The Roaring Twenties
VUS.10 ~ How did radio, movies, newspapers, and magazines create popular culture and
challenge traditional values in the 1920s and 1930s?
For the United States as a whole, the 1920s were a decade of prosperity, and popular culture
reflected the prosperity of this era. New forms of mass media and communications and challenges to
traditional values led many American observers to refer to this decade as the “roaring twenties.” These
new forms of mass media continued to affect America culture throughout the 1930s during the dark days
of the Great Depression. Radio and movies revolutionized mass media and communications, and important
new developments also occurred in the newspaper and magazine industries. Together radio, movies,
newspapers, and magazines promoted challenges to traditional values.
Radio broadcasts began in 1920, when KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania reported that year’s
presidential election returns. By 1929, nearly forty percent of American homes owned radios. Radio
advertising created national markets for consumer products. By broadcasting jazz, radio made this new
style of music both popular and respectable nationwide. Throughout the 1930s, President Franklin D.
Roosevelt effectively used radio talks, called “Fireside Chats,” to reassure and inform the American people
during the Great Depression.
During the decade of the twenties, silent films became a major form of entertainment in America.
Then in 1927 movies gained sound with the release of The Jazz Singer, the first talking picture. The
movies created national stars, like Rudolph Valentino, Mary Pickford, Clara Bow, and Charlie Chaplin. Movie
stars continued to gain popularity during the depression years of the thirties, when films provided escape
from Depression-era realities. Newspapers and magazines also influenced American popular culture.
Reader’s Digest, Time, and The Saturday Evening Post appealed to a general middle class audience. These
and other magazines and newspapers shaped cultural norms and sparked fads, like crossword puzzles and
the Chinese game of Mah Jong.
Revolutionary changes in mass media and communications brought immense social change to the
United States. Because many of these changes challenged traditional American values, they led to
conservative reaction and social conflict. Darwin’s theory of evolution was one such cause of social conflict,
because it challenged the traditional Christian belief in the Bible’s account of creation. Evolution means
gradual change, and in biology, evolution refers to the changes in a population over time. In 1859 Charles
Darwin, an English biologist, published The Origin of Species, in which he proposed the idea of natural
selection. The concept of natural selection focused on the importance of competition and evolution in the
development of species (different types of plant and animal life). By the 1920s, many Christians in rural
America viewed Darwin’s theory of evolution as an attack on their religious beliefs. In 1925, the
Tennessee legislature passed a law that made it illegal “to teach any theory that denies the story of the
Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible….” The state’s lawmakers considered the teaching of evolution
an attack on traditional religion. John Scopes, a young biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee refused to
obey this new law and continued to teach the theory of evolution to his high school students. Scopes was
arrested and tried in a case to test the constitutionality of Tennessee’s anti-evolution law. Scopes’ trial
received the attention of the national press. Although the Tennessee court found John Scopes guilty and
fined him, the trial made the prosecution’s lawyer look foolish and urban newspapers and radio poked fun at
Tennessee for being backward.
Traditional American values were even more widely challenged by young women of the 1920s. In the
nation’s culture, especially that of 19th century Victorian America, the traditional role of women was that of
dutiful wife and caring mother. The 19th Amendment appeared to challenge this traditional role by granting
women the right to vote in time for participation in the 1920 presidential election. No longer would politics
be the under exclusive control of American men. In addition, the flappers became a symbol for rebellious
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young, middle class women of the 1920s. Flapper was a term used to describe young women of the 1920s
who behaved or dressed in an unconventional way. Flappers seemed to be the exact opposite of their
traditional mothers. The image of the youthful flapper greatly upset American traditionalists. In movies,
novels, and everyday life flappers publicly expressed their sexuality. They had short haircuts, used lots of
makeup, wore short skirts, publicly smoked cigarettes, danced erotic dances like the tango and the
Charleston, and drank illegal alcoholic beverages.
The 18th Amendment, or Prohibition, had made the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages
illegal in 1919. This amendment climaxed a long crusade by Protestant reformers, who believed that
drinking alcohol was a sin that could destroy the American family. Together with the 19 th Amendment, it
was one of the final achievements of the Progressive movement. However, Prohibition had unintended
consequences, which challenged the traditional beliefs of its supporters. Prohibition led to mass smuggling
of alcohol into the United States by gangsters, who used the fortunes made from illegal liquor profits to
establish organized crime. In addition, illegal bars or “speakeasies” sprang up everywhere in the nation.
Prohibition contributed to the attack on traditional values until its repeal in 1933.
A final challenge to traditional values came in mainstream America’s reaction to open immigration
following World War I. The decade of the twenties witnessed a strong increase in anti-immigrant feeling
among native-born Americans. This feeling resulted from racial and religious prejudice, fears of job
competition, and a belief that immigrants might bring with them radical ideas like communism. Opposition
to renewed immigration after the war contributed to a revival of the Ku Klux Klan, which during the
twenties enjoyed popularity in various parts of the entire nation, rather than just the South, and which was
now anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish, as well as prejudiced against African-Americans. The Klan claimed to
defend traditional American values and everywhere blamed Roman Catholic and Jewish immigrants for many
of the nation’s problems. During the 1920s, Congress bowed to this public pressure to limit immigration.
The Immigration Restriction Act of 1921 placed the first numerical limits, called quotas, on most
immigration. It particularly discriminated against immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and was
followed three years later by a law that established even stricter quotas. These laws effectively cut off
most European immigration until the end of World War II, although the 1924 law did not restrict
immigration from Canada or Latin America.
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