The fear of radicalized immigrant agitators undercut the legitimacy of independent unions which were displaced by corporate pension and benefit plans instituted by “company”
unions.
See Babbitt for
example of middle-class finding identity in consumer products and gadgets; cars,
recreation, appliances,
sports. During the 1920s a new confluence of mass
production, mass marketing and mass popular culture.
Installment buying and Chain Stores made items like irons, gas stoves,
vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators, radios, sewing machines, and
especially automobiles, commonplace.
Blue-Collar Consumption and Leisure: While skilled workers did enjoy some
wage advances, less skilled, especially new immigrants, African Americans, and
women earned less, and enjoyed smaller increases; unemployment was persistent,
steady work not the rule for unskilled workers, a circumstance exacerbated by
heightened expectations. Working-class and ethnic groups helped shape culture,
while resisting homogenization. Ethnic groups initially utilized new cultural
formats (local theaters, ethnic shops, native language newspapers, etc) to
reinforce their distinctiveness, but gradually nationalizing momentum undermined
localism and ethnicity.
White-Collar Consumption and Leisure: Middle-class had most capacity to
engage in new consumer culture, accompanied by shift from value of
self-sacrifice to self-realization.
The 20s concept of self-expression and self-realization (Freud) through
consumption and leisure was the flip side of the monotony and alienation of
workplace. Popular tracts of the day included titles like, “Day by day, I’m getting better and better,”
How to Win Friends and Influence People (How to get ahead).
Advertising mushroomed, 5X growth from 1914-1929 on appeals to self
satisfaction through leisure and consumption. Advertising offered cures to
stress, and the plight of the individual in ‘modern’ society. Consuming a
solution to life’s problems--see celebrity pitches,
concern with opinion of others, e.g. mouthwashes (Listerine), deodorants
etc. Movies reflected and
reinforced consumer culture. Nonetheless, there was a
certain ambivalence between peoples’ desires for the fruits of technology
etc and their concern for individual freedom and autonomy.
According to historians, the work
ethic actually began dying in the middle of the nineteenth century and finally
succumbed entirely by the 1920s. Two developments killed it. The first was
industrialism, which made work dreadfully dull. Jewish glove makers in Chicago,
Herbert Gutman found, grew morose and spiritless when the owner of the factory
where they worked installed an assembly line. Nobody wanted to work all day
sewing just one finger of a glove instead of the entire piece. At congressional
hearings held in the 1880s clergyman R. Heber Newton noted that the industrial
worker "makes nothing," and "sees no complete product of his skill growing into
finished shape in his hands." Hence, the worker feels dejected and lifeless.
"What zest," he asked, "can there be in the toil of this bit of manhood?" Add to
this the fact that factories exploited many workers and you understand why
workers suddenly weren't as thrilled with the work ethic as they once may have
been.
A second factor in the death of
the work ethic was the birth of consumerism in the 1920s. "Want the good life?"
businesses asked Americans. It's for sale! The goal in life then became living
well not working hard. In the past one worked hard to gain the good life. Now
one simply achieved it instantaneously by buying goods on credit. Loren Baritz
reports that in the 1920s "$6 billion worth of consumer goods were bought on
credit: 85 percent of furniture sales, 80 percent of phonographs, 75 percent of
electric washing machines, and most of the vacuum cleaners, pianos, sewing
machines, radios, and electric refrigerators."
High Culture:
The Lost Generation:Americans jaded by the war produced literary
expressions of disillusionment.Hemingway (The Sun
Also Rises; Farewell to Arms), Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald (Great
Gatsby).Social critics like H.L. Mencken satirized American provincialism.Political radicals like John Dos Passos offered tough critiques and alternative visions to
capitalism.
The New
Woman
Education: After the Civil war educational opportunities expanded for
women ( Vassar 1865, Wellsley, Smith 1875, Bryn Mawr, Banard, Radcliff, B.U.
Stanford, U. of Chicago by 1890s).That translated into women representing 40%of
all college students in 1910, and a peak of 47% in 1920, a rate that went into
decline for the next five decades.
Occupations:Women were
52% of social workers
79% of librarians
83% of stenographers
93% of nurses
66% of teachers
The 1920s witnessed a major increase in married women in the
workplace.Prior to 1920, most married women who worked
for wages were poor, but in the 20s, middle class women entered the expanding
white collar world.Part of the impetus was fueled by
the consumer revolution and credit plans, the desire for discretionary income to
make payments for consumer products.
The flapper was the image of daring:smoking, drinking, and sexual experimentation. Dancing
the
Charleston, the Bunny Hug! Old and New image.
The automobile and dating.
Birth control (MargaretSanger):the promise and fears about sex without reproduction.Popular movie titles reveal the titillation and
fears surrounding “liberated” women:The Daring
Years;Women Who Give; The Price She Paid; Name the
Man; Queen
of Sin.
One response came from the science of psychology: the notion of
companionate marriage, in which one should expect to enjoy an intimate sexual
partnership rather than the Victorian model of male dominance and submission.This position turned the tables on the old morality:the Victorian woman who
enjoyed sex was “abnormal,” but the new woman was expected to find a man and
fulfillment within marriage.By extension, women who
did not marry were portrayed as dangerous, unwholesome, mannish. Social
science effectively domesticated sexual freedom (the Flapper) into the arena of
marriage.
Social sciences redefined (essentialized) femininity, masculinity, and literally
invented the category of homosexuality.
Social sciences also reinforced the role of the homemaker as a domestic
engineer, with a proliferation of literature to enable women to make the home
safe, satisfying, etc., covering topics including nutrition, hygiene,
sanitation, and child rearing manuals. Advertising used “scientific claims” as
the modern authority.Advertisers assumed the role of
educators, aimed at women who made 80% of the consumer purchases.Advertisers largely sold women images of
themselves. Purchasing became the arena where women could exercise choice and
control, essentially collapsing feminist notions of choice to individual
consumer decisions.
Chicago
Tribune, 1930:
“Today’s woman gets what she wants. The vote.Slim sheaths of silk to replace voluminous petticoats.Glassware in sapphire blue or glowing amber.The right to a career.Soap
to match her bathroom’s
colors.”
The net effect of was to safely contain the radical feminism of the 1920s
back within the confines of traditional domestic subservience.
The “New Negro,” from the title of Alain Locke’s 1925 collection of poetry, prose, art and essays
representing the strength and accomplishments of black culture and the Harlem
Renaissance.The revival was broader than
just
Harlem
, it took place
in
St
Louis
with the Jazz,
in
Chicago
with the Blues, and other cities as well. Authors Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, Claude
McKay.Paul Robeson on Broadway.
I, too, sing
America
I am the darker brother.
They
send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When
company comes
--Langston Hughes
COLLECTION
The great migration of Southern blacks to northern cities had created new
African American urban communities.While there was racism in the North
too, the iron clad oprssion of Jim Crow was not everywhere the same, there were other
possibilities in the urban Black communities.
Civil Rights:NAACP, DuBois, the Crisis, the Defender,The Urban League.NAACP
office
.
On the presistence of lynching: http://www.musarium.com/withoutsanctuary/main.html
Pan Africanism (precursor of Black
Nationalism, Black Power):
"Up you mighty
race! You can accomplish what you will!
The negro of yesterday has disappeared from the
scene, and his place is taken by a new negro who stands erect, conscious of his
manhood rights, fully determined to preserve them at all costs."--Marcus
Garvey.
Garvey was Jamaican-born and a gifted promoter who founded
the Universal Negro
Improvement Association.He promoted ethnic pride and self-help, in the form of
Black-owned, operated, and supported businesses.Most
visible: The Black
Star Line. 2.Garvey’s empire collapsed and he was imprisoned for
fraud (rightly or wrongly) and deported.
Cultural Conflict:Fundamentalists (prohibition), the Scopes trial, The New KKK
The Klan:3-5 million members, native-born
Protestants, targeted immigrants, Jews, Catholics, and Blacks for failing to
live up to “100% American.”Lynchings continued, but
ironically the rate declined in the face of energetic
work by the NAACP.
Around the turn of the century the Klan, and the Confederate "lost cause" generally, took on a
retrospective romantic appeal for southerners. This appeal was greatly
stimulated by Thomas Dixon's 1905 novel, The Clansman, and D. W.
Griffith's 1915 motion picture based on it, Birth of a Nation. The second
Klan was born in that environment in 1915, which encouraged the superpatriotism of World War I. After the war its membership
and geographic range expanded dramatically.
During its heyday in the early 1920s this Klan numbered over 3 million
members nationwide, and it won political power in
Indiana,
Oklahoma,
Oregon, and a number of other
states. Unlike its predecessor it was mainly an urban phenomenon, reflecting the
demographic changes in the nation. It drew members and leaders from all ranks of
white society, including substantial women's
participation, but chiefly from lower-middle-class people, largely religious
fundamentalists who felt threatened by a national drift away from the small-town
Protestant culture they had grown up with. The 1920s Klan fed on a variety of
frustrations and fears: fear of the immigrants who were entering the country in
large numbers, of communists and other radicals spawned by the Russian
Revolution, of blacks who were moving into northern cities in increasing
numbers, of Jews and Catholics who were rising in the economic and social order,
and of labor unions demanding a larger share of the pie for their members.
Some of these Klansmen resorted to violence as in the days of old. But, in a
membership exceeding 3 million, the vast majority were
nonviolent. They marched in parades, paid dues, and bought regalia (this Klan
was, for some of its organizers, a financial bonanza). They voted for
Klan-endorsed political candidates and attended rallies
where crosses were burned. (The original Klan did not burn crosses; the idea
seems to have originated in
Dixon
's
novels.) The organization dwindled away in the late 1920s, the result of its own
legal, financial, and political excesses, though a remnant persisted until its
final disbandment in 1944.
Excerpt from The Klan Manual, 1925:
Purpose:
"To
unite white male persons, native-born, Gentile citizens of the United States of
America, who owe no allegiance of any nature or degree to any foreign
government, nation, institution, sect, ruler, person, or people; whose morals
are good; whose reputations and vocations are respectable; whose habits are
exemplary; who are of sound minds and eighteen years or more of age, under a
common oath into a brotherhood of strict regulations."
Cultural
The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is a movement
devoting itself to the needed task of developing a genuine spirit of American
patriotism. Klansmen are to be examples of pure patriotism. They are to organize
the patriotic sentiment of native-born white, Protestant Americans for the
defense of distinctively American institutions. Klansmen are dedicated to the
principle that America shall be made American through the promulgation of
American doctrines, the dissemination of American ideals, the creation of
wholesome American sentiment, the preservation of American institutions.
Fraternal
The movement is designed to create a real
brotherhood among men who are akin in race, belief, spirit, character, interest,
and purpose. The teachings of the order indicate very clearly the attitude and
conduct that make for real expression of brotherhood, or, "the practice of Klannishness."
Beneficent
"To relieve the injured and the oppressed; to
succor the suffering and unfortunate, especially widows and orphans." The supreme pattern for all true Klansmen is
their Criterion of Character, Jesus Christ, "who went about doing good." The
movement accepts the full Christian program of unselfish helpfulness, and will
seek to carry it on in the manner commanded by the one Master of Men, Christ
Jesus.
Protective
I. The Home. "To shield the
sanctity of the home." The American home is fundamental to all that is
best in life, in society, in church, and in the nation. It is the most sacred of
human institutions. Its sanctity is to be preserved, its interests are to be
safeguarded, and its well-being is to be promoted. Every influence that seeks to
disrupt the home must itself be destroyed. The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan would
protect the home by promoting whatever would make for its stability, its
betterment, its safety, and its inviolability.
2. Womanhood. The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
declares that it is committed to "the sacred duty of protecting womanhood"; and
announces that one of its purposes is "to shield . . . the chastity of
womanhood." The degradation of women is a violation of the
sacredness of human personality, a sin against the race, a crime against
society, a menace to our country, and a prostitution of all that is best, and
noblest, and highest in life. No race, or society, or country, can rise higher
than its womanhood.
3. The Helpless. "To protect
the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless from the indignities, wrongs, and
outrages of the lawless, the violent, and the brutal."Children, the disabled, and other helpless ones
are to know the protective, sheltering arms of the Klan.
4. American Interests. "To protect and defend
the Constitution of the United States of America, and all laws passed in
conformity thereto, and to protect the states and the people thereof from all
invasion of their right from any source whatsoever."
Racial
"To maintain forever white
supremacy." "To
maintain forever the God- given supremacy of the white race." Every Klansman has unqualifiedly affirmed that
he will "faithfully strive for the eternal maintenance of white
supremacy."
Alabama ended their constitutional ban on interracial marriage in 2000, by voter referendum. South Carolina removed laws criminalizing interracial marriage in 1998. Although such laws were unenforceable, the Alabama legislator who fought for removing Article IV, Section 102 of the Alabama Constitution, contended that the law continued to discourage interracial couples from marrying in rural areas of Alabama into the 1990s.
See Werner Sollers, ed. Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature and Law. Oxford UP 2000
“Here in Arizona, a mixed-race couple, Chinese and Anglo, were offered a marriage license but reminded the clerk of the anti-miscegenation law. The law was then taken off the books in 1962, well before the Supreme Court Loving decision. I believe my wife and I were the first Black/White couple legally married in Arizona (1964).”
PBarrett @cox.net Pat Barrett
On Aug. 23, 1927 , Italian-born anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in Boston for the murders of two men during a 1920 robbery.
The Scopes trial was a mass media pageant carried live on the radio that ultimately yielded a devastating blow to fundamentalism as Darrow embarrassed Bryan.. Great actors : Wm Jennings Bryan v Clarence Darrow (ACLU). The paradox about the trial was that Dayton, Ohio wanted to be the host in order to profit from the proceeding in order to finance its modernization!
Meanwhile,
science strikes again with the surge in eugenics at UMN and elsewhere across the
country, imposing over 20,000 forced sterilizations.
Linkages:
Klan, Scopes, Origins Act, Prohibition, New Negro, NAACP, Flappers.
The
Collapse: The Great Stock Market Crash
Underlying conditions:
Maldistribution
of wealth--prosperity and poverty. Mechanized production exceeds demand
capacity. Unsteady employment patterns in industry. “Sick” industries belie
prosperity. Coal, shipbuilding, and esp. agriculture endure persistent economic
declines. Farmers’ depression started in the 1920s with foreclosures and bank
failures in full stride.
Short term:
Confluence of economic pressures, lead by Speculative fever like the Florida
land bubble and the bull market--increased margin stock buying, land
speculations, corporate pyramids (Insull)--shakes
investor confidence and initiated a downward spiral of production and
demand.
