Roaring Twenties Teacher Notes
1. Politics (Prohibition, bills)
a. America’s involvement in the First World War and its propaganda and suspicions of
anything less than “100 percent American,” pushed Congress to address fears of
immigration and foreign populations—American Yawp
b. sour postwar economy led elites to raise the specter of the Russian Revolution and
sideline not just the various American socialist and anarchist organizations, but
nearly all union activism.
i. During the 1920s, the labor movement suffered a sharp decline in
memberships.
1. Workers not only lost bargaining power, but also the support of
courts, politicians, and, in large measure, the American public
c. Harding’s administration suffered a tremendous setback when several officials
conspired to lease government land in Wyoming to oil companies in exchange for
cash.
i. Known as the Teapot Dome scandal (named after the nearby rock
formation that resembled a teapot), Interior Secretary Albert Fall and Navy
Secretary Edwin Denby were eventually convicted and sent to jail.
ii. But then, on August of 1923, Harding died suddenly of a heart attack and
Vice President Calvin Coolidge ascended to the highest office in the land
d. Christian and women’s groups lobbied for Prohibition and it was finally passed as an
amendment to the constitution
i. Prohibited the sale and purchase of alcohol
ii. Led to organized crime
iii. Was finally repealed with another amendment because of the violence and
general disregard for the law
2. Economics (credit, banks, regulation)
 Federal Reserve behavior
o 1. Benjamin Strong, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,
while he was alive, controlled Federal Reserve Policy.
 When he died Adolph Miller took his place
 a. believed that speculation was causing share prices to be too
high and in the fall of 1928, he buckled down on Fed Res.
policy.
 b. “...sought to keep banks from extending loans that would
be used to buy stock.”
 c. this caused “the interest rate on broker loans to rise
dramatically”
 a. also states that an important factor was that government officials
kept saying the stock prices were too high, even though evidence
shows they were not, creating a fictional speculation bubble.
o “...an unusual credit system was developed to circumvent the Federal
Reserve’s Policy to stop the boom, following the fears of credit growth that
they had experienced 1927 and earlier.”
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a. “regulatory arbitrage”--finding ways/loopholes to get around a
piece of legislation that is unfavorable to the situation or the interests
of the party.
b. “the credit grew in line with variations during the boom” c. Kabiri,
Ali. 2015. The Great Crash of 1929 : a reconciliation of theory and
evidence. n.p.: Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire : Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015. 4.
These ways to circumvent ultimately led to the crash on Black
Tuesday
3. New technology
a. As transformative as steam and iron had been in the previous century, gasoline and
electricity—embodied most dramatically for many Americans in automobiles, film,
and radio—propelled not only consumption, but also the famed popular culture in
the 1920s.
b. As the automobile became more popular and more reliable, more people traveled
more frequently and attempted greater distances.
i. Vacationing Americans sped to Florida to escape northern winters.
c. New consumer products flooded the market.
d. Radio
i. Jazz
ii. Radio shows
iii. Voice actors
e. Movies
i. Silent films
ii. Talkies
1. The jazz singer
4. Consumerism and Entertainment
 Marketing and ads
o People had more money so they began to buy luxuries
o Credit
 Marketing campaigns were big during this time
o Towards women, men, and children
 Weight gain pills
 Cleaning products
 Hygiene
 Food products
 Let me show you this product that you never knew you needed -> in a nutshell
 The department store stood at the center of this early consumer revolution.
o These emporiums concentrated a broad array of goods under a single roof,
allowing customers to purchase shirtwaists and gloves alongside toy trains
and washbasins.
o To attract customers, department stores relied on more than variety.
o They also employed innovations in service—such as access to restaurants,
writing rooms, and babysitting—and spectacle—such as elaborately
decorated store windows, fashion shows, and interior merchandise displays.

Automobiles themselves became objects of entertainment: nearly one hundred
thousand people gathered to watch drivers compete for the $50,000 prize of the
Indianapolis 500.
 Baseball became very popular during the 20’s
o Perhaps no sports figure left a bigger mark than did Babe Ruth.
 Born George Herman Ruth, the “Sultan of Swat” grew up in an
orphanage in Baltimore’s slums.
 Ruth’s emergence onto the national scene was much needed, as the
baseball world had been rocked by the so-called black Sox scandal in
which eight players allegedly agreed to throw the 1919 World Series.
 Ruth hit fifty-four home runs in 1920, which was more than any
other team combined.
 Baseball writers called Ruth a superman, and more Americans
could recognize Ruth than they could then-president Warren
G. Harding.
 By 1930, as movie-making became more expensive, a handful of film companies
took control of the industry.
o Immigrants, mostly of Jewish heritage from Central and Eastern Europe,
originally “invented Hollywood” because most turn-of-the-century middle
and upper class Americans viewed cinema as lower-class entertainment.
5. Harlem Renaissance
a. Jazz, a uniquely American musical style popularized by the African-American
community in New Orleans, spread primarily through radio stations and records.
b. The New York Times had ridiculed jazz as “savage” because of its racial heritage, but
the music represented cultural independence to others.
i. As Harlem-based musician William Dixon put it, “It did seem, to a little boy,
that . . . white people really owned everything. But that wasn’t entirely true.
They didn’t own the music that I played.”
c. The Harlem Renaissance was manifested in theatre, art, and music.
i. For the first time, Broadway presented black actors in serious roles.
1. The 1924 production, Dixie to Broadway, was the first all-black show
with mainstream showings.
ii. In art, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Aaron Douglas, and Palmer Hayden
showcased black cultural heritage as well as captured the population’s current
experience.
iii. In music, jazz rocketed in popularity. Eager to hear “real jazz,” whites
journeyed to Harlem’s Cotton Club and Smalls.
1. Next to Greenwich Village, Harlem’s nightclubs and speakeasies
(venues where alcohol was publicly consumed) presented a place
where sexual freedom and gay life thrived.
2. Unfortunately, while headliners like Duke Ellington were hired to
entertain at Harlem’s venues, the surrounding black community was
usually excluded.
3. black performers were often restricted from restroom use and
relegated to service door entry.
iv. As the Renaissance faded to a close, several Harlem Renaissance artists went
on to produce important works indicating that this movement was but one
component in African American’s long history of cultural and intellectual
achievements.
6. Women in the 1920’s
a. Women found freedom in the automobile.
i. Women increasingly drove themselves to their own activities as well as those
of their children. Vacationing Americans sped to Florida to escape northern
winters.
b. The rising emphasis on spending and accumulation nurtured a national ethos of
materialism and individual pleasure.
i. These impulses were embodied in the figure of the flapper, whose bobbed
hair, short skirts, makeup, cigarettes, and carefree spirit captured the
attention of American novelists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair
Lewis.
ii. Rejecting the old Victorian values of desexualized modesty and self-restraint,
young “flappers” seized opportunities for the public coed pleasures offered
by new commercial leisure institutions, such as dance halls, cabarets, and
nickelodeons, not to mention the illicit blind tigers and speakeasies spawned
by Prohibition.
iii. So doing, young American women had helped to usher in a new morality
that permitted women greater independence, freedom of movement, and
access to the delights of urban living. In the words of psychologist G. Stanley
Hall, “She was out to see the world and, incidentally, be seen of it.”
c. For young, middle-class, white women, the most common workplace was the office.
i. predominantly single women
ii. became clerks, jobs that had been primarily “male” earlier in the century.
1. there was a clear ceiling.
a. While entry-level clerk jobs became increasingly feminized,
jobs at a higher, more lucrative level remained dominated by
men.
b. rather than changing the culture of the workplace, the
entrance of women into the lower-level jobs primarily
changed the coding of the jobs themselves.
i. Such positions simply became “women’s work.”
7. Prejudice and Radicalism (kkk, scopes trial, etc.)
a. Christian Fundamentalism arose most directly from a doctrinal dispute among
Protestant leaders.
i. Liberal theologians sought to intertwine religion with science and secular
culture.
ii. These “Modernists,” influenced by the Biblical scholarship of nineteenth
century German academics, argued that Christian doctrines about the
miraculous might be best understood metaphorically.
iii. The church, they said, needed to adapt itself to the world.
1. The social gospel, which encouraged Christians to build the Kingdom
of God on earth by working against social and economic inequality,
was very much tied to liberal theology.
b. On March 21, 1925 in a tiny courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee, Fundamentalists
gathered to tackle the issues of creation and evolution.
i. A young biology teacher, John T. Scopes, was being tried for teaching his
students evolutionary theory in violation of the Butler Act, a state law
preventing evolutionary theory or any theory that denied “the Divine
Creation of man as taught in the Bible” from being taught in publicallyfunded Tennessee classrooms.
ii. Seeing the act as a threat to personal liberty, the American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU) immediately sought a volunteer for a “test” case, hoping that
the conviction and subsequent appeals would lead to a day in the Supreme
Court, testing the constitutionality of the law.
iii. It was then that Scopes, a part-time teacher and coach, stepped up and
voluntarily admitted to teaching evolution (Scopes’ violation of the law was
never in question). Thus the stage was set for the pivotal courtroom
showdown—“the trial of the century”—between the champions and
opponents of evolution that marked a key moment in an enduring American
“culture war.”
c. The case became a public spectacle.
i. Clarence Darrow, an agnostic attorney and a keen liberal mind from Chicago,
volunteered to aid the defense came up against William Jennings Bryan.
1. Bryan, the “Great Commoner,” was the three-time presidential
candidate who in his younger days had led the political crusade
against corporate greed.
2. He had done so then with a firm belief in the righteousness of his
cause, and now he defended biblical literalism in similar terms.
3. The theory of evolution, Bryan said, with its emphasis on the survival
of the fittest, “would eliminate love and carry man back to a struggle
of tooth and claw.”
d. Suspicions of immigrants, Catholics, and modernists contributed to a string of
reactionary organizations.
i. Rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)
1. a white supremacist organization that expanded beyond its
Reconstruction Era anti-black politics to now claim to protect
American values and way of life from blacks, feminists (and other
radicals), immigrants, Catholics, Jews, atheists, bootleggers, and a
host of other imagined moral enemies.
2. Two events in 1915 are widely credited with inspiring the rebirth of
the Klan:
a. the lynching of Leo Frank
b. the release of The Birth of the Nation
i. a popular and groundbreaking film that valorized the
Reconstruction Era Klan as a protector of feminine
virtue and white racial purity.
c. Taking advantage of this sudden surge of popularity, Colonel
William Joseph Simmons organized what is often called the
“second” Ku Klux Klan in Georgia in late 1915.
i. This new Klan, modeled after other fraternal
organizations with elaborate rituals and a hierarchy,
remained largely confined to Georgia and Alabama
until 1920, when Simmons began a professional
recruiting effort that resulted in individual chapters
being formed across the country and membership
rising to an estimated five million.
**American Yawp