Section 4: A New Mass Culture
•
Leisure time:
–
Farm: On the farm, once the day was done you
played cards, read or sang around the piano, had
picnics with other farm families.
–
City Life:
Movies!!
• Movie industry grew in Hollywood, California.
• 60-100 million Americans went to the movies each week.
• Early in the decade there were silent movies.
– Immigrants spoke little English but they were able to follow the story lines.
• Movies were available to anyone with a few cents to spare.
• Stars of the Silent era:
– Charlie Chaplin- played “the Little Tramp”. (hobo, dreamer and poet but eternal optimist)
– Rudolph Valentino – exotics desert Arabian sheik
•
Movies changed with the advent of the “Talkie”
•
First talkie was The Jazz Singer – sound
synchronized to the action.
Charlie Chaplin
Women wanted to be
like the “It” girl, and
wanted their men to be
“Sheiks” like Rudolf
The Radio
• Produced a standardized culture. Everyone was listening to the
same music and radio.
• The Radio: invented by Guglielmo Marconi. First radio station was
KDKA in Pittsburg PA.
• Within 3 years there were almost 600 licensed stations with
600,000 radios.
• Music, educational lectures, religious sermons, news and weather
• Brought distant events into millions of homes
Phonographs
•
Could listen to music anytime you wanted.
•
Grooved disc recordings and superior sound
reproduction improved.
•
Spread country and western music.
•
Pop tunes from New York City’s Tin Pan Alley.
Age of Heroes
•
Babe Ruth –
baseball,
Sultan of Swat,
Homerun
record stood
for 30 years.
Gambler,
Bobby Jones – golf
•
Red Grange – football
•
•
Women athletes:
Helen Wills – tennis
Sports writers
• Turned athletes into “immortal gods”.
• Made the sport exciting.
• Gave players great nicknames like Sultan of Swat for Babe
Ruth and the backfield of Notre Damn football the Four Horsemen.
• The nation needed heroes – WWI shattered many dreams,
athletes gave people the sense that they could achieve greatness.
Charles Lindbergh – Lucky Lindy
•
Airplane pilots became a
romantic daredevil.
•
May 1927 he took off from
Long Island New York – his
plane was named “Spirit of St.
Louis.
•
He flew non stop across the
Aviator Charles Lindbergh
services his plane, "The Spirit of St. Louis," as he prepares for his historic solo flight from New York to Paris in May, 1927.
Women’s new roles
• The new woman of the 1920’s – liberated, wore dresses with shorter hemlines, makeup, danced and shared political power with men.
• Rejection of Victorian morality - Hair cut into a “bob”
• Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming and Miriam Ferguson of Texas became the first women elected as State Governors.
• National Women’s Party demanded equal rights and pushed for the passage of an Equal Rights Amendment.
• Women lived longer, married later and had fewer children
• Women devoted more time to either work or charity work
Women insisted on a new
role in the 1920s. Girls
became “co-eds”, bobbed
their hair, shortened their
skirts, powdered their
Art and Literature
•
Thoughts: Sigmund Freud argued that much of
human behavior is driven not by rational
thought but by unconscious desires. Explore
the subconscious.
•
Modernist Art: moved away from
Modern Art
•
Edward Hopper
•
Man Ray
•
Joseph Stella
Art and Literature
• Greenwich Village and the area south side of Chicago created the
“Bohemian” lifestyle = unconventional and free.
• Modern American art- individual and modern experience
– John Marin
Edward Hopper: visual accuracy of realism to haunting scenes of modern disenchantment
• convey a mood of loneliness and desolation by their emptiness or by the presence
Post War Literature
• “The Lost Generation” – no longer had faith in the cultural guideposts of the Victorian era.
• Search for new truths and expression
• F. Scott Fitzgerald- The Jazz Age – The Great Gatsby
• Earnest Hemingway- Disillusionment of postwar generation –: novelist, “heroic antiheroes” flawed individuals who were heroes. Famous works: For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms.
• Edith Wharton – Life among the rich in New York – The Age of Innocence.
• William Faulkner – life in the South – The Sound and the
Fury.
• Willa Cather – life on the Great Plains – My Antonia.
• Eugene O’Neil: playwright, portrayed realistic characters and
situations, vision of life was often tragic. experimented with the subconscious . The Emperor Jones, Strange Interlude
• T.S. Eliot - world filled with empty dreams- The Hollow Men
African American Politics
•
Black vote in the north:
–
Most voted for Republican party since that was what
Abe Lincoln was.
–
They elected Oscar DePriest to be the first African
American representative to Congress
•
NAACP and Anti-lynching laws
–
Attempted several times to get Congress to pass laws
outlawing lynching.
Marcus Garvey
• Dynamic leader calling for Negro Nationalism.
• He founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association – to promote black pride and unity.
• Convention in Harlem: – 50,000 attended.
– He wanted to create a settlement in Liberia Africa for them to move to
– Middle class and intellectuals started moving away from his rhetoric.
Jazz. Blues, and the Theater
• Louis Armstrong – jazz, a style of music influenced by Dixieland
music and ragtime.
– Band was called the “Hot Five”
– Famous song: “Cornet Chop Suey”
• Duke Ellington – blend of improvisation and orchestration using
different combinations of instruments.
– Songs: “Mood Indigo” and “Sophisticated Lady”
Music cont.
• Bessie Smith: soul music, Empress of the Blues. Famous song:
“Down Hearted Blues”
• Shuffle Along was the first musical written. Produced and
performed by African Americans
• Paul Robeson – Played in Emperor Jones, and Show Boat
• Apollo theater- famous entertainment club
Harlem Renaissance
•
Great Migration of African Americans to the
North for better living conditions and work.
•
New York Suburb became known for the
movement called the Harlem Renaissance
–
Stimulated artistic development
The Writers of the Renaissance
• Claude McKay: wrote a collection of poems called Harlem Shadows
describing racism
– Poems: The Lynching, and If We Must Die
• Langston Hughes became the leading voice for the African American
experience.
• Zora Neale Hurston: Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching
God. Portrayed rural African American culture.
• Other famous writers: Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Countee Cullen, Alain