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CHAPTER 21 The Promise of Consumer Culture. The 1920s. CREATED EQUAL JONES WOOD MAY BORSTELMANN RUIZ.
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CHAPTER 21 The Promise of Consumer Culture The 1920s CREATED EQUAL JONES WOOD MAY BORSTELMANN RUIZ
“I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant, from his garden, and the cars going up and down his drive.” The Great Gatsby, F.Scott Fitzgerald
TIMELINE 1919 Volstead Act (Prohibition Bureau) 1920 Sacco and Vanzetti arrested for murder KDKA radio broadcast of Harding presidential win (1920s) Klan membership estimated at 5 million (mid-1920s) Film industry grosses $80 million per week 1921 Emergency Quota Act 1923 Alice Paul, the National Woman’s Party, begins work on ERA Approximately 500 radio stations in U.S. Johnson-Reid Act (cuts in immigration) 1925 The Scopes Trial, or “Monkey Trial” The Man Nobody Knows by Bruce Barton 1927 The Jazz Singer, the first “talkie” The National Broadcasting Company established The Great Flood 1929 (October) The Stock Market crashes and the Great Depression begins
THE PROMISE OF CONSUMER CULTURE Overview • The Business of Politics • The Decline of Reform • Hollywood and Harlem: National Cultures in Black and White • Science on Trial • Consumer Dreams and Nightmares
THE BUSINESS OF POLITICS • Warren G. Harding: The Politics of Scandal • Calvin Coolidge: The Hands-Off President • Herbert Hoover: The Self-Made President
Warren G. Harding: The Politics of Scandal • Harding: “machine-made”, 1920 Presidential Election • Albert Fall, Secretary of Interior went to prison for taking $400,000 from oil companies in exchange for leases • Charles Forbes, Veteran’s Bureau, and $200 million in hospital supplies • Superintendent of Prisons: Harding’s brother-in-law
Calvin Coolidge: The Hands-Off President • Inheried presidency from Harding in 1923 • Hands-off attitude towards big business • Progressive Party forms • Cool Coolidge won the presidency in 1924
Herbert Hoover: The Self-Made President • Elected president in 1928 • Quaker orphan raised in poverty • Stanford University graduate, mining engineer • Won over Irish Catholic Al Smith from New York
THE DECLINE OF REFORM • Women’s Rights After the Struggle for Suffrage • Prohibition: The Experiment That Failed • Reactionary Impulses • Marcus Garvey and the Persistence of Civil Rights Activism
Women’s Rights After the Struggle for Suffrage • The League of Women Voters • Promoted social and political reform; opposed ERA • National Woman’s Party (Alice Paul) • Campaigned for ERA for women • Sheppard-Towner: health education for women and infants • Divorce rate doubled from 1900 to 1920 and continued to rise
Prohibition: The Experiment That Failed • 18th Amendment: prohibited sale or making of alcohol. Volstead Act of 1919 • Enforcement difficult and gangsters were on the rise • Protection monies; bootlegging
Reactionary Impulses • Anti-immigrant sentiments • Sacco and Vanzetti • Emergency Quota Act of 1921 • 800,000 immigrants to 300,000 in a year • Johnson-Reid Act of 1924 • Cut immigration from 3% to 2%
Marcus Garvey and the Persistence of Civil Rights Activism • Universal Negro Improvement Association • Nation-state in Africa • Encouraged establishment of black-owned businesses • Black Star Line Corporation and black investment • Garvey convicted of mail fraud • Garvey deported to Jamaica after 5 years in prison • Inspired many blacks
HOLLYWOOD AND HARLEM: NATIONAL CULTURES IN BLACK AND WHITE • Hollywood Comes of Age • The Harlem Renaissance • Radios and Autos: Transforming Leisure at Home
Hollywood Comes of Age • The Great Train Robbery, first feature length • The Jazz Singer, the first “talkie” • Foreigners on screen: • Greta Garbo, Dolores del Rio, Lupe Valez, Ramon Navarro, Rudolph Valentino
The Harlem Renaissance • European, as well as African American influence • Writers: Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes • Dancers: Josephine Baker • Singers: Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters • Filmmakers: Oscar Micheaux
Radios and Autos: Transforming Leisure at Home • By 1923, there were about 500 radio stations in the U.S. • By 1930, Americans owned 30 million cars
SCIENCE ON TRIAL • The Great Flood of 1927 • The Triumph of Eugenics: Buck v. Bell • Science, Religion, and the Scopes Trial
The Great Flood of 1927 • Confidence in levees shattered in March, 1927 when torrential rains drown prime farmland, forced 900,000 from their homes and cost $100 million in crop loss and $23 million in livestock loss • Refugee camps set up by Department of Commerce, National Guard and the Red Cross
The Triumph of Eugenics: Buck v. Bell • 1924: The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, Stoddard • Social Darwinists—natural selection of the fittest • Eugenic laws • Sterilization of “inferior” individuals without their knowledge or consent. Inferiority determined by government and medical officials. • Carrie Buck, determined feebleminded because she was born out of wedlock, sent to institution, and determined to be “unfit for parenthood”
Science, Religion, and the Scopes Trial • William Jennings Bryan • The Butler Act • John Thomas Scopes and the ACLU (Dayton, Tennessee) • Religion versus Science? • Aimee Semple McPherson • Guilty verdict overturned by The Tennessee Supreme Court. Never made it to the U.S. Supreme Court.
CONSUMER DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES • Marketing the Good Life • Writers, Critics, and the “Lost Generation” • Poverty Amid Plenty • The Stock Market Crash
Marketing the Good Life • “Advertising is to business what fertilizer is to farms.” • 1925: The Man That Nobody Knows, Bruce Barton • The shopping center • The Florida real estate boom and collapse
Writers, Critics, and the “Lost Generation” • Sinclair Lewis: Babbitt, 1922; Main Street, 1920 • F. Scott Fitzgerald: This Side of Paradise (1920); The Beautiful and the Damned (1922); The Great Gatsby (1925) • Gertrude Stein: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)
Poverty Amid Plenty • Southern sharecroppers, black and white • Latinos work for the company store • Asian immigrants and domestic work • Industrial workers
The Stock Market Crash • “Black Tuesday” October 29, 1929 • Stocks fell in value $14 billion, down 50% • By 1932 $74 billion lost • Industrial production halved, businesses bankrupt, banks fail • Little relief from government agencies • Felt globally • The gap between the rich and the poor