Okay. Well, good morning, everybody. Today, were going to discuss the jazz age. At least im going to discuss it, and your part of the discussion will be at the end. Please write down any thoughts you have, questions, responses. That would be good. The jazz age, the period from 1919 to 1929 reminds me of the opening lines of the tale of two cities by charles dickens. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Well it wasnt exactly the best of times, but for many people, it was certainly good times. It was the great age of literature, the golden age of sports, music, jazz. The 19th amendment to the constitution, which allowed women to vote in National Elections for the first time. Radio was becoming popular. It was the early days of hollywood and certainly the age of the automobile, the modelt. Automobiles were for almost every budget. It certainly wasnt the worst of times although there were very bad times. And the failures of that decade led to the worldwide depression in the 1930s and helped the rise of fascism in europe. So, lets begin with talking about the politics of the era. It was a republican decade. Three republican president s, harding, coolidge and hoover. And the republicans controlled the presidency from 1921 until 1933, and congress from 1918 or from the 1918 election until 1930. Domestically, it was an era of laissez faire. In other words, give business a free hand. Now that might be surprising to you, because we had discussed the progressive era when there were a great many although there was the federal trade commission, there were other commissions to control business, but in the 1920s, those commissions were manned by people from the industry, so they werent doing much controlling. Internationally, we cut our commitments abroad, beginning with the failure of the senate to ratify the league of nations, Wilsons League of nations. And these two policies taken together, laissez faire and our reluctance to take our place in the world, although we had emerged from world war i as the most powerful nation, would prove disastrous to the United States and to the world in the 1930s. So lets say a word about each of the presidencies, beginning with warren harding. I think the best thing you can say about warren harding, he looked president ial. That was pretty much it. He looked president ial. It was the most corrupt administration that we had until that time, and maybe in all of our history. He escaped a lot of the because he died in office, but before that, the teapot dome, the most scandalous of all the scandals, was revealed when it turned out that the interior secretary, albert fole, had accepted bribes from private Oil Companies to lease public lands, public naval oil reserves. When harding came from ohio, he brought his pals with him, the ohio gang, and they had a very good time. They drank a lot, even though it was during prohibition. There was wine, women and song. They really enjoyed national politics. Anyway, then he died rather suddenly, and the person who took his place, his Vice President , calvin coolidge, was probably as different from harding as two humans can be. Harding, what can you say . He didnt even talk. He knew how to talk but he didnt talk. He was the new englander. He came from vermont, but had made his name by being governor of massachusetts when there was a police strike, and he took a very hard line against the poli police. And that made him known nationally. As president , he worked very little. He brought his rocking chair with him, and he would put it out on the porch, facing pennsylvania avenue, and he would rock away. This is the person who said the business of america was business, and he did not interfere much with the business. Meanwhile, the stock market kept going up and up and up. And not for very good reasons or for any reasons, and there were warnings about this, that the economy could really bust. There were warning from the Federal Reserve board and others in his government, but he simply did nothing about it. And there were lots of funny stories about saddling cow as he was called. One was when a woman was invited to the white house to have lunch with him and some other people and she was very chatty. She turned to him and she said, mr. President , i have a bet with my friends that i can make you say more than two words tonight. And he said, you lose. And that was his conversation for the entire meal. And then he could have easily run for president again. The country was quite prosperous, but, in fact, he decided not to run. He didnt tell anybody for a long time. He didnt tell his wife. He didnt tell his campaign manager. But at one point he called reporters together and he handed each of them a slip of paper. The slip of paper had ten words on it. The ten words were see if im counting right. I do not choose to run for president in 1928. And then he walked away. And the reporters were running after him, saying, tell us more. Why arent you running . He refused to say anything but he stepped down in 1928. The person who did get the nomination, the republican nomination for president , was a very different kind, and a very interesting person, and that was the mining engineer herbert hoover. Herbert hoover probably spent less time in the United States than any president before or since. He was always involved in Great Projects in the world, and he was orphaned at the age of 9, but was sent from iowa, sent to live with an uncle in california. And the uncle sent him to stanford university. And he really became a selfmade millionaire. He was in his 20s when he was a millionaire. He had no political history, except for one. He ran for treasurer as a College Student from stanford university, but he was secretary of commerce and he had done a great deal. President wilson had sent him to europe when world war i began, and his job was to get the american tourists out of europe, and he did that. And then he helped the belgians. Remember, belgium was overrun in the first world war, and he was responsible for belgium relief. When he came back to the United States during the war, he was the food administrator, and his job was to see that the military got fed, that the homefront got fed as well. And he did all that, and he did it very well. Now, think of the timing of this. He wasnt a democrat. He wasnt a republican. Both parties were interested in him running for president in 1920. Had he run for president in 1920, he would have been president from 1921 to the beginning of 1929, during prosperous times, and we would n not, as we will be doing next week, be talking about hoovervilles and president hoover taking responsibility for the depression, but, in fact, that did not happen. He ran for president in 1928 against al smith, the new yorker. And he defeated al smith, who was the first catholic to run for president. During the terms of these three president s, the country was disillusioned by the war. Remember, this was the war to save democracy. This was the war to end all wars. And many people vented their frustration and their anger on antisocial acts and legislation. It was a time when traditional values were shattered, but new standards had not yet emerged. A case in point, for example, was the scopes trial, john scopes, when he faced William Jennings brian, and the issue was scopes teaching evolution in a tennessee public school. It was actually against the law. And William Jennings brian defended a literal interpretation of the bible against evolution. And, actually, William Jennings brian won that and john scopes had, in fact, violated the law by teaching evolution. The decade began with the red scare of 19191920. It was a response to a series of strikes in the United States. The bestknown one was the one that crippled seattle for five days. There was a strike there. And it was also a time when the bolshevics were in power in russia and invented the common term, communist international. It red to the palmer raise, a. Mitchell palmer, a progressive, a quaker, who was the attorney general of the United States. It resulted in the arrest of 4,000 people, immigrants mostly. Most of them hardworking, just workers who did not speak english. They certainly werent going to start a revolution here. But many of them were beaten up. People were denied representation, and there was really no most of them had nothing to do with radicalism, but there were bombings. There were a series of bombings in this country, including the home of a. Mitchell palmer. And there was a bombing on wall street. And you can still go down to wall street, by the way, and see the bullets, where the bullet holes were. Anyway, it led to some people without representation being sent back to russia, and it was a time in the United States that perhaps had it been better known, we would not have had a second red scare. The second red scare of the 1950s, the mccarthy era in this country. That one lasted much longer than the 19191920 one, and damaged the lives of thousands of americans, writers, professors, people from hollywood who were wrongly identified as being enemies of the United States. Xenophobia is very common, a fear of foreigners. And the popularity of eugenics. Eugenics is the, i guess you could say, pseudoscience of improving the human species by a kind of selective breeding. And both were very popular in the 1920s. Ill let that era pretty much speak for itself. One author of a zoeologyist lawyer wrote a book published in 1916 called the passing of the great race. The passing of the great race. The and his thesis was that nordics were responsible for human development. Hitler called the book my bible. Another popular writer, he wrote for the saturday evening evening post and millions of americans got the saturday evening post once a week. He urged immigration laws because he said, this is an exact quote, immigrants would result in a hybrid race of people as worthless and futile as the good for nothing mongrels of Central America and southeastern europe. Thats a word we use for animals, for dogs. And then there was henry ford whose antisemitism was spread in the newspaper the deer born independent beginning in 1920. By the way, henry ford is the only american named by hitler in in this. The results of what these people believed and other people believed is very restrictive legislation for immigration in this country. Despite the fact that the lady with the lamp was new york harbor, give me your words, youre poor, you huddle masses learning to be free. There was a temporary act in 1921 that restricted immigration. But then there was another one in in 1924, the in ational origins act. And what this did was to have a quota based on the population in 1890 and the purpose of it was to freeze the country ethnically. To freeze it ethnically. St to say whoever was here already, we want we will allow in a percentage of those people to enter the country. And, by the way, not very many. 150,000 a year. And asians were excluded. Now what that meant in practice was that the people who were allow allowed were not necessarily the people that wanted to come. They came from northern europe. They were from italy, greece, poland, russia. But they were very severe restrictions on those people because there arent a great many of them counted in the 1890 election. This led to many injustices and the best known one is the execution of two italian anarchists in 1927. For a crime they did not commit. And these are the cases of sacco and vanzetti. They were mild anarchists. They were not bomb throwing anarchists. And it really divided the country. Do you execute these men . Or not . And by the way, they didnt commit the crime that they were convicted of having done. And it was the murders in braintree, massachusetts, of two people. The novelist wrote a poem in which he talked about the division of the country for the on the vanzetti and the attempts to execute them. And they were executed. The night they were facing execution, people all over the world at american embassies were protesting the killings by the government of these two people. John dos pasos wrote a poem. He said, they have clubbed us off the streets. Theyre stronger. They are rich. They hire and fire the politicians, the newspaper editors, the old judges, the small man with reputations, the College President s, the ward healers. List businessmen, College President s, judges, america will not forget her betrayers. All right, you have won. You will kill the brave men, our friends. Good night. All right. We are two nations. Madison grant was also active in the movement to prevent intermarriage between between whites and africanamericans which leads us to another subject and that is the second ku klux klan. You remember the first ku klux klan was right after the civil war . Well this was the second one. And in some ways it was the same. It actually was a rather small it didnt amount to much until it was taken over by two professional fundraisers. Edward clark and elizabeth tyler. And, by the way, they made their money, they saw an opportunity here by selling sheets. She sold sheets in childrens sizes, adult sizes, and the second kkk actually had five million card carrying members. It was very powerful in the midwest. Indiana was the leading klan state with 350,000 members. The targets, like the first klan, africanamericans. But mostly catholics and jews. And they also went after bootleggers. Remember this is during prohibition. And also there was kind of an auxiliary that was powerful. And that was the wkkk, the womens ku klux klan. There were no minimum in the first ku klux klan. They acted quietly but they did a lot of damage. They would talk as they were hanging up clothes behind their homes. And they would talk about the italian butcher. All of a sudden, the italian butch eastern the jewish shoemaker zrnlt any customers. They didnt know why. Customers were their customers for years werent their customers anymore. And they would have to move away because they didnt have any businesses. It is mostly important in small towns. And the small town americans, many of them, believed they were losing out to urban americans and, by the way, in the 1920 for the first time in 1920, urban americans, there were more urban americans than rural americans. The klan was brutal. There were murders, church burnings, brandings. And that ended suddenly. It ended when the grand dragon, as he called himself, of the ku klux klan in indiana was convicted of the kidnap, rape, and murder of a young woman. And since the klan prided itself on protecting young women, especially young protestant women, a lot of people gave up their klan membership at that time. But it did stay alive and it had a little more people became a little more interested in the kkk in the 1928 election when al smith, a catholic, a roman catholic, ran for president. The 1920s was a time of prohibition. The 18th amendment to the constitution went into effect in 1919. Its the only part of the constitution that was ever repealed. It was repealed in 1933 in the 21st amendment of the constitution. It wasnt just the experiment that failed. Most americans didnt want to be told that they could not buy alcohol. It led to the rise of, of course, speak easies, who did you know . Of liquor being imported into the country. Much of it from canada over the great lakes. Organized crime was very small until prohibition. But this is the era of al capone, of chicago. And also a great disrespect for the law and gang wars. And then when prohibition ended, it didnt end organized crime. By then, they moved into other fields, prostitution, protection, and so forth. And it took well into the 1960s, actually when Bobby Kennedy was attorney general for much of that, not all of that, but for much of that to end. Well, enough about the bad times. Lets Say Something about the good times. Charles lindbergh, 1927, the boy wonder. He was 25 years old when he left Roosevelt Field to go to paris. 25 years old and he flew solo. He was probably the best known person in the world in the mid 1920s. But he lost his luster. He accepted a medal from herman goring. He was trying to make the point that we were not as well prepared as germany. Which was the case. It was a great age of literature. I know some of you read the great gatsby. The great gatsby more than any other book is the novel of the decade. F. Scott fitzgerald. A year later, the sthe sun als rises was published. It was a golden era for american literature. And it was also the age of the harlem renaissance. Most writers, musicians, artists who we know and today from the harlem renaissance were not from new york. But harlem became the center of this renaissance. And the center of the center was the home of the daughter of madam c. J. Walker. I wonder if you remember madam c. J. Walker . Shes the only woman millionaire, not to inherit her wealth in an earlier era. Not so much earlier. She had a daughter. And her brownstone in harlem was the center of the center. When she died in 1931, the writer langston yew said the harlem renaissance is over. I have painting up there. Hes my favorite artist of the harlem renaissance. You can take a closer look when you leave. And, of course, it was the age of jazz. Cab calloway, Louie Armstrong and so many others. It was a very rich period. And there was a sexual revolution in the 1920s. I think sometimes students think thats the 1960s. Yeah, that was another one. The 1920s. There were actually new words in the lexigon. Sexy dates from the 1920s. The expression sex appeal dates from the 1920s. And why the 1920s . Well, part of it was liberation of women. A lot of women going to college for the first time in the United States. Women gaining the right to vote. The age of jazz, the age of hollywood. Sigmu Sigmund Freud. They had a sense of what Sigmund Freud was talking about when he talked about sex. And he came to the United States. The dances it, the charleston, the black bottom and it was the age of the flapper. And the flapper were essentially liberated women. My favorite line, and you have to listen closely to this from that era, the word neck ceased to be a noun abruptly became a verb immediately lost all anatomical precision. Do you want to hear it agai