Chapter 22 (The Roaring Twenties: America's New Era) - American YAWP

Introduction

• In March 1921, Warren G. Harding became the twenty-ninth president, he called for a “return to normalcy.”
• The nation was still reeling from:
  • World War I
  • Racial violence
  • Political repression
  • The "Red Scare" from the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia
• Over 115,000 American soldiers died in Europe in a year of fighting.
• A flu epidemic killed about 700,000 Americans between 1918 and 1920, hitting almost 20% of the population.
• After the war, there were labor strikes and radical actions, including mail bombs sent by anarchists in 1919.
• When wartime controls ended, the economy slowed sharply, with unemployment rising to 20% and farmers facing high bankruptcy rates.
• Harding pledged peace, which appealed to a population affected by instability.
• The 1920s were far from "normal", they reshaped American society, and were known as:
  • The New Era
  • The Jazz Age
  • The Age of the Flapper
  • The Prosperity Decade
  • The Roaring Twenties
• Increased production and use of:
  • Automobiles & household appliances
  • Film
  • Radio
• These drove a new economy and living standards.
• Talking movies and jazz became popular, while old sexual and social rules became less strict.
• Many Americans rejected political and economic reforms, opposed America's changing population, restricted immigration, promoted traditional religion, and revived the Ku Klux Klan.
• Other Americans advocated for equal rights
• Cultural commentators recognized "the New Woman" and "the New Negro."
• Long-established immigrant groups preserved their cultures and religions.
• The 1920s were complex and filled with conflict, and it was not "normalcy."

Republican White House, 1921-1933

• Harding promised stability and prosperity.
• He enacted protective tariffs and ended wartime controls, while Congress focused on immigration due to fears about foreign populations.
• The postwar economy led elites to fear the Russian Revolution, marginalizing socialist and anarchist groups, alongside union activism.
• Union membership declined in the 1920s.
• Workers lost bargaining power and public support.
• Harding's presidency is remembered for corruption.
• His cabinet included notable figures. The following people were appointed to serve various American constituencies:
  • Henry C. Wallace, editor of Wallace's Farmer
  • He was named secretary of agriculture.
  • Herbert Hoover, head of the wartime Food Administration
  • He was made secretary of commerce.
  • Andrew Mellon, a business man
  • He became secretary of the treasury.
• The "Ohio gang", a group of Harding's friends and supporters, caused issues.
• Harding's administration suffered a setback when:
  • Officials leased government land in Wyoming to oil companies for money in the Teapot Dome scandal.
  • Interior Secretary Albert Fall and Navy Secretary Edwin Denby resigned
  • Fall was jailed, and the event was named after a rock formation resembling a teapot.
• Harding took vacation in the summer of 1923 to consider how to handle his "God-damned friends".
• Harding died of a heart attack in August 1923.
• Vice President Calvin Coolidge became president.
• Coolidge, a shopkeeper's son, rose through Republican ranks to become governor of Massachusetts.
• As president, Coolidge aimed to remove the stain of scandal but largely continued Harding's economic policies, avoiding involvement in labor or consumer protection.
• The new president stated that "The chief business of the American people is business."
• Coolidge supported business interests and wealthy Americans, who benefitted from initiatives like tax cuts.
• Congress reduced taxes on the wealthy from 66% to 20%, and Coolidge supported this.
• While Coolidge favored business, some Americans kept up their activism.
• The 1920s became a great period of increased activism among American Women.
  • They gained the right to vote with the 19th Amendment in 1920.
• Female voters aimed to take advantage of their right to vote, focusing on various interests such as:
  • Squalor
  • Poverty
  • Domestic violence
• Women had been active in prohibition, which took effect with the Eighteenth Amendment in January 1920, outlawing alcohol production and sale.
• Reformers called for government efforts to reduce infant mortality, provide education funding, and promote peace.
• Some activists pushed for laws protecting women and children, while some others such as Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party wanted to end all legal distinctions based on sex with the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), though it failed in Congress.
• National politics in the 1920s was controlled by the Republican Party, which held the presidency and both houses of Congress.
• Coolidge did not run for reelection in 1928.
• Coolidge publicized his decision by handing a scrap of paper to a reporter that simply read: “I do not choose to run for president in 1928."
• The 1928 election was a contest between Al Smith, the Democratic governor of New York, and Herbert Hoover, the Republican candidate.
• Smith was Catholic and his immigrant background raised nativist suspicions, and ties to Tammany Hall and anti-Prohibition politics angered reformers
  • Hoover was all-American, Midwestern.
  • He was a protestant with managerial experience from World War I.
  • He focused on economic growth and prosperity, and was therefore favored by American voters.
• Hoover, having been Harding and Coolidge's secretary of commerce, claimed responsibility for the growth of the 1920s.
• Hoover promised that America was nearing the end of poverty in his 1928 campaign.
• Much of the election focused on Smith's religion and his stance against Prohibition, despite Hoover's ambitious statements. It was preached by many Protestant ministers that Smith would be controlled by the pope.
• Hoover won the landslide, and while Smith won the nation's largest cities, he lost the country's majority.
• Democratic southern states voted for a Republican for the first time since Reconstruction.

Culture Of Consumption

• Marketing expert and home economist Christine Frederick stated ""Change is in the very air Americans breathe, and consumer changes are the very bricks out of which we are building our new kind of civilization,"
• Frederick advised manufacturers and advertisers how to capture women's purchasing power, who spent 90% of household money.
• Frederick's work reflected the social and economic shifts of her time.
• The consumer shift Frederick noted resulted from the industrial expansion of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
• With new manufacturing tech, production output flooded the market with products like ready-to-wear clothes and appliances.
• Near the end of the 19th century, output rose and many people feared that the supply would outpace demand, possibly leading to huge financial problems from over production.
• American businessmen used merchandising and marketing to transform distribution and encourage consumer desire.
• Department store stood at the center of this early consumer revolution.
• Several major department stores grew from large dry-goods stores during the 1880's.
• Customers could purchase many goods under one roof this allowed them to attract customers.
• Department stores offered a variety of services and spectacles, such as:
  • Restaurants
  • Writing rooms
  • Babysitting
  • Elaborate store windows
  • Fashion shows
  • Interior merchandise displays
• Marshall Field & Co. in Chicago pioneered these tactics, including a tearoom for well-off female shoppers.
• Thomas W. Goodspeed, a trustee of University of Chicago, noted that Field made a store "in which it was a joy to buy."
• Mass-circulation magazines and national branding rose which further drove consumer desire.
• The automobile industry helped fuel the new consumer culture by embracing credit.
• By 1927, over 60% of American automobiles were sold on credit.
• Installment purchasing became available for nearly every other large consumer purchase.
• Consumer spending on items like appliances grew significantly between 1919 - 1929.
• Henry Ford's assembly line sped up industrial production and made automobiles affordable for middle-class Americans, driving consumerism
• By 1925, Ford made a Model-T every ten seconds.
• The number of registered vehicles ballooned from just over nine million to nearly twenty-seven million by the end of the decade.
• Americans owned more cars than all of Great Britain, Germany, France, and Italy combined.
• About eighty percent of the world's cars drove on American roads in the late 1920s.

Culture of Escape

• Gasoline and electricity transformed American life, primarily due to the use of:
  • Automobiles
  • Film
  • Radio
• These not only increased consumption but also contributed to the popular culture of the 1920's.
• Edgar Burroughs is quoted saying “We wish to escape... the restrictions of manmade laws, and the inhibitions that society has placed upon us."
• Burroughs wrote a new Tarzan story almost every year from 1914 until 1939, and said that he would like to be Tarzan he admits it.
• Like many Americans of the 1920s, Burroughs wanted to challenge and escape the constraints of an increasingly industrialized society
• Americans escaped in a variety of ways, such as:
  • Automobiles
  • Hollywood movies
  • Listening to Jazz records
  • Listening to radio broadcasts of Jack Dempsey's prizefights
• Popular culture became more widely accepted.
• Americans preferred the musical hit “Yes, We Have No Bananas" over “The Star Spangled Banner."
• The automobile's increasing dependability caused wider travel.
• Women began driving themselves and their kids to activities.
• Vacationers drove to areas that saw milder winters like Florida.
• Young people began to use cars unsupervised, to explore romantic or sexual experiences.
• Gas stations, diners, motels, and billboards were built on roadsides to serve drivers.
• The automobile became a source of entertainment; thousands of people gathered to watch drivers race for the $50,000 prize of Indianapolis 500.
• The United States dominated the global film industry.
• By 1930, moviemaking became more expensive, so a handful of film companies took control of the industry.
• Immigrants, namely Jewish people from central and Eastern Europe, originally “invented Hollywood."
• Mostly middle-class people saw cinema as lower-class entertainment.
• Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack Warner who were the sons of Polish immigrants founded Warner Bros.
• In 1918, the names of several production companies were created.
  • Universal
  • Paramount
  • Columbia
  • Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)
• They consciously produced movies that represented American values of opportunity , democracy, and freedom because they, as well as most film executives, were aware of their social status as outsiders.
• Film moguls started producing films of higher quality to show in larger theaters to attract those who had avoided the film industry so the filmmakers could capture the middle and upper classes.
• The maintained working-class moviegoers by blending traditional and modern values Cecil B. DeMille's 1923 epic The Ten Commandments depicted orgiastic revelry while still managing to celebrate a biblical story.
• Palatial theaters were soon constructed in the place of dingy theaters.
• Samuel Rothafel's Roxy Theater in New York was able to hold more than six thousand visitors.
• The Jazz Singer (1927) was the first movie with synchronized words and pictures, and the Warners spent half a million to equip two theaters so It could be shown.
• Although one MGM producer had said ""Sound is a passing fancy,"" Warner Bros.' assets increased dramatically.
• They went from just $5,000,000 in 1925 to $230,000,000 in 1930.
• Movies became extremely popular in America, whether it was the:
  • Surroundings
  • Sound
  • Film budgets
• Movie attendance sky rocketed.
• Weekly movie attendance soared from sixteen million in 1912 to forty million in the early 1920s.
• Hungarian immigrant William Fox stated motion pictures were distinctly American because the rich and poor shared in it.
• Price admission was accessible for nearly all Americans, and the one- price admission was accessible for nearly all Americans.
• Over 60% of moviegoers were women, who packed theaters to see Mary Pickford.
• Mary Pickford nicknamed “America's Sweetheart”, earned around a million dollars a year by 1920 by a combination of film and endorsements contracts.
• Pickford and other female stars popularized the “flapper," an image of a women wearing short skirts, makeup, and cigarettes.
• Italian scientist Guglielmo Marconi sent the first transatlantic radio message in 1901.
• Radio had been at home since around the 1920s.
• By 1930 around half of American homes contained a radio.
• Radio stations brought the sale of advertisements and sponsorships to directly entertain people in their living rooms
• Soap companies sponsored soap operas everyday.
• Radio stations were corporations like the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) or the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), which helped make spreading popular culture on a national level easier because they did not hold as strong to traditional boundaries.
• The radio introduced Americans to various genres of music.
• Jazz, a uniquely American musical style popularized by the African-American community in New Orleans, spread primarily through radio stations and records.
• The New York times considered jazz "savage" because of its racial heritage, the music represented cultural independence to others.
• Harlem-based musician William Dixon stated that the white people didn't own the Jazz he played.
• Jazz became nationally popular, and widely enjoyed by people of all colors.

The New Woman

• Emphasis on spending and accumulation promoted materialism and pleasure in individuals.
• These impulses were personified in the flapper, whose bobbed hair, short skirts, makeup, cigarettes, and carefree attitude which captured the attention of American novelists.
• Such as F. Scott Fitzgerald
• and Sinclair Lewis.
• Young "flappers" rejected old Victorian values of modesty and restraint and were excited for public pleasures such as:
  • Dance halls
  • Cabarets
  • Nickelodeons
• As well as illicit clubs and speakeasies spawned by Prohibition.
• Young women introduced a new morality that allowed more independence, movement, and fun.
• Psychologist G. Stanley Hall stated that the new morality, “She was out to see the world and, incidentally, be seen of it."
• An advertisement in a 1930 publication of Chicago Tribune stated “Today's woman gets what she wants. The vote. Slim sheaths of silk to replace voluminous petticoats. Glassware in sapphire blue or glowing amber. The right to a career. Soap to match her bathroom's color scheme.“
• The 1920s were a study in contradictions regarding to sex and gender.
• Although it was a decade were the ‘New Woman’ came about, only 10 percent of married women worked outside their home, compared to nearly half of unmarried women.
• New tech reduced time requirements for chores and more housework duties were expected of the homemaker.
• Women could vote.
• There was an attempt to rebel against what they saw as a repressive Victorian values about sexuality that led to increased premarital sexual activity.
• In areas such as New York, centers the gay community thrived, but gay males struggled increased policing.
• They lived more freely compared to previous decades.
• At the same time, for lesbians during that they were under new and increasingly high and unfair scrutiny regarding same-sex relations.
• The most enduring symbol of evolving new ideas regarding the role of women was the flapper.
• There were many women in the that of differing races, ethnicities, and lived experiences, and for some this was a time for opportunity, while others found confusion, added pressures, and traditional struggles under new names.

The New Negro

• Jim Crow laws, America's epidemic of lynching, and the atrocities of the Red Summer of 1919 took a toll on Black Americans entering the 1920s, and injustices and violence would continue
• Black Americans in Tulsa, Oklahoma, erected the Greenwood District, a hub of commerce and success which Booker T. Washington named the "Black Wall Street”.
• On May 31, 1921, a white mob mobilized, armed themselves, and ruined the district following a false accusation of sexual assault against a young 19 year old Black man- Dick Rowland.
  • More than thirty square blocks were destroyed.
  • Mobs burnt thousands of homes and killed hundreds of Black Tulsans.
  • Heavy machine guns and planes were reported to being employed during the destruction.
  • Those killed were buried in mass graves, and thousands of survivors became homeless.
• Racial violence awoke a new generation of Black Americans to new alternatives.
• The Great Migration brought more numbers of Black southerners northward.
• The city's Black population grew 257 percent, from 91,709 in 1910 to 327,706 by 1930 (the while population grew only 20 percent).
• By 1930, about 98,620 foreign-born Black people had been in the US.
• About half lived in Manhattan's Harlem district.
• Harlem initially laid and expanded from Fifth and Eighth Avenue and 130th to 155th Street.
• It was home to 164,000 people, mostly African Americans, by 1930.
• Relocation to the world's greatest Black City caused problems regarding crime and health.
• A cultural ferment in the area saw the rise of the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro Movement due to:
  • Race pride
  • Military service in World War I,
  • Many ideas of Pan-Africanism, such as Garveyism
• Alain Locke did not create the term New Negro, but popularized it. stated that subservience was in the past.
• Locke released what is known as the most popular New Negro novel in 1925, which was not just about African Americans- that was not what the book jointed many others about.
• From 1922 through 1935, popular Harlem Renaissance authors released several works.
• Langston Hughes
• Claude McKay
• Female authors such as Jessie Redmon Fauset
• Zora Neale Hurston
• The literature frequently covered and countered pervading stereotypes and forms of American racial prejudice.
• The Harlem Renaissance was manifested in theatre, art, and music.
• Broadway presented Black actors in major roles for the fist dime. -The 1924 production Dixie to Broadway was the show to do so. – Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Aaron Douglas, and Palmer Hayden showcased Black cultural heritage and captured the demographic’s current experience in art.
• Jazz grew in popularity and the population was eager to hear it
• Black performers were restricted from restroom use and were only allowed entry through service doors.
• The Harlem Renaissance artists produced works, and those indicated it was crucial in indicating that it was only one ingredient in long run history regarding African Americans and their cultural/ intellectual achievements.
• In the 1910s and 1920s, Marcus Garvey attracted activists disaffected activists that wanted to make a difference in politics.
• Garvey was a Jamaican publisher and labor organizer arrived at the location in 1916.
• He built world's largest Black nationalist - UNIA within just the years of his occurrence.
• Black economic independence would result from it which promote racial, lead to the Africa and root out the Black elite, was who Garvey sought.
• Newspaper publication known as Negro World, Harlem parades where the UNIA members knew him as Garveyites. –Innate militaristic regalia and that is what street the organization criticized since their NAACP focus was less effective.
• The UNIA created the Black Star Line in 1919, the organization created a vision that would push Black Americans out of their political box to allow their return to Africa.
• The UNIA received investments from supporters, many whom gave rousing speeches across the country, which pushed for commercial cooperation.
• Because Garvey gained such large scale detractors they poorly mismanaged business. -NAACP believed they made the struggle seemed useless. Campaigns occurred with government officials due to his aggressive attacks on Black activists which lead to his 1922 inditement which lead to a 1925 arrest for the mail scam .

Culture War

• The 1920s saw cultural activity, and in the meantime also were a hard time immigrants, and or radicals.
• Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti both anarchists, from Italy were known as a fear of radicals to execute which occurred in 1927.
• 1920 the arrest for murder was the incident that occurred in Massachusetts. Verdicts of guilty were appealed because the surrounding evidence had a small amount of the information,
• The witnesses even stated that it went down with a get away car and a person. All that contributed, radicals did a worldwide lobbying between the class Italian organizations located in USA.
• August 23, 1927 death concise for his execution and with the death came suffering that was from a radical side and is the death because I am Italian.
• Americans began to express that what was occurring in USA needed to be remedied and those Americans pointed. Asian Immigration came and began to work more that was on the side of Civil Rights, or at the American South that contained migration that stemmed from America.
• Southern cities being close to half a million, had numbers the Black would see move that area which all occurred between 1910 and 1920.
• Protestants started denouncing Roman Catholic charging Americans that they didn’t provide allegiance.
• Emergency Immigration Act came from the act passed for immigration for then three years later.
• The Act was explicit in it's exclusion of Asians.
• Sacco and Vanzetti had a sweeping restriction, many worried that a bigger America would not resemble it.
• Many even saw this was during a new culture type war.

Fundamentalist Christianinty

• Besides alarms about immigration, came new core Christians also in their worries which had to do with sexual things.
• In organized groups lashed out to sagging that had to do with public morality. Protestantism seemingly had various women practice sexual freedom.
• Critics were not able to make fun which spurned and spoke easy in mockery.
• Christians most began had doctrinal which was among the theologies.
• The church would need to be adapted.
• Baptist Harry Emerson Fosdick also stated is shall occur will and principles.
• By grace human life will occur with God which is the theology.

Rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)

• Suspicions on Catholics along with other contributing factors led many.
• Captured as capture them by the reborn Ku Klux Klan (KKK) with claim to American values.
  • African Americans
  • Jews
  • Feminist
• 1915 the cause was the rebirth, The Birth of a Nation with how it was received.
• In the second Ku Klux in Georgia 1915 thanks to Colonel to Joseph
• The Klan above expanded to being above the mason-dixon line in a response to the the Black southerners of the World War 1.
• Klan endorsed various politicians
• The Klan enticed others who jointed through picnics and parades