Unit 17: 1920s

• Normalcy


  A return to the pre-war status quo
• Although production and wealth boomed after World War I, the benefits were spread unevenly, foreshadowing the Crash and Depression
• Technological innovations

  • Made it possible to increase industrial output without expanding the labor force
  • Efficiency became the watchword in all areas of economic life
• Driven by electricity and automated machinery

  • Industry concentrated on producing consumer goods
• Consumer credit


  Spurred consumption but masked inequities of wealth
• Welfare capitalism


  Corporations employed this to improve worker morale and reduce the challenge of unions
• Open shop

  Businesses promoted this to undercut unions, where non-union workers received the same benefits as union workers
• Union membership rapidly declined
• The car


  Symbolized the rise of the consumer economy
• Henry Ford's Highland Park assembly line

  • Produced a car every 10 seconds
• Ford's Model T


  Enabled workers to be both producers and consumers ($300—three month's wages)
• Road building


  • Promoted new businesses along highways and changed social habits
• Cities


  • Grew at a fast pace, not only horizontally, but also vertically as new buildings reshaped the skyline
• Houston

  • Grew from 75,000 to 300,000 residents between 1910 and 1930
• New media


  • Shaped the 1920s, including movies, radio and sound recording, which increased Americans' access to entertainment but undermined traditional values and cultural distinctiveness in ethnic and rural communities
• Early movie industry

  • Was centered around New York City, but moved to Hollywood and expanded rapidly
• Movie ticket sales

  Soared, but studios and moguls dominated the industry
• Publicists

  Whetted American appetites by creating an elegant image for movie stars
• Hollywood studios


  Came up with a plan of self-censorship by hiring Will Hayes as a morals czar, in response to being attacked by conservative groups for sexual permissiveness
• Radio


  • Was the nation's first comprehensive mass entertainment medium
  • Large companies formed national networks that aired a variety of programs to homes across the country
  • "Amos 'n' Andy" was the first national radio hit show
  • Advertising and sponsors supported and influenced programming
  • Radio also helped to commercialize previously isolated forms of music and build a mass following for sports
• Newspaper tabloids


  • Emphasized crime, sex scandals, gossip columns, and sports in the 1920s
• Walter Winchell's gossip column

  Was slangy
• Advertisers


  Appealed directly to working class and immigrant readers
• Journalism saw the trend towards consolidation in the 1920s
• The Hearst chain


  Controlled 14 percent of the nation's circulation
• Advertising


  • Became a thriving industry that promoted consumerism
  • Influenced by psychologist John B. Watson, advertising agencies employed market research and psychology to stress consumer needs, desires, and anxieties rather than the qualities of the product
  • They celebrated consumption as a positive good
• The recording industry


  • Transformed American mass and regional popular culture, fueled in part by dance crazes
• In the later '20s as sales declined, record companies focused on regional and ethnic markets to maintain sales
• Records made American music popular worldwide
• Spectator sports


  • Reached unprecedented popularity as athletes took on a celebrity status
• Babe Ruth


  His home run hitting and appetite for publicity helped restore baseball's tarnished image as it recovered from the 1919 Black Sox scandal
• Although African Americans were excluded from major league baseball, the Negro National League (organized in 1920) provided new opportunities
• Radio and newspaper coverage also spurred interest in college sports and made stars of boxers, golfers and tennis players
• The new morality of the Twenties

  Was symbolized by the flapper who danced to jazz, smoked cigarettes, drank bootleg liquor, and was sexually active
• Writers had encouraged a greater degree of openness about sexuality
• Surveys of sexual behavior showed that an increased number of women had sexual relations prior to marriage
• The new morality was reflected in American popular culture
• Margaret Sanger


  Campaigned to make birth control more widely available
• A shadowy but increasingly open LGBTQ subculture developed in some big cities
• Prohibition was enacted by the 18th Amendment, which was passed by the Senate on December 18, 1917 and ratified on January 16, 1919 after 36 states approved it