in the Roaring Twenties

1
in the Roaring Twenties

• 1919-1929

2
Urban Growth

• Urban growth drove up land values and reshaped
  the skyline of Americas cities forced
  architects to build up
• Launched first great era of skyscrapers
• By 1929, U.S. had more than 377 buildings with 20
  or more floors
• 1920 Census more Americans lived in cities than
  rural areas for first time
• 3.2 million immigrants poured into the country
  and cities between 1919 and 1921

3
Urban Growth

• Racial composition of cities also changed
• 1910 75 of African Americans lived on farms and
  90 lived in the South
• Great Migration during World War I
• 1.5 million moved to cities during 1920s to
  escape sharecropping and debt peonage
• Most settled in New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland
  (307), Detroit (611), and Chicago (148)

4
Urban Growth
5
Urban Growth

• Competition for housing became a major source of
  friction cities passed municipal residential
  segregation ordinances, white realtors refused to
  show houses in white areas to African Americans,
  and neighborhood improvement associations
  formed
• Supreme Court ruled municipal resident
  segregation ordinances were unconstitutional in
  1917
• Whites resorted to the restrictive covenant
  struck down by Supreme Court in 1948
• Zoning laws offered a more subtle way of
  segregating cities segregated on the basis of
  wealth

6
Urban Growth

• Black metropolises or cities within cities
  began to emerge in American cities Harlem, NYC
• Racial prejudice made it impossible for African
  Americans to escape these new ghettoes
• Many white middle-class, white-collar workers
  began moving to the suburbs made possible by
  streetcars and the automobile
• City congestion remained a serious problem
• Federal Highway Act of 1916
• Traffic signals, traffic circles, divided dual
  highways, cloverleaf interchanges all introduced
  during 1920s

7
Consumer Economy
8
Consumer Economy

• Henry Ford
• Introduced automated assembly line to cars in
  1913 cut production time from 12.5 hours to 1.5
  hours per car
• He also cut prices six times between 1921 and
  1925 a new Model T only cost 290 in 1925
• To increase productivity, he introduced a minimum
  daily wage of 5 and shortened the workday to 8
  hours in 1914
• In 1926, he shortened the workweek to 5 days
• Logic of mass production expanded production
  allows manufacturers to reduce costs and
  therefore increase the number of products sold,
  and higher wages allow workers to buy more
  products

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Consumer Economy
10
Consumer Economy

• Alfred Sloan, president of General Motors
  (1923-41)
• The primary object of the corporation was to
  make money, not just make cars.
• Was convinced Americans were willing to pay extra
  for luxury and prestige
• Advertised cars as symbols of wealth and status
  introduced yearly model change in 1927
• Developed a series of divisions that were
  differienteated by status, price, and level of
  luxury Chevrolet to Buick to Cadillac
• Set up nations first national consumer credit
  agency, 1919
• Revealed the importance of merchandising in a
  modern consumer economy

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Consumer Economy

• Cars were the symbol of the new consumer society
• 1919, 6.7 million cars on American roads
• 1929, 27 million cars on American roads
• 60 purchased cars on credit with interest rates
  of 30 or more
• Cars revolutionized American way of life
• Promoted family togetherness?
• Created conflict between parents and teenagers?
• portable bedrooms?

12
Consumer Economy

• Automobiles also transformed American landscape
• Roads and highways doubled during 1920s
• Increased government spending 2 billion/year
• Increased pollution 30,000 annual traffic deaths
• Automobile industry stimulated national economy
• By 1929 produced 12.7 percent of manufacturing
  output and employed 1 of every 12 workers
• Stimulated growth of steel, glass, rubber
  industries and gasoline stations, motor lodges,
  campgrounds, and hotdog stands

13
Consumer Economy

• Other emblems of the consumer economy included
  the telephone and electricity electrical
  appliances became more common in American homes
  (refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum
  cleaners, toasters, etc.)
• Labor-saving appliances increased standards of
  cleanliness and imposed new pressures on
  housewives
• Ready-to-wear clothing was another important
  innovation in the consumer economy standard
  sizes defined by government in World War I

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Consumer Economy
15
Consumer Economy

• Eating habits also underwent a shift from
  starches (bread and potatoes) to more fruit and
  sugar
• More processed foods canning and freezing
  innovations during World War I saved homemakers
  enormous amounts of time
• To stimulate sales and increase profits,
  businesses expanded advertising, offered
  installment credit, and created the nations
  first regional and national chains

16
Consumer Economy
17
Consumer Economy

• Advertising agencies hired psychologists
• Built up name-brand identification
• Created memorable slogans
• Manipulated endorsements by doctors or
  celebrities
• Appealed to consumers desire for prestige and
  status
• By 1929, American companies were spending 3
  billion a year on advertising
• Uneeda Biscuits, first million-dollar advertising
  campaign

18
Consumer Economy
19
Consumer Economy

• Use of installment credit soared during 1920s
• Banks offered home mortgages for first time
• 60 of all furniture and 75 of all radios were
  purchased on credit
• New consumer society emphasized spending and
  borrowing over thrift and saving
• Nations families spent a declining proportion of
  income on necessities, more on appliances,
  recreation
• Older industries (textiles, railroads, steel)
  declined and newer industries (appliances,
  automobiles, aviation, chemicals, entertainment,
  and processed foods) surged ahead

20
Consumer Economy

• During the 1920s, chain-store movement
  revolutionized retailing Woolworths
• Interlocking networks of banks and utility
  companies played a critical role in promoting
  financial speculation of the 1920s

21
Radio

• Radio was most significant appliance to enter
  American homes in the 1920s Sales went from 60
  million (1922) to 426 million (1929)
• 1919, first commercial radio station 500 by 1925
  news, musical variety shows, advertisements,
  soap operas, and comedies
• Blunted regional differences and imposed similar
  tastes and lifestyles

22
Radio

• Radio made Charles Lindbergh an instant hero when
  he became the first person to fly solo across the
  Atlantic in 1927
• Amos n Andy debuted in 1926 spread racial
  stereotypes Italian gangster and tightfisted Jew

23
Phonograph

• Phonograph sales surged from 190,000 in 1923 to 5
  million in 1929 replaced piano in many homes
• Fueled by popularity of jazz, blues, and
  hillbilly music
• Fiddlin John Carson broke hillbilly music
  into popular culture in 1923
• F. Scott Fitzgerald called the 1920s, the Jazz
  Age

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Jazz Age
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Movies

• Single most significant instrument of mass
  entertainment was the movies
• Movie attendance grew from 50 million patrons a
  week in 1920 to 90 million a week in 1920
  Americans spent 83 cents of every entertainment
  dollar at the movies and 75 of the population
  went to a movie theater each week
• By the 1920s, the film industry had relocated to
  Hollywood ideal climate and cheap labor

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Movies

• Hollywood released 700 movies each year and
  dominated worldwide film production
• A small group of companies controlled the film
  industry Paramount, 20th-Century Fox, and MGM
  kept actors, directors, and screenwriters under
  contract
• Movies in the 1920s introduced the sex appeal
  Greta Garbo and Rudolph Valentino
• Hollywood also reinforced stereotypes

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Movies
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Spectator Sports
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Low-Brow Middle-Brow Culture

• Mah Jong and crossword puzzles
• Golf, tennis, and bowling
• Dance crazes fox trot, Charleston, jitterbug
• Egyptian fad in 1922
• Pole-sitting
• Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
• Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey
• Confession magazines
• Time, Readers Digest, New Yorker, Vanity Fair
• Book-of-the-Month Club

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Avant Garde

• Playwright Eugene ONeill
• Writers William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, F.
  Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe published
  their first novels
• Poets Hart Crane, e.e. cummings, Countee Cullen,
  Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and
  Wallace Stevens
• Artists Charles Demuth, Georgia OKeeffe, and
  Joseph Stella pioneered nonrepresentational and
  expressionist art forms

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Avant Garde
The Figure 5 in Gold (1928) Charles Demuth
32
Avant Garde
My Egypt (1927) Charles Demuth
33
Avant Garde
Brooklyn Bridge (1919-20) Joseph Stella
34
Avant Garde
Radiator Building at Night, New York
(1927) Georgia OKeeffe
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Avant Garde

• The 1920s marked Americas entry into the world
  of serious music
• 50 symphony orchestras founded
• Julliard, Eastman, and Curtis music
  conservatories founded
• Aaron Copeland and Charles Ives
• George Gershwin

36
Avant Garde

• World War I left many American intellectuals and
  artists disillusioned and alienated saw the war
  as a senseless mistake
• T.S. Eliot called the United States a wasteland
• Sinclair Lewis critized American middle class in
  Main Street (1920) and Babbit (1922)
• Won Nobel Prize for Literature
• H. L. Mencken

37
Lost Generation

• Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott
  Fitzgerald
• Existentialism maintains that life has no
  transcendent purpose and that each individual
  must salvage personal meaning from the void
• The Sun Also Rises (1926)
• A Farewell to Arms (1929)
• The Great Gatsby (1925)
• so we beat on, boats against the current, borne
  back ceaselessly into the past.

38
The Sex Debate

• If all girls at the Yale prom were laid end to
  end
• I wouldnt be surprised.
  Dorothy Parker
• Practically every newspaper featured articles on
  prostitution, venereal disease, sex education,
  birth control, and the rising divorce rate.
• City life nurtured new sexual attitudes end of
  courtships, rise of dating
• Sigmund Freud
• Increase in premarital sex after 1900 especially
  generation that reached maturity in 1920s
• Margaret Sanger vs. Comstock Law (1873)

39
Margaret Sanger
40
Flapper

• Bobbed her hair
• Painted her lips
• Raised her hemline
• Danced the Charleston
• Smoked and drank alcohol publicly
• Openly talked about sex
• Dated without chaperones
• Wore high heels and felt hats

• In reality, womens sexual experiences were
  typically limited to one or two partners, one of
  whom she married. This narrowed the gap between
  men and women and moved society towards a single
  standard of morality.

41
The Clash of Cultures

• The 1920s was a decade of intense cultural
  conflict, the Protestant culture of rural America
  was being undermined by the secular values of an
  urban society
• Country vs. City
• Native vs. Immigrant
• Protestant vs. Catholic and Jew
• Fundamentalist vs. Liberal and Science
• Conservative vs. Progressive
• Wet vs. Dry
• The chief battlegrounds in this culture war
  were gender, immigration, prohibition, and
  evolution in public schools.

42
The New Woman

• After Nineteenth Amendment, male politicians
  passed laws guaranteeing womens rights to serve
  on juries and hold public office
• Set up a national system of womens and infants
  health care clinics

43
The New Woman

• Womens movement divided in the 1920s over the
  Equal Rights Amendment
• Pitted professional women against working-class
  women
• Womens movement also faced opposition from
  federal government Spider Web chart
• Adkins v. Childrens Hospital (1923)
• Women did not win new opportunities in the
  workplace confined to traditional female jobs
  and professionals consistently received less pay
  than their male counterparts

44
Prohibition

• Initial compliance had more to do with supply and
  demand than respect for the law private
  enterprise filled the void
• Smugglers, bootleggers, and moonshiners
• Neither federal nor state authorities had enough
  funds to enforce prohibition
• Lax enforcement and huge profits enticed
  organized crime to enter bootlegging by late
  1920s, liquor sales generated 2 billion annually
  Al Capone

45
Prohibition
46
Prohibition

• In large cities, people openly defied the law 17
  convictions of 7,000 arrests in New York City
  President Harding
• In 1923, New York became the first state to
  repeal its enforcement law by 1930 six more
  states had followed suit
• Congress repealed Prohibition in 1933 with the
  21st Amendment
• National Anti-Cigarette League, 1903 by 1923, 14
  states had outlawed cigarettes

47
Fundamentalism

• Charles Darwins theory of evolution caused a
  split in American Protestantism Fundamentalists
  vs. Liberals
• Rise of Pentecostalism in early 1900s The
  Fundamentals (1910-1915)
• Religious revivals in West, South
• Billy Sunday
• Aimee Semple McPherson

48
Fundamentalism
49
Scopes Trial
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Scopes Trial
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Xenophobia

• Emergency Quota Act, 1921
• National Origins Act of 1924
• Sacco Vanzetti Case, 1921

52
Ku Klux Klan

• The KKK experienced a rebirth in the 1920s under
  the leadership of Col. William Joseph Simmons
  100 percent pure Americanism
• Hired advertising agency to boost membership 5
  million members by 1925
• Powerful political force influenced governors
  and state legislatures
• Continued to intimidate African Americans,
  immigrants, Catholics, Jews and others who
  violated moral standards (wife-beaters,
  drunkards, bootleggers, gamblers, etc.)
• A series of sex scandals and increasing violence
  decreased power of the Klan by late 1920s

53
Ku Klux Klan
54
African American Protests

• After facing discrimination and segregation in
  World War I and race riots in 1919-1920, African
  Americans were more determined to fight
  discrimination
• National Urban League, 1911 focused on economic
  issues (Washington)
• NAACP, 1909 focused on civil rights and legal
  action (Du Bois)

55
African American Protests

• Supreme Court ruled against grandfather clause
  (1915) and segregation ordinances (1917)
• NAACP also fought against school segregation in
  North and for federal anti-lynching bill under
  James Weldon Johnson
• A. Philip Randolph New Negro
• Marcus Garvey Universal Negro Improvement
  Association, 1917

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African American Protests
57
Harlem Renaissance
Black Belt (1934) by Archibald Motley, Jr.
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Harlem Renaissance

• Increasing interest in African American History
  and Culture W. E. B. Du Bois
• Fisk University Jubilee Singers
• American Negro Academy, 1897
• Negro dolls and all-Negro towns
• African Americans newspapers and magazines
  appeared in 1910s
• Association for the Study of Negro Life and
  History Carter Woodson, 1919

59
Harlem Renaissance

• Harlem became the center of African American
  cultural expression
• Poets Countee Cullen, Claude McKay and Langston
  Hughes
• Novelist Zora Neale Hurston
• Performer Paul Robeson
• If we must dieoh let us nobly die . . . dying,
  but fighting back!

60
Warren G. Harding(1921-1923)
61
Return to Normalcy

• Americans wanted a partnership between government
  and industry, instead of trustbusting in the
  1920s Republicans offered the conservative
  choice
• Supreme Court, under Chief Justice William Howard
  Taft, outlawed picketing, overturned national
  child labor laws, and abolished minimum wage laws
  for women states were responsible for protecting
  individual citizens
• Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover proposed to
  eliminate competition and waste in the economy
  through associationism 2000 trade associations
  by 1929

62
Return to Normalcy

• Charles Evan Hughes and Andrew Mellon were other
  capable members of Hardings cabinet Ohio Gang

63
Return to Normalcy

• Teapot Dome Scandal Secretary of Interior
  Albert B. Fall was convicted of taking bribes
• Attorney General Harry Daughtry
• Warren G. Harding died on 2 August 1923

64
Election of 1924
65
Calvin Coolidge(1923-1929)
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Twilight of Progressivism

• Coolidge had no desire to be a strong president
  and believed that government should do everything
  in its power to promote business interests the
  business of America is business
• The governments tilt toward business signaled a
  retreat from progressivism
• Robert La Follette (WI) and George Norris (NB)
  tried to keep progressivism alive in Congress
  had better luck at state and local level
• By 1930, 43 states had passed laws providing
  assistance to women with dependent children and
  34 states had workers compensation laws NY
  Governor Alfred E. Smith

67
Election of 1928
Alfred E. Smith
Herbert Hoover
68
Election of 1928