Download Postwar Prosperity Scientific and technical innovations caused the

Postwar Prosperity
Scientific and technical innovations caused the 1920’s known as the "Second
Industrial Revolution."
Electricity became widespread
Industrial production became more efficient
Mass produced goods became available at attainable prices.
Communication innovations contributed to the homogenization of ideas that led
to national popular culture
Americans began using credit, which further fueled consumerism.
Postwar Prosperity
The cycle that created the business boom in the 1920's:
standardized mass production led to
more efficient machines, which led to
higher production and wages, which led to
increased demand for consumer goods,
which perpetuated more standardized mass production.
Postwar Prosperity
Industries began to employ automated machinery and "scientific management"
to increase efficiency.
The reorganization of work to maximize production resulted in more spare time
and disposable income for average workers.
Scientific management practices also led to a decline in the importance of skill
and craftsmanship in favor of discipline and subordination.
The Automobile and American Culture
The explosive growth of the automobile industry revolutionized American life.
Henry Ford's innovative production techniques made cars affordable for average
Americans and set new standards for industry.
By the end of the decade, there were enough cars on the road for every one in
five persons.
Related industries sprang up including service facilities, filling stations, and
motels.
Mass Culture: The Movies
With mass communication came the parallel ascendancy of consumer culture
and the cult of celebrity.
A new culture of youth and celebrity emerged with the popularity of the movies.
Films celebrated themes like consumerism, romance, exotic locales, and new
fashions.
Young people emulated the glamorous Hollywood elite just as they do today,
raising much concern among parents.
Mass Culture: The Movies
Although it was not the first film to incorporate an element of sound, the 1927
Warner Brothers film The Jazz Singer is widely credited with heralding in
the age of "talkies" and the end of the silent film era.
The star Al Jolson appears in blackface in the film.
Mass Culture: The Movies
Mary Pickford, known as "America's Sweetheart" in the 1910's and 1920's
appears in an advertisement for beauty cream.
Pickford embodied the movie icon as a marketing tool in the new era of mass
culture and consumption.
Mass Culture: The Movies
Rudolph Valentino and Clara Bow- two sex symbols and film icons of the Jazz
Age.
Mass Culture: Radio
After war-time restrictions on civilian radio use were lifted, amateurs began
experimenting with broadcasting.
After years of limited broadcasts by amateurs and experimental stations, large
corporations such as AT&T, Westinghouse and GE began to recognize the
profit potential in radio.
As the popularity of radio expanded, advertisers began sponsoring radio shows
to appeal to consumers.
By the end of the decade, 40% of homes had radio receivers.
Mass Culture: Music and the Music Industry
Although the phonograph first became available at the turn of the century, the
device became more popular as sturdy disc recordings replaced delicate
wax cylinders during World War I.
As America developed mass culture through film, advertising, and radio,
previously isolated musical styles blended to produce lively and often
rebellious radio hits.
Record companies profited as Americans snapped up dance records and new,
exciting types of music.
Literature and Poetry in the Jazz Age: The Harlem Renaissance
In the wake of the black exodus from the South, known as the Great Migration,
the Harlem section of New York City became home to a number of African
American intellectuals, artists, and writers.
The seminal magazine feature "Harlem: Mecca for the New Negro" in Survey
Graphic summarized the cultural phenomena this way:
"If The Survey reads the signs aright, such a dramatic flowering of a
new racespirit is taking place close at home among American Negroes,
and the stage of that new episode is Harlem."
Literature and Poetry in the Jazz Age: The Harlem Renaissance
Literature and Poetry in the Jazz Age: The Lost Generation
F. Scott Fitzgerald often wrote critically about the illusions of wealth and fame,
while at the same time partaking in the excesses of celebrity and striving
for immortality in literature. Fitzgerald succumbed to alcoholism and his
wife to mental illness after years behind the facade of glamour and
celebrity.
Ernest Hemmingway’s dense, understated writing style became a model for
generations of writers. He wrote for "the lost generation," of young men
who came of age in the trenches of World War I and were unable to settle
back into the norms of traditional society.
The New Woman and the New Morality
The image of the flapper and the "new woman," who bobbed her hair, wore
make-up, danced to jazz music, and smoked cigarettes is synonymous with
the 1920's.
The emerging advertising industry and mass media promoted more sexualized
images of women, thus, giving license for young women to shed some of
the old sexual mores that were perceived as "Victorian."
The New Woman and the New Morality
The New Woman and the New Morality
In 1920, the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote.
The notable birth control activist Margaret Sanger campaigned across the
country to educate women about family planning, remove the social stigma
attached to contraceptives, and make safe birth control accessible to every
class of women.
Sanger began her campaign for birth control after spending years as a nurse in
poor communities.
Prohibition, "A Noble Experiment"
Along with the social changes of the interwar era came reactions to those
trends.
Prohibition went into effect in January 1920 as a result of decades of
campaigning by temperance groups, rural Protestants, and some
progressives who felt that alcohol represented a scourge on family life and
a catalyst to crime.
Although the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act outlawed the sale,
transport, and consumption of intoxicating beverages, many otherwise lawabiding Americans defied the regulations.
The black market for alcohol was a boon for organized crime.
Nativism and Immigration Restrictions
As cities underwent explosive growth, rural populations and traditionalists
sometimes felt threatened by foreign cultures and modernism.
As Catholic and Jewish immigrants from southern and eastern Europe began to
outnumber those from northern and western Europe, nativist sentiments
inflamed by the war coalesced into a "100% American" movement fueled
by pseudo-scientific theories of race.
Nativism and Immigration Restrictions
The 1921 Immigration Act:
limited new arrivals to 350,000 and
set caps for European countries- the maximum number of immigrants
from a given country could not exceed 3 percent of the number of its
natives already in the United States as counted by the 1910 census.
The 1924, the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act:
further restricted immigration by cutting the maximum total of
immigrants to 164,000 and
changed the caps to 2 percent from a given country, as counted by
the 1890 census (when even fewer natives from these countries
resided in the U.S.)
The Resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan
One of the most disturbing manifestations of nativist sentiment in the United
States in the 1920's was the brief resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.
Originated after the Civil War as an instrument of white terror against the newly
freed slaves, the Klan's influence and membership faded by the 1870's.
In the 1920's, the new Klan added advocacy of "100% Americanism" to its
agenda, which engendered hatred of Jews, Catholics, foreign born citizens,
and communists in addition to African Americans.
The Resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan
The Klan's purported "law and order platform" made it appealing to those who
rejected modernism and saw the organization as a champion of patriotism,
female purity, temperance and Christian morality.
In many circumstances, the Klan represented itself as an opportunity for people
to socialize feel connected by ritualized gatherings.
In some states like Texas and Indiana, Klan members were influential in politics
and law enforcement.
The Resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan
The membership of the KKK rapidly declined from around 3 million in 1925 to
several hundred thousand in the late 1920's, due in part to the implication
of its leaders in various scandals.
In response to growing disillusionment and defection by its members, the KKK
staged a march down Pennsylvania Avenue in August 1928.
Religious Fundamentalism
Nostalgia for the past in reaction changing social mores characterized the
growing influence of religious fundamentalism in the Jazz Age.
Conservative Christians struggled to maintain their beliefs and the beliefs of
their children in the face of the culture of consumerism, changing gender
roles, the teaching of evolution, and the influence of mass media.
Fundamentalism centers on belief in the literal truth of the Bible and claims
adherents in all denominations of Christianity.
Religious Fundamentalism
The tension between liberal and fundamentalist Christians, often within the
same congregation, was symptomatic of the larger struggle between
modernists and those who longed to "get back to basics" in interwar
America.
The division between these groups would become a national preoccupation with
the drama of the Scopes Trial in 1925
The Scopes Trial
The Scopes Trial provides the most dramatic illustration of the cultural tension
of the Jazz Age, pitteing secularists and modernists against traditionalists
and fundamentalists in a carnival atmosphere that was tailor-made for the
tabloids and new mass media.
The 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial" in Dayton, Tennessee was not a spontaneous
occurrence.
In response to legislation outlawing the teaching of evolution, the ACLU offered
to finance the defense of any teacher willing to challenge the law. 25 year
old biology teacher John Scopes agreed to participate after some urging by
local townspeople.
The Scopes Trial
The trial was not about whether or not Scopes was guilty, nor was it about the
$100 penalty he faced.
Scopes’ agnostic lawyer Clarence Darrow wanted to appeal the case the to the
Supreme Court and have the law declared unconstitutional.
Populist and former presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan was
motivated by a need to defend Christianity and the integrity of the
fundamentalist cause.
Although, as expected, Bryan won the legal case, Darrow triumphed in the court
of public opinion.