ABSTRACT
F. Scott Fitzgerald, who dubbed the 1920s “the Jazz Age,” wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, in 1931 that “it extended from the suppression of the riots of May Day 1919 to the crash of the stock market in 1929-almost exactly a decade.” (For the earlier date, he refers to an incident that took place in New York, also depicted in his 1920 short story “May Day,” not to the better known “Palmer raids” against suspected Communists instituted by U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in 1919-20.) But a better date for the start of the Jazz Age would be the institution of the Prohibition Enforcement, or Volstead Act, sponsored by Minnesota Congressman Andrew John Volstead. Although intended to prevent Americans from drinking alcohol, the 18th Amendment probably led them to drink more. And while they were drinking they often were listening to music and dancing.
