The Roaring 1920’s: People, Places and Events

1. THE NEW URBAN SCENE   People from farms all over the United States were moving to cities because that’s where all the new work was. Life in these booming cities was far different from the slow-paced, everybody-knows-your-business type of life in America's smaller, rural towns. Chicago, for instance, was an industrial powerhouse, home to native-born whites and African Americans, immigrant Polish, Irish, Russians, Italians, Swedes, Arabs, French, and Chinese. Each day, an estimated 300,000 workers, 150,000 cars and buses, and 20,000 trolleys filled the vibrant downtown. At night people crowded into incredible-looking movie theaters and vaudeville houses offering live variety shows.

2. For small-town migrants, adapting to the city demanded changes in thinking as well as in everyday living. The city was a world of competition and constant change. City dwellers read and argued about current scientific and social ideas. They judged one another by accomplishment more often than by someone’s background. City dwellers also tolerated drinking, gambling, and casual dating and sex—behaviors considered shocking and sinful in small towns.

For all its color and challenge, the city could be impersonal and scary. Streets were filled with strangers, not friends and neighbors. Life was fast-paced, not leisurely. The city demanded endurance.

Science and Religion Clash Another bitter controversy highlighted the growing rift between traditional and modern ideas during the 1920s. This battle raged between fundamentalist religious groups and secular (non-religious, separate from religion) thinkers over the validity of certain scientific discoveries.

AMERICAN FUNDAMENTALISM    The Protestant movement grounded in a literal (word-for-word) interpretation of the Bible was known as fundamentalism. Fundamentalists were skeptical of scientific knowledge; they argued that all important knowledge could be found in the Bible. They believed that the Bible was inspired by God, and that therefore its stories in all their details were true.

   Their beliefs led fundamentalists to reject the theory of evolution advanced by Charles Darwin in the 19th century—a theory stating that plant and animal species had developed and changed over millions of years. The claim they found most unbelievable was that humans had evolved from apes. They pointed instead to the Bible's account of creation, in which God made the world and all its life forms, including humans, in six days.

THE SCOPES TRIAL     In March 1925, Tennessee passed the nation's first law that made it a crime to teach evolution. Immediately, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU, is a group of attorneys that protect free speech rights) promised to defend any teacher who would challenge the law. John T. Scopes, a young biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, accepted the challenge. In his biology class, Scopes read this passage from Civic Biology: “We have now learned that animal forms may be arranged so as to begin with the simple one-celled forms and culminate with a group which includes man himself.” Scopes was promptly arrested, and his trial was set for July.

The ACLU hired Clarence Darrow, the most famous trial lawyer of the day, to defend Scopes. William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic candidate for president and a devout fundamentalist, served as a special prosecutor. There was no real question of guilt or innocence: Scopes was honest about his action. The Scopes trial was a fight over evolution and the role of science and religion in public schools and in American society.

This clash over evolution, the Prohibition experiment, and the emerging urban scene all were evidence of the changes and conflicts occurring during the 1920s. During that period, women also experienced conflict as they redefined their roles and pursued new lifestyles.

THE FLAPPER    During the twenties, a new ideal emerged for some women: the flapper, a young woman who embraced freedom and the new fashions and urban attitudes of the day. Tight-fitting felt hats, bright waist-less dresses an inch above the knees, skin-toned silk stockings, sleek pumps, and strings of beads replaced the dark and prim ankle-length dresses, whalebone corsets, and petticoats of Victorian days. Young women clipped their long hair into boyish bobs and dyed it jet black.

Many young women became more assertive. In their quest for equal status with men, some began smoking cigarettes, drinking in public, and talking openly about sex—actions that would have ruined their reputations not many years before. They danced the fox trot, camel walk, tango, Charleston, and shimmy with abandon.

   Attitudes toward marriage changed as well. Many middle-class men and women began to view marriage as more of an equal partnership, although both agreed that housework and child-rearing remained a woman's job.

THE DOUBLE STANDARD    Magazines, newspapers, and advertisements promoted the image of the flapper, and young people openly discussed dating and relationships in ways that scandalized their elders. Although many young women donned the new fashions and disregarded tradition, the flapper was more an image of rebellious youth than a widespread reality; it did not reflect the attitudes and values of many young people. During the 1920s, morals loosened only so far. Traditionalists in churches and schools protested the new casual dances and women's acceptance of smoking and drinking.

   In the years before World War I, when men “courted” women, they pursued only women they intended to marry. In the 1920s, however, casual dating became increasingly accepted. Even so, a double standard —a set of principles granting greater sexual freedom to men than to women—required women to observe stricter standards of behavior than men did. As a result, many women were pulled back and forth between the old standards and the new.

LINDBERGH'S FLIGHT   America's most beloved hero of the time wasn't an athlete but a small-town pilot named Charles A. Lindbergh, who made the first nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic. A handsome, modest man from Minnesota, Lindbergh decided to go after a $25,000 prize offered for the first nonstop solo transatlantic flight. On May 20, 1927, he took off near New York City in the Spirit of St. Louis. After 33 hours and 29 minutes, Lindbergh set down at Le Bourget airfield outside of Paris, France, amid beacons, searchlights, and mobs of enthusiastic people.

   Paris threw a huge party. On his return to the U.S., New York showered Lindbergh with ticker tape, the president received him at the White House, and America made him its idol. In an age of sensationalism, excess, and crime, Lindbergh stood for the honesty and bravery the nation seemed to have lost.

The Harlem Renaissance Flowers in New York Many African Americans who migrated north moved to Harlem, a neighborhood on the Upper West Side of New York's Manhattan Island. In the 1920s, Harlem became the world's largest black urban community, with residents from the South, the West Indies, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Haiti. James Weldon Johnson described Harlem as the capital of black America.

Like many other urban neighborhoods, Harlem suffered from overcrowding, unemployment, and poverty. But its problems in the 1920s were eclipsed by a flowering of creativity called the Harlem Renaissance, a literary and artistic movement celebrating African-American culture.

AFRICAN AMERICANS AND JAZZ   Jazz was born in the early 20th century in New Orleans, where musicians blended instrumental ragtime and vocal blues into an exuberant new sound. In 1918, Joe “King” Oliver and his Creole Jazz Band traveled north to Chicago, carrying jazz with them. In 1922, a young trumpet player named Louis Armstrong joined Oliver's group, which became known as the Creole Jazz Band. His talent rocketed him to stardom in the jazz world.