The Jazz Age and Cultural Conflicts

1
The Jazz Age and Cultural Conflicts

• Americans in the 1920s had new-found wealth and
  more leisure time to support expanding forms of
  mass entertainment.

2
At The Movies

• In the 1920s, movies became more popular than
  regional forms of entertainment, contributing to
  the rise of a mass culture. Publicity departments
  turned actors and actresses into national stars.
  The Musical becomes popular.
• Because every seat in the movie palace cost
  exactly the same admission price, going to the
  movies helped level differences among Americans.

3
New Heroes

• With time, energy, and money to play, Americans
  took to sportstennis, golf, baseball, swimming,
  and more.
• Hard-playing Americans also provided huge
  audiences for professional sports. The eras
  popular sports heroes became as newsworthy as
  movie stars.
• Individual feats of daringsuch as Gertrude
  Ederles swim across the English Channelwon
  special acclaim.
• Charles Lindberghs solo flight across the
  Atlantic generated more excitement than any
  single event in the decade. Amelia Earhart
  matched his feat a short time later.

4
New Rhythms in the Air

• The blues and jazz, both essentially African
  American creations, helped define the 1920s. The
  blues grew out of work songs and field chants of
  enslaved African Americans. Jazz began in New
  Orleans and moved north during the Great
  Migration. It gave rise to new dances such as the
  Charleston, which first appeared in an African
  American revue in 1924.
• While live music predominated in the 1920s,
  electricity gave recorded music its start via the
  phonograph and the radio.

5
Time to read

• With time on their hands and with more education
  than any previous generation, more Americans in
  the 1920s read.
• The existence of a large national audience
  encouraged the publication of new magazines, the
  birth of several new publishing houses, and the
  formation of newspaper syndicates. Tabloids
  newspapers with small pages and large
  typebattled for readers with a steady fare of
  gossip, scandals, and news on the latest fad.

6
The Lost Generation

• Some writers attacked Americas materialism. They
  questioned a society that placed more importance
  on money and material goods than it did on
  intellectual, spiritual, and artistic concerns.
• Some members of the lost generation such as
  Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott
  Fitzgerald left the United States and lived as
  expatriates. They used their pens to expose what
  they considered to be the shallow culture of
  their nation. The argument Buying on credit, the
  explosion of advertising, or the popularity of
  fads and tabloids prove that American culture was
  shallow and materialistic.

7
The Power of Religion

• When large numbers of farmers migrated to cities
  during the 1920s, they brought with them
  fundamentalisma movement that affirmed the
  literal truth of the Bible. The familiar religion
  helped them make sense of their lives in changing
  times.
• At the same time, however, traditional religions
  began to take on modern aspects, such as the use
  of radio by some evangelists.

8
The Scopes Trial

• John Scopes was tried for teaching evolution in
  the schools but the trial ended up being a
  conflict over evolution itself
• The Scopes trial highlighted the tensions that
  existed between traditional religious beliefs
  such as the Biblical story of creation and new
  scientific ideas such as evolution.
• Today it is illegal to teach creationism in
  public schools

9
Prohibition

• Like fundamentalism, Prohibition pitted
  small-town residents against a newer, more urban
  America.
• Prohibition succeeded in eradicating saloons, but
  speakeasies sprang up in their place.
• Prohibition was hard to enforce because the
  nations long coastlines and land borders made it
  easy for smugglers to sneak alcohol into the
  country, bootleggers could distill liquor
  illegally almost anywhere, and druggists could
  sell liquor legally on doctors prescriptions.

10

• Prohibition led many Americans, particularly in
  cities, to take a casual attitude toward breaking
  the law. Big-city crime profited from
  bootlegging, while liquor-related cases clogged
  the courts.

11
Crosses In The Night

• The rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan pointed out many
  of the conflicts that divided American society
  during this period. When the Klan spread from
  Georgia in the 1920s, it added new enemies to its
  listMexican Americans in Texas, Japanese
  immigrants in California, Jews and European
  immigrants in New York, and French Canadians in
  New England.
• All over the country, Klan members directed
  hatred at African Americans. It became strong in
  some Northern cities affected by the Great
  Migration.

12
The Klan

• The Klan prided itself on pure-blood Americanism,
  but it shared many similarities with German and
  Italian movements of this period. It stressed
  nationalism and racial purity, attacked alien
  minority groups, disapproved of urban culture,
  and called for a return to the past.
• The Klan began to sink back into obscurity after
  one of its leaders was convicted for the
  kidnapping and second-degree murder of a woman he
  brutally abused.

13
(No Transcript)
14
Closing The Doors

• Many Americans associated immigrants with
  radicalism and disloyalty. Rural Americans in
  particular believed that immigrants had somehow
  caused the erosion of old-fashioned American
  values.
• These fears led to new laws that restricted
  immigration through a quota system that favored
  immigrants from northern and western Europe and,
  in the case of the National Origins Act of 1924,
  excluded Asians altogether.

15
The Challenge of Change

• The tensions between the city and the country
  erupted into national election politics for the
  first time in 1928 when New York Governor Al
  Smith made a bid for the presidency. Smith
  represented everything small-town America feared
  the big city with sinful and foreign ways.
• Hoover sold himself as a typical Iowa farm boy
  who had helped engineer the prosperity of the
  1920s. To no ones surprise, Hoover won in a
  landslide. Lost in the excitement was the fact
  that for the first time in a decade of Republican
  prosperity, a President had failed to win the 12
  largest cities in the United States.

16
New Challenge of change

• The people in powerwhite, Protestant, and
  malestill gave lip service to the small-town
  virtues of the past, but in the 1920s the United
  States was rapidly changing into a modern, urban
  society.