A uniquely American genre of music, jazz had its origins in New Orleans and in the urban North, where musicians and more recent migrants brought together diverse elements of African-American and European music into a new form. In music clubs, musicians drew upon their cultural traditions of down-home blues, minstrelsy, and brass band music, while others brought in elements from their formal European musical training. Jazz was and remains an amorphous music that is both rhythmically driven and at the same time open to the freedom of individual improvisation and interpretation. Syncopation, blue or indeterminate notes, rough vocal style, and improvisation form the boundaries of the genre. Within these lines, there is a multitude of styles. George Gershwin, whose music was a hybrid of Tin Pan Alley and jazz influences along with classical technique, wrote, “It is difficult to determine just what enduring values, aesthetically, jazz has contributed, because ‘jazz’ is a word which has been used for at least five or six different types of music.” Expatriate musician Sidney Bechet, a native of New Orleans, claimed that jazz was “a name the white people have given to the music.”
Whatever jazz was, it drew from a range of cultural influences. In New Orleans, diverse musical traditions first began to reshape musical idiom into what became recognizable as jazz. By the 1890s, ragtime, a syncopated jazz music, emerged and became popular with African-American listeners and increasingly with white audiences. By 1906, Jelly Roll Morton started touring nationally with his new jazz piano compositions. Dixieland jazz, ragtime’s first heir, first made its appearance in recording in 1917. Other innovators, such as Chicago’s Joe “King” Oliver, New Orleans’ Sidney Bechet, and New York’s Fletcher Henderson began to work out arrangements that combined blue notes with ragtime rhythm for a “hot” sound. In 1923,
King Oliver’s band recruited New Orleans jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong to make recordings for a broader audience. Armstrong moved on to make his own mark with the classic Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings (1925-28) that featured jazz solo improvisations. In New York, jazz music became, with African-American literature, one of the lasting elements of the cultural rebirth known as the Harlem Renaissance and greatly contributed to the emergent culture of the 1930s. Jazz music, early defined as an African-American musical style, attracted growing numbers of white patrons and musicians by the late 1920s. Further, while Fletcher Henderson created the first jazz dance band in 1923, the demand for hot jazz dance music fueled the careers of Edward “Duke” Ellington and others. Innovative white musicians such as Bix Beiderbecke, Hoagy Carmichael, Benny Goodman, and Artie Shaw adopted these jazz styles and organized their own bands in the 1930s, when swing music began to take hold of the popular imagination.
Louis Armstrong (Library of Congress)
Further reading: Burton Peretti, The Creation of Jazz; Music, Race and Culture in Urban America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Gunther Schuller, History of Jazz, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); Geoffrey C. Ward, Jazz; A History of Africa’s Music (New York: Knopf, 2000).
Johnson, Hiram Warren (1866-1945) politician The Progressive Era was a time of political realignment, in which political parties were divided in sentiment and program and regional party loyalties were at stake. The career of Hiram W. Johnson reflected these tides of change. As a western progressive, Johnson fought for and achieved democratic reforms in his home state of California. He also struggled against the dominance of business in local and national politics and urged the adoption of labor laws and farm relief. In foreign affairs, Johnson was an isolationist and, toward the end of his career, an opponent of the New Deal. He fought internationalism and spent the last 28 years of his life in the U. S. Senate seeking to keep his country out of foreign entanglements.
The son of Lawrence Grove Johnson and Anne Williamson de Montfredy Johnson, Hiram was born on September 2, 1866, in Sacramento, California, as the third of five children. His father Grove was a lawyer who served for short periods of time in the California state senate and later in its house of representatives. Grove Johnson’s reforming instincts brought him to the Republican Party, where he supported such causes as temperance, free textbooks, compulsory education, and women’s rights. Hiram Johnson graduated from high school in 1882 at age 16 as class valedictorian and entered the University of California at Berkeley two years later. He left the university early to marry Minnie McNeal, the daughter of a carpenter and contractor. The couple had two sons, Hiram, Jr., and Archibald. Hiram Sr., read law in his father’s office and joined the family firm.
Although Johnson revealed little inclination for following his father into politics, he became Sacramento city attorney in 1900. In 1902, he moved to San Francisco to practice law with his brother Albert; and two years later, he joined the team prosecuting former political boss Abraham Ruef and other city officials for bribery and graft. With this record, he arrived at the forefront of state reform politics, and he ran for the governorship as a Republican in 1910. Johnson won the election and served for six years, becoming the first governor in state history to be reelected. As governor, he supported a series of progressive reforms including railroad regulation, a workers’ compensation law, and the popular election of senators, and helped frame constitutional amendments for woman suffrage. In 1913, in an act reflecting the racial hostility of his day, he signed a bill denying Japanese immigrants the right to own agricultural land in California. In 1911 Johnson helped to form the National Progressive Republican League; and in 1912, he was nominated on the PROGRESSIVE Party ticket as Theodore Roosevelt’s vice presidential running mate.
In 1916 Johnson ran for the U. S. Senate on the Republican ticket. Reelected to that office four more times, he served a total of 28 years in Congress. The spring he began serving in the Senate, the United States declared war on Germany. Informally, Johnson was opposed to the war, and he objected when his own son volunteered for the army. At the same time, as senator, Johnson publicly supported the nation’s war effort. After the war, he became an outspoken critic of the League of Nations and became one of the “irreconcilables” who opposed ratifying the Treaty of Versailles. An isolationist by inclination, Johnson fought against U. S. participation in the World Court, worked to stave off American intervention in the growing crisis in Europe in the 1930s, and voted against the United States joining the United Nations at the end of his long career. Johnson also worked for farm legislation, supporting the McNary-Haugen Farm Bill and sponsored the act in Congress that created Hoover Dam on the Colorado River.
Further reading: Richard Cole Lower, The Bloc of One: The Political Career of Hiram W. Johnson (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993).
Johnson, Jack (1878-1946) heavyweight boxing champion
Born in Galveston, Texas, in 1878, Jack Johnson was the first African-American heavyweight boxing champion in U. S. history. He is still considered by many to be among the most gifted heavyweights ever to enter the ring. Johnson took up boxing relatively late, but he quickly gained a reputation as a fearless fighter. In excellent physical condition, he turned professional in 1897. Remarkably quick for a heavyweight, Johnson had great strength inside the ring. By 1903 he was considered to be among the top fighters in the country; but many in the profession, including the two most dominant heavyweights, John L. Sullivan and Jim Jeffries, refused to give the African-American boxer a shot at the heavyweight title. While he waited for a chance at the heavyweight crown, Johnson defeated another top-ranked African-American fighter, Sam McVey, in 1904 in what many called the “Black Heavyweight Championship.” Johnson was forced to wait five years for the opportunity to fight for the heavyweight crown. Finally in 1908 the reigning champion, Canadian Tommy Burns, agreed to fight Johnson in Sydney, Australia. Johnson won the fight handily and remained heavyweight champion until 1915.
Jack Johnson and James Jeffries in the World Championship battle, July 4, 1910 (Library of Congress)
The period during which Johnson was the reigning heavyweight champion was one of rampant racism in America. Jim Crow laws and social custom had established racial segregation as common practice in both North and South, and African Americans faced systematic discrimination, loss of the right to vote, and racial violence. In the face of widely accepted beliefs of African-American inferiority, Jack Johnson proudly asserted not only his equality but also his dominance over his white peers. His arrogance infuriated many white Americans. Refusing to retreat from the public spotlight, Johnson was highly visible and in many ways larger than life. He relished his role as hero in the African-American community. In response, many white boxing fans, managers, promoters, and reporters were desperate for someone to “put Johnson back in his place.” Author Jack London put out a call for a “Great White Hope” to defeat Johnson. In 1910 London and others convinced former heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries to come out of retirement for a July 4 fight for a record prize
Of $100,000. Johnson, who was at the peak of his career, put on a brilliant boxing display and knocked Jeffries out in the 15th round. News of Johnson’s victory was greeted with enthusiastic celebrations in African-American communities throughout the country.
As champion, and for the rest of his life, Johnson disregarded the social conventions of his day. Bold, outspoken, and proud, he infuriated white America by his two marriages to white women. In 1912, Johnson was charged and convicted of violating the Mann Act, which prohibited an individual from transporting a woman across state lines for “immoral purposes.” The crime Johnson committed was that he and his future wife, Lucille Cameron, traveled across state lines together. In order to avoid imprisonment, Johnson fled the country and moved to Paris. While in Paris, the Champ successfully defended his title three times. He eventually lost the heavyweight title to Jess Willard in a controversial bout inHavana, Cuba, in 1915. At the time and ever since, Johnson and many of his supporters claimed that he threw the fight in an attempt to have his prison sentence overturned. Whether or not Johnson intentionally lost the fight, the charges were not dropped. Johnson returned to the United States in 1920 and served a one-year prison sentence in Leavenworth, Kansas. Even after his retirement from boxing in the early 1920s, he remained a prominent figure, appearing in vaudeville acts and operating several businesses until he died in a car accident in 1946.
Further reading: Randy Roberts, Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the Era of White Hopes (New York: Free Press, 1983); Jeff Wells, Boxing Day: The Fight That Changed the World (New York: HarperCollins, 1999).
—Robert Gordon
Johnson, Tom Loftin (1854-1911) politician
Early in the 20th century, large cities faced the need for reform. Garbage wasn’t picked up on time; streetcar companies refused to improve lines; prostitution and crime seemed out of control; and bribery and graft were the only way to make the wheels turn. Journalist Lincoln Stel-LENS spoke to these problems in his book, The Shame of the Cities; another response was the URBAN RELORM movement led by a group of exceptional mayors, including Hazen Pingree of Detroit, Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones of Cincinnati, and Tom Johnson of Cleveland.
Tom Loftin Johnson was born in Blue Spring, Kentucky, on July 18, 1854. The son of Helen Loftin and Albert W. Johnson, a failed planter-turned-businessman, Tom Johnson had little formal schooling. He began working at an early age. When he turned 15, wealthy relatives purchased the smallest of three streetcar lines in Louisville and hired him as office clerk and, four years later, superintendent of the line. In 1874, Johnson married his cousin, Maggie J. Johnson. The couple had two children—Loftin and Elizabeth.
With good mechanical aptitude and a knack for invention, Johnson became an engineer-entrepreneur in the booming streetcar business. He began to invest in streetcar lines himself, buying his first line in Indianapolis in 1876. Although the line had snarled finances, Johnson helped turn the company around and sold his shares for $800,000 a few years later. While he bought shares in streetcar lines in other cities, he made his largest investment in Cleveland, where his company eventually controlled 60 percent of the streetcar lines in the city.
Johnson’s fascination with the working of streetcar lines led to his invention of mechanical improvements for streetcars and their lines. He invented and began to manufacture a streetcar pay box and the girder groove rail, which was a metal electric streetcar rail. In addition, he improved upon designs for, or invented, curved tracks, crossovers, frogs, and special track devices. To manufacture the steel streetcar rails, Johnson founded the Johnson Company in 1883 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. He also established the Johnson Electric Company in Cleveland to repair steel motors. In the 1880s and early 1890s, newcomers were able to enter and quickly dominate the business of parts and motor manufacture and to buy streetcar franchises. By the late 1890s, however, competition in steel manufacturing and urban transport began to crowd out entrepreneurs like Johnson. He eventually sold his shares in both of his companies to devote himself to reform.
Having become a member of an elite business class, Tom Johnson discovered the problems of poverty, taxes, and cities through the writings of Henry George. George’s Progress and Poverty influenced reformers for a generation. In George’s thinking, it was speculation on undeveloped land, and the concentration of land in the hands of the few, that was at the root of social ills in the United States. Using his wealth to further the cause, Johnson supported George’s political campaigns and a number of single-tax journals.
George’s ideas about tax reform helped inspire Johnson into running for elective office. He ran for Congress and served two terms (1891-95) in the House of Representatives, where he was known for his single-tax oratory. In his next move, he ran for and won election as mayor of Cleveland, where he served as mayor from 1901 to 1910. Johnson called for tax reform in scientific tax assessments and equitable property taxes. He also campaigned and fought for centralized city government, municipal ownership of streetcars and utilities, lower streetcar fares, city beautification, and local prison reform. Johnson was bankrupt by 1908; under a flurry of charges of corruption, he lost the mayoral election in 1909. He died in 1911 at age 57.
See also CITIES AND URBAN LILE; URBAN transportation.
Further reading: Eugene C. Murdock, Tom Johnson of Cleveland (Dayton, Ohio: Wright State University Press, 1994).
World History
