A Decade of Tensions: The 1920s

Key Themes: The 1920s

• 1920s aren’t just about parties: all kinds of conflict

• But most Americans would like to ignore politics and social tensions, which is why the party image

• Exciting cultural development: the Harlem Renaissance - black migrants from the South export culture from NY

1919

• Worldwide upheaval

• In the U.S.: flu, bombings, strikes

• Red and black scares: deportations and Palmer raids; racial violence

1920

• Warren G. Harding (R) elected President

• “a return to normalcy”

• retreat from “Wilsonianism”

A Decade of Tensions• Parties vs. Prohibition

• Rural vs. urban Americans

• Traditional vs. “modern” Christianity

• Consumers vs. those left out of prosperity

1920s Consumerism

• American business around the world

• Consumer goods and technologies

• Leisure activities

• Radio and phonographs

Image source: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/coke-ads-1920s

Check out a sound clip from an early celebrity: This is Enrico Caruso. Does it surprise you that this is what a popular

musician sounded like?

Limits to Prosperity

• Wages for industrial workers rose much slower than corporate profits

• 1929: majority of families had no savings; 40% of population in poverty

• Farmers excluded from prosperity - many left farms

• Some farmers to LA: population from 575,000 to 2.2 million

Image: River Rouge Plant, Charles Sheeler, 1932Source: The Whitney Museum

http://whitney.org/Collection/CharlesSheeler/3243

The Image of Business

Decline of Progressivism

• Labor: “welfare capitalism” instead of “industrial freedom”

• Women’s rights: Equal Rights Amendment fails

• Women’s freedom: the liberated young woman

We have a hard time understanding why people would support Prohibition.

The video clip coming up next gives us some ideas.

Decline of Progressivism (3)

• Lack of political engagement: less than 50% voted in 1924

• Alliance between business and government

• Government corruption: Teapot Dome, WY

Culture Wars: Religion

• Evangelical Protestants - Fundamentalism

• Support for Prohibition

• Opposition to “modernism,” new moral rules

• An example of an evangelical preacher: Billy Sunday

Image: Ames Historical Societyhttp://

www.ameshistoricalsociety.org/

residents_sunday2.htm

Check out a film clip of Billy Sunday preaching.

What do you think of his style?

Culture Wars: Religion• The Scopes Trial

• Clarence Darrow on behalf of John Scopes and the ACLU (founded 1920)

• William Jennings Bryan for prosecution

• Bryan on the stand: http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/hist409/scopes.html

Outside the Scopes Trial. Source: npr.org

Clarence DarrowWilliam Jennings Bryan

The author of the book excerpted on the next slide had a booth outside the trial -

which was like a circus, complete with pet monkeys!

WHAT can be done? Where is our hope? The pussyfooting apologies for the Evolutionists will say "Don't do anything drastic. Educate the people, and the thing will right itself." Educate the people? How can we, when Evolutionists have us by the throat? When they have, while we were asleep, captured our tax-supported schools from primary to University, and many of our denominational colleges? "The Philistines be upon thee Samson !" But alas! We have been asleep upon the lap of this Delilah and. have been shorn of our strength-they have captured our schools. But "O Lord God, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, strengthen me only this once, O God." "And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the house stood, and on which it was borne up." So could we. "And he bowed himself with all his might." So can we. And the strength of God who "created man in his own image" will come into us, and we will slay these Philistines, the greatest curse that has come upon man since God created him in His own image. What is a war, what is an epidemic that sweeps people away by the hundred thousand, compared to this scourge that under the guise of "science," when it is not science, at all, is sweeping our sons and daughters away from God, away from God's word, taking from them their Redeemer and Saviour, to spend eternity in hell? From T.T. Martin Hell and the High Schools

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/evolut.htm

Culture Wars: Race• The Second Klan: 3 million

members 1920s

• Immigration restricted:

• 1921 - reduced 67%

• 1924 - national quotas

• Quotas allegedly based on a “biologically ideal” population

• Immigrants - especially Catholics and Jews - respond

Cultural Renaissance: Harlem

• “Capital” of black America, including West Indian immigrants

• Black artists and actors were accepted by previously all-white institutions

• “New Negro” - in politics and art

Check out this film of nightclub dancer Josephine Baker. She became a celebrity

in France in the 1920s.

You can see how African Americans are getting power at this time, but are also

limited: a banana dance pokes fun at a silly idea of what African culture is like.

Poetry is another part of the Harlem Renaissance

Check out the following poem, either in text or video clip!

If We Must Die

by Claude McKay

If we must die—let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot. If we must die—oh, let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe; Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Black Protest: W.E.B. Du Bois

• b. 1868

• Education: Fisk University; Harvard University

• “talented tenth” should challenge inequality

• 1905: Niagara movement leads to founding of NAACP

• NAACP: legal strategy - Bailey v. Alabama (1911) overturns “peonage” laws

Marcus Garvey

• Born in Jamaica, moved to Harlem 1916

• Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)

• Encouraged establishment of black businesses

• Founded Black Star Line - shipping

Conclusions

• 1920s are a decade of conflicts, of extremes

• Politics: more conservative; Progressivism rejected or defeated

• Social conflict: between rich and poor; conservative and liberal; racial conflict

• Cultural flowering in Harlem, some of which grows out of racial protest