The Jazz Age 1920-1929

1
The Jazz Age1920-1929

• Section 1 Boom Times
• Section 2 Life in the Twenties
• Section 3 A Creative Era

2

• Section 1 Boom Times
• Prosperity and Productivity
• GNP 70 billion in 1922 and 100 million in
  1929
• Investments grew
• Business expansion led to wage increases
• Electricity becomes common in American homes, by
  1930 2/3 of homes have electricity
• Mixers, food grinders, sewing machines, washing
  machines, radio and phonographs
• Scientific management Frederick W. Taylor-
  based on the idea that every kind of work could
  be broken down into a series of smaller tasks
• Time-and-Motion studies identified these tasks
• Efficiency experts
• The Growth of the Automobile Industry
• Henry Ford
• Model T Tin Lizzy
• Assembly line at Detroit factory cut production
  time in half, reduced prices, 850 in 1909 to
  290 in 1924

3

• Brought them to the average American
• Average 1 car for every 5 citizens
• Became largest business
• Consuming glass, rubber, steel, etc
• By 1929 over 1 million people worked in auto
  industry or a related industry
• Changes in work
• Ford and his workers
• Shortened workday (8 hours)
• Raised wages (5 per day due to tedium)
• Regulated morality and personal behavior of
  workers
• Opposed tobacco use, alcohol use, American values
  stressed, Recommended workers move from ethnic
  neighborhoods, learn to read and write English
• Impact of new products
• Electric appliances
• Less domestic help

4

• A Land of Automobiles
• Trains Trolley Cars lose riders
• Almost completely replaced horse-drawn vehicles
• 400,000 miles of new roads built in 1920s
• Billboards, drive-in restaurants, filling
  stations, tourist cabins start to appear
• Suburbs
• Auto-tourism- allowed Americans to travel without
  restrictions of schedules or routes of trains.
• Family life
• New social opportunities for teens
• Critics claimed it caused a loss of community
• Also brought pollution, traffic jams, parking
  problems, accident rates soared
• Creating Consumers
• Alfred P. Sloan- head of General Motors
• Marketing
• Installment plans buy it on time kitchen
  appliances, pianos, sewing machines, cars

5

• Streamlined look used for planes, ships, cars,
  etc started doing it for other things like
  radios, clocks, and appliances
• Up-to-date models continued to arrive
• GM introduced yearly model change and the
  trade-in, getting people to get a new car each
  year
• Department of Labor reported women were going
  into debt trying to keep up with fashion!
• Advertising
• Big business in 1920s
• 1929 3 million spent on advertising alone in
  magazines, newspapers, billboards, radio spots
• Targeted women, used slogans, jingles and
  celebrities
• A growing retail industry
• Chain stores- AP grocery chain
• Quick freezing techniques
• cellophane

6

• Section 2 Life in the Twenties
• Prohibition
• Eighteenth Amendment
• Ban on manufacture, sale, transportation of
  alcoholic beverages
• Volstead Act created to enforce amendment
• Some places strictly enforced, some not so much
• Al Capone and the Chicago mob
• violence against other mobs/gangs
• St. Valentines Day 1929 his mob killed 7 of a
  rival gang
• Speakeasies, clubs, bars, bootleg, smuggling
• Enter Eliot Ness and the Federal Prohibition
  Bureau
• Strict enforcement of prohibition laws
• Untouchables and Ness arrested Capone on tax
  evasion charges, during prison time lost control
  of his gang

7

• Positives of Prohibition
• Alcoholism, alcohol related deaths declined
• Negatives of Prohibition more press
• Widespread breakdown of law and order
• Turned millions of law abiding citizens into
  lawbreakers
• Repealed by the 21st Amendment in 1933
• Youth Culture
• The new woman
• Flappers Stylish, adventurous, independent,
  career-minded
• Changed their dress Goodbye corsets hello
  shorter skirts and silk hose!
• Cut hair into bobbed styles
• Drove cars, sought economic independence
• Participated in sports

8

• College life
• 1900-1930 college enrollment tripled
• Middle and upper classes
• collegiate look baggy flannel slacks sports
  jacket
• Leisure fun and fads
• Dance marathons
• Dance Derby of the Century 482 hours! (nearly 3
  weeks) in 1928
• Beauty Contests
• Miss America- 1921
• Flag pole sitting
• Alvin Shipwreck Kelly, most famous
• Mass entertainment
• Radio
• Broadcasted church services, local news reports,
  music, sports events
• Dempsey- Carpenter heavyweight title fight
• World Series
• Advertising spots for sale sponsors

9

• Movies
• Cecil B. DeMille
• Biblical epic plots, complex characters
• Why Change Your Wife (1920)
• Forbidden Fruit (1921)
• The Ten Commandments (1923)
• Actors silent films
• Lon Chaney (horror/scary)
• Charlie Chaplin (comedy)
• Tom Mix (westerns)
• 1927 Talkies
• The Jazz Singer (1st one) 1927- starred Al Jolson
• The Sheik Rudolph Valentino (married in Crown
  Point)- created controversy. People demanded
  regulations on films.
• Sports
• Professional sports
• College/professional football
• Red Grange played his first professional game for
  the Chicago Bears Thanksgiving 1925

10

• Baseball
• Black Sox Scandal
• Shoeless Joe Jackson and seven other Chicago
  White Sox players accused of taking a bribe to
  throw the World Series game in 1919
• Legends Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Lou Gehrig
• Books and magazines
• Book-of-the-month club founded 1923
• Colliers and The Saturday Evening Post
• Cartoons, short stories, advertising pages
• Dewitt and Lila Wallace found Readers Digest in
  1921
• Celebrities and Heroes
• Young people copied the celebrities behaviors
• A Woman of Affairs, starring Greta Garbo, she
  wore a slouch hat became the in thing
• Sultan of Swat Babe Ruth
• Jim Thorpe, won both the pentathlon and decathlon
  in the 1912 Olympics, went on to play baseball
  and football
• Amelia Earhart- first woman to fly across the
  Atlantic Ocean

11

• Religion in the 1920s
• Revivalism
• Evils of popular entertainment and alcohol
• Aimee Semple McPherson
• Movie star image white dress, white shoes, blue
  cape
• International Church of the Foursquare Gospel,
  headquartered in Los Angeles
• Dramatic religious services- combined orchestra,
  chorus, stage sets
• Closely tied with Pentecostalism
• Fundamentalism
• Protestant movement
• Traditional Christian doctrine to be followed
  without question
• Bible was a literal translation
• Christian liberals were attacked, the ones who
  believed in science, evolution
• Evangelical spread fundamentalism old-time
  religion

12

• The Scopes Trial- July 1925
• Tennessee legislature outlawed Darwinism in
  public schools
• American Civil Liberties Union offered to defend
  a school teacher, John Scopes, a science teacher
• Defense attorney, Clarence Darrow
• Prosecution witness William Jennings Bryan 3
  time democratic presidential hopeful
• Trial exposed the deep divide in American society
  between traditional religious values and new ones
  based on scientific thought and theory
• Darrow attacked the law as impeding free
  expression
• Bryan admitted his belief that bible was literal,
  forced Bryan to admit inconsistencies in his
  interpretation of the scriptures
• Darrow failed to convince the jury. Snopes was
  found guilty and fined 100
• Showed to some a narrow mindedness in some
  fundamentalists like Bryan and lowered some
  Americans views of fundamentalism

13

• Section 3 The Creative Era
• Music
• The Emergence of Jazz
• Charles Buddy Bolden
• Blues mix of slave music and spirituals
• Mamie Smith
• Gertrude Ma Rainey
• Bessie Smith
• Louis Armstrong
• Jazz Moves North
• Chicago and New York
• Ferdinand Jelly Roll Morton Chicago formed a
  band called the Red Hot Peppers, Jelly Roll
  Blues
• Joseph King Oliver, Creole Jazz Band, Louis
  Armstrong joined his band in 1922, Mabels
  Dream and Froggie Moore
• 1924 Louis Armstrong goes solo When the Saint Go
  Marching In, Savoy Blues, and Hotter than
  That

14

• The popularization of jazz
• Bix Beiderbecke, cornetist and pianist, put jazz
  rhythms in his music
• George Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue
• Igor Stravinsky
• Aaron Copeland
• Big Band music, dance music
• Harlems Cotton Club
• Duke Ellington
• Ethel Waters
• Cab Calloway
• Many clubs were white only with black
  entertainers, even when the clubs were in black
  neighborhoods
• Langston Hughes Why should I want to be white? I
  am a negro and beautiful
• Josephine Baker and others traveled and spread
  jazz to other places, such as Paris which had its
  own Jazz Age

15

• The Harlem Renaissance
• Theater
• Paul Robeson, Emperor Jones
• Son of a former slave
• Graduate from Rutgers and Columbia Law
• Singer Ol Man River, from Showboat
• First African American actor to play a leading
  role opposite a white actress
• Rose McClendon, Deep River
• In Abrahams Bosom
• Porgy, she appeared in the first production
• Literature
• Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928)
• Claude McKay, Home to Harlem
• James Weldon Johnson, educator, lawyer, diplomat
  to Venezuela and Nicaragua, office of the NAACP
• Poetry Lift Evry Voice and Sing became a song

16

• Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)
• The Book of American Negro Poetry
• Executive secretary of NAACP, raised money to
  support African American artists and art programs
  in Harlem
• The Lost Generation
• Scorned middle-class consumerism and
  superficiality of post war years
• lost generation was coined by Gertrude Stein in
  reference to Ernest Hemingway and others
• Stories of disillusionment
• Ernest Hemingway
• A Farewell to Arms devastation of war
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Great Gatsby emptiness of the pursuit of
  social status and money
• Married Zelda Sayre, her mental illness and his
  alcoholism cut short their glamorous lifestyle
  when his creativity dried up due to the pressures

17

• Criticizing the middle class
• Sinclair Lewis
• Main Street (1920) satire of close-mindedness of
  a typical small Midwestern town
• Babbitt (1922), story of middle aged realtor and
  city booster who hates his life but is too
  cowardly to change
• H.I. Mencken, wrote in The American Mercury, he
  promoted writers who satirized middle America or
  booboisie, made fun of Republican politicians,
  Fundamentalist Christians, rural southerners,
  people who lived in small towns, and others
• The Visual Arts
• Painting and Photography
• Georgia OKeefe NY factories and tenements
• Alfred Stieglitz photos of people, airplanes,
  skyscrapers, crowded city streets

18

• Murals
• Mexican influence
• Jose Clemente Orozco
• Diego Rivera
• Detroit Institute of Art
• Wife, Frida Kahlo
• Rockefeller Center mural was destroyed by the
  sponsors because it featured Lenin
• David Alfaro Siqueiros
• Architecture
• Louis Sullivan
• Frank Lloyd Wright
• Empire State Building (1250 feet) in 1931
  tallest building in the world until 1954.
• Chrysler Building (1048 feet) in 1930

-End notes-