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.