CHAPTER 22: NEW ERA
Objectives: o We will study the technology, socio-economic conditions, and popular culture of the 1920s.
Ecc_5:10 He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance with increase: this is also vanity.
THE NEW ECONOMY: o The economic boom was a result of many factors. o One was the degradation of European industry in the aftermath of World War I, which left the U.S. for a short time the only truly healthy industrial power in the world. o More important in the long run was technology was the great industrial expansion it made possible.
THE NEW ECONOMY: o The Automobile Industry, as result of the development of the assembly line and other innovations now became one of the most important industries in the nation. o It stimulated growth in any related industries. o Auto Manufacturers purchased the products of steel, rubber, glass, and tool companies. o Auto owners bought gasoline from the oil corporations. o Road construction is response to the proliferation of motor vehicles became an important industry.
THE NEW ECONOMY: o Radio came in the scene in 1920. o With development of radio tubes that communicated speech and music that caused families to flock to purchase these models. o By 1925, 2 million sets were in American homes, and by the end of the 1920s almost every family had one.
Economic Organization: o Large sectors of American business accelerating their drive toward national organization and consolidation. o Some industries were less susceptible to domination. o But a few great corporations attempted to stabilize themselves not through consolidation but through cooperation.
Economic Organization: o Efforts by industrialists throughout the economy was to find ways to curb competition through consolidation or cooperation reflected a strong fear of overproduction.
Labor in the New Era o American industrial workers experienced both successes and failures of the 1920s as much as any other group. o On one hand they enjoyed a higher standard of living during the decade, many enjoyed greatly improved working conditions and other benefits.
Labor in the New Era o Industrialists trying to quell any potential labor unrest, created the development of welfare capitalism. o For example, Henry Ford shortened the workweek, raised wages, and instituted paid vacations. o Pensions from retirement were made available.
Labor in the New Era o However welfare capitalism affected only a relatively small number of workers in any case. o Most employers were interested primarily in keeping their labor costs to a minimum. o Workers as a whole received wage increases at a rate far below increases in production and profits. o Unskilled workers in particular, saw their wages increase in a very miniscule way.
Women and Minorities in the Workforce: o Growing proportion of workforce consisted of women who were concentrated in what since became known as pink-collar jobs. o Low-paying service occupations with many of the same problems as manufacturing employment. o Large number of women worked as secretaries, salesclerks, telephone operators, and in other similarly underpaid jobs.
Women and Minorities in the Workforce: o Similarly, half-million African Americans who had migrated from the rural South to the cities during the Great Migration was excluded from Union representation.
Women and Minorities in the Workforce: o Most African Americans who migrated to Urban areas filled menial jobs as janitors, dishwashers, garbage collectors, commercial laundry attendants, and domestics and in other types of service jobs. o This general reluctance to organize service sector workers was in part because AFL leaders did not want women and minorities to become union members.
Women and Minorities in the Workforce: o African Americans founded their unions spearheaded by A. Philip Randolph who founded the Sleeping Car Porters who won significant gains for his members, increased wages, shorter working hours, and other benefits. o He also enlisted the union in battles for Civil Rights for African Americans.
Women and Minorities in the Workforce: o In the West and the Southwest, the ranks of unskilled workers included considerable number of Asians and Hispanics. o In the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Acts of the late nineteenth century, Japanese immigrants increasingly took the place of the Chinese in menial jobs in California, despite hostility from Whites.
Women and Minorities in the Workforce: o Some were able to become small business owners to set up track farms, farmers who grew small food crops for local sale. o Many of the Issei (Japanese immigrants) and Nisei (their American-born children enjoyed significant economic success so much so that California passed laws in 1913 and 1920 to make it more difficult for them to buy land.
Women and Minorities in the Workforce: o Other Asians most notably Filipinos, swelled the unskilled workforce and generated considerable hostility. o Anti-Filipino riots in California beginning 1929, helped produce legislation in 1934 that virtually eliminated immigration from the Philippines.
Women and Minorities in the Workforce: o Mexican immigrants formed a major part of the unskilled workforce throughout the Southwest and California. o Nearly half a million Mexicans entered the U.S. in the 1920s, more than any other national group.
Women and Minorities in the Workforce: o Mexicans also faced hostility and discrimination but there were few efforts to exclude them. o Employers in the relatively underpopulated West needed this ready pool of low-paid unskilled, and unorganized workers.
The American Plan: o It was at this time, Unions were seen as subversive and the courts sided with employers and industrialists in preventing picketing and protests.
Agricultural Technology and the Plight of the Framer: o With the advance in mechanization with tractors and fertilizers, food production became more efficient and greater yields.
Agricultural Technology and the Plight of the Farmer: o But demand for agricultural goods was not rising as fast as production. o The results were substantial surpluses, a disastrous decline on food prices, and a severe drop in farmers income beginning early in the 1920s. o More than 3 million people left agriculture altogether in the course of the decade. o Of those who remained, lost ownership of their lands, and had to rent instead from banks or other landlords.
THE NEW CULTURE: o Consumerism: Industrialization produced a mass consumer culture. o American society in the 1920s could not only afford essential needs but also wants for pleasure in the form of goods and services. o Middle class families purchased such new appliances as electric refrigerators, washing machines, electric irons, and vacuum cleaners, o Women purchased cosmetics and mass produced fashions.
THE NEW CULTURE: o Above all Americans bought automobiles. o Car expanded the geographic horizons of families and expanded them from immediate towns. o Weekend drives because part of everyday life. o Many employers also began to add paid vacations.
Advertising: o This was the era of advertising, where publicists no longer simply conveyed information; they sought to identify products with a particular lifestyle. o To invest with glamour and prestige, and to persuade potential consumers that purchasing a commodity could be personally fulfilling and enriching experience.
Advertising: o Advertising industry could never have had the impact it did without the emergence of new vehicles of communication such as newspapers and magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post and Reader s Digest.
The Movies and Broadcasting: o It was the era of motion pictures as movies became an even more popular and powerful form of mass communication. o More than 100 million people saw films in 1930 as compared to 40 million in 1922. o The addition of sound of motion pictures beginning in 1927 with the first feature-length talking, o The jazz Singer, with Al Jolson created nationwide excitement.
The Movies and Broadcasting: o The first commercial radio station in America, KDKA in Pittsburgh began broadcasting in 1920, the first national radio network, the National Broadcasting Company, was formed in 1927. o By 1923, there were more than 500 radio stations, covering every area of the country.
Modernist Religion: o The influence of consumer culture and its increasing emphasis on immediate, personal fulfillment, was visible even in religion. o Theological modernists taught their followers to abandon some of the traditional tenets of evangelical Christianity (literal interpretation of bible) and accept a faith that would help individuals to live more fulfilling lives in the present world.
Modernist Religion: o There was a move where there was no longer devoted much time to teaching their children the tenets of their faith; they seldom prayed at home or attended church on any day but Sunday. o Even the Sabbath was becoming not a day of rest and religious reflection, but rather a holiday filled with activities and entertainments.
Changing Ideas of Motherhood: o The role of motherhood began to significantly alter. o The middle class wife shared increasingly in her husband s social life; she devoted more attention to cosmetics and clothing; she was less willing to allow children to interfere with their marriage.
Changing Ideas of Motherhood: o Issues of birth control also began to be promoted, by such like Margret Sanger under the premise that large families were among the major causes of poverty and distress in poor communities.
The Flapper: Image and Reality: o The New more secular view of womanhood had effects on women beyond the middle class as well. o Some women concluded that in the New Era it was no longer necessary to maintain rigid, Victorian female respectability. o Women could smoke, drink, dance, wear seductive clothes and make up, and attend lively parties.
The Flapper: Image and Reality: o Such assumption was that of the flapper the modern women those liberated lifestyle found expression in dress, hairstyle, speech, and behavior. o The flapper lifestyle had a particular impact on lower-middleclass and working-class single women who were flocking to new jobs in industry and service sector.
The Flapper: Image and Reality: o At night such women flocked, often alone, to clubs and dance halls in search of excitement and companionship. o But despite their image of liberation, the flapper evoked in popular culture, most women remained highly dependent on men both in the workplace. o Where they were usually poorly paid and in the home and relatively powerless when men exploited that dependence.
The Disenchanted: o The generation that lived through and in many cases fought in the Great War quickly came to see the conflict as a useless waste of lives lost for no purpose. o For many young people in the 1920s, disenchantment with the war contributed to a growing disenchantment with the United States.
The Disenchanted: o The newly prosperous and consumer driven era they encountered seemed meaningless and vulgar to many artists and intellectuals in particular. o As a result, they came to view their own culture with contempt.
The Disenchanted: o They were called the Lost generation. o There was personal alienation felt in this era. o The repudiation of Wilsonian idealism, the restoration of business as usual, the growing emphasis on materialism and consumerism suggested that the war had been a fraud; that the suffering and dying had been in vain.
The Disenchanted: o Ernest Hemingway one of the most famous authors wrote, A Farewell to Arms. o Its protagonist, an American officer fighting in Europe decides that there is no justification in the fighting and deserts the army with a nurse. o And wrote that he should be admired to do so.
The Disenchanted: o Critiques of American religion, politics, the arts, even democracy itself merged. o The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald ridiculed the American obsession with material success in The Great Gatsby. o Where the main character Jay Gatsby spends his life accumulating wealth and social prestige in order to win the woman he loves. o The world to which he has aspired, however turns out to be one of pretension, fraud, and cruelty, and it ultimately destroys him.
The Harlem Renaissance: o This era saw the flourishing of African American culture as a new generation of artists and intellectual came on the scene o Jazz musicians such as Duke Ellington came on the scene. o Harlem became the center of literature, poetry, and art. o Celebrating their roots with pride. o Poets like Langston Hughes among others developed a rich contribution to the American literary and artistic landscape.