Slides on the 1920s. Matches up with Chapter 20.

1. A Decade of Tensions:
The 1920s

2. Key Themes:The 1920s
• 1920s aren’t just about parties: all kinds of
conflict
• But most Americans would like to ignore
politics and social tensions, which is why
the party image
• Exciting cultural development: the Harlem
Renaissance - black migrants from the
South export culture from NY

3. 1919
• Worldwide upheaval
• In the U.S.: flu, bombings, strikes
• Red and black scares:
deportations and Palmer raids;
racial violence

4. 1920
• Warren G. Harding (R)
elected President
• “a return to normalcy”
• retreat from “Wilsonianism”

5. A Decade of
Tensions• Parties vs. Prohibition
• Rural vs. urban Americans
• Traditional vs.“modern”
Christianity
• Consumers vs. those left
out of prosperity

6. 1920s Consumerism
• American business
around the world
• Consumer goods
and technologies
• Leisure activities
• Radio and
phonographs
Image source: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/coke-ads-1920s

7. Check out a sound clip from an early
celebrity:This is Enrico Caruso. Does it
surprise you that this is what a popular
musician sounded like?

8. Limits to
Prosperity
• Wages for industrial workers
rose much slower than
corporate profits
• 1929: majority of families had
no savings; 40% of population
in poverty
• Farmers excluded from
prosperity - many left farms
• Some farmers to LA:
population from 575,000 to
2.2 million

9. Image: River Rouge Plant, Charles Sheeler, 1932
Source:The Whitney Museum
http://whitney.org/Collection/CharlesSheeler/3243
The Image of Business

10. Decline of Progressivism
• Labor:“welfare capitalism”
instead of “industrial
freedom”
• Women’s rights: Equal Rights
Amendment fails
• Women’s freedom: the
liberated young woman

11. We have a hard time understanding why
people would support Prohibition.
The video clip coming up next gives us
some ideas.

12. Decline of
Progressivism (3)
• Lack of political
engagement: less than 50%
voted in 1924
• Alliance between business
and government
• Government corruption:
Teapot Dome,WY

13. Culture Wars: Religion
• Evangelical Protestants - Fundamentalism
• Support for Prohibition
• Opposition to “modernism,” new moral
rules
• An example of an evangelical preacher: Billy
Sunday

14. Image:Ames
Historical
Society
http://
www.ameshistori
calsociety.org/
residents_sunday
2.htm

15. Check out a film clip of Billy Sunday preaching.
What do you think of his style?

16. Culture Wars:
Religion• The Scopes Trial
• Clarence Darrow on behalf
of John Scopes and the
ACLU (founded 1920)
• William Jennings Bryan for
prosecution
• Bryan on the stand: http://
chnm.gmu.edu/courses/
hist409/scopes.html
Outside the Scopes Trial. Source: npr.org

17. Clarence Darrow
William Jennings Bryan

18. The author of the book excerpted on the
next slide had a booth outside the trial -
which was like a circus, complete with pet
monkeys!

19. WHAT can be done? Where is our hope? The pussyfooting apologies for the
Evolutionists will say "Don't do anything drastic. Educate the people, and the
thing will right itself." Educate the people? How can we, when Evolutionists
have us by the throat? When they have, while we were asleep, captured our
tax-supported schools from primary to University, and many of our
denominational colleges? "The Philistines be upon thee Samson !" But alas! We
have been asleep upon the lap of this Delilah and. have been shorn of our
strength-they have captured our schools. But "O Lord God, remember me, I
pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, strengthen me only this once, O
God." "And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the house
stood, and on which it was borne up." So could we. "And he bowed himself
with all his might." So can we.And the strength of God who "created man in
his own image" will come into us, and we will slay these Philistines, the
greatest curse that has come upon man since God created him in His own
image.What is a war, what is an epidemic that sweeps people away by the
hundred thousand, compared to this scourge that under the guise of
"science," when it is not science, at all, is sweeping our sons and daughters
away from God, away from God's word, taking from them their Redeemer and
Saviour, to spend eternity in hell? From T.T. Martin Hell and the High Schools
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/evolut.htm

20. Culture Wars:
Race• The Second Klan: 3 million
members 1920s
• Immigration restricted:
• 1921 - reduced 67%
• 1924 - national quotas
• Quotas allegedly based on a
“biologically ideal” population
• Immigrants - especially Catholics
and Jews - respond

21. Cultural Renaissance:
Harlem
• “Capital” of black
America, including
West Indian
immigrants
• Black artists and
actors were
accepted by
previously all-white
institutions
• “New Negro” - in
politics and art

22. Check out this film of nightclub dancer
Josephine Baker. She became a celebrity
in France in the 1920s.
You can see how African Americans are
getting power at this time, but are also
limited: a banana dance pokes fun at a silly
idea of what African culture is like.

23. Poetry is another part of the
Harlem Renaissance
Check out the following poem, either
in text or video clip!

24. If We Must Die
by Claude McKay
If we must die—let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die—oh, let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;
Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one
deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly
pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

25. Black Protest:
W.E.B. Du Bois
• b. 1868
• Education: Fisk University;
Harvard University
• “talented tenth” should
challenge inequality
• 1905: Niagara movement
leads to founding of
NAACP
• NAACP: legal strategy -
Bailey v.Alabama (1911)
overturns “peonage” laws

26. Marcus Garvey
• Born in Jamaica, moved to Harlem
1916
• Universal Negro Improvement
Association (UNIA)
• Encouraged establishment of black
businesses
• Founded Black Star Line - shipping

27. Conclusions
• 1920s are a decade of conflicts, of extremes
• Politics: more conservative; Progressivism
rejected or defeated
• Social conflict: between rich and poor;
conservative and liberal; racial conflict
• Cultural flowering in Harlem, some of which
grows out of racial protest