American Life in the “Roaring Twenties”

1. American Life in the “Roaring Twenties” Chapter 31 pp. 738-745

2. The 1920 census revealed that for the first time, most Americans lived in urban areas, not the rural countryside. The city was taking over. The birth-control movement was led by fiery Margaret Sanger, and the National Women’s Party began in 1923 to campaign for an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. The Dynamic Decade

3. A brash new group shocked many conservative older folk (who labeled the new style as full of erotic suggestions and inappropriate). The “flaming youth” who lived this modern life were called “flappers.” Jazz was the music choice for flappers. It is considered perhaps the first unique form of American music and was developed by American blacks. They danced new dances like the risqué “Charleston” and dressed more provocatively. Sigmund Freud said that sexual repression was responsible for most of society’s ills, and that pleasure and health demanded sexual gratification and liberation. So, to justify their new sexual frankness, many Americans pointed to the theories of Sigmund Freud. The Dynamic Decade Cont’d

4. For the first time in American history, black culture was given respect with the rise of the Harlem Renaissance – a movement of jazz musicians, writers, and actors who greatly influenced American culture across the country.

5. African-American Voices in the 1920s • Between 1910 and 1920, hundreds of thousands of African Americans had moved from the South to the big cities of the North to find work. • This was called the Great Migration and was a response to racial violence and economic discrimination against blacks in the south.

8. By 1920, 40 percent of African Americans lived in cities, and racial tensions increased in northern cities. • The National Association for the Advancement of colored people (NAACP) worked to end violence against African Americans. • W.E.B. Du Bois led a peaceful protest against racial violence. • The NAACP also fought to get laws against lynching passed by Congress. James Weldon Johnson, a poet and lawyer, led that fight. While no law against lynching was passed in the twenties, the number of lynching gradually dropped.

10. Marcus Garvey voiced a message of black pride that appealed to many African Americans. • Garvey thought that African Americans should build a separate society. He formed a black nationalist group called the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). • Garvey promoted black-owned businesses. He also urged African Americans to return to Africa to set up an independent nation.

11. In the 1920s, many African Americans moved to Harlem, a section of New York City. So did blacks from the West Indies, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Haiti. Harlem became the world’s largest black urban community. This neighborhood was also the birthplace of the Harlem Renaissance. This literary and artistic movement celebrated African- American culture. The Harlem Renaissance Flowers in New York

12. The Harlem Renaissance was partially a literary movement. • Led by well-educated middle-class blacks, who took pride in their African heritage and their people’s folklore. They also wrote about the problems of being black in a white culture. • An important collection of works by Harlem Renaissance writers, The New Negro, was published by Alain Locke in 1925.

13. The Harlem Renaissance produced many outstanding poets, including Jean Toomer and Countee Cullen. • Claude McKay wrote about the pain of prejudice. He urged African Americans to resist discrimination. • The most famous Harlem Renaissance poet was Langston Hughes, who wrote about the daily lives of working-class blacks. • Hughes wove the tempos of jazz and the blues into his poems.

14. Zora Neale Hurston was the most famous female writer of the Harlem Renaissance. She collected the folklore of poor Southern blacks. Hurston also wrote novels, short stories, and poems. • Music and drama were important parts of the Harlem Renaissance, too. Some African-American performers became popular with white audiences. Paul Robeson became an important actor and singer. In 1924 he starred in Eugene ONeill’s play The Emperor Jones and in Shakespeare’s Othello.

15. Jazz became more popular in the twenties. Early in the 20th century, musicians in New Orleans blended ragtime and blues into the new sound of jazz. • Musicians from New Orleans traveled North, and they brought jazz with them. The most important and influential jazz musician was Louis Armstrong. • Many whites came to Harlem to hear jazz in night clubs. Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington led an orchestra there. He was a jazz pianist and one of the nation’s greatest composers. • The outstanding singer of the time was Bessie Smith. Some black musicians chose to live and perform in Europe. Josephine Baker became a famous dancer, singer, and comedy star in Paris.

16. Josephine Baker Bessie Smith Louis Armstrong

19. AUTHORS: F. Scott Fitzgerald-This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby Ernest Hemingway-The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms Sherwood Anderson-Winesburg, Ohio Theodore Dreiser-An American Tragedy Sinclair Lewis-Main Street and Babbitt William Faulkner’s Soldier’s Pay, The Sound and the Fury, and As I Lay Dying Ezra Pound-poet T.S. Elliott-poet Cultural Liberation

20. George Gershwin and Aaron Copland- composers that combined popular American music with classical forms • Eugene O’Neill- won a Nobel Prize for his plays • Edward Hopper- portrayed America’s loneliness through paintings

21. Hopper’s Nighthawks

22. ARCHITECTURE: • Frank Lloyd Wright was an understudy of Louis Sullivan (of Chicago skyscraper fame) and amazed people with his use of concrete, glass, and steel and his unconventional theory that “form follows function.” • The champion of skyscrapers, the Empire State Building debuted in 1931.

25. Wall Street’s Big Bull Market • There was much over-speculation in the 1920s, especially on Florida home properties (until a hurricane took care of that), and even during times of prosperity, many, many banks failed each year. • The whole system was built on fragile credit. • Many people would buy stock “on margin” which meant purchasing it with a small down payment – a risky venture indeed. • The stock market’s stellar rise made headline news (and enticed investors to drop their savings into the market’s volatility). • Secretary of the Treasury Mellon reduced the amount of taxes that rich people had to pay, thus conceivably thrusting the burden onto the middle class. • He reduced the national debt, though, but has since been accused of indirectly encouraging the Bull Market. • Whatever the case, the prosperities of the 1920s was setting up the crash that would lead to the poverty and suffering of the 1930s.