THE ROARING TWENTIES
A New Economy and New Society
AN ECONOMY OF MASS
CONSUMERISM
THE CONSUMER ECONOMY

Farm  City = AG  Industrial
Manufacturing up 60%
 Income up 20%
 Inflation trivial


Prosperity by all!
Middle class: installment plans
 “These standard advertised wares- toothpastes, socks,
tires, cameras, instantaneous hot water heaters- were the
symbols and proofs of excellence” –Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt


Economy of Scale
Large v. Small business
 Price
 Availability

WORKERS IN THE AGE OF CAPITALISM

Capital = $$ for investment

Welfare Capitalism
Benefits for workers
 Felt by relatively few


State of the Unions
Weakened by shop committees
 William Green- AFL
 Open shops = The American Plan

"I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be
large enough for the family, but small enough for
the individual to run and care for. It will be
constructed of the best materials, by the best men to
be hired, after the simplest designs that modern
engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price
that no man making a good salary will be unable to
own one – and enjoy with his family the blessing of
hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces."
IMPACT OF THE TIN LIZZIE

 prosperity of 1920s
Impact on other industries
 Cheap, available



 social change


$850  $290
Positive & negative
Assembly Line
= mass production  cheap goods
 Frederick Winslow Taylor & scientific management

ADVERTISING

 demand for products

Bruce Barton
Ad exec. & author
 The Man Nobody Knows

Jesus = founder of modern business (strong, worldconquering, work from bottom up)
 Vs. “Sunday School Jesus” (weak, moral)


How?


magazines = mass circulation
Commercial radio
RADIO

KDKA



Commercial Radio




Pittsburgh, PA
11/2/1920
NBC, CBS 1927
Golden Age of Broadcasting
Rudy Vallee- “The Dream Man”
"This is KDKA, of the Westinghouse Electric and
Manufacturing Company, in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
We shall now broadcast the election returns."
—Leo Rosenburg, on the very first radio broadcast by
KDKA, November 2, 1920
AVIATION

Wright Brothers, 1903

Kitty Hawk, NC

WWI use

New technology  commercial flights


Lindberg, 1927


Federal aid to air transport, navigation
1st solo flight
Earhart
1931 solo flight
 1937 last flight

THE NEW SOCIETY
ON PRAIRIE TOWNS. . .
A “SAVORLESS PEOPLE, GULPING
TASTELESS FOOD, AND SITTING
AFTERWARD, COATLESS AND
THOUGHTLESS, IN ROCKING CHAIRS
PRICKLY WITH INANE DECORATIONS,
LISTENING TO MECHANICAL MUSIC,
SAYING MECHANICAL THINGS ABOUT
THE EXCELLENCE FOR FORD
AUTOMOBILES, AND VIEWING
THEMSELVES AS THE GREATEST
RACE IN THE WORLD.”
-SINCLAIR LEWIS, MAIN STREET
Disruptive
social
behavior
Disruptive
intellectual
currents
Defensive
temper
Repressive
movements
THE JAZZ AGE
New forms of sexuality, recreation, music
 Jazz = improvisation
 Jazz/ragtime new dance  shock & awe


Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith,
Cab Calloway
ALL THAT JAZZ!

The Black Bottom
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTR6xBeC2xA
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMCoOEKkvsA


The Charleston

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psch9N4PmO4
THE NEW MORALITY

This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald




Books, magazines, moves spread knowledge of
city life, parties, bathtub gin, promiscuity,
speakeasies
Freud & psychoanalysis


College life @ Princeton
Victorian mothers v. Modern daughters
Well known in “prudish America”
More open about sexuality
THE FLAPPER:
DEGENERATING SOCIETY
Fashion = rebellion vs. prudishness
 Flapper fashion is new feminism + masculinity
 New expression of “rugged individualism”



d
“By sheer force of violence, [the flapper] ]has
established the feminine right to equal
representation in such hitherto masculine fields of
endeavor as smoking and drinking, swearing,
petting, and upsetting the community peace.” - NYT
THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UU_SAPOdqGk
THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT

Suffrage revisited

1912, Alice Paul- NAWSA
Pickets, chains, hunger strikes, provoke police
 http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5336/


1915, Carrie Chapman Catt- NWSA

Worked w/ Wilson

June 4, 1919 = 19th Amendment

August 20, 1920 = ratification


No sudden release from social customs, legal
discrimination
Push for Equal Rights Amendment


Paul- no legal distinction b/t sexes
20s-30s = increase in women working

Traditional occupations
“EVERY CHILD A WANTED CHILD.”

Margaret Sanger & The Woman Rebel
NY nurse, militant socialist, cultural radical
 Comstock Law


1914- birth control info. out to working class women
Why?
 Effects




Reproductive freedom, control of body
Family planning clinics, American Birth
Control League
Promotion by conservatives for social
control


Eugenics, “racial health”
Buck v. Bell (‘27) = sterilization of. . .
HARLEM RENAISSANCE


Great Migration  black political influence
Spirit of protest  literary, artistic cultural
expression

Claude McKay- to rediscover black folk culture

Harlem Shadows = defiance
Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James
Weldon Johnson
 “New Negro”


 Negro Nat’lism

Racial pride + self-reliance
A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH

Eatonville

Post-CW: leave, assimilate, separate
Struggles of black life through writing, poetry,
folk lore
 Sense of place, challenge to tradition, role of race


"I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my
search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of
wishful illusions."
- Letter from Zora Neale Hurston to Countee Cullen
GARVEYISM

Marcus Garvey
Jamaican
 Black expression + black exclusiveness


Liberation from white culture
“We have outgrown slavery, but our minds are still
enslaved to the thinking of the Master Race.”
 Threat of whites


Negro Nat’lism spreads
“Social & political seperation of all peoples to the
extent that they promote their own ideals and
civilization”
 Black version of Xnty, own businesses, own
newspaper
 Attempt to build own republic in Africa

Universal Negro Improvement Assoc. (UNIA)
 “He gave my people backbone where they had
wishbone”
 MAIL FRAUD- 1925-1927

NAACP

1910- led by N. white liberals + black leaders

W.E.B. DuBois (Niagra Movement)
14th & 15th Amendments
 Guinn v. U.S. (1915)



Overthrow OK grandfather clause
1919- campaigns vs. lynching
Mob murder = federal offense
 Struck down

A SOUTHERN RENAISSANCE

Reflect world in rebirth


Mirrored modernist lit in Europe, US
Tradition v. modern


Thomas Wolfe: Look Homeward, Angel



Klan + fundamentalism
Turned against tradition
Desire for knowledge, experience, outside world
William Faulkner
Aimless drifting  hometown writing
 Sense of place + questioning of myths, traditions

How does the past shape the present and future?
 What role does skin color, our ancestors, or economic
situation determine our lives?


Zora Neale Hurston