unit 8 (ch. 21) notes: the roaring life of the 1920s u.s. history & the constitution coach...
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Unit 8 (Ch. 21) Notes:The Roaring Life of the 1920s
U.S. History & The Constitution
Coach Weathers
21.1: Changing Ways of Life
1.) What is this cartoon “talking” about?
2.) What effect of the topicfrom question #1 does thiscartoon illustrate?
3.) According to the cartoon,what led to the growth oforganized crime duringProhibition?
4.) In the cartoonist’s view,helpful or harmful? Explainyour answer.
Warm-Up: Political Cartoon Analysis
21.1: Changing Ways of Life
- As a result of anti-German sentiment & grain shortages during the war years, the temperance movement, which had been advocating prohibition in order to preserve American culture in the face of immigration since the 1830s, was finally successful on a national scale.
- The 18th amendment prohibited the sale & distribution of alcohol, but not its consumption. Compliance was often a matter of class, ethnic background & religious affiliation.
- Soon illegal sources were filling the demand & speakeasies proliferated incities & ethnic communities.
- Neither the federal nor the local governments had the manpower to stop thisillegal trade or the organized crime that grew as a result of the bootleggingbusiness.
- The 21st amendment passed in 1933 repealed the 18th amendment &ended prohibition.
21.1: Changing Ways of Life
21.1: Changing Ways of Life
- Conflict between traditional religious beliefs & science also caused anxiety in the 1920s. A revival movement at the beginning of the century led to the development of religious fundamentalism which believed in the literal truth of the Bible.
- Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution challenged that belief.
21.1: Changing Ways of Life
- The Scopes Trial, also known as the Monkey Trial, was the result of a Tennessee state law that forbade the teaching of evolution in public schools.
- A young biology teacher purposefully defied the law in order to bring a test case, was arrested and defended by the American Civil Liberties Union.
- The clash of two famous lawyers, Clarence Darrow for the defense & William Jennings Bryan for the state, resolved nothing. Although the teacher was fined, both sides believed that they had won the argument that continues to this day.
The conflict between social conservatives who advocate conformity to atraditional moral code & liberals who advocate individual rights took placein the 1920s & continues today.
End of 21.1 Notes
21.1: Changing Ways of Life
21.2: The Twenties Woman
- The role of women changed somewhat during the 1920s. Women had takennew jobs while men were fighting, but many gave them up as soon as thesoldiers returned.
- Having advocated for suffrage since the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 &winning it in many states (particularly in the West), women finally won the rightto vote throughout the United States with the passage of the 19th Amendment.
- However, women did not significantlymake politics more moral as they hadpromised to do in their campaign forsuffrage & women most often votedas their husbands did.
21.2: The Twenties Woman
- Women did not win new opportunities in the workplace & continued to beconcentrated in the few occupations in which they had made inroads sincethe Civil War, as teachers, nurses, telephone operators & secretaries.
- They also continued to be employed as domestic servants, factory workers& sweatshop laborers.
21.2: The Twenties Woman
- Working women made less money than their male counterparts. Movementto the cities during the war nurtured new sexual attitudes & aroused publicanxiety about the decline of moral values.
- The iconic image of the flapper represented this change but posed littlethreat to the traditional roles of wife & mother.
End of 21.2 Notes
21.3: Education & Popular Culture
- The advent of growing mass media shaped the mass culture of 1920s America.
- Newspaper circulation rose as writers and editors learned how to hookreaders by imitating the sensational stories in the tabloids.
- Mass-circulation magazines also flourished during the 1920s.
- Although major magazines and newspapers reached big audiences, radiowas the most powerful communications medium to emerge in the 1920s.
- By the end of the decade, the radio networks hadcreated something new in the U.S. - the shared nationalexperience of hearing the news as it happened.
- The wider world had opened up to Americans, whocould hear the voice of their president or listen to theWorld Series live.
- Radio also helped to spread appreciation for new trends in music suchas jazz to white audiences & promoted a shared national culture. - Advertisements, on radio & in newspapers & magazines spread the consumer culture.
21.3: Education & Popular Culture
- Literature of the 1920s reflected a rejection of the idealism of the WWIera & the narrow-mindedness & shallowness of life in America as well as aquestioning of the materialism of the 1920s.
- The expatriate authors of the Lost Generation called American cultural valuesinto question.
Ernest Hemingway: A Farwell to Arms and The Sun also Rises
H.L. Mencken: famous journalist of the time: the “Monkey Trial”
F. Scott Fitzgerald: author of The Great Gatsby
21.3: Education & Popular Culture
21.3: Education & Popular Culture
- Art of the period also reflected the conflict between tradition & the modernworld, challenging the dominant realist tradition & pioneering inexpressionist art forms.
Ram's Head White Hollyhock & Little Hills, 1935
Artist: Georgia O’Keefe
Blue & Green Music, 1921
End of 21.3 Notes
21.4: The Harlem Renaissance
- The Great Migration that brought African Americans to segregated neighborhoods in the cities of the North & Midwest also brought about a cultural renaissance.
- Many African Americans moved to Harlem, a neighborhood on the Upper West Side of New York’s Manhattan Island. In the 1920s, Harlem became the world’s largest black urban community, with residents from the South, the West Indies, Cuba, Puerto Rico, & Haiti.
- The Harlem Renaissance broughtrecognition & pride to black artists,particularly musicians, but furtherpointed out their second-classcitizenship.
21.4: The Harlem Renaissance
- Above all, the Harlem Renaissance was a literary movement led bywell-educated, middle-class African Americans who expressed a new pridein the African-American experience. Writers of the time, celebrated ties toAfrican cultural traditions and black pride and questioned the position ofAfrican Americans in American life.
- James Weldon Johnson: author, politician,diplomat, critic, journalist, poet, anthologist,educator, lawyer, songwriter, & early civilrights activist. He is best remembered for hisleadership within the NAACP, as well as forhis writing.
- His works included Lift Ev'ry Voice & Sing &The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.
- Langston Hughes: Hughes’s 1920s poems described the difficultlives of working-class African Americans.
- Some of his poems moved to the tempo of jazz & the blues.
- Zora Neale Hurston: portrayed the lives of poor, unschooled Southernblacks – focusing on the simple folkways & values of people who hadsurvived slavery through their ingenuity & strength.
- Her notable works included Their Eyes Were Watching God.
21.4: The Harlem Renaissance
21.4: The Harlem Renaissance
- Included in this Harlem Renaissance was the spirit of jazz music. It was born in the early 20th century in New Orleans, where musicians blended instrumental ragtime & vocal blues into an exuberant new sound.
- During the 1920s, Harlem pulsed to the sounds of jazz, which lured throngs of whites to the showy, exotic nightclubs there, including the famed Cotton Club.
21.4: The Harlem Renaissance
- Louis Armstrong became a musical genius & legend, perhaps the most important & influential musician in the history of jazz.
- Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, a jazz pianist & composer, led his ten-piece orchestra at the Cotton Club. Through the 1920s & 1930s, Ellington won renown as one of America’s greatest composers, with pieces such as “Mood Indigo” & “Sophisticated Lady.”
- Bessie Smith, a female blues singer, was perhaps the most outstanding vocalist of the decade. In 1927, she became the highest-paid black artist in the world.
21.4: The Harlem Renaissance
End of 21.4 Notes
- The Harlem Renaissance represented a portion of the great social & cultural changes that swept America in the 1920s.