The Roaring Life of the 1920s

AMSCO Ch 23; Pageant Ch 31

Changing ways of life

3

The 1920 census

• For the 1st time, more people in urban than rural areas

• Nearly 70 cities with more than 100,000 people

• Transition from rural to urban society brought problems

4

Prohibition

• Favored by rural, opposed by city dwellers

• 1920: 18th Amendment takes effect • Never enough law officers to enforce

the law

5

Law Breaking

• Illegal nightclubs (speakeasies) and • illegal production, sale, distribution

(bootlegging) sprung up throughout the nation • Organized crime controlled liquor market in

many major cities: Chicago and Al Capone • By 1925, support for prohibition dwindled to

less than 20%

6

Prohibition-era cartoon about the Anti-Saloon League; when it became apparent that prohibition was a failure, the ASL had lost much of its credibility

7

8

9

Revival of Christian fundamentalism

• Fundamentalists believe in the literal truth of the Bible

• Preachers and revivals drew large crowds, particularly in the South and the West

10

Clash with science

• Fundamentalists rejected scientific theory of evolution

• Able to persuade some states to outlaw the teaching of evolution in schools

Bryan in the pulpit

11

Scopes trial: challenge to Tennessee law

• Teacher John T. Scopes tried for teaching evolution – Prosecution led by William Jennings Bryan – Defense led by Clarence Darrow

• Scopes found guilty; technicality led to reversal of his conviction;

• Law remained on the books until 1967

12

Clockwise from upper left: John T. Scopes, defendant; Darrow and Bryan; the courtroom with Bryan visible at left center

Women in the 1920s

14

A new freedom

• New urban culture influenced greater freedom

• The “Flapper” becomes the symbol of the age

• Characterized by short skirts, shorter hair styles, more jewelry and makeup

• Most women were not “flappers,” but the style is influential

15

16

Work

• More women worked outside the home after the war than before

• Hundreds of thousands entered the workforce as teachers, nurses, sales clerks

• Still, discrimination was rampant (widespread)

• Jobs were identified as “male” and “female” • Women paid less than men (still true)

17

Marriage and work

• Few married women worked • Fewer children per family • Ready-made clothes and labor-saving

devices • Arranged marriages became less

common • Divorce became more common • Beginnings of a youth culture

Education and popular culture

19

With prosperity, more education

• High schools changed: offered voc ed and home ec classes

• Millions of children of immigrants poured into the schools

• School costs skyrocketed • John Dewey: Columbia University

professor argued for “progressive education” – learning by doing

20

Mass media

• More people reading newspapers and magazines

• Radio grew in popularity • National networks

developed with programming to millions

1923 RCA-Westinghouse Radiola Senior; this set required earphones (not shown)

21

Leisure

• Growing prosperity: more money to spend on leisure time

• Fads swept the nation • Entertainment dollars spent on sports • Baseball captures the American

imagination • Particularly stars like Babe Ruth drew

new fans

22

Lindbergh

• Pilot Charles Lindbergh becomes a national hero

• First to fly transatlantic solo in 1927

23

24

Movies

• Movies continue to grow in popularity • Silent films give way to “talkies” in 1927 • First major film with sound: The Jazz

Singer • Movies, like magazines and radio, help

to create a national culture

25

Writers, artists, and musicians

• Sinclair Lewis (Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith) writes about the American middle class

• F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby) about the dark underside of what he termed “The Jazz Age”

• Playwright Eugene O’Neill dramatized family conflicts as in “The Glass Menagerie”

• Women authors added a fresh perspective: Dorothy Parker, Edith Wharton

26

Gershwin & Copland

• Composers George Gershwin (Rhapsody in Blue, Porgy and Bess) and

• Aaron Copland (Appalachian Spring) • combined jazz rhythms with classical forms

The Harlem Renaissance

Duke Ellington and his Cotton Club Orchestra, c. 1927

28

Demographics

• As a result of the 1920s “Great Migration” of African Americans out of the South to Northern cities,

• by 1929 40% of all Blacks lived in Northern cities.

• Riots break out in some Northern cities, however

29

NAACP

• W.E.B. DuBois, president of the NAACP, led protests against racial violence

• James Weldon Johnson, another NAACP official, led drive to get anti-lynching law passed in Congress

• Weldon’s effort fails, although the number of lynchings decline

30

Marcus Garvey

• Founded the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)

• Voiced a message of black pride that appealed to many

• Promoted the formation of black-owned businesses

• Urged many African Americans to return to Africa

31

Harlem and beyond

• The Harlem section of NYC becomes a home to a flowering of African American culture

• Writers such as – Langston Hughes, – Claude McKay, – and Zora Neale Hurston

• wrote of the black experience in poetry, novels, and plays

• Paul Robeson became renown for his acting and singing

32

Langston Hughes

Zora Neale Hurston

Claude McKay

33

Artists • Painters like William

H. Johnson captured daily life of some blacks – far from the notions of the “New Negro,” reality could be much more harsh

• At right, “Chain Gang”

34

Jazz music

• with roots in African and Caribbean rhythms,

• Jazz moved up the Mississippi from New Orleans to Kansas City and Chicago, and east to Harlem – Louis Armstrong: trumpet – Duke Ellington: piano – Bessie Smith: blues vocalist

35

Louis Armstrong

Bessie Smith Edward K. “Duke” Ellington

Postwar issues

37

Bolshevik revolution in Russia, 1917

• 70,000 join Communist Party in the US • Sparks fear of communism spreading to

the US: Red Scare

38

39

Atty. Gen. A. Mitchell Palmer

• Palmer became convinced that Communist agents were planning to overthrow the government

• View reinforced by the discovery of 38 bombs sent to leading politicians

• An Italian anarchist blew himself up outside Palmer's Washington DC home

40

Atty. Gen. A. Mitchell Palmer moves against perceived threat

• “Palmer Raids” violated constitutional rights

• Deported hundreds, jailed thousands of socialists, leftists, radicals, anarchists

41

Emma Goldman • Probably the most

famous person deported • A Russian immigrant

who was a passionate radical Socialist

• The famed “Lady Anarchist” was jailed and deported in 1919

• See the movie “Reds”

42

Sacco and Vanzetti trial

• Radicals arrested for murder, armed robbery

• Controversial execution during time of hysteria

• Were they really guilty?

43

Immigration quotas during the ‘20s

• Isolationism and nativism (as a successor to the war hysteria concern for 100% “Americanism”) work against immigration

• Emergency Quota Act of 1921: immigration quotas to 3% of a given nationality in the US in 1910

• Immigration Act of 1924: cut quotas from 3 to 2%; base year to 1890

• Ended Japanese immigration altogether; Calif Alien Land Acts of 1913 & 1920

44

Revival of Ku Klux Klan

• KKK opposed to blacks, Jews immigrants, Catholics

• Members held key offices in several states

45

KKK March, Washington DC, 1925

August 8, 1925: 40,000 Klansmen and women march against anti-lynching legislation

46

Labor troubles

• Police strikes (e.g. in Boston,)

• Steel strikes • Coal Strikes: United Mine

Workers president John L. Lewis (left) wins wage increases – We’ll see more about the coal

strikes in the film “Matewan”

The Business of America

The chief business of the American people is business.

– Calvin Coolidge

48

Business transformed US society

• The automobile – By late 1920s, 50% of all autos in the world

were in the US – New roads and highways – Cities grew larger

• Airplane industry also grows • Lindbergh’s 1927 Atlantic crossing

49

The “Golden Twenties”: Prosperity and Consumerism

• Urbanization • Economic growth • Consumerism • Advertising • A-U-T-O, Symbol for an Age

The following 20 slides are from “American Youth and Mass Culture of the 1920s” by Karen Halttunen, UC Davis Department of History

50

Howard Thain’s “The Great White Way—Times Square,” New York City, 1926

51

The census of 1920 showed that for the first time, a majority of Americans lived in cities (defined by a population of at least 2500). In the 1920s, the city replaced the countryside as the focal point of American life.

Flapper with the City Lights that made her nightlife possible: Vogue, 1927

52

Henry Ford’s assembly line, introduced in 1914. By 1925, it could turn out a new Model T every 10 seconds. Standardization and mass production made possible the economic boom of the Twenties.

53

Economic Growth • Calvin Coolidge: “The business of America is

business” • Manufacturing rose 64% in the 1920s • Output per work hour rose 40% with the application

of “scientific management” • Between 1922 and 1927, the economy grew by 7%

annually—the largest peacetime rate ever • Americans now enjoyed the highest standard of living

in the world • The Lynds reported that “Middletown” was “a culture

in which everything hinges on money”

54

The explosion of consumer goods: window display at F. W. Woolworth’s. The prosperity of the 1920s depended increasingly on consumption.

55

Consumerism in the 1920s

• Mass production meant an explosion of affordable new products, especially those powered by electricity (the sale of which doubled)

• Cigarette lighters, wristwatches, radios, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, clothing . . .

• Installment buying raised consumer debt 2 ½ times faster than personal income

• One newspaper announced, “The first responsibility of an American to his country is no longer that of a citizen, but of a consumer”

56

Saturday Evening Post ad, 1926

In 1929, American advertisers spent an average of $15. Annually on every man, woman, and child in America, for a total of 2.6 billion dollars.

57

Advertising made a particularly strong appeal to youth—and youthful revolt—in the 1920s. This ad begins, “Youth demanded simple clothes instead of these fussy, elaborate styles of the 1900s.”

58

The automobile, symbol of the new consumer-based economy. In 1920, there were 10 million; by 1929, 26 million, including GM’s new variety of Cadillacs, Chevrolets, Oldsmobiles, Pontiacs, and Buicks.

59

When sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd went to Muncie, Indiana to study the transformation of American culture and values for their classic study Middletown (1929), one resident said, “Why on earth do you need to study what’s changing this country? I can tell you what’s happening in just four letters: A-U-T-O!” Another Muncie resident reported, “We’d rather do without clothes than give up the car.” Americans coined a new term—”automobility”—to capture its impact on production methods, the landscape, and American values.

60

John Held, Jr. on the attractions and perils of automobile courtship

Youth culture: The A-U-T-O and S-E-X. A Model T offered more privacy and comfort than the family living room or front porch.

61

The Triumph of the Mass Media

• Newspapers and Magazines • Radio • Movies

62

Tabloid newspapers—with their bold headlines, photographs, and short sensational stories—became part of the national scene.

63

By 1922, 10 magazines claimed a circulation of at least 2.5 million, including the Saturday Evening Post, the Ladies Home Journal, Collier’s Weekly, and Good Housekeeping. Reader’s Digest, Time Magazine, and The New Yorker all started in the 1920s. The Book of the Month Club was founded in 1926.

64

Professional radio broadcasting began on November 2, 1920, when station KDKA in Pittsburgh carried presidential election returns. By 1929, 40% of the nation’s households had a radio, and listened to over 800 stations, most affiliated with the Columbia Broadcasting service (1928) or the National Broadcasting Company (1926).

65

Charles Lindbergh, the “Lone Eagle,” shown in the context of two of the mass media that made him an overnight sensation and national hero: the tabloid newspaper and radio.

66

Mass Culture: New Freedoms or New Conformities?

What is Mass Culture? Dueling images: cigarette ad/chorus line The complex role of women in the 1920s

67

Cigarette ad from Life Magazine, 1929: Smoking will liberate women just as the new bathing suits have freed her from the shackles of the past.

68

The Coca-Cola Flapper: Image of BOTH individual freedom AND mass-culture conformity

69

70

Spread of electricity

• Suburbs get electricity but rural areas without power

• Electrical appliances: radios, washing machines, vacuum cleaners

• Advertising: image, brand identity, radio

71

National prosperity seemed limitless

• Big problems, though • Growing disparity between rich and

poor, managers and workers • Farmers were in real trouble: prices

tumbled • Consumer debt rose at alarming rates • Stock market wildly overvalued

72

Income Distribution

and Consumer Spending