The Greats of the Jazz Generation

A Few Final Thoughts

Since I launched this New Florence Substack ten months ago today, almost half my posts have been about the Jazz Generation born from 1883 to 1901. They were the focus of my first novel, Renaissance Radio, and have been a focus of my attention and study since 1990.

Tomorrow, with the arrival of my second novel, We Are Like Fire, I’ll shift my focus to the Big Band Generation — more often called the World War II Generation or the G.I. Generation — born from 1902 to 1924. So I thought that this morning I’d write one last “farewell” piece about the Jazz Generation.

First, let’s celebrate the enduring cultural geniuses of the Jazz Generation. Here are photos of my Big Five — Louis Armstrong, Georgia O’Keefe, Agatha Christie (two billion novels sold), Erich Maria Remarque, and (widely believed to have written the best novel of the 20th Century) J.R.R. Tolkien:

Then there is the most underestimated man in world history — the founder of the radio industry and the television industry. No individual has had a bigger impact on the day-to-day life experience of billions of people than David Sarnoff.

The Jazz Generation also produced at least four great thinkers in the field of psychology: Otto Rank, Roberto Assagioli, Jean Piaget, and Margaret Mahler.

Piaget and Mahler helped us peer into the mental and emotional world of children and infants. Rank and Assagioli, interestingly, both placed great emphasis on the spiritual development of the human being and especially on the human will. Otto Rank will always stand out to me as his generation’s best thinker in any field.

Beyond culture and psychology, the Jazz Generation lived through and participated in the two largest cataclysms in global history. And it’s here that we find much of their legacy.

In most of the ways that count, the pre-Jazz but post-Renaissance Age from about 1800 to 1914 didn’t involve any sharp break from the Renaissance Age that ran from about 1350 to 1800. (This is a big statement that deserves a post of its own.) And without the two world wars perhaps we’d have gone on living in the world of Austen, Eliot, Dickens, Whitman, and even Henry James the same way people did in the Edwardian Era before the First World War.

But with the start of World War I in 1914 — and especially with the Battle of Verdun and Battle of the Somme in Spring and Summer 1916 — one could certainly no longer be a Romantic. And there was no going back to the Renaissance.

And so the Jazz Generation, having been dragged for four years into the trenches of a meaningless war, emerged with a new mindset. The mass casualties caused by their elders’ colossal blindness led the young Jazz to reject their parents’ worldview. But what would replace it?

The short answer, when you ignore those who chose cynicism or surrealism or nihilism or all three, was pragmatism. The rising adults of the 1920s, at least in America, poured themselves into business. They created the fastest-paced lives any generation had ever known. And they created jazz music to keep pace with their new rhythm.

That lasted until 1929, when the whole gaudy spree came crashing down. And the exhausted Jazz entered midlife as survivalists and protectors of the young.

With world-historical tragic consequences, the Jazz Generation in Germany, Italy, and Japan chose another path — Fascism — and generated an even larger global crisis than World War I. Even more disturbing than the war were the Holocaust and other genocides — and now our view of human nature had to include the utter depravity of what the Germans did to Jews and Slavs and what the Japanese did to the Chinese in Manchuria.

Facing down Fascism across the globe, the Jazz midlifers of America and the Allied nations emerged as ideal crisis managers: clear-eyed realists who stepped forward with courage and did whatever it took to get the job done. It was their next-juniors who made up the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines. But, with a couple major exceptions (MacArthur and Marshall), it was the Jazz who led the G.I.s into battle.

There were Admiral Chester Nimitz, U.S. Air Force founding General “Hap” Arnold, and U.S. Marines General Alexander Vandergrift. While General George Patton will have a mixed legacy, the Jazz Generation will always be well-remembered for the leadership of General Dwight Eisenhower, General Omar Bradley, and British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery:

In the last analysis, history will never forget that the Jazz Generation produced five of the worst leaders in human history: Adolph Hitler, Hideki Tojo, Benito Mussolini, Mao Zedong, and Joseph Stalin. Together, these five men brought about the deaths of some 150 million human beings.

But as I look back after all these years of mulling over the lives and legacies of the Jazz Generation, my mind settles on two of their leading lights.

First, back to J.R.R. Tolkien. This conservative Catholic professor of language and literature at Oxford University was able to emerge from the two world wars and the genocides and do something remarkable. Drawing on the best of northern European culture and the best of the Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian tradition, Tolkien offered us The Lord of the Rings.

In one three-volume novel, Tolkien provided us with a compelling, enduring, and universal moral vision. Like his Jazz Generation, the innocent residents of the Shire are called into heroic action to secure the physical survival and the spiritual destiny of the world.

And finally, ultimately, in centuries to come, the Jazz Generation may be best remembered for the vision and leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt. Yes, for showing us that compassionate social awareness and action were still possible. And, even more so, for showing us that even after two world wars, even after the Holocaust, we could dream of a world built on personal dignity and rights — and on active ongoing diplomacy between nations — and take action to bring that world to fruition.