Booze, Bullets, and Babes

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Booze, Bullets, and Babes
Chp 20 and 21
White Sheets, Red Scares, Black Monday and all
those Blues
Yeah, well he aint got nothing on the original!
This is Leon James 1920s
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Chapter 21 The Roaring Twenties
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Changing Ways of Life
Chp 21 1
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The Prohibition Experiment

• 18th Amendment
• sin or savior?
• Volstead Act

didnt we just have a war man? Immigrants dont
see this as a sin.
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The Prohibition Experiment

• speakeasies
• bootleggers

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The Prohibition Experiment

• Causes

Effects

• Religious groups believe alcohol is sinful
• reformers believe govt should protect peoples
  health
• reformers believe alcohol leads to crime, abuse
• Immigrant groups brew beer and alcohol (carry
  over from WWI

• Consumption declines
• Disrespect of the law
• Increase in lawlessness (bootlegging, smuggling)
• Organized crime

326
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Science and Religion Clash
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Science and Religion Clash
Billy Sunday

• Fundamentalist (literal interpretation of the
  Bible) vs. Scientific Discoveries
• Reject Charles Darwins Evolution Theory

He predicted that with the prohibition of
alcohol, the slums would cease to exist, prisons
and jails would become nothing more than a
memory Hell will be for rent, said Sunday
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Scopes Monkey Trail

• March 1925, TN passed law to prevent teaching
  of evolution
• ACLU promised to defend any teacher challenging
  the law
• John T. Scopes bio teacher from Dayton, TN took
  challenge

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Scopes Monkey Trail

• We have now learned that animal forms may be
  arranged so as to begin w/the simple one-celled
  forms and culminate w/a group which includes man
  himself
• Scopes was arrested

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Scopes Monkey Trail

• CLARENCE DARROW most famous trial lawyer of his
  day
• Hired to defend Scopes
• Wm Jennings Bryan (3x pres cand) was prosecutor

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Scopes Monkey Trail
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Scopes Monkey Trail
Darrow questioned Bryan as an expert on the
Bible, and finally questioned him about the
creation in 6 days Bryan admitted it was not
likely 6-24 hour days- so Bible might be open to
interpretation
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1. Explain how urbanization created a new way of
life that often clashed with the values of
traditional urban society. 2. Describe the
controversy over the role of science and religion
in American education and society in the 1920s
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The Twenties Woman
Chp 21 2
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Society Just Aint Like It Used To Be!

• Birthrate dropped at faster rate in 20s
• MARGARET SANGER 1916, 1st birth control clinic
  in US
• Lots of new technology to make work at home
  easier - sliced bread!
• Public assistance for elderly, public health
  clinics for ill workers

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Education andPopular Culture
Chp 21 3
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Society Just Aint Like It Used To Be!
Sinclair Lewis- Babbit main character ridicules
American conformity and materialism (Nobel Prize
winner) F Scott Fitzgerald- The Great Gatsby
showed negative side of 20s gaiety even wealthy
had hollow lives Edna St Vincent Millay- poems
celebrate youth Ernest Hemingway- Sun Also Rises
criticized glorification of war.
The mass media, movies, spectator sports played
important roles in creating the popular culture
of the 1920s a culture that many artists and
writers criticized.

• Widespread education meant literate citizens but
  it took mass media to shape a mass culture.
• Newspapers increased dramatically
• Magazines flourished

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Society Just Aint Like It Used To Be!

• All about fads
• King Tut
• Charles Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis
• Movies
• Jazz Singer
• Steamboat Willie
• Art Edward Hopper

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Society Just Aint Like It Used To Be!

• THE BIGGEST ITEM OF THE DECADE FOR INFLUENCING
  AMERICAN CULTURE
• -everyone in the US could experience the same
  news, sports, and advertisements at the same
  time. A shared national experience
• - plus it is privately owned unlike Europe with
  govt owned radio systems

RADIO!
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Harlem Renaissance
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Harlem Renaissance

• Harlem Renaissance - flourishing of African
  American culture

The ever-so-talented Miss Josephine Baker
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Harlem Renaissance

• Langston Hughes- best known poet of Harlem
  Renaissance. Describes difficult lives of AA.
  Some poems set to jazz tempo
• Claude McKay
• W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, Marcus
  Garvey
• Zora Neale Hurston- told of lives of poor
  Southern blacks. Celebrated common persons art
  form - folkways
• Paul Robeson- son of a slave became major
  dramatic actor (Othello)

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Harlem Renaissance

• Cotton Club
• Louis Armstrong
• Duke Ellington
• Cab Calloway
• Bessie Smith
• Ella Fitzgerald
• Josephene Baker

Alexanders Ragtime Band
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Harlem Renaissance
Billie Holiday
Considered by many to be the greatest jazz
vocalist of all time, Billie Holiday lived a
tempestuous and difficult life. Her singing
expressed an incredible depth of emotion that
spoke of hard times and injustice as well as
triumph. Though her career was relatively short
and often erratic, she left behind a body of work
as great as any vocalist before or since. Born
Eleanora Fagan in 1915, Billie Holiday spent much
of her young life in Baltimore, Maryland. She was
raised primarily by her mother. Living in extreme
poverty, Holiday dropped out of school in the
fifth grade and found a job running errands in a
brothel. When she was twelve, Holiday moved with
her mother to Harlem, where she was eventually
arrested for prostitution. Desperate for money,
Holiday looked for work as a dancer at a Harlem
speakeasy. When there wasnt an opening for a
dancer, she auditioned as a singer. Long
interested in both jazz and blues, Holiday wowed
the owner. This led to a number of other jobs in
Harlem jazz clubs, and by 1933 she had her first
major breakthrough. Her bluesy vocal style
brought a slow and rough quality to the jazz
standards that were often upbeat and light. This
combination made for poignant and distinctive
renditions of songs that were already standards.
By slowing the tone with emotive vocals that
reset the timing and rhythm, she added a new
dimension to jazz singing.
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Harlem Renaissance
Billie Holiday
It was not, however, until 1939, with her song
"Strange Fruit," that Holiday found her real
audience. A deeply powerful song about lynching,
"Strange Fruit" was a revelation in its
disturbing and emotional condemnation of racism.
Holidays voice could be both quiet and strong at
the same time. Though one of the highest paid
performers of the time, much of her income went
to pay for her serious drug addictions. By the
late 1940s, after the death of her mother,
Holidays heroin addiction became so bad she was
repeatedly arrested eventually checking herself
into an institution in the hopes of breaking her
habit. By 1950, the authorities denied her a
license to perform in establishments selling
alcohol. Though she continued to record and
perform afterward, this marked the major turning
point in her career. For the next seven years,
Holiday would slip deeper into alcoholism and
begin to lose control of her once perfect voice.
In 1959, after the death of her good friend
Lester Young and with almost nothing to her name,
Billie Holiday died at the age of forty-four.
During her lifetime she had fought racism and
sexism, and in the face of great personal
difficulties triumphed through a deep artistic
spirit. It is a tragedy that only after her death
could a society, who had so often held her down,
realize that in her voice could be heard the true
voice of the times.
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Harlem Renaissance