Journal 5: The Roaring Twentieshe decade from 1920-1929 is often referred to as the “Roaring Twenties” because of the exuberant, freewheeling popular culture of the decade. Fortunately, the bleak outlook and large sacrifices of the wartime era were now a part of the past and young Americans were looking to cut loose and have a

good time. In addition, the nation’s total wealth more than doubled between 1920 and 1929, and this economic growth swept many Americans into an affluent but unfamiliar “consumer society.” New products seemed to burst from American production lines with the potential of revolutionizing American life. The decade after the end of the first world war was in many respects the first decade of our modern era.

TInnovations Change How People LivePerhaps no invention affected American everyday life in the 20th century more than the automobile. Although the technology for the AUTOMOBILE existed in the 19th century, it took HENRY FORD to make the useful gadget accessible to the American public. Ford used the idea of the ASSEMBLY LINE for automobile manufacturing. He paid his workers an unprecedented $5 a day when most laborers were bringing home two, hoping that it would increase their productivity. Furthermore, they might use their higher earnings to purchase a

new car. Ford reduced options, even stating that the public could choose whatever color car they wanted — so long as it was black. The MODEL T sold for $490 in 1914, about one quarter the cost of the previous decade. By 1920, there were over 8 million registrations. The 1920s saw tremendous growth in automobile ownership, with the number of registered drivers almost tripling to 23 million by the end of the decade.

Technology used to improve the lives of Americans:

Below is a list of home appliances and/or newer technologies that are widely used in the 1920s:

Washing machine

Vacuum cleaner

Refrigerator

Telephone

Electric light

Automobile

Typewriter

Radio

Entertainment in the 1920s: Moviesmericans also looked to new sources of entertainment during the 1920s and motion pictures helped supply that demand. The technology to make motion pictures had been around for a generation, but the movie industry rose to new

heights in the 1920s. Between 60 and 100 million Americans went to the movies each week. For most of the decade, the studios made silent pictures. They were an ideal entertainment at a time when millions of immigrants spoke little English. Motion pictures transcended languages and even literacy, treating universal themes in familiar ways that allowed any viewer to follow the stories. However, in 1927 the film history was changed forever with the release of The Jazz Singer, the first movie with sound synchronized to the action. Audiences were amazed when Al Jolson said—not pantomimed—“You ain’t heard nothin’ yet” and then launched into a song. Silent pictures quickly faded out, replaced by “talkies.” But whether silent or with sound, movies spoke directly to the desires, needs, fears, and fantasies of millions of people in the United States and around the world. Unlike theatrical productions or classical concerts, movies were available to anyone with a few cents to spare. For example, a movie ticket in America cost on average 35 cents in 1929.

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Jazz Jazz music began in the early 1900s within the black community in New

Orleans. It was a new type of music that combined European and African styles. It is a difficult style to define as it incorporates several different elements of several different styles, relies on a lot of improvisation and syncopated rhythms and is subjective in many ways. Jazz music reached the mainstream in the 1920s when Southern African American musicians began moving up to Chicago looking for work. The Twenties are often called the Jazz Age because the popularization of Jazz music had an enormous cultural effect. Jazz music was important because it influenced fashion, dances, accepted moral standards, youth culture, and race relations.

Jazz gained popularity and spread through the country in clubs, speakeasies, and dance halls where Jazz bands would play their new music. Many of the clubs were segregated and would only allow white bands in white clubs and black bands in black clubs. Some popular African American bands playing in white clubs where black patrons were not allowed. There were very few integrated clubs around and they were called "Black and Tan" clubs. The most famous jazz musician of the decade and possibly of all time was Louis Armstrong. Armstrong was a popular African American jazz musician who played the trumpet and cornet and was known for his distinct and gravelly singing voice. Armstrong's talent helped him break down some of the racial barriers of the time as he played in several mixed race bands and was invited to play in white only clubs. Some of Armstrong's notable hits from the decade included "Heebie Jeebies" from 1926, "West End Blues" from 1928, and "Ain't Misbehavin'" from 1929.

The Top 10 Movies of 19291. Arsenal

2. Three Loves

3. Asphalt

4. Thunderbolt

5. Old and New

6. Hallelujah

7. The Love Parade

8. Diary of a Lost Girl

9. The New Babylon

10. Marianne

Popular Jazz Songs in 1929Song:

When You’re Smiling

Tip Toe Thru’ The Tulips

Maybe, Who Knows?

Dream Lover

Ain’t Misbehavin’

Artist:

Louis Armstrong

Nick Lucas

Kate Smith

Jeanette MacDonald

Fats Waller

Popular Jazz Artists

Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington and Eddie Lang

Popular Jazz Clubs in the United States

The Cotton Club, New York CityThe Friar’s Inn, Chicago

Popular Dance Crazes

The WaltzThe Tango

The FoxtrotThe CharlestonTexas Tommy

Radio ike the movies, the radio also became a powerful instrument of mass popular culture. Millions of radios were marketed in the 1920s and helped produce a standard culture throughout America because Americans throughout the

country listened to the same songs, learned the same dances, and shared the same popular culture as they never had before. Americans were also able to listen to educational lectures, sporting events, religious sermons and learned of news and caught weather reports. Radio stations also introduced radio dramas, soap operas, quiz shows, and comedies for American families to listen to in the daytime and evening hours. They also heard commercials for a wide variety of consumer products on their new radios.

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Popular Radio Shows of the 1920sAmos 'n' Andy Great Moments in History Grand Ole Opry House of Myths

House of Myths House of Myths House of Myths The Cuckoo Hour

BaseballThe 1920s has been called the Golden Age of American Sports. It also has been called the Age of the Spectator. The United States had a strong economy for most of that decade. Many workers had more leisure time. New and bigger stadiums and gymnasiums were built. The introduction of radio made it easier for fans to keep up with their favorite teams. Newspapers increased their coverage of sports. Improvements in roads made it possible for fans to travel to athletic events in distant cities. For the first time, large numbers of Americans began to pay money to watch other people compete in athletic contests.

Baseball was the “national pastime” in the 1920s. More people went to baseball games, more people followed baseball, and more people played baseball for fun than any other sport. Two words describe why the 1920s stake a claim to baseball’s golden age – Babe Ruth. The man had stadiums (some could say cathedrals) built to either house his home runs or for him to hit them out. Everything about today’s game goes back to Ruth. Ruth didn’t just make news; he made big, bold headlines, as the press magnified his every move whether good or bad. His genuine charisma, worthy arrogance and importance to the New York Yankees’ fortunes justified the media’s obsession with him.

As Ruth went, so went the Yankees, even if the team was often talented enough to be a contender without him. When Ruth was on fire, the Yankees were unbeatable—winning six American League pennants and three World Series in the 1920s.

Click here to see the box score from the September 1st, 1929 game between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.

An Unsettled Society: The Palmer Raids

ollowing the Russian Revolution in 1917 which created the communist Soviet Union,, America was on high alert, fearing Communist

revolutionaries on their own shores. These fears became known as the first American Red Scare, a wave of widespread fear of suspected communists and radicals thought to be plotting revolution within the United States. Authorities received bombs mailed to important industrialists and government officials, including Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer.

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As the leading law-enforcement official, Palmer mounted a broad offensive against radicals in the United States in 1919 and 1920. On January 2, 1920, the most spectacular of the Palmer Raids took place, when thousands of individuals (estimates vary between 3,000 and 10,000) were arrested in more than 30 cities. The following day, federal, state, and local agents conducted further raids. In all the Palmer Raids, arrests greatly exceeded the number of warrants that had been obtained from the courts, and many of those arrested were guilty of nothing more than having a foreign accent.

Some of these people were radicals, but some were simply immigrants from southern or Eastern Europe. Most were never tried or charged with a crime. The government then deported hundreds of radicals or suspected radicals back to Russia which is depicted by the political cartoon on the right of this slide. Consequently, the 1st Red Scare and the Palmer Raids helped to contribute to a period of increased nativism in the United States.

The Scopes TrialFundamentalism and modernism clashed head-on in the Scopes Trial of 1925. John Scopes, a high school science teacher, was arrested in Dayton, Tennessee for teaching evolution. The state of Tennessee had recently passed a law that forbade Charles Darwin’s teachings in publics schools. The case caught national attention when Scopes went on trial in July 1925 and pitted fundamentalists against modernists across the nation. Fundamentalists are individuals who believe every word in the Christian Bible as literal truth. In contrast, modernists are individuals who show an openness toward social change and the new discoveries of science.

In the end, Scopes was found guilty because he admitted to teaching evolution and was fined $100. However, the ruling in the case did little to heal the conflict or answer the central questions between fundamentalists and modernists. Each side still believed in the truth of its position and the conflict over evolution continues today.

The Great Migration

tarting in about 1890, African Americans migrated to the North in great numbers. This Great Migration eventually relocated hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North and began because of a "push" and a "pull." Disenfranchisement and Jim Crow laws led many

African Americans to hope for a new life up north. Hate groups and hate crimes cast alarm among African American families of the Deep South. The promise of owning land had not materialized. Most blacks toiled as sharecroppers trapped in an endless cycle of debt. In the 1890s, a boll weevil blight damaged the cotton crop throughout the region, increasing the despair. All these factors served to push African Americans to seek better lives. The booming northern economy forged the pull. Industrial jobs were numerous, and factory owners looked near and far for sources of cheap labor.

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Unfortunately, northerners did not welcome African Americans with open arms. While the legal systems of the northern states were not as obstructionist toward African American rights, the prejudice among the populace was as acrimonious. White laborers complained that African Americans were flooding the employment market and lowering wages. Most new migrants found themselves segregated by practice in run down urban slums. The largest of these was Harlem. Writers, actors, artists, and musicians glorified African American traditions, and at the same time created new ones.

The Harlem Renaissanceazz and blues were expressions of the African American experience. The pain of the African American experience can be heard in the blues, and the joy of that experience in the soaring notes of jazz. The range of such African American musicians as Duke

Ellington and Cab Calloway speaks to the varieties of African American life. But in the 1920s, there were other expressions of African American culture. Novelists, poets, and artists celebrated their culture and explored questions of race in America. This flowering of African American culture became known as the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance helped give a new vocabulary and dynamic to race relations in the United States.

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In the 1920s, the term the “New Negro” entered the American vocabulary. It suggested a radical break with the past. No longer would African Americans silently endure the old ways of exploitation and discrimination. The new mood was most vividly expressed in Harlem, which attracted African American artists and writers from all over the country and beyond. In their work, these artists and writers explored the pains and joys of being black in America, leaving a legacy that spoke to all Americans of all times.

Artists such as Aaron Douglas created paintings with stylized art that reflected African Americans’ racial pride and collective historical experience, while other artists such as Jacob Lawrence and Archibald J. Motley, Jr., expressed similar sentiment in their colorful paintings of urban life.

Many writers communicated the same themes. Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923) set the literary tone for the Harlem Renaissance. A collection of short stories, poems, and sketches, Cane presented African American life and folk culture in all its richness. It was not a blueprint for where African Americans needed to move politically in the future, but a plea to remember and preserve the past.

Soon, other African American writers joined Toomer at the forefront of the Harlem Renaissance. Jamaican immigrant Claude McKay was the most militant of these writers. In his novels and poems, McKay showed ordinary African Americans struggling for dignity and advancement in the face of discrimination and economic hardships.

McKay represented the political and ideological left wing of the Harlem Renaissance. More in the center was Langston Hughes, probably the most powerful African American literary voice of his time. For Hughes, the force of the movement was not politics but a celebration of African American culture and life. In more than 50 works of fiction, poetry, journalism, and criticism, he captured the remarkable diversity of everyday African American life.

Another powerful voice was Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston traveled the rural back roads of her native Florida, collecting folk tales in books such as Mules and Men. But Hurston also looked to the future. Her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God expressed the new longing for independence felt by many women, black and white.

The Harlem Renaissance gave a voice to African American culture, just as jazz and blues gave it a tune. It altered the way many white Americans viewed African American culture, and even the way African Americans viewed themselves. The movement was not, however, without its critics. Some, for example, dismissed the quality of literature produced during the period. Others, such as Langston Hughes, expressed a degree of disillusionment with the movement’s inability to improve the political status and economic opportunities of African Americans throughout the country. However, the artistic forms and cultural debates associated with the Harlem Renaissance continue even today. Although the Harlem Renaissance came to a close as the nation fell into economic difficulty in the late 1920s, the sense of group identity and African American solidarity that it created would become part of the bedrock on which the later civil rights movement would be constructed.