Passing of the Jazz Age 1927

JAZZ – THE GOOD NEWS FROM ROME

LABORERS IN THE VINEYARD should welcome, and do, the good news from the Vatican that the jazz age is passing, and that the flood of immorality which lapped every shore is receding. Civilization is returning to normalcy, custom is becoming sane, Governments are checking orgiastic vices, religion everywhere is remustering its depleted ranks. It is a most encouraging note, agree a number of our own observers, and as the Pittsburgh Chronicle Telegraph reminds us, “it is based on reports from trained observers. It should hearten all who are working in the cause of public decency and righteousness the world over.”

Not only is Christendom affected, it is announced in Vatican circles; but Turkey has taken steps against immoral dances, and Japan against the social evil. The Vatican does not proclaim a victory, but there is no doubt, a spokesman is quoted in dispatches as saying, that “all Governments, confronted with a general collapse of standards and wholesale confusion of ideas, are occupying themselves more and more with the task of checking immorality and seeking to destroy or, at least, limit its cause.” The Conte Della Torre, who is said usually to speak for the Pope, remarks that the sight was terrifying when the people whose eyes had gradually returned to normal focus saw the moral pit into which they had fallen after the war.” In consequence, it is said, the so-called modern ideas are in retreat all along the line. Belgium and Czechoslovakia have taken official steps against immorality posing as art. The United States, England, and Canada are showing signs of awakening to the danger of immorality on the stage, while Italy, Spain and other Mediterranean countries are cooperating with the Church in defense of the traditional ideas of sanctity of the family. Advocates of birth control and easy divorce are losing ground. Dress fashions and dance vogues are becoming less absurd and bizarre. Even the Bohemian colonies in the capitals of Europe, where the self-styled apostles of freedom and modernism daily proclaim the same old revolution, are losing their rhetoric and forgetting their causes.

It seems generally conceded that the moral let-down was a result of the war, when a sort of fatalism seized the people and they ate, drank and made merry because civilization might be dead on the morrow. “The most charitable thing to say of that period is that people were scarcely responsible for their actions, so shattered were their nerves, and so bitter the sorrows they had to bear,” comments the Providence News. Most deplorable was the physical destruction of youth in the war, “but even worse was the moral destruction that followed on the peace. It is to be hoped,” continues The News, “that this will be kept in mind by persons who take the pagan view that in some mysterious way war is a blessing because of the heroic qualities it brings forth on the battlefield.”

Source: The Literary Digest of April 16, 1927

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