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1920-1929
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During the 1920s, rural America clashes with
a faster-paced urban culture.
Women’s attitudes and roles change,
influenced in part by the mass media.
Many African Americans join in the new urban
culture.
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Americans
experience cultural
conflicts as
customs and values
change in the
United States
during the 1920s.
Objectives:
1. Explain how urbanization created a new way of
life that often clashed with the values of
traditional rural society.
2. Describe the controversy over the role of science
and religion in American education and society in
the 1920s.
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Terms and Names:
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Billy Sunday
18th Amendment
Prohibition
Speakeasy
Bootlegger
“Organized Crime”
Al Capone
Fundamentalism
Clarence Darrow
Scopes Trial
William Jennings Bryan
John Scopes
The New Urban Scene:
◦ 1920 census: 51.2% of Americans in communities of
2,500 or more
◦ 1922-1929: nearly 2 million people leave farms, towns
each year
◦ Largest cities are New York, Chicago, Philadelphia
 65 other cities with 100,000 people or more
◦ In 1920s, people are caught between urban and rural
cultures
 Anonymous crowds, moneymaking, pleasure-seeking in
cities
 Close ties, hard work, strict morals of small towns
◦ Use the top two paragraphs on page 435 of your text to
fill in worksheet section
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The Prohibition
Experiment:
◦ 18th Amendment
Launches the Prohibition
era
 Supported by religious
groups, rural South, West
◦ Prohibition—production,
sale, transportation of
alcohol illegal
◦ Government does not
budget enough money to
protect the law
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Speakeasies and Bootleggers:
◦ Speakeasies (hidden saloons, nightclubs) become
fashionable
◦ People distill liquor, buy prescription alcohol,
sacramental wine
◦ Bootleggers smuggle alcohol from surrounding
counties
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Organized Crime:
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American Fundamentalism:
◦ Prohibition contributes to
organized crime in major
cities
◦ Al Capone controls
Chicago liquor business
by literally killing off his
competition
◦ Elliot Ness and his group
of government agents
called “The Untouchables”
battled Capone
◦ By mid 1920s, only 19%
support prohibition
◦ 18th Amendment is
repealed in 1933 by 21st
Amendment
◦ Fundamentalism—movement based on literal
interpretation of the Bible
◦ Fundamentalists skeptical of some scientific
discoveries, theories
 Reject theory of evolution
◦ Believe all important knowledge can be found in the
Bible
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Billy Sunday holds
emotional meetings
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Aimee Semple McPherson uses
showmanship while preaching on
radio
The Scopes Trial:
◦ 1925, Tennessee passes law making it a crime to
teach evolution
◦ American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) backs teacher
John T. Scopes’ challenge of the law
◦ Clarence Darrow, the most famous trial lawyer of
the time, defends Scopes
◦ Fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan is special
prosecutor
◦ Scopes “Monkey” Trial—debates evolution, role of
science, religion in school
 National sensation—thousands follow
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Students pair up and work on Section 1 of
Chapter 13 study guide.
American women
pursue new
lifestyles an assume
new jobs and
different roles in
society in the
1920s.
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Objectives:
1. Explain how the image of the flapper embodied
the changing values and attitudes of young
women in the 1920s.
2. Identify the causes and results of the changing
roles of women in the 1920s.
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Terms and Names:
◦ Flapper
◦ Double standard
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The Flapper:
◦ Flapper—emancipated young woman, adopts new
fashions, attitudes
◦ Many young women want equal status that men,
become assertive
◦ Middle class men and women begin to see marriage
as an equal partnership
 However, housework and child-rearing still a woman’s
job
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Believe it or not…even your great grandma
was cool “back in the day”
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New Work Opportunities:
◦ After war, employers replace female workers with
men
◦ Female college graduates become teachers, nurses,
librarians
◦ Many women become clerical workers as demand
rises
◦ Some become sales clerks, factory workers
◦ Few become managers, always paid less than men
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The Changing Family:
◦ Birthrate drops partly due to birth control information
◦ Manufactured products, public services, give
homemakers freedom
◦ Housewives can focus more on families and pastimes,
not housework
◦ Marriages increasingly based on romantic love,
companionship
◦ Children spend most of the day at school and in
organized activities
 Adolescents resist parental control
◦ Working-class and college-educated women juggle
family and work
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The Double Standard:
◦ Elders disapprove new
behavior and its
promotion by
periodicals, ads
◦ Casual dating begins to
replace formal
courtship
◦ Women subject to
double standard-more
sexual freedom
granted to men and
women having to
observe stricter
standards of behavior
Students pair up and work on Section 2 of
Chapter 13 study guide.
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The mass media,
movies, an
spectator sports
play important
roles in creating the
public culture of
the 1920s—a
culture that many
artists and writers
criticize
Objectives:
1. Describe the popular culture of the 1920s
2. Explain why the youth-dominated decade came to
be called the Roaring Twenties
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Youth in the Roaring Twenties:
◦ Turn to page 444 in your textbook
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Terms and Names:
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Charles A. Lindbergh
George Gershwin
Georgia O’Keefe
Sinclair Lewis
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Ernest Hemingway
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School Enrollments:
◦ High school population increases dramatically in
the 1920s due to
 Prosperity
 Higher standards for industry jobs
◦ Pre-1920s, high school was only for college-bound
◦ In 1920s, high schools also offer vocational training
◦ Public schools prepare immigrant children who
speak no English
◦ School taxes increase as school costs rise sharply
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Expanding News
Coverage:
◦ Mass media shapes
mass culture; takes
advantage of greater
literacy
◦ By 1914, hundreds of
local newspapers
replaced by national
chains
◦ 1920s-mass market
magazines thrive;
Reader’s Digest, Time
founded
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Radio Comes of
Age:
◦ Radio is the most
powerful
communications
medium of 1920s
◦ Networks provide
shared national
experience
 Can hear news as it
happens
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New-Found Leisure Time:
◦ In 1920s, many people have extra money and
leisure time to enjoy it
◦ Crowds attend sporting events; athletes glorified in
the mass media
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Lindbergh’s Flight:
◦ Charles A. Lindbergh
makes first solo
nonstop flight across
Atlantic
◦ Small-town
Minnesotan
symbolizes honesty,
bravery in age of
excess
◦ Lindbergh paves way
for other pilots
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Entertainment and the Arts:
◦ Silent movies are already a
national pastime
◦ Introduction of sound in 1927
leads millions to attend every
week
◦ Playwrights and composers
break away from European
traditions
◦ George Gershwin uses jazz to
create distinctly American
music
◦ Painters portray American
realities and dreams
◦ Georgia O’Keeffe paints
intensely colored canvases of
New York in the art deco style
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Writers of the 1920s:
◦ Sinclair Lewis is the first American to win Nobel
Prize for literature
 Criticizes conformity, materialism
◦ F. Scott Fitzgerald reveals negative side of the era’s
excesses and freedom
◦ Edna St. Vincent Millay celebrates youth and
independence in her poems
◦ Writers soured by American culture and war settle
in Europe
◦ Expatriate Ernest Hemingway introduces a tough,
simple American style
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Writers of the 1920s:
◦ F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (2013)
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Students pair up and work on Section 3 of
Chapter 13 study guide.
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