modern times: the 1920s. warren harding, president 1921-1923 "america's present need is...
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Modern Times: the 1920s
Warren Harding, President 1921-1923
"America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality...."
Calvin Coolidge, President 1923-1929“The Business of America is Business”
Narratives of the 1920s..
• The birth of the modern age: social liberation and a modern aesthetic
• “Culture Wars”: moderns v traditionalists, urban v rural, religious v secular
• The privatisation of consumption and the diminished public sphere
• A new nationalism, isolationism
Modernity…
Social transformation: “new women”, “new negro”
Mass production… “Fordism”Mass consumption and a new culture
of consumption: youth, leisure, celebrity, advertising, private affluence
Jazz: transgressing boundaries of race, gender, class, urban/rural, genre?
The New Woman
“I really think that American gentlemen are the best after all, because kissing your hand may make you feel very good but a diamond and a sapphire bracelet lasts forever.“
Anita Loos, actress and author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1926)
Clara Bow and the cult of celebrity
Al Capone: Gangster as celebrity
Babe Ruth: Commercialised leisure
Henry Ford
Pro-Business Supreme Court
William Howard Taft • Bailey v Drexel Furniture Co. (1922): anti-child labor legislation unconstitutional
• Coronado Coal Co. v United Mine Workers (1925): labor unions could be prosecuted for restraint of trade
“Youth demanded simple clothes instead of these fussy, elaborate styles of the 1900's"
Ivory Soap ad, 1929
Images of modernity:Women empowered as consumers?
• Legitimating desire
• Consumption as modernity
Chesterfield and Camel ads (late 20s)
Mass consumption as liberation:The link between the “New Woman” and the consumer society
Consumption as competition,pleasure…and sex
Buick ad (1923)
Sophistication and discernment: the “Democratisation of consumption”?
Woodbury’s soap ad from the Ladies Home Journal (November 1926)
The Rise of the Consumer Movement
• Christine Frederick, Selling Mrs Consumer (1929)
• Chase and Schlink, Your Money’s Worth (1927)
• Consumers Research (founded 1929)
…discontents
1. Cynicism of the “Lost Generation”
2. Closed Society: Red Scare, Racism, Nativism and the Klan.. Fear of subversion and fear of difference
3. A New Puritanism: prohibition and evangelicalism
F. Scott Fitzgerald and the “Lost Generation”
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clear up the mess they had made....”
The Great Gatsby (1925)
The Red Scare and “One Hundred Percent Americanism”
Sacco and Vanzetti
Immigration Restriction Acts of 1921 and 1924
Immigration Quotas after 1924 based on 1890 census
Britain 65,721Germany 25,957Ireland 17,853Italy 5,802Poland 6,524Russia 2,784Japan 100
(whites only)
China 100 (whites
only)
The Revival of the Klan
The Scopes “Monkey Trial” (1925)
Puritanism and Politics: Prohibition, from progressive reform to
reactionary moralism?
“It was the Americans who invented the curious doctrine that there is a body of doctrine in every department of thought that every good citizen is duty-bound to cherish and accept. It was Americans who invented the right thinker.”
H.L. Mencken