Famous People of the Twenties –Deborah Hoeflinger- Butler High School

A gallery of the people who made news in the decade

Musicians

Louis Armstrong was the greatest of all Jazz musicians. Armstrong defined what it was to play Jazz. His amazing technical abilities, the joy and spontaneity, and amazingly quick, inventive musical mind still dominate Jazz to this day.

Bessie Smith

She was the greatest of the classic Blues singers of the 1920s Her rendition of "St. Louis Blues" with Armstrong is considered by most critics to be one of finest recordings of the 1920s Bessie had started to style herself as a Swing musician and was on the verge of a comeback when her life was tragically cut short by an automobile accident in 1937. Their car rear-ended a slow moving truck and rolled over crushing Smith's left arm and ribs. Smith bled to death by the time she reached the hospital.

King Oliver

Joe Oliver is one of the most important figures in early Jazz. When we use the phrase Hot Jazz, we are really referring to his style of collective improvisation (rather than solos). He was the mentor and teacher of Louis Armstrong. Louis idolized him and called him Papa Joe.

Jelly Roll Morton

Jelly Roll Morton was the first great composer and piano player of Jazz. He was a talented arranger who wrote special scores that took advantage of the three-minute limitations of the 78 rpm records. But more than all these things, he was a real character whose spirit shines brightly through history, like his diamond studded smile.

Duke Ellington

Duke Ellington brought a level of style and sophistication to Jazz that it hadn't seen before. Although he was a gifted piano player, his orchestra was his principal instrument. Like Jelly Roll Morton before him, he considered himself to be a composer and arranger, rather than just a musician.

Paul Whiteman

Paul Whiteman's Orchestra was the most popular band of the 1920s. They are also the most controversial to Jazz historians because Whiteman billed himself as "The King Of Jazz". In 1924 he secured his place in history when he commissioned and introduced George Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue.

George Gershwin

George and Ira Gershwin were famous composing brothers. George was one of the first composers to combine American jazz with traditional concert music in pieces such as Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris.

Movie Stars

Sports

The Pride of the Yankees – Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig

Jack Dempsey –”The Manassa Mauler”

His opponents feared him – his fans adored him –

His record – 60-7-8 Finally defeated (twice) by Gene Tunney

Bobby Jones

From 1923 to 1930 he won thirteen major championships and remains the only player ever to win all four majors in the same year-all before retiring from competitive golf when he was just 28 years old.

Knute Rockne

Player and coach at Notre Dame

one of the most innovative and charismatic coaches of his era.

coined the phrase, "Win one for the Gipper."

coached the "Four Horsemen" –

Aided development of the forward pass

Red Grange – The Galloping Ghost

Played for the Chicago Bears.

Many have said that Red was the player who first made professional football a respected and popular sport.

Red was the most famous athlete of the time, and he lent his name to many different products.

Gertrude Ederle

First woman to swim the English Channel at age 19!!

At the 1924 Summer Olympics, she won a gold medal as a part of US 400-meter freestyle relay team and bronze medals for finishing third in the 100-meter and 400-meter freestyle races.Ederle passed away on November 30, 2003 in Wyckoff, New Jersey at the age of 97.

Bill Tilden

The biggest tennis star of the 1920s

There has never been a single player who dominated an entire era of tennis as Tilden had during his prime.

For seven straight years in the 1920s, he never lost a single important match, especially when the Davis Cup was at stake.

Reformers

John Dewey – educational reformer

Marcus Garvey – colonist or back to Africa movement.

Alice Paul "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on

account of sex."

While many suffragists left public life and activism after the 19th Amendment was enacted, Alice Paul believed the true battle for equality had yet to be won. Paul announced that she would be working for a new constitutional amendment, one she authored. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was introduced in every session of Congress from 1923 until it passed in 1972.

Margaret Sanger “No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. “ Sanger gave up nursing

work to dedicate herself to the distribution of birth control information

Coined the term birth control. set up the first birth control

clinic in the United States, and the following year, she was sent to the workhouse for "creating a public nuisance."

helped organize the Planned Parenthood Federation

The Infamous – Sacco and Vanzetti

Two Italian immigrants who were tried(1921) and executed(1927) for the murder of a paymaster and a security guard.

Many people believed they were innocent, convicted because they were foreign and anarchists.

"Never in our full lives could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man's understanding of men as now we do by accident... That last moment belongs to us. That agony is our triumph." -- Bartolomeo Vanzetti

Corrupt Officials

They were….

Harry SinclairEdward DohenyCharles ForbesAlbert FallHarry Daugherty

Writers –’The Lost Generation”

F. Scott Fitzgerald – Gertrude Stein– Ernest Hemingway – William Faulkner – John Steinbeck – Thomas Wolfe – T.S. Eliot – Zora Neale Thurston – Edna St. Vincent Millay- William Carlos Williams – John Dos Passos

‘expatriates’ – Paris – Greenwich Village – Rebellion against accepted social and sexual

norms

Politicians

Politicians

Calvin Coolidge Warren G. Harding Herbert Hoover Al Smith Frank Kellogg Charles Dawes Charles Evans Hughes Andrew Mellon

One of a Kind…