ABSTRACT
Wartime exaltation flowed freely out into America's Jazz Age, an era in which journalists learned how to personally profit from revving engines of mass communication. Editors complained of public pressure to "fill our pages with boot legging, jazz dancing, automobiles, moving pictures, radio, and sports to get ourselves read". Defenders of the tabloid press saw jazz-age journalism as a natural response in the interwar era to the changes in urban America. War critic Randolph Bourne wrote, "All my thoughts now appear to be unprintable". The public square was "flooded with the sewage of the war spirit," drowning out "those of us who still retain an irreconcilable animus against war". Woodrow Wilson's Justice Department locked up more than 4,000 of the nation's half-million German aliens for aiding the German war effort. German capitulation on the Western Front on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 ended the Great War at 38 million casualties.
