1920s
The Decade That Roared
• 1920's collectively known as the "Roaring 20's",
or the "Jazz Age"
• in sum, a period of great change in American
Society - modern America is born at this time
• for first time the census reflected an urban
society - people had moved into cities to enjoy a
higher standard of living
This 1925 Judge cartoon, “Sheik with Sheba,” drawn by John Held Jr., offered one
view of contemporary culture. The flashy new automobile, the hip flask with illegal
liquor, the cigarettes, and the stylish “new woman” were all part of the “Roaring
Twenties” image.
Thomas Hart Benton’s 1930 painting City Activities with Dance Hall depicts the
excitement and pleasures associated with commercialized leisure in the Prohibition
era, reflecting urban America’s dominance in defining the nation’s popular culture.
SOURCE:Thomas Hart Benton,City Activities with Dance Hall from America Today ,1930. Distemper and egg tempera on gessoed linen with oil glaze 92 x134 1/2 inches.Collection, AXA Financial,Inc.,through its
subsidiary, The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the U.S.©AXA Financial,Inc.
Post WWI Problems
•
•
•
•
•
violent labor strikes
urban racial riots
bomb scares
anger towards anarchists
Red Scare
– the presence of Communist party members
in the United States
– the Russian Revolution
– bomb scares and actual bombings
– labor strikes
• Red Scare 1919-1920
• At this time, W.
Wilson was gravely
ill following a stroke
• His Attorney General,
A. Mitchell Palmer,
wanted to take a shot
at the presidency - he
used fears of both
immigrants and
communism to his
advantage
• He had J. Edgar
Hoover round up
suspected radicals,
many of which were
deported (Palmer
Raids)
People
•
Margaret Sanger
– advocacy of birth control
– Planned Parenthood
•
Charles Lindbergh and Babe Ruth
– Demonstrated that individualism was still
alive in a modern American dominated by
corporations and team players
•
Marcus Garvey
– Universal Negro Improvement Association
(UNIA)
Doctors wash their hands!
Women go to hospitals to
have babies
40% of maternal deaths
were caused by sepsis
(half following delivery
and half associated with
illegally induced abortion)
with the remaining
deaths primarily
attributed to hemorrhage
and toxemia
1942: First use of penicillin
• Marcus Garvey (Jamaican born
immigrant) established the
Universal Negro Improvement
Association
• believed in Black pride
• advocated racial segregation b/c
of Black superiority
• Garvey believed Blacks should
return to Africa
• he purchased a ship to start the
Black Star line
• attracted many investments:
gov't charged him with w/fraud
• he was found guilty and
eventually deported to Jamaica,
but his organization continued
to exist
Events
•
KKK
–
–
•
promote white supremacy
Nordic Americans
Prohibition
–
–
–
–
–
–
•
the rise of organized crime
proved difficult to enforce
defiance of the law by large numbers of people
rise of organized crime
divisions in the Democratic party
widespread smuggling
Harlem Renaissance
–
–
–
Langston Hughes
"Song to A Negro Wash Woman“
“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"
Women members of the Ku Klux Klan in New Castle, Indiana, August 1, 1923. The
revived Klan was a powerful presence in scores of American communities during
the early 1920s, especially among native-born white Protestants, who feared
cultural and political change. In addition to preaching “100 percent Americanism,”
local Klan chapters also served a social function for members and their families.
SOURCE:Ball State University Libraries,Archives &Special Collections,W.A.Swift Photo Collection.
The Ku Klux Klan
Great increase
In power
Anti-black
Anti-immigrant
Anti-Semitic
Anti-Catholic
Anti-women’s suffrage
Anti-bootleggers
A KKK group you’ll never
see
18th
Prohibition
Amendment
Gangsters
Al Capone
Volstead Act
• PROHIBITION - on manuf. and sale of
alcohol
• adopted in 1919 - 18th AMENDMENT
• an outgrowth of the temperance movement
• in WWI, temperance became a patriotic mvmt.
- drunkenness caused low productivity &
inefficiency, and alcohol needed to treat the
wounded
• a difficult law to enforce... organized crime,
speakeasies, bootleggers were on the rise
• Al Capone virtually controlled Chicago in this
period - capitalism at its zenith…
• Prohibition finally ended in 1933 w/ the 21st
Amendment
• forced organized crime to pursue other
interests…
Fun Fact
chemist's war of Prohibition
• In 1926, in New York City, 1,200 were sickened
by poisonous alcohol; 400 died. The following
year, deaths climbed to 700
• How did the alcohol get poisonous? The gov’t.
• Frustrated, federal officials had decided to try a
different kind of enforcement. They ordered the
poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in
the United States, products regularly stolen by
bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The
idea was to scare people into giving up illicit
drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended
in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some
estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
Fun Fact
• Think the gov’t learned their lesson from
the 1920’s?
• In the 1970s, the U.S. government's
sprayed Mexican marijuana fields with
Paraquat, an herbicide.
• Its use was primarily intended to destroy
crops, but government officials also
insisted that awareness of the toxin would
deter marijuana smokers.
• Blacks moved north to
take advantage of
booming wartime
industry (= Great
Migration) - Black
ghettoes began to
form, i.e. Harlem
• within these ghettoes a
distinct Black culture
flourished (Harlem
Ren.)
• But both blacks and
whites wanted cultural
interchange restricted
The critic and photographer Carl Van Vechten took this portrait of Harlem
Renaissance poet Langston Hughes in 1932. The print next to Hughes reflects the
influence of African art, an important source of inspiration for Harlem Renaissance
• Oh, wash-woman / Arms elbow-deep in white suds, /
Soul washed clean, Clothes washed clean, / I have
many songs to sing you / Could I but find the words.
Was it four o’clock or six o’clock on a winter afternoon, I
saw you wringing out the last shirt in Miss White Lady’s
kitchen? Was it four o’clock or six o’clock? I don’t
remember.
But I know, at seven one spring morning you were on
Vermont Street with a bundle in your arms going to
wash clothes. / And I know I’ve seen you in the New
York subway in the late afternoon coming home from
washing clothes.
Yes, I know you, wash-woman.
I know how you send your children to school, and highschool, and even college. / I know how you work to help
your man when times are hard. / I know how you build
your house up from the washtub and call it home. / And
how you raise your churches from white suds for the
service of the Holy God…
•
• I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
Compare / They send me to eat in
the two
the kitchen / When
poems
company comes, / But I
laugh, / And eat well, /
Black US And grow strong.
vs
Tomorrow, I’ll be at the
table / When company
White
comes.
US
Nobody’ll dare / Say to
experience
me, / ‘Eat in the kitchen,’
/ Then.
Besides, / They’ll see
how beautiful we are /
And be ashamedI, too, am America.
• -I, too (in whole)
•
-Hughes
I hear America singing, the varied carols
I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one
singing his as it should be blithe
and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he
measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes
ready for work, or leaves off
work,
The boatman singing what belongs to
him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat
deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on
his bench, the hatter singing
as he stands,
The woodcutter's song, the
ploughboy's on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or
at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or
of the young wife at work,
or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or
her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at
night the party of young
fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong
melodious songs.
Walt Whitman—leaves of grass
Black Population, 1920 Although the Great Migration had drawn hundreds of
thousands of African Americans to the urban North, the Southern states of the
former Confederacy still remained the center of the African American population
in 1920.
Laws
•
The Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921
– aimed at reducing childbirth mortality
rates and infant mortality rates
– At the time the legislation was introduced,
childbirth remained the second leading
cause of death for women. About 20% of
children in the United States died in their
first year and about 33% in their first five
years
– Critics said it was socialism and challenged
it in the supreme court…they lost. But the
act was de-funded in 1929 due to critics
Laws
• The law was significant in American legal
history because it was the first federallyfunded social welfare program, and
because the challenge to the Supreme
Court failed.
• The Sheppard-Towner Act is significant in
women's history because it addressed the
needs of women and children directly at a
federal level.
A Society in Conflict
• Anti-immigrant
– National Origins Act
– Discrimination
Sacco-Vanzetti
Trial
– Italian immigrants
– Unfair trial
Vanzetti (L)
Sacco (R)
Laws
• Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924 (National
Origins Act)
– Immigration limited to 2% of the number of people
from that country living in the US in 1890…particulary
tried to limit Jews and forbids Asians from immigration
– Resentment of workers against foreign immigrants'
taking jobs away from Americans by their willingness
to work for low wages
– A belief, caused by two short postwar depressions,
that the nation's pool of labor was already
overcrowded
– The belief that those immigrants already in the
country were not adequately Americanized
– White Anglo-Saxon Protestants wanted to bar
immigrants of different racial, ethnic, and religious
backgrounds
Fun Fact
• Some of the law's strongest supporters
were influenced by Madison Grant and his
1916 book, The Passing of the Great
Race.
• Grant was a eugenicist and an advocate of
the racial hygiene theory. His data
purported to show the superiority of the
founding Northern European races.
Sacco-Vanzetti Case
• The Sacco and Vanzetti case
is still hotly debated in some
circles today as a classic
example of the tyranny of the
establishment over the poor
and politically non-conforming.
Fun Fact
• Who did it?
• Most scholars agree in the probable
guilt of Sacco and the likely
innocence of Vanzetti.
• Sorry about the being electrocuted
Vanzetti
Small Town Anti-Urban
Characteristics/beliefs
•
•
•
•
•
Prohibition
Fundamentalism
Immigration restriction
Ku Klux Klan
Election of 1928
Mexican workers gathered outside a San Antonio labor bureau in 1924. These employment
agencies contracted Mexicans to work for Texas farmers, railroads, and construction
companies. Note the three Anglo men in front (wearing suits and ties), who probably owned
and operated this agency. During the 1920s, San Antonio’s Mexican population doubled from
roughly 40,000 to over 80,000, making it the second largest colonia in El Norte after Los
Angeles. SOURCE:Goldbeck Collection,Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center,University of Texas at Austin.Photo by Summerville (46ND).
Annual Immigration to United States, 1860–1930
Mexican Immigration to the United States in the 1920s Many Mexican migrants
avoided official border crossing stations so they would not have to pay visa fees. Thus
these official figures probably underestimated the true size of the decade’s Mexican
migration. As the economy contracted with the onset of the Great Depression, immigration
from Mexico dropped off sharply.
Clifford K. Berryman’s 1928 political cartoon interpreted that year’s presidential contest along
sectional lines. It depicted the two major presidential contenders as each setting off to campaign in
the regions where their support was weakest. For Democrat Al Smith, that meant the West, and for
Republican Herbert Hoover, the East. SOURCE:Copyright,1928,Lost Angeles Times.Reprinted by permission.
The Election of 1928 Although
Al Smith managed to carry the
nation’s twelve largest cities,
Herbert Hoover’s victory in
1928 was one of the largest
popular and electoral landslides
in the nation’s history.
Celebrities
Babe Ruth &Ty Cobb
Charles Lindbergh
The Spirit of St. Louis
Jack Dempsey
Sports
•
•
•
•
Gene Tunney defeated Jack Dempsey
to become the heavyweight champion
of the world.
Jim Thorpe, later voted the most
outstanding athlete of the first half of the
twentieth century, won the decathlon at
the Olympics and was later stripped of
his medals for earlier playing semiprofessional baseball
Gertrude Ederle was the first woman to
swim the English Channel.
Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in a single
season.
The Pittsburgh Crawfords, one of the most popular and successful baseball teams in
the Negro National League, organized in 1920. Excluded from major league baseball
by a “whites only” policy, black ballplayers played to enthusiastic crowds of African
Americans from the 1920s through the 1940s. The “Negro leagues” declined after
major league baseball finally integrated in 1947.
SOURCE:1935 Pittsburgh Crawfords, champions Negro National League. National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown,N.Y.
• "Americans can have any kind of car
they want, and any color they want,
as long as it's a Ford, and as long as
it's black." Henry Ford
Automobiles
•
Effects
– Changes in dating customs
•
“Bedroom on wheels”
– More individualism
•
Go your own way
– Demands by voting public for more
governmental funds for highways
•
National highway system
– The stimulation of industries connected to
the automobile industry, such as batteries,
steel, oil, glass, and rubber
– The development of a motel industry
Automobiles
• In 1929, sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd
published, Middletown, a book based on field
research done in Muncie, Indiana, in 1924 and
1925.
• The Lynds explored how industrialization had
transformed tradition values and customs in
Middle America. They paid particular attention to
people's changing attitudes toward the
automobile.
• They found that people of every income level
considered the automobile a necessity rather than
an luxury. People were willing to sacrifice food,
clothing, and their savings in order to own a car.
Fun Fact
• Perceived as a shining model of the
American success story, Ford was so
trusted by the American public that in
1928, when he announced the
development of the new Model A, half
a million Americans made a down
payment on the car without having
seen it, taken it for a test drive, or even
known how much it would cost.
Model A
Fun Fact
• Henry Ford was very anti-Semitic
• He opened up a newspaper, The
Dearborn Independent, whose sole
purpose was to advise the people of
the US of the threat of the Jews.
Finished automobiles roll off
the moving assembly line at
the Ford Motor Company,
Highland Park, Michigan, ca.
1920. During the 1920s, Henry
Ford achieved the status of
folk hero, as his name became
synonymous with the
techniques of mass
production. Ford cultivated a
public image of himself as the
heroic genius of the auto
industry, greatly exaggerating
his personal achievements.
SOURCE:Brown Brothers.
Until 1924, Henry Ford
had disdained national
advertising for his cars.
But as General Motors
gained a competitive
edge by making yearly
changes in style and
technology, Ford was
forced to pay more
attention to advertising.
This ad was directed at
“Mrs. Consumer,”
combining appeals to
female independence
and motherly duties.
Great Trials
•
Leopold and Loeb
– symbolize immoral decadence
•
Scopes Trial
– fundamentalist’ discomfort with evolutionary
science
– dispute between modernists and
traditionalist
Bobby Franks
Clarence Darrow
Leopold and Loeb
• were two wealthy University of Chicago students
who murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in
1924, and were sentenced to life imprisonment.
• The duo were motivated to murder Franks by
their desire to commit a perfect crime. Once
apprehended, Leopold and Loeb retained
Clarence Darrow as counsel for the defense.
• Darrow’s summation in their trial is noted for its
influential criticism of capital punishment and
retributive, as opposed to rehabilitative, penal
systems.
The 1925 Scopes trial attracted an enormous amount of media attention, as well as
many anti-evolution crusaders. This group set up shop near the Dayton, Tennessee
courthouse.
Scopes “Monkey” Trial
Evolution vs. Creationism
Church Vs. State
Famous Lawyers
Darrow
Science vs. Religion
Dayton, Tennessee
John Scopes
High School Biology teacher
Fun Fact
• Scopes was on trial for teaching
from the text A Civic Biology:
Presented in Problems which
violated TN law
• Now he’d be on trial for teaching
from it because it was racist
Fun Fact—some quotes
from the biology book
• “At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties
of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs,
and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type,
originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the
Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including
the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest
type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white
inhabitants of Europe and America.
•
Hunter was also a proponent of eugenics. "[T]he science of being
well born, is an imperative for sophisticated society. "When people
marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the race
should demand," he wrote, arguing that tuberculosis, epilepsy, and
even "feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair
but criminal to hand down to posterity." "If such people were lower
animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from
spreading," Hunter lamented in Civic Biology. "Humanity will not
allow this but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in
asylums or other places and in various ways preventing
intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and
degenerate race."
Age of Prosperity
• Economic
expansion
• Mass Production
• Assembly Line
• Age of the
Automobile
• Ailing Agriculture…
Why the boom?
• On the whole, the United States economy
experienced steady growth and expansion
during the 1920s.
• Machines
• Factories
• The Process of Standardized Mass Production
and increased worker productivity
• Effect of WWI on technology.
• Scientific management: "Taylorism"
– Formula for labor, streamline work, industrial research
• Psychology of consumption
• Relations between the federal government and
big business –more business, less gov’t
Fun fact
• A new innovation appeared in the
1920s…the installment plan, which
encouraged Americans to build up debt in
order to buy consumer goods.
• In 1926, 75% of all cars were purchased
on the installment plan. Avg. cost of a
car…$290.
Consumer Debt, 1920–31 The expansion of consumer borrowing was a key
component of the era’s prosperity. These figures do not include mortgages or money
borrowed to purchase stocks. They reveal the great increase in “installment buying”
for such consumer durable goods as automobiles and household appliances.
• An agri. depression in early 1920's
contributed to urban migration
• U.S. farmers lost agri. markets in
postwar Europe
• At same time agri. efficiency increased
so more food produced (more food =
lower prices) and fewer labourers needed
• So farming was no longer as prosperous,
and bankers called in their loans (farms
repossessed)
• So American farmers enter the
Depression in advance of the rest of
society
• Black American
farmers in this
period continued to
live in poverty
• sharecropping kept
them in de facto
slavery
• 1915 - boll weevil
wiped out the cotton
crop
• white landowners
went bankrupt &
forced blacks off
their land
Consumer Economy
Consumerism
• In a variety of ways, Americans wanted to get
rich, and to do so with little effort. Thorstein
Veblen, an economist, published The Theory of
the Leisure Class in 1898.
• The book reached a wide American audience
during the 1920s because it spoke directly to the
psychology of American consumption.
• Veblen, in fact, introduced the now-familiar term
"conspicuous consumption," which seemed to
embody the cultural mindset of post World War I
America.
Why the crash?
Stock prices
Were too high
And people
Bought them
On margin
Stock Market Prices, 1921–32 Common stock prices rose steeply during the
1920s. Although only about 4 million Americans owned stocks during the period,
“stock watching” became something of a national sport.
Stocks---what goes up,
goes down
• From 1921 to 1929, the Dow Jones
rocketed from 60 to 400! Millionaires
were created instantly.
• Investors mortgaged their homes, and
foolishly invested their life savings in
hot stocks, such as Ford and RCA.
Stocks
• Investors soon purchased stock on margin.
Margin is the borrowing of stock for the
purpose of getting more leverage. For
every dollar invested, a margin user would
borrow 9 dollars worth of stock. Because of
this leverage, if a stock went up 1%, the
investor would make 10%!
• This also works the other way around,
exaggerating even minor losses. If a stock
drops too much, a margin holder could lose
all of their money AND owe their broker
money as well.
Black Tuesday
The stock market was only one cause of the Great Depression. Unequal income
distribution was another problem. While businesses showed great profits during
the 1920s, workers got only a small portion of this wealth in their low wages.
People who had small incomes therefore bought merchandise on credit.
Advertisers pushed them to do so with the slogan "Buy now, pay later." Many
consumers accumulated so much debt that they couldn’t keep up
Stocks
• To the average investor, stocks were a
sure thing. Few people actually studied the
fundamentals of the companies they
invested in.
• Thousands of fraudulent companies were
formed to hoodwink unsavvy investors.
Most investors never even thought a crash
was possible. To them, the stock market
“always went up”.
Stocks go up and down
The A&P grocery chain expanded from 400 stores in 1912 to more than 15,000
by the end of the 1920s, making it a familiar sight in communities across
America. A&P advertisements, like this one from 1927, emphasized cleanliness,
order, and the availability of name-brand
goods at discount prices. SOURCE:From Ladies Home Journal .A&P Food Stores LTD.
This 1920 magazine
advertisement touts the
wonders of a new
model vacuum cleaner.
Much of the advertising
boom in the post World
War I years centered on
the increasing number
of consumer durable
goods, such as
household appliances,
newly available to
typical American
families. SOURCE:The
Granger Collection,New
Culture of the Roaring 20’s
Radio
KDKA Pittsburgh
GE, Westinghouse,& RCA
form NBC
Silent Movies
Charlie Chaplin
“Talkies”
The Jazz Singer
Starring Al Jolson
Mary Pickford
“America’s Sweetheart”
The 20’s is The Jazz Age
The Flappers
make up
cigarettes
short skirts
Writers
Musicians
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway
Louis Armstrong
Duke Ellington
Play Simpson’s Clip
• Avg presidents
Republican
Power
• President
Harding
• Elected 1920
• Legacy of
Scandals
• “Teapot Dome”
• Died in office
Fun Fact
• A Democratic leader, William Gibbs
McAdoo, called Harding's speeches
"an army of pompous phrases
moving across the landscape in
search of an idea."
Oil reserve scandal/bribes
"Coolidge prosperity"
President Coolidge
“The business of America is
business.”
• Fordney-McCumber
Tariff
– isolationism
• Smoot-Hawley Tariff
– Record tariffs/contr.
to depression
• No help for farmers
• Foreign Policy
– Isolationism
Silent Cal speaks
• "Wealth is the chief end of man!"
• "The man who builds a factory, builds
a temple. The man who works there,
worships there."
Fun Fact
• The political genius of President
Coolidge, Walter Lippmann
pointed out in 1926, was his
talent for effectively doing nothing
Fun Fact
• His wife, Grace Goodhue Coolidge,
recounted that a young woman sitting
next to Coolidge at a dinner party
confided to him she had bet she could get
at least three words of conversation from
him. Without looking at her he quietly
retorted, "You lose."
Calvin Coolidge
combined a spare,
laconic political style
with a flair for
publicity. He
frequently posed in
the dress of a cowboy,
farmer, or Indian chief.
SOURCE:Calvin
Coolidge in headdress
and robes after joining
Sioux
Indians as Chief Leading Eagle,ca.1928.CORBIS.