Modern Times: the 1920s
Warren Harding, President 1921-1923
"America's present need is not
heroics, but healing; not nostrums,
but normalcy; not revolution, but
restoration; not agitation, but
adjustment; not surgery, but
serenity; not the dramatic, but the
dispassionate; not experiment, but
equipoise; not submergence in
internationality, but sustainment in
triumphant nationality...."
Calvin Coolidge, President 1923-1929
“The Business of America is Business”
Narratives of the 1920s..
• The birth of the modern age: social
liberation and a modern aesthetic
• “Culture Wars”: moderns v traditionalists,
urban v rural, religious v secular
• The privatisation of consumption and the
diminished public sphere
• A new nationalism, isolationism
Modernity…
Social transformation: “new women”, “new
negro”
Mass production… “Fordism”
Mass consumption and a new culture of
consumption: youth, leisure, celebrity,
advertising, private affluence
Jazz
: transgressing boundaries of race, gender, class, urban/rural, genre?
The New Woman
“I really think that
American gentlemen are
the best after all, because
kissing your hand may
make you feel very good
but a diamond and a
sapphire bracelet lasts
forever.“
Anita Loos, actress and
author of Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes (1926)
Clara Bow and the
cult of celebrity
Al Capone:
Gangster as
celebrity
Babe Ruth:
Commercialised
leisure
Henry Ford
Pro-Business Supreme Court
William Howard Taft
• Bailey v Drexel
Furniture Co. (1922):
anti-child labor
legislation
unconstitutional
• Coronado Coal Co. v
United Mine Workers
(1925): labor unions
could be prosecuted
for restraint of trade
“Youth demanded
simple clothes
instead of these
fussy, elaborate
styles of the
1900's"
Ivory Soap ad,
1929
Images of
modernity:
Women
empowered as
consumers?
• Legitimating
desire
• Consumption as
modernity
Chesterfield and
Camel ads (late
20s)
Mass
consumption as
liberation:
The link between
the “New Woman”
and the consumer
society
Consumption as
competition,
pleasure…
and sex
Buick ad (1923)
Sophistication
and discernment:
the
“Democratisation
of consumption”?
Woodbury’s soap
ad from the
Ladies Home
Journal
(November 1926)
The Rise of the Consumer
Movement
• Christine Frederick, Selling Mrs Consumer
(1929)
• Chase and Schlink, Your Money’s Worth
(1927)
• Consumers Research (founded 1929)
…discontents
1. Cynicism of the “Lost Generation”
2. Closed Society: Red Scare, Racism,
Nativism and the Klan.. Fear of
subversion and fear of difference
3. A New Puritanism: prohibition and
evangelicalism
F. Scott Fitzgerald and the
“Lost Generation”
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy-they smashed up things and creatures and then
retreated back into their money or their vast
carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them
together, and let other people clear up the mess
they had made....”
The Great Gatsby (1925)
The Red Scare and “One Hundred
Percent Americanism”
Sacco and Vanzetti
Immigration Restriction Acts of
1921 and 1924
Immigration Quotas after 1924
based on 1890 census
Britain
Germany
Ireland
Italy
Poland
Russia
Japan
China
65,721
25,957
17,853
5,802
6,524
2,784
100 (whites
only)
100 (whites
only)
The Revival of the Klan
The Scopes “Monkey Trial” (1925)
Puritanism and Politics:
Prohibition, from progressive reform to
reactionary moralism?
“It was the Americans who invented the
curious doctrine that there is a body of
doctrine in every department of thought
that every good citizen is duty-bound to
cherish and accept. It was Americans who
invented the right thinker.”
H.L. Mencken