The Roaring 20s

Why do you think the 1920s were called the Roaring Twenties?

Major Social Changes

• Traditional Moral Values v. Modern Values – Parties, dancing, music,

art ideals are changing– Improvements in

technology and urbanization created a higher standard of living for some Americans.

Why might all of these people be celebrating?

Armistice - End of WWI!

Time to celebrate!!!

…wait just a minute

Prohibition

• Manufacture and sale of alcohol outlawed in 1920

…but people drank anyway

Bootleggers

• Prohibition gave rise to organized crime

• Police could not stop the all of the sale of illegal alcohol

Al Capone

• Famous Chicago mobster made money from bootlegging

Speakeasies

• Secret bars and clubs where people went to drink

Modern Women

• Flappers– Smoked and drank in

public– Wore their hair and

dresses short

Immigration Restriction v. Golden Door

• Quota system - set up a maximum number of immigrants from each country– Kept out Southern and Eastern Europeans– Kept out Japanese

Hispanic Immigration• Hispanics took

advantage of the fact that they were excluded from the quotas set, and over 600,000 moved to the US to fill the labor gap

Fundamentalism v. Modernism• Discourse of the 1920s

between Evangelical Christians and groups that embraced science and secular values

• Scopes Trial– John Scopes was

brought to trial in Tennessee for teaching evolution in the classroom

– He was found guilty– The high profile trial

brought attention to the tension between religion and science

Anti-Evolution League book sale." Image. AP/Wide World Photos. American

History. ABC-CLIO, 2011. Web. 21 Nov. 2011.

Harlem Renaissance

• Movement in art, literature, music, that centered on African-American culture

What kind of music would they have been dancing to?

Jazz

• Started in New Orleans, but became a cultural force in New York

Louis Armstrong

Duke Ellington

Cab Calloway

Bessie Smith

But it wasn’t just music…

New Dances

• Charleston

• Black Bottom

• Lindy Hop

Josephine Baker

…and new writers

Claude McKay

Zora Neale Hurston

Langston Hughes

…and thinkers

DuBois and Garvey

Radical approach to civil rights

Back to Africa movement

The Lost Generation

• “Lost Generation”– Group of writers who moved to Europe– Not happy with the direction of American

culture

Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Gertrude Stein

John Marin

Modernist artist best known for his watercolors and abstract landscape paintings

Edward Hopper

Realist painterMany of his paintings are dark and feature scenes of urban lifeFocused on using light and shadow and on placement of his figures within his paintings to strike the proper mood

Leisure Time

• Professional sports– Babe Ruth

• Amusement Parks

• National Parks

• Films

Sports• Many spectator sports

were extremely popular, including golf, tennis, boxing, and swimming

• Baseball had become “America’s pass time”

• Football began to gain prominence with the founding of the National Football League (NFL) in 1920

Silent Films• Many early films were

comedies because “slapstick” provided effective visuals

• Most successful actor of the 1920s was comedic star Charlie Chaplin

Metropolis (1927)• Silent film made in

Germany which many consider to be the first significant “science fiction” film ever made

• Silent movies, since they used no spoken language, could be effectively played anywhere in the world

The Jazz Singer (1927)

• First “talkie” or film which had a synchronized soundtrack for dialogueThis film’s success led to the end of the silent picture era