Roaring Twenties

Mass Production

 After World War I ended factories began to produce more to consumer goods.  Consumer goods are: Goods, such as food and clothing, that satisfy human wants through their direct consumption or use.

 With the war over people wanted normalcy and these goods allowed Americans to enjoy their families and return to normal lives.

Mass Production

 Things like washing machines, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, fans, radios, toasters, stoves, sewing machines, and electric irons became popular in the American home.

Mass Production

 Driving the production of these goods was the assembly line.  The assembly line was introduced by Henry Ford to build Model T automobiles.  The goal of the assembly line is to create an efficient, cheaper product because more could be created for less.

Great Migration

 Blacks began to head to the Northern United States by the millions. Racism, while still a serious obstacle, was considered much less brutal there than in the South. In addition, the North granted all adult men with the right to vote; provided better educational advancement for African-Americans and their children; and offered greater job opportunities as a result of World War I and the industrial revolution. This phenomenon, known as the Great Migration, brought more than seven million African-Americans to the North.

The Jazz Age

   Out of the roaring twenties and the Great Migration came a new style of music, Jazz. The jazz sound reflected the restless spirit of the roaring twenties. Famous Jazz musicians included: Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong.

Harlem Renaissance

 Out of the Great Migration also came a movement called the Harlem Renaissance.

 Black writers and artist like Langston Hughes used the, all black, New York neighborhood of Harlem for inspiration in their work.

Flappers & Hollywood

 New types of entertainment and styles developed during the roaring twenties.  Flappers were free spirited women that wore shorter skirts, short bobbed hair, and heavy make up.

Flappers & Hollywood

 Mass media became important especially in radio and the film industry.  Radio stations like NBC & CBS became extremely popular airing sports and music.  Sports figures also became more popular during the roaring twenties with such figures as Babe Ruth (Baseball), Jack Dempsey (boxing), and Knute Rockne (football).

Flappers & Hollywood

 Movies also became popular in the roaring twenties.  Mainly made in Hollywood, California the first movies featured subtitles and an in-house organists or pianists.  Not long after “talkies” became popular.  Soon stars like Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplain became famous.  The first full length movie with sound was the Jazz Singer which mixed the popularity of movies with that of jazz.

The Lost Generation

  The "Lost Generation" was the generation that came of age during World War I .

The writers of the Lost Generation criticized the world around them.

 Sinclair Lewis wrote about the emptiness of middle-class life in Main Street.

 F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about the excesses and emptiness of the Jazz Age in The Great Gatsby (in which Jay Gatsby invents a new life for himself and becomes rich, but never achieves his dreams).

 William Faulkner wrote stories about the Deep South that presented a strange, backward, and inbred society.

 Ernest Hemmingway wrote about the loss of belief in great causes such as war and even tried to strip language itself to its simplest forms in his writing.

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Red Scare

Although the 1920s were a time of economic prosperity, for many people, they were also a time of cynicism and paranoia.

 Many people in Europe and America were afraid that communism would grow in their countries and even overthrow their governments. As this paranoia grew in the US in the late 1910a and early 1920s, it led to a Red Scare— paranoid persecution of communists.

 Two men, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were Italian atheist anarchists who were accused of involvement in a murder and robbery at a shoe factory near Boston.

 Although there was some evidence against them, it was considered fairly weak, and when they were eventually executed (in 1927), it was generally felt that they were killed for their ethnicity and politics rather than the alleged murder.

Ku Klux Klan

 The most extreme group to oppose Communism and many of the other social changes in the 1920s was the Ku Klux Klan.

 Originally created in the 1860s to oppose reconstruction, it had died away until it was reborn in 1915.

 However, it did not just hate blacks any more—it also hated Jews, foreigners, communists, Catholics, atheists, and other unpopular groups.

Ku Klux Klan

 By the mid-1920s, the Klan grew into an Invisible Empire of over 3 million (perhaps up to 4 or 5 million) members, not only in the South, but also in many parts of the North, particularly in cities where immigrants competed against local whites for jobs and brought new cultures with them.

 Many people joined (or at least sort of sympathized with) the Klan because their traditional way of life seemed under threat by modernism—new ways of life.

Monkey Trial

 Most rural people wanted their children to get an education but they wanted a fairly basic education: reading, writing, and arithmetic.

 More and more Americans were graduating high school and even going to college, though, and were being exposed to new ideas.

 Fundamentalists and other traditionalists responded by trying to control what was taught in schools. The most famous attempt at this was the Butler Act in Tennessee, which outlawed teaching evolution of humans.

 This act was tested by John Scopes of Dayton at the urging of the ACLU. Even some local leaders wanted him to challenge the law to draw attention to their town.

Monkey Trial

 Scopes taught evolution in his high school classroom and was arrested. The Monkey Trial that followed drew national attention, particularly as William Jennings Bryan came to prosecute the case and famous defense lawyer Clarence Darrow came to defend Scopes.

 There was no doubt that Scopes had broken the law he was found guilty and fined the minimum of $100, which Bryan immediately offered to pay, although the conviction was later overturned on a technicality.

 Instead, the case was a contest between fundamentalism and modernism. Many of the national media ridiculed Bryan and Tennessee, and Darrow managed to prove that Bryan was not as great a biblical expert as he claimed, all of which reduced national respect for fundamentalism, while making traditionalists even more suspicious of modernism.

Prohibition and Organized Crime

  Alcohol was seen as the devils advocate and banning the substance would help improve the quality of American lives. It caused an explosive growth in crime with more than double the amount of illegal bars and saloons operating than before prohibition.

18

th

Amendment

     With the passage of the 18 became illegal to manufacture, sale or transport intoxicating liquors.

th Amendment it People who enjoyed a drink became criminal for doing so. It was organized crime who supplied the booze. In January of 1920 the American government banned the sale and supply of alcohol, the government thought that this would curb crime and violence, prohibition did not achieve it’s goals, leading more toward higher crime rates and excessive violence.

Prohibition doesn’t work!

   As crime increased and gangsters began to have turf wars killing innocent people Americans began to tire of the law.

With a large coastline it was almost impossible to police with only five percent of alcohol ever being confiscated. Finally 14 years after it passed, prohibition was repealed with the passage of the 21 st Amendment.