Tommy's Notes Repository

6 - 3 THE ROARING TWENTIES

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THE ROARING TWENTIES

LIFE & CULTURE IN AMERICA IN THE 1920S

THE TWENTIES WOMAN

  • After the turmoil of World War I, Americans were looking for a little fun in the 1920s

  • Women were becoming more independent and achieving greater freedoms ( right to vote, more employment, and freedom via the auto )

  • During the 1920s, a new ideal emerged for some women: the Flapper

  • Flapper was an emancipated young woman who embraced the new fashions & Urban attitudes

NEW ROLES FOR WOMEN

  • Black women were already working outside their homes in fields as sharecroppers.
  • Black women also worked as teachers and other roles in black owned countries

Early 20th Century teachers

  • Fast changing world of the 1920s produced new roles for women

  • Many women entered the workplace as nurses, teachers, librarians, and secretaries

  • However, women earned less than men & were kept out of many traditional male jobs (mgmt) & faced discrimination Women’s Suffrage – 19th Amendment

  • The Nineteenth Amendment, passed in 1920 after the government acknowledged the contributions of women during World War I, removed gender restrictions for voting by allowing women to vote.

  • Except in the western states where they were a cherished minority, women rarely had a “voice” in their government

  • More people ( women ) were represented after the passing of the nineteenth amendment created a more democratic government

American Consumer Society

  • Welfare Capitalism
    • Real income increases
      • Higher rate for owners, managers, skilled labor
      • Minimal increased rates for unskilled labor and working class
    • Insurance, profit-sharing, worker safety
    • Decreased influence of unions
  • Mass Production
    • Wide variety and availability of consumer products at affordable prices
    • Model T
    • Domestic appliances
  • Installment plans
  • Impact of the Automobile

Going Electric

  • Access to electricity provided american households the power to run all sorts of new labor saving devices
  • Advertisements in magazines and newspapers pushed new products like
    • Refrigerators
    • Washers
    • irons
    • Toasters
  • The popularity and affordability of the automobile changed the face of America.
  • Familes moved to suburbs and could communite to work in the cities
  • Doctors could use automobiles to make house calls.
  • Police departments retired their horses and bought cars
  • Driving vacations became popular, resulting in thosuands of restaurants and ice cream parlors opening across the US
  • “Auto-related” industries like gas, steel, glass, tires, and other car parts and services started to grow to support the increasing success of automobiles.

CHANGING FAMILY

  • American birth rates declined for several decades before the 1920s

  • During the 1920s that trend increased as birth control information became widely available

  • Birth control clinics opened and the American Birth Control League was founded in 1921 MODERN FAMILY EMERGES

  • As the 1920s unfolded, many features of the modern family emerged

  • Marriage based on romantic love, women managed household & finances, children not considered laborers/ wage earners but rather developing children who needed nurturing & education

EDUCATION & POPULAR CULTURE

  • During the 1920s, developments in education had a powerful impact on the nation

  • Enrollment in high schools quadrupled between 1914 and 1926

  • Public schools met the challenge of educationg millions of immigrants

EXPANDING NEWS COVERAGE

  • As literacy increased newspaper circulation rose and mass-circulation magazines flourished

  • By the end of the 1920s, ten American magazines — including Reader’s Digest and Time – boasted circulations of over 2 million RADIO COMES OF AGE

  • Although print media was popular, radio was the most powerful communications medium to emerge in the 1920s

  • News was delivered faster and to a larger audience

  • Americans could hear the voice of the president or listen to the World Series live

AMERICAN HEROES OF THE 20s

  • in 1929 Americans spent 4.5 billion on entertainment ( inlcuding sports )

  • People crowded into baseball games to see their heroes

  • Babe Ruth was a larger than life American hero who played for Yankees

  • He hit 60 homers in 1927

  • Black people had to play in the Negro League and had their own heros, like Satchel Paige, Bullet Joe Rogan and Buck O’Neil

LINDBERGH’S FLIGHT

  • Some America’s most beloved hero of the time wasn’t an athlete but a small-town pilot named Charles Lindbergh

  • Lindbergh made the first nonstop solo trans-atlantic flight

  • He took off from NYC in the Spirit of St. Louis & arrived in Paris 33 hours later to a hero’s welcome ENTERTAINMENT AND ARTS

  • Even before sound, movies offered a means of escape through romance and comedy

  • First sound movie: Jazz Singer ( 1927 )

  • First animated with sound: _Steamboat Willie _(1928)

  • By 1930_ millions of _Americans went to the movies each week WRITERS OF THE 1920s

  • Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald coined the phrase “Jazz Age” to describe the 1920s.

  • Fitzgerald wrote _Paradise Lost _and The Great Gatsby

  • The Great Gatsby reflected the emptiness of New York Elite Society

  • Edith Warton’s age of Innocence dramatized the clash between traditional and modern values

  • Willa Cather celebrated the simple, dignified lives of immigrant farmers in Nebraska in My Antonia The Great Migration

  • The Great Migration of African Americans from southern rural (country) to northern urban (city) areas was the result of push and pull factors.

  • Jim Crow Laws and lynchings as well as economic hardship of sharecroppying the effects of the boll weevil, and the lack of alternative economic opportunities prompted many to leave the same .

  • Job opportunities in the factories, especially during World War I, brought African Americans to the cities of the North and the Midwest

    Question: _Discuss _the changes in American society or the shifts in American culture that took place in the 1920’s

    • Explain TWO specific changes in American culture or American society that illustrate a change from traditional to modern values.
      • What was the change?
      • What were the traditional values in the 1920s? What were the modern values in the 1920s?
      • How did this change impact the future of American history?

Harlem Renaissance

  • Between 1910 and 1920 the Great migration saw hundreds of thosuands of African Americans move north to big cities
  • By 1920 over 5 million of the nation’s 12 million blacks (over 40%) lived in cities

African American Goals

  • Founded in 1909, the NAACP urged African Americans to protest Racial Violence
  • W.E.B Dubois, a founding member, led a march of 10,000 black men in NY to protest violence

Marcus Garvey-UNIA

  • Marcus Garvey believed that African Americans should build a sperate society ( Africa )
  • In 1914, Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association
  • Garvey claimed a million members by the mid-1920s
  • He left a powerful legacy of black pride, economic independence and Pan-Africanism

Harlem, New York

  • Harlem, NY became the largest black urban community
  • Due to social segregation Harlem suffered from overcrowindg, unemployment and poverty. However, in the 1920s it was home to a literary and artistic revival known as the Harlem Renaissance

African American Writers

  • ** **The Harlem Renaissance was primarily a literary movement
  • Led by well educated black with a new sense of pride in the african american experience
  • Claude McKay’s poems expressed the pain of life in the ghetto

Langston Hughes

  • Missouri bourn Langston Hughes was one o fht movement’s best known poets
  • Many of his poems described the difficult lives of working-class blacks
  • Some of his poems were put to music, especially jazz and blues

Louis Armstrong

  • Jazz was born in the early 20th century
  • In 1922, a young trumpet player named Louis Armstrong joined the Creole Jazz Band
  • Later he joined Fletcher Henderson’s band in NYC
  • Armstrong is considered one of the most important and influential musicians in the history of jazz

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington

  • In the late 1920s Duke Ellington a jazz pianist and composer, led his ten piece orchestra at the famous cotton club
  • Ellington won renown as one of America’s greatest composers