Prohibition

• At midnight, January 16, 1920, the United States went dry; breweries, distilleries, and saloons were forced to close their doors.

• before the 18th Amendment was ratified, about 65 percent of the country had already banned alcohol

Prohibition

• Dry forces linked prohibition to a series of Progressive goals– Ending wife beating and child

abuse – Concern about the impact of

drinking on labor productivity – Outlawing drinking would

eliminate corruption, end machine politics, and help Americanize immigrants

Prohibition• The Volstead Act

– defined intoxicating beverages as anything with more than 0.5 percent alcohol. (Now beer and wine illegal)

– Enforcement of Prohibition assigned to the Internal Revenue Service

– In 1930 to the Justice Department

Prohibition

• Fostered corruption and contempt for law and law enforcement

• Popular culture glamorized bootleggers like Chicago's Capone

• Organized crime filled that vacuum left by the closure of the legal alcohol industry.

Race• Some of the most vicious

racial violence in American history took place between 1917 and 1923

• Movement north and to competition with whites for factory jobs

• Black veterans returned from World War I insisting on the civil rights that they had fought for in Europe

Race

• In Chicago, Ill., Longview, Texas, Omaha, Neb., Rosewood, Fla., Tulsa, Okla., and Washington, D.C., white mobs burned and killed in black neighborhoods.

The Great MigrationThe Great Migration

• In 1910, three out of every four black Americans lived on farms, and nine out of ten lived in the South

• Hoping to escape tenant farming, sharecropping, and peonage, 1.5 million Southern blacks moved to cities.

The Great MigrationThe Great Migration

• Confined to all-black neighborhoods, African Americans created cities-within-cities during the 1920s.

• The largest was Harlem, in upper Manhattan, where 200,000 African Americans lived in a neighborhood that had been virtually all-white fifteen years before

The Harlem RenaissanceThe Harlem Renaissance

• The first self-conscious literary and artistic movement in African American history.

• Harlem became the capital of black America, attracting black intellectuals and artists from across the country and the Caribbean

The Harlem RenaissanceThe Harlem Renaissance

• Embracing their Blackness

• Authors and Poets– Langston Hughes– Paul Laurence Dunbar– Claude McKay– Zora Neale Hurston– W.E.B. DuBois

Langston Hughes - The Negro Speaks of Rivers.mp3

The Harlem RenaissanceThe Harlem Renaissance

• Jazz, the only truly American art form blooms– Louis Armstrong– Billie Holiday– Duke Ellington– Cab Calloway– Bessie Smith– Count Basie– Ella Fitzgerald

Marcus Garvey

• The Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)

• Black working class mass movement

• Had at one time 4 million members

• Back to Africa Movement• Convicted of mail fraud, sent to

prison then deported back to Jamaica

Politics of the 1920’s

• Warren G. Harding (Rep)– Elected in 1920 under the

slogan –”A return to normalcy”

– Pro-business– Conservative cultural values– Isolationist foreign policy– Teapot Dome Scandal

• Albert Fall

Harding dies in office

• Replaces Harding when he dies

• Reelected in 1924• Lowest turnout in

Presidential electoral history

• The Business of America is Business!

• Return to laissez faire

The EconomyThe Economy

• Andrew Mellon set about lowering taxes and reducing national debt

• proposed a series of tax cuts--in 1921, 1924, and 1926

• Approved reduced income tax rates across the board

• got the estate tax lowered• strong supporter of tax cuts for

the rich

A Consumer SocietyA Consumer Society

• The growth of exciting new opportunities to buy cars, appliances, and stylish clothing

• Americans wore ready-made, exact-size clothing.

• First to play electric phonographs• Use electric vacuum cleaners• Listen to commercial radio

broadcasts• Drink fresh orange juice year

round.

A Consumer Society

• Cigarettes, cosmetics, and synthetic fabrics

• Cars were the symbol of the new consumer society

• The telephone and electricity became emblems of the consumer economy.

A Consumer Society

• Labor Saving devices– Refrigerators– washing machines– vacuum cleaners– toasters– Canned and frozen food

(Clarence Birdseye)

Advertising

• Advertising agencies hired psychologists (including John B. Watson, the founder of behaviorism, and Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew) to design the first campaigns

• By 1929, American companies spent $3 billion annually to advertise their products

Installment Credit

• Installment credit soared during the 1920s.

• Banks offered the country's first home mortgages.

• Manufacturers of everything--from cars to irons--allowed consumers to pay "on time."

• About 60 percent of all furniture and 75 percent of all radios were purchased on installment plans

The Chain Stores• Chains of stores multiplied across

the country, like Woolworth's, the five-and-dime chain. The largest grocery chain, A&P, had 17,500 stores by 1928

• Interlocking networks of banks and utility companies played a critical role in promoting the financial speculation of the late 1920’s.

Henry FordHenry Ford• In 1913, Ford had revolutionized American manufacturing by introducing the automated assembly line

• Conveyor belts to bring automobile parts to workers, he reduced the assembly time for a Ford car from 12 ½ hours in 1912 to just 1 ½ hours in 1914.

• Declining production costs allowed Ford to cut automobile prices--six times between 1921 and 1925.

• The cost of a new Ford was reduced to just $290. Less than three months wages for an average American worker

• To lower employee turnover and raise productivity, Ford introduced a minimum wage of $5 in 1914--twice what most workers earned-

• Shortened the workday from nine hours to eight hours.• Twelve years later, Ford reduced his work week from six days to five days.

Mass Entertainment

• The record chart, the book club, the radio, the talking picture, and spectator sports--all became popular forms of mass entertainment

• Sales of radios soared from $60 million in 1922 to $426 million in 1929

Mass EntertainmentRadio

• Radio drew the nation together by bringing news, entertainment, and advertisements to more than 10 million households by 1929.

• Radio blunted regional differences and imposed similar tastes and lifestyles

• The record player enter American life in full force

Mass EntertainmentMovies

• The popularity of the movies soared as films increasingly featured glamour, sophistication, and sex appeal

• Talking movies revolutionize movies in 1927 with “The Jazz Singer”

Mass EntertainmentSports

• Prize fighters like Jack Dempsey became national idols.

• Team sports flourished, such as football and baseball

• Heroes like Babe Ruth and Red Grange

• World War I revealed that the economy functioned effectively without foreign immigration

• Chief proponent of immigration restriction American Federation of Labor

• Make the quotas proportionate to the current population

• Future immigration would not change the balance of ethnic groups.

• In 1924, Congress reduced the number of immigrants allowed into the United States each year to two percent of each nationality group counted in the 1890 census.

• It also barred Asians entirely.

The Ku Klux Klan

• A new version of the Ku Klux Klan arose during the early 1920s through the use of ads

• Throughout this time period, immigration, fear of radicalism, and a revolution in morals and manners fanned anxiety in large parts of the country.

• Roman Catholics, Jews, African Americans, and foreigners were only the most obvious targets of the Klan's fear-mongering.

• Bootleggers and divorcees were also targets.

Fundamentalism

• Religion was a pivotal cultural battleground during the 1920s

• religious traditionalists sought to preserve the basic tenets of their religious faith.

• Literal interpretation of the Bible and the actuality of the virgin birth, the atonement, the resurrection, and the second coming of Christ.

Fundamentalism• Early fundamentalist

doctrine attacked competing religions--especially Catholicism, which it portrayed as an agent of the Antichrist

• Insisted on the literal truth of the Bible, a strict return to fundamental principles, and a thoroughgoing rejection of modernity

Court is in Session

•Sacco and Vanzetti•Loeb and Leopold•The Scopes Trial

Court is in Session

You’ve Come a Long Way Baby!

• Domestic service remained the largest occupation, followed by secretaries, typists, and clerks--all low-paying jobs

• Female professionals consistently received less pay than their male counterparts.

• They were concentrated in traditionally "female" occupations such as teaching and nursing.

You’ve Come a Long Way Baby!

• Organized women's movement declined in influence, partly due to the rise of the new consumer culture

• To popularize smoking among women, advertisers staged parades down New York's 5th Avenue, imitating the suffrage marches of the 1910s, in which young women carried "torches of freedom"--cigarettes.

Flappers or Back seat

Betties