American Life in the

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American Life in the Roaring Twenties

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Insulating America from the radical virus

• America turns inward in the 1920s
• Shun diplomatic commitments
• Denounced radicals
• Closed gates of immigration
• Condemn un -American lifestyles

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Seeing Red
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Russian Revolution

• Russian revolution spawns small communist party
  in America
• Strikes at wars end associated w/ reds
• Seattle strike said to be brought on by reds

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Red Scare 1919-1920

• Nationwide crusade against left wingers
• A. Mitchell Palmer- Attorney General- led the
  charge
• Fighting Quaker saw Red too easily
• Rounded up about 6,000 suspects
• House bombed in 1919

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• Buford- Soviet Ark
• 249 suspects deported to Russia
• Bomb on Wall Street kills 38 and wounds hundreds

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States join the red scare

• Anti Red laws
• against advocacy of violence to secure social
  change
• critics aroused against freedom of speech
• IWWs and other radical groups prosecuted
• New York refused to seat 5 socialists in
  legislature

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• Conservatives like it
• Breaks backs of unions
• Closed shops called communistic
• Open shop was the American plan

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Court Cases

• Sacco and Vanzetti
• Murder in Massachusetts
• Jury and judge were prejudice
• World rallies to their defense
• Class struggle
• Evidence could not convict them of murder

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Hooded Hoodlums of the KKK

• New group of Klan members in the 1920s
• More anti-foreign, Catholic, Black, Jewish,
  Pacifist, Communist,Internationalist,
  Evolutionist, Gambling, etc.
• Extremist ultra conservative group against
  forces transforming American life
• Midwest and Bible Belt South
• 5 million dues paying members

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• Camaraderie and adventure and secret rituals
• used huge parades, cross for warning, lash as a
  weapon
• Collapses suddenly
• Became a financial racket
• members leave
• Leader (Stephenson) jailed for rape murder

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Stemming the Foreign Flood

• Immigrants began flooding American shores shortly
  after the wars end
• Eastern and Southern Europe
• 800,000
• Wretched refuse from Europe

• Emergency Quota Act of 1921
• Quota from any given country
• 3 if people of their nationality had been living
  in the us since 1910
• By 1910 many immigrants had come from Eastern and
  Southern Europe

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• Immigration act of 1924
• Quota is cut from 3 to 2
• Shifted national origin base to 1890 from 1910
• Favored Northern Europe
• Southern Europe Protests
• Triumph for Nativists
• No Japanese immigration
• Hate America Rallies in Europe
• Canada and Latin America exempt for need of
  workers in tough times

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Departure in American Foreign Policy

• Immigration dried up
• 1931 more left than came to America

• End of an Era
• End of unrestricted immigration
• 35 million had come to America
• Separated immigrants from native country
• Ethnic Variety undermines political and class
  solidarity

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The Prohibition Experiment

• 18th amendment
• Prohibition
• Advocated by women and churches
• enforced by the Volstead act
• 1919
• Popular in midwest and South
• Keep liquor out of hands of blacks
• Strong opposition

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• Immigrants
• Old world sociability built around drink
• Naïve movement
• Tradition of strong drink and weak control by
  central government
• Cannot make crime out of something that was not a
  crime the day before
• Could not legislate thirst

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• Peculiar conditions
• Serious doubts rise very quickly
• wets thought to end law, violate the law
• law makers call for prohibition while drinking
• poor say only rich can buy illegal brew
• put over while troops were over there

• Enforcement weak
• Staff small
• Innocent bystanders killed by mob violence
• Speakeasies
• Bars that ran illegally
• Bootleg liquor sold quite well
• sold by gangsters and rumrunners(smugglers)

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• Adults began to make their own
• Home brew or alky cooking
• Success of prohibition
• bank savings increased
• Absentee workers decline
• Prohibition was better than no liquor at all

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The Golden age of Gangsterism

• Shocking crimes because of Prohibition
• Bribery of police
• Violent gang wars
• Erase bootlegging competitors
• Over 500 killed in gang wars in Chicago

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• Al Capone
• 6 years of gang warfare in Chicago
• To control Alcohol industry
• Could not be convicted of St. Valentines day
  Massacre of 1929
• Sentenced on income tax evasion and served11
  years in prison

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• Other gangster areas
• Prostitution, gambling, and narcotics
• Protection money or be destroyed
• Moved into labor unions
• Organized crime became a gigantic business
• made more than the government
• 1932 kidnapping of Lindberghs baby
• Murder leads to Lindbergh laws
• Interstate abduction a federal crime

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Monkey Business in Tenneessee

• Education making great strides
• More children getting a high school education
• Required to stay in longer
• John Dewey
• Set forth learning by doing
• Sets forth progressive education

• Education for life primary goal of teachers
• Schools became more attractive
• Not a prison
• Science advances
• Rockefeller Foundation had helped wipe out hook
  worm

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• Life expectancy rises
• Fundamentalists
• Teaching Darwinism was destroying faith in bible
  and God
• Tried to get laws to prohibit its teaching
• Tennessee passes such a law

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• Scopes Monkey trial
• 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee
• John T. Scopes challenges law by teaching
  evolution in class
• Becomes a nationwide story

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• Defended by Clarence Darrow
• Fundamentalists led by Wm. J Bryan
• Bryan takes stand and is humiliated by Darrow
• Dies shortly afterwards

• Clash really inconclusive
• Scopes fined 100 but Tennessee Supreme Court set
  it aside
• Case cast ridiculous absurdities of their case
• Fundamentalism remains a vital force

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The Mass Consumption Economy

• American Economy surges forward
• Small depressionin 1920-1921
• War and Mellons tax polices helped economy
• New machines and cheap energy
• Assembly line production
• New industries
• Electric power

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• Automobile
• 30 million cars sold by 1930
• Automobile showed shift in character of economy
• Mastered production now had to master consumption

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• Growth of advertising
• Make Americans discontent with their lot
• New profession
• Bruce Barton Man nobody knows
• Talks of Jesus as greatest advertiser
• conquered the world

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• Sports became big business
• Babe Ruth and the House that Ruth built
• Jack Dempsey Boxing
• first million dollar gate

• Buying on credit new innovation
• Old Puritans go into debt
• Prosperity accumulated debt
• Vulnerable to disruptions of economy

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Putting America on Rubber Tires

• New industrial revolution in America in the 1920s
• Machinery was the means
• Automobile was the king
• Automobile creates a whole new industrial system
• Automobile invented in Europe
• Fords and Olds creating infant industry in us
• 1910, 69 companies put out 181,000 autos/
  unreliable

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• Frederick W. Taylor
• Father of Scientific Management
• Sought to eliminate wasted motion
• Henry Ford
• Creates the Model T
• Cheap, rugged, and reasonably reliable

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• Adapts and fully applies the assembly line
  production of the automobile
• Only in black
• So efficient that the price went down to 260
• Thrifty workers could afford one
• 1914 Ford Produced his 500.000th Model T
• By 1930 over 20 million
• By the time of the crash in 1929 there was I
  automobile for every 4.9 Americans

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Advent of the Gasoline Age

• Impact of Automobile tremendous on American life
• Replaces steel as king of industry
• 6 million employed in auto industries
• Supporting industries sprang up that created more
  wealth
• Rubber, glass, fabrics, highway construction
• American Standard of living also rises

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Effects of Auto industry

• Older industries die out
• Oil industry booms
• Railroads begin to die
• Speedy marketing of perishables
• Enriched farms
• New roads

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Agents of social change

• Necessity
• Badge of freedom
• Self respect
• Open road vacations
• Isolation among sections broken down
• Americans own more cars than bathtubs
• Consolidation of schools
• Suburbs spread

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Demon machine

• Thousands injured
• Americans become statistics
• By 1951 more Americans die in autos than wars
• Home life broke down
• Morals of youth break down
• Crime waves of 20s use automobile

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No one willing to go back to horse and buggy

• Brought more convenience , pleasure, excitement
  than pollution and deaths

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Humans Develop wings

• Orville and Wilbur Wright In North Carolina in
  Dec.17, 1903
• 12 seconds and 120 feet

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The world shrinks

• Aviation grows slowly
• Stunt planes at first
• Used during WWI
• Private Passenger lines and mail carrying after
  WWI
• New York to San Fran in 1920

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• Charles Lindbergh in 1927
• 25,000 prize
• Crosses Atlantic in spirit of St. Louis

• Lucky Lindy becomes Americas hero
• Did much to dramatize and popularize flying
• Gives boost to infant aviation industry

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Impact of the Airplane

• .Gave American spirit another dimension
• .Gave rise to new industry
• .Death rate high at first
• . Regular air travel by 1930s and 40s
• .Increase tempo of civilization
• .Hurt RR industry even more
• .Making the world smaller
• .New weapons of war

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The Radio Revolution

• Guglielmo Marconi, invents wireless telegraph in
  1890s in Italy
• Used during WWI
• November 1920 KDKA airs the Harding presidential
  race
• At first local only
• Began to broadcast to larger areas
• National commercial radio overcomes local radio

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Effects of the radio

• Draws families back to home
• Brings nation together
• Standardized shows
• Nationwide products
• American cultural standards
• Stimulated sports industry
• Politicians had to adjust to the radio
• Ministers used to reach millions of listeners
• Brought new music into homes

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Hollywoods Filmland Fantasies

• Edisons invention still a novelty in early 20th
  century
• Nickelodeons and peep shows
• The Great Train Robbery, and Birth of a Nation
  (1915)
• Southern California becomes capital of film
  industry

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• Southern California becomes capital of film
  industry
• Censorship had to be installed
• Came into use of propaganda during WWI

• 1927 the first talkie The Jazz Singer
• Al Jolsen
• Age if silent film gone
• Color also being tried

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Effects of the movies

• Movies were the the number 1 form of
  entertainment
• Movie stars rose over night
• More popular than politics

• Effects
• Culture standardizes as Vaudeville dies and
  attracts immigrant youth
• Standardized language and tastes
• Working class coalition will emerge

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The Dynamic Decade

• Changes in lifestyle and value of the 1920s
• More Americans lived in the cities than in the
  rural areas
• Women finding work in the cities
• Margaret Sanger champions birth control
• National Womens Party organizes
• Wants Equal Rights
• Some thought the world had gone mad

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Churches affected

• Modernists gain over Fundamentalists
• Had to turn to advertising and marketing to
  compete with new forms of entertainment

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Erotic Eruption

• Advertisers exploit sex
• Flappers
• Goddess of the 20s
• Bobbed dresses
• Elevated hemlines
• Make up
• Symbolize independent woman, adventure

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Sigmund Freud

• Justified for new sexual frankness
• Psychiatrist
• Health demanded sexual gratification

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Many taboos go

• Teenagers pioneer the sexual frontier
• Listened and danced to jazz
• Sat in movie houses
• Rode in cars

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• Jazz was the sacred music of the age
• Begins in New Orleans and moves to the cities
  with the black migration
• Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver ( Louis
  Armstrong)
• Whites get in on the act

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New racial pride develops in African-Americans

• Harlem was one of the largest black communities
  in the world (100,000)
• Langston Hughes poet

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Marcus Garvey

• Political leader
• United Negro Improvement Association
• Wanted to resettle blacks back to Africa
• Black was beautiful
• Avoid integration with whites
• He failed and was eventually deported
• Inspired many young blacks who had moved to the
  cities

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Literary Liberation

• Old novelists and literary giants dying out
• Some still popular like Edith Wharton and Willa
  Cather
• New literary movement after WWI
• Not always from New England which had dominated
  literature
• American literature now has new vitality,
  imagination and artistic quality

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• HL Menken
• Critical attitude toward all American life
• Wrote in the Atlantic Monthly
• Attacked the South, Puritanism , middle class
  values, Democracy, prohibition, and more

• Writers searched for new codes of morals and
  understanding and fresh forms of expression
• Turn Against traditional values

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• F. Scott Fitzgerald
• This Side of Paradise - becomes a bible for the
  young
• Followed with The Great Gatsby
• Theodore Driesers An American Tragedy

• Ernest Hemmingway
• Affected by the war
• The Sun Also Rises - Expatriates in Europe after
  the war
• A Farewell To Arms -War

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• Sherwood Anderson
• Winesburg Ohio
• About small town life
• Sinclair Lewis
• Main Street - Women against provincialism
• Babitt - Traditional lifestyle

• William Faulkner
• Strong Southern writer from Mississippi
• The Sound and the Fury
• Writes about southern character

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• Strong New Poetry
• Ezra Pound
• Left America as the old bitch civilization gone
  in the teeth
• T.S. Elliot
• Also left for Europe
• Robert Frost
• Wrote about New England
• EE. Cummings
• Most daring of all poets

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• Drama
• Eugene ONiell
• Laid bare Freudian sexual notions
• Noble prize in 1936
• From New Yorks Greenwich Village

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Harlem Renaissance

• New outpouring of creative art from blacks in New
  York
• Louis Armstrong, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale
  Hurston
• Called for the New Negro with full citizenship
  rights

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Architecture

• New materialism and functionalism
• Frank Lloyd Wright
• Buildings should grow from their sites
• Not imitate Greek and Roman styles
• Empire State Building finished in 1931
• Machine age out does itself

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Wall Streets Big Bull Market

• American standard of living rises
• Even though banks failed and scams were
  everywhere economy kept right on rolling

• Stock Market a great lure for wealth
• Stock Market becomes a gambling den
• Stock prices soared
• Speculation runs wild

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• Buying on Margin
• Everyone was doing it even the little guy
• Rags to Riches stories all over
• Washington does not help
• Debt rose during war years
• From 1.8 billion to over23 billion

• Bureau of Budget created in 1921
• Work with president to create a budget
• Want to stop extravagant appropriations

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• Andrew Mellon - Sec of Treasury
• Tax Burden on rich hurts economy
• Forced to invest in tax exempt securities not in
  industry to create jobs
• Discouraged business
• Brought less into treasury

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• Mellons tax reduction for the poor rich
• Repealed excess profits tax, abolished the gift
  tax, reduced excise taxes
• Rich taxed less
• Tax Burden transferred to middle income groups

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• Controversial figure
• Reduced national debt by 10 billion
• Rich wanted more tax cuts
• Indirectly encouraging the bull market
• If income would have paid off national debt then
  less money for speculation and crash

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