5. From "Jazz Age" to Depression: The Tragedy of the 1920's

5.1. "The Age of Wonderful Nonsense"

5.2. "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?"

5.1. "The Age of Wonderful Nonsense"

5.1.1 "The Business of America Is Business"

5.1.2 A Return to Normalcy

5.1.3 Silent Cal

5.1.4 The Consumer Age

5.1.5 Demographic Trends

5.1.6 Age of Wonderful Nonsense

5.1.7 America in Transition

5.1.8 Age of Intolerance

5.1.9 From Lost Generation to Harlem Renaissance

5.1.1 "The Business of America Is Business"

Big Business and America• Era starts with brief

postwar economic decline

• Growth -> installment buying

• Oligopolies • A few businesses

control entire industries • U.S. Steel, G.E.

• Associations & “New Lobbying”

• Trade organizations swap info

• Lobbying: organizations work to convince legislators to support their interests

Court Cases Hinder Organized Labor

• Coronado Coal Company v. United Mine Workers (1922)

• Strikers guilty of illegal restraint of trade

• Maple Floor Association v. U.S. (1929) • Trade organizations that

distributed anti-union info were not acting in restraint of trade

• Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Company (1922) • Voided restrictions on

child labor

• Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923)

• Overturned minimum wage law affecting women because it infringed on right to contract

5.1.2 A Return to Normalcy

• Scandals under Harding • Illegitimate child • Cronies used offices

for personal gain • Albert Fall: took

bribes to lease government property to oil companies (Teapot Dome)

Politics

• Coolidge Prosperity

• Reduced federal debt, lowered income tax rates, built national highway

• “Business of America is business.”

5.1.3 Silent Cal

Calvin Coolidge & the “Jazz Age”

Coolidge’s hands-off policies were sweet music to big business.

• 19th Amendment (1919) • Lobbied on issues

such as birth control, peace, education, lynchings

Women and Politics

• Sheppard-Towner Act (1921): Allotted funds to states to create maternity and pediatric clinics to reduce infant mortality

• The Cable Act (1922): U.S. woman who married a foreigner retains U.S. citizenship

5.1.4 The Consumer Age

• Cars become a “necessity”

• Wages and salaries grow

• “Keeping up with the Joneses”

• People buy beyond their means

Consumer Society

• Advertising • Manipulated people’s

tastes

• Radio • Focused on

entertainment, economic promotion

• Government-owned airwaves

5.1.5 Demographic Trends

• 1920s: For the first time, a majority of Americans lived in urban areas

• Great Migration • 1.5 million African

Americans moved to N. cities

Migration: Cities and Suburbs

• Marcus Garvey

• Blacks should separate themselves from whites

• UNIA: Universal Negro Improvement Association

• Suburbs on the rise

5.1.6 Age of Wonderful Nonsense

Social Trends• Women at work,

women at play

• More women joined the workforce

• Others challenged gender perceptions (flappers)

• Rise of Sport

• Baseball (Babe Ruth, Bill Tilden, Black Sox)

• Boxing (Jack Dempsey)

• Prohibition and Organized Crime

• Era of prohibition was marred by organized crime • Al Capone

The Flapper• New dance styles, like

the “Charleston,” flamboyantly displayed the new social freedom of the “flapper,” whose dress and antics frequently flummoxed the guardians of respectability.

5.1.7 America in Transition

The Guardian of Morality

• Women’s new one-piece bathing suits were a sensation in the 1920s. Here a check is carefully made to ensure that not too much leg is showing.

5.1.8 Age of Intolerance

Immigration Quotas

• Emergency Quota Act of 1921

• 3% of the number of immigrants from that nation residing in the U.S. in 1890

• National Origins Acts (1924 and 1927)

• 150,000 people annually, quotas at 2% in 1900, 1920

Fundamentalism and Scopes

• Fundamentalists sought salvation from hedonistic modern society

• Tried to control what schools taught

• Scopes (Monkey) Trial • Tennessee law

banned the teaching of evolution • Scopes taught it

anyway • Found guilty, fined

$1 • Modernists claimed

victory

5.1.9 From Lost Generation to Harlem Renaissance

Cultural Currents

• Literature

• Lost Generation abandoned U.S. for Europe

• Hemingway, Pound, Eliot, Lewis, Fitzgerald

• Harlem Renaissance

• Intellectuals and artists… literary and social movement • New Negro: assertive

and celebratory of African American culture

• The Jazz Age

King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band• Joseph (“Joe”) King

Oliver arrived in Chicago from New Orleans in 1918.

• Chicago’s first important black jazz ensemble

• Honoré Dutrey (trombone), Baby Dodds (drums), King Oliver (cornet), Lil Hardin (piano), Bill Johnson (banjo), Johnny Dodds (clarinet) A young Louis Armstrong kneels in front.

Langston Hughes (1902–1967)• Raised in the Midwest,

Hughes arrived in New York City in 1921 to attend Columbia University. He spent most of his life in Harlem

• “the Poet Laureate of Harlem.”

5.2 "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?"

5.2.1 The Election of 1928

5.2.2 The Great Crash

5.2.3 From Hero to Goat

5.2.4 The Depression in a Nutshell

5.2.1 The Election of 1928

The Most Popular Man in America• Herbert Hoover wins

presidential election (1928)

• Cabinet full of millionaires

The Most Popular Man in America

• American opinion

• Poverty suggests personal weakness

• Business cycle is natural, not the business of government

Herbert Hoover on the Road

• Typical “whistle-stop” campaign

• Candidate speaks from the rear platform of a train

• Commonplace before television.

Presidential Election of 1928 (electoral vote)• Runner-up Smith polled

almost as many votes as the victor Coolidge 1924.

• Attracting an huge urban vote, the New Yorker foreshadowed Roosevelt’s New Deal victory in 1932.

5.2.2 The Great Crash

Stock Market Crash

• Black Thursday (October 24, 1929)

• Stock Market prices plunge

• Prices hit record low

• Black Tuesday (October 29)

• Prices fall further

• Hoover: “The crisis will be over in 60 days.”

Pride Comes Before a Fall• The Great Crash

humbled high-flying investors.

• This desperate curbside seller of this brand-new Chrysler paid $1,550 for it just months before.

5.2.3 From Hero to Goat

Hoover’s Response

• Voluntarism • Business and social

leaders will voluntarily help get the nation out of the Depression

• Limited Solutions • Reconstruction Finance

Corporation (loans to banks)

• Money would trickle down to average citizens

• Hawley-Smoot Tariff (support American farmers)

• Boulder (Hoover) Dam: Bureau of Reclamation

Response to Hoover• Hoovervilles:

shantytowns erected in open areas

• Hoover flags: Pockets turned inside-out to show that they are empty

• Hoover blankets: newspaper covers to try to stay warm

• Bonus Army • WWI veterans

demanded their bonus early

• Hoover ordered federal troops to disband them

The Bonus Army in Washington, D.C., 1932• World War I veterans

from Muncie, Indiana, were set up camp in the capital during the summer of 1932

• Determined to remain until they received full payment of bonuses due in 1945.

“Hooverville” in Seattle, 1933• All over the country,

desperate, homeless people constructed shacks out of scavenged materials.

5.2.4 The Depression in a Nutshell

Lampooning Hoover,

1932