The 1920`s - pvwrobertazzi

The 1920’s The Roaring Jazz Age or the Turbulent Twenties?

What is Happening Here?

What Does This Movie Poster Suggest About the Era?

The 1920s Must Be….??

Turbulent Decade or Jazz Age? • Prohibition and Women’s Suffrage usher in the decade • US becomes more modern • Movies, radio, the car, mass production • Harding, Coolidge and Hoover: Scandals • The Red Scare • US stays isolated from foreign affairs • More Americans lived in towns and cities then in the countryside

Do we need so many laws?? • Do laws help to prevent crime or do they assist in the creation of crime? Explain.

Prohibition and Women’s Suffrage PART I

Why Prohibition??? • Began in the progressive era, a time of reform in America • Improve social conditions • Reduce crime & family instability • Increase economic efficiency • Purify politics • Alcohol reduced efficiency of soldiers. • Progressives, Baptists, Methodists, Protestants, women’s temperance unions all pushed for prohibition

Trading Alcohol for Al Capone • Prohibition – alcohol is illegal • 18th Amendment 1/1919 • Volstead Act 10/1919, established Prohibition Bureau (Eliot Ness), set penalties • Speakeasies, bootlegging, organized crime • Medicinal uses • Enforcement issues • 21st Amendment 1933 – repealed the 18th

A Raid in Lake Ontario

Was this “noble experiment” a success??? • Was prohibition a success? What did the Senate judiciary committee of 1926 feel about the progress of prohibition?

Women’s Suffrage • Movement began during colonial times • Women made great strides toward equality during WWI • 19th Amendment 8/26/20 • "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex." • 1920 Women vote in election

A Time of Amendments Explain the purpose of each of the following three Constitutional Amendments: th th st 18 , 19 & 21 . Which do you feel is the most important? Explain.

THE USA AFTER WWI The Economy, The Red Scare, Immigration and Politics Part III

BOOM TIMES “One hundred thousand people flocked into the showrooms of the Ford Company in Detroit; mounted police were called out to patrol the streets of Cleveland, in Kansas City so a great a mob stormed Convention Hall that the platforms had to be built to lift the new car high enough for everyone to see”

Post WWI Issues • Communist Russia – Will Communism infect the minds of Americans?

• Postwar Economy – High unemployment – Inflation – Low wages

• Labor Unrest – Worker’s strikes crippled production

Land of Opportunity? • Red Scare – Paranoia and exaggeration caused hysteria

• Bomb Scares – 36 mail bombs discovered • Bolshevism – Communist Conspiracy, a call for a worldwide revolution of workers – .5% of Americans • Palmer Raids – raids in 33 cities. 4000 arrests and 560 deportations of “communists”

• Nativism – National Origins Act 1924 – Limited immigration, European, 2% of the number of people living in the US from that country (census 1890)

The Red Scare Was…. “A nation-wide anti-radical hysteria provoked by a mounting fear and anxiety that a Bolshevik revolution in America was imminent — a revolution that would destroy private property, Church, home, marriage, civility, and the American way of Life.” - Historian L.B. Murray

"These attacks will only increase the activities of our crime-detecting forces"

The Impact of National Origins Act

Does he have a point? “Not for at least half a century, perhaps at no time in our history had there been such a wholesale violation of civil liberties” - Historian William Leuchtenburg

Review Question

What was America so SCARED of after WWI and in the early 1920s? Why? Name two consequences of this fear?

3 Strikes!!! – (3,600 in 1919) • Seattle General –60,000 peaceful • Boston Police – 75% of officers – “agents of Lenin” – “Bolshevik nightmare” – Strikers did not regain their jobs

• Steel Strike – Pennsylvania, 365,000, Black and Mexican replacement workers are brought in, strikers jailed beaten or shot! • How did these strikes help “fuel” the Red Scare?

Sacco and Vanzetti

Seriously? “This man Vanzetti, although he may not have actually committed the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless morally culpable [guilty], because he is an enemy of our existing institutions…..The defendants ideas are cognate [associated] with the crime” -Judge Thayer

Returning to Normal and Keeping it Cool

29 & 30 – Republican Presidents • “A return to normalcy” – Harding 1920 – The Ohio Gang – Teapot Dome Scandal – Albert B. Fall

• “Keep it cool with Coolidge” 1924 • “The business of government is business”-Silent Cal – Prosperity and Thrift – Very popular after Harding’s corruption – “I do not choose to run for president in nineteen twenty eight”

• Republican capitalism – High Tariffs – to stimulate domestic business – Trickle-down “a rising tide floats all boats”

Cars and Consumerism Part IV

Henry Ford • Assembly Line Production- cut production time in ½ • Model T • Output – 1920-1.9 mill – 1930-5 mill

• Payment Plans – Workers

• Gave birth to 400,000 miles of new roads • Road side businesses

Working on the Chain Gang? “The chain system [assembly line] you have is a slave driver! My God! Mr. Ford. My husband has come home and thrown himself down and won’t eat his supper – so done out! Can’t it be remedied?……..That $5 a day is a blessing one bigger than you know but oh they earn it” - Wife of a Ford worker

Review Question • Who said “The business of America is business”? How did he support this claim? • The auto industry was one of America’s best during the decade of the 1920s, use statistics to support this statement. If you could hold one person responsible for this who would it be and why?

Creating Consumers • 1926 – 75% of cars on credit • Items that were “pleasing” to look at • Planned obsolescence – creating something that is planned to go out of style • Chain-stores, A&P 14,000 by 1925 • Advertising – pre WWI = $500 million by 1929 $3 billion – Magazines, newspaper, billboards, radio – Targeted women – Slogans, jingles, celebrities

Marketing Wisdom “To keep America growing we must keep America working, and to keep America working we must keep them wanting; wanting more than the bare necessities; wanting the luxuries and frills that make life so much more worthwhile, and installment selling makes it easier to keep Americans wanting” - Car dealer

HOMEWORK 15 POINTS • DUE FRIDAY 10/1: FIND AN ADVERTISEMENT IN A RECENT MAGAZINE OR NEWSPAPER. CUT OUT THE AD. – EXPLAIN WHY IT IS AN EFFECTIVE AD – EXPLAIN WHY YOU CHOSE THAT AD – IS YOUR AD SIMILAR OR DIFFERENT FROM THE ADS OF THE 1920’S? EXPLAIN

Women and African Americans in the 1920s PART III

Women of the 1920’s • Women were able to vote and serve on juries but they gained little influence • Few women held positions in political parties or were elected to office • Women had greater job opportunities but faced tremendous discrimination at work • The social lives of women changed most

Flappers – The Exception or the Rule?? • The “new woman” • “Stylish, adventurous, independent, career minded” • No more corsets, short skirts instead • Bobbed or short hair style • Participated in sports and drove cars • Taxi drivers, teachers, stenographers, pilots etc. • Most women were still house wives (married & older, a small percentage were flappers (young & single)

FLAPPERS

W.E.B. Du Bois – We Return – We return from fighting – We return fighting

Historian David Levering Lewis Wrote…. “In the course of his long, turbulent career, W. E. B. Du Bois attempted virtually every possible solution to the problem of twentieth-century racism”

Violence Erupts • By late 1919 25 Race Riots erupted • “People [African Americans] were seen to flee from their burning home, some with babies in their arms” • “The colored troops fought nobly [In WWI]. We have something to fight for now”

The Great Black Migration • General trend of Urbanization • 1920s 800,000 Blacks moved North

The Fight For Equality Begins – NAACP- W E B Dubois (1909) • Formed the anti-lynching committee • The Crisis – newsletter which published accounts of violence • Appealed to the well educated – Marcus Garvey (UNIA) -“We shall now organize” • Aimed to unite all those of African descent worldwide, lost hope of achieving equality in America • “Back to Africa” • Black owned businesses • Appealed to the working class • “He made black people proud, he taught them that black is beautiful”

White Backlash • 1920 100,000 new members, fueled by the red-scare • Nativism – white Protestant American born, white supremacy • The new KKK – 1920-over 700 lynchings – North & Mid-West – Infiltrated all aspects of society

Review Question **Yesterday we discussed the challenges that blacks faced “growing up in the 1920s”. What efforts were made in the quest for equal rights during this decade? How did some of “white America” respond to this?**

“Growing up Black” What was Daisy Bates’ experience like growing up black in the 1920s?

Jazz, Sports, Radio and Religion Part IV

Harlem Renaissance • Flourishing of artistic development • Glowing pride in black culture“The New Negro” • Langston Hughes • Zora Neale Hurston • Harlem Jazz – – – – –

Savoy, Cotton Club Duke Ellington Count Basie Benny Goodman Louis Armstrong

THE DUKE

IF WE MUST DIE - Claude McKay “If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs…. What though before us lies an open grave? Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!”

Langston Hughes “We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, & we stand on the top of the mountain, free within ourselves”

“The Lost Generation” • Rise of a new generation of American Writers • Reflected gloom of WWI and scorned “superficial” middle class • Ernest Hemingway – A Farewell to Arms • F. Scott Fitzgerald – This Side of Paradise & The Great Gatsby

1927 – 1st Talkie – The Jazz Singer CHARLIE CHAPLIN

AL JOLSON

Sports of the 1920s BABE RUTH

JIM THORPE

Charles Lindbergh – “Spirit of St. Louis”, non stop NY – Paris (1927)

Monkey Business • • • • • •

The Scopes Monkey Trial 1925 John T Scopes (teacher) Dayton, Tennessee Teaches theory of evolution to his class Tennessee state law outlawed the teaching of anything but the Biblical creation story • William Jennings Bryan – Prosecutor (fundamentalist) • Clarence Darrow (ACLU) – defense attorney

Science vs. Religion • Bryan represented many Americans who felt that evolution contradicted their religious beliefs • Darrow “Today it’s the public school teachers, tomorrow the private, the next day the preacher and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers” • Scopes loses and is fined $100 • Bryan who was called by Darrow as a witness came to represent “narrow-minded” Americans

John T Scopes

Darrow

Jennings Bryan