Social and cultural developments in the 1920s, including the Jazz Age, mass consumption, the changing role of women, the Harlem Renaissance, immigration restriction, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Scopes trial

What this dot point is asking

NESA expects you to give an integrated account of the social and cultural changes of the 1920s and to weigh the transformation against the nativist and fundamentalist reaction. Strong answers integrate the consumer boom, the new mass media, the changing role of women, the Harlem Renaissance, immigration restriction, the second Klan, and the Scopes Trial as parts of a single contested decade.

The answer

The consumer economy

The 1920s American economy doubled in size, with real GDP rising around 42 per cent from 1921 to 1929. Real wages rose around 20 per cent between 1923 and 1929. Consumer credit ("buy now, pay later") expanded around eight-fold.

The automobile was the leading sector. Henry Ford's River Rouge plant (1928) was the largest factory in the world. The Model T fell from 950 dollars in 1909 to 290 dollars in 1924. Registered cars rose from 8 million in 1920 to 23 million by 1929. The automobile reshaped suburbs, courtship (drive-in cinemas), and women's mobility.

Electrification reached around 68 per cent of homes by 1929 (almost entirely urban). Refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, electric irons, and washing machines transformed household labour. Around 12 million radios were sold by 1929.

The new mass media

The film industry concentrated in Hollywood. Around 800 films per year were produced by the end of the decade; weekly cinema attendance reached 95 million in 1929 in a population of 122 million. "The Jazz Singer" (6 October 1927) starring Al Jolson introduced talkies.

Radio began with KDKA Pittsburgh's broadcast of the 1920 election (2 November 1920). The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) was founded in 1926, followed by CBS in 1927. The Jack Dempsey-Georges Carpenter fight (2 July 1921) was the first major sporting broadcast.

Spectator sport produced national celebrities: Babe Ruth (60 home runs in 1927), Jack Dempsey, Bobby Jones, Bill Tilden. Charles Lindbergh's solo transatlantic flight in the "Spirit of St Louis" (20 to 21 May 1927, New York to Paris in 33.5 hours) was the decade's defining hero moment.

The "New Woman"

The Nineteenth Amendment (18 August 1920) gave women the federal vote. The Sheppard-Towner Act (1921) funded maternal and child health. Around 25 per cent of women were in paid employment by 1929, mostly in clerical, retail, and teaching work.

The flapper (around 1922) cut her hair short, raised her hemline, smoked, drank in speakeasies, and danced the Charleston. The figure was urban, middle class, and largely cinematic; rural women's lives changed less. Margaret Sanger's American Birth Control League (1921) campaigned for legal contraception, achieving only limited success.

The decade also saw a backlash. The Equal Rights Amendment (drafted 1923 by Alice Paul) failed. Many of the social roles of suburban housewives became more, not less, demanding as houses got bigger and standards of cleanliness rose.

The Harlem Renaissance

The Great Migration brought around 1.5 million African Americans to northern cities between 1916 and 1930. New York's Harlem became the cultural capital. The "New Negro" anthology edited by Alain Locke (1925) gave the movement its name.

Key figures: Langston Hughes (The Weary Blues, 1926), Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay. Musicians: Louis Armstrong (in Chicago from 1922, New York from 1924), Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club from 4 December 1927, Bessie Smith, Fletcher Henderson. Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association at its peak in 1920 claimed around 4 million members.

Jazz, born in New Orleans and travelling north on Mississippi steamboats, became the soundtrack of the decade and gave it its name (F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Jazz Age").

The nativist reaction

The new Ku Klux Klan, refounded by William J. Simmons in 1915, expanded under Hiram Wesley Evans from 1922. Membership peaked at around 4 million by 1925. The new Klan opposed African Americans, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants; it was strong in Indiana (Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson) as well as the South. The Stephenson rape and murder trial (1925) destroyed the Klan's respectability, and by 1928 membership had collapsed to around 30,000.

Immigration restriction reflected the same impulse. The Emergency Quota Act (19 May 1921) capped annual immigration at 357,000 and based national quotas on the 1910 census. The National Origins Act (26 May 1924) cut the cap to 165,000, used the 1890 census (to favour northern Europeans), and barred Asians completely. Mexican immigration was not capped.

The Sacco and Vanzetti case (1920 to 1927) ran the length of the decade. Two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were convicted of a 1920 robbery and murder in South Braintree, Massachusetts. The defence argued the conviction reflected their politics and ethnicity. They were executed on 23 August 1927.

The Scopes Trial

The fundamentalist movement, organised around the Niagara Bible Conference (1878 onwards) and the World's Christian Fundamentals Association (1919), pushed state laws banning the teaching of evolution. Tennessee's Butler Act (March 1925) banned teaching that humans descended from lower animals.

The American Civil Liberties Union recruited Dayton schoolteacher John T. Scopes to challenge the law. The trial (10 to 21 July 1925) became a media event with around 200 reporters in Dayton. Clarence Darrow defended Scopes; William Jennings Bryan led the prosecution. Darrow's cross-examination of Bryan on the literal Bible was the rhetorical climax. Scopes was convicted and fined 100 dollars; the verdict was overturned on a technicality on appeal. Bryan died five days after the trial ended.

The Trial dramatised the urban-rural and modernist-fundamentalist split; H.L. Mencken's reporting in the Baltimore Sun mocked rural America.

Historiography

Frederick Lewis Allen (Only Yesterday, 1931) is the foundational journalistic account.

Lynn Dumenil (The Modern Temper, 1995) is the standard modern study and argues the decade's transformations were structural and predated the war.

Nathan Miller (New World Coming, 2003) is the standard narrative for HSC purposes.

David Levering Lewis (When Harlem Was in Vogue, 1981) is the standard study of the Harlem Renaissance.

Common exam traps

Reducing the decade to flappers and jazz

The Klan, Scopes, Sacco-Vanzetti, and the immigration acts are equal parts of the answer.

Missing the urban-rural divide

The transformation was largely urban; rural America was in agricultural depression for the whole decade.

Treating Black Americans as outside the story

The Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance are central; so is the violence of the Klan and the disenfranchisement of the South.

In one sentence

The 1920s transformed urban America through mass consumption (Ford's Model T at 290 dollars by 1924, 23 million cars by 1929), mass media (Hollywood, KDKA, "The Jazz Singer" of 1927, Lindbergh's flight of May 1927), the Nineteenth Amendment (18 August 1920), and the Harlem Renaissance, while a defensive nativist and fundamentalist reaction (Klan at 4 million by 1925, the National Origins Act of 26 May 1924, the Scopes Trial of July 1925, the Sacco and Vanzetti execution of 23 August 1927) showed that the transformation was contested.

Examples in context

Example 1. The Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1921) and Alain Locke's The New Negro (1925) crystallised the cultural movement. David Levering Lewis (When Harlem Was in Vogue, 1981) is the standard account. Lynn Dumenil (The Modern Temper, 1995) integrates the cultural movement with parallel transformations in gender and consumption.

Example 2. The Scopes Trial (10 to 21 July 1925). Tennessee teacher John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching evolution under the Butler Act. Clarence Darrow defended; William Jennings Bryan prosecuted. Edward Larson (Summer for the Gods, 1997) won the Pulitzer Prize for his account. The trial dramatised the cultural fault line between modernist urban America and fundamentalist rural America.

Try this

Q1. Source A is an extract from H.L. Mencken's Scopes Trial dispatch (Baltimore Sun, 1925). Using Source A and your own knowledge, explain the cultural fault lines of the 1920s. [5 marks]

• What the marker wants. Identify Scopes Trial; pair with Prohibition and KKK revival; cite Harlem Renaissance as counter-current.

Q2. Evaluate the extent to which the 1920s were a decade of cultural transformation rather than reaction. [25 marks]

• What the marker wants. Weigh Harlem Renaissance, Jazz Age, new woman against KKK, Prohibition, immigration restriction; use Lewis, Dumenil, Larson.

Q3. Compare the views of David Levering Lewis and Lynn Dumenil on the 1920s cultural shifts. [10 marks]

• What the marker wants. Lewis (African-American cultural awakening) versus Dumenil (mass-consumption modern temper); judgement.