America Life in the Roaring Twenties

1. America Life in the Roaring Twenties

2. Bloodied by war and disillusioned by peace, Americans turned inward in the 1920’s. The boom of the 20’s had many benefits on Americans. Incomes and the living standard rose for many, but there seemed something incredible about all of it. • New technologies, new consumer products and new forms of leisure and entertainment made the 20’s roar. Introduction

3. Fears of a red Russia continued to color American thinking for several years after the Communists came into power in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The big red scare of 1919-1920 resulted in a nation-wide crusade against left-wingers whose Americanism was suspect. • General A. Mitchell Palmer who saw red too easily, and earned the title of Fighting Quaker, rounded up around 6000 suspects. Seeing Red

4. Anti-redism and anti-foreign were reflected in a notorious case regarded by liberals as judicial lynching. Nicola Sacco a shoe factory worker and Bartolommeo Vanzetti a fish peddler were convicted in 1921 of the murder of a Massachusetts paymaster and his guard. The judge and jury were prejudice in some degree against the defendants because they were Italians, atheists, anarchists, and draft dodgers. • Liberals and radicals the world over rallied to the defense of these two people and the case will go on for over 6 years. Communists and other radicals were thus presented with 2 martyrs in the class struggle. The evidence against them had some serious weaknesses, but the trial was filled with anti-redism, and the outcome might have been only a prison term. Seeing Red

5. A new KKK spawned by the postwar reaction came out in the early 1920’s. Their group consisted of antiforeigner, anti-Catholics, Anti-Black, anti-Jewish, anti-communists, anti-revolutionists, antigambling and anti-bootlegger. The Klan beckoned an extreme ultraconservative uprising against many of the forces of diversity and modernity that were transforming American culture. • The Klan spread especially in the Midwest and the Bible belt south were the Protestant Fundamentalism thrived. Their chief warning was the blazing cross, and their weapon of choice was the bloodiest lash supplemented by tar and feathers. This reign of hooded horror, so repulsive to the best American ideals, collapsed rather suddenly in the late 1920’s. Hooded Hoodlums of the KKK

6. The KKK was an alarming manifestation of the intolerance and prejudice plaguing people anxious about the dizzying pace of social change in the 1920’s Despite the Klan’s decline, civil rights activists fought in vain for legislation making lynching a federal crime, as lawmakers feared alienating southern white voters. Hooded Hoodlums of the KKK

7. One of the last peculiar spasms of the progressive reform movement was prohibition that was loudly supported by crusading churches and by many women. In 1919 by the 18th amendment was implemented by the Volstead Act passed by Congress later that year. • The legal abolition of alcohol was especially popular in the South and West. Southerners were happy to keep the stimulants out of the hands of blacks. Despite the overwhelming ratification of the dry amendment, there was strong opposition persisted in the largest of cities. Yet most Americans now assumed that prohibition had come to stay. The Prohibition Experiment

8. But prohibitionists were naïve in the extreme. They overlooked the tenacious American tradition of strong drink and of weak control by the central government especially over private lives. • A majority of people enforced the law and small minorities of people were hostile to it. They ignored the fact that one cannot make a crime overnight more of something that millions of people have never regarded as a crime. Lawmakers could not legislate away a thirst. • Prohibition might have started off on a better foot if there had been a larger army of enforcement officials. But at the same time there were not enough state and federal officials to help with these problems. The Prohibition Experiment

9. Prohibition spawned shocking crimes. The profits of illegal alcohol led to bribery of the police, many of whom were induced to see and smell no evil. Many wars broke out between large cities over the rich market of booze. • In the gang wars of the 1920’s in Chicago about five hundred mobsters were murdered. Arrests were few and convictions were even fewer, as the gangsters covered for one another with the underworld’s code of silence. The Golden Age of Gangterism

10. In 1925, Al Capone a murderous booze distributor began six years of gang warfare that netted him millions of blood-spattered dollars. He zoomed through the streets in an armor plated car with bulletproof windows. • Gangsters rapidly moved into other profitable and illicit activities: prostitution, gambling, and narcotics. Those who were honest were forced to pay for protection money. Organized crime had come to be one of the nation’s most gigantic businesses. By the 1930’s someone’s take would be between 12-18 billion, more than the federal government even has. The Golden Age of Gangterism

11. Education in the 1920’s continued to make giant boot strides. More and more states were requiring young people to remain in school until age 16 or 18 or until graduation from high school. • Science also scored wondrous advances in these years. A massive public health program was launched in the South in 1909. They were seeking for better nutrition and health care helped to increase the life expectancy of a newborn infant from 50 years to 59 years in 1929. • Yet both science and progressive education in the 1920’s were subjected to unfriendly fire from the organized Fundamentalists. The fundamentalist believed that by teaching Darwin’s theories that it would ruin the students faith in God and in the Bible. Many laws were put into place to prohibit many of these schools from teaching Darwin’s theory. Monkey Business in Tennessee

12. The stage was set for the memorable Monkey Trial in eastern Tennessee in 1925. A high school biology teacher name John T. Scoopes was indicted for teaching evolution. Many newspaper reporters armed with notebooks and cameras. • Scoopes was defended by nationally known attorneys, while former presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan who joined the prosecution and taking a stand as an expert on the Bible. Taking the stand Bryan was made to appear foolish by the famed criminal lawyer Clarence Darrow. Five days later the trial was over, Bryan died of a stroke and it was no doubt that it was brought on by the heat and the witness strain. • This clash found Scoopes guilty and fined 100 dollars. But the fine was set aside on a technicality. Yet even though there were an increasing number of Christians were coming into the picture and the growing churches of Christ were being organized in 1906. Monkey Business in Tennessee

13. The economy kicked off its war harness, faltering a few steps then finally it sprinted off for nearly seven years of prosperity. Great new industries transpired during this time. Supplying electrical power for the humming new machines became a giant business in the 1920’s. • Above all the automobile once the horseless chariot of the rich and by 1930’s Americans owned almost 30 million cars. There was a complete love affair with the automobile and it was a momentous shift in the character of the economy. Manufacturers worked out the kinks and now it was just about consumption. The Mass Consumption Economy

14. Responding to this need was now commerce came into being: advertising. However they were going to get people to buy they would do it. Bruce Barton was the founder of this new profession and in 1925 he published a best seller, called the Man Nobody Knows. He believed that everyone should study the teaching of Jesus, because he was the best seller. • Sports also became very popular, and images such as Babe Ruth brought fans to the ballparks and Yankee Stadium became Ruth’s hometown park. Also in 1921, heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey knocked out French light weight Georges Carpentier. Just in attendance, they made over a million dollars. • Buying on credit was also another feature of the postwar economy. Puritans who were once frugal; now they were getting into deeper and deeper in debt as they were buying on credit. Also new inventions were being made as well; refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, cars, and radios. The Mass Consumption Economy

15. A new industrial revolution slipped into high gear in America in the 1920’s. Steel was changing the daily life of the people in many ways, and the automobile was its principle prophet. • Out of all of the inventions during this time, the automobile was the most amazing new industrial invention. The automobile produced new assembly-line methods and mass production techniques. American inventors Henry Ford and Ransom E. Olds were developing an annual production of 181,000 units. • Many of the cars up to this point were not reliable and many of them were told to get a horse from those that had passed them on their way. Fredrick Taylor a prominent engineer and inventor invented Scientific Management. He sought to eliminate waste motion which his innovations in industrial engineering, particularly in time and motion studies, paid off in dramatic improvements in productivity. Putting America on Rubber Tires

16. Henry Ford put America on rubber tires and the Model T was invented, it was cheap, rugged and reasonably reliable. He was ill-educated but somehow he grasped the technique of the moving assembly line-Fordism. This meant that Fords could be in any color of your choosing and they were selling for 260$. Before too long Fords were being sold everywhere in America. • By 1930 20 million Fords had been sold, which were enough to circle the Globe. By 1929, 26 million vehicles were registered in the United States. Putting America on Rubber Tires

17. A new industry was now emerging, which now will employ 6 million people by 1930. New industries boomed dramatically, while other ones grew sickly. The petroleum business experienced an explosive development. Hundreds of oil derricks shot up in Oklahoma, Texas, and California. The railroad was hit hard by the competition of passenger cars, buses, and trucks. • Other effects were widely felt. Marketing of foodstuffs, such as fresh fruits, was accelerated. For the first time farms could provide people with produce at attractive prices. Lured by advertising and encouraged by tempting installment plan buying countless Americans with shallow purses and riding on the habit as they paid. The Advent of the Gasoline Age

18. Other products of the automobile were visible. Autobuses made possible the consolidation of schools and to some extent of churches. As a result, the suburbs spread out farther from the urban core, as Americans became a nation of commuters. • In 1951, Americans were looking at another statistic which was one million Americans had died in the motor vehicle accidents. Yet at the same time, Americans would plead for a return of the old horse and buggy. But the automobile brought in more people’s lives than almost any other single invention. The Advent of the Gasoline Age

19. Gasoline engines also provide the power that enables humans to spread their wings. The Wright Brothers, Orville, and Wilbur performed a miracle at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. On that historic day, that plane stayed in the air for 12 seconds and 120 feet off the air. Now with aviation, the world shrank. • In 1927, Charles Lindbergh electrified the world with the first solo west to east conquest of the Atlantic. This single engine plane traveled from New York to Paris for 39 hours and 39 minutes. This impact of the airship was tremendous. • It provided the restless American spirit with yet another dimension. Yet this also gave birth to a new giant. By the 1930’s and 1940’s travel by air on regularly scheduled airlines was significantly safer than on many overcrowded highways. Humans Develop Wings

20. Guglielmo Marconi an Italian invented a wireless telegraphy in the 1890’s, and his brainchild was used for long range communication during WWI. • Educationally and culturally the radio made a significant contribution. Sports were further stimulated. Politicians had to adjust their speaking techniques to the new medium, and millions heard promises and pleas. Finally, the music of famous artists and symphony orchestras was beamed in to countless homes. The Radio Revolution

21. Thomas Edison as early the 1890’s invented this novel contraption and attained some popularity in the naughty peep-show penny arcades. But the real birth of the movie was in 1903 when the first story sequence reached the screen. The Great Train Robbery was featured in the 5 cent theaters that were called nickelodeons. • A fascinating industry was thus launched. Hollywood, in southern California, quickly became the movie capital of the world. Movies in the beginning offended the public and forced them to enforce a rigorous code of censorship. • A new era began in 1927 with the success of the first talkie-The Jazz Singer-, and the age of silent was ushered out as theatres everywhere were wired for sound. At about the same time, reasonably satisfactory color films were being produced. Many actors and actresses were far more widely known than the nation’s political leaders. Hollywood’s Filmland Fantasies

22. Far reaching changes in lifestyles and values paralleled the dramatic upsurge of the economy. The 1920’s revealed that for the first time most Americans no longer lived in the countryside but in urban areas. • Women will continue to find opportunities for employment, and they classified it into women’s work. An organized birth control movement, and to some defenders of traditional ways, it seemed that the world had suddenly gone mad. The Dynamic Decade

23. Churches were affected because Fundamentalists were losing ground and Modernists who liked to think that God was a good guy, and the universe was a great place to be. Once modest women now proclaimed their new freedom as flappers in bobbed tresses and dresses. Young women appeared with hemlines elevated, stockings rolled, cheeks rouged, and red lips that held a cigarette. American women were more adventurous and shocked their elders when they sported the new one-piece bathing suit. • If the flapper was the goddess of the era of wonderful nonsense, jazz was it sacred music. Jazz moved up from New Orleans along with the migrating blacks during WWI. A new racial pride also was blossoming in the black communities that came after the war. Harlem in New York City, counting some 100,000 African Americans residents in the 1920’s was one of the largest black communities in the world. The Dynamic Decade

24. The stock exchange provided even greater sensations. Speculations ran wild, and a boom or bust trading pushed the market up to dizzy peaks. Wall Street bulls gored one another and fleeced greedy lambs. The stock market became a veritable gambling den. • In the 1920’s everybody was buying stocks on margin-that is, with a small down payment. Little was done by Washington to curb money-mad speculators. In the wartime days of Wilson, the national debt had rocketed from the 1914 figures to: 1,188,235,400 to 1921’s figures: 23,976,250. • In 1921, Republican Congress created the Bureau of the Budget. The director was to assist the president in preparing careful estimates of receipts and expenditures for submission to Congress as the annual budget. This reform was to help prevent extravagant appropriations. Wall Street’s Big Bull Market

25. Treasury Mellon inherited some burdensome taxes from the war. Their theory was that such high levies forced the rich to invest in tax exempt securities rather than in the factories that provided prosperous payrolls. • Seeking to help the poor, Mellon helped engineer a series of tax reductions from 1921 to 1926. In 1921, a wealthy person with an income tax of 1 million had to pay 663,000 in income taxes, and Mellon wanted to switch much of the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle class income groups. • Mellon remains a controversial figure reduced the national debt by 10 billion. He was accused of indirectly encouraging the bull market. If he had absorbed more of the national income in taxes, there would have been less money left for frenzied speculation. Mellon dominated the political scene throughout the postwar decade. Wall Street’s Big Bull Market