, books and occasionally technology)