Book of 20s

THE ROARING

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Content IT ALL LOOK LIKE THIS THE FLAPPERS RULE THE WORLD JAZZ JAZZ JAZZ MONEY AND POWER ENTERTAINMENT CARS

THE PROHIBITION CRIME AND GANGSTERS

THE NEW ARRIVAL OF IMMIGRANTS THE GREAT MIGRATION

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IT ALL LOOK LIKE THIS

The census of 1920 revealed that for the first time most Americans no longer lived in the countryside but in urban areas; women continued to find opportunities for employment in cities. An organized birth-control movement, led by feminist Margaret Sanger, openly championed the use of contraceptives and Alice Paul’s National Woman’s party campaigned for Equal Rights. Fundamentalist champions of the religion lost ground to the Modernists (God was a “good guy”).

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Advertisers exploited sexual allure to sell everything from soap to car tires— maidens now proclaimed their new freedom as “flappers” in bobbed tresses and dresses (sex o’ clock). Adventuresome females shocked their elders when they sported the new one-piece bathing suits.

Justification for this new sexual frankness could be found in the translated writings of Dr. Sigmund Freud who argued that sexual repression was responsible for a variety of illnesses.

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THE FLAPPERS RULE THE WORLD If the flapper was the goddess of the “era of wonderful nonsense,” “The Flapper awoke from her lethargy of sub-deb-ism, bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into the battle.

She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure, she covered her face with powder and paint because she didn’t need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring. She was conscious that the things she BOOK.indd 6-7

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did were the things she had always wanted to do. Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances, to teas, to swim and most of all to heart. She had mostly masculine friends, but youth does not need friends it needs only crowds.”

Less than affluent flappers reveal their knees in the 1920s.

That’s the piece that most people forget: The flapper movement wasn’t simply a fashion trend. it was a full-blown, grassroots feminist revolution. After an 80-year campaign by suffragists, women were finally granted the right to vote in the United States in 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was passed.

When the U.S. entered World War I in April 1917, many women entered BOOK.indd 8-9

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the workforce, and when the soldiers returned in November 1918, their female counterparts were reluctant to give up their jobs.

As a result, young, unmarried women experienced far greater financial independence than they’d ever had before. Bicycles, and then cars, allowed them to get around town without a male escort. The spread of electric lighting allowed nightclubs to flourish, just as the Prohibition Amendment of 1919 forced them to go underground.

Drinking at illegal “speakeasies” became a thrilling part of flapper culture. Suddenly, it was possible for women to go out and enjoy freedom and rebellion in a way they never had before when they were behold8/2/14 11:49 AM

en to their fathers or husbands.

First, these flappers ditched the constraining, skin-covering clothes of their Edwardian mothers. Inspired by Cubist art and Art Nouveau haute couture, flappers rejected the dramatic, hyper-feminine S-shaped Edwardian silhouette created by tight, time-consuming corsets for sheath dresses that gave them boxy boyish shapes. In fact, this straight up-and-down figure was so extreme that curvier women went out of their way to squeeze into girdles and bandage their breasts flat. It was so severe that Luhrmann’s film doesn’t really go there, as most women today would not want to sport such a curveless look. These radical women pushed BOOK.indd 10-11

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the boundaries of androgyny even further by chopping off their long Edwardian locks for bobbed hairstyles.

At the same time, flappers revealed a shocking amount of skin.

The older generation was absolutely outraged by the site of bare knees and arms, which flappers would highlight with loads of bangles.

They were also appalled by the red lips, rouged cheeks, and kohl-lined eyes of flappers, as previously only prostitutes had worn makeup. But these young women would load up with affordable costume jewelry and take their newly invented lipstick tubes and compacts out with them to speakeasies, where they would smoke, drink hard liquor, listen to BOOK.indd 14-15

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jazz, and dance the Charleston, the Black Bottom, or the Lindy Hop, dances considered sexually provocative. So flappers were derided for being both too masculine and too titillating.

So flapper fashion had lost its edge by the mid-1920s, when department stores and mail-order companies had discovered the money-making potential of this radically new look. Flapper fashions can be seen in the 1926 Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog, as shown in Smithsonian.com’s “The History of the Flapper.” It wasn’t long before, the Great Wall Street Crash of 1929, which led to the Great Depression of the 1930s, crushed the fun, free spirit of Jazz Age, forcing men and 8/2/14 11:49 AM

women alike to get less materialistic and more practical about money.

But the flapper’s influence on American culture could not be undone.

She rejected the notion that women should be submissive and keep to their “separate sphere” of the home.

She proved that women could work and live independent from men— and party just as hard. She opened up new conversations about dating, sexuality, and sexually transmitted diseases. Along with all those feminist hallmarks, she also created a new, more demanding beauty standard for women that requires wearing makeup, tanning, and dieting and exercising to stay lithe and youthful.

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JAZZ Jazz moved up from New Orleans along with the migrating blacks during World War I. The decade of 1920s marked huge advances in the music industry. The phonograph record became the primary method of disseminating music, surpassing sales of sheet music and piano rolls. The music industry, ever keen to discover new ways of making profits, realized that record, sheet music and piano roll sales could all be tied together. The “song plugger” was born: a person who worked to make sure his company’s tunes would be performed by dance bands or by singers, live and on records, ever hopeful of a “hit.”

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The decade marked the beginning of independent (or indie) record companies, smaller operations that weren’t afraid to take a chance on music and artists that the bigger companies shied away from. Some of the great early jazz, blues and country performers appeared on indie labels like Gennett, Paramount and Okeh. Jazz music, which had originated in New Orleans in the early 1900s, began to spread throughout the country by the late ‘teens. As more employment opportunities opened up in the North, especially in Chicago and the Midwest, both black and white musicians from New Orleans moved to Chicago.

Prohibition and the advent of the “speakeasy”

created many opportunities for musicians in small cabarets, dance halls and ballrooms.

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Beginning in 1922, Gennett Records, an indie company located in Richmond, Indiana, began recording jazz groups performing in Chicago.

The first group they recorded was the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, followed in 1923 by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band with young lion Louis Armstrong on second cornet. That same year Gennett waxed a series of solo piano recordings by Jelly Roll Morton. The following year they recorded The Wolverines, a northern group which had been influenced by both the New Orleans Rhythm Kings and King Oliver’s Jazz Band and featured the up-and-coming cornetist Bix Beiderbecke. Another indie company in Chicago, Paramount Records, was competing with Gennett BOOK.indd 22-23

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and Okeh for jazz talent. (King Oliver’s band recorded for all three companies during 1923.)

MONEY AND POWER Signals abounded that economic joyride might end in a crash—hundreds of banks failed annually. Florida boom that culminated in 1925 involved the selling of numerous underwater lots at preposterous sums. wildcat scheme collapse when peninsula was devastated by a hurricane.

The stock exchange provided even greater sensations—speculation ran wild and an orgy of boom-or-bust trading pushed the market up to dizzy peaks (“Be a bull on America”). As the 1920s lurched forward, everybody seemed to be buying stocks “on margin”with a small down payment (rags-to-riches Americans worshiped at the altar of the ticker-tape machine. Little was done

by Washington to curb money-mad speculators (national debt sky-rocketed).

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A businesslike move toward economic sanity was made in 1921, with the creation of the Bureau of the Budget—assist president in preparing careful estimates of receipts and expenditures for submission to Congress as the annual budget (prevent haphazardly extravagant appropriations).

The burdensome taxes inherited from the war were distasteful to the Secretary of the Treasury Mellon—their theory was that such high levies forced the rich to invest in tax-exempt securities rather than in the factories that provided prosperous payrolls (high taxes discouraged business and also brought a smaller net return to the Treasury than moderate taxes).

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Mellon helped engineer a series of tax reductions from 1921 to 1926 and Congress followed by repealing excess-profits tax, abolishing gift tax, and reducing excise taxes, surtax, income tax, and estate taxes (Mellon’s spare-the-rich policies shifted tax burden to middle-income groups).

True he reduced the national debt by $10 billion (to $16 billion) but he was accused of indirectly encouraging the bull market—single-mindedly probusiness regime that dominated political scene.

Toward the end of the decade, radio went from being an expensive novelty into a major purveyor of inexpensive entertainment. With the beginning of the Great Depression, 8/2/14 11:49 AM

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phonograph and sheet music sales would plummet and radio would become the most important medium in the music industry. As a result, indie record companies went bankrupt or merged with the bigger companies, and similar operations wouldn’t emerge again until the late 1930s.

ENTERTAINMENT By the late 1920s motion pictures had gone from silent to sound, creating another medium for the sale of sheet music and phonograph records. Soon Broadway and Tin Pan Alley songwriters would be exercising their craft for films. The flickering movie was the fruit of numerous ge-

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niuses, including Thomas A. Edison. It was available in the 1890s in naughty peep-show penny arcades but the real birth of the movie came in 1903 when the first story sequence reached the screen (The Great Train Robbery).

Hollywood, in southern California, quickly became the movie capital of the world; an outraged public forced the screen magnates to set up their own rigorous code of censorship (propaganda). A new era began in 1927 with the success of the first “talkie” The Jazz Singer.

Movies eclipsed all other new forms of amusement in the phenomenal growth of popularity. Much of the rich diversity of the immigrants’ Old Country cultures was lost, but the standardization of tastes and of language hastened entry into the American mainstream.

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Gugleilmo Marconi, invented wireless telegraphy in the 1890s and his brainchild was used for long-range communication during World War I. next came the voice-carrying radio. A red-letter day was posted in November 1920 when a Pittsburgh radio station broadcasted news.

Later miracles were achieved in transatlantic wireless phonographs, radiotelephones, and television. by the late 1920s, technological improvements made long. distance broadcasting possible, and national commercial networks drowned out much local programming.

The radio was drawing Americans back to the home (radio knitted the nation together).

Educationally and culturally, the radio made a significant contribution—sports were further stimulated and politicians were now able to deliver their speeches over the radio (music).

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CARS A new industrial revolution slipped into high gear in America in the 1920s. Of all inventions of era, the automobile cut the deepest mark (assembly-line, mass production).

Americans adapted rather than invented gasoline engine and a few daring American inventors and promoters, including Henry Ford and Ransom Olds were developing the automotive industry.

An enormous industry sprang into being, as Detroit became the motorcar capital of America, which owed much to the stopwatch efficiency techniques of Frederick W. Taylor (inventor).

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Best known of new crop of industrial wizards was Henry Fords who put America on rubber tires. Ford’s Model T was cheap, rugged, and reasonably reliable, though rough and clattering. So economical were his methods that in the mid-1920s he was selling the Ford roadster for $260. Fords were phenomenal and by 1930 the total had risen to 20 million from 0.5 million in 1914.

A gigantic new industry emerged, dependent on steel but displacing steel from its kingpin role. Employing about 6 million people by 1930, it was a major wellspring of the nation’s prosperity.

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THe Great migration and Immigration

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New industries boomed lustily; the petroleum business experienced an explosive development. states expanded wondrously and the wilderness frontier became an industrial frontier. Speedy marketing of perishable foodstuffs was accelerated; a new prosperity enriched outlying farms, countless new roads ribboned out to meet demand of the American motorist.

Zooming motorcars were agents of social change; they changed from a luxury to a necessity. Leisure hours could not be spent more pleasurably and women were further freed from men. Autobuses made possible the consolidation of schools and to some extent of churches and the sprawling suburbs spread out still farther from the urban core nation of commuters.

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The demon machine exacted a terrible toll by catering to the American mania for speed. The morals of flaming youth sagged corresponding.

The automobile contributed notable to improved air and environmental quality despite its later notoriety as a polluter—automobile brought convenience, pleasure, and excitement.

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THE PROHIBITION CRIME AND GANGSTERS

Lush profits of illegal alcohol led to bribery of the police; violent wars broke out in the big cities between rival gangs who sought to corner the rich market in booze (bootlegging competitors).

Arrests were few and convictions were even fewer—gangsters covered for one another (code).

Chicago was by far the most spectacular example of lawlessness; “Scarface” Al Capone, a grasping and murderous booze distributor, began six years of gang warfare netting millions.

Capone could not be convicted of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre of 1929 but served ten years in jail for income-tax evasion. gangsters moved to prostitution, gambling, and narcotics. Honest BOOK.indd 40-41

merchants were forced to pay protection money organized crime became big business

The kidnapping for ransom and eventual murder the son of aviator-hero Charles A. Lindbergh—Congress passed the Lindbergh Law in 1932, making interstate abduction in certain circumstances a death-penalty offense (annual take of underworld was $12 to $18 billion.

The last pillar of the progressive reform was prohibition, loudly supported by crusading churches and by many women. Eighteenth Amendment in 1919 as implemented by the Volstead Act. The legal abolition of alcohol was especially popular in the South and West (Southern whites wanted to keep blacks in place and West led an attack on all vices associated with saloons).

Prohibitionists overlooked the tenacious American tradition of strong drink and of weak 8/2/14 11:49 AM

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control by the central government, especially over private lives. majority of people were hostile to it. Slaking thirst became a cherished personal liberty; frustrated soldiers complained about prohibition; workers bemoaned their loss of cheap beer; flaming youth of the jazz age drank.

State/federal agencies were understaffed and snoopers, susceptible to bribery, were underpaid. Both men and women drank hard liquor in staggering volume—cases leaked from Canada.“Home brew” and “bathtub gin” became popular but some produced blindness, even death. Bank savings increased, absenteeism in industry decreased, less alcohol was consumed than in the days before prohibition, though strong drink continued to be available.

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THE NEW ARRIVAL OF IMMIGRANTS

Immigrants began to flood into the country as peace settled in the 1920s; some 800,000 stepped ashore in 1920-1921, about two-thirds of them from southern and eastern Europe. Congress plugged the breach with the Emergency Quota Act of 1921—newcomers from Europe were restricted in any given year to a definite quota (set at 3 percent of the people of their nationality who had been living in the U.S. in 1910— favorable to southern/eastern Europeans).

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The Immigration Act of 1924 replaced the stopgap legislation of 1921—quotes were cut from 3% to 2% and the national-origins base was shifted from the census of 1910 to that of 1890. Comparatively few southern Europeans had arrived there and the door was shut absolutely against Japanese immigrants (hate rallies in Japan); exempt were Canadians and Latin Americans.

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THE GREAT MIGRATION As a result of housing tensions, many blacks ended up creating their own cities within big cities, fostering the growth of a new urban African-American culture. The most prominent example was Harlem in New York City, a formerly all-white neighborhood that by

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crediter

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The quote system was a departure in American policy—immigration dwindled to a mere trickle. The Immigration Act of 1924 marked the end of virtually unrestricted immigration (by 1931). America was patchwork of ethnic communities separated (language, religion, customs).

Efforts to organize labor unions repeatedly founded on the rocks of ethnic differences; ethnic variety thus undermined class and political solidarity did not have a common language.A new Ku Klux Klan, spawned by the postwar reaction, spread fearsomely in the early 1920s. It was antiforeign, anti-Catholic, anti-black, anti-Jewish, anti-pacifist, anti-Communist, anti-internationalist, antievolution, anti-bootlegger, antigambling, anti-adultery, and anti-birth control

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It was pro-Anglo-Saxon, pro-“native” American, and pro-Protestant (ultraconservative uprising). The Klan spread rapidly in the Midwest and the South—peak in the mid1920s with 5 million. Capitalized on American love of adventure, camaraderie, and secret ritual—“conclaves,” huge flay-waving parades, and the chief warning was the blazing cross (reign of hooded horror).

The movement collapsed in the late 1920s with a congressional investigation—initiation fee.

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the 1920s housed some 200,000 African Americans. The black experience during the Great Migration became an important theme in the artistic movement known first as the New Negro Movement and later as the Harlem Renaissance, which would have an enormous impact on the culture of the era.

The Great Migration also began a new era of increasing political activism among African Americans, who after being disenfranchised in the South found a new place for. themselves in public life in the cities of the North and West.

In the 1920s, another 800,000 blacks left the south, followed by 398,000 blacks in the 1930s. Between 1940 and 1960 over 3,348,000 blacks left the south for northern and western cities.

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The economic motivations for migration were a combination of the desire to escape oppressive economic conditions in the south and the promise of greater prosperity in the north. Since their Emancipation from slavery, southern rural blacks had suffered in a plantation economy that offered little chance of advancement. While a few blacks were lucky enough to purchase land, most were sharecroppers, tenant farmers, or farm labors, barely subsiding from year to year. When World War I created a huge demand for workers in northern factories, many southern blacks took this opportunity to leave the oppressive economic conditions in the south.

The northern demand for workers was a result of the loss of 5 million men who left to serve in the armed forces, as well as the restriction of foreign immigration. Some sectors of the economy wereso desperate for workers at this time that they would pay for blacks to migrate north.

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The Pennsylvania Railroad needed workers so badly that it paid the travel expenses of 12,000 blacks. The Illinois Central Railroad, along with many steel mills, factories, and tanneries, similarly provided free railroad passes for blacks.

World War I was the first time since Emancipation that black labor was in demand outside of the agricultural south, and the economic promise was enough for many blacks to overcome substantial challenges to migrate.

In additional to migrating for job opportunities, blacks also moved north in order to escape the oppressive conditions of the south. Some of the main social factors for migration included lynching, an unfair legal system, inequality in education, and denial of suffrage.

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SHANEQUA SIMPSON PUBLISHED QUEENS NY 2014 BlackPast.org is an independent non-profit corporation 501(c)(3). It has no affiliation with the University of Washington. BlackPast.org is supported in part by a grant from Humanities Washington, a state-wide non-profit organization supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the state of Washington, and contributions from individuals and foundations. - See more at: http://www.blackpast.org/aah/great-migration-1915-1960#sthash.n5PIcrO4.IjO4sGkU. dpuf © 2014, A&E Television Networks, LLC. All Rights Reserved. http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2013/03/25/guest-post-the-rise-of-the-flapper/ “Roaring Twenties: 1919–29.” Fashion, Costume, and Culture: Clothing, Headwear, Body Decorations, and Footwear through the Ages. 2004. Encyclopedia.com. 2 Aug. 2014 <http:// www.encyclopedia.com>.

Allen, Frederick Lewis. Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1931. Reprint, New York: Wiley, 1997.

Hanson, Erica. The 1920s. San Diego, CA: Lucent Books, 1999.

Katz, William Loren. The New Freedom to the New Deal, 1913–1939. Austin, TX: Raintree Steck-Vaughn, 1993.

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THE END

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