The 1920’sA Selective Look

at the “Roaring 20’s”

Confined to the Northeast, Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans

The Solid South: The Bible Belt, Jim Crow, lynchings, poll taxes, white primaries

• The West: No professional teams west of St. Louis, the rise of Hollywood, undeveloped and under-populated

• Religion: The Scopes trial, Catholic schools, Jews in the northeastern cities

• Women: Just got the right to vote, high percentage attend college, “flappers”

• African Americans: parallel social institutions in religion and baseball, Marcus Garvey, the Harlem Renaissance

• Consumerism: Age of mass consumption, no new consumer protection laws

• Poverty: Justified under the concept of Social Darwinism

• Workers: In smokestack industries dependent on unorganized labor, technological change, imposition of the Protestant work ethic

• Left-wing movements: Socialism, scientists challenging prescribed authority

• Right-wing movements: Prohibition, nativism, anti-Margaret Sanger, anti-Darwin, anti-science

• Foreign policy: U.S. as global economic power as creditor nation after WWI

• Anti-immigration laws, pressure to Americanize, Irish begin to seek political power in cities

• Organized crime: bootlegging, crime families• Crystallization of American culture:

managerial and corporate ethos, corporate values, materialism

• Music: “Dardanella” sells 1,000,000 records, eventually rising to 6,500,000; “Whispering” sells 2,000,00 records