Unit 1 Learning Goal #3 American Life in

the “Roaring Twenties” Mr. Mac January 28, 2012

continued on next slide

The Jazz Age

•rise in racism and nativism •clash of values •changing status of women •explosion of art and literature •popular culture: sports, movies, radio, and music •Harlem Renaissance •increase in African American political activism

Why It Matters

The 1920s was an era of rapid change and clashing values. Many Americans believed society was losing its traditional values, and they took action to preserve these values.

Other Americans embraced new values associated with a freer lifestyle and the pursuit of individual goals. Writers and artists pursued distinctively American themes, and the Harlem Renaissance gave African Americans new pride.

Section Theme: Culture

The rapid changes of the early 1900s challenged Americans who wanted to preserve traditional values. American culture in the 1920s saw a rise in both the arts and popular entertainment. African Americans played stronger political and cultural roles in the 1920s than they had in previous decades.

Nativism Resurges • In the 1920s, racism and nativism increased.

• Immigrants, demobilized military men, and women competed for the same jobs during a time of high unemployment and an increased cost of living.

• Ethnic prejudice was the basis of the Sacco and Vanzetti case, in which two immigrant men were accused of murder and theft.

• Sacco and Vanzetti were sentenced to death, and in 1927 they were executed still proclaiming their innocence.

•They were thought to be anarchists, or opposed to all forms of government.

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1921)

• The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) led the movement to restrict immigration.

• This new Klan not only targeted African- Americans but also Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and other groups believed to have “un-American” values.

• Because of a publicity campaign, by 1924 the Ku Klux Klan had over 4 million members and stretched beyond the South into Northern cities.

Nativism Resurges (cont.)

Ku Klux Klan pamphlet: “America for Americans” This image is from a Ku Klux Klan pamphlet published in the mid-1920s, when the Klan claimed as many as five million members nationwide. The Klan portrayed itself as defending traditional, white, Protestant America against Jews, Catholics, and African Americans.

Ku Klux Klan parade in Washington, D.C., September 13, 1926 In a brazen display of power, the Ku Klux Klan organized a march in the nation's capital in 1926. By this time, the Klan was already in decline.

Controlling Immigration

• In 1921 President Harding signed the Emergency Quota Act, limiting immigration to 3 percent of the total number of people in any ethnic group already living in the United States.

• This discriminated heavily against southern and eastern Europeans.

• Scandals and poor leadership led to the decline of the

Klan in the late 1920s.

• Politicians supported by the Klan were voted out of

office.

Sheet music: O! Close the Gates Anti-immigrationists used songs, as well as speeches and posters, to promote their cause. This 1923 tune urges the government to "Close the Gates" lest foreigners betray the hard-won rights of Americans and "drag our Colors down."

• The National Origins Act of 1924 made immigrant restriction a permanent policy.

• The act lowered the quotas to 2 percent of each national group living in the U.S. in 1890.

• This further restricted immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.

• The act exempted immigrants from the Western Hemisphere from the quotas.

• The immigration acts of 1921 and 1924 reduced the labor pool in the United States.

Controlling Immigration (cont.)

• Employers needed laborers for agriculture, mining, and railroad work.

• Mexican immigrants began pouring into the United States between 1914 and the end of the 1920s.

• The immigrants fled their country in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution of 1910.

Controlling Immigration (cont.)

Mexican workers in California This photo, taken around 1920, depicts Mexican American workers laying irrigation pipe in Ventura County, California. Immigration from Mexico increased significantly during the 1910s and 1920s, due to improvements in transportation within Mexico and to the social and economic dislocations produced by revolution and civil war in Mexico. By the 1920s, Mexicans made up much of the workforce in California agriculture.

The New Morality

• A “new morality” challenged traditional ideas and glorified youth and personal freedom.

• New ideas about marriage, work, and pleasure affected the way people lived.

• Women broke away from families as they entered the workforce, earned their own livings, or attended college.

• The automobile gave American youth the opportunity to pursue interests away from parents.

Margaret Sanger leaving court of Special Sessions after arraignment Margaret Sanger is seen here in 1916, leaving court after being charged with distributing birth control information illegally. During the Progressive Era, women worked to remove legal barriers to obtaining information on preventing conception.

Life cover, July 1, 1926 On the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Life magazine presented this cover, which parodied the famous painting, the Spirit of '76. The Spirit of ‘26 depicts an uninhibited flapper, a jazz saxophonist and drummer, and banners with the snappy sayings of the day. The caption reads: "One Hundred and Forty-three Years of LIBERTY and Seven Years of PROHIBITION."

Women’s Changing Roles

• Women’s fashion drastically changed in the 1920s.

• The flapper, a young, dramatic, stylish, and unconventional woman, exemplified the change in women’s behavior.

• Professionally, women made advances in the fields of science, medicine, law, and literature.

The New Morality (cont.)

Flapper sheet music: Oh! You Have No Idea This 1928 novelty song, arranged for the newly popular Hawaiian ukulele, included the lyrics: "Has she the lips the boys adore? Does she know what she's got'm for? Oh! You have no idea."

Two flappers dancing the Charleston on the roof of Chicago’s Sherman Hotel (1926).

The Fundamentalist Movement

• Some Americans feared the new morality and worried about America’s social decline.

• Many of these people came from small rural towns and joined a religious movement called Fundamentalism.

• The Fundamentalists rejected Darwin’s theory of evolution, which suggested that humans developed from lower forms of life over millions of years.

• Instead, Fundamentalists believed in creationism–that God created the world as described in the Bible.

• The debate between evolutionists and creationists came to a head with the Scopes Trial.

• Answering the request of the ACLU, John T. Scopes, a biology teacher, volunteered to test the Butler Act by teaching evolution in his class.

• After being arrested and put on trial, Scopes was found guilty, but the case was later overturned.

• After the trial, many fundamentalists withdrew from political activism.

• Tennessee’s law against teaching evolution remained on the books until 1967.

• In 1925 Tennessee passed the Butler Act, which made it illegal to teach anything that denied creationism and taught evolution instead.

The Fundamentalist Movement (cont.)

Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan 1925 Scopes’ Monkey Trial

Clarence Darrow William Jennings Bryan

Prohibition

• Many people felt the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited alcohol, would reduce unemployment, domestic violence, and poverty.

• The Volstead Act made the enforcement of Prohibition the responsibility of the U.S. Treasury Department.

• Until the 1900s, police powers–a government’s power to control people and property in the public’s interest, had been the job of the state governments.

Detroit police inspecting equipment found in a hidden underground brewery during the prohibition era.

Prohibition (cont.)

• Americans ignored the laws of Prohibition.

• They went to secret bars called speakeasies, where alcohol could be purchased.

• Crime became big business, and gangsters corrupted many local politicians and governments.

• It was a defeat for supporters of traditional values and those who favored the use of federal police powers to achieve moral reform.

• In 1933 the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment ended Prohibition.

Al Capone

Al Capone Police Photo

Income Tax Evasion

Art and Literature

• During the 1920s, American artists, writers, and intellectuals began challenging traditional ideas as they searched for meaning in the modern world.

• The main themes of artists and writers during the 1920s were disenchantment, isolation, disillusionment, and emptiness.

• World War I led many writers to portray disillusionment and to reevaluate the myths of American heroes.

• The artistic and unconventional, or Bohemian, lifestyle of Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and Chicago’s South Side attracted artists and writers.

• These areas were considered centers of creativity, enlightenment, and freedom from conformity to old ideas.

• The European art movement influenced American modernist artists.

• The range in which the artists chose to express the modern experience was very diverse.

Art and Literature (cont.)

Blues by Archibald Motley, 1929 This painting by the African American artist Archibald Motley represented the "Ash-Can" style, which considered no subject too undignified to paint, as well as the sensual relationship between jazz music and dancing within African American culture.

Georgia O’Keeffe, 1923

She is chiefly known for paintings in which she synthesizes abstraction and representation in paintings of flowers, rocks, shells, animal bones and landscapes.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Untitled (Two Pears), 1921

Georgia O’Keeffe Old Maple,

Lake George 1926

Thomas Hart Benton, painter His fluid, almost sculpted paintings showed everyday scenes of the contemporary Midwest, especially images of pre-industrial farmlands.

Thomas Hart

Benton

Industry (Women

Spinning)

1924–27

Thomas Hart Benton The Lord is my Shepherd, 1926 Benton knew these people. In real life they were deaf-mutes who lived near him on Martha's Vineyard. Here they become symbols of the old-fashioned rural values he championed.

Edward Hopper’s House by the Railroad, 1925, was the first work by any artist accepted for the Museum of Modern Art collection.

Edward Hopper Automat (1927) Art critics often cite this work as an example of urban alienation.

• Writing styles and subject matter varied. Chicago poet Carl Sandburg used common speech to glorify the Midwest and the expansive nature of American life.

• Playwright Eugene O’Neill’s work focused on the search for meaning in modern society.

• F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby exposed the emptiness and superficiality of modern society as the characters spent much of their lives chasing futile dreams.

Art and Literature (cont.)

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald on the Riviera, 1926 While Fitzgerald chronicled the 1920s in his fiction, he and Zelda lived the high life in New York and in Europe.

U.S. writer Ernest Hemingway and Sylvia Beach in front of her Paris bookstore, Shakespeare and Company (1928).

Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist and playwright. In 1930 he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. His works are known for their insightful and critical views of American society and capitalist values. His style is at times droll, satirical, yet sympathetic.

Popular Culture

• The economic prosperity of the 1920s afforded many Americans leisure time for enjoying sports, music, theater, and entertainment.

• Radio, motion pictures, and newspapers gave rise to a new interest in sports.

• Sports figures, such as baseball’s Babe Ruth and heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, were famous for their sports abilities but became celebrities as well.

The Chicago “Black” Sox During the

1919 World Series, eight members of the Chicago White Sox threw (intentionally lost) games. They were caught during the 1920 season.

Babe Ruth

• Sport: Baseball (1914-1935)

• Stats: 60 home runs in 1927

• Other Facts: Loved to eat hot dogs, drink beer, and go out for late nights . . . Was named the number one player of all time in 1998 by the Sporting News.

The Negro Leagues

• In 1920, Rube Foster formed the Negro National Leagues.

• African-American players were not allowed to play in Major League Baseball.

• Rube Foster wanted black owners to have control of the finances of the new league, and for the most part, they did.

• Many of the most talented baseball players of the 1920’s played in the Negro Leagues.

Negro Leagues

• At first, Negro League teams would play exhibition games against the Major League teams during the off-season.

• Many times, the Negro League teams were victorious.

• At the end of the 1920’s, Major League Baseball stopped playing these games because they were too embarrassed to lose.

• Motion pictures became increasingly popular.

• The first “talking” picture, The Jazz Singer, was made in 1927.

• The golden age of Hollywood began.

• The mass media–radio, movies, newspapers, and magazines–helped break down the focus on local interests.

• Mass media helped unify the nation and spread new ideas and attitudes.

Popular Culture (cont.)

Moviemaking at Warner Brothers Pioneering in sound films in a movie-mad decade, Warner Brothers Pictures earned profits of more than $17 million in 1929.

Poster: Birth of a Nation D. W. Griffith's epic film glorified the racist Ku Klux Klan. President Woodrow Wilson called it "history written with lightning."

The Harlem Renaissance • The Great Migration occurred when hundreds of

thousands of African Americans from the rural South headed to industrial cities in the North with the hope of a better life.

• In large northern cities, particularly New York City’s neighborhood of Harlem, African Americans created environments that stimulated artistic development, racial pride, a sense of community, and political organization, which led to a massive creative outpouring of African American arts.

The Harlem Renaissance (cont.)

• This became known as the Harlem Renaissance.

• Writer Claude McKay became the first important writer of the Harlem Renaissance.

• His work expressed defiance and contempt of racism, which were very strong writing characteristics of this time.

• Langston Hughes became the leading voice of the African American experience in the United States.

The Harlem Renaissance (cont.)

The Weary Blues This is the original cover for The Weary Blues, the first book of poetry by Langston Hughes, published in 1926. Hughes later wrote that the book included some of the first blues that he had ever heard, dating to his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas. Both the reference to the blues in Hughes's poetry and the cover design for the book evoke the connection between music and poetry that was part of the Harlem Renaissance.

• Louis Armstrong introduced jazz, a style of music influenced by Dixieland music and ragtime.

• He became the first great cornet and trumpet soloist in jazz music.

The Harlem Renaissance (cont.)

Louis Armstrong Louis Armstrong, born in 1900, first began to play the trumpet in New Orleans but emerged as a leading innovator in jazz after 1924, when he joined Fletcher Henderson's orchestra in New York. Some of his recordings from the 1920s are among the most original and imaginative contributions to jazz.

The Harlem Renaissance (cont.)

• A famous Harlem nightspot, the Cotton Club, was where some famous African American musicians, such as Duke Ellington, got their start.

• Bessie Smith sang about unrequited love, poverty, and oppression, which were classic themes in blues style music.

• This soulful style of music evolved from African American spirituals.

The Harlem Renaissance (cont.)