22: The New Era

Warren G. Harding (1921-1923)

Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929)

Music from 1920-1929

I. Introduction

• In March, 1921, Warren G. Harding became the 29th president of the U.S.

• Over 115,000 Americans died in World War I.

• Spanish Influenza killed almost 700,000 people.

• People still feared communism and the “Red Scare.”

• The era of the Roaring Twenties started. Mass production, household appliances, talking films and more changed the U.S.

II. Republican White House, 1921-1933

• Harding restored tariffs and ended wartime industry controls.

• Congress feared the “Red Scare,” communism from Russia getting into the U.S.

• Harding’s administration was one of the most corrupt ever. He appointed “the Ohio gang,” people that were his friends from his home state.

• Several officials tried to lease government land in Wyoming to oil companies for cash. This was called the Teapot Dome scandal.

• Harding took a vacation so he could deal “with my God-damned friends,” but then suddenly had a heart attack and died.

Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover

• Coolidge lowered taxes and kept tariffs high in order to keep businesses happy.

• Female activism rose, especially now that women could vote.

• In January, 1920, prohibition became law, and alcohol could no longer be manufactured or sold.

• In 1928, Calvin Coolidge chose not to run for president. Herbert Hoover ran against Alfred E. Smith.

• Smith and Hoover were both against prohibition, but Smith was a Catholic; Hoover won in a landslide.

III. Culture of Consumption

• Christine Frederick wrote a monograph, Selling Mrs. Consumer, which said women purchase 90 percent of household expenditures.

• Americans worried that supply was higher than demand and tried to avoid the disaster by creating new marketing strategies.

• The department store was one of these new strategies.

• Marshall Field & Co. was one of the most successful department stores of the time.

• Automobiles began to allow credit, which made them sell more.

• The Ford assembly line also helped to create cars cheap and fast.

• By 1930, Americans owned more cars than Great Britain, Germany, France, and Italy combined.

Marshall Field

IV. Culture of Escape

• Society seemed more industrialized every day, and Americans wanted to escape laws and society.

• Americans used automobiles, Hollywood films, jazz records, and radio broadcasts to escape.

• As automobiles became more popular, people drove further and further, and women began to drive themselves to their own activities.

• Gas stations, diners, motels, and billboards appeared.

Movies

• The U.S. dominated the global film industry.

• Most turn of the century middle and upper class Americans felt that movies were low class entertainment. Thus, immigrants mostly of Jewish heritage from central and Eastern Europe “invented Hollywood.”

• In 1918, Warner Bros., Universal, Paramount, Columbia, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) were all founded or led by Jewish executives.

• These executive purposefully produced films that portrayed American values of opportunity, democracy, and freedom.

New Movies and Actors

• Many of these movies blended traditional and modern values.

• Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923, The Ten Commandments, showed modern “orgiastic revelry” while managing to celebrate a Biblical story.

• The Jazz Singer was the first movie with synchronized words and pictures.

• Americans began to love movies. It was an institution where “the rich rub elbows with the poor.”

• Women represented more than 60 percent of moviegoers. They went to see “America’s Sweetheart” Mary Pickford.

Cecil B. Demille's Ten Commandments (1923 & 1956)

The Jazz Singer

Mary Pickford's Oscar Winning Performance in Coquette

Outside of Movies

• At home, Americans listened to the radio. Soap companies sponsored daytime dramas so frequently that they became called “soap operas.”

• Radio exposed many people to music as well, including jazz.

• Play by play sportscasters introduced the masses to sports, including Jack Dempsey, a famous boxer, and Red Grange, a famous football player.

• The most famous player was George Herman “Babe” Ruth. He hit 54 home runs in 1920, more than any other team combined.

• America wanted heroes, and along with sports players, Charles Lindbergh was a famous pilot. He flew the first non-stop flight from New York to Paris in his plane The Spirit of Saint Louis.

Soap Operas

Jack Dempsey

Red Grange

Babe Ruth

Charles Lindbergh Flight

V. “The New Woman”

• The “flapper” was the new idea of a woman, with bobbed hair, short skirts (for the time), makeup, cigarettes, and carefree spirit.

• Along with this spirit, the ability for women to work outside the home rose. However, most female professionals were in feminized professions such as teaching and nursing. Even in those professions, it was difficult for women to rise to leadership positions.

• New positions as office clerk jobs appeared as well, but these also had a clear ceiling.

The Flapper

Fashion in the 1920s

VI. “The New Negro”

• During the 1920s, New York City became a popular destination for American blacks. This period was called the Great Migration.

• From 1910 to 1930, the city’s black population grew from 91,709 to 327,706 (up 257%). Nearly half made their home in Harlem.

• Harlem was a mass of black people energized by race pride, military service in WWI, the urban environment, and for many, the ideas of Pan-Africanism (Garveyism).

• In Alain Locke’s 1925 book The New Negro, he proclaimed that they were a generation of subservience no more.

The Great Migration

The Arts and Music

• At this time was the first Broadway presented black actors in serious roles. 1924’s Dixie to Broadway was the first all-black show with mainstream showings.

• In art, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Aaron Douglas, and Palmer Hayden showcased black cultural heritage and the population’s current experience.

• In music, jazz rocketed to popularity. Whites went to Harlem to hear “real jazz.”

• Unfortunately, black people were still segregated at this time.

• When headliners like Duke Ellington were hired to entertain at Harlem’s venues, the surrounding black community was often excluded.

Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller

Aaron Douglas

Palmer Hayden

Duke Ellington: It Don't Mean a Thing

Garveyism

• Marcus Garvey was a Jamacaican publisher and labor organizer.

• He founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).

• The UNIA sought to promote racial pride, encourage black economic independence, and root out racial oppression in Africa and the Diaspora.

• The UNIA published the newspaper Negro World and organized elaborate parades.

• Many of these displays and business ventures were poorly managed.

• In 1922 he was indicted and in 1925 imprisoned and deported for “using the mails for fraudulent purposes.”

• He was pardoned in 1927, but the UNIA never recovered.

• He inspired Malcom X, whose parents were Garveyites, and Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana.

Garveyism

VII. Culture War

• Many Americans had anxiety about the changes happening, and wanted scapegoats.

• Middle-class white Americans blamed Eastern Europeans and Latin Americans, as well as African Americans for problems.

• Protestants continued to blame Catholics, and said that Catholics gave their allegiance to the Pope, not their country.

• Congress passed the National Origins Act which made it so that annual immigration allowed only 2% of each nation that had come from that country and resided in the U.S. in 1890.

• This made it very difficult for immigrants from southern and eastern Europe as well as Latin America and Asia to enter the U.S.

• This restriction was omitted on Mexican immigrations, to help southern and western growers.

VII. Fundamentalist Christianity

• During the 1910s, oil barons Lyman and Milton Stewart enabled evangelist A.C. Dixon to commission essays to combat religious liberalism. This collection was known as The Fundamentals and became the foundational documents of Christian Fundamentalism.

• Contributions rested on literal truths, such as that Jesus would physically return to earth at the end of time to redeem the righteous and damn the wicked.

• One issue was evolution. John T. Scopes was on trial for teaching his students evolutionary theory over creationism.

The Scopes Trial

• Clarence Darrow defended Scopes.

• William Jennings Bryan defended Biblical literalism.

• Bryan argued that evolutionary theory morally corrupts. Darrow argued for academic freedom.

• Bryan took the stand as an “expert witness” and showed that he did not believe literally in all of Genesis.

• The case was thrown out on a technicality, but it seemed that the fundamentalists had lost.

The Scopes Trial

IX. Rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan

• The release of Birth of a Nation and the lynching of Leo Frank were thought to be what rebirthed the KKK.

• Because of the Great Migration, the KKK had a rise of membership in the north, even in Canada.

• The KKK was composed largely of middle-class people.

• Today, the KKK is remembered largely as a violent vigilante group.

• This is because they were known for lynching and “nightriding.”

• “Nightriding” was the physical harassment of bootleggers, union activists, civil rights workers, or any others deemed “immoral.”

• “Nightriding” was done while wearing hoods and robes, or under the cover of darkness.

Rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan

X. Conclusion

• Herbert Hoover told Americans that the Republican Party had brought prosperity.

• The new culture of consumption promoted new freedoms as well as new insecurities.

• Flailing European economies, high tariffs, wealth inequality, a construction bubble, and an ever-more flooded consumer market loomed dangerously until the Roaring Twenties ground to a halt.

• The Great Depression came quickly to end the Roaring Twenties.