Postwar Social Change (1920-1929)

1
Postwar Social Change (1920-1929)
2
I. Society in the 1920s

• The 1920s helped create what we think of today
  as modern America.
• Flappers- young women who were rebellious,
  energetic, fun-loving, and bold symbolized the
  revolution away from the traditional values that
  had led to war

3
A. Womens Changing Roles

• Both single and married women had been in the
  work place for a long time
• Yet, the of women in the work force continued
  to rise, women gained the right to vote (19th
  Amendment), and women wanted more equality with
  men

4
1. The Flapper Image

• The flapper represented only a small number of
  American women, yet her image had a wide impact
  on fashion and behavior
• Shorter skirts - from 9 inches above the ground
  to knee length or even higher
• Short hair-cuts, didnt wear wide-brimmed hats
• Began to drink strong drinks and smoke cigarettes
  
• Partly in protest of prohibition, but also to
  express their new freedom

5
(No Transcript)
6
(No Transcript)
7
2. Women Working and Voting

• Many women changed their fashion because it was
  more convenient
• More women were getting jobs, but only 15 of
  working women were professionals
• Owners feared women would quit once they married
  and got pregnant
• It took women nearly a decade to begin to vote
  with any regularity
• They had more influence in local elections than
  national

8
B. Americans on the Move

• Changes in demographics occurred in the 1920s
• Demographics are the statistics that describe a
  population, such as data on race or income
• Most people moved away from the countryside

9
1. Rural-Urban Split

• A wealth gap developed between the rural and
  urban societies.
• Farmers began to be economically stressed while
  the industrial and commercial economy began to
  boom
• This led about 6 million people to move from
  farms to the city in the 1920s
• Changed the importance of public schools
• Changed the ideas about traditional values
• Why?

10
2. African Americans in the North

• African Americans continued their great migration
  north to get away from the Jim Crow South and to
  seek jobs in the industrial North
• Blacks still faced anger and hatred from many
  whites who believed they were taking jobs and
  lowering wages

11
3. Other Migration

• Congress acted to limit immigration during the
  1920s, esp. from Southern and Eastern Europe,
  China, and Japan
• Employers turned to immigrant workers from Mexico
  and Canada to fill low-paying jobs
• Mexicans worked the farms of California and the
  ranches of Texas
• Barrios were Spanish-speaking neighborhoods (LA)

12
4. Growth of the Suburbs

• Cities built transportation systems that used
  electric trolleys powered by overhead wires to
  get people to and from their suburban homes
• Buses became available in the 1920s and the
  automobile became much more affordable
• Henry Fords Model T is going to allow a rapid
  growth in suburban homes

13
C. American Heroes

• The nation became fascinated with heroes such as
• Charles Lindbergh- 1st to fly across the Atlantic
  
• Amelia Earhart- 1st woman to fly the Atlantic
• Jack Dempsy- American boxing hero
• Jim Thorpe- Olympic gold medals in track, pro
  football player, pro baseball player (Native
  American)
• Babe Ruth- Professional baseball player
• Gertrude Ederle- Olympic swimmer and swam the
  English Channel faster than any male (a Flapper)

14
II. Mass Media and the Jazz Age

• During the 1920s, a national culture began to
  form instead of the regional cultures that
  existed before the invention of mass media
• Mass media are print, film, and broadcast methods
  of communicating information to large s of
  people
• Allowed people throughout the U.S. to be
  influenced by the same movies, the same music,
  etc.

15
A. Types of Mass Media

• Movies- Silent films continued to succeed, but
  talkies or movies with talking quickly began to
  gain popularity
• Newspapers and Magazines- Profits, not quality,
  continued to drive the tabloids
• 90 entertainment, 10 information
• Radio- Enjoyed tremendous growth networks such
  as NBC linked many stations together
• The Mass Media brought the same forms of
  entertainment and influence to everyone in the
  U.S.

16
B. The Jazz Age

• Both the growing popularity of the radio and the
  great African American migration to the cities
  helped make a music called jazz widely popular in
  the 1920s

17
1. Jazz Arrives

• Jazz grew out of the African American music of
  the South, especially ragtime and blues
• Jazz became a nationwide craze in the 1920s
  leading the era to be known as the Jazz Age
• Symbolized the free manners and morals of the
  decade with the breathless, energetic times of
  the 1920s

18
2. Jazz Clubs and Dance Halls

• Harlem, a district on the northern end of
  Manhattan, was one of the most popular places to
  listen to Jazz.
• There were over 500 Jazz clubs in Harlem
• Flappers would often dance to jazz on the radio
  and in dance halls and dancing became a national
  craze

19
3. The Jazz Spirit

• Poetry and painting were influenced by Jazz as
  was literature
• Artists focused on everyday life and did not shy
  away from lifes rougher side
• Some artists disagreed with the Jazz Era of art
  and left the country for Europe because they were
  disconnected from their country and its values-
  They were known as a Lost Generation

20
C. The Harlem Renaissance

• New York Citys Harlem was the cultural center of
  the U.S. for African Americans
• The Harlem Renaissance- was an African American
  literary awakening of the 1920s
• African Americans expressed their political,
  cultural, social, and economic wants and needs
  through literature
• Langston Hughes, a poet, short story writer,
  journalist, and playwright whose career stretched
  into the 1960s is the most studied individual
  from the Harlem Renaissance (pg. 389)

21
III. Cultural Conflicts

• Prohibition- 18th Amendment (1920)
• Religious Conflict
• Racial Tensions

22
A. Prohibition

• Main Goals
• Eliminate drunkenness and the resulting abuses
• Get rid of saloons, where immoral acts take place
• Prevent absenteeism and on-the-job accidents from
  people being drunk

23
1. Bootlegging

• The bootlegger- a new type of criminal who was a
  supplier of illegal alcohol
• Some made their own alcohol to sell others
  smuggled the alcohol in from Canada or the
  Caribbean
• Speakeasies- Bars that were operated illegally
• Flourished in the cities
• Ex. Boston had 4,000 speakeasies and 15,000
  bootleggers

24
2. Organized Crime

• Huge potential for profits from bootlegging led
  to the development of organized crime
• Local gangsters operated independently at first,
  but eventually created large, complex rings of
  bootleggers
• Rival gangs would compete for profit, and death
  and violence followed

25
3. Al Capone

• The most notorious gangster
• Operated primarily in Chicago
• Nickname Scarface
• Murdered his way to the top of Chicagos
  organized crime network
• Made 60 million a year from bootlegging
• Bribed police and others to avoid jail until the
  Fed. Court convicted him of tax-evasion in 1931
• Investigation led by J. Edgar Hoover

26
B. Issues of Religion

• Tended to split the country along urban and rural
  lines with the teaching of evolution
• Teaching of evolution began in the 1920s

27
1. Fundamentalism

• Fundamentalism- support of traditional Christian
  ideas about Jesus, plus they argue that God
  inspired the Bible so every story in the Bible is
  exactly true
• Some fundamentalists used the radio as a way to
  broaden their reach

28
2. Evolution and the Scopes Trial

• Fundamentalists denounced evolution
• Tennessee passed a ban of teaching evolution in
  school so John T. Scopes went to court to
  challenge the ruling as unconstitutional (the
  Scopes Trial)
• Very high profile case with famous lawyers and it
  was the first trial ever broadcast over the radio
• Scopes was fined 100 for breaking the law

29
C. Racial Tensions

• Mob violence between whites and blacks broke out
  in 1919
• Red Summer was its nickname for all of the
  blood that was spilled
• The lynching of the Jim Crow era continued

30
1. Revival of the Klan

• The KKK was largely eliminated during
  Reconstruction, but by 1922- membership had grown
  to 100,000
• By the end of 1922, its membership was 4 million
• The new Klan was no longer just a Southern
  organization.
• They wanted to defend their own white-Protestant
  culture against any group (not just black) that
  seemed un-American to them

31
2. Fighting Discrimination

• The NAACP worked very hard to get anti-lynching
  laws passed
• Lynching gradually decreased to ONLY 10 by 1929
• The NAACP also worked to protect voting rights,
  but with only limited success

32
Politics and Prosperity (1920-1929)
33
I. A Republican Decade

• The memory of WWI was fresh in everyones mind in
  1920
• The Senate still refused to accept the Versailles
  Treaty and refused to join the League of Nations
• Warren G. Harding (Republican) won the
  Presidential race with a call for a return to
  normalcy

34
A. The Red Scare

• Normalcy appealed to Americans in 1920
• Upheaval in Russia and a series of strikes and
  bombings in the U.S. convinced Americans that
  political violence posed a real threat to the U.S.

35
1. The Russian Revolution

• Revolutionary leader Vladimir I. Lenin promised
  peace, land, and bread
• His Bolsheviks overthrew the existing
  government, pulled out of WWI, and put all farms,
  industries, land, and transportation under
  government control
• Lenin made communism the official ideology of
  Russia which was openly hostile to American
  beliefs

36
Communism meant

• The government owned all land and property
• A classless society
• A single political party controlled the
  government
• The needs of the country always took priority
  over the rights of individuals
• Lenin believed communism needed to spread
  throughout the world in order to survive

37
2. American Fears

• Russias intention to spread communism to other
  countries alarmed many Americans
• Many worried that Southern and Eastern European
  immigrants were Communists or other radicals
• Communists tried to overthrow Germany after WWI
  and Communists came to power in Hungary
• The U.S. soon was in a Red Scare
• An intense fear of communism and other
  politically radical ideas

38
The Red Scare

• Reds- the nickname for Lenins army and
  eventually for Communists
• Americans called for known communists to be
  jailed or driven out of the country
• Rights of individuals were sacrificed during the
  Red Scare to protect national security

39
3. Sacco and Vanzetti

• The Red Scare played a part in one of the most
  controversial events in U.S. history
• Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were
  anarchists and Italian immigrants who were
  arrested and connected with a deadly robbery
• Many Americans suspected that they were arrested
  simply for being immigrants with radical beliefs
• A case with international attention convicted the
  two men and sentenced them to death despite
  contrasting evidence
• Died in electric chairs 4 months later despite
  mass protest

40
B. Labor Strikes

• A wave of strikes in 1919 helped fuel the Red
  Scare
• There were more than 3,500 strikes including
  police strikes in Boston
• Many Americans were fearful that Communists were
  to blame for the high number of work stoppages
  since many labor union workers were immigrants
• Gradually, strikes would decrease over the 1920s

41
C. Republican Leadership

• Americans felt that the Republican party was more
  likely to restore stability than the Democratic
  Party
• Republicans controlled all three branches of
  government during the 1920s
• Republican Presidents of the 1920s were Warren
  Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover

42
1. Foreign Policy

• Isolationism- Americans wished to avoid political
  or economic alliances with foreign countries
• Harding opposed joining the League of Nations
  which is an excellent example of isolationism
• Harding acted to promote business at home by
  raising tariffs to record highs (angered European
  countries trying to pay war debts to the U.S.)
• Harding did call for disarmament- a program in
  which the nations of the world would voluntarily
  give up their weapons

43
2. Domestic Issues

• As Americans became more isolationists, they also
  became more nativist
• Nativism is a movement favoring native-born
  Americans over immigrants
• Appeared in late 1800s but flared up again after
  WWI.. In part because of the Red Scare
• Congress passed a law limiting immigrants- a
  quota
• limits immigration based on a preset for
  certain ethnic groups or nations (Ex.- only
  10,000 Italians per/year)

44
D. The Coolidge Presidency

• Keep cool with Coolidge-1924
• Believed that the chief business of the American
  people is business
• Believed in Laissez-Faire for American business
• Government stays out of business (low taxes,
  higher tariffs to protect Americans)
• Hands off

45
II. A Business Boom

• By 1920, incomes were on the upward trend again
  after WWI and many new goods and production
  methods were taken advantage of

46
A. A Consumer Economy

• The economy of the 1920s was a
  Consumer Economy
• One that depends on a large amount of spending by
  consumers (individuals who use, or consume,
  products)
• Increased spending leads to larger profits for
  businesses, which in turn pushes up wages and
  encourages even more spending

47
1. Buying on Credit

• Until the 1920s, middle-class Americans paid for
  everything in cash or barter (trade)
• In the 1920s, Americans started buying on credit
  to pay for the new products like cars,
  refrigerators, and other new products
• Many would pay using an installment plan- the
  customer makes partial payments at set intervals
  over a period of time until its fully paid
• Theres usually an interest rate involved

48
2. New Products

• Refrigerators
• Washing Machines
• Vacuum Cleaners
• Toaster
• Ovens
• Sewing Machines
• Many new products required electricity

49
3. Advertising

• Marketers began using the mass-media to advertise
  goods
• Advertising shifted from trying to provide
  detailed info about a product to trying to create
  a consumer image for the product

50
B. Ford and the Automobile

• Rapid growth in the production of automobiles
• Ford made it so almost everyone could afford an
  automobile
• He massed produced a car called the Model T

51
1. Fords Assembly Line

• He adapted an assembly line for his factory
• Each worker does 1 specialized task in the
  construction of the final product (division of
  labor)
• Ford didnt invent the assembly line, but he made
  it more efficient
• The line moved while the workers stayed in place
  saving time and energy
• They could assemble a car every 24 seconds using
  prefabricated parts
• By making so many cars, the price of cars dropped
  
• This made the cars affordable to most Americans

52
C. Industrial Growth

• Other businesses emerged or grew because of the
  boom in the automobile industry
• Garages, Car Dealerships, Motels, Camp Grounds,
  Gas Stations, and Restaurants
• Suburbs expanded
• Republican laissez-faire policies also helped the
  big businesses grow
• There were not restrictions on their profits

53
D. Bypassed by the Boom

• Unskilled Laborers
• African American migrants
• Agricultural workers
• Many farmers could not pay back their loans they
  took out to get new equipment during WWI when
  demand was high
• Prices of farm goods went down when demand did

54
III. The Economy in the Late 1920s

• Most Americans were optimistic as the economy
  had been booming under Laissez-faire economic
  conditions

55
A. Economy Appears Healthy

• Herbert Hoover easily won the 1928 Presidential
  election
• He had been the Secretary of Commerce and was a
  self-made millionaire
• Most expected that Hoover would help keep the
  good economic times around

56
1. Wonderful Prosperity

• In 1928, stock values rose by 11 billion
• The stock market was widely regarded as the guide
  for how well the economy was doing
• The New York Times described 1928 as the year of
  wonderful prosperity
• Unemployment was below 4

57
2. Everybody Ought to be Rich

• John J. Raskob- author of the article titled,
  Everybody Ought to be Rich
• His belief is an excellent example of the
  confidence in business and the stock market
  during the 1920s
• He believed saving 15 a week could bring someone
  400 per/month income after investing for 20 years

58
3. Welfare Capitalism

• Welfare Capitalism- Employers raised wages and
  provided benefits such as paid vacations, health
  plans, and English classes for recent immigrants
  all in the interest of strengthening worker
  loyalty and morale
• The result- the number of labor unions decreased

59
B. Economic Danger Signs

• It was not until the economy was in a depression
  that people looked back and noticed the warning
  signs of an unsound economy
• Hind sight is 20/20

60
1. Uneven Prosperity

• Mainly the rich got richer
• Nearly 80 of all families had no savings
• .1 of Americans owned 34 of the countrys
  savings
• The government tax policy contributed to this
  imbalance
• The largest tax cuts were to the wealthiest
  Americans

61
2. Personal Debt

• Increasing debt was mostly to be blamed on people
  buying on credit for the first time and not
  being able to make payments

62
3. Playing the Stock Market

• Speculation was popular b/c of high stock prices
• The practice of making high-risk investments in
  hopes of getting a huge return
• Many small investors entered the stock market for
  the first time often risking their entire life
  savings
• Less wealthy investors were able to buy on margin
• Pay only a fraction of the stocks price (10-50)
  and borrow the rest
• Brokers charged high interest rates and could
  collect payment at any time

63
4. Too Many Goods, Too Little Demand

• The assembly line turned out goods (products) at
  record rates but consumers couldnt buy them fast
  enough
• There became an over-supply of goods meaning
  production had to slow
• This caused a ripple-effect in the economy
• Industries that depend on the car and housing
  industry to boom were also forced to slow

64
5. Trouble for Farmers and Workers

• Congress tried to pass a farm-relief bill
• President Coolidge vetoed it twice
• He believed that it was not the governments job
  to provide such assistance
• This Laissez-faire attitude would be the same
  attitude that Herbert Hoover has during the Great
  Depression