The Roaring Twenties (The 1920s pt. 3)

​The Roaring Twenties

• The decade of the twenties well earned the label ”Roaring Twenties”

  • It roared with change

• People had greater leisure time for new entertainments

The Roaring Twenties

• Many Americans revolted against traditional morality during the 1920s

• Wild parties, drunkenness, and sexual immorality were common on many college campuses

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Moral Decay

Moral Decay

• There was a popular psychologist named Sigmund Freud

  • In his writings, Freud emphasized the “danger” of repressing one’s sexual desires and thoughts

  • Some Americans came to believe that sexually suggestive comments and behavior as well as immoral conduct were acceptable

• This openness was displayed in the major visual medium of the era—the motion picture

• Influenced by movies, many young women adopted the dress and lifestyle of “flappers”

  • young women of the 1920s who wore shorter skirts and heavy makeup, used slang, drank, smoked, and danced

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Leisure Activities

Leisure Activities

• The literature of the period revealed the despair and disillusionment that lay beneath the surface

  • T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land reflected the hopelessness that followed World War I

  • Ernest Hemingway wrote stories in which characters failed to find meaning in life

  • Author F. Scott Fitzgerald was himself a symbol of the age

    • His novel The Great Gatsby tells the story of a man corrupted by the new morals of the era

Leisure Activities

• There was a growing interest in sports

  • In 1926, Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim the twenty-one miles across the English Channel

  • College football drew thousands of fans

    • Harold “Red” Grange, the “galloping ghost” of the University of Illinois ran for four touchdowns within twelve minutes

  • A famous golfer was Bobby Jones

  • A famous baseball star was George Herman “Babe” Ruth

• Realizing the serious problems of drinking, thousands of Americans rallied in temperance societies through the 1800s

• In the early 1900s, many progressives had made prohibition a major reform issue

  • banning the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol

Prohibition

Prohibition

• During World War I, when the US was selling all its surplus grain to the Allies for food use, it was considered unpatriotic to make liquor

• In December 1917, the Eighteenth Amendment, which called for nationwide prohibition, passed congress

  • It went to the states for ratification

  • All states except for three ratified it in less than fifteen months

  • The period during which alcohol was illegal in the country is known as Prohibition

    • term for the Eighteenth Amendment; the period from 1920 to 1933 during which alcohol was illegal in the United States

Prohibition

• In 1919 Congress passed the Volstead Act to provide federal implementation of

  the amendment.

  • 1919 law providing federal implementation of the Eighteenth Amendment, outlawing any beverage that contained more than 0.5% alcohol content

• Bootlegging became a big business and made many people wealthy.

  • making and selling illegal liquor

• "Speakeasies" were created and called such because people talked softly about them in public

  • illegal taverns or bars where people would often whisper to obtain entry

Prohibition

• Violence often accompanied the criminals involved in bootlegging and operating speakeasies

  • Al Capone, also known as Scarface, led a large crime ring in Chicago

• In 1933 the Twenty-First Amendment was ratified

  • repealed the Eighteenth Amendment

    and ended Prohibition

• In 1916 the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) reappeared

• Leaders within the black community differed over how to address the challenges of racism

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Racism & Response

Racism & Response

• Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Associated (UNIA), claimed that whites were incapable of overcoming their racial prejudices

  • He urged emigration to Africa

• From 1919 to 1925 the NAACP promoted an anti-lynching bill that would punish those who permitted lynching

  • Because of opposition from many southern senators, the bill never passed

• Conservative Christians in the 1920s were concerned about the growth of theological liberalism in the churches

• Between 1910 and 1915, concerned pastors and theologians wrote a series of books that contained ninety articles

  • They were called The Fundamentals

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Fundamentalism

Fundamentalism

• They dealt with the “fundamentals” or basic, foundational beliefs of the Christian faith

• These books gave rise to the name Fundamentalist

  • term arising in the 1920s to describe people who believe in the foundational truths of Christianity

• J. Gresham Machen was one of the Fundamentalist’s most respected scholars in the early twentieth century

• He worked hard to prevent the spread of theological liberalism at Princeton and within the presbyterian Church

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Growth of Fundamentalism

Growth of Fundamentalism

• Machen said that liberalism is not Christianity but is its own religion

• He argued that liberalism should start its own institutions rather than taking control of existing ones

• Fundamentalists were forced to leave or willingly left many Christian denominations, colleges, and seminaries

Fundamentals of the Faith

1. Inspiration of the Bible by God

2. Virgin birth and deity of Jesus

3. Death on the cross for mankind’s sins

4. Resurrection of Jesus from the dead

• Fundamentalists were uncertain how to handle Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution

• By the 1920s, a greater understanding of evolution and its impact emerged

  • Most Fundamentalists rallied to oppose Darwinism

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The Scopes Trial

The Scopes Trial

• The Tennessee state legislature had passed a law forbidding public school

  teachers to teach evolution

• A substitute teacher named John Scopes agreed to be arrested for doing so

• In the summer of 1925, the Scopes trial, also called the Monkey trial, turned into a gigantic media event

  • Attorney Clarence Darrow defended Scopes by trying to portray fundamentalist Christians as foolish, ignorant, and unscientific

  • William Jennings Bryan was a prosecutor for the trial

  • Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution and ordered to pay a fine of

    one hundred dollars