LIFE

1
THE ROARING TWENTIES

• LIFE CULTURE IN AMERICA 1920-1929

2
Americans on the Move

• Urbanization still accelerating
• More Americans lived in cities than in rural
  areas

3
URBAN VS. RURAL

• Urban life anonymous crowds, strangers,
  moneymakers, and pleasure seekers.
• Rural life safety, with close personal ties,
  hard work and morals.

Cities were impersonal
Farms were innocent
4
Demographical Changes

• Great Migration
• African Americans moving North at rapid pace.
• Jim Crow laws
• New job opportunities in north

1860 93 in South 1930 80 in South
5
Ku Klux Klan

• Colonel William J. Simmons
• Revived organization in 1915
• 1922 enrollment 4 million
• Sales 8 commission of 10 initiation fee for
  recruits

6
Immigration

• Emergency Quota Act (1921) 3 of ethnic group as
  per 1910 census SE Europe, exempted those in
  Western Hemisphere
• National Origins Act (1924) 2 1890 census

7
Keep America America
8
SCIENCE AND RELIGION CLASH

• Fundamentalists vs. Secular thinkers
• Eugenics- pseudo-scientific racism
• The Protestant movement - literal interpretation
  of the bible is known as fundamentalism
• Fundamentalists found all truth in the bible
  including science evolution

9
SCOPES TRIAL

• Tennessee made it a crime to teach evolution

Scopes was a biology teacher who dared to teach
his students that man derived from lower species
10
THE TWENTIES WOMAN

• Women were independent and achieving greater
  freedoms.
• ie. right to vote, more employment, freedom of
  the auto

Chicago 1926
11
THE FLAPPER

• A Flapper was an emancipated young woman who
  embraced the new fashions and urban attitudes.

12
NEW ROLES FOR WOMEN
Early 20th Century teachers

• Many women entered the workplace as nurses,
  teachers, librarians, secretaries.

13
THE CHANGING AMERICAN FAMILY

• Margaret Sanger
• Birth control activist
• Founder of American Birth Control League
• ie. Planned Parenthood

Margaret Sanger and other founders of the
American Birth Control League - 1921
14
PROHIBITION

• The 18th Amendment in 1920
• Launched era known as Prohibition
• Made it illegal to make, distribute, sell,
  transport or consume liquor.
• A.K.A. Volstead Act

15
PROHIBITION
16
SUPPORT FOR PROHIBITION

• Supporters were largely from the rural south and
  west

17
Poster supporting prohibition
18
SPEAKEASIES AND BOOTLEGGERS

• To obtain liquor, drinkers went underground to
  hidden saloons known as speakeasies
• People also bought liquor from bootleggers who
  smuggled it in from Canada, Cuba and the West
  Indies

19
GOVERNMENT FAILS TO CONTROL LIQUOR

• Prohibition failed
• Why? Government did not budget enough money to
  enforce the law

Federal agents pour wine down a sewer
20
SUPPORT FADES, PROHIBITION REPEALED

• By the mid-1920s, only 19 of Americans
  supported Prohibition
• The 21st Amendment finally repealed Prohibition
  in 1933

21
ORGANIZED CRIME

• Al Capone
• Chicago, Illinois
• famous bootlegger
• Scarface
• 60 million yr (bootleg alone)

Al Capone was finally convicted on tax evasion
charges in 1931
22
St. Valentines Day Massacre

• Valentines Day February 14, 1929
• Rival between Al Capone and Bugs Moran
• Capone South Side Italian gang
• Moran North Side Irish gang
• Bloody murder of 7 of Morans men.
• Capones men dressed as cops

23
EXPANDING NEWS COVERAGE

• Literacy increased in the 1920s
• as a result
• Newspaper and magazine circulation rose.

24
RADIO COMES OF AGE

• Radio- most powerful mode of communication in
  1920s

25
Henry Ford and Model T
26
ENTERTAINMENT AND ARTS

• First sound movies Jazz Singer (1927)
• First animated with sound Steamboat Willie
  (1928)
• By 1930 millions of Americans went to the movies
  each week

Walt Disney's animated Steamboat Willie marked
the debut of Mickey Mouse. It was a seven minute
long black and white cartoon.
27
Icons of 1920s
28
LINDBERGHS FLIGHT

• Charles Lindbergh
• May 27, 1927 Lindbergh made the first nonstop
  solo trans-Atlantic flight.
• NYC - Paris
• 33 ½ hours later (no auto pilot)
• 25,000 prize

29
Amelia Earhart

• 1932 First female to fly solo across the
  Atlantic
• 1937 Attempt to fly around the world
• 2/3 completed and went missing, presumed dead.

30
AMERICAN HEROES OF THE 20s

• In 1929, Americans spent 4.5 billion on
  entertainment
• Babe Ruth was a larger than life American hero
  who played for Yankees and hit 60 homers in 1927

31
1920s DANCING

• Charleston
• Swing Dancing
• Dance Marathons

32
Walt Disney

• Walt Disney only attended one year of high
  school.
• He was the voice of Mickey Mouse for two decades.
  

33
ART OF THE 1920s

• Georgia O Keeffe captured the grandeur of New
  York using intensely colored canvases

Radiator Building, Night, New York , 1927Georgia
O'Keeffe
34
WRITERS OF THE 1920s

• Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald coined the phrase
  Jazz Age to describe the 1920s

35
MARCUS GARVEY - UNIA

• Marcus Garvey believed that African Americans
  should build a separate society (Africa)
• In 1914, Garvey founded the Universal Negro
  Improvement Association

• Garvey represented a more radical approach

36
HARLEM, NEW YORK

• Harlem, NY became the largest black urban
  community
• Home to literary and artistic revival known as
  the Harlem Renaissance

37
LANGSTON HUGHES

• Missouri-born Langston Hughes was the movements
  best known poet
• Many of his poems described the difficult lives
  of working-class blacks

38
1919 Chicago White Sox
39
Prohibition Photos

• http//www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/06/02/dining
  /20090603-speakeasy-slideshow_2.html