Booze, Bullets, and Babes

White Sheets, Red Scares, Black Monday and all those Blues

Chp 20 and 21

Yeah, well he ain’t got nothing on

the original!

This is Leon James1920s

Chapter 21 The Roaring Twenties

Changing Ways of Life

Chp 21: 1

The Prohibition Experiment

•18th Amendment

•sin or savior?

•Volstead Act

The Prohibition Experiment

•speakeasies

•bootleggers

The Prohibition Experiment

•Causes

Effects•Religious groups believe alcohol is sinful•reformers believe gov’t should protect people’s health•reformers believe alcohol leads to crime, abuse•Immigrant groups brew beer and alcohol (carry over from WWI

•Consumption declines• Disrespect of the law• Increase in lawlessness (bootlegging, smuggling)• Organized crime

Science and Religion Clash

Science and Religion Clash•Fundamentalist

(literal interpretation of the Bible) vs. Scientific Discoveries

•Reject Charles Darwin’s Evolution Theory

Billy Sunday

He predicted that with the prohibition of alcohol, the slums would cease to exist, prisons and jails would become nothing more than a memory…

“Hell will be for rent”, said Sunday

Scopes Monkey Trail•March 1925, TN – passed law to prevent teaching

of evolution

•ACLU promised to defend any teacher challenging the law

•John T. Scopes – bio teacher from Dayton, TN took challenge

Scopes Monkey Trail

•“We have now learned that animal forms may be arranged so as to begin w/the simple one-celled forms and culminate w/a group which includes man himself”

•Scopes was arrested

Scopes Monkey Trail•CLARENCE DARROW – most famous trial

lawyer of his day

•Hired to defend Scopes

•Wm Jennings Bryan (3x pres cand) was prosecutor

Scopes Monkey Trail

• No real question of quilt or innocence –Scopes admitted what he did

• The Trial was a fight over evolution and therole of science and religion in public schoolsand in American society.

Scopes Monkey Trail

Darrow questioned Bryan –as an expert on the Bible, and finally questioned him about the creation in 6 days – Bryan admitted it was not likely 6-24 hour days- so Bible might be open to interpretation

1. Explain how urbanization created a new way of life that often clashed with the values of traditional urban society.

2. Describe the controversy over the role of science and religion in American education and society in the 1920s

The Twenties Woman

Chp 21: 2

Society Just Ain’t Like It Used To Be!

• Birthrate dropped at faster rate in 20s

• MARGARET SANGER – 1916, 1st birth control clinic in US

• Lots of new technology to make work at home easier - sliced bread!

• Public assistance for elderly, public health clinics for ill; workers

Education and

Popular Culture

Chp 21: 3

Society Just Ain’t Like It Used To Be!The mass media, movies, spectator

sports played important roles in creating the popular culture of the1920s – a culture that manyartists and writers criticized.Widespread

education meant literate citizens but it took mass media to shape a mass culture. Newspapers

increased dramaticallyMagazines

flourished

Sinclair Lewis- Babbit – main character ridicules American conformity and materialism (Nobel Prize winner)

F Scott Fitzgerald- The Great Gatsby showed negative side of 20s gaiety even wealthy had hollow lives

Edna St Vincent Millay- poems celebrate youth

Ernest Hemingway- Sun Also Rises – criticized glorification of war.

Society Just Ain’t Like It Used To Be!

All about fads:

King Tut

Charles Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis

Movies

Jazz Singer

Steamboat Willie

Art Edward Hopper

Society Just Ain’t Like It Used To Be! THE BIGGEST ITEM OF THE

DECADE FOR INFLUENCING AMERICAN CULTURE

-everyone in the US could experience the same news, sports, and advertisements at the same time. A shared national experience

- plus it is privately owned unlike Europe with gov’t owned radio systems

RADIO!

Harlem Renaissance

Harlem Renaissance

•Harlem Renaissance - flourishing of African American culture The ever-so-talented

Miss Josephine Baker

Harlem RenaissanceLangston Hughes- best known

poet of Harlem Renaissance. Describes difficult lives of AA. Some poems set to jazz tempo

Claude McKay

W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, Marcus Garvey

•Zora Neale Hurston- told of lives of poor Southern blacks. Celebrated common person’s art form - folkways

•Paul Robeson- son of a slave became major dramatic actor (Othello)

Harlem Renaissance

•Cotton Club

•Louis Armstrong

•Duke Ellington

•Cab Calloway

•Bessie Smith

•Ella Fitzgerald

•Josephene BakerAlexander’s Ragtime Band

Harlem Renaissance

Billie Holiday Considered by many to be the greatest jazz vocalist of all time, Billie Holiday lived a tempestuous and difficult life. Her singing expressed an incredible depth of emotion that spoke of hard times and injustice as well as triumph. Though her career was relatively short and often erratic, she left behind a body of work as great as any vocalist before or since. Born Eleanora Fagan in 1915, Billie Holiday spent much of her young life in Baltimore, Maryland. She was raised primarily by her mother. Living in extreme poverty, Holiday dropped out of school in the fifth grade and found a job running errands in a brothel. When she was twelve, Holiday moved with her mother to Harlem, where she was eventually arrested for prostitution. Desperate for money, Holiday looked for work as a dancer at a Harlem speakeasy. When there wasn’t an opening for a dancer, she auditioned as a singer. Long interested in both jazz and blues, Holiday wowed the owner. This led to a number of other jobs in Harlem jazz clubs, and by 1933 she had her first major breakthrough.

Her bluesy vocal style brought a slow and rough quality to the jazz standards that were often upbeat and light. This combination made for poignant and distinctive renditions of songs that were already standards. By slowing the tone with emotive vocals that reset the timing and rhythm, she added a new dimension to jazz singing.

Harlem RenaissanceBillie HolidayIt was not, however, until 1939, with her song "Strange Fruit," that Holiday

found her real audience. A deeply powerful song about lynching, "Strange Fruit" was a revelation in its disturbing and emotional condemnation of racism. Holiday’s voice could be both quiet and strong at the same time. Though one of the highest paid performers of the time, much of her income went to pay for her serious drug addictions.

By the late 1940s, after the death of her mother, Holiday’s heroin addiction became so bad she was repeatedly arrested— eventually checking herself into an institution in the hopes of breaking her habit. By 1950, the authorities denied her a license to perform in establishments selling alcohol. Though she continued to record and perform afterward, this marked the major turning point in her career. For the next seven years, Holiday would slip deeper into alcoholism and begin to lose control of her once perfect voice. In 1959, after the death of her good friend Lester Young and with almost nothing to her name, Billie Holiday died at the age of forty-four.

During her lifetime she had fought racism and sexism, and in the face of great personal difficulties triumphed through a deep artistic spirit. It is a tragedy that only after her death could a society, who had so often held her down, realize that in her voice could be heard the true voice of the times.

Harlem Renaissance

STRANGE FRUITby DAVID MARGOLICKSouthern trees bear a strange fruit,Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,And the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,Here is a strange and bitter crop.