Prohibition
• At midnight, January 16, 1920,
the United States went dry;
breweries, distilleries, and
saloons were forced to close
their doors.
• before the 18th Amendment
was ratified, about 65 percent
of the country had already
banned alcohol
Prohibition
• Dry forces linked prohibition to
a series of Progressive goals
– Ending wife beating and child
abuse
– Concern about the impact of
drinking on labor productivity
– Outlawing drinking would
eliminate corruption, end
machine politics, and help
Americanize immigrants
Prohibition
• The Volstead Act
– defined intoxicating
beverages as anything with
more than 0.5 percent
alcohol. (Now beer and wine
illegal)
– Enforcement of Prohibition
assigned to the Internal
Revenue Service
– In 1930 to the Justice
Department
Prohibition
• Fostered corruption and
contempt for law and law
enforcement
• Popular culture glamorized
bootleggers like Chicago's
Capone
• Organized crime filled that
vacuum left by the closure of
the legal alcohol industry.
Race
• Some of the most vicious
racial violence in American
history took place between
1917 and 1923
• Movement north and to
competition with whites for
factory jobs
• Black veterans returned
from World War I insisting
on the civil rights that they
had fought for in Europe
Race
• In Chicago, Ill., Longview,
Texas, Omaha, Neb.,
Rosewood, Fla., Tulsa,
Okla., and Washington,
D.C., white mobs burned
and killed in black
neighborhoods.
The Lost Generation
The Lost Generation
The Lost Generation
The Lost Generation
• The Authors
– F. Scott Fitzgerald (The
Great Gatsby)
– T.S. Elliot (The Hollow Men)
– Ernest Hemingway (A
Farewell to Arms)
The Great Migration
• In 1910, three out of every
four black Americans lived
on farms, and nine out of
ten lived in the South
• Hoping to escape tenant
farming, sharecropping,
and peonage, 1.5 million
Southern blacks moved to
cities.
The Great Migration
• Confined to all-black
neighborhoods, African
Americans created citieswithin-cities during the 1920s.
• The largest was Harlem, in
upper Manhattan, where
200,000 African Americans
lived in a neighborhood that
had been virtually all-white
fifteen years before
The Harlem Renaissance
• The first self-conscious
literary and artistic
movement in African
American history.
• Harlem became the capital
of black America, attracting
black intellectuals and
artists from across the
country and the Caribbean
The Harlem Renaissance
• Embracing their Blackness
• Authors and Poets
– Langston Hughes
– Paul Laurence Dunbar
– Zora Neale Hurston
– W.E.B. DuBois
The Harlem Renaissance
• Jazz, the only truly
American art form blooms
– Louis Armstrong
– Billie Holiday
– Duke Ellington
– Cab Calloway
– Bessie Smith
– Count Basie
– Ella Fitzgerald
Marcus Garvey
• The Universal Negro
Improvement Association
(UNIA)
• Black working class mass
movement
• Had at one time 4 million
members
• Back to Africa Movement
• Convicted of mail fraud, sent to
prison then deported back to
Jamaica
Politics of the 1920’s
• Warren G. Harding (Rep)
– Elected in 1920 under the
slogan –”A return to
normalcy”
– Pro-business
– Conservative cultural values
– Isolationist foreign policy
– Teapot Dome Scandal
• Albert Fall
Harding dies in office
• Replaces Harding when he
dies
• Reelected in 1924
• Lowest turnout in
Presidential electoral
history
• The Business of America is
Business!
• Return to laissez faire
The Economy
• Andrew Mellon set about
lowering taxes and reducing
national debt
• proposed a series of tax cuts-in 1921, 1924, and 1926
• Approved reduced income tax
rates across the board
• got the estate tax lowered
• strong supporter of tax cuts for
the rich
A Consumer
Society
• The growth of exciting new
opportunities to buy cars,
appliances, and stylish clothing
• Americans wore ready-made,
exact-size clothing.
• First to play electric
phonographs
• Use electric vacuum cleaners
• Listen to commercial radio
broadcasts
• Drink fresh orange juice year
round.
A Consumer
Society
• Cigarettes, cosmetics,
and synthetic fabrics
• Cars were the symbol of
the new consumer
society
• The telephone and
electricity became
emblems of the
consumer economy.
A Consumer
Society
• Labor Saving devices
–
–
–
–
–
Refrigerators
washing machines
vacuum cleaners
toasters
Canned and frozen
food (Clarence
Birdseye)
Advertising
• Advertising agencies
hired psychologists
(including John B.
Watson, the founder of
behaviorism, and Edward
Bernays, Sigmund Freud's
nephew) to design the
first campaigns
• By 1929, American
companies spent $3
billion annually to
advertise their products
Installment
Credit
• Installment credit soared
during the 1920s.
• Banks offered the country's
first home mortgages.
• Manufacturers of everything-from cars to irons--allowed
consumers to pay "on time."
• About 60 percent of all
furniture and 75 percent of
all radios were purchased on
installment plans
The Chain Stores
• Chains of stores multiplied across
the country, like Woolworth's, the
five-and-dime chain. The largest
grocery chain, A&P, had 17,500
stores by 1928
• Interlocking networks of banks
and utility companies played a
critical role in promoting the
financial speculation of the late
1920s--which would be one of the
causes for the Great Depression.
Henry Ford
• In 1913, Ford had revolutionized American manufacturing by
introducing the automated assembly line
• By using conveyor belts to bring automobile parts to
workers, he reduced the assembly time for a Ford car from 12
½ hours in 1912 to just 1 ½ hours in 1914.
• Declining production costs allowed Ford to cut automobile
prices--six times between 1921 and 1925.
• The cost of a new Ford was reduced to just $290. This amount
was less than three months wages for an average American
worker; it made cars affordable for the average family.
• To lower employee turnover and raise productivity, Ford
introduced a minimum wage of $5 in 1914--twice what most
workers earned--and shortened the workday from nine hours to
eight hours. Twelve years later, Ford reduced his work week
from six days to five days.
Mass Entertainment
• The record chart, the
book club, the radio, the
talking picture, and
spectator sports--all
became popular forms of
mass entertainment
• Sales of radios soared
from $60 million in 1922
to $426 million in 1929
Mass Entertainment
Radio
• Radio drew the nation
together by bringing news,
entertainment, and
advertisements to more than
10 million households by
1929.
• Radio blunted regional
differences and imposed
similar tastes and lifestyles
• The record player enter
American life in full force
Mass Entertainment
Movies
• The popularity of the
movies soared as films
increasingly featured
glamour, sophistication,
and sex appeal
• Talking movies
revolutionize movies in
1927 with “The Jazz
Singer”
Mass Entertainment
Sports
• Prize fighters like Jack
Dempsey became national
idols.
• Team sports flourished,
such as football and
baseball
• Heroes like Babe Ruth
and Red Grange
• World War I revealed that the
economy functioned effectively
without foreign immigration
• Chief proponent of immigration
restriction American Federation
of Labor
• Make the quotas proportionate
to the current population
• Future immigration would not
change the balance of ethnic
groups.
• In 1924, Congress reduced
the number of immigrants
allowed into the United
States each year to two
percent of each nationality
group counted in the 1890
census.
• It also barred Asians
entirely.
The Ku Klux Klan
• A new version of the Ku Klux
Klan arose during the early
1920s through the use of ads
• Throughout this time period,
immigration, fear of radicalism,
and a revolution in morals and
manners fanned anxiety in large
parts of the country.
• Roman Catholics, Jews, African
Americans, and foreigners were
only the most obvious targets
of the Klan's fear-mongering.
• Bootleggers and divorcees
were also targets.
Fundamentalism
• Religion was a pivotal cultural
battleground during the 1920s
• religious traditionalists sought to preserve
the basic tenets of their religious faith.
• Literal interpretation of the Bible and the
actuality of the virgin birth, the atonement,
the resurrection, and the second coming of
Christ.
Fundamentalism
• Early fundamentalist doctrine attacked
competing religions--especially
Catholicism, which it portrayed as an agent
of the Antichrist
• Insisted on the literal truth of the Bible, a
strict return to fundamental principles, and
a thoroughgoing rejection of modernity
Court is in Session
•Sacco and
Vanzetti
•Loeb and
Leopold
•The Scopes Trial
Court is in Session
You’ve Come a Long
Way Baby!
• Domestic service remained the
largest occupation, followed by
secretaries, typists, and clerks-all low-paying jobs
• Female professionals
consistently received less pay
than their male counterparts.
• They were concentrated in
traditionally "female"
occupations such as teaching
and nursing.
You’ve Come a Long
Way Baby!
• Organized women's movement
declined in influence, partly
due to the rise of the new
consumer culture
• To popularize smoking among
women, advertisers staged
parades down New York's 5th
Avenue, imitating the suffrage
marches of the 1910s, in which
young women carried "torches
of freedom"--cigarettes.
Flappers or Back
seat Betties