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This presentation describes • how life was in the U.S.A and the World during the 1920's - a time that is often referred to as the "Roaring Twenties" - a boisterous period characterized by rapidly changing lifestyles, financial excesses, and the fast pace of technological progress.
AMERICA ENTERED A PERIOD of CELEBRATION! This footage celebrates the 90 Year remembrance
Women’s Role in Society • The participation of women in the war effort had some affects on equality and fair treatment after the war. • After men came back from the war most of the women were forced out of work by men, and by the 1920s, less than 7 percent of white, married women worked. The development of the radio and progress of electricity opened up new areas of work for women.
Social Freedoms • Outside of labor, however, women gained many new freedoms after World War One. • Before the war, women could be arrested for smoking or cursing; after the war, woman began to enjoy a greater freedom to express themselves and more independence.
After the war drinking became more popular in the United States. *
Prohibition began largely as a women’s movement. Women began to use political power. This is a commercial from the era against drinking.
During Prohibition, the manufacture, transportation, import, export, and sale of alcoholic beverages were restricted or illegal. • Prohibition was supposed to lower crime and corruption, reduce social problems, lower taxes needed to support prisons and poorhouses, and improve health and hygiene in America. • Instead, Alcohol became more dangerous to consume; organized crime blossomed; courts and prisons systems became overloaded; and endemic corruption of police and public officials occurred.
Prohibition began on January 16, 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect.
IT OUTLAWED THE PRODUCTION, SALE, TRANSPORTATION AND POSSESSION OF ALCOHOL.
Even though the sale of alcohol was illegal, alcoholic drinks were still widely available at "speakeasies" and other underground drinking establishments. • Many people also kept private bars to serve their guests. Large quantities of alcohol were smuggled in from Canada, overland and via the Great Lakes.
Prohibition helped bring about organized crime and the violence that often goes with it. Al Capone was the most notorious outlaw gangster of the 1920s.
The Saint Valentine's Day massacre is the name given to the 1929 murder of 7 mob associates as part of a prohibition era conflict between two powerful criminal gangs in Chicago: the South Side Italian gang led by Al Capone and the North Side Irish gang led by Bugs Moran.
The 19th Amendment to the Constitution finally gave women the right to vote in 1920.
Arts and entertainment • Two art movements, Surrealism and Art Deco had their beginnings during the 1920's. • Photography was a recognized art form but advertising still mainly relied on artists and illustrators to produce the high quality black-white and color advertisements that are sought after by collectors today.
Arts and entertainment • Two art movements, Surrealism and Art Deco had their beginnings during the 1920's. Salvador Dalí. (Spanish, 1904-1989). The Persistence of Memory. 1931
The Jazz Age was a movement that took place during the 1920s from which jazz music and dance emerged with the introduction of mainstream radio and the end of the war.
Jazz artists like Louis Armstrong originally received very little airtime because most stations preferred to play the music of white American jazz singers. Big-band jazz, like that of James Reese Europe and Fletcher Henderson in New York, was also popular on the radio.
The Jazz Age • Jazz gained popularity in America and worldwide by the 1920s. • Nothing quite like it had ever happened before in America. • New exuberant dances were devised to take advantage of the upbeat tempo's of Jazz and Ragtime music.
Flappers were young women who expressed their new found liberty by listening to jazz music, wearing short hair, dressing provocatively, smoking, drinking, driving cars and dismissing other social norms.
The “Charleston” was the popular dance of the 20s. This is a clip of people doing the Charleston!
. Dance marathons were big events. Couples would dance for days at the chance to win cash prizes.
America began its obsession with movie stars in the 1920s. Mary Pickford appeared in dozens of silent movies as “pure or innocent” romantic lead or the damsel in distress.
Rudolph Valentino was seen as the macho, action, adventurous leading man. • His sudden death at a young age was Hollywood’s first celebrity scandal.
Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin were the two top comedy stars of the 1920s. They made low budget movies that made Hollywood rich. They often did their own stunts. Buster Keaton and Mary Pickford Charlie Chaplin video
Pole Sitting was a popular stunt throughout the 1920s. Events were often covered by live radio shows.
Harry Houdini • Harry Houdini began his professional career at age 17 doing magic shows before civic groups, in music halls, at sideshows, and at New York’s Coney Island amusement park, where he sometimes performed 20 shows each day. Escape clip
Harry Houdini • As his reputation grew, Houdini assumed a leadership role among other magicians. He served as president of the Society of American Magicians and founded the Magician’s Club in London. Houdini was generous with other magicians, but jealous of anyone who attempted to duplicate his escapes.
Transportation is revolutionized • Prior to the 1920's only the very wealthy could afford to travel the world. • With the increase in wages driven by people like Henry Ford, Americans for the first time had the time and money to travel.
In 1918 the price of a Model T was over $850 dollars or about $25,000 in today’s money. By the mid 1920s the price had dropped to less than $300 or about $3,500 in today’s money.
By 1925, more than 9,000 Model T’s could be produced by Ford’s moving assembly line per day!
Throughout the 1920s and beyond the car gave many Americans a new found sense of freedom. Route 66 Song Video *
In the 1920's, trains and ocean liners were the dominant mass transportation methods, providing comfortable, reliable transport to millions of American vacationers. • Trains had opened up the continent and ships the world, but newer methods of transport captured the imagination of the public and reduced travel times. • Air travel, though still in its infancy, captured America’s imagination during the 1920s.
Charles Lindberg became the first wide celebrity when he flew across the Atlantic Ocean, May 20th-21st 1927.
Planes were still new and dangerous inventions. People in the 1920s would often attend air-shows to see wing walking, loop the loops and other stunts. *
