Essential Question:

1
Transition to Modern America

• Essential Question
• What led to the economic, social, urban changes
  of the Roaring 20s?

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The Second Industrial Revolution
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America in the 1920s

• America was changed by the industrialism of the
  Gilded Age the economic boom of WWI
• During the 1920s
• The USA was the richest most developed country
  in the world
• Wages rose, hours declined, Americans had
  access to new, innovative consumer goods

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The Second Industrial Revolution
The increase of national name brands (rather than
locally produced goods) linked Americans more
than ever

• From 1922 to 1929, the U.S. had a 2nd industrial
  boom
• Mostly in consumer durable goods like appliances,
  cars, radios, furniture, clothing
• Electricity replaced steam power
• Corporations used salaried executives, plant
  managers, engineers to increase efficiency

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The Second Industrial Revolution

• To stop the growth of labor unions companies used
  welfare capitalism
• Offered employees stock, house-purchase,
  insurance options
• Used an open shop offered non-union workers
  the same rights that unions gained
• After WWI, the federal govt Supreme Court
  reverted back to a pro-business stance

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Henry Ford revolutionized the assembly line, the
5-day, new marketing advertising techniques,
annual model changes
The consumer goods revolution was best seen in
the auto industry
The work moves and the men stand still
Henry Fords River Rouge plant emphasized
uniformity, speed, precision, coordination
The auto industry stimulated the steel, sheet
metal, rubber, glass, petroleum industries
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The auto industry led to the construction of
roads new filling stations
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and new suburban shopping centers Kansas
Citys Country Club Plaza was the 1st U.S.
shopping mall (built in 1924)
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Glenwood Stove Ad
1920s consumerism led to luxury living New
appliances like refrigerators, washing
machines, vacuums
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1920s advertising
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1920s consumerism led to luxury living Radios
movies boomed
100 million Americans went to the movies in 1929
per week
The first talkie
NBC was the 1st successful radio network
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Economic Weaknesses

• The Roaring 20s was not as prosperous as it
  appeared
• RR, cotton textile, coal industries suffered due
  to new competition
• Farmers boomed during WWI but a decline in demand
  after the war deflated farm prices

Farm per capita income was 273 per year vs. the
U.S. average of 681 per year
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Economic Weaknesses

• Union membership dropped due to improved
  conditions links to Debs radical socialism
• Northern migration of blacks grew but workers
  gained menial jobs faced racism
• Growth in income was unequal with middle-class
  managers, bankers, engineers benefiting the most
  from the new affluence

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Social Changes in the Jazz Age
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Women and the Family

• Change ( continuity) for women
• Female workers after WWI were limited to
  teachers, nurses, other low-paying jobs
• The 19th Amendment
  gave women the
  right to vote but few
  women voted

16
Alice Pauls National Womens Party (NWP) failed
to pass an Equal Rights Amendment
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Women and the Family

• Flappers rebelled against Victorian customs
• Divorce rates doubled

Butmost women looked forward to lives as a
mother and a wife
The creation and fulfillment of a successful
homecompares favorably with building a beautiful
cathedral. Ladies Home Journal
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Women and the Family

• Families became smaller due to greater access to
  birth control
• Children were no longer need to work to support
  their families
• Teens began to discover their adolescence
  revolt against their parents by drinking, having
  premarital sex, searching for new forms of
  excitement

I have been kissed by dozens of men. I suppose
Ill kiss dozens more. character in F. Scott
Fitzgerald novel
19
The Flowering of the Arts

• The Harlem Renaissance reflected the explosion of
  black culture the New Negro
• Jazz Blues expressed the social realities of
  blacks Louis Armstrong became very popular
• Langston Hughes poetry, novels, plays promoted
  equality, condemned racism, celebrated black
  culture

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Josephine Baker, internationally renowned
singer/dancer
You could be black proud, politically
assertive economically independent, creative
disciplinedor so it seemed
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The Flowering of the Arts
The Waste Land focused on a sterile U.S. society

• The 1920s gave rise to a new class of
  intellectuals who condemned the new American
  industrial society materialism
• Pessimistic Literature TS Eliot, Ezra Pound,
  Sinclair Lewis, F Scott Fitzgerald,
  Hemmingway
• Playwrights Eugene ONeill
• Music Gershwin Copland

Poetry discussed a botched wasteland
Main Streetnarrow-minded small towns
Great Gatsbyhuman emptiness
Romantic individualism violence
Plays of tragic pipedreams
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Marcus Garvey

• Marcus Garvey was the preeminent civil rights
  activist of the 1920s
• Oppression in the U.S. necessitated strict
  segregation black nationalism
• He formed the United Negro Improvement Assoc
  advocated a return to Africa

The most dangerous enemy of the Negro
race W.E.B. DuBois
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Closure Activity The Long Road to Womens
Suffrage

• What was a typical womans role in each era in
  American history?
• Colonial life
• Revolutionary era
• Antebellum South
• 19th century sphere reform
• Progressive era

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The Rural Counterattack
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• Essential Question
• To what extent did the new economic, social,
  urban changes of the Roaring 20s conflict with
  the traditional values of rural America?
• Warm-Up Question
• How did the 1920s change Americans lives?

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City Life in the Jazz Age
The shift in focus from the countryside revealed
that urban life was different traditional ties
of home, church, schools were absent

• The 1920 census revealed for the 1st time that
  more Americans lived in cities than the
  countryside

The New York City skyline in 1930
Skyscrapers gave cities a unique architectural
style
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The Rural Counterattack

• Rural Americans identified cities with saloons,
  whorehouses, communist cells, immorality
• The 1920s saw an attempt to restore a
  Protestant culture in America an attack on
  any un-American behavior like drinking,
  illiteracy, immigration

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Prohibition

• In Jan 1920, Congress passed the Volstead Act to
  enforce the 18th Amendment (1919)
• 26 states had already banned alcohol but the real
  conflict came when prohibition was applied to
  urban ethnic groups
• Rural America became dry urban consumption
  dropped but was severely resisted

A rural, Protestant attack on the social disease
of drunkenness
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(No Transcript)
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Per capita consumption of alcohol (1910-1929)
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(No Transcript)
32
The Ku Klux Klan

• The rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915 (Stone
  Mtn, GA) was aimed at blacks, immigrants, Jews,
  Catholics, prostitutes
• The Invisible Empire sought to ease rural
  anxieties in the face of changing cultural
  attitudes
• Used violence, kidnapping, murder, politics to
  affect change

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The KKK provided a sense of identity to its
members Womens Order, Junior Order for boys,
Tri-K Klub for girls, Krusaders for assimilated
immigrants
Klan violence met resistance membership
declined by 1925
34
D.W. Griffiths The Birth of a Nation (1915) was
one of the most controversial films in movie
history. Set during after the Civil War, the
film glorifies white supremacy the KKK
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The Fear of Radicalism

• The most dramatic rural reaction was the Red
  Scare (1919-1920)
• A general workers strike in Seattle, police
  strike in Boston, series of mail bombs led to
  fears of anarchy socialism
• Deportation without due process, searches without
  warrants, imprisonment of innocent people was
  initially backed by the American people

Including the bombing of Attorney General
Palmers house in 1919
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Palmers Soviet Ark
The solution is simple S.O.S.ship or shoot
Place the Bolsheviks on ships of stone with
sails of lead
Stand them up before the firing squad and save
space on our ships
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Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco Bartolomeo
Vanzetti were executed for armed robbery murder
without evidence
The judge in the case even referred to Sacco
Vanzetti as those anarchist bastards
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Immigration Restriction
This act still allowed over 500,000 immigrants
mostly from South East Europe

• Many feared mass immigration to the U.S. among
  Europeans escaping post-war rebuilding
• The Immigration Act (1921) placed a cap on
  European immigration to 3 of each ethnic groups
  U.S. population
• The National Origins Quota Act (1924) limited
  U.S. immigration to 150,000 total Allocated most
  spots to British, Irish, Germans

Immigration restrictions (unlike the Red
Scare, Prohibition, or the KKK) lasted beyond the
1920s (into 1960s)
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The Fundamentalist Challenge
Pentecostals, Church of Christ, Jehovahs
Witnesses all grew in membership

• The most long-lasting reaction of rural America
  was a retreat to Christian beliefs
• Aggressive fundamentalist churches provided a
  haven for rural American values
• The Scopes Monkey Trial revealed the rural
  attack on evolution in schools

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Conclusions

• Urban America came to define all of the United
  States in the 1920s
• Radio, movies, advertising reflected urban
  culture
• Consumer goods were made in American cities
• Small-town whites, blacks, immigrants moved to
  cities
• But, conservative rural Americans (religious
  fundamentalists KKK) attacked these new, urban
  ideas

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Closure ActivityThe Urban vs. Rural Debate

• Examine the list of events of the 1920s. Pick 4
  and describe urban and rural perspectives for
  each.
• Discussion questions
• Why did the rural counter-attack occur in the
  1920s? Why not earlier?
• Are any of the arguments among rural Americans
  justified? Explain