By the dawn of the twenties, Americans had more time and money to spend on new kinds of public amusements like dance halls, movie theaters, fun parks, and baseball stadiums. They also had more opportunities to buy competitively priced durable items, thanks to new methods of production and distribution. The prosperity of the post-war period greatly accelerated this trend. The proliferation of advertising—alongside the maturation of the publishing, music, and film industries—exposed citizens to a new gospel of fun that was intimately associated with the purchase of goods and services.
Sell them hats by splashing sunlight across them. Sell them dreams—dreams of country clubs and proms and visions of what might happen if only. They buy hope—hope of what your merchandise might do for them.
If many of the social trends that we associate with the twenties had long been building, the decade was indeed unique in many ways. It was a decade of firsts. For the first time ever, more Americans 51 percent lived in cities than in villages or on farms. It was a decade of economic expansion. Between and horsepower per wage earner in manufacturing skyrocketed by 50 percent, signaling a robust wave of mechanization that increased productivity by 72 percent in manufacturing, 33 percent in railroads, and 41 percent in mining.
In , only 16 percent of American households had electricity; by the mids, almost two-thirds did. Overnight, the electric vacuum cleaner, the electric refrigerator and freezer, and the automatic washing machine became staples in middle-class homes.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, automobiles were still unreliable and scarce, but in the years just prior to World War I, pioneers like Ransom Olds, Henry Leland, and Henry Ford revolutionized design and production methods to make the car affordable and trustworthy.
Another pre-war technology that came of age in the twenties was film. By the mids movie theaters were selling 50 million tickets each week, a sum equal to roughly half the US population! The flapperism of today, with its jazz. And it contains a bathing scene in silhouette that must have made the censors blink. Like film, radio was invented in the late nineteenth century but experienced its formative era of commercial expansion in the twenties.
It was the first-ever live radio transmission for a popular audience, and although few Americans that evening had the necessary technology to hear the results, by more than three million households had acquired radio sets. Since the dawn of the twentieth century, American politics had been dominated by Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, two presidents whose outsized personalities and dueling visions of the progressive spirit defined the tenor and tone of public life.
Harding, they got exactly what they bargained and voted for. Both got him in trouble regularly. Even as a young boy, the future president seemed all too inclined to please everyone and offend no one. He relished poker games and excelled at public speaking. He played the b-flat trumpet in the town marching band. The ever-genial Harding stacked his Cabinet with cronies from Ohio.
He let his attorney general sell pardons and pledges of government non-interference to the highest bidders. All the while, he adhered to a limited and conservative vision of government, pressing for lower taxes and less regulation and issuing an implicit repudiation of Wilsonian reformism.
Despite—or perhaps even because of—his limitations, Warren Harding was widely admired by the American electorate. When he died halfway through his term, the public offered up a great outpouring of sorrow and sympathy.
But by then, it hardly seemed to matter. Everything was back to normal. Coolidge slashed the federal budget by almost half, eliminated the gift tax, sliced the estate tax by 50 percent, and lowered the maximum federal surtax from 60 percent to 20 percent.
The president disavowed anything beyond minimal regulation of business and commerce. He denied a federal role in labor relations and repeatedly affirmed his absolute faith in market forces. His wife was as surprised as anyone.
Orphaned at the tender age of nine, Hoover was raised by austere Quaker relatives in Iowa. He worked his way through Stanford University, where he earned a degree in engineering and graduated first in his class. Over the next twenty years he ascended steadily up the corporate ladder, carving out a brilliant career as a mine operator, engineer, and businessman.
During World War I he served as US food administrator and masterminded voluntary production and consumption standards that kept the American Expeditionary Force well nourished and domestic prices steady. After the war he headed up the American relief effort in Belgium, where he was widely credited with feeding and clothing several hundred thousand European refugees. After saving Belgium, Hoover served as secretary of commerce under Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge.
Smart, well educated, well traveled, and enormously capable, Hoover considered himself an activist and a Quaker humanitarian. As an engineer, he embodied the guiding spirit of progressivism, with its faith in rational and informed public policy. The poverty and despair of his countrymen profoundly affected Hoover.
But like most public men of his era, Herbert Hoover believed that sound volunteerism was the best remedy for economic distress. Rather than adopt strong federal regulatory and fiscal measures, he called for more studies and for an organized—but voluntary—response on the part of the private sector.
By , this pattern of inaction made Herbert Hoover one of the most despised men in America. A popular Vaudeville skit had the straight-man announce that the Depression was over. In public appearances, the president seemed thoroughly defeated. Though the twenties are remembered primarily as a decade of bold innovation and experimentation, they also witnessed a fierce counter-revolutionary tendency.
They merely wanted to draw attention to their economically depressed crossroads town. The trial seemed like the culmination of a long-simmering clash between liberal and fundamentalist Christians.
Although it was technically a win for the prosecution, liberals declared it a great victory for their cause. In fact, the conservatives were far from beat. Americans were drinking too much alcohol , and it was a long-standing problem. By the end of the 18 th century, it was normal for someone to have a dram of whiskey at breakfast, more alcohol in the afternoon, ale with supper and a nightcap before bed.
In , average annual consumption of alcohol stood at 5. In the 19 th century, women had few rights and were dependent on their husband for financial support. They blamed alcohol for the abuse they received and began a campaign to ban it. The Anti-Saloon League was founded in and gave even more strength to the prohibition movement. With the aid of the WCTU in , the League helped oversee the election of the two-thirds majority required in both Houses to initiate the passing of the 18 th Amendment.
Although they finally got what they had campaigned for, these groups soon came to regret their actions. Within minutes of the Volstead Act coming into law, violence and the theft of alcohol began.
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