The Jazz Age and Cultural Conflicts

1. The Jazz Age and Cultural Conflicts Americans in the 1920s had new-found wealth and more leisure time to support expanding forms of mass entertainment.

2. At The Movies • In the 1920s, movies became more popular than regional forms of entertainment, contributing to the rise of a mass culture. Publicity departments turned actors and actresses into national stars. The Musical becomes popular. • Because every seat in the movie palace cost exactly the same admission price, going to the movies helped level differences among Americans.

3. New Heroes • With time, energy, and money to play, Americans took to sports–tennis, golf, baseball, swimming, and more. • Hard-playing Americans also provided huge audiences for professional sports. The era’s popular sports heroes became as newsworthy as movie stars. • Individual feats of daring–such as Gertrude Ederle’s swim across the English Channel–won special acclaim. • Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic generated more excitement than any single event in the decade. Amelia Earhart matched his feat a short time later.

4. New Rhythms in the Air • The blues and jazz, both essentially African American creations, helped define the 1920s. The blues grew out of work songs and field chants of enslaved African Americans. Jazz began in New Orleans and moved north during the Great Migration. It gave rise to new dances such as the Charleston, which first appeared in an African American revue in 1924. • While live music predominated in the 1920s, electricity gave recorded music its start via the phonograph and the radio.

5. Time to read • With time on their hands and with more education than any previous generation, more Americans in the 1920s read. • The existence of a large national audience encouraged the publication of new magazines, the birth of several new publishing houses, and the formation of newspaper syndicates.Tabloids– newspapers with small pages and large type–battled for readers with a steady fare of gossip, scandals, and news on the latest fad.

6. The Lost Generation • Some writers attacked America’s materialism. They questioned a society that placed more importance on money and material goods than it did on intellectual, spiritual, and artistic concerns. • Some members of the “lost generation” such as Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald left the United States and lived as expatriates. They used their pens to expose what they considered to be the shallow culture of their nation. The argument: Buying on credit, the explosion of advertising, or the popularity of fads and tabloids prove that American culture was shallow and materialistic.

7. The Power of Religion • When large numbers of farmers migrated to cities during the 1920s, they brought with them fundamentalism–a movement that affirmed the literal truth of the Bible. The familiar religion helped them make sense of their lives in changing times. • At the same time, however, traditional religions began to take on modern aspects, such as the use of radio by some evangelists.

8. The Scopes Trial • John Scopes was tried for teaching evolution in the schools – but the trial ended up being a conflict over evolution itself • The Scopes trial highlighted the tensions that existed between traditional religious beliefs such as the Biblical story of creation and new scientific ideas such as evolution. • Today it is illegal to teach creationism in public schools

9. Prohibition • Like fundamentalism, Prohibition pitted small-town residents against a newer, more urban America. • Prohibition succeeded in eradicating saloons, but speakeasies sprang up in their place. • Prohibition was hard to enforce because the nation’s long coastlines and land borders made it easy for smugglers to sneak alcohol into the country, bootleggers could distill liquor illegally almost anywhere, and druggists could sell liquor legally on doctors’ prescriptions.

10. Prohibition led many Americans, particularly in cities, to take a casual attitude toward breaking the law. Big-city crime profited from bootlegging, while liquor-related cases clogged the courts.

11. Crosses In The Night • The rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan pointed out many of the conflicts that divided American society during this period. When the Klan spread from Georgia in the 1920s, it added new enemies to its list–Mexican Americans in Texas, Japanese immigrants in California, Jews and European immigrants in New York, and French Canadians in New England. • All over the country, Klan members directed hatred at African Americans. It became strong in some Northern cities affected by the Great Migration.

12. The Klan • The Klan prided itself on pure-blood Americanism, but it shared many similarities with German and Italian movements of this period. It stressed nationalism and racial purity, attacked alien minority groups, disapproved of urban culture, and called for a return to the past. • The Klan began to sink back into obscurity after one of its leaders was convicted for the kidnapping and second-degree murder of a woman he brutally abused.

14. Closing The Doors • Many Americans associated immigrants with radicalism and disloyalty. Rural Americans in particular believed that immigrants had somehow caused the erosionofold-fashionedAmericanvalues. • These fears led to new laws that restricted immigration through a quota system that favored immigrants from northern and western Europe and, in the case of the National Origins Act of 1924, excluded Asians altogether.

15. The Challenge of Change • The tensions between the city and the country erupted into national election politics for the first time in 1928 when New York Governor Al Smith made a bid for the presidency. Smith represented everything small-town America feared: the big city with sinful and foreign ways. • Hoover sold himself as a typical Iowa farm boy who had helped engineer the prosperity of the 1920s. To no one’s surprise, Hoover won in a landslide. Lost in the excitement was the fact that for the first time in a decade of Republican prosperity, a President had failed to win the 12 largest cities in the United States.

16. New Challenge of change • The people in power–white, Protestant, and male–still gave lip service to the small-town virtues of the past, but in the 1920s the United States was rapidly changing into a modern, urban society.