AMERICAN LIFE IN THE “ROARING ‘20s”(“The Jazz Age”)

Chapter 32

The Jazz Age (“ROARING ‘20s”)

1921 - 1929

Chapter 15

Nativism - Again!!!

• In the 1920s, racism and nativism increased.

• Immigrants and military men coming home from war competed for the same jobs.

• Ethnic prejudice was the basis of the Sacco and Vanzetti case, in which the two immigrant men were accused of robbery and murder.

• They were thought to be anarchists, or opposed to all forms of government.

• Sacco and Vanzetti were sentenced to death, and in 1927 they were executed still proclaiming their innocence.

Sacco & Vanzetti

• The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) led the movement

to restrict immigration.

• By 1924 the Klan had over 4 million members and stretched beyond the South into Northern cities.

• Scandals and poor leadership led to the decline of the Klan in the late 1920s.

• Politicians supported by the Klan were voted out of office.

Controlling Immigration

In 1921 President Harding signed the Emergency Quota Act, limiting immigration to 3 percent of the total number of people in any ethnic group already living in the United States.

This discriminated heavily against southern and eastern Europeans.

The National Origins Act of 1924 made immigrant restriction a permanent policy.

President Harding

• Employers needed laborers for agriculture, mining, and railroad work.

• Mexican immigrants began pouring into the United States between 1914 and the end of the 1920s.

• The immigrants fled their country in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution of 1910.

The New Morality

• A “new morality” challenged traditional ideas and glorified youth and personal freedom.

• New ideas about marriage, work, and pleasure affected the way people lived.

• The automobile gave American youth the opportunity to pursue interests away from parents.

• Women broke away from families as they entered the workforce, earned their own livings, or attended college.

• Women’s fashion drastically changed in the 1920s.

• “Bobbed hair” & youthful appearance.

• Flapper - young, stylish & unconventional women (smoking & drinking)

New

hairstyles

and dress

• Professionally, women made advances in the fields of science, medicine, law, and literature.

• Florence Sabin - medical research in tuberculosis.

• Edith Wharton - Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence.

• Margaret Sanger - founded the American Birth Control League.

• Margaret Mead - anthropologist; studied Samoan culture and wrote Coming of Age in Samoa.

Mead

Sanger

Wharton

Sabin

Margaret Sanger was a proponent of giving birth control

information to women at a time

when public discussion of that topic was still not

socially acceptable.

The Fundamentalist Movement• Some Americans feared the new morality and

worried about America’s social decline.

• Many of these people came from small rural towns and joined a religious movement called Fundamentalism.

• The Fundamentalists rejected Darwin’s theory of evolution, which suggested that humans developed from lower forms of life over millions of years.

• Instead, Fundamentalists believed in creationism – that God created the world as described in the Bible.

• In 1925 Tennessee passed the Butler Act, which made it illegal to teach anything that denied creationism and taught evolution instead.

• The debate between evolutionists and creationists came to a head with the Scopes “Monkey” Trial.

• Answering the request of the ACLU, John T. Scopes, a biology teacher, volunteered to test the Butler Act by teaching evolution in his class.

• After being arrested and put on trial, Scopes was found guilty, but the case was later overturned.

John

Scopes

Clarence Darrow

(defended Scopes)

Wm. Jennings Bryan

The trial was held in Dayton, Tennessee and was the first covered on radio. Outcome: Scopes found guilty of violating the Butler Act; fined $100. Conviction later

overturned on appeal due to technicality.

Prohibition• Many people felt the passage of the Eighteenth

Amendment, which prohibited alcohol, would reduce unemployment, domestic violence, and poverty.

• The Volstead Act made the enforcement of Prohibition the responsibility of the U.S. Treasury Department.

Prohibition is sometimes called the “Noble Experiment.” Why?

“Yes…it’s a noble experiment.”

Enforcement of Prohibition difficult:* In cities, people flocked to secret

bars known as speakeasies.

* In rural areas, bootlegging was

common.

* Organized crime was a

major problem; ex: Al Capone.

* Eliot Ness, Treasury

Department Task Force,

brought Capone to justice (but

only for tax evasion).

• In 1933 the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment repealed the Eighteenth Amendment and ended Prohibition.

• It was a defeat for supporters of traditional values and those who favored the use of federal police powers to achieve moral reform.

X

• Greenwich Village (Manhattan) and the South Side of Chicago - home to the artistic and unconventional lifestyle known as bohemian.

• Modern American Art - John Marin drew on nature and the city for inspiration.

• Edward Hopper revived realism in art.

John Marin’s Top of Radio City

Edward Hopper’s

Pennsylvania Coal Town

Poets & WritersCarl Sandburg - Chicago poet who used common speech to glorify Mid-West and American life.

Edna St. Vincent Millay - expressed women’s freedom and equality: “My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends

It gives a lovely light.”

Carl Sandburg

Other noted authors and poets.....

Ezra

Pound

Eugene

O’Neill

Ernest

Hemingway

F. Scott

Fitzgerald

Writers of this age are often called the

Lost Generation.

New Words The youth culture of the twenties produced a number of new words and phrases that became a part of their own language. In the mid-1920s, partygoers urged fellow dancers to “Get hot! Get hot!” Young Americans also invented such terms as beauts, cat’s pajamas, and cat’s whiskers to describe attractive young women. The terms lounge lizards, jelly beans, and jazzbos described attractive young men, while the phrase hard-boiled eggs described tough guys.

Prohibition also expanded American vocabulary. Bootlegger, speakeasy, and hip flask became part of common speech. It also gave new meaning to the words wet and dry.

• The economic prosperity of the 1920s gave Americans more leisure time for entertainment.

• Radio, motion pictures, and newspapers gave rise to a new interest in sports.

• Sports figures, such as Babe Ruth and heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, were famous for their sports abilities but became celebrities as well.

Red Grange

“The

Galloping

Ghost”

Bobby Jones

Gertrude Ederle

Swam the English

Channel in 14 hours

• Motion pictures became increasingly popular.

• The golden age of Hollywood began.

• The mass media –radio, movies, newspapers, and magazines–helped break down the focus on local interests.

• Mass media helped unify the nation and spread new ideas and attitudes.

The first “talking” picture, The Jazz Singer, was made in 1927.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG01/hughes/clip/jazz.ram

The New “Movie Stars”

Charlie Chaplin

“America’s Sweetheart”

Mary Pickford

Douglas Fairbanks

Gloria Swanson Rudolph Valentino

The Harlem Renaissance

• The Great Migration occurred when hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the rural South headed to industrial cities in the North with the hope of a better life.

• In large northern cities, particularly New York City’s neighborhood of Harlem, African Americans created environments that stimulated artistic development, racial pride, a sense of community, and political organization, which led to a massive creative outpouring of African American arts.

• This became known as the Harlem Renaissance.

• Louis Armstrong introduced jazz, a style of music influenced by Dixieland music and ragtime.

• He became the first great cornet and trumpet soloist in jazz music.

• A famous Harlem nightspot, the Cotton Club, was where some famous African American musicians, such as Duke Ellington, got their start.

African American Politics• After World War I, many African

Americans wanted a new role in life and in politics.

• Oscar DePriest was elected as the first African American representative in Congress from a Northern state after African Americans voted as a bloc.

Great Migration African Americans are powerful voting bloc affect elections

NAACP - Battled (often unsuccessfully) against segregation and discrimination. Focused on using the court system to try to obtain full African American rights.

Marcus Garvey - encouraged African Americans to gain political power by educating themselves.

Formed a “Back to Africa” project. He pushed separatism and racial purity.

He was convicted of mail fraud and served two years in prison.