Lecture 7: The Jazz Age

The Jazz Age

Introduction

The Jazz Age generally refers to the 1920s.
The 1920s was a paradoxical time period with contradictory elements.
- Cultural vibrancy: New forms of entertainment and music emerged.
- Women's liberation: White women gained the right to vote with the 19th Amendment in 1920, leading to liberalization and opportunities.
- Reactionary tendencies: Response to the overreach of the Progressive Era and World War I, with a return to smaller government and traditionalist movements.
  - Prohibition: Banning the sale of alcohol at the national level.
  - Christian fundamentalism: Teaching that the words in the Bible were literal and should be followed by Americans.
  - Racial repression and xenophobia: Country trying to figure out its identity after World War I.

Flappers

Emblematic of the 1920s, representing high spirits and a desire to move forward from the tragedy of World War I.
Flappers were young women who smoked, drank, danced to jazz, and flaunted their sexual liberation with revealing clothes.
The flapper controversy highlighted cultural conflicts of the 1920s.

Focus Questions

How did the U.S. fashion a new role for itself in world affairs during the 1920s?
How did the new mass culture change Americans' lifestyles and attitudes?
What motivated a reactionary backlash during the 1920s, and how did it manifest itself?
Were the 1920s a time of political, economic, and social liberation for women, or were these ideas exaggerated?
What was the Harlem Renaissance, and what role did it play in furthering black civil rights?

Foreign Policy

The U.S. did not sign the Treaty of Versailles or join the League of Nations.
Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge aimed to prevent armed conflict through disarmament and economic influence.

Disarmament

An anti-militarization movement to prevent arms races like those leading up to World War I.
Warren Harding convened the Washington Conference in 1921-1922 to limit warships and reaffirm the Open Door Policy in China.
The conference aimed to correct Woodrow Wilson's failures in Paris and rejected the League of Nations due to concerns about American sovereignty.
The Washington Conference helped limit the growth of worldwide navies and set a ten-year moratorium on battleship construction.

Kellogg-Briand Pact

Negotiated in 1928, it renounced aggressive war as an instrument of national policy and aimed to resolve disagreements through peaceful means.

Economic Influence

The U.S. used its strong economy to keep peace and spread commerce.
European countries owed debts to the U.S. from World War I, and the U.S. insisted on repayment.
Germany faced a large war debt and a $33,000,000,000$ reparation bill per the Versailles Treaty.
The Dawes Plan loaned Germany $200 million in gold to pay a reduced reparations bill and provided more time to meet its debt.
Charles G. Dawes won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925 for his efforts.
American dollars kept the world's economy afloat for several years, but the arrangement collapsed when the U.S. economy declined in 1929, leading to a worldwide depression and the rise of authoritarian regimes.

Domestic Policy

Republican administrations of the 1920s aimed to return the government to a pre-Progressive Era state.
Harding's campaign promoted a return to normalcy, with smaller and more efficient government.
Tax cuts were instituted, union-friendly policies were revoked, anti-union policies were promoted, and high tariffs were reinstated to protect domestic industries.The Supreme Court outlawed closed shop states, weakening union power.
Closed shop states: States where union membership was required for certain industries.
Open shop states: States where workers could choose whether or not to join a union; often led to intimidation against joining.

Scandals

Close ties between business and government led to scandals, particularly in the Harding administration.
The Teapot Dome Scandal involved Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall, who accepted bribes for leasing government-controlled oil reserves in Teapot Dome, Wyoming.

Car Culture

Car registration nearly tripled from 1920 to 1930.
By 1930, 80% of the world's cars were in the U.S.
Cars offered a clean solution to transportation problems in cities, which were often dirty and smelly with horse manure.
The government responded to the demand for good roads with a massive road-building program.
Hundreds of small towns decayed as people bypassed them for more distant cities.
Streetcars disappeared as workers moved to suburbs and commuted by car.
The automobile industry significantly impacted the natural world through the demand for resources like rubber, asphalt, iron, steel, and petroleum.
Increased manufacturing productivity led to more affordable cars, with productivity increasing by 33% between 1922 and 1929, while average wages only increased about 8%.
Cars allowed teenagers and young adults to take their dating lives out of their households
Cars made it harder for town officials to regulate vice and led to concerns about moral decay, with one judge declaring the automobile a "house of prostitution on wheels."
Gas stations grew along new highways and roads nationwide.
Advertising became sophisticated, using visuals and psychology to promote cars to both men and women, linking cars with sophistication and lifestyle.

Labor and Welfare Capitalism

After World War I, the government withdrew from regulating industry and managing worker-industry relations, leading to lower wages, longer hours, and blacklisting of union members.
Strikes in 1919 led to accusations of communism against strikers.
Welfare capitalism emerged, with industrialists offering benefits like medical insurance, pensions, and stock ownership to create a loyal workforce and obviate the need for unions.
Fringe benefits such as paid vacations and sick leave were introduced.
Despite enthusiasm for welfare capitalism, layoffs continued, wages fluctuated, and unsafe working conditions persisted.
When the economy collapsed in 1929, capitalists cut these benefits, leading to increased demands for government intervention from the labor movement.

Consumer Culture

Increased industrial productivity created an abundance of affordable goods.
Both blue-collar and white-collar workers used their growing leisure time and access to material goods to create more fulfilling lives.
A modern consumer culture arose that deemphasized Victorian values of thrift and restraint.
Americans increasingly relied on credit to buy cars, radios, and household appliances.
Radio played a key role in forging a national mass culture, with over 60% of American homes owning a radio by 1930.
Radio broadcasts made the New York Yankees popular and Babe Ruth a national hero.
Big companies used radio to sponsor shows and boost sales.
The 1920s was the heyday of local radio designed specifically for communities, including unions, religious groups, and immigrant communities.
Movie stars enjoyed nationwide adulation, with Hollywood producing films with sound by the end of the decade.
Consumerism alleviated anxiety and dealt with cultural unrest and the erosion of traditional moral values.

Harlem Renaissance

African Americans migrated to urban cities in the North, congregating in places like Harlem, New York City.
Harlem became a hub of African American artists, musicians, and writers, united in celebrating a distinct black culture.
Alain Locke's "The New Negro" (1925) captured the creative impulse of the Harlem Renaissance, embodying black racial pride and militancy.
Langston Hughes celebrated distinctly black forms of cultural production and challenged the idea of assimilating into white culture.
The Harlem Renaissance addressed themes absent from mainstream literature, such as black Americans' aspirations, female sexuality, and the psychological impact of racism.
Marcus Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), promoting economic self-sufficiency and black nationalism.
Garvey's movement, though short-lived, offered an alternative to integration and introduced separatist ideas.
Langston Hughes debunked negative stereotypes and defended the artistic freedom of the new Negro movement.
Despite cultural expressiveness in urban areas, some believed in dangers for African Americans migrating to the North.

Jazz

Jazz was an integral part of the Harlem Renaissance, with musicians like Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, and Jelly Roll Morton making their names in Harlem clubs.
Jazz combined African American and European musical traditions and was propelled to popularity by radio stations and the record industry.
Jazz was not universally appreciated, with some African Americans viewing it as the devil's music due to its syncopated rhythms and association with immoral behavior.
The Cotton Club and other venues provided spaces where the color line could be temporarily breached, but they were still highly segregated.

Women in the 1920s

The 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote in 1920, but it primarily impacted white women, as black women in the South remained disenfranchised.
The anticipated women's vote never fully materialized, as American women offered competing visions of their proper place in society.
Black women supported suffrage as a step towards empowering the black community, but Southern authorities used tactics to disenfranchise them.
The League of Women Voters successfully lobbied for social welfare measures like the Shepherd-Towner Act in 1921, which supported impoverished women and children.
The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was conceptualized, but it was met with debate: radical feminists argued it would eradicate legal barriers, while moderate reformers worried it would endanger protective legislation for women.
Younger women focused on economic prospects, making up almost 24% of the workforce by 1920, though they were largely restricted to traditional female professions.
Advertising characterized the new woman as a devoted mother, a high-fashion sophisticate, and an engaging spouse, often manufacturing discontent to sell products.

Margaret Sanger

A birth control advocate who believed that women deserved contraception because having too many children ruined their health and relegated them to poverty.
She opened the nation's first birth control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916 and served 30 days in jail for distributing information about birth control.
Sanger believed that contraception would empower working-class mothers and provide women with the opportunity to enjoy sexual intercourse without fearing for their lives. There was still a dark side to this; birth control was also a tool of eugenics.

Lost Generation

Writers and artists felt alienated from America's consumerist society.
The lost generation, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Thurber, and Sinclair Lewis, left the United States and helped launch a creative period in American art and literature.

Prohibition

The 18th Amendment banned the manufacture and sale of alcohol, aiming to eliminate crime, boost productivity, and lift the nation's morality.
Instead, it unleashed a fourteen-year period of law-breaking, making lawbreakers out of millions of people.
The Treasury Department faced challenges in enforcing prohibition, and local police were often sympathetic to anti-prohibitionists or in the pockets of organized crime.
Speakeasies became common in urban areas and led to the sexual integration of previously all-male drinking culture.
Serious criminals took over the liquor trade, leading to gang violence and bootlegging empires.
By the end of the 1920s, prohibition was widely seen as a failure and was repealed in 1933.

Backlash Against the New Woman

Newspapers. movies, and magazines all provided stories about liberated women.
She challenged American convictions about separate spheres for women and men, challenged double standards of sexual conduct, challenged Victorian ideas about what proper women looked like and acted like
Her sexuality was more fluid, and it was ok to engage in premarital sex.
The nation's urban population outnumbered rural for the first time in 1920.

Xenophobia and Nativism

Rural people felt marginalized, and immigrants were blamed for their current situation.
Anti-foreign hysteria climaxed in the trial of anarchist immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were executed despite doubts about the fairness of the verdict.

Red Scare

The rise of communism in Europe and labor unrest in the U.S. led to the first Red Scare in 1919.
The Red Scare involved the widespread repression of dissent and labor unrest, culminating in the Palmer Raids, which targeted men and women for their political beliefs.

Fundamentalism vs. Modernism

The debate between fundamentalism and modernism centered on the interpretation of the Bible and Darwin's theory of evolution.
Fundamentalists viewed the Bible as literal and authentic, while modernists reinterpreted it in light of new scientific knowledge.
The Scopes Trial in 1925 highlighted this conflict, with Clarence Darrow defending John Scopes, who taught evolution, against William Jennings Bryan, who defended the fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible.
The trial was a media circus that revealed the disdain that urban people felt for country people.

Ku Klux Klan

Directed hatred towards African Americans, immigrants, radicals, feminists, Catholics, and Jews
The second Ku Klux Klan was more expansive in its hatred, targeting African Americans, immigrants, radicals, feminists, Catholics, and Jews.
It built on the frustrations of rural America and directed its animosity towards the assault of modernity.