1920s: The "New Era"

1920s

  • The “Jazz Age” or “Roaring Twenties”

    • Flappers, speakeasies, soaring stock market, easy credit, consumer goods, modernity, advertising, celebrities

    • Not the whole story of the decade

  • Culture wars and paradoxes

    • Jim Crow and Harlem Renaissance

    • Prosperity and poverty

    • Modernity and fundamentalism

Decade of Prosperity

  • New industries take off

    • Chemicals

    • Aviation

    • Electronics

  • Older industries increased production

  • U.S. companies are the major global industrial producer

Automobile Industry grows in the ‘20s

  • Tripled production

  • General Motors became a major competitor in the auto industry

  • Stimulates other industries

American Investments Abroad Increase

  • Multinational corporations expand

  • American > British

  • Companies source raw materials internationally

Consumer goods boom during this time

Easy Credit allows larger purchases and changed peoples daily lives

  • Telephones

  • Vacuum cleaners

  • Refrigerators

  • Washing machines

Leisure activities flourish

  • Movies

  • Sports

  • Radio

This is the time celebrity culture begins

Workers in Certain Industries suffer even more

  • Beginnings of de-industrialization

  • Farmers struggling

The Farmers Plight

  • High taxes, debts, and price drops

  • Rise of agribusiness

  • Deep poverty for small rural farmers

Labor organizing has to contend with welfare capitalism and company “unions”

Labor organizing has to contend with the decade of the open

The Decline of labor

  • The “American Plan”

  • Union busting

  • Labor loses 2 million members in the 1920s

  • Unions struggle to survive

Women’s movement splinters after suffrage is achieved in 1920

Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)

  • Supported by Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party; amendment legislation introduced in 1923 but never ratified

Political Wings Shift

  • Progressive retreat

  • Government/politicians sway public opinion to create “manufactured consent”

  • Voter turnout drops

Political wind shifts: ushering in the new Republican era

Political Wing Shifts: Laissez-faire resurgence

1880s: Laissez Fair > 1900s: Progressive > 1920s: Laissez Faire

Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929)

  • Coolidge easily reelected in 1924

  • Pro-business republican

Foreign policy in the ‘20s: Economic diplomacy

  • Era of isolation? Not so much

  • Private international investments + military backings

Repression intensifies in both public and private sectors

  • Lynching

  • Jim Crow legislation

  • Book bans

  • Censorship

  • Union busting

Courts in the 1920s

  • American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) est. 1920

  • Schenck v United States (1919) chips away at rights of free speech

  • Slow gains for civil liberties

Culture Wars: Christian Fundamentalism

  • Scope Trials 1925

In 1924 quotas on immigrants depending on their country of origin

  • “Johnson-Reed” or “Quota” Act

  • Birth of border patrol in 1924

Advocates for Pluralism

  • Horace Kallan - “cultural pluralism”

  • Anthropologist

  • Immigrant communities

Immigrants Advocate for Tolerance

  • Organized Group

  • Roman Catholic Church

  • Court decisions on schools

Urban Black communities flourish culturally

  • Black populations in Northern cities surge

  • Diverse communities: rich and poor, working class and intellectuals, West Indies and Southern migrants

  • Political, cultural and artistic exchanges

  • Urban poverty still persist despite this

Black Harlem & White New York

  • “Slumming”

  • Cultural patronage

  • Black artist participate in white cultural scene

Harlem Renaissance as Queer History