The Jazz Age: Redefining the Nation, 1919-1929

Introduction

The United States experienced significant prosperity in the 1920s after the postwar era.
Mass production, particularly of automobiles, spurred growth in mobility and related industries.
Unemployment rates decreased due to business expansion that met rising demands.
Urban areas grew, with the 1920 census indicating that most of the population resided in cities with 2,500 or more residents.
Urban nightlife was characterized by jazz music, movies, speakeasies, and modern dances.
Immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, especially among Catholics, led to increased participation in the political system.
This challenged rural Protestant fundamentalism, which led to quota laws that aimed to restrict immigration.
The Ku Klux Klan gained prominence by protesting changing roles of African Americans, as well as the increasing presence of immigrants, Catholics, and Jewish Americans.
These intersecting social, political, economic, and cultural changes and conflicts earned the decade the nicknames "Roaring Twenties" and "Jazz Age."

24.1 Prosperity and the Production of Popular Entertainment

The 1920s was a period of prosperity that was evident through advancements in entertainment and technology.
New leisure patterns and increased consumption were observed during this time.
Movies and sports became more accessible and popular.
Credit buying enabled more sales of consumer goods, making automobiles affordable for average Americans.
Advertising emerged as a central institution in the consumer economy.
Commercial radio and magazines transformed athletes and actors into national icons.

Movies

Increased prosperity of the 1920s meant Americans had more disposable income which they could use on entertainment.
As moving pictures became popular, movie palaces capable of seating thousands were built in major cities.
A ticket for a double feature and live show was a quarter of a dollar which allowed Americans to escape their reality.
Weekly movie attendance grew to ninety million people by the end of the decade.
Silent movies led to the rise of movie stars such as Rudolph Valentino, Clara Bow and Charlie Chaplin.
In 1927, the release of the first "talkie," The Jazz Singer, marked a shift from silent movies.
The Jazz Singer told the story of a Jewish man who was training to be a cantor who then became an Americanized jazz singer.
Southern California became the center of the American film industry.
Film production was originally based in New York where Thomas Edison first debuted the kinetoscope in 1893.
Major filmmakers like D. W. Griffith moved to Southern California to avoid the cost of Edison's camera equipment patents.
Griffith filmed In Old California (1910), the first movie shot in Hollywood, California.
Hollywood became a major profitable industry.

Automobiles and Airplanes: Americans on the Move

New possibilities for mobility opened in the 1920s for a large part of the U.S. population due to mass-produced automobiles and advancements in aircraft technology.
The Model T Ford, was a significant innovation that made car ownership possible for the average American.
Henry Ford focused on mass production to lower the price of automobiles.
Revolutionizing industrial work through the assembly line, Ford reduced the Model T’s price from 850 in 1908 to 300 in 1924.
By 1929, there were over twenty-three million automobiles on American roads.
The assembly line helped reduce labor costs by having workers complete simple steps moving from one team to the next.
Ford emphasized efficiency over craftsmanship.
Ford did not allow his workers to unionize, however, he doubled their pay to 5 a day and standardized the workday to eight hours.
Ford's assembly line offered greater equality by paying white and black workers equally.
African Americans from the South moved to Detroit and other large northern cities to work in factories in order to receive the elevated wages.
The automobile changed America economically and socially.
Industries processing glass, steel, and rubber expanded to keep up with auto production.
The oil industry in California, Oklahoma, and Texas expanded.
There was a transition from a coal-based economy to one driven by petroleum.
Local and state governments had to fund infrastructure expansion related to the roadways.
New shopping and living habits emerged as traffic on public roads replaced the mass transit on trains and trolleys.
The 1920s also saw transformations in air travel.
In 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to Paris in thirty-three hours.
Following Lindbergh's success, the airline industry began to grow in the 1930s.
In 1934, U.S. domestic air passengers was just over 450,000 annually, and by the end of the decade it had jumped to nearly two million.
Newly developed devices such as radios, phonographs, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and refrigerators emerged on the market during this period.
Consumer purchasing innovations like store credit and installment plans made the more expensive items available to a larger segment of the population. However, the time saved by such innovations were not fulfilled as women ended up cleaning more frequently, washing more often, and cooking more elaborate meals rather than gaining spare time.
The dream of gateway technology was a testament to the influence of the advertising industry.
Magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post became vehicles to connect advertisers with middle-class consumers.
Radio was a new medium for advertisers in the 1920s, reaching out to consumers in innovative ways.

The Power of Radio and the World of Sports

After being introduced during World War I, radios became common in American homes in the 1920s.
Hundreds of radio stations developed and broadcasted news, serial stories, and political speeches.
Advertising space was interspersed within entertainment.
Advertisers could reach anyone within listening distance of the radio, however, their broader audience meant that they had to be more conservative and careful not to offend anyone.
Radio sped up the processes of nationalization and homogenization that were previously begun with newspapers using railroads and telegraphs.
Radio created and pumped out American culture onto the airwaves and into the homes of families around the country.
Radio programs entertained listeners around the country with racial stereotypes about African Americans that were familiar from minstrel shows of the previous century.
With the radio, Americans from coast to coast could listen to the same programming which smoothed out regional differences in dialect, language, music, and consumer taste.
Radio allowed Americans to enjoy sports more easily.
The introduction of play-by-play descriptions of sporting events broadcast over the radio brought sports entertainment right into the homes of millions.
Radio helped popularize sports figures and their accomplishments.
Jim Thorpe was known as one of the best athletes in the world who won the 1912 Olympic Games, played Major League Baseball, and was one of the founding members of the National Football League.
In 1926, Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim the English Channel.
Helen Wills dominated women’s tennis and won Wimbledon eight times in the late 1920s.
In football, Harold “Red” Grange played for the University of Illinois, averaging over ten yards per carry during his college career.
Babe Ruth changed the game of baseball from one dominated by pitchers to one where his hitting became famous.
By 1923, pitchers frequently chose to intentionally walk him and in 1927, he hit sixty home runs.

24.2 Transformation and Backlash

Many Americans disagreed on a "good life" and how to achieve it, reacting to rapid social changes in urban society with religious values and a rejection of cultural diversity and equality.

Nativism

Beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, immigration into the United States increased.
Many immigrants were coming from eastern and southern Europe, leading to concern and anxiety among English-speaking, native-born Americans of northern European descent.
Some embraced nativism, prizing White Americans with older family trees over recent immigrants, and rejecting outside influences.
Nativists pointed to anarchist assassinations of political figures as proof towards their concerns over immigration.
Following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in November 1917, the sense of a foreign threat grew among those who disliked immigrants.
The trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti was caused by fear and anxiety over immigration.
Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian immigrants accused of being part of a robbery and murder in Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1920.
The district attorney emphasized Sacco and Vanzetti’s radical views, and the jury found them guilty on July 14, 1921, despite a lack of direct evidence.
Opinions on the trial and judgment tended to divide along nativist-immigrant lines, with immigrants supporting the innocence of the condemned pair.
The verdict sparked protests from Italian and other immigrant groups, as well as from intellectuals such as writer John Dos Passos, satirist Dorothy Parker, and physicist Albert Einstein.
Upton Sinclair based his work on the trial which he considered a gross miscarriage of justice. As the execution neared, the radical labor union Industrial Workers of the World called for a three-day nationwide walkout, leading to the Great Colorado Coal Strike of 1927.
Protests occurred worldwide.
Felix Frankfurter criticized the trial when he wrote in The Atlantic about the exploitation of the defendants being immigrants.
The Emergency Immigration Act of 1921 introduced numerical limits on European immigration for the first time in U.S. history.
The limits restricted annual immigration from any given country to 3 percent of the residents from that same country in the 1910 census.
The National Origins Act of 1924 went even further, lowering the level to 2 percent of the 1890 census, significantly reducing the share of eligible southern and eastern Europeans.
President Coolidge signed the bill into law saying “America must be kept American”.

The Ku Klux Klan

The Ku Klux Klan had a resurgence of attention and popularity following the popularity of the 1915 film, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.
The film offers a racist, White-centric view of the Reconstruction Era.
Noble White southerners were depicted as helpless and were made helpless by northern carpetbaggers who empower freed Black people to abuse White men and violate women.
The heroes of the film were the Ku Klux Klan, who saved the White people, the South, and the nation.
The film was reviled by African Americans and the NAACP, however, it was celebrated by many White people who accepted the historical revisionism as an accurate portrayal of Reconstruction Era oppression.
President Wilson reportedly remarked, “It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”
A second incarnation of the Klan was established in 1915 under the leadership of William Simmons as a response to the film.
The new Klan publicly eschewed violence and received mainstream support as its embrace of Protestantism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-Semitism, and its appeals for stricter immigration policies, gained the group a level of acceptance by nativists with similar prejudices.
The ranks of the Klan also included many women, who participated in reform-minded activities and more expressly Klan activities and would be active in reform-minded activities.
By 1924, this Second Ku Klux Klan had six million members in the South, West, and the Midwest - more Americans than there were in the nation’s labor unions at the time.
The organization employed intimidation, violence, and terrorism against its victims, particularly in the South.
Several states combatted the Klan through anti-masking legislation.
InfLuential people and citizen groups condemned the Klan.
Jewish organizations, especially the Anti-Defamation League, amplified Jewish discontent at being the focus of Klan attention.
The NAACP worked to lobby congress and educate the public on lynchings.
The Great Depression put an end to the Klan, and they lost power due to dwindling paying members.

Faith, Fundamentalism, and Science

The sense of degeneration and anxiety over mass immigration prompted was in part a response to the process of postwar urbanization.
Urbanites viewed rural Americans as hayseeds who were hopelessly behind the times, and the lawmakers of Tennessee drew a battle line over the issue of evolution and its contradiction of the Biblical explanation of history.
Fundamentalist Protestants targeted evolution as representative of all that was wrong with urban society.
Tennessee’s Butler Act made it illegal “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) hoped to challenge the Butler Act as an infringement of the freedom of speech, enlisting teacher and coach John Scopes as a defendant.
Town leaders in Dayton, Tennessee, used the ACLU to promote their town.
The Scopes Monkey Trial quickly turned into a carnival that captured the attention of the country and epitomized the nation’s urban/rural divide.
Fundamentalist champion William Jennings Bryan argued the case for the prosecution.
Clarence Darrow, a prominent lawyer and agnostic, led the defense team, which made an impact through the statement that, “Scopes isn’t on trial, civilization is on trial. No man’s belief will be safe if they win.”
Scopes was found guilty and fined 100, yet the trial itself proved to be high drama.
Darrow called Bryan as an expert witness on the Bible, and was ridiculed for his unusual choice.
The cross-examination was seen as an attack on the Bible and their faith, despite the rural Americans in attendance.
Indicative of the revival of Protestant fundamentalism and the rejection of evolution among rural and White Americans was the rise of Billy Sunday who had a successful baseball career before becoming an evangelist.
Billy Sunday rallied many Americans around “old-time” fundamentalist religion and garnered support for prohibition.
Aimee Semple McPherson was a spectacular Canadian Pentecostal preacher whose Foursquare Church in Los Angeles catered to midwestern transplants and newcomers to California.
Her style blended Hollywood style and modern technology with a message of fundamentalist Christianity.

24.3 A New Generation

The 1920s was a time of change in the United States.
Many young people embraced a new morality.
They listened to jazz music in Harlem, and the decade was also a time of prohibition.

A New Morality

Many Americans were disillusioned in the post-World War I era, and their reactions took many forms.
Rebellious American youth adjusted to the changes by embracing a new morality.
Many young women became flappers and adopted the dress and mannerisms of the Jazz Age female stereotype.
Flappers had short skirts, short hair, makeup, and they drank and smoked with the boys.
At the time, many of these fads became a type of conformity, especially among college-aged youths.
Sexual mores changed and social customs grew more permissive.
“Petting parties” or “necking parties” became the rage on college campuses.
Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis emphasized that sex was a natural and pleasurable part of the human experience.
Margaret Sanger launched an information campaign on birth control to give women a choice in the realm after the suffrage.
Movie posters were promising “neckers, petters, white kisses, red kisses, pleasure-mad daughters, sensation-craving mothers . . . the truth: bold, naked, sensational.”
New dances and new music—especially jazz—also characterized the Jazz Age.
Born out of the African American community, jazz was an American music that spread from African American clubs in New Orleans and Chicago to reach greater popularity in New York and abroad.
One New York jazz establishment, the Cotton Club, became particularly famous and attracted large audiences of hip, young, and White fappers and sheiks to see Black entertainers play jazz.

The "New Woman"

The Jazz Age and the flapper lifestyle was the product of postwar disillusionment and new found prosperity.
The search for new styles of dress and entertainment was part of a larger women’s rights movement.
The early 1920s, especially with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, was a period that witnessed the expansion of women’s political power.
The public flaunting of social and sexual norms by flappers represented an attempt to match gains in political equality with gains in the social sphere as women were increasingly leaving the Victorian era norms of the previous generation behind.
In 1921, Congress passed the Promotion of the Welfare and Hygiene of Maternity and Infancy Act, also known as the Sheppard-Towner Act, which earmarked 1.25 million for well-baby clinics and educational programs, as well as nursing, which dramatically reduced the rate of infant mortality.
In 1923, Alice Paul drafted and promoted an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) that promised to end all sex discrimination by guaranteeing that “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.”
After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, many women believed that they had accomplished their goals and dropped out of the movement resulting in stalled progress of legislation.
An increasing number of women were working for wages in the U.S. economy beginning in the 1920s although employment of single and unmarried women had largely won social acceptance, married women often suffered the stigma that they were working for pin money.

The Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro

African Americans were also expanding their horizons and embracing the concept of the “new Negro.”
The decade witnessed the continued Great Migration of African Americans to the North, with over half a million fleeing the strict Jim Crow laws of the South.
Life in the northern states, as many African Americans discovered, was hardly free of discrimination and segregation with the Black population of New York City doubling during the decade.
Harlem became a center for Afro-centric art, music, poetry, and politics.
Urban Black people developed a strong cultural expression in the 1920s that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance, leading to the formulation of an independent Black culture and encouragement of racial pride.
The new Negro found political expression in a political ideology that celebrated African Americans distinct national identity.
Negro nationalism proposed that African Americans had a distinct and separate national heritage that should inspire pride and a sense of community.
W. E. B. Du Bois rejected assumptions of White supremacy, encouraging Africans to work together in support of their own interests, and promoting the elevation of Black literature and cultural expression, and the African continent as the true homeland of all ethnic Africans—a concept known as Pan-Africanism.
Marcus Garvey promoted a “Back to Africa” movement starting the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and earning a legacy for Malcolm X and the Black Power movement of the 1960s.

Prohibition

The country was undergoing a process of social reform by alcohol prohibition.
After decades of organizing to reduce or end the consumption of alcohol in the United States, temperance groups and the Anti-Saloon League pushed through the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, which banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors.
The law proved difficult to enforce, as illegal alcohol came in from Canada and the Caribbean, and rural Americans resorted to home-brewed “moonshine” causing respect for law and order to erode.
Instead of bringing about an age of sobriety, it gave rise to a new subculture that included illegal importers, interstate smuggling (or bootlegging), clandestine saloons referred to as “speakeasies,” hipflasks, cocktail parties, and the organized crime of trafficking liquor.
Prohibition also revealed deep political divisions in the nation which gave rise to internal Democratic division and opened the door for the Republican Party to gain ascendancy in the 1920s.
Prohibition sparked a rise in organized crime led by “Scarface” Al Capone, who ran an extensive bootlegging and criminal operation and was eventually imprisoned for eleven years for tax evasion.

The Lost Generation

The country struggled with the side effects of prohibition and young intellectuals came to grips with a lingering sense of disillusionment.
World War I, fundamentalism, and the Red Scare left their mark on these intellectuals.
Known as the Lost Generation, writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton, and John Dos Passos expressed their hopelessness and despair by skewering the middle class in their work, feeling alienated from society, so they tried to escape (some literally) to criticize it.
The Lost Generation writer that best exemplifies the mood of the 1920s was F. Scott Fitzgerald, now considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.
Equally idiosyncratic and disillusioned was writer Ernest Hemingway.
The writing of Sinclair Lewis, rather than expressing a defined disillusionment, was more influenced by the Progressivism of the previous generation.
Writer Edith Wharton celebrated life in old New York, a vanished society, in The Age of Innocence, in 1920.

24.4 Republican Ascendancy: Politics in the 1920s

The election of 1920 saw the weakening of the Democratic Party due to the death of Progressive leaders.
The waning of the Red Scare took with it the last vestiges of Progressive zeal, and Americans were ready for a return to “normalcy.”
The 1920s signaled a return to a pro-business government almost a return to the laissez-faire politics of the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.
Calvin Coolidge’s statement that “the chief business of the American people is business,” often rendered as “the business of America is business” became the dominant attitude.

Warren Harding and the Return to Normalcy

In the election of 1920, professional Republicans were eager to nominate Warren G. Harding, a senator from Ohio, a man whom they could manage and control.
With his running mate, Calvin Coolidge, the governor of Massachusetts, they attracted the votes of many Americans who sought Harding’s promised return to normalcy defeating Governor James Cox of Ohio by the greatest majority in the history of two-party politics: 61 percent of the popular vote.
Harding’s cabinet reflected his pro-business agenda, with Herbert Hoover as his Secretary of Commerce and Andrew Mellon, as his Secretary of the Treasury.
Harding proposed and signed into law tax rate cuts as well as the country’s first formal budgeting process, which helped to reduce the debt that the United States had incurred during World War I.
In the area of foreign policy, Harding worked to preserve the peace through international cooperation and the reduction of armaments around the world.
The Harding administration has gone down in history as one that was ridden with scandal as Harding turned to unscrupulous advisors or even his “Ohio Gang” of drinking and poker buddies for advice and guidance.
From 1920 to 1923, Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall was involved in a scam that became known as the Teapot Dome scandal, leasing navy reserves to private oil companies for bribes which resulted in his conviction.
In 1923, Harding also learned that the head of the Veterans’ Bureau, Colonel Charles Forbes, had absconded with most of the 250 million set aside for extravagant bureau functions.
In July 1923, traveling in Seattle, the president suffered a heart attack; and on August 2, in his weakened condition, he suffered a stroke and died in San Francisco, leaving the presidency to his vice president, Calvin Coolidge.

A Man of Few Words

Coolidge ended the scandals, but did little beyond that believing in the Puritan work ethic.
Republicans—and the nation— now had a president who combined a preference for normalcy with the respectability and honesty that was absent from the Harding administration.
Coolidge’s first term was devoted to eliminating the taint of scandal that Harding had brought to the White House by adhering to the creed “The business of America is business”.
Coolidge believed that since only the rich best understood their own interests, the government should let businessmen handle their own affairs with as little federal intervention as possible.
Coolidge’s legendary reserve was famous in Washington society, and he won the 1924 election easily over the divided Democrats.

The Election of 1928

The cultural battle between the forces of reaction and rebellion appeared to culminate with the election of 1928, the height of Republican ascendancy.
Coolidge announced that he would not be participating in the 1928 election.
Republicans promoted the heir apparent, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, as the Democrats nominated Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York.
Republican prosperity carried the day once again, and Hoover won easily with twenty-one million votes over Al Smith’s fifteen million.
As Hoover came into office, Americans had every reason to believe that prosperity would continue forever.