Orientalism
Today, strange happenings in the 1920s. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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My oldest childhood memory: My mother singing in her red kimono. She’d worked in the '20s, for a sheet music store – singing their songs on the radio. Songs that reflected the jazz age, women’s emergence as independent, and ...
Well, here things get contradictory. The songs of composers like Oley Speaks had also gained traction. He’d set many Rudyard Kipling texts to music. And I grew up hearing them sung. But here we need to back up a generation – into the late nineteenth century.
There we find a huge gathering interest in a romanticized East – India, China, Burma, Persia, Japan, Egypt. Not as they were, but as the West wanted to imagine them. Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Kipling’s poems about India. A fascination with the poetry of Omar Khayyam.
And now the art deco movement seized upon all that imagery. It would embrace those eastern figures and portray them as tall and languid, blending into beautiful landscapes. Kipling and Puccini had, at least, wed their romanticism to the harsh realities of the time. But the art of the ‘20s asked us to forget the pain. Just bask in the romance.
So back to the music. Oley Speaks’ enormously popular song “On the Road to Mandalay” was about an Englishman’s affair with a Burmese woman. Or an even starker example: A poem that began: “Less than the dust, beneath thy Chariot wheel ... even less am I” ... and she goes on to kill herself. A horrid sentiment in a compelling song that my mother used to sing. And that was just one example of where all this had taken us. It spread to Valentino’s Sheik as an object of women’s desire. To the art deco of Josephine Baker’s wild dances.
Rudolf Valentino And Agnes Ayres in The Sheik, 1921 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)
(Music - Less Than the Dust, Amy Woodforde-Finden)
The crowning irony was that American women had finally begun coming into their own. They’d just won the right to vote. They were on the march.
Equal rights envoys of the National Woman’s Party, 1927 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)
But then: The depression. All this escapism collapsed into the need to find work, to find food, to find self-respect. Only remnants remained. Songs my mother sang. Art deco figures in my Uptown theater where we watched newsreels of the gathering world war.
A last gasp of Orientalism in 1932 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)
Our Western world had, for a time, shrouded itself in a daydream. We call that time the Roaring Twenties. A time when we escaped reality before we returned at last to the hard Earth.
So I, born into its remnants, grew up with its echo. My mother’s songs, her red kimono. The Uptown Theater. Those languid figures, still seen, etched in stone on buildings. Silent reminders, as we forgot all the rest of it.
Art Deco remnant on Houston’s 1941 Air Terminal (Photo by JHL)
I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.
(Theme music)
Some Sources:
The “Less than the Dust” song was written by Amy Woodforde-Finden. Amy Woodforde-Finden - Wikipedia
The author of the texts of the Woodforde-Finden songs was a woman, Adela Florence Nicolson, who wrote under the male pseudonym, Laurence Hope.
There is much more to the “Roaring ‘20s, of course. Here is a useful site: Orientalism and Egyptomania in 1920s fashion.
The song, “Less than the Dust,” to which I refer is the second song in this set of four Woodforde-Finden songs.
“Less than the Dust” and 3 other Amy Woodforde-Finden songs.
This Episode first aired on July 21, 2026.