The Great War profoundly affected the generation born around the turn of the century. It had raised and then dashed their hopes for the future. Now the narrowness and prudery of so many of their elders and the stuffy conservatism of nearly all politicians seemed not merely old-fashioned but ludicrous. The actions of red-baiters and reactionaries led them to exaggerate the importance of their right to express themselves in bizarre ways. Their models and indeed some of their leaders were the prewar Greenwich Village bohemians.
The 1920s has been described as the Jazz Age, the era of “flaming youth,” when young people danced to syncopated “African” rhythms, careened about the countryside in automobiles in search of pleasure and forgetfulness, and made gods of movie stars and professional athletes. This view of the period bears a superficial resemblance to reality. “Younger people,” one observer noted in 1922, were attempting “to create a way of life free from the bondage of an authority that has lost all meaning.” But if they differed from their parents and grandparents, it was primarily because young people were adjusting to more profound and more rapid changes in their world than their grandparents could have imagined.
Beliefs that only the avant-garde had held before the war became commonplace; trends that were barely perceptible during the Progressive Era now reached avalanche proportions. This was particularly noticeable in relationships between the sexes. Courtship, for example, was transformed. In the late nineteenth century, a typical young man “paid a call” on a female friend. He met and conversed with her parents, perhaps over coffee and cookies. The couple remained at home, the parents nearby if not actually participating in what was essentially a social (one might say, public) event held in a private place.
By the 1920s paying calls was being replaced by dating; the young man called only to “pick up” his “date,” to go off, free of parental supervision, to whatever diversion they wished. Many dating conventions counteracted the trend toward freedom in sexual matters. A man asked a woman “for a date” because dating meant going somewhere and spending money, and the man was expected to do the transporting and pay the bill. This made the woman doubly dependent; under the old system, she provided the refreshments, and there was no taboo against her doing the inviting.
But for young people of the 1920s, relations between the sexes were becoming more relaxed and uninhibited. Respectable young women smoked cigarettes, something previously done in public only by prostitutes and bohemian types. They cast off heavy corsets, wore lipstick and “exotic” perfumes, and shortened both their hair and their skirts, the latter rising steadily from instep to ankle to calf to knee and beyond as the decade progressed. For decades female dressmakers and beauty salon proprietors had sold their own beauty products and potions. By 1920, however, new cosmetic corporations, managed primarily by men, appropriated the products and marketing strategies of local women entrepreneurs and catered to national mass markets.
Freudian psychology and the more accessible ideas of the British “sexologist” Havelock Ellis reached steadily deeper into the popular psyche. According to A. A. Brill, the chief American popular-izer of Freud’s theories, the sex drive was irrepressible. “Love and sex are the same thing,” he wrote. “The urge is there, and whether the individual desires it or no, it always manifests itself.” Since sex was “the central function of life,” Ellis argued, it must be “simple and natural and pure and good.” Bombarded by
Chicago (2003) is a tale of illicit sex, booze, and "all that jazz."
The characters played by Renee Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones aspire to cabaret stardom. Each is married, each is jilted, and each shoots her wayward lover because "he had it coming."The newspapers gleefully promote the stories. From prison, while awaiting trial for murder, the women compete to garner the most headlines, courting the fame that will boost their careers. Richard Gere, who plays their celebrity lawyer, "razzle dazzles"all Chicago (including the juries) and gets the women acquitted. Chicago is a musical. It does not claim to be history. Trial lawyers do not tap dance upon the judge's bench, nor do prisoners tango on death row. The movie, however, is based on a true story; and both the movie and the story illuminate important aspects of the Roaring Twenties.
On March 11,1924,Walter Law, an automobile salesman, was found slumped against the steering wheel of a car in downtown Chicago. He was dead from a gunshot wound to the head. A pistol and an empty bottle of gin were on the floor. The car was registered to Belva Gaertner, a twice-divorced cabaret singer known as Belle Brown. Police hurried to her rooming house and peppered her with questions.
"We went driving, Mr. Law and I,"she told them. She explained that they had stopped at the Bingham "cafe," bought a bottle of gin (illegally, since this was during Prohibition),and drove around town. "I don't know what happened next,"she declared. During the interrogation Gaertner paced nervously, perhaps for good reason: Her clothes were soaked with blood. The police charged her with murder.
On April 3, police received a phone call from Beulah Annan, a young married woman who worked in a laundry. She said that a man had attempted to rape her and that she had shot him. Police raced to her apartment, where they found Harry Kalstedt dead from a gunshot wound. Annan insisted that she had acted in self-defense, and her husband supported her story. But police hammered away at the fact that Kalstedt had worked at the same laundry as Annan, and that he had been shot in the back. Annan eventually confessed that the two had been having an affair and that, when he threatened to dump her, she shot him. For two hours, as he lay dying, she drank cocktails and listened to a recording of "Hula Lou,"a foxtrot about a Hawaiian girl "with more sweeties than a dog has fleas."
Maurine Watkins, a young reporter, covered both stories for the Chicago Tribune. Murder had long been a staple of local journalism, but Watkins recognized the extraordinary appeal of this story:jazz, booze, and two comely "lady mur-deresses,"as Watkins termed them. While awaiting trial in prison, the women provided Watkins with delicious quotes.
Gaertner told Watkins that she was innocent. "No woman can love a man enough to kill him,"she explained. "There are always plenty more."She added, "Gin and guns— either one is bad enough, but together they get you in a dickens of a mess." When the grand jury ruled that she could be tried for murder, Gaertner was irritated. "That was bum,"she snapped. She called the jurors "narrow-minded old birds—bet they never heard a jazz band in their lives. Now, if I'm tried, I
Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renee Zellweger from the movie Chicago.
Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, "lady murderesses.”
Want worldly men, broad-minded men, men who know what it is to get out a bit. Why, no one like that would convict me!”
Watkins described Gaertner as "stylish"and "classy"but called Annan the "prettiest woman ever accused of murder in Chicago”—"young, slender, with bobbed auburn hair; wide set, appealing blue eyes, upturned nose; translucent skin, faintly, very faintly, rouged, an ingenuous smile. Refined features, intelligent expression—an 'awfully nice girl.'” This account appeared on the front page.
During the trial, Annan's attorney pointed to "this frail little girl, struggling with a drunken brute.” On May 25, after deliberating less than two hours, the all-male jury acquitted her of the crime. (Justice in those days was swift; in Illinois, too, it was devoid of women, who did not gain the right to serve on juries until 1939.) Two weeks after Annan's trial, Gaertner was also found not guilty."Another pretty woman gone free,”muttered the prosecutor. Watkins noted that four other women remained on death row, but none were as "styl-ish”or "pretty”as Gaertner and Annan.
Unlike the movie's "lady murderesses,”Annan and Gaertner did not team up in a cabaret act. Annan had a nervous breakdown, was institutionalized, and died in 1928. Of Gaertner's subsequent life, little is known. Watkins abandoned journalism and entered Yale drama school. In 1926 she wrote Chicago, a comedy derived from the Gaertner and Annan trials, and it ran on Broadway for 172 performances. The next year Cecil B. De Mille adapted the play as a silent movie. In 1975 director Bob Fosse bought the rights to Chicago and created the Broadway musical on which the 2003 movie was based.
The "lady murderesses” became part of the lore of the Roaring Twenties; the story seemed to confirm the fears of traditionalists. One minister warned about jazz's "wriggling movement and sensuous stimulation”of the body's "sensory center.”Short, bobbed, or marcelled hair was similarly worrisome, because it signified a young woman's break from convention. Silk stockings, skirts that exposed knees, and straight dresses that de-emphasized the waist further suggested that women's bodies were not meant solely for childbirth. The movie makes all of these points with suitable salaciousness.
The movie also reiterates widespread concerns about city life. Several months after the acquittal of Gaertner and Annan, Literary Digest warned "country girls”of the moral dangers of large cities. Such fears echoed the judgments of sociologists, especially those of "the Chicago school”of urban sociology, headed by Robert Park of the University of Chicago. The Chicago sociologists contended that large cities disrupted traditional bonds of family and community and fostered crime and deviance. In The Gold Coast and the Slum (1929), sociologist Harvey Zorbaugh maintained that life in much of downtown Chicago was "the direct antithesis of all we are accustomed to think of as normal in society.” Big-city life was characterized by a "laxity of conventional standards, and of personal and social disorganization.”
Scholars now recognize that the portrait of urban city life as propounded by "the Chicago school”—and by movies such as Chicago—was overdrawn. Urbanization did not shatter family and ethnic ties. Neighborliness and community persisted even in blighted tenement districts. Few people cast off social conventions, much less succumbed to murderous impulses. In short, Belva Gaertner and Beulah Annan were good copy, and stories such as theirs helped make that celebrated decade roar, but most folks painted the town less vividly, if at all.
World History
