The Jazz Age 1920-1929
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Transcript The Jazz Age 1920-1929
The Jazz Age
1920-1929
Section 1: Boom Times
Section 2: Life in the Twenties
Section 3: A Creative Era
Section 1: Boom Times
Prosperity and Productivity
GNP = $70 billion in 1922 and $100 million in 1929
Investments grew
Business expansion led to wage increases
Electricity becomes common in American homes, by
1930 2/3 of homes have electricity
Mixers, food grinders, sewing machines, washing
machines, radio and phonographs
Scientific management – Frederick W. Taylor- based on
the idea that every kind of work could be broken down
into a series of smaller tasks
“Time-and-Motion” studies identified these tasks
“Efficiency” experts
The Growth of the Automobile Industry
Henry Ford
Model T “Tin Lizzy”
Assembly line at Detroit factory – cut production
time in half, reduced prices, $850 in 1909 to $290
Brought them to the average American
Average 1 car for every 5 citizens
Became largest business
Consuming: glass, rubber, steel, etc
By 1929 over 1 million people worked in auto industry or
a related industry
Changes in work
Ford and his workers
Shortened workday (8 hours)
Raised wages ($5 per day due to tedium)
Regulated morality and personal behavior of workers
Opposed tobacco use, alcohol use, American values
stressed, Recommended workers move from ethnic
neighborhoods, learn to read and write English
Impact of new products
Electric appliances
Less domestic help
A Land of Automobiles
Trains & Trolley Cars lose riders
Almost completely replaced horse-drawn vehicles
400,000 miles of new roads built in 1920s
Billboards, drive-in restaurants, filling stations, tourist
cabins start to appear
Suburbs
Auto-tourism- allowed Americans to travel without
restrictions of schedules or routes of trains.
Family life
New social opportunities for teens
Critics claimed it caused a loss of community
Also brought pollution, traffic jams, parking problems,
accident rates soared
Creating Consumers
Alfred P. Sloan- head of General Motors
Marketing
Installment plans – “buy it on time” –kitchen
appliances, pianos, sewing machines, cars
Streamlined
look – used for planes, ships, cars, etc…
started doing it for other things like radios, clocks, and
appliances
Up-to-date models continued to arrive
GM introduced yearly model change and the trade-in,
getting people to get a new car each year
Department of Labor reported women were going
into debt trying to keep up with fashion!
Advertising
Big business in 1920s
1929 $3 million spent on advertising alone – in
magazines, newspapers, billboards, radio spots
Targeted women, used slogans, jingles and celebrities
A growing retail industry
Chain stores- A&P grocery chain
Quick freezing techniques
cellophane
Section 2: Life in the Twenties
Prohibition
Eighteenth Amendment
Ban on manufacture, sale, transportation of
alcoholic beverages
Volstead Act created to enforce amendment
Some places strictly enforced, some not so much
Al Capone and the Chicago mob
violence against other mobs/gangs
St. Valentine’s Day 1929 – his mob killed 7 of a
rival gang
Speakeasies, clubs, bars, bootleg, smuggling
Enter Eliot Ness and the Federal Prohibition Bureau
Strict enforcement of prohibition laws
“Untouchables” and Ness arrested Capone on
tax evasion charges, during prison time lost
control of his gang
Positives of Prohibition
Alcoholism, alcohol related deaths declined
Negatives of Prohibition – more press
Widespread breakdown of law and order
Turned millions of law abiding citizens into
lawbreakers
Repealed by the 21st Amendment in 1933
Youth Culture
The “new woman”
Flappers: Stylish, adventurous, independent,
career-minded
Changed their dress = Goodbye corsets… hello
shorter skirts and silk hose!
Cut hair into bobbed styles
Drove cars, sought economic independence
Participated in sports
College life
1900-1930 college enrollment tripled
Middle and upper classes
“collegiate look” = baggy flannel slacks
& sports
jacket
Leisure fun and fads
Dance marathons
Dance Derby of the Century = 482 hours!
(nearly 3 weeks) in 1928
Beauty Contests
Miss America- 1921
Flag pole sitting
Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly, most famous
Mass entertainment
Radio
Broadcasted church services, local news reports,
music, sports events
Dempsey- Carpenter heavyweight title fight
World Series
Advertising spots for sale “sponsors”
Movies
Cecil B. DeMille
Biblical epic plots, complex characters
Why Change Your Wife (1920)
Forbidden Fruit (1921)
The Ten Commandments (1923)
Actors – silent films
Lon Chaney (horror/scary)
Charlie Chaplin (comedy)
Tom Mix (westerns)
1927 “Talkies”
The Jazz Singer (1st one) 1927- starred Al Jolson
The Sheik – Rudolph Valentino (married in Crown
Point)- created controversy. People demanded
regulations on films.
Sports
Professional sports
College/professional football
Red Grange played his first professional
the Chicago Bears Thanksgiving 1925
game for
Baseball
“Black Sox” Scandal
Legends: Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Lou Gehrig
Books and magazines
Book-of-the-month club founded 1923
Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post
“Shoeless” Joe Jackson and seven other Chicago White Sox
players accused of taking a bribe to throw the World Series
game in 1919
Cartoons, short stories, advertising pages
Dewitt and Lila Wallace found Reader’s Digest in 1921
Celebrities and Heroes
Young people copied the celebrities behaviors
A Woman of Affairs, starring Greta Garbo, she wore a slouch
hat… became the “in” thing
“Sultan of Swat” = Babe Ruth
Jim Thorpe, won both the pentathlon and decathlon in the
1912 Olympics, went on to play baseball and football
Amelia Earhart- first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean
Religion
in the 1920s
Revivalism
Evils of popular entertainment and alcohol
Aimee Semple McPherson
Movie star image: white dress, white shoes, blue
cape
International Church of the Foursquare Gospel,
headquartered in Los Angeles
Dramatic religious services- combined orchestra,
chorus, stage sets
Closely tied with Pentecostalism
Fundamentalism
Protestant movement
Traditional Christian doctrine to be followed without
question
Bible was a literal translation
Christian “liberals” were attacked, the ones who
believed in science, evolution
Evangelical spread fundamentalism “old-time” religion
The
Scopes Trial- July 1925
Tennessee
legislature outlawed “Darwinism” in
public schools
American Civil Liberties Union offered to defend a school
teacher, John Scopes, a science teacher
Defense attorney, Clarence Darrow
Prosecution witness… William Jennings Bryan… 3
time democratic presidential hopeful
Trial exposed the deep divide in American society
between traditional religious values and new ones based
on scientific thought and theory
Darrow attacked the law as impeding free expression
Bryan admitted his belief that bible was literal, forced
Bryan to admit inconsistencies in his interpretation of
the scriptures
Darrow failed to convince the jury. Snopes was found
guilty and fined $100
Showed to some a narrow mindedness in some
fundamentalists like Bryan and lowered some
American’s views of fundamentalism
Section 3: The Creative Era
Music
The Emergence of Jazz
Charles “Buddy” Bolden
Blues mix of slave music and spirituals
Mamie Smith
Gertrude “Ma” Rainey
Bessie Smith
Louis Armstrong
Jazz Moves North
Chicago and New York
Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton – Chicago formed a band
called the Red Hot Peppers, “Jelly Roll Blues”
Joseph “King” Oliver, Creole Jazz Band, Louis
Armstrong joined his band in 1922, “Mabel’s Dream”
and “Froggie Moore”
1924 Louis Armstrong goes solo “When the Saint Go
The popularization of jazz
Bix Beiderbecke, cornetist and pianist, put jazz rhythms in his
music
George Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue
Igor Stravinsky
Aaron Copeland
Big Band music, dance music
Harlem’s Cotton Club
Duke Ellington
Ethel Waters
Cab Calloway
Many clubs were “white” only with black entertainers, even
when the clubs were in black neighborhoods
Langston Hughes “Why should I want to be white? I am a
negro – and beautiful”
Josephine Baker and others traveled and spread jazz to other
places, such as Paris which had its own Jazz Age
The
Harlem Renaissance
Theater
Paul Robeson, Emperor Jones
Son of a former slave
Graduate from Rutgers and Columbia Law
Singer “Ol’ Man River”, from Showboat
First African American actor to play a leading role
opposite a white actress
Rose McClendon, Deep River
In Abraham’s Bosom
Porgy, she appeared in the first production
Literature
Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928)
Claude McKay, Home to Harlem
James Weldon Johnson, educator, lawyer, diplomat to
Venezuela and Nicaragua, office of the NAACP
Poetry: “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” became a song
Autobiography
of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)
The Book of American Negro Poetry
Executive
secretary of NAACP, raised money to support
African American artists and art programs in Harlem
The Lost Generation
Scorned middle-class consumerism and superficiality of post
war years
“lost generation” was coined by Gertrude Stein in reference
to Ernest Hemingway and others
Stories of disillusionment
Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms – devastation of war
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby –emptiness of the pursuit of social
status and money
Married Zelda Sayre, her mental illness and his
alcoholism cut short their glamorous lifestyle when
his creativity dried up due to the pressures
Criticizing
the middle class
Sinclair Lewis
Main Street (1920) satire of close-mindedness
of a typical small Midwestern town
Babbitt (1922), story of middle aged realtor and
city booster who hates his life but is too
cowardly to change
H.I. Mencken, wrote in The American Mercury, he
promoted writers who satirized middle America or
“booboisie”, made fun of Republican politicians,
Fundamentalist Christians, rural southerners, people
who lived in small towns, and others
The Visual Arts
Painting and Photography
Georgia O’Keefe – NY factories and tenements
Alfred Stieglitz – photos of people, airplanes,
skyscrapers, crowded city streets
Murals
Mexican influence
Jose Clemente Orozco
Diego Rivera
Detroit Institute of Art
Wife, Frida Kahlo
Rockefeller Center mural was destroyed by the
sponsors because it featured Lenin
David Alfaro Siqueiros
Architecture
Louis Sullivan
Frank Lloyd Wright
Empire State Building (1250 feet) in 1931 – tallest
building in the world until 1954.
Chrysler Building (1048 feet) in 1930
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