Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures •http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgqVCJpRqWQ Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • Post-World War I brought tumultuous change. • Economic boom accompanied by high inflation. • Labor unions brought scores of strikes. • During the summer of 1919, race riots erupt (white on black). • Concerns abound of Russia’s Communist Revolution spilling over its borders. • In April 1919, postal service intercepted almost 40 bombs. • Attorney-General Mitchell Palmer’s house bombed leads round-ups of foreign radicals and has them deported. Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • More than 3,300 postwar strikes. • Establishment figures blame labor activism for violence and disruptions. • (Right) “The Soviet Ark” took 249 Russian immigrants without just cause back to their native country. • The Federal Bureau of Investigation created under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover. • Federal government investigates and incarcerates 5,000 with out regard for their rights. • Public criticism and change of administration bring an end to Palmer’s tactics. Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • On 15 April 1921, two employees of a shoe warehouse in Massachusetts, were murdered during a robbery. • Police arrest two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco (oppostte, right) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. • Declared their innocence, but marred by their anarchist and socialist allegiances. • Two weeks after their arrest, found guilty. • Never granted a retrial; executed in August 1927. Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures Europe: the Interwar Years The Jazz Age Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • Jazz can be seen as America’s Black community celebration of itself. • Starting in about 1890, Black America’s Great Migration relocated hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. • African American culture reborn in the Harlem Renaissance. Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • The “push” and “pull” of the Great Migration. • Promises of Reconstruction never delivered. • Organized violence directed against southern Blacks. • Lure of jobs in northern cities takes many from rural South. Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • No other aspect of the Harlem Renaissance influenced America and the entire world as much as jazz. • Jazz’ syncopated rhythms and improvised instrumental solos ignored many musical conventions. • Harlem's Cotton Club featured the talents of composer Duke Ellington and such singers as Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. • Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong’s cross-ver appeal gave white Americans jazz fever Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofImnBpf7aE Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • (Left) Paul Robeson became prominent stage actor as well as athlete, actor, singer, cultural scholar, author, and political activist. • Poet Langston Hughes adopted with the rhythmic meters of blues and jazz. • Writers Charles McCay and Jean Toomer urged African- American assertion. • Novelist Zora Neale Hurston won acclaim for her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • The Great Gatsby--arguably the quintessential American novel, and certainly the most explicit in its examination of the Jazz Age. • (Right) F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda operated among the social elite in New York, Paris, and on the French Riviera. • Gatsby cast a harsh light upon the opulence of American materialism and its deficient morality. Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. • “Why are we still reading a book written in the 1920's? • What gives a book its longevity? • Which of its themes are eternal in the American psyche? • What is the American Dream? • How does Gatsby represent this dream? • Does the novel praise or condemn Gatsby's dream? • Has the American dream changed since Gatsby's time?” Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • Disillusioned by the world and alienated by the changes in modern America the Lost Generation of American and other writers forsook their homes to live in Paris in the 1920s. • The Roaring Twenties’ materialism left many intellectuals empty-- more to life than middle-class conformity. • Ernest Hemingway (right) portrayed the malaise wrought by the war in The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929). Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • American ex-pat poet T. S. Eliot commented on the post-war vacuum in “The Waste Land.” • Playwright Eugene O’Neil elevated American dramatic theatre--Desire under the Elms and A Long Day’s Journey into Night. • America’s first Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Sinclair Lewis (left) lampooned American middle-class life in Babbitt. Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • Fundamentalism conservatism reacted to a modernist social and intellectual revolution visible in changing manners and morals. • The 1920s came to be known as the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, or the era of “flaming youth.” • (Right) H. L. Mencken denounced the venality of American life along with the Progressives who believed in the masses’ ability to govern. • Mencken and elitist called democratic man a boob and characterized the American middle class as the “booboisie.” Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMX6BubBwmM Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • One of the most profound -- and outrageous Jazz Age influences of the Jazz Age was the group of a dozen or so tastemakers who lunched together at New York City’s Algonquin Hotel.. • (Left) The Algonquin Round Table in caricature by Al Hirschfeld. Seated at the table, clockwise from left: Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Marc Connelly, Franklin P. Adams, Edna Ferber, George S. Kaufman, Robert Sherwood. In back from left to right: frequent Algonquin guests Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield and Frank Case. Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • Robert Sherwood, reviewing cowboy hero Tom Mix: "They say he rides as if he’s part of the horse, but they don’t say which part." • Dorothy Parker: "That woman speaks eighteen languages and can’t say ‘no’ in any of them." • George S. Kaufman: Once when asked by a press agent, "How do I get my leading lady’s name into your newspaper?" Kaufman replied, "Shoot her.“ • By 1925, the Round Table was famous and the country-at- large hung on their every word. Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • Movie-making blossoms in the 1920s. • Hollywood replaces east coast as center of film industry. • By the end of the decade, Hollywood counted 20 studios. • During decade silent films dominated; first talkie in 1927, The Jazz Singer. • Among the stars were Buster Keaton-comedy, Rudolph Valentino and Mary Pickford- romance, and Douglas Fairbanks-action. • Disney introduced Mickey Mouse in 1928. Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWEo4M8nZQQ Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh3z89u1NtY Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • To ease tension at the pace of change, Americans engage in sometimes entertaining, sometimes senseless, fads. • Radio promotes such endeavors as flag-pole sitting (left) and dance marathons. • In 1921, Atlantic City stages the first Miss America Pageant. Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZEdF1pPLEo Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS3N6j8NIKU Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vwI7yhOiB4 Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • (Right) Gertrude Ederle won public acclaim as the first woman to swim the English Channel. • Spectator sports shine the spotlight on football’s Red Grange and boxing had Jack Dempsey. Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • In 1889, the poet Walt Whitman (left) said of baseball, “Well — it's our game; that's the chief fact in connection with it; America's game; it has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere; it belongs as much to our institutions; fits into them as significantly as our Constitution's laws; is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.” Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • For much of its literati, baseball serves as a metaphor for America. • A repository of national truths by which the present is measured. • Jacques Barzun wrote, "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.“ • Because of its timeless quality, baseball offers cultural continuity, generational connectedness, and the sense of belonging. Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • In 1919, the Chicago White Sox (left) threw the World Series; they became known ever after as the Black Sox. •In Gatsby, Meyer Wolfsheim echoes the real-life gambler Arnold Rothstein who was behind much of the scandal. • The sport took action to right itself, eliminate gambling’s overt presence in clubhouses, and win back the public it had in part lost. • The baseball stars featured a remarkable collection of characters, many of whom had indelible flaws; the era’s greatest hitter, Ty Cobb was an overt racist. Explorations in American History: You Oughta be in Pictures • Babe Ruth as quintessential American rags to riches story. • When he played for the Boston Red Sox they were the best team in the sport, and Ruth was a record-setting pitcher and hitter.