Everyone would gather around the radio and listen to the news, the comedy shows, and the music. Musical styles were also changing in the s. In Louis Armstrong started improvising and adding personal musical variations with his trumpet, playing in a style known as jazz.
In the flappers found a new dance craze, called the Charleston. In Mickey Mouse first appeared in the cartoon Steamboat Willie , and in Popeye first appeared in the comic strip Thimble Theater. Aviation represented another area in which things were changing quite rapidly, helped by advances and improvements in aircraft during World War I. Up to this time only a few daredevils and barnstormers had flown. In the United States Air Service circumnavigated the world in airplanes, just twenty-one years after Orville Wright flew the first powered plane for only forty yards here in North Carolina.
Before the decade was over, commercial passenger air travel had begun. The Fourteenth Amendment had already given African Americans citizenship in Yet segregation , or separation of the races, continued to be practiced in North Carolina and in the South. Modern civil rights laws for minorities were still many years away. As mentioned in the beginning of this article, the decade also represented the worst of times.
Here in North Carolina, Thomas W. Bickett was the governor until Show Boat became the basis for the popular musical of the same name. Prosperity had ended. The economic boom and the Jazz Age were over, and America began the period called the Great Depression. The s represented an era of change and growth. The decade was one of learning and exploration.
America had become a world power and was no longer considered just another former British colony. American culture, such as books, movies, and Broadway theater, was now being exported to the rest of the world.
World War I had left Europe on the decline and America on the rise. In anticipation of the ban, many people stockpiled wines and liquors during the latter part of before alcohol sales became illegal in January As Prohibition continued, people began to perceive it as illustrative of class distinctions, since it unfairly favored social elites.
Working-class people were enraged that their employers could dip into a cache of private stock while they were unable to afford similar indulgences. The rift between the Dries and the Wets over alcohol consumption and sales largely hinged on the long-running, historical debate over whether drinking was morally acceptable in light of the antisocial behavior that overindulgence could cause.
Powerful gangs corrupted law enforcement agencies, leading to the blanket criminal activity of racketeering, which includes bribery, extortion, loan sharking, and money laundering.
By the end of the decade, Capone controlled all 10, Chicago speakeasies, illegal nightclubs where alcohol was sold, and ruled the bootlegging business from Canada to Florida. Numerous other crimes, including theft and murder, were directly linked to criminal activity in Chicago and other cities in violation of Prohibition. A colorful figure notorious for a multitude of crimes related to his illegal alcohol operation, Capone was eventually imprisoned for tax evasion in To prevent bootleggers from using industrial ethyl alcohol to produce illegal beverages, the government ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols.
Bootleggers combated this by hiring chemists who successfully renatured the alcohol to make it drinkable. As many as 10, people died from drinking denatured alcohol before Prohibition ended. Prohibition had a large effect on music in the United States, specifically on jazz.
Speakeasies became far more popular during the Prohibition era, partially influencing the mass migration of jazz musicians from New Orleans to major northern cities such as Chicago and New York. This movement led to a wider dispersal of jazz, as different styles developed in different cities. Because of its popularity in speakeasies and its advancement due to the emergence of more advanced recording devices, jazz became very popular in a short amount of time.
Jazz was also at the forefront of the minimal integration efforts of the time, as it united mostly black musicians with mostly white crowds. The beer that could be legally consumed was essentially a very weak mixture. On March 22, , President Franklin D. As Prohibition ended, some of its supporters, including industrialist and philanthropist John D.
Rockefeller, openly admitted its failure. In a positive epilogue, however, the overall consumption of alcohol dropped and remained below pre-Prohibition levels long after the Eighteenth Amendment ceased to be law. The Roaring Twenties represented a significant shift in American cultural values, morals, and social roles. During the Roaring Twenties—a decade with a distinct cultural edge—ideas about morality and social roles shifted as much as the booming economy.
Young women in the s took part in a liberation of sexuality and education that redefined their generation, while minority groups such as African Americans and homosexuals began to emerge from the shadows of traditional American culture. Many of the ideas that fueled the change in sexual thought were already floating around intellectual circles in New York prior to World War I through the writings of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, physician and social reformer Havelock Ellis, and feminist Ellen Key.
These thinkers asserted that sex was not only central to the human experience, but also that women were sexual beings with human impulses and desires just like men, and that restraining these impulses was self-destructive. By the s, these ideas had filtered into the mainstream of society, although not without resistance from traditional standard bearers such as conservative religious leaders and politicians.
But while these women entered into the mainstream middle-class experience, including higher education, they largely remained in gendered roles within society. At school, women typically took classes such as home economics, referring to the study of skills and tasks such as cooking, sewing, and cleaning employed in the successful operation of a home. Fueled by ideas of sexual liberation, however, dating underwent major changes on college campuses. With the advent of the automobile, courtship occurred in much more private settings than it had within previous generations.
Teenagers, May : The societal expectations and allowances for young women changed dramatically in the s. Another significant change in the overall behavior of American society began in urban areas, where minorities were treated with more equality in the s than they had been accustomed to previously.
This was reflected in some of the films of the decade, as well. Redskin and Son of the Gods dealt sympathetically with Native Americans and Asian Americans, respectively, by rejecting social bias. In movies and on the stage, black and white players appeared together for the first time, while it became common in nightclubs to see whites and blacks dancing and dining together. The s was also a period of more visibility, and somewhat more acceptance, for homosexuals. New York, London, Paris, and Berlin were important centers of the new ethic, and humor was used to assist its acceptability.
The relative liberalism toward homosexuality was publicly demonstrated by the actor William Haines, regularly named in newspapers and magazines as the top male box-office draw, who lived in an openly gay relationship with his partner, Jimmie Shields. West regarded talking about sex as a basic issue of human rights and was an early advocate of gay rights.
Mae West : Screen, stage, and radio megastar Mae West was a vocal proponent of sexual openness and gay rights. Profound hostility toward homosexuality continued to exist, however, especially in more remote areas. People also went to the movies: Historians estimate that, by the end of the decades, three-quarters of the American population visited a movie theater every week. But the most important consumer product of the s was the automobile. In there was one car on the road for every five Americans.
Cars also gave young people the freedom to go where they pleased and do what they wanted. Jazz bands played at venues like the Savoy and the Cotton Club in New York City and the Aragon in Chicago ; radio stations and phonograph records million of which were sold in alone carried their tunes to listeners across the nation. The novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald chronicled the Jazz Age. During the s, some freedoms were expanded while others were curtailed.
This drove the liquor trade underground—now, people simply went to nominally illegal speakeasies instead of ordinary bars—where it was controlled by bootleggers, racketeers and other organized-crime figures such as Chicago gangster Al Capone. Prohibition was not the only source of social tension during the s. This led to the passage of an extremely restrictive immigration law, the National Origins Act of , which set immigration quotas that excluded some people Eastern Europeans and Asians in favor of others Northern Europeans and people from Great Britain, for example.
Immigrants were hardly the only targets in this decade. The Great Migration of African Americans from the Southern countryside to Northern cities and the increasing visibility of Black culture—jazz and blues music, for example, and the literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance —discomfited some white Americans.
Millions of people, not just in the South, but across the country, including the west coast, Midwest and Northeast joined the Ku Klux Klan in the s. More specifically, the s represented economic and political uplift for African Americans that threatened the social hierarchy of Jim Crow oppression.
During this decade, Black Americans sought stable employment, better living conditions and political participation. As factories and shops mechanized, the work week of the urban blue-collar worker fell from By the dawn of the twenties, Americans had more time and money to spend on new kinds of public amusements like dance halls, movie theaters, fun parks, and baseball stadiums. They also had more opportunities to buy competitively priced durable items, thanks to new methods of production and distribution.
The prosperity of the post-war period greatly accelerated this trend. The proliferation of advertising—alongside the maturation of the publishing, music, and film industries—exposed citizens to a new gospel of fun that was intimately associated with the purchase of goods and services.
Sell them hats by splashing sunlight across them. Sell them dreams—dreams of country clubs and proms and visions of what might happen if only. They buy hope—hope of what your merchandise might do for them. If many of the social trends that we associate with the twenties had long been building, the decade was indeed unique in many ways. It was a decade of firsts. For the first time ever, more Americans 51 percent lived in cities than in villages or on farms.
It was a decade of economic expansion. Between and horsepower per wage earner in manufacturing skyrocketed by 50 percent, signaling a robust wave of mechanization that increased productivity by 72 percent in manufacturing, 33 percent in railroads, and 41 percent in mining. In , only 16 percent of American households had electricity; by the mids, almost two-thirds did. Overnight, the electric vacuum cleaner, the electric refrigerator and freezer, and the automatic washing machine became staples in middle-class homes.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, automobiles were still unreliable and scarce, but in the years just prior to World War I, pioneers like Ransom Olds, Henry Leland, and Henry Ford revolutionized design and production methods to make the car affordable and trustworthy. Another pre-war technology that came of age in the twenties was film.
By the mids movie theaters were selling 50 million tickets each week, a sum equal to roughly half the US population! The flapperism of today, with its jazz. And it contains a bathing scene in silhouette that must have made the censors blink.
Like film, radio was invented in the late nineteenth century but experienced its formative era of commercial expansion in the twenties. It was the first-ever live radio transmission for a popular audience, and although few Americans that evening had the necessary technology to hear the results, by more than three million households had acquired radio sets. Since the dawn of the twentieth century, American politics had been dominated by Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, two presidents whose outsized personalities and dueling visions of the progressive spirit defined the tenor and tone of public life.
Harding, they got exactly what they bargained and voted for. Both got him in trouble regularly. Even as a young boy, the future president seemed all too inclined to please everyone and offend no one. He relished poker games and excelled at public speaking. He played the b-flat trumpet in the town marching band. The ever-genial Harding stacked his Cabinet with cronies from Ohio.
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