Roaring 20’s IDS
- Flappers:
- Carefree
young women with short, "bobbed" hair, heavy makeup, and short
skirts. The flapper symbolized the new "liberated" woman of the
1920s.
- Many
people saw the bold, boyish look and shocking behavior of flappers as a
sign of changing morals.
- Though
hardly typical of American women, the flapper image reinforced the idea
that women now had more freedom.
- Harlem Renaissance
- black
artistic movement in New York city in the 1920s, when writers, poets,
painters, and musicians came together to express feelings and
experiences, especially about the injustices of Jim Crow;
- leading
figures of the movement included Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Duke Ellington,
Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes
- Langston Hughes
- African
American poet who described the rich culture of African American life
using rhythms influenced by jazz music. he wrote of African American hope
and defiance, as well as the culture of Harlem and also had a major
impact on the Harlem renaissance
- Jazz Age
- a term
coined by F. Scott Fitzgerald for the postwar era (1920’s) because the
young people were willing to experiment with new forms of recreation and
sexuality. the music blended African and European traditions to form a
new kind of music
- music
became a symbol of the new and modern culture of the cities.
- Teapot Dome
- Scandal
of Harding administration; Secretary Albert Fall went to jail for
secretly leasing gov't oil reserves in Elk Hills, California, and Teapot
Dome, Wyoming, to 2 oilmen while accepting "loans" from them
($400,000)
- “Teapot
Dome” became a shorthand label for a tangle of presidential scandals
- Calvin Coolidge
- former
Massachusetts governor; soft-spoken,
- Became
president when Harding died of heart attack.
- He was
known for practicing a rigid economy in money and words, and acquired the
name "silent cal" for being so soft-spoken.
- He was a
true republican and industrialist.
- Believed
in the government supporting big business.
- “Hollywood”
- stimulated
consumption with alluring images of the good life
- mass-produced
fantasies shaped behavior and values, especially of the young
- Babe Ruth
- See
below
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- part of
both the jazz age and the lost generation. wrote books encouraging the
flapper culture, and books scorning wealthy people being self-centered
- “this
side of paradise" and "the great Gatsby”
- Charles Lindbergh
- An
American aviator, engineer, and Pulitzer Prize winner, daredevil stunt
pilot. he was famous for flying solo across the Atlantic, paving the way
for future aviation development
- flew in
his small biplane, The Spirit of St. Louis,
- Advertising
- In 1929
corporations spent nearly two billion dollars promoting their wares via
radio, billboards, newspapers, and magazines
- Advertising
business employed some six hundred thousand people. Advertising barons
ranked among the corporate elite
- Consumer credit
- rationalized
as retailers offered installment plans with fixed payment schedule
- In the
1920s involved mostly big-ticket items such as automobiles, furniture,
and refrigerators. By 1929 credit purchases accounted for 75 percent of
automobile sales
- As
farmers bought automobiles, tractors, and other mechanized equipment on
credit, however, the rural debt crisis worsened
- Radio
- The
radio era began on November 2, 1920, when Pittsburgh station KDKA
reported Warren Harding’s election
- a Newark
station broadcast the World Series (the New York Giants beat the New York
Yankees).
- In 1922
five hundred new stations began operations, and radio quickly became a
national obsession
- in 1926
three big corporations—General Electric, Westinghouse, and the Radio
Corporation of America—formed the first radio network, the National
Broadcasting Company (NBC).
- The
Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) followed in 1927
- Americans
everywhere laughed at the same jokes, hummed the same tunes, and absorbed
the same commercials
- Prohibition
- ban on
alcohol consumption by the 18th Amendment, effective in 1920; failure; when
repealed in 1933, prohibition was thoroughly discredited and seemed
little more than a relic of another age
- Would-be
drinkers grew bolder as enforcement faltered. For rebellious young
people, alcohol’s illegality increased its appeal. “
- Organized
crime helped evade the law
- The
“drys”—usually native-born Protestants—praised it as a necessary social
reform. The “wets”—liberals, alienated intellectuals, Jazz Age rebels,
big-city immigrants—condemned it as moralistic meddling.
- National Origins Act
- limitation
of immigrants to keep out the "wrong sort"
- Act
which restricted (put Quotas) immigration from any one nation to two
percent of the number of people already in the US. of that national
origin in 1890.
- severely
restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe, and excluded
Asians entirely
- Calvin
Coolidge : “America must be kept American.”
- Sacco-Vanzetti case
- Nicola
Sacco and Bartolommeo Vanzetti were Italian immigrants charged with
murdering a guard and robbing a shoe factory in Braintree, Massachusetts.
the trial lasted from 1920-1927. Convicted on circumstantial evidence,
many believed they had been framed for the crime because of their anarchist
and pro-union activities.
- Scopes “monkey trial”
- a high
school biology teacher was accused of teaching Darwinism in class instead
of the biblical account of creation; the trial that pitted the teaching
of Darwin’s theory of evolution against teaching bible creationism
- fundamentalism:
literal interpretation and strict adherence to basic principles of a
religion (or a religious branch, denomination, or sect).
- Henry Ford and
assembly-line production
- Perfected
assembly-line manufacturing techniques and democratized the automobile;
paid his employees higher wages
- He made assembly line production
more efficient in his rouge river plant near Detroit- a finished car
would come out every 10 seconds. he helped to make car inexpensive so
more Americans could buy them
Automobile/Model
T/General Motors Corporation
·
60
percent of U.S. families owned cars in 1930
·
The
Ford Motor Company led the market until mid-decade, when General Motors (GM)
spurted ahead by touting a range of colors (Ford’s Model T came only in black)
and greater comfort
·
GM’s
lowest-priced car, named for French automotive designer Louis Chevrolet, proved
especially popular
Fordism/corporate
consolidation
·
Synonym
for worldwide for American industrial might and assembly-line methods
·
By
the late 1920s, over a thousand companies a year vanished through merger.
·
Corporate
giants dominated the major industries: Ford, GM, and Chrysler in automobiles;
General Electric and Westinghouse in electricity
wage
discrimination/ “women’s professions”
·
In
1928 the average unskilled laborer in New England earned 47 cents an hour, in
contrast to 28 cents in the South.
·
Women
workers, blacks, Mexican-Americans, and recent immigrants clustered at the
bottom of the wage scale
·
Women
workers faced wage discrimination. In 1929, , a male trimmer in the meatpacking
industry received 52 cents an hour, a female trimmer, 37 cents
·
secretaries,
typists, or filing clerks, nursing, library work, social work, and teaching
Warren
G. Harding /Andrew Mellon
·
Warren
G. Harding: A genial backslapper, he enjoyed good liquor, a good poker game,
and occasional trysts with his mistress, Nan Britton. His blandness and empty
oratory had a soothing appeal. His appointments (Albert Fall &Charles
Forbes) made his presidency corrupt. Heart attack died during presidency.
·
Andrew
W. Mellon, a Pittsburgh financier, was Harding’s treasury secretary. embraced
the “trickle down” theory, which held that tax cuts for the wealthy would
promote business investment, stimulate the economy, and thus benefit everyone
Washington
Naval Arms Conference/Kellogg-Briand Pact/Dawes Plan
·
Washington
Naval Arms Conference: called by Harding in 1921 when naval race between US,
Britain, and Japan was a danger, they pledged to reduce battleships but failed
to prevent WW2, US and Japan recognized each other’s territory in the pacific
·
Kellogg-Briand
Pact: In 1928 the United States and France, eventually joined by sixty other
nations, signed it renouncing aggression and calling for the outlawing of war.
Lacking any enforcement mechanism, this high-sounding document did nothing to
prevent World War II
·
Dawes
Plan: the American plan to loan money to Germany, who would pay their
reparations to France and Britain, who would pay back their debt to America,
which created a win-win for everyone, and made they people happy and thought
that peace was possible.
League
of Women Voters/National Woman’s Party
·
League
of Women Voters: an organization which works to increase understanding of major
public policy issues, and to influence public policy through education and
advocacy, as well as through political lobbying of congress. Died since lost
support
·
National
Woman’s Party: Alice Paul party proposed an equal-rights amendment to the
Constitution, but other reformers argued that such an amendment could
jeopardize gender-based laws protecting women worker
·
Women
of the younger generation, bombarded by ads that defined liberation in terms of
consumption, rejected the prewar feminists’ civic idealism. Ridiculed “the old
school of fighting feminists” for their lack of “feminine charm” and their
“constant clamor about equal rights.”
Vacuum
cleaners/refrigerators/washing machines/tractors/automobile suburbs
·
stimulated
the economy and transformed the lives of ordinary Americans. Ingrained patterns
of diet, dress, travel, entertainment, and even thought changed rapidly as the
economic order evolved
·
For
women, city life meant electric and gas appliances that reduced household labor
Cecil
B. DeMille/The Jazz Singer/Walt Disney
·
Cecil
B. DeMille : an American film director and producer of both silent and sound
films Road to Yesterday , Director
Cecil B. De Mille, the son of an Episcopal clergyman, pioneered lavish biblical
spectacles with The Ten Commandments(1923)
·
The
Jazz Singer: Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer (1927) introduced sound to the movies,
a new generation of screen idols arose, including the Western hero Gary Cooper
and the aloof Scandinavian beauty Greta Garbo.
·
Walt
Disney: Mickey Mouse debuted in a 1928 animated cartoon, Steamboat Willy
Babe
Ruth/Ty Cobb/Jack Dempsey/Charles Lindbergh/The Spirit of St. Louis
·
Babe
Ruth of the New York Yankees, who hit sixty home runs in 1927; Ruth was a
coarse, heavy-drinking womanizer; “the Sultan of Swat”
·
Ty Cobb, the Detroit Tigers’ manager, whose earlier
record of 4,191 hits still inspired awe; Cobb, an ill-tempered racist; “the
Georgia Peach”
·
prizefighters
Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney, whose two heavyweight fights drew thousands of
fans and massive radio audiences
Sexual revolution
·
Premarital
intercourse may have increased, but it remained exceptional and widely
disapproved
·
Dating
without marriage increased
·
Shorter
skirts and make-up, women smoked, boyish look
Sinclair
Lewis/Main Street/Babbitt/H.L. Mencken/Ernest Hemingway/Willa Cather
·
Sinclair
Lewis wrote Main Street(1920) Lewis
satirized the smugness and cultural barrenness of a fictional Midwestern farm
town, Gopher Prairie, based on his native Sauk Centre, Minnesota.
·
In
Babbitt(1922) Lewis skewered a mythic larger city, Zenith, in the character of
George F. Babbitt, a real estate agent trapped in middle-class conformity.
·
H.L.
Mencken: The American Mercury magazine,
championed writers like Lewis and Theodore Dreiser while ridiculing small-town
America, Protestant fundamentalism, the middle class “Booboisie,” and all
politicians
·
Ernest
Hemingway: seriously wounded in July 1918 while serving in northern Italy as a
youthful Red Cross volunteer. wrote In
The Sun Also Rises (1926) portraying a group of American and English young
people, variously damaged by the war, as they drift around Spain. His A Farewell to Arms (1929), depicts
the war’s futility and politicians’ empty rhetoric.
The
Cotton Club/Louis Armstrong
·
The
Cotton Club, controlled by gangsters, featured black performers but barred most
blacks from the audience. was a Harlem nightspot where many African American
entertainers got their start
·
Louis
Armstrong: Trumpeter and singer “Hot Five” and “Hot Seven” groups in the late
1920s decisively influenced the future of jazz
Georgia
O’Keefe/Aaron Copland/George Gershwin/Robert Goddard
·
Georgia
O’Keefe: a pioneer of modernism in America, she first produced largely abstract
work, adopting a more figurative style in the 1920s. Her best-known paintings
depict enlarged studies, particularly of flowers, and are often regarded as
being sexually symbolic.
·
Aaron
Copland: America’s best known classical composer. Created an accessible style
with a distinctly American identity. He used jazz influences, folk-songs,
hymns, and familiar songs with 20th century techniques such as thin textures,
wide intervals, and using silence.
·
George
Gershwin: a twentieth-century American composer known for putting elements of
jazz into forms of classical music, such as the concerto. his works include
rhapsody in blue, an American in Paris, and the music to the opera porgy and
bess. together with his brother, Ira, he wrote many musical comedies
·
Robert
Goddard: father of modern rocketry, 1st to launch a liquid fuel rocket (march,
1926)
Billy Sunday/Aimee Semple McPherson
·
Billy
Sunday: preacher and former pro baseball player- key figure in the prohibition
movement
·
Aimee
Semple McPherson: evangelist, founder of four square church of god, 1920s, used
Hollywood like tactics to get more followers, was popular on the radio, faked
death. appealed to poor white people, practiced healing, anti evolution
Ku
Klux Klan/Marcus Garvey/Universal Negro Improvement Association
·
KKK:
anti-modern reactionary group; wielded substantial political power in the
1920s; white supremacy, racism toward immigrants, blacks, Jews
·
Marcus
Garvey: Harlem political leader, founder of the united Negro improvement
association (unia), supported "back-to-Africa" movement. deported to
Jamaica in 1927.
·
UNIA:
foster African American economic independence and establish an independent
black homeland in Africa
Volstead
Act/speakeasies/Al Capone
·
Volstead
Act: the act specified that "no person shall manufacture, sell, barter,
transport, import, export, deliver, furnish or possess any intoxicating liquor
except as authorized by this act." it did not specifically prohibit the
purchase or use of intoxicating liquors
·
Speakeasies:
secret bars where alcohol could be purchased illegally, and rumrunners
routinely smuggled liquor from Canada and the West Indies.
·
Chicago
gangster Al Capone controlled a network of speakeasies that generated annual
profits of $60 million
Election
of 1928/Al Smith/Herbert Hoover/American Individualism
·
Election
of 1928: republican: Herbert Hoover and democrat: al Smith. Republicans
identified themselves with the booming economy of the 1920s, and smith's
campaign, anti-catholic prejudice. Hoover won in a landslide victory
·
Al
Smith: first roman catholic and Irish-American to run for president as a major
party nominee. emphasized his lowly beginnings, identified himself with
immigrants, and campaigned as a man of the people
·
Herbert
Hoover: promising the American people prosperity and attempted to first deal
with the depression by trying to restore public faith in the community. called
on businesses to help solve the situation rather than the government. Americans
felt he did little to help them
·
“American
Individualism” : (1922) Hoover’s book that set out ideology that should drive
American policy, values of public service, neighborliness, self help,
volunteerism, cooperation, stressed individualism as part of American
character, these values translated into American free market system. key to
success was unbridled initiative. government should be small, self regulated,
and should promote business
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