Jewish Jazz Becomes our National Music

THE INTERNATIONAL JEW by HENRY FORD - Chapter 11

JEWISH JAZZ BECOMES OUR NATIONAL MUSIC

Many people have wondered whence come the waves upon waves of musical slush that invade decent homes and set the young people of this generation imitating the drivel of morons. Popular music is a Jewish monopoly. Jazz is a Jewish creation. The mush, slush, the sly suggestion, the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes, are of Jewish origin.

Monkey talk, jungle squeals, grunts and squeaks and gasps suggestive of calf love are camouflaged by a few feverish notes and admitted in homes where the thing itself, unaided by scanned music," would be stamped out in horror. The fluttering music sheets disclose expressions taken directly from the cesspools of modern capitals, to be made the daily slang, the thoughtlessly hummed remarks of school boys and girls.

Is it surprising that whichever way you turn to trace the harmful streams of influence that flow through society, you come upon a group of Jews? In baseball corruption -a group of Jews. In exploitative finance-a group of Jews. In theatrical degeneracy-a group of Jews. In liquor propaganda-a group of Jews. In control of national war policies-a group of Jews. In control of the Press through business and financial pressure-a group of Jews. War profiteers, 8-0 per cent of them-Jews. Organizers of active opposition to Christian laws and customs-Jews.

In this miasma of so-called popular music, which combines weak-mindedness with every suggestion of lewdness -again Jews.

  The Jewish influence on American music is without doubt regarded as serious by those who know anything about it. Not only is there a growing protest against the Judaization of our few great orchestras, but there is a strong reaction from the racial collusion which fills the concert stage and popular platform with Jewish artists to the exclusion of all others. If they were superior artists, nothing against it could be said; they are only better known and racially favored in Jewish musical circles.

  "Let me make a nation's songs and I care not who makes the laws," said one; in this country the Jews have had a very large hand in making both. It is the purpose of this article to put people in possession of the truth concerning the moron music which they habitually hum and sing and shout day and night, and if possible to help them to see the invisible Jewish baton which is waved above them for financial and propaganda purposes. Just as the American stage and motion picture have fallen under the control of Jews and their art-destroying commercialism, so the business of handling "popular songs" has become a Yiddish industry. The Jews who captured it in the early days of exploitation were for the most part Russian-born Jews, some of whom had personal pasts which were as unsavory as the past of many Jewish theatrical and movie leaders have been exposed to be.

  In the early 1920's, Irving Berlin, Leo Feist and other officers of seven music publishing corporations in New York, were charged with violating the Sherman anti-Trust law in a suit brought by the United States Government. The defendants, it was alleged, controlled 80% of the available copyrighted songs used by manufacturers of phonographs, player piano rolls and other musical reproducing instruments, and fixed prices at which the records or rolls were to be sold to the public. The corporations involved in the action were the Consolidated Music Corporation; Irving Berlin, Inc.; Francis, Day and Hunter, Inc.; Shapiro, Bernstein & Co.; Watterson, Berlin & Snyder, Inc.; and M. Witmark & Sons, Inc.;-all of New York. The agreement which the United States Government sought to dissolve was alleged to provide that the defendants would make contracts only through the Consolidated Music Corporation which they had organized. The other 20 % of the song business was controlled by other Jewish music houses not included in that special group.

HOW THE JEWISH SONG TRUST MAKES YOU SING

Jews did not create the popular song; they debased it. The time of the entry of Jews into control of the populal song is the exact time when the morality of popular songs began to decline. The "popular" song, before it became a Jewish industry, was really popular. The people sang it and had no reason to conceal it. The popular song today is often so questionable a composition that performers with a vestige of decency must appraise their audience before they sing. Citizens of adult age will remember the stages through which the popular song has passed during recent decades. War songs persisted after the Civil War and were gradually intermingled with songs of a later time, picturesque, romantic, clean. The same and similar songs and ballads had a brief revival during World War I. These were not the product of song-factories, but the creation of individuals whose gifts were given natural expression. These individuals did not work for combines of publishers but for the satisfaction of their work, for individual artists of the music-hall stage. There were no great fortunes made out of songs, but there were many satisfactions in having pleased the public taste. The public taste, like every other taste, craves what it is given most to feed upon. Public taste is public habit. The public is blind to the source of that upon which it lives, and it adjusts itself to the supply. Public taste is raised or lowered as the quality of its pabulum improves or degenerates.

  In a quarter of a century, given all the avenues of publicity like theater, movie, popular song, newspapers and radio - in the meantime having thrown the mantle of contempt over all counter-active moral agencies-you can turn out nearly the kind of public you want. It takes just about a quarter of a century to do the job.

  In other days the people sang as they do now, but not in such doped fashion nor with such bewildered continuity. They sang because they wished to, not as an uncontrolled habit. They sang songs nonsensical, sentimental, heroic, but the "shady" songs were outlawed. The old songs come readily back to memory. Though years have intervened since they were the fashion, yet their quality was such that they do not die. The popular song of last month-who knows its name? But there are songs of long ago whose titles are familiar even to those who have not sung them. What margin did these songs leave for the suggestive and for the unvrholesomely emotional? Sentiment was not lacking, but it was unobjectionable sentiment. Then came the Jews; the popular song underwent a change. An entirely new crop of titles appeared dealing with an entirely different series of subjects than the songs they displaced Talented singers, tuneful singing vanished. The Jew and the African period, being the entrance of the jungle motif, the so-called "Congo" stuff, and other compositions which swiftly degenerated into a rather more bestial type than the beasts themselves arrive at. Running alongside this swamp strain was the "ragtime" style of music which was a development of the legitimate Negro minstrelsy. Lyrics disappeared before the numerous "cake-walk" songs that deluged the public ear. Seductive syncopation swamped the harmony of the real song. Minstrelsy took on a new life; glamorous youths mutter dirges in low monotones, voluptuous females with grossly seductive gestures moan nasal notes no real musician can recognize. "Piano acts" were made the rage; "jazz bands" made their appearance. By insensible gradations now easily traceable through the litter of songs with which recent decades are strewn, we have been able to see the decline in the popular song supply. Sentiment has been turned into sensuous suggestion. Romance has been turned into eroticism. The popular musical lilt slid into ragtime and ragtime has been superseded by jazz and crooning. Song topics became lower and lower until at last they are the dredges of the slimy bottom of the underworld.

The first self-styled "King of Jazz" was a Jew named "Frisco." The general directors of the whole downward trend have been Jews. It needed just their touch of cleverness to camouflage the moral filth and raise it half a degree above that natural stage where it begets nothing but disgust.

PLAGIARISM

In this business of making the people's songs the Jews have shown as usual, no originality but much adaptability -which is a charitable term used to cover plagiarism, which in its turn politely covers the crime of mental pocket-picking. The Jews do not create; they take what others have done, give it a clever twist, and exploit it. Plagiarism is the result of mediocre artists being spurred on by nonartistic promoters to produce something that can be dressed up with sufficient attractiveness to draw the public's money. The Jews bought up all the old song books, opera scores, collections of folk songs, and, if you stop to analyze some of the biggest "hits" of the early days of the Yiddish song manufacturing Trust, you will find they are woven on the motif and melody of the clean songs of the pre-swamp era. The music jazzed and swung out of recognition, the sentiment sensualized very much, and pushed upon their smutty road across the world. Because of absolute Jewish control of the song market, both in publish ing and in theatrical performance, it is next to impossible for anything but a Jewish song to be published in the United States, or if published, to get a hearing. The proof of this is in the fact that the Yiddish trust owns all the business and the so-called "song-hits" all bear Jewish names.

  The insidiousness of the Jewish menace to our artistic integrity is due partly to the speciousness, the superficial charm and oriental persuasiveness of Hebrew art, its glitter, its violently juxtaposed extremes of passion, its poignant eroticism and pessimism, and partly to the fact that the strain in us which might make head against it, the deepest, most fundamental strain in our nature is diluted and confused by a hundred other tendencies of the Jewish age. The Anglo-Saxon group of qualities and the AngloSaxon point of view, are the vital nucleus of the American temper. The Jewish domination of our music threatens to submerge and stultify them at every point.

TIN-PAN-ALLEY

America does not sing what it likes, but what the vaudeville "song-pluggers" popularize by repeated renditions, until the flabby minds of the audiences begin to repeat it on the streets.

The "song-pluggers" of theater, vaudeville and radio, are the paid agents of the Yiddish song agencies. Money, and not merit, dominates the spread of the moron music which is styled Jewish jazz and swing. Non-Jewish music is stigmatized as "high-brow." The people are fed from day to day on the moron suggestiveness that flows in a slimy flood out of "TinPan-Alley," the head factory of filth in New York which is populated by the "Abies," the "Izzies," and the 'Moes" who make up the composing staffs of the various institutions. "TinPan-Alley" is the name given to the region in Twenty-eighth street, between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, where the first Yiddish song manufacturers began business. Flocks of young girls who thought they could sing, and others who thought they could write song poems, came to the neighborhood allured by the dishonest advertisements that promised more than the budding Yiddish promoters could fulfill. Needless to say, scandal became rampant, as it always does when so-called "Gentile" girls are reduced to the necessity of seeking favors from the Jew. It was the constant shouting of voices, the hilarity of "parties," the banging of pianos and the blaring of trombones that gave the district the name of "Tin-Pan-Alley." All America is now one great Tin-PanAlley, its entertainment, its youth, its politics, a blare of moronic Judaism.

  The diabolical cunning with which an unclean atmosphere is created and sustained through all classes of society and by the same influence, will not be overlooked by any observer. There is something Satanic about it, something calculated with demonic shrewdness.

  And the stream flows on and on, growing worse and worse, to the degradation of the non-Jewish public and the increase of Jewish fortunes.

  Ministers, educators, reformers, parents, citizens are amazed at the growth of looseness among the people, and rail at the evil results. They see the evil product and they attack the product. They rail at the young people who go in for this eroticism and suggestiveness. They deplore the sexual license, the delinquency and the infantilism of the younger people. But all this has a source! Why not attack the source? When a nation is bathed in sights, sounds and ideas of a certain character, drenched in them and drowned in them, by systematic, deliberate, organized intent, the point of attack should be the cause, not the effect.

  Yet, that is precisely where the point of attack has not been made, presumably because of lack of knowledge, possibly because of fear.

  It is little use blaming the people. The people are what they are made. Give the liquor business full sway and you have a population that drinks and carouses. The population could be turned into drug addicts if the same freedom was given to the illicit narcotic ring as is now given to the Yiddish popular song manufacturers. In such a condition it would be stupid to attack the addicts; common sense would urge the exposure of the panderers.

  A dreadful narcotizing of moral modesty and the application of powerful aphrodisiacs have been involved in the present craze for crooning songs-a stimulated craze. The victims are everywhere. But too few of the opponents of this moral poison see the futility of scolding the young people thus diseased.

  Common sense dictates a cleaning out, and a clearing out, of the sources of the disease. The source is in the Yiddish group of song manufacturers who control the whole output and who are responsible for the whole matter from poetry to profits.

NOT SO "POPULAR"

Next to the moral indictment against the so-called "popular" song is the indictment that it " not popular There is no spontaneous popularity, public taste is not so discriminating. It is artificial popularity by constant plugging. It is a mere mechanical drumming on the minds of the public. It is flung at them at every movie and from every stage. It is advertised in flaring posters, gramophone records shriek forth day and night, dance bands plug it, radios plug it, and by sheer dint of repetition and suggestion the song catches on-until it is replaced by another. It is the old game of changing the styles to speed up business and make the people buy. Nothing lasts in the Yiddish game-styles of clothing, movies nor songs; it is always something "new" to stimulate the flow of money from the popular pocket into the moron music makers' coffers.

Two facts about the "popular" song are known to all: first, that for the most part it is indecent and the most active agent of moral miasma in the country, or if not the most active, then neck and neck with the "movies"; second, that the "popular" song industry is an excessively Jewish ind2estrv.

There is work here for the Anti-Defamation League! That League knows how to put the screws on anyone who disparages the Jews ! From important publishers down to inconsequential country newspapers, the Anti-Defamation League makes itself felt. There is work for it in the movies and the theater and popular song industries. Why does not the League put the screws on those Jews who have degenerated the movies and debauched the people in their "arts," sports, and entertainments? On those who have brought shame on the racial name? Why not? Is the answer that only non-Jews are to be controlled, and Jews let to run loose? Is the answer that the gentle Gentiles can be curbed as by bridle and bit and the Jews cannot? American Jewry is desperately afraid of opening a single seam in its armour by means of a single investigation or reform. They are afraid of how far the fire of correction may spread !

"To prevent them from really thinking out anything themselves, we shall deflect their attention to amusements, games, pastimes, excitements and people's palaces. Such intends will distract their minds completely from questions on which we might be obliged to struggle with them. Becoming less and less accustomed to independent thinking, people will express themselves in unison with us because we alone offer new lines of thought-of course through persons whom they do not consider as in any way connected with us. "

- The Thirteenth Protocol

THE INTERNATIONAL JEW
by HENRY FORD, SR.
PDF-file in English (the complete book)

CONTENTS (HTML-version, abridged from the original)
Index

Chapter 1. Jewish History in the United States

Chapter 2 .Angles of Jewish Influence

Chapter 3. Victims, or Persecutors?

Chapter 4. Are the Jews a Nation?

Chapter 5. The Jewish Political Program

Chapter 6. Introduction to the "Jewish Protocols"

Chapter 7. How the Jews Use Power

Chapter 8. Jewish Influence in American Politics

Chapter 9. Bolshevism and Zionism

Chapter 10. Jewish power in the Theatre and Cinema

Chapter 11. Jewish Jazz Becomes our National Music

Chapter 12. Liquor, Gambling, Vice and Corruption

Chapter 13. The World's Foremost Problem

Chapter 14. The Jewish Money Power

Chapter 15. The Battle for Press Control

Chapter 16. The State of All-Judaan