1920sThe Great Gatsby

DRAM A CLUB

Pre-war to 1920’s• The class system rigid, but Americans still believed America was

the land of opportunities. The self-made man was a model. Successful businessmen and moguls- heroes.

• The heroes and hero-worship: belief in individuality and possibility of greatness

• Social reform and Progressive Movement. The beginning of American Socialism

• So we inherited two worlds; the one of hope to which we had been bred; the one of disillusion which we had discovered early for ourselves. And that first world was growing as remote as another country, however close in time.

The 1920’s * The Roaring Twenties * The Boom

* The Decade of Decadence * The Jazz Age• The Boom: - general prosperity; easy money in stock-market speculation; • Prohibition of alcohol (the reform): increased alcohol consumption; Speakeasies –

centers of social life and literary life; Jazz music; • the rise of organized crime and bootlegging- major industry – Al Capone (The

Mafia: mostly Sicilians with some Jews - racketeers) • Homemade ‘bootleg’ liquor was the easiest kind of alcohol to get on the black

market but it was so disgusting that cocktails were invented to mask the taste of it (‘Orange Blossoms’, ‘Pink Lady’)

• "I have to see a man about a dog" at this period often meant going to buy whiskey; and a "handcuff" or "manacle" was an engagement or wedding ring.

The decade of decadence• the time of hedonism, alcoholic orgies, high jinks;

• the glamor vs. waste; charm vs. self-destruction; excess and unashamed glamour; • war-torn survivors were determined to live life to

the full; youth and energy more important than class or status• Energetic era that glorified youth and made

excess acceptable

Racial and religious prejudice

• segregation of blacks – the law of the South; the KKK= Ku Klux Klan – hate for African Americans, Jews, Catholics, and foreigners. Jews excluded from hotels and restaurants with sign “Restricted”.

The Second Industrial Revolution

• Mass production and great economic prosperity: the economic boom;

• Production of American consumer goods by advertising; "BUY NOW, PAY LATER" became the credo of many middle class Americans of the ROARING TWENTIES. 

• Radio- mass broadcasting medium; affordable; mass marketing;

• Telephones, record – players saw mass consumption• T Ford: the automobile

The Women in 1920s• votes for women:• for the first time women drank and smoked in public; more

educational opportunities; the war against Puritanism• Sigmund Freud: psychoanalysis fashionable; loosening of moral and

sexual restrictions liberated women. Birth control (condoms). • flappers- young, rebellious, middle-class: Louise Brooks, Clara

Bow • Fashion: Corsets abandoned. Skirts – shorter, exposed legs and

arms; hairstyle : a chin-length bob. Make-up; Nylon- thin stockings; Coco Chanel- women wore trousers; boyish figure; women on diets; Lucky Strike cigarettes: get lucky instead of sweet

The Age of Art• Literary renaissance: a.k.a. the lost generation: Fitzgerald,

Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Gertrude Stein, Eugene O’Neill; poets: T. S .Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, E.E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens- a time of wit and satire. Paris creative colony; disillusioned and cynical about the war: ‘Go East, not West!’

• Hollywood: silent movies: Charlie Chaplin; talkies; stars: Mary Pickford, Rudolph Valentino, Buster Keaton, Greta Garbo

• Architecture: the Chrysler Building in NYC; Art Deco

The Jazz Age• With radio stations flourished in New York and Chicago• Influenced by blues sung by freed slaves, plantation banjo

music- ragtime; calypso rhythms of the West Indies; improvisational, collaborative and instinctive sound

• George and Ira Gershwin; Cole Porter; Louis Armstrong; Duke Ellington Bessie Smith

• Dances: foxtrot, waltz and tango, the Charleston; the Cotton Club in Harlem the place to invent new dance styles

The end of the party (the Roaring Twenties)

• The president Herbert Hoover stated in 1928: “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.”

• Black Tuesday- October 29, 1929- stock prices on Wall Street collapsed; market lost 14 million in value; bankrupted brokers leapt to death from skyscrapers

• worldwide depression – the Great Depression; millions of people out of work

• The recipe: live life to the full for a decade-long party – with a hangover to match.