Referred to as the Jazz Age, the Golden Era, or a reactionary decade, the 1920s were a paradoxical time.
Marked by cultural vibrancy, new forms of entertainment and music, and a new openness.
Women, particularly white women, experienced liberalization after gaining the right to vote with the 19th Amendment in 1920.
Also a period of reactionary tendencies in response to the overreach of the Progressive Era and World War I.
Saw a return to smaller government and the rise of traditionalist movements like Prohibition, Christian fundamentalism, and racial repression.
The country was trying to define itself after World War I.
Flappers
Flappers, with short skirts, bobbed hair, and carefree attitudes, became emblematic of the era.
They defied stricter morals of previous generations and embodied a generation ready to move on from World War I.
The term "flapper" came from the unbuckled shoes that would flap while dancing.
Represented either a new age of openness or imminent moral decay, depending on the viewpoint.
Flappers smoked, drank, danced to jazz, and flaunted sexual liberation.
The flapper controversy exemplified the cultural conflicts of the 1920s.
Focus Questions for the Module
How did the U.S. fashion a new role in world affairs during the 1920s, maintaining influence diplomatically and economically despite not joining the League of Nations?
How did mass culture, including car culture, Hollywood, and radio, change American lifestyles and attitudes, creating both unity and cultural shifts?
What motivated the reactionary backlash, and how did it manifest through movements like Prohibition and Christian fundamentalism, influencing social and political landscapes?
Were the 1920s a time of genuine liberation for women or were the ideas of the "new woman" and flappers exaggerated, masking the continued relegation of many women to traditional roles?
What was the Harlem Renaissance, and what role did it play in furthering black civil rights by fostering black cultural pride and activism?
Foreign Policy
The U.S. did not sign the Treaty of Versailles or join the League of Nations but remained active in world affairs.
Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge used disarmament and economic influence to prevent armed conflict.
Washington Conference (1921-1922)
Convened to negotiate agreements limiting warships.
Reaffirmed the Open Door Policy in China.
Urged cooperation among leading military powers (Britain, Japan, France).
Aimed to correct Woodrow Wilson's failures in Paris.
Sought to prevent war without joining the League of Nations.
Resulted in countries voluntarily destroying armaments and a ten-year moratorium on battleship construction.
Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928)
Negotiated by Calvin Coolidge's Secretary of State Frank Kellogg.
Renounced aggressive war as an instrument of national policy.
Agreed to resolve disagreements through peaceful means.
Aimed to prevent the recurrence of World War I.
Economic Influence
The U.S. used its strong economy to keep peace and spread commerce.
European countries, especially France and Great Britain, were in debt to the U.S. from World War I.
The U.S. insisted on debt repayment.
Dawes Plan
Loaned Germany 200,000,000 in gold to pay a reduced reparations bill.
Gave Germany more time to meet its debt obligations.
Charles G. Dawes won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925 for his efforts.
America loaned money to Germany, Germany paid reparations to Britain and France, which helped their economies recover and The United States got a share of interest, from those loans.
American dollars kept the world's economy afloat for several years.
Collapsed when the U.S. economy declined in 1929, leading to a worldwide depression and radicalizing Europe.
Republican Administrations
Republicans controlled the White House throughout the 1920s (Harding, Coolidge, Hoover).
They saw the Progressive Era as a mistake and aimed to return to a laissez-faire ethos.
Harding's campaign promised a return to "normalcy."
Implemented tax cuts and anti-union policies.
Reinstated high tariffs to protect domestic industries.
Supreme Court
Outlawed closed shop states, weakening union power.
Close ties between business and government led to scandals.
Harding administration was plagued by scandals.
Teapot Dome Scandal: Secretary of Interior Albert Fall went to jail for accepting bribes in exchange for leasing government-controlled oil reserves.
Car Culture
Car registration almost tripled from 1920 to 1930.
By 1930, 80% of the world's cars were in the U.S.
Cars offered a cleaner solution to transportation in cities compared to horse-drawn carriages.
Government responded with road-building programs.
Cars transformed the possibilities in the landscape of American society Because the ease of car travel and the growing affordability of cars meant that Americans demanded good roads for the first time in the nineteen twenties.
Hundreds of small towns decayed because automobiles enabled people to bypass them for more distant cities and towns.
In cities, streetcars began to disappear as workers moved to the suburbs and commuted to work.
The rubber, asphalt, iron and steel, petroleum take a toll on the natural world.
Mass production by the assembly line became standard.
Productivity in manufacturing increased by 33% between 1922 and 1929, while average wages increased only about 8%.
Cars transformed recreational habits
Minister often complained that instead of spending Sunday in church, families chose to take all day drives.
Cars let teenagers and young adults take their dating lives out of their households, out of their family parlor, and into the backseat of an automobile, to the dismay of parents everywhere.
Automobiles made it harder for town officials to regulate vice and regulate things like red light districts.
Efficient mass production made the automobile revolution possible.
Advertisement
Using striking visuals, using psychology and sociology, you know, playing on gender roles, playing on idealized lifestyles, advertising by the nineteen twenties had taken firm root.
Cars were advertised to both men and women.
For women, cars are seen as extensions of the women themselves much like the clothing that these women are buying.
This is explicitly linked: cars and new consumer culture.
Labor and Welfare Capitalism
After the war, the government withdrew from regulating industry and worker-industry relations.
Businesses reinstated low wages, long hours, and blacklisted union members.
Increased association between unions and communism.
Industrialists offered benefits like medical insurance, pensions, and stock ownership (welfare capitalism) to create a loyal workforce and obviate the need for unions.
Fringe benefits like paid vacations and sick leave were introduced for stable, well-trained workforce.
When the economy collapsed in 1929, capitalists started cutting these benefits in effort to save revenue.
Increased industrial productivity created an unprecedented abundance of affordable goods.
Blue and white collar workers often frustrated at work and the monotony of work.
They used their growing leisure time and access to material goods to create more fulfilling lives.
A modern consumer culture arose that often deemphasized Victorian values of thrift, and restraint.
Radio and Movies
Radio played a key role in forging a national mass culture.
Over 60% of American homes owned a radio by 1930.
Americans simultaneously gathered around their radios to learn election results or to listen to a baseball game.
Big companies used radio to sponsor shows to boost sales.
The nineteen twenties was the heyday of local radio that was designed specifically for the communities around it, whether it was unions, whether it was certain religious groups or immigrant communities.
Movie stars enjoyed nationwide adulation.
Hollywood produced films with sound.
Consumerism was a way to alleviate anxiety, to deal with cultural unrest and social upheaval.
The Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance
African Americans migrated to urban cities in the North, escaping the racial confines of the South.
Cities became hubs of black politics and culture.
Harlem became a center of African American artists, musicians, and writers who celebrated black culture.
Alain Locke's "The New Negro" in 1925 captured the creative impulse of the Harlem Renaissance, emphasizing black racial pride and militancy.
The Harlem Renaissance took up themes that were absent from what were considered, quote, unquote, serious works of literature.
Marcus Garvey
Took up Washington's idea of empowering blacks economically.
Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association or the UNIA, which encouraged economic self sufficiency by creating black owned businesses.
A Jamaican immigrant named Marcus Garvey took up Washington's idea of empowering blacks economically.
Founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), promoting economic self-sufficiency through black-owned businesses.
A black nationalist, Garvey advocated for an independent African nation to reunite the world's dispersed black peoples.
Convicted of mail fraud in 1923 and deported.
Garveyism offered black Americans an alternative to the integrationist vision of Du Bois and the NAACP; double and it introduced separatist ideas that that black power advocates would, in many ways, resurrect in the nineteen sixties.
Jazz
Jazz was an integral part of the Harlem Renaissance and was an original American musical style that combined African American and European musical traditions.
Famous jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, Jelly Roll Morton made their name in the clubs of Harlem.
White and black patrons flocked to Harlem to listen to black bands at venues like the Cotton Club.
Jazz was propelled to popularity by the growth of radio stations and record industry.
Many African Americans themselves views jazz as kind of the devil's music
Jazz clubs like the Cotton Club often served alcohol illegally.
The Black Middle Class often preferred spirituals because they felt that it was a musical tradition that projected a much more respectable image of black culture to mainstream America.
White audiences were common at black jazz performances.
Women in the 1920s
Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote in 1920.
Black women in the South in particular remained disenfranchised, although some black women did exercise the the did exercise their rights to vote in the North, in places in the North.
Female reformers were expecting impact on things that affected women
League of Women Voters had a list of issues it expected to resonate among female voters including child labor, cleaning up city politics, protective legislation for female workers.
League of Women Voters did not include demanding the 19th amendments enforce for black and white women alike.
**Shepherd Towner Act in 1921 that offered eight years of of matching funds to states for classes that taught that taught poor mothers, about things like nutrition, hygiene, prenatal care.
The Shepherd Towner Act also provided visiting nurses for low income pregnant women and for new mothers.
it became clear by the end of the decade that women did not vote as a block.
Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)
On the one hand, radical feminists like Alice Paul argued that the ERA would, in kind of one fell swoop, eradicate all the legal barriers, and all these kind of archaic state laws that had been created to keep women in a a state of second class citizenship
More moderate reformers who worried that the ERA would endanger protective legislation for women that they had very carefully crafted in recent in in the years before the nineteen twenties opposed it.
Women made up almost 24%, almost a quarter of the workforce by 1920.
women earned less than men; women did become a key consumer demographic and advertisers targeted them.
Female Reformers like Maragaret Sanger believed that women deserved contraception because having too many children undermined women's health. and economic prospects.
In 1916, Sanger opened the nation's first birth control clinic in Brooklyn but was shut down for distributing information about birth control under the idea that it constituted a form of illicit information.
For serving 30 days in jail for this
By openly discussing birth control, Sanger helped make public the private contraception practices of middle class couples.
Rather than counseling women to avoid sex if they wanted to advance economically, Sanger asserted that women had as much right as men to enjoy sexual intercourse without fearing for their lives.
Eugenicists saw birth control as a tool to prevent those deemed unfit from having children.
States authorized compulsory sterilization of women deemed mentally handicapped, criminals, epileptics, etc., until the 1960s.
Cultural Unrest
Many writers and artists felt alienated from America's consumerist society.
The "Lost Generation" of young, white, college-educated men and women were embittered by the war and left the U.S.
Lost Generation writers: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Thurber, Sinclair Lewis.
Prohibition
The 18th Amendment banned the manufacture and sale of alcohol.
Prohibition aimed to eliminate crime, boost productivity, and lift the nation's morality.
Instead, Prohibition unleashed a fourteen year orgy of law breaking that is just unparalleled in the nation's history
The treasury department was charged with enforcing prohibition; enforcement of prohibition from the very beginning was piecemeal.
Local police were either sympathetic to anti prohibitionists or were in the pockets of organized crime particularly in major cities like Chicago and New York City.
Illicit drinking led to a new kind of space, the speakeasy, which was a an illegal nightclub
Detroit, for example, was home to more than 20,000 illegal drinking establishments.
Serious criminals took over the liquor trade.
Prohibition made law breakers of many
Federal authorities finally sent Al Capone to prison for tax evasion.
By the beginning of the 1930s Americans overwhelmingly favored the repeal of the eighteenth amendment, And it would be it would ended up it would end up being repealed as one of the first acts of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's new administration in 1933 simply because the social and political costs outweighed its benefits.
Criminalizing liquor did not defeat what many prohibitionists called Satan in a bottle.
Public drinking by respectable middle and upper class women; they are now in the act of giving the secret password to the doorman!
Backlash Against the New Woman
The actress Sports the badgers of flapper hood; an intoxication of rouge.
There was question of whether or not a sexual revolution occurred in the nineteen twenties due to widespread fears about flapper culture and the ideals of the new woman.
Change in sexual morals were evoluntionary rather revolutionary.
Rural America vs Urban America
In 1920 the nation's urban population outnumbered its rural, and fear of being marginalized often led rural white Americans into really, really ugly directions.
Farmers did not share in the wealth of the nineteen twenties.
By the end of by the end of the twenties, almost 40% of the nation's farmers did not own land.
About almost nine out of every 10, rural home lacked indoor plumbing, electricity, and urban domination over the nation's political, cultural, and economic life drove rural Americans in really reactionary directions.
Cities seem to stand for everything that rural areas stood against.
In the twenties, frustrated rural people sought to kind of recapture their country by helping to push through prohibition, to dam the flow of immigrants, to revive the Ku Klux Klan, to defend the Bible as a literal truth, all kinds of different things.
Immigration Restrictions
War against Germany expanded nativist sentiments.
Union leaders feared that millions of poor immigrants would undercut their efforts to organize American workers.
Rural America and its god fearing Protestants were alarmed that most of the immigrants were Catholic.
In 1921, Congress responded by severely restricting immigration
Johnson-Reed Act: limited the number of immigrants, squeezing nationalities like Italians and Russians; It cut immigration by more than 80%, but it squeezed some nationalities a lot more than others; also add Japanese and other Asians to those completely excluded; It was supported rural Americans; Anti foreign hysteria climaxed in the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, who were arrested in 1920 for robbery and murder in Massachusetts; the law marked the end of the era symbolized by the statue of liberty welcome of europe's huddle masses. who were yearning to breath free!!!
The Red Scare
The Red Scare was widespread repression of dissent of labor unrest and it led to It culminated in raids by the attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, that targeted men and women for their political beliefs, not their illegal acts.
Palmer raids in 1920 arrested thousands of alleged subversives.
Collapse of the Red Scare because of success as the Palmer Raids!!!!
Fundamentalism and Modernism
Christian fundamentalists felt they darwins theories contradicted the bible description of god is that he created the world in seven days.
Those believers are fundamentalism and they feel the bible is the one true belief!
Modernism: new scientific knowledge that went against the bible (fossiles)
Battle with fundimentalism and modernism= SCOPES TRIAL
Scopes trail generatred into a media cercus becuase of the 1 court trial coverage on he radio!!!
Court upheld law and did punished John Scope!
Fudementilism won legal but last the war = Portraied in batlle between the country and the city showed hte haterd on urbab peple for rural people!!!
Ku Klux Klan
Second klux KLAN: was expanded in with and direct hatred toward
Second iteration of the Klan was a lot more xenophobic than the first Klan!!!!
The second Klan proclaimed 100% americanism the pledge to defend morality; Hiram EVANS, one of our primary source; the sacratness of our sabbath; home, chastity
Eventually soulical changed alogn with violence and exxcess.!!!!! Crippled THISVERSION OF KU KLUX KLAN because concerns invading foreigners. Sensational wrong doing by leaders and member cost supporter to traditional moralists!!!! AGAIN the socail grievences and religious anxietis of the countryside be able to get ingitned